*
It stopped running. We had to take it to the watchmaker’s.
†
When will it be fixed?
‡
In a week or two.
§
Mrs. Guček took it to a watchmaker in the old town who’s a friend of hers.
‖
No, no, we didn’t trade the watch with the grocer and we didn’t put it in hock … it was so broken that the watchmaker couldn’t do anything with it … nothing but cogs and springs …
a
Gritli will send you another one.
b
Pangs of the soul are far nobler than pains of the body.
c
Hi!
(Serbo-Croatian)
d
Hold still, please.
Von Wem Hat Der Lümmel
“VON WEM HAT DER LÜMMEL nur das schlechte Beispiel?”* mother asked, as if I weren’t in the room … It was a harsh blow … the whole house found out about the scandal, the whole block … From the hospice to “Mexico” … The twins disappeared whenever they saw me … I didn’t dare show myself to butcher Ham, who was always so nice to me … not to mention Jože, whom I hid from like a needle in a haystack. I shook passing the newsstand as if it were my tombstone … I would have preferred to spend days and days in bed, hidden under a blanket … Slept or died. But you can’t afford a luxury like that living together in one room. I had to get up and go to school, that ludicrous chaff cutter … The tobacconist lady told mother, “Dieses Kind wird Ihr Unglück sein, liebe Frau … Schon jetzt ist er durch und durch verdorben … Ein elender Bub … Ich habe mein Vertrauen in ihn gelegt …”
† Those were her last words … Mother was afraid she was going to take us to court, even though she’d gotten furs as compensation … that she would have me locked up … She didn’t dare respond. She and Mrs. Guček discussed whether or not to put me in some institution … yes or no? At length they weighed the arguments for and against … “Ach, wenn der Lausbub nur wüßte, wie Weh er Ihnen tut …”‡ Mrs. Guček said. Yes, the very same fright with the shriveled eyes of a mad crow … “Die einzige Rettung ist die Erziehungsanstalt,”§ mother concluded, fixing me with her eyes … The old woman and that girl of hers by the faucet now had a free hand … to go at me with even greater zest … I spilled water on the floor when I set a bucket down … Of course I would first take the bucket back to our room and then come back with a rag … No! Up went the blinds … the foster child or stepdaughter pressed her elliptical, pimply face to the glass pane. She said something back into the room, informing her aunt, and the next instant the old lady had leapt into the hallway and begun shouting at me … Mother came out … she brought a rag along with her … and more or less came to my defense … I was boiling … with rage at the old hag, but even more at that pale, anemic puppet of hers … A few days later I finally ran into her, just as she was coming up the stairs. She pressed flat up against the wall, so as not to brush against me … that low life and wild man. She was taller than me and four or five years older. I stood right where I was on the steps up above her and suddenly landed her such a wallop, a full wooden mask, that it deafened me, too, for a while. At first she almost fainted … then the tears started to pour … as pale as her face … amid sobbing that was so miserable that it touched my heart. She ran upstairs, sprinkling the hallway, the walls, the support beams as she went … At that very moment mother reached for the bamboo cane again …