I could imagine all women like this, except for Enrico’s mother. She was too pure, beautiful and bright for me to imagine without her clothes on … With naked breasts, bottom, and belly … The skin of her face was so white. And her hair, with waves on both sides that seemed like a single curl, a big treble cleff. The ring in her ear cast a violet reflection on her cheek and neck … I couldn’t imagine her long, pretty arms in anything but motherly caresses … nor her pale lips, which weren’t painted into a rectangle, like they were on other women … she didn’t use makeup at all … kissing anything but a cheek or a forehead … nor did the big, almost lonely brown eyes of her long face ever become harsh, cold or hateful … You never heard the sound of squeaking bedsprings coming from her room, like you did from the Permes’ upstairs or the shack selling pop … When she wore her low-cut blouse, it would never have occurred to me to pull the front down to see more, and when she sat, I never once glanced at her knees … With her, everyplace else was as pure as her face and her hands. She was almost an angel, perhaps even a nun at one time, ready for nothing more than friendly squeezes, pleasant smiles and heartfelt talks … The bricklayer could be happy to have a wife who was such an aristocrat …
May Came …
MAY CAME … I was on my way with the Balohs and others to the new church in Moste for devotions to Mary … At a crossroads before we reached St. Martin’s Road we suddenly ran into the Pestotniks and other Falcons and girls … They were on their way back from exercising at the National Home … We spotted each other from a distance and as we drew close, both sides got ready … It started with taunts: “Hey, owls!..” “Falcons!..” “Clerical curs!..” “Red rubbish!” Shouts, arguments, then blows … The path was narrow. We went first then they had at us. We shoved each other into the grass, the clover, the wheat … The girls started squealing like cats. And went running to the houses with pianos for help from adults … We pushed toward the property markers and the telegraph poles. Once you get slugged in the face, the hatred comes from somewhere deep down. And it floods everything. And it’s so deep that a bit of it stays in you … They threw themselves on each other … twisting, rolling ahead, rolling back … Two girls grabbed at each other’s hair, too, by the ribbons … The Falcons knew some good punches and in their gym clothes they were lighter, too. Our guys shouted too much, and Štef wasn’t there … I didn’t feel like getting involved … I’d gone with the Pestotniks to the Falcons’ exercise grounds in Moste a few days before … I’d seen the brothers and sisters dressed in red and white carrying a big flag like a carpet between them, and the decorated portrait of King Petar. A brass band played the anthem. They shouted “Hail! Hail!” and sang … I didn’t like it … all that defiance and rigidity came out of nowhere … perhaps from the high schools … Some tall, skinny guy from a small house by the road was approaching … I acted as though I didn’t see him and let him get close. When he leapt at me with his arms stretched out and his right leg extended … I didn’t wait anymore … and I slugged him in the chest for all I was worth and kicked him in the shins, so that he howled and began hopping around like a frog … He was out!.. Then one of his girls came running up and started whining and sniffing around me … I stretched out an arm … Brats are the same everywhere in the world … if you don’t strike immediately, nothing works later … Spoiled mamas’ boys and cosseted baby girls … We wiped off our faces, slapped the dust off our shirts and picked the straw out of each other’s hair … The church in Moste was full and we had to stand on steps along the side wall. The church was new and very white … only a few statues and paintings, all very bright, stood here and there in niches or hung on the walls. It wasn’t like a church at all, more like a whitewashed hangar, or synagogues in Africa that were white so the black people could see each other more easily. Somehow God couldn’t be here. He had to be in dark churches, so dark that there had to be lamps or at least candles burning in order for you to look around. So that darkness descended on you when you entered and you couldn’t see a single person in the pews … So you could pray or think as you saw fit … Here that wasn’t possible … You saw all the people, and in the light of day as it fell through the clear windows all the faces were as alike as under the open sky … I didn’t care to go back there for services …
In the woods we made paper airplanes and each of us was supposed to mark his with his country’s flag. I wanted to draw a white cross on a red field on mine … all the others were either Yugoslavia, England, America, France … or such far-off countries as Holland and Sweden … “You’re competing for Germany …” Pestotnik said. “No, I’m koink to pee Zvitzerlant …” “Others have already got Switzerland.” They stood there glaring at me, the pains. So I took my plane and on its wings and tail drew a swastika, which I didn’t like because it was so prickly, like four linked gallows … Coats of arms with swords, lilies, or lions were completely different. We assembled along a line in front of the building site. Three heats. The plane that flew the farthest and longest would win … In one of the heats the winning plane bore the sign of the swastika … So I had won.
