We Muddled Through
WE MUDDLED THROUGH the first half of August, that most beautiful month of the year, as best we could … I read to Gisela from the big little volume of Die schönen illustrierten Abenteuer (Wien 1933) that the old lady who lived over the cleaner’s had given me … It was really an exceptional artifact … the little one was intrigued by the princes and especially the princesses riding around in their coaches, attending dances at the royal court … Each story was richly illustrated … with everything, down to the last detail, before our eyes. I especially admired the drawings, then the colors … scarlet, green, pomegranate red, a knight’s armor with rubies … It was masterful work! The best picture of all was one in the middle of the volume … a mighty battle stretching its whole height and width. Two-humped camels, elephants, Knights Templar, heathens in desperate flight … Gisela picked some daisies and grass and strewed them all over the book.
Then beginning in the middle of August it started to rain for all it was worth and we couldn’t go anywhere … A number of things happened during those rainy days.
First, one afternoon a soaking wet gentleman from the St. Vincent’s conference knocked on our door … When we opened it, there he stood, tall, with a dark mustache, wearing a hat and a camel hair coat … so elegant we didn’t know what to do with him. He filled the whole room … taking all its light and air for himself … We grew afraid … was he the police, had he come for us? He held an over-stuffed briefcase and had a board wrapped up in brown paper under his arm … He set something down on the table and something else on the bed … “My name is Vladimir Kompare and I’m from the St. Vincent’s conference,” he said. “Your family has returned from living abroad?” I nodded, whatever he said. “In the name of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul I’ve brought you some beans and a devotional icon,” he said. His mouth made such strange shapes, like a boxer’s after a knockout — mostly twisted, causing his brushed mustache to shake.… But he had the same sort of bent nose as the Arab merchants or the barbarians at the bazaar in my book … He wiped the sweat and raindrops off his face … he must have had to walk very fast from the streetcar stop near Holy Cross … No, he hadn’t had to walk that far, on the road outside, next to the fence, was an old, rectangular car with a canvas roof … Targa-Florio 100 HP … So he was this wet from that short walk to the house … His briefcase was full of pieces of paper and newspaper clippings … he set a cloth bag down on the table … and an old, gray paper bag. He unwrapped the picture and threw the paper under the stove. “Where shall we hang it?” he asked. We didn’t have a single nail in the wall. “It will look nicest here over the bed,” he said. I looked for a tack for stretching skins and Vati’s pliers. He picked up the paper that he’d thrown under the stove and spread it over the bed. Then he climbed up … He had wide shoes, which were in style and looked like submarines … and he began to hammer the tack in. It didn’t take the first time, second time, not until the third … Then I handed him the picture, which had been printed on cardboard and put in a wide, shallow, brown frame with rounded corners. It was the first time I’d held a holy icon … on the back it was all scribbled with receipts, stamps and signatures … The man got back down and looked to see if it was hanging nicely … God knows I didn’t see him as a real person. His fancy hat and camel hair coat were completely mismatched with his distorted, fleshy afterthought of a face … If this wasn’t a disguise, then he was just strange. He took a document out of his stuffed briefcase. “Sign here. One kilogram of beans and one reproduction of the Mother of God.” Mother signed in Gothic script. Then he went to the Balohs to deliver the bag of flour. At that very moment they were kneeling around their stove, praying their rosaries … I went outside … through the small celluloid back window of his car I could see a whole stack of old cardboard pictures in wooden frames … “Ein komischer Kauz!”
* Clairi said … “Die machen so eine blöde Reklame für das Kirchenamt,”† mother said. The beans were the main thing. But they were so old, gnarly, and tough that even after cooking them several times and gnawing and grinding at them like peach pits, they wouldn’t soften and we had to throw them away …