In the middle of July Vati’s lungs got worse … They wheezed so much that it was truly disgusting. He spat out blood everywhere, onto the dusty road or into small bits of paper. When he went to see a doctor, they made him stay in the hospital. He lay in a big room with lots of other patients. They were always pleasant and said hello whenever I went to visit him. Real skeletons. They lifted their heads and waved at me over their pull-up bars or at least bared their teeth. They were so meek … gray, not dangerous in the least or aggressive like healthy people were, I felt so good among them. If I ever became a doctor, then in addition to the respect I would enjoy in endless supply, I would also have a peaceful life … Vati would give me the bread left over from his supper, breakfast and lunch, which he hid from the sisters of mercy in the drawer of his night table. In return I collected butts for him, the ends of stogies and cigarettes … I always found the greatest density of them scattered near the Moste movie theater on St. Martin’s Road, next to the sidewalk, and outside buildings that housed taverns and restaurants. I folded little pouches out of newspaper to put in my pockets, to make my collecting more efficient and keep my trousers from stinking of butts. “Not a word to your mother about … (he didn’t want to actually say about what), Bubi!” Vati exhorted me. He looked at me uncertainly … doubting my word. But because we spoke Slovene to each other, our conspiracy remained under a double seal of silence, more confidential and hush-hush than the White Prince’s secret writing. Out in the hospital garden we unwrapped the tobacco remains from their papers and leaves and dried them out on the cement of a fire hydrant … it produced quite an exemplary heap of assorted tobaccos … yellow, black, dark brown … as fine as grit or as coarse as crepe noodles … if by some miracle that heap could have changed into food, into rice or spaghetti … that would have been something!.. Vati wore an old, oversized, patched pair of pajamas and a striped robe that belonged to the hospital. He looked a little eccentric, like a crazy person or a masquerader. Behind his baggy hospital clothes he was even skinnier, shaggier and more naked than Christ on the cross … The most he ever saved from a meal was three slices of bread, sometimes a breakfast roll hard as a rock … It was a long way home and I didn’t always succeed in practicing chivalrous restraint … now and then I arrived home with just two pieces of bread, or just one.
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That coward is going to plunge the whole world into horror.
Baloh and I
BALOH AND I would go to the Sava for firewood … to old Jarše to steal heads of cabbage … out of a little field around the power line, where the peasants had to run too far uphill to be able to catch us … and to more remote destinations, like Štepanja Village or near the airport for potatoes … One time we nabbed a whole wooden bucket of lard out of an unlocked granary … and another we brought a half pound of plums home along with the basket … It was a time of legumes and vegetables, which could be prepared in a hundred different ways … But the lot of it lasted for barely more than a supper …
Clairi and I took all of the finished items and the better hides … except for the opossum skin … In order to be able to sell them, we wrapped each item up in its own attractive package made out of newspaper and we put all of them into a bundle, because the suitcase would have been too small for such a selection. We left early in the morning, because Clairi was ashamed for anyone to see what we were living off of. She sent me into the courtyard first, so I could sneak out while everyone was still asleep, and I ran through the grain field to the road, where I waited for her. Each time she sent me a little farther out … until at last we agreed I would wait for her by the wall of the railway overpass next to the Dragon factory. I hoisted the bundle up and we set off on our rounds, basing our calls on the appearance of a given house, whether it looked well-to-do or at least had something distinguished about it … the front door, a doormat, a curtain. We also paid calls on furriers … But the furriers … the four or six of them on both sides of the Ljubljanica … didn’t have any work or income, themselves, aside from storing their clients’ furs for the summer. Clairi would ask, and I would translate, whether they had any work we could take home to do, no matter how basic or trivial, but because the summer season was at its height … I sweated streams under the weight of that stifling bundle … they had laid off all their workers and they didn’t anticipate “any increase in demand for furs on the part of clients during the autumn” … so naturally they didn’t buy anything from us. Mrs. Rot, a fat blonde lady, owner of the largest fur store in town next door to city hall, was impressed with our expertly finished items. With Clairi’s permission she cut open a collar lining, which she then gave to one of the girls working for her to sew back up in the workshop that was over the store, which had a mannequin in a fur coat in each of its five display windows. She examined Vati’s stitching on the skin and then the fur on the other side … he always used a collection of various pieces, patches and remains of pelts to sew an entire fur hat, a muff, or a vest … in such a way that the fur of the various pieces of pelts was aligned with respect to color, composition, and density, making it look as though he had made each item out of the whole pelt of a single animal or just from the backs of a few larger animals … “Das ist wirklich ein großer Meister,”