Mother rearranged our room. It was five paces from the door to the window and two and a half paces across. The window was big and the walls were blue, with little flowers on them … From now on all four of us were going to sleep in the bed, she said, and Vati would have the table. The stove that was there had outlived its usefulness. A small cooktop with at least two burners and an exhaust pipe for the oven would need to be bought at a rummage store. A chiffon curtain would need to be sewn for over the window … So we wouldn’t have to constantly be going out and in, we would keep a bucket full of fresh water in the room. Its place would be here by the door. Bubi, you are going to look in the woods for a short stump or something similar that we can set the bucket on. Whether or not there was a woodshed we didn’t yet know, so we were going to keep a stack of wood here in the corner and under the stove. Our clothes and underwear would stay in the suitcase for now. We would nail several catches to the door … We would have to be careful in the toilet. It was just a latrine! Each tenant had to clean it once a month with a poker on a pole. So … “Ihr zwei müßt brav sein,” she impressed on us. “Mit niemandem reden, außer das notwendigste. Keinem etwas erzählen über unser Leben. Mit niemandem eine zu große Freundschaft schließen! Still und anständig sich benehmen. Die Leute in Ruhe lassen.”† Gisela, who sat on the bed, washed and brushed and happy, was impossible to stop. Even if she did get into mischief, anybody would have forgiven her. It warmed everyone’s heart just to see her. She was like a daisy gleaming in the grass … “Now to the water hole,” mother decided. So out the door … and to the well for water … into that glorious world I had no idea how to navigate. On tiptoe? On my head? On my hands? When you still don’t have any idea to what or to whom you’re going to belong … Clatter! I set the bucket down on the drain and took hold of a pole hanging down from the handle. Screeeaaaa … it squeaked … it squealed all through the courtyard, the garden, the forest, the sky … I stood there petrified … Already I’d committed my first transgression against peace on earth …
*
A retired Navy paymaster.
†
The two of you must be good. Say nothing to anyone, except when it’s absolutely essential. Tell no one anything about how we live. Make no close friendships with anybody. Behave modestly and with dignity. Leave people alone.
There Was Never a Light
THERE WAS NEVER A LIGHT on in the vestibule. Steps led from it into the courtyard. I flew over these one-two-three when the baker came calling in the morning, “Kaiser rolls! Sesame rolls! Bread loaves! Baguettes! Croissants!..” The baker was a little man riding a bicycle. With a huge basket on his back and a slightly smaller one over the handlebars … He pulled a cloth off the basket to reveal thin loaves jutting up like lances among the croissants and rolls. I bought a small loaf of cornbread for two dinars … Every morning he pulled up like this outside our courtyard door and announced himself. As though he were paying a call at some landed estate … Who all lived in this building?
At the far end of the vestibule, in a slightly larger room next door to ours, lived a young dark-haired woman with her son named Enrico. Her husband, a mason, built houses all over the country and was seldom at home. All three of them had fled the Littoral after Mussolini came to power, settling in Ljubljana. Enrico, who was a sickly boy, knew Slovene only slightly better than I did, but he spoke it as if he were singing a song, which made it harder to understand him. At first he didn’t like me, because he thought we were Germans, and Mussolini was great friends with Hitler. Then that got straightened out. He began coming out to the woods where I would spend time. Most often at lunchtime, carrying his plate, which was laden down with delicacies he wanted to share with me. The best food of all was little fried bits of polenta. Like me, Enrico was a little mixed up from their move … He hadn’t found his bearings and he was afraid. He didn’t know where to go to find friends, and so, for the most part, he stayed at home with his mother, shut away in their room. There he drew and read out loud to her from comic books in Italian, while she, always beautifully dressed, knitted or ironed … Across from us in a room with a kitchen that had a proper brick stove, lived a many-headed family named Baloh. Father and mother with six daughters and sons. All of them heavy-set, pimply, with low foreheads and dense jungles of hair, and very pious. Every evening when the Ave rang at the cemetery, they would pray their rosaries aloud, kneeling around the stove in their kitchen. You could hear the murmur through the door, as though in a church … Outside, in the courtyard, an old woman, formerly a waitress, lived with her young, pretty daughter in a tarpaper shack … That was everyone … Except for the owner, a former naval officer, and his housekeeper. Looking in through his window from the road you could clearly see a gold compass, a ship’s wheel, and ship’s rigging hanging in his nicer room … Wearing a white cap, his servant cooked, cleaned and took care of him … In the mornings he came out into his garden down a staircase with a railing that had a stone ball on it … dressed in a robe that was only a shade less blue than the house … An utterly white, thin, old gentleman with sparse hair, wearing a white cap with a celluloid visor. Even his eyes were blue, as were the lenses of his sunglasses … He carried motorized model boats in one arm … little cruisers and destroyers … At the pond he would set them down in the water … That was interesting, but I could only watch from a distance, from behind some flowers … Other times he would come out without anything … taking a seat in a chaise longue in the gazebo, where his maid in the cap would serve him at a small table. The first time I saw him, I had the feeling that it might be Mr. Perme, his embroidered robe or something else about him that caused that noise and shimmering in the air … Vati introduced us one Sunday morning. When he heard the footsteps coming down the stairs, he called us, “So! Jetzt!” And all of us went over to where that ball was at the bottom of the staircase railing. Vati was a little nervous. Mr. Perme stopped in his tracks. He spoke like an officer. In short, abrupt sentences, to the point. We were not to play on the sandy paths, he said, looking at Gisela and me with his slightly faded blue eyes … And if we did, we were to rake the sand every evening before we went in … If we wanted to pull some weeds, he said, we would get apricots as a reward … The forest, over there on the far side of the lime pit, was for playing in. Then he came to the bottom of the steps and shook hands with each of us … And though he smelled of perfume and was all silky smooth in his embroidered robe and smooth shaven underneath his white cap, somehow or other he seemed less clean to me than the peasants in Cegelnica …
So we played in the forest. The Baloh boys and girls went there, too. All of them strong, healthy, and wild. The nicest among them was stocky Štef, whom I made friends with because he was so bold. Of course, Enrico also came here, although somewhat reluctantly because of the large number of kids. Then there were the three Pestotnik urchins from a tall, half-completed building that was going up practically in the forest. They were members of the Falcons. Sometimes they would come racing out of their construction site wearing their red costumes or colorful soccer uniforms. The Balohs were Eagles and soon they would spend whole days debating with the other three … At the sound of a whistle all of them would leap at a ball, pounding the muddy ground for all they were worth, jostling with each other and slapping mud into their mouths and eyes … Some people who lived in their own handsome houses down on the road that led toward Ljubljana also belonged to the Falcons … I had already seen the pretty lace curtains that hung in their windows, and had once even heard a real piano being played there. Imagine that!.. Two pale, freckled, red-haired boys who were nearly identical would also show up. They lived in the unplastered house next to the gravel pit and their last name was Jaklič. Quick, nervous, and as variable as the weather. Then there was easy-going, lazy Mirko, who lived with his mother in that wooden wagon at the bottom of the gravel pit. Then two blond boys named Slabe, with noses like boxers, who came from a long, one-story house a little farther on from the Jakličes. Their father, a scrawny man who had worked a long time in France, was called the Frenchman … Farther on from his unplastered house, which stood right in the middle of some lettuce and bean patches, a new, white, four-story building loomed up on the top of a hill that the road skirted. There was just one tenant living in it, a Mrs. Gmeiner with a sickly son about my age. He never came out to the forest … But from a house by the road, where they lived with their parents in the cellar, two tall, lanky, long-haired brothers named Žikič would often come out.