*
You just need to be as diligent as he is, learn to do something that gives you pleasure.
At the Start
AT THE START of the school year Vati had to show up at school. It was there that he found out that I’d flunked the previous year and was doing third grade over again … He was standing in that hallway beneath the portraits of learned men and talking with teacher Roza … I stood way off to the side, because adult conversations interested me less than the dirt beneath my fingernail. To this day. Miss Roza was as pleasant as she’d been the year before, when we lived in Jarše, and all flushed in the face … I saw Vati flinch at the news … and his hand drop while holding his sooty hat … how much grayer he was … Yet another jolt. After so many had assaulted him that he’d broken into splinters … I couldn’t bear to watch it … I could have spared him this blow … Oh, yes! I couldn’t stand causing anyone pain. I absolutely forbade myself any malicious act … I would sooner have let any mischief, treachery, greed, or cowardice pass than have to be the cause of someone else’s pain … I would rather have committed harakiri or cut off a finger than see anyone have to cry on account of me, as I had to cry on account of others a number of times … I hated the devil, Satan, that vicious freeloader … I wanted to go up, and I strove and sought and longed for God and heaven … I didn’t want to go to hell for things that depended entirely on me … “And the report card?… He destroyed it?!” I heard Roza’s voice … Getting a certified copy would require rubber stamps, running from courthouse to courthouse, it meant yet another expense … This was bad!.. Miss Roza was beside herself … she called for the new teacher who was going to teach me, Mr. Marok, to come see her … What would this one be like?… The door to the teachers’ lounge opened behind my back … He was here … Oh God … he looked like he’d stepped out of an antique store! Broad-shouldered, stocky, big belly … a fat head with no neck and regular feather dusters for a mustache, with sideburns that flowed down into his wide shirt with a dirty necktie and the dirty necktie into a sweater the color of kohlrabi … But his voice, I have to admit, was beautiful, like a basso profundo’s … Vati kept blinking as he listened to both of them … and I could practically feel the fury shaking inside him … electrifying his hands. I knew I was going to be punished … justly so … I would endure it … But I would show them my teeth if they were going to try to drag the beating out into infinity … Then finally back home! Everyone sat stunned … mother, Clairi, even Gisela, who was worried how much blood the rod would send spurting this time … Their mouths were all open, as though the news was so big it wouldn’t fit in. The staring and disbelief lasted the whole day, until evening … and then a whole week … They couldn’t get their mouths shut, as though their jaws had come out of joint … I couldn’t sit or lie down for all the bruises … “Hör zu,” Clairi said to me … “Wie kannst du so schlecht in der Schule sein, wo du so ein Köpfchen hast? Und lügen dabei? Und ein wichtiges amtliches Papier vernichten?”* She was shocked, furious, pitying … she looked at me in disbelief … me, a gargoyle, a phantom who stood somewhere beyond Hades … “Du wirst dir das Leben versauen … Sie werden dich ja in die Erziehungsanstalt oder sogar ins Gefängnis stecken …”† She was at her wit’s end. Vati left me alone … but oh, how he shook the table, the boxes, and threw the pliers on the floor … Mother didn’t want to have anything to do with me, she couldn’t bear to look at me … There was just Gisela … she was my angel of God … And of course Clairi. She would thoughtfully wake me up in the morning … twist the lamp so I could find my socks … spread the lard thick on my bread, if there was any … She would try to arouse some interest in me for the day’s classes … Kiss me in the doorway … She became a regular nuisance!.. I knew that I’d lost a year of my life. Oh, if I just could have rolled up in a ball like a hedgehog.
Mr. Marok also taught handicrafts … basket weaving using different colored papers, sawing little shelves, crocheting. Drawing was hardest for me. Marok drew a ship on the blackboard, a big pot with holes for the cabins. I drew a similar one, only I added everything I’d seen on steamboats on the Rhine: in addition to the smokestacks and railings I drew signal masts, little flags, the captain’s bridge, and all around the boat swarms of tugboats and freighters like little bacilli … My bench neighbor, Bajželj, had drawn a steamship in perspective … with its prow raised and its stern low as it sailed on the horizon … Pot-bellied Marok came padding over in his slippery suit and kohlrabi sweater … he was excited about Bajželj’s drawing on account of its perspective … this was something … he pinned it up to the board as an example for everyone … Bajželj got an A and I got a C. It didn’t help to do what they said, or be disobedient … I had no head for other things … I calculated everything wrong on the abacus … my language assignments teemed with mistakes.… my handwriting was all smudged and I could barely read … Rote answers to questions while standing in front of the class … would have to be heard to be believed … It was torture to pronounce each word … they were like little stone cubes that it took all my effort to push out of my mouth with my tongue … out of my throat, the corners and hollow of my mouth … There wasn’t much I could do with them, least of all express myself … I couldn’t like anyone, get mad or laugh at a joke with them. All the words were wrapped in thorns or compressed into balls of tangled threads … there was no way to take hold of them or turn them around, much less disentangle them … It just wouldn’t work! It was a mystery … One of my schoolmates named Robert also lived on Bohorič. He was a pale, blond boy. It was strange that I hadn’t become aware of him before. His father was a train engineer … Once he invited me over to their house. They had a big, bright kitchen with four windows on two sides, with every possible dish simmering and sizzling on a big range … His mother was a pretty, freckled lady whose red hair and little green apron suited her perfectly … I sat on a painted cabbage box and watched as, kneeling beside him, she tried to feed my colleague beef soup with light groat dumplings one spoon at a time. The boy refused and his pretty mother had to beg him with each spoonful. A spoonful for daddy, a spoonful for grandma, and on and on … I couldn’t believe it! I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been like that … maybe in Basel or when I was in the hospital, but even then I must have been hopeless with asthma … His mother served me with hearty pastries, which were golden inside like her fine skin, and had a brownish crust like the little roof over the secret little house that she hid under her heart-shaped apron. Between Robert’s mother and the atmosphere filling that prosperous white kitchen, I had enough scents and colors to keep me satisfied for a full month.