Second: suddenly, because we hadn’t paid him the rent for three months, Mr. Perme threw us out on the street. Clairi went up to talk to him, but halfway there she turned back. “Er ruft mich … ich müßte zu ihm hinauf kommen … ich weiß, was das bedeutet, ich gehe nicht,”‡ she told me, her face flushed red. I understood what the old man wanted from her … On the day when we were supposed to clear out of the room by evening, Clairi and I put some things in bundles and headed over to the sugar mill to ask if we could spend a few days under their roof. “So, jetzt sind wir ans Ende gelangen … nur die Armenanstalt bleibt uns übrig,”§ Clairi whined the whole way there, making me cringe … First we had to go to city hall to get a document called a “poverty certificate.” I didn’t want to go upstairs with her and have to listen to her laments all over again … I stayed downstairs in the main courtyard entrance, among the cannon and mortars from World War I … The big, old Sugar Mill building was near the boat locks … it had at least a thousand dark windows … Its wide wooden stairs … where we met all different kinds of people carrying washbasins, cooking pots, baskets full of tomatoes and lettuce on their heads … were so worn down that they frayed under each additional footstep as if it were a pistol shot. First, at a window in the entryway, they registered us, then we proceeded to a big office where rows of little female officials worked — gray-haired ladies who handed us a ticket for three beds … The dormitory upstairs was a long, vaulted room with twenty iron cots, all of them nicely made up with bedding. I rather liked it … It reminded me of a hospital or the sanatorium in Urach … We set our bundles and hand baskets down on the first three reserved beds by the door, and then we went back to Jarše … That evening at six, when the deadline arrived that Mr. Perme had given us for clearing out of the room, we handed the key to Enrico’s mother to take upstairs, and we left … We went as though we weren’t going. Even though we were. It was like a tasteless joke … Suddenly it occurred to me that we had become unrecognizable, barely a memory, and that from now on we had nothing to be afraid of … and that nobody would find us ever again, not even Vati … I pulled my hood made out of a bag way down over my eyes to my chin … this is how death walked around in its monk’s habit at the time of the plague and in my vivid green picture … Mother and Clairi took turns carrying Gisela and one other bundle. At the St. Peter’s Bridge a raincloud suddenly burst which almost broke their umbrella and whisked it away … we were all soaked through in an instant, with fountains and rivulets gushing all around us … We weathered it out in a little park right under the the nose of the sugar mill … the boat lock was on the verge of exploding in the onrush of water … We went up the wide vaulted staircase. I knew which door … opened it: the dormitory was full of people … a regular circus ring … Some fat woman in a slip was brushing out her braids … three or four men, either idiots or beggars, were sitting on chests at the back in their long underwear … there were a lot of fruit vendors or Gypsy women along the wall … with green and red eyes … who were bathing a child in a wash basin as the water sloshed out. A strange world … never before seen … some sort of crazy picture … “Nein, da gehe ich nicht hinein!” mother said. “Und wenn ich auf der Stelle sterben müsse.”
‖ She was as white as a sheet and shaking. “Nimm die Sachen! Wir gehen zurück!”a I was sleepy and my soaked clothing stuck to my skin … but worst of all were my shoes, which were full of water and threatening to float off of my feet … “Warum nicht?”b Clairi stared at mother as though she were seeing her for the first time. “Nimm das Zeug, Bubi!..”c I picked up the two bundles and baskets that Clairi and I had set there and closed the door … I had no idea what to do next. We stood on the staircase landing for a few moments like statues … As alien to ourselves as strangers … The rain was pouring and streaming out of all of the big building’s gutters. We waited behind the half-opened doors of the wide entryway for the storm to dump all its rain and supersaturate everything … Gisela slept on the bundles, which we set in a cart fastened to the wall with a chain so fat it could have been used for a drawbridge. Mother sat the whole time without saying anything … “Gehen wir”d she said. Clairi wailed, “Wie …”e “Ich habe die Fenster im Zimmer offen gelassen,”f mother said. It was a long way and we had to endure more on the way back than when we came down … We waited the weather out under a railway overpass with sooty bundles billowing through it … It wasn’t so much raining anymore as misting, but we were still soaked from before, we were shivering, and we were muddied up to the waist when we got to the vicinity of Jarše … It was as though we had suddenly returned to our former bodies, that we’d come back to life; but we were afraid. On St. Martin’s Road we stood in front of a deep, water-filled depression before we headed down the old path through the wheat fields … It was eleven thirty … We carefully pushed the iron gate open so it wouldn’t squeak in its hinges … we walked down the sand path on tip-toe … the windows really were open a crack … We pushed them open and one by one we stepped from the window ledge onto the sewing machine and from it down onto the floor … “Wir werden da hinter dem Bett schlafen,”g mother whispered. We stretched a rope from the stovepipe to a nail over the bed and hung a sheet over it so that the owner wouldn’t catch us first thing in the morning, we pulled the mattress off of the bed and made it up behind the sheet, from corner to corner … Quietly, very quietly, so that the Balohs, who liked to snoop around, wouldn’t hear us … against the wall by the stove, on the other side of which Enrico and his mother had their room, we could breathe and talk a bit more normally, because the two of them would never give us away … “Ich muß hinauf,” Clairi whined with resolve. “Wir können uns doch nicht so einschleichen und wohnen, wo wir doch nicht gezahlt haben.”h Mother said nothing. “Schlaft jetzt,”i she ordered. All four of us retreated behind the sheet, which let through the feeble light from the window like the screen in some cheap movie theater … I woke up late that next morning, the sun was already out … actually, Clairi woke me with a cup of warm milk in one hand and a fresh breakfast roll in the other. The sheet was gone from the rope. Was everything that had happened last night just a dream? I couldn’t believe that … “Wie denn das?…”j I asked. Clairi blushed deeply, then went pale, her lips quivering and her eyes misting over … She threw herself straight at me, past Gisela, who was still asleep … She hugged me so hard that I felt jabbed in the ribs … Her hug almost smothered me, and she smooshed me with kisses … I was suffocating … pushed her away … objected … shrank back. I didn’t want to shout, or old Mr. Perme would hear … I wriggled loose, but she latched onto me again … and everything started all over again … A regular avalanche of affection … I nearly broke my back under all her crazy kisses and hugs … My face turned into mush … I couldn’t find my nostrils … “Bubi! Bubi!” As though she were begging me … She began crying somewhere inside, from very deep down … She was completely beside herself … The old man upstairs was going to leap out of bed … Finally she calmed down a bit. “Iß nur!” she said. She must have done something. But what? Had she sold Vati’s opossum skin on the sly? Had she gone upstairs to Mr. Perme’s, to that room with the compasses? What had happened? Where was mother?… I wolfed down the milk and roll … and got more of each, in the same portions, while Clairi kept looking at me very nervously. Then I got yet a third breakfast, which left me lying knocked out …