Newcomers (3 page)

W
HEN
I
OPENED MY EYES
, all three of them – Vati, Gisela and mother – were sitting across from me. Judging from the thick tobacco smoke that filled my head and my lungs, I could tell that something must have happened in the meantime, and I could hear various languages and murmuring voices intermingling around my head. The train car was full. Thick with people … but I had to shake off the sleep and the smoke in order to see them. “Sind wir schon über die Grenze?”
^*
I asked randomly, because I didn’t know … “Ja, jetzt sind wir schon in Jugoslawien,”
^†
Vati said, smiling. I was crestfallen. There had been no flash, no thunder when the locomotive penetrated the
border, there was no sign that anything had been split or changed outside … all around in the blue darkness there was a huge number of people just sitting … I pressed my eyes shut to see if somewhere in the darkness of my body, my chest, my head, I could find a bright line of lightning, some afterglow of the border, an echo of thunder … Because although I’d been sleeping, my body must have perceived the transition from darkness to light … and in my darkness there must be some trace at least, some dim glow, some smoldering bulb … There was nothing … it was mute, black, weightless, thick. I was just terribly sleepy. People were sitting in the shadows … on all the benches, dressed almost for autumn, although it was June. They had scarves and hats on their heads … Their heads, their heads. What were they like? Blurry. They were holding baskets, bags woven from straw, brightly colored, a man in a black suit and white shirt sitting on the bench across the aisle from me had the ugly remains of an old backpack slung over his shoulder. On the luggage racks there were baskets covered with napkins like pillows. I wanted to inspect them from head to toe, but that wasn’t possible on account of the weak, dim light … Who were they? They were sitting, from right next to me all the way to the door at the far end … there wasn’t even the tiniest free space remaining in the whole train car … They just went on forever at the back, as if in the rain. But some of them were seated facing toward our bench and seemed to be alert. What were they like? They had darkish, old faces, like leather soccer balls … and big, black cavities of various depths where their eyes were. I couldn’t make out their speech. They stared at mother, who in contrast was as white as
snow, and at Gisela, even at me, and especially Vati … But he was one of them and could have blended in … They stared at us, languidly, from head to toe, causing me to feel a flush of warmth that cooled as soon as it reached my face. Vati turned to a man who was dressed in an ordinary jacket, although on his head he was wearing a uniform cap with a cockade. He said something, his mouth moving so slowly that his jaw muscles tightened, turning his face into a mask … he said something in a strange, soft language, as though he had some new, unusual mashed food in his mouth. They looked him in the face, in the eyeglasses, the mouth, his hair … “Was hast du gesagt?”
^‡
mother said. Our language was sharper and firm, but understandable. Now everyone turned to look at mother, even the ones sitting in the back … Still holding his hands between his knees from the cold, father turned toward where the other man was sitting … and again he said something in that extraordinarily pliable language in which I could barely make out even the more distinct consonants. The man in the cap didn’t answer, even though he was the one facing him. Instead, the voice of someone in the packed car who was sitting in shadow by the window across from us answered. I couldn’t distinguish him from the other dark-clad figures around him … He answered quickly, as though issuing some call, but again in the same strangely drawling language where I couldn’t distinguish friendliness from hostility, nor could I detect any melody, if it had one. The same man, now with his head stretched out, continued to speak, while the others kept stealing glances at Vati
from over the backrests. The man with the backpack said something like thunder. Using a black, bushy umbrella that had a knotty handle resembling a roasted lizard on it, he drew something on the floor with its tip. Vati pointed at the drawing, invisible on the dark floor, which was now caked in mud and covered with sand that had been tracked in … and bent over the floor, he said something in their language that sounded very childish. Suddenly everyone started talking at once, a veritable barrage of yarn and wool … and somebody got up from the seat by the window behind me, revealing the unbuttoned panels of their vests and white expanses of the shirts underneath … “Worüber sprecht ihr?”
^§
mother asked, and all eyes fastened on her, including mine. “Wo wir billing essen und schlafen können,”
^‖
Vati answered from the door of the car, where he now stood, looking rumpled and very pale.

Maybe these ones crammed into the train car weren’t yet the real ones. The real ones lived in houses, had stores and horses and all kinds of machines.

W
HEN WE GOT OFF THE TRAIN
they didn’t even give me enough time to look up at the sky and catch my breath … There was a gray, illuminated, covered passageway on the platform with a few people … and beyond it was pitch darkness all the way to the sky. The air was
warm, dry and a bit oily, with a fine mist slowly drizzling … We set our luggage down on the stone floor of the illuminated passageway … It was quiet, extremely quiet. The passageway didn’t have any interesting posters or different-colored light bulbs, just iron pillars curved at the bottom and top … Some people were standing around at the far end or were walking back and forth … many of them in black trousers and white shirts, with hats on their heads … Nobody spoke … laughed … or waved … There were a few dark-skinned women with scarves on their heads and men’s shoes on their feet … just one woman, running across the tracks in the distance, was dressed in cheery, colorful clothes like the women in Basel … but she vanished among the trains … The people were milling around as if waiting, looking around, especially at us, although they moved as though they were slightly crippled … They had umbrellas as big as the one on the train … I couldn’t believe that we had arrived here so quickly and that I was still awake in the middle of the night … maybe because we were so tired and sleepy, someone had tricked us and we’d been directed to the wrong place … and now we were who knows where … It was a shame I couldn’t see the sky and a shame it wasn’t daytime so I could find out whether all of this was just some prank … Vati was in a conversation with some short, stocky, swarthy man. He was speaking to him in his language that felt as soft as pastry … was he asking him something? This man, too, instead of listening to Vati, looked him square in the face, and then answered him the same way … straight in the eyes, the mouth, the nose … in a voice that resounded way up toward the ceiling. Was he a woman, perhaps?

