Much later, several weeks after our arrival, he and I set out for an air show at the airport … Old Baloh, Štef and Marija also went with us … We took side paths and shortcuts and snuck through a beech grove so we wouldn’t have to pay admission at the airport … The meadow was full of banners and people. The planes did all kinds of acrobatics and flew flags on their tails … sky-divers jumped out of them … and gliders released pigeons from cages … Vati discovered that the handiest thing to do was to lie down in the grass and look up at everything flying and doing loops, at the cupolas of chutes opening up in the air. That’s when I got in the practice of lying down to look at the sky, at stars and clouds …
Back at home everything was out of joint again. Bang! Vati sat down at the table with his back turned to mother and began sewing a fur with a thread three feet long … jerking his arm way up over his head. Whirrrr! mother started nervously working the pedals of her sewing machine … That the two of them had ever hugged? Impossible … Vati kept carping the whole time at Clairi about Gisela. But she wasn’t afraid of him. She would walk right past his chair to mother or me, as though Vati wasn’t even there … Clairi would come home from Elite completely worn out … on foot, more than an hour’s walk, in order to save the money she would otherwise have spent for a streetcar ticket. Her heart was acting up. It was throbbing all the way up near the armpit. She had to lie down … She always held her hands turned forward when she walked, or turned up when she was lying down. While she was resting, I was tempted to turn them over at the wrist, to correct her posture … but I left her alone, because she would have hit me if I did … She had a tremendous desire to eat her fill of a variety of fine dishes, especially cakes. For lunch she and Vati would always sit in the park and have some slices of bread and a bit of salami, and now and then they would treat themselves to an apple … “Heute,” she told me when we were alone, “bin ich einem älteren Herrn so sehr aufgefallen, daß er mich eine Stunde angestarrt hat … aber Vati saß leider die ganze Zeit bei mir. Vielleicht, Bubi, werde ich einmal einen feinen älteren Mann treffen, der mich trotz Gisela heiraten wird. Dann wirst du etwas zu staunen bekommen: uns allen wird es wie durch einen Zauber gehen …”
i She believed that eventually somewhere in the world she was going to meet an understanding man who was smart and not too old, who would give her everything … clothes, a decent house, travel, perfumes … and with whom she would have a nice life, not like mother and Vati’s … “Nur warum wurden wir auf die Welt gestellt von diesen zwei, die sich nie verstanden haben?”j That was too complicated. That part I didn’t understand. Welt, monde, svet! That part was nice! A garden with shiny globes, paths, flowers, roses, gazebos, striped lounge chairs, swimming pool … a forest, fields, and the Sava flowing through white gravel … The world was magnificent! It looked boldly up at the sky like a baby … Clairi pressed me to herself, as though I were her husband, and rubbed her cheek against my shoulder … Was I supposed to believe that she was just my sister, a child of Vati and mother like myself?… I couldn’t … She belonged more to people who were constantly arguing … that jungle where eyes got lost even close up … where chaos came to life in the most colorful way, and which excluded any sense of rules or regular patterns of repetition … I fled to join the boys and girls from Jarše in the woods, where at least something was happening.