One Day
ONE DAY Vati unexpectedly received from the Swiss authorities the money that was left after they confiscated his property in Basel and settled his debts … There it wouldn’t have amounted to much money, but here it was a lot … Vati began making plans to start over again, from the ground up, so to speak … Despite the fact that we’d been living in the center of town for quite a few months, and despite all his advertising, the business refused to get off the ground … He could count the customers who had walked in our door on the fingers of one hand. Mrs. Hamman, one or two friends of hers, Sergeant Mitič and the wives of other NCOs … But those were just repairs — blowing the fur, as they called it, to see where the piece was worn down or deficient … No serious orders. A fur coat. Or a whole outfit: a fur hat, a stole, and a muff … A jacket or a vest … “Die Leute haben kein Verständnis mehr, kein Gefühl für wirklich schöne Dinge,” mother lamented. “Sie schätzen die feinen, ganz handgearbeiteten Dinge nicht mehr nach Gebühr … Man interessiert sich nur für den verkommenen maschinengezeugten Kram …”* In the display windows of the six or eight furriers in town … Eberle, Rot, or on the square, you could see yards and yards of muffs, fur hats, little caps. Miles and miles of them! And fur coats on mannequins! Always different and new, a regular multitude. The junk that mother saw that was quickly stitched together by machine not only made her sad, it gave her stomach cramps … And we continued to eat badly. Rice made a hundred different ways … steamed, with peas and milk … There was no butter on the bread … maybe once a month some beef soup … twice a week a little, thin disk of salami … macaroni mixed with egg, just one of course …
Vati was making his plans: to become a supplier of hides. He was thinking of building a rabbit farm. Rabbits of all different colors and breeds. Silver, Russian, angora, and silk … He would build his farm in Polica on Uncle Janez’s property. We didn’t know him yet. It was near Ljubljana. The gray fur of Russians, resembling chinchilla, for overcoats and jackets, and wavy angoran like yarn for children’s outfits … We would have the furs and the meat, to boot … Mother and Clairi were against it … Mother kept vigilant against flights of fancy. A farm like that would be exposed to all kinds of opportunities for theft. And somebody would have to look after it. And then there was the expense of the hutches!.. you couldn’t just leave the rabbits out in a field or the woods. Then there was food for the rabbits, a special kind of bark, these rodents had an insatiable appetite … We have to think very carefully. It would be better to invest the money … But Vati kept pushing. I wrote in his name to Uncle Rudi in Polica that we would be coming for a visit on Sunday. We took the train to Grosuplje and from there we walked through a quarry and a road that ran through some fields … which I hadn’t seen or smelled in a long time. It was like an outing …
Uncle Rudi was a short, broad-shouldered man who bore some resemblance to Uncle Jožef, but wasn’t as caustic. He would ride his bicycle to Ljubljana and in the winters did road maintenance work in nearby Grosuplje. His house stood on a small hill with a winding path leading up to it like the kind in picture books … He had a number of children, including some girls, and one of the boys was my age … They were poorer than Karel and Jože, but they were nicer. They had just one cow, two pigs and a few hens. Their fields were all on the hillside … But their barn was magnificent. The straw was hard and smooth and we could slide down it like a lumber chute, then tumble down the slope outside the door … Vati chatted with Rudi about his interest in building some hutches on his property and buying some rabbits … Uncle Ivan was for the idea … We got a basket of fruit, lard, and some flour to take home …
The train was overflowing with drunk and happy men and women … There were so many of them that they sat on the floor between benches, in the corridor, outside the lavatory … All of them were carrying bags, suitcases, backpacks, bundles, and wicker baskets … with corn, beans, barley, sausage, and chickens … “Well, boy, I’m going to need to empty my bladder here in a second,” an excited little man kindly put his hand on my head. I drew in my legs so he could shove his way through to the toilet … People were singing in the compartments … including the women, flushed red, their shiny faces with necklaces that got lost in the fat folds of their pendulous dewlaps … I had never before liked people so much as I did on that train. Every compartment had its own song, or several compartments would share one … The luggage racks practically shook from the basses and sopranos and things fell down in our laps … In the compartment next door people were of course talking about that … the willy and wee-wee. That was interesting … “Me, no longer able to do it?” cackled a man’s bass. “Even after three score years she isn’t satisfied … Now when I get home, she’ll start whining … like you wouldn’t believe. I’ll tell her, look, here’s a news flash. When I leave in the morning, you get one kiss, so in thirty days that’s thirty kisses and after dinner I’ll slap your bottom, another thirty per month, so that’s thirty kisses and thirty slaps on the ass all together … whoever wants more won’t get any, that’s bolshevism, skinning a man alive …” … “Ha ha ha!” … “Score, one-zero, my favor!” On the platform of the last car where you had a good view of the tracks as they narrowed on the gray granite ballast the farther away they got, the happiest people on the whole train were shouting and playing an accordion …