There were so many people in shirtsleeves jostling in the enormous, poorly lit waiting room with ticket windows and bars over them!… And such a big clock hanging way up on the wall, as white as a moon that had escaped indoors … but it was still outlined with those big, disgusting numbers from the first grade arithmetic workbook …

Outside there was a street with trees that ran parallel to the train tracks, but everything else lay in darkness. It was monotonous and dreary, like some side street.

“Kommt, ich werde euch etwas zeigen,”
^*
said Vati. “Laß die Kinder in Ruhe, wir gehen schlafen.”
^†
 … Vati took me assiduously by the arm in a way he’d never done before, and we proceeded to walk the length of the gray station building. From around a dark building on the other side of the street it got lighter and lighter. “Schau nur!”
^‡
he said. All at once, in the middle of the black sky, there appeared a dazzling glass castle. So that was it!…

“Ein Schloß aus Glas,”
^§
I said. So this really was it now. The light permeated my skin, coat and hair, touching me like a ghost. I had no sense that any of my family were anywhere nearby.

“Wie schön,”
^‖
mother said behind me, holding Gisela, now
awake in her arms. There, you see, now even she admitted that something was beautiful. The light made us as visible as though it were day, it saturated the sidewalk and transfixed us like the sight of a Christmas tree … The glass castle had a tower and a long main building. No windows were visible. It hung in a cloud … did it float like the moon? What kept it up there? Was there just air between it and the city? I didn’t want to risk asking questions, or they might drag me away. Even my buttons, the anchor, my whole blue navy coat from Basel was saturated with this topaz-yellow light, as though it were changing. The street that we saw the glass palace through seemed wrapped in a flannel darkness, between its tall buildings there were lamps that shone in a line going all the way down … It was impossible to do anything but just stand and stare.

We had to go back to our stack of suitcases and take them across the road and some streetcar tracks. The front door of a tall, dark building was open and lit in the very middle of the night. A gentleman wearing a striped waistcoat was standing behind a desk, with numerous keys hanging on the wall behind him. Vati spoke to him and the gentleman spoke back to Vati in that language that even here, in this building, among chairs and tables, refused to stop being dreamlike … We got a key with a big wooden pear attached to it. Some other man helped us carry our suitcases as we went up the red carpet covering the stairs. We went all the way to the top, bumping into some wood-paneled walls on the landings, and then turned left where there were even more stairs that appeared to have no end. In the corner of some hallway next to a small table a door opened. It was a room, not very deep,
with white covered beds and a divan … a mirror and a cute washbasin. The white castle shone through the window. I wanted to sleep on the divan next to the window. They grudgingly moved it for me. Vati and mother lay down on the double bed with Gisela between them. When they put out the light, the castle shone gently into the room at the same height as my pillow. I crouched there looking at it and at mother, who saw my head against the pane, and quietly tried to persuade me to lie down …

In the morning … the pillow under my head smelled funny … and I jumped when I suddenly woke up … Out the window, in the place where the white castle had shone the night before … there was an old building resembling an ugly, brown ruin with a square, crumbling tower and holes in a sort of stone crown jabbing into the cloud cover above it. I couldn’t believe my eyes … But maybe, I quickly recovered, the glass castle is invisible in the daytime, because it’s transparent … The brownish-gray jagged wall with its square tower stood atop a forested hill … above the reddish cupola of a church and the tin roof of the hotel courtyard that had been soaked black in a downpour … It refused to be erased so that I could see the glass walls of the resplendent castle from the previous night … Or maybe the earth moves so fast that the glass palace is already appearing to people on the other side of the world.

I called out to Vati when his eyebrows began to move. I told him that the castle was no longer made out of glass, that it had turned to stone. He jumped out of bed in his long linen skivvies and nightshirt and leaned over my shoulder at the window. I was expecting something
to happen when his eyes made contact with the demolished castle … but it stayed the same. “Weisch, es its abends nur beleuchtet,”
^a
he said.

I didn’t feel like reminding him that yesterday when I’d said the castle was made out of glass, he hadn’t corrected me.

“So hast du dir das nur vorgestellt.”
^b

“Es war aus Glas.”
^c

Then mother spoke up. “Shhh! Bleibt still, daß die Gisela nicht erwacht.”
^d
I told her what had happened. “Schon gut, das war nur die elektrische Beleuchtung.”
^e

Vati hopped back into bed, because his feet were cold … but really so he could sleep some more!… How was this possible? They’d fooled me again, if not lied outright. There was nothing outside, and here in this room with them everything was the way it had always been, broken and rancid for the millionth time. I flung myself back down and closed my eyes. I could hear father as he shaved. He was standing at the sink in front of the mirror, tugging – tsht, tsht – the razor across his face. Admittedly, this was the first time I’d ever seen him shave, but the brownish gray castle with the strange tower stayed the same.

We had breakfast in a nice dining room downstairs. I had to stay with mother and Gisela while father went into town to take care of some business. I took up my position by the window. Maybe the reason
it was made out of old stone was because there were noblemen, old knights with their squires, horses – and maybe even a White or Black Prince living there. And maybe it was even better that way, because if it had been made out of glass, then only princesses could have lived in it.