Out of the blue old Slabe, the Frenchman, started coming out to the woods, a toothless old grandfather in a white shirt, white cap and white tennis shoes … He taught us fencing … At first we each smoothed off a stick and attached the cover of a box of shoe polish at one end as a foil guard to protect our fingers … In the clearing he showed us the various basic thrusts … eight in all … and especially a trick for assuring victory in a match. In the usual course of crossing foils, instead of going after and parrying your opponent’s tip … you plant your foil diagonally into the floor in front of him, while your opponent, whom you’ve tricked while he’s holding his foil in a horizontal position, naturally strikes downward to protect his legs, but just as he does that, you lift your foil up, striking him in the chest on the heart side with its tip. A kill!.. All of us learned it and it would have been monotonous if we didn’t know other basic attacks and didn’t use the trick at various intervals … Somewhere in the middle or at the end of a round, after several warm-up lunges on the ground as we leapt from stump to stump while fencing. But your eyes had to be quicker than your opponent’s … The Frenchman’s wife, a tiny woman in an apron fastened across her breasts, who raised flowers and vegetables to sell at market, would get angry at her husband and make fun of him … Every so often she would call to him from on top of the flat roof of their half-built house to come home and get to work, her shouts echoing all through the woods, but he would pretend he was deaf … Others made fun of him, too, but everyone liked him more than they liked his wife … After every competitive round he would solemnly praise us after lining us up. He also taught us boxing. Not knockout punches, which each of us already knew, but hooks and uppercuts and how to block punches. Word was that he had once been a wrestler or trainer, and ultimately a referee too … he showed us a photograph on a scrap of a French newspaper: him dressed in white with a black bow tie. What was he like? You couldn’t make fun of him. He went jumping around so earnestly when we practiced. And his gray eyes bulged so severely whenever we broke a rule that we had to take him seriously. Mornings he would already be waiting for us, as we’d agreed, past the bushes in the clearing, all dressed in white and with the wet gray fur that grew out of his ears … He would ask if we’d slept well and then we were off, repeating the previous day’s lesson after him. There was no difference between him and the kids, we could address him informally … When occasionally he had to go watering flowers with his watering can and we had to wait for him over in the clearing he would be red in the face with embarrassment … Once mother, Gisela, Clairi, Vati, and I were invited to his house for a visit … Vati didn’t want to go … He never liked paying visits, or formalities … The Frenchman’s wife showed us around their house. Everywhere you looked there were colorful things … variegated curtains, multicolored furniture, rainbow bedcovers and curtains, yellow, red, and green throw pillows … it was as if you’d walked into the wagon of some circus performers. I liked it … From their flat roof, where his wife always called to her husband and the Frenchman was supposed to finish the house by building another story, if only he hadn’t been so lazy and run out of money, there was a beautiful view: over the grain fields all the way to the forest and then across more fields to the cemetery and airport. They were constantly at odds with the Jakličes, who wouldn’t let them take the road across their property … so the Frenchman’s wife had to take all her flowers, which grew near the neighbor’s beds, and take them on a cart back to the house and only then set out on the road into Ljubljana … She brought glasses of lilac juice which she herself made out to the garden for each of us … She smiled a lot, she didn’t seem at all as hard-hearted as she did on the roof, and the Frenchman told a few jokes from Paris … During our visit mother constantly kept looking over at the new four-story building where tall, stout Mrs. Gmeiner lived. Now the one boy, who was my age, was joined by a brother who was a student of engineering. According to the Frenchman’s wife some bank officer, a Slovene, was also paying occasional visits. Mrs. Gmeiner was reportedly from Vienna and an Austrian, but she kept very much to herself and hadn’t even exchanged a word with the Frenchman yet … One day I ran into her. It was pouring buckets and I was coming home from school without an umbrella and soaked to the skin, when I noticed her in a shiny black leather coat holding an umbrella in one hand and a cape in the other, running through puddles past the houses across from the school, which was on St. Martin’s Road. Her little boy was just then coming back by a shortcut nearby and she shouted out, “Mein armes Büblein!”* An instant later she had him wrapped up in the cape. I was jealous. My mother would never have done anything like that …