Newcomers Read Free Page B

town … peasant houses, a peasant church, a wooden bridge. Better a proper village than this sort of town. I was as hungry as a wolf … Mr. Alojz patted me on the shoulder now and then as he walked by, clutching his grade book and papers under his arm … He would whack others with his stick, but not me. I was a kind of guest … It was autumn, so it was rainy and muddy. At home there was a single umbrella, Karel’s … Most often I walked alone to school and back, holding a scrap of an old horse blanket over my head … At noon when I came home by way of the Krka and through the quarry, now and then I would be accosted by the Gypsy kids who otherwise darted back and forth among the older Gypsies out cooking in pots on the fires … In the morning they’d all still been sleeping the sleep of the dead, but now they were full of vigor and ready for battle. They chased me all the way to the footbridge … but they didn’t dare go over the stream … That’s why I would skirt the top of the quarry on the way home. I knew that it would still be a while before mother would cook anything in that round stove, so I looked through the grass for all possible edible saps and grains I could chew on.
    After two weeks Clairi came back from Ljubljana … She had lost the job she’d been given as an assistant seamstress. Now all four of us slept in the same bed – Gisela and me at one end, mother and Clairi at the other. At least that way we kept warm, even if there were too many legs under the blanket. The down comforter loomed up over us like a white mountain … light and warm. It reminded me of allmy Basel haunts … the park, the streets, the drumming school, the Rhine … our places on rue Helder and rue de Bourg, next to the movie theater before the St. Elisabeth Church. The comforter was so out of place that I really ought to have hidden it. It refused to blend in with Karel’s house. It covered our narrow bed like a cloud, but this cloud had been plucked from some other climate, over some other town … I began to dream about a witch who lived near my friend Friederle. She would wait in front of our building for me to come out. She would attack me … and chase me until up on the square I found a balloon I could escape in.

 
    T HERE WAS NEVER A LIGHT on in the vestibule. Steps led from it into the courtyard. I flew over these one-two-three when the baker came calling in the morning, “Kaiser rolls! Sesame rolls! Bread loaves! Baguettes! Croissants!…” The baker was a little man riding a bicycle. With a huge basket on his back and a slightly smaller one over the handlebars … He pulled a cloth off the basket to reveal thin loaves jutting up like lances among the croissants and rolls. I bought a small loaf of cornbread for two dinars … Every morning he pulled up like this outside our courtyard door and announced himself. As though he were paying a call at some landed estate … Who all lived in this building?
    At the far end of the vestibule, in a slightly larger room next door to ours, lived a young dark-haired woman with her son named Enrico.Her husband, a mason, built houses all over the country and was seldom at home. All three of them had fled the Littoral after Mussolini came to power, settling in Ljubljana. Enrico, who was a sickly boy, knew Slovene only slightly better than I did, but he spoke it as if he were singing a song, which made it harder to understand him. At first he didn’t like me, because he thought we were Germans, and Mussolini was great friends with Hitler. Then that got straightened out. He began coming out to the woods where I would spend time. Most often at lunchtime, carrying his plate, which was laden down with delicacies he wanted to share with me. The best food of all was little fried bits of polenta. Like me, Enrico was a little mixed up from their move … He hadn’t found his bearings and he was afraid. He didn’t know where to go to find