Newcomers

At home they were now allowing me my own tiny place at the table to do my homework. I felt a resistance to numbers … to the arithmetical symbols + — ×: themselves … I would furrow my brow when they looked at me from the page, because that’s how one thought … you couldn’t just lure your brain out with limesticks … My resistance to school got stuck on them like some little toad. I didn’t have the slightest inclination to illuminate the darkness inside my head like some castle hall. It would have made my head hurt … There was nobody I could ask for help with anything — not mother, not Vati, not Clairi … They didn’t understand the rules of arithmetic, much less of grammar … I jotted down an equation and answer based foremost on how elegant they looked. For the answers I would choose numbers that didn’t appear in the equation above or, if they did, I would change their sequence. It developed into a kind of drawing. I scribbled out the writing and grammar assignments hastily, from the topmost to the bottommost letter in my notebook I could see my hand moving deftly and with childish ignorance as I wrote them … as though it were playing in sand. One day I’ll master these things the way I breathe … without any agony. I would have preferred not to have anything more to do with these notebooks, erasers, and pen holders, even though big, fat, juicy ones with tails on them, the kind only Marok knew how to draw, kept glaring at me from out of my notebooks … In the morning before classes some of my schoolmates would hastily copy the star students’ homework. I could see fat Marok going from bench to bench, reading them and assigning good grades, without those knuckleheaded cheats having to lift an eyebrow. That was cheap, tricking Marok, because he was ugly enough as it was and all he had in the world was his beautiful voice … My backpack began to stink of classrooms and benchs, as though I were lugging the whole school home … I threw it into the farthest corner. That was enough for one day! I wanted to have some peace in the afternoons … I went out and looked at what few interesting things there were on our street. At least that was something, even though I still didn’t have any friends …

^*

Listen, how can you be so bad at school when you’ve got such a bright little head on your shoulders? And lie, to boot? And destroy an important official document?

^†

You’re going to mess up your life … They’re going to put you in a reform school or even in prison.

Zdravko all but Disappeared

ZDRAVKO ALL BUT DISAPPEARED for a time and sickly Robert was always out on errands with his mother. He needed a lot of air … I was left with Gisela, the twins, or the old monkeys over behind the hospice’s fence. I couldn’t understand how a person could become so old and decrepit and still feel like living. Particularly in as messy a yard as that. If only the old folks were at least a little bit nice. But sometimes their eyes would start glinting as though a whole madhouse had just opened up in their heads. They also sang now and then, sometimes in the middle of the night, like monks … I could hear them through the wall. They didn’t have bad voices.

Finally I gave myself a kick and headed over to the barracks. I climbed up the fence and looked in. What utter poverty! The wooden shacks were as shabby as those plague-eaten horses in the pictures of my illustrations … Heaps of rusted metal, pipes, strips, and sheets … And what wasn’t strewn around the gate … motorcycle tires, holy icons, horse collar padding … But they had piglets in pens, with chickens pecking around, and rabbits in warrens … There was a brilliant sign on the fence: “Cunt and prick make little Dick,” next to which there was a picture of something like poop dropping into a potty … A few boys with bowl haircuts came out accompanied by girls. I wasn’t afraid of them … they seemed to be shyer than I was. I particularly liked one of the girls. She was wearing a skirt that probably belonged to her mother, because it reached to the ground. Her ass almost bounced like a ball. Dark hair. With a little ring on her tanned hand … They invited me to come on over the wall … Lots of interesting wrenches lying around heaps of old metal, some of which would have made fine brass knuckles. And cleaning rods like arrows. Unusual package-like parts of machines. And fat rubber bands for slingshots and tanks that you could make out of spindles. Sheets of aluminum. Glass liquor bottles … I kept close to my Gypsy girl. She let me know that she liked me. She was like Adrijana and Anka rolled into one … We scaled a few little fences and in an empty, abandoned pigpen with high walls we kissed each other on the dry cinders; she put her tongue in my mouth … she stroked my balls so hard, with both hands, the way the little Gypsy girls in Cegelnica begged for a dinar, and I stroked her cherry with its little groove. Her little sisters and brothers exploded with laughter. They made fun of our caresses by rubbing themselves between the legs and kissing the air with big, puffed-up cheeks, as if in some big movie … When I came back the next day, firmly resolved to see our nastiness to its end, my girlfriend was gone … she had moved … It was always like that: either I moved or others did.

At the end of Bohorič Street on the other side of the railroad crossing was the Salesian Home, which housed the Kodeljevo movie theater. This building and the playgrounds below it is where you would see some strange boys, all of them religious and a little crippled. They would kick the ball in a restrained, oddly tame sort of way under the watchful eye of their trainer and referee, a young priest in a cassock, with a whistle clenched in his mouth, who kept jumping around among the spectators … Their founder was the blessed don Bosco, the educator priest whose life I was familiar with … The players ran around their shallow clay-covered depression in pathetically baggy uniforms like harlequins … The goalie was leaning up against the goal, probably because his position gave him some peace and quiet that he could use to think about things. He didn’t like it when they disturbed him and he always let the ball go by … Toward the end of the game they looked like staggering statues of clay … The reason for the bad match was probably that they didn’t have any real opponent. They were playing against themselves. They were so light and thin, just skin and bones like me. They almost didn’t weigh anything … when they attacked, if the wind picked up speed, they would go flying over the edge of the field with the ball … If I compared them to the Falcons’ team across the train tracks in Moste! The way those guys marched up the embankment, well-fed, each of them carrying a soccer ball under his arm, with their captain out in front, the whole team in their pale pink uniforms contrasting vividly against the blue sky … The Salesian Home was as much home to gawky boys and girls as the new church next-door and the movie theater it contained. They always showed movies from all different times there … black and white ones, old-fashioned sepia ones, modern ones in color. And always two at a time: an adventure movie and a comedy, a detective story and a tragedy, an operetta and a serious drama … If I had a spare dinar, I would go sit in their big, red auditorium … The Salesian boys and girls acted like they owned the whole building. They ran around the place with bunches of keys to various main doors and side doors, to cabinets and closets, entrances and exits and various stairways … They didn’t behave like some closed little society that doesn’t let in any outsiders, but they did act as though they were themselves a bunch of Errol Flynns, Mickey Rooneys and Shirley Temples, day after day entertaining the public from the screen in the big auditorium … They had their own little rooms or classrooms with benches upstairs, where they studied, played and ate snacks that were brought up to them in laundry baskets … I couldn’t have joined them. One day I listened to them talking out on the soccer field. They were talking about sports and goals, about Biblical parables and piety in church … in fact it was neither the one nor the other, but some cross of the two. It was stupid and hypocritical.