Newcomers Page 4

  We finally arrived in uncle’s town in the middle of the night. The station was an ordinary peasant house. Uncle wasn’t waiting for us, even though we’d sent him a telegram. There was a dark forest right in front of us and not a single streetlamp on the road. Neither on the left, in a depression that had standing water in it … a regular lake that was impossible to cross … nor on the right, where the road climbed a sort of hill, beyond which it was pitch dark … We set our suitcases down on top of some logs and a coal monger’s bags in a shack next to the tracks … We took with us only the bag in which our nightshirts were packed. Since we’d been spattered with wet coal dust, we wiped ourselves off with bits of cardboard that were lying around. We stayed standing outside the closed little station to give father time to figure out which way we should go. Mother was on pins and needles. But here, in the place where he grew up, she could at least trust him a little … Yes, he suddenly recalled some shortcut, a path that he often used as a child to go to school and also to come home, when he’d return to the village. The path was up there somewhere, way at the top of a hill, and then led back down to the water …

  We headed uphill. To one side there was a long wall that rose up with the road from the train tracks and some monstrously mighty body of water that roared down below … I felt the wall with my hand. It was made out of coarsely hewn stone and was full of gaps and bits of flint. A regular rampart! But I was more interested in the body of water that was splashing around down there … It hung in the air with the rain, like an ocean that was cooling my head from afar and giving me shivers … Vati walked so far ahead of us that he vanished from sight. We caught up with him again at the top. He was standing next to some black bushes in front of a wall. “Da hinunter müssen wir gehen, glaube ich,”h he said with a note of guilt in his voice. “Einen anderen Weg kenne ich nicht.”i He pushed some dripping branches aside. Between the leaves and the wall appeared a gap leading into a veritable abyss. “Was?” exclaimed mother, who wouldn’t have been visible at all if she hadn’t been dressed in white … But there was no other way out. Vati headed down the steep slope first, with a suitcase and a lit sulphur match, then, like it or not, mother followed holding Gisela, who fortunately wasn’t crying, because she wasn’t a whiny child by nature … with me, carrying mother’s bag, coming last. The leafy branches all around rustled and snapped, surprised to find us hugging the ground with them … I had never before penetrated such a jungle. I couldn’t even see my hand in front of me. For an instant in the faint glow of a match I noticed some rods within a circle of blistered trees … no, a bunch of snakes standing upright!… and on the moleskin spread out all around them were sea shells, smashed snails and soft, white, broad-capped mushrooms, toadstools – the poisonous ones from the Schwarzwald … I began to feel afraid, especially at my back. But here I was in Vati’s country, after all!… I seized onto every solid thing that came into my fingers … there were so many leaves, like a dark, thick, slippery carpet, that they stood upright like weasels, scratched my hands and caused me to keep sliding forward. My God, what if I do a somersault and crack my head open on the fork of some bush! I was staring so intently into the dark that my eyes started to hurt. But each time I went flying again … into some forked branch, hanging vine or tree trunk … or were they all so happy to see me that they kept clumsily bumping into me?… I tried to walk crouching down to trick anything that might have been lurking in the dark brush … I expected Vati any instant to run into some monster, beast or robber that would proceed either to eat or to strangle him, so I got ready to beat a quick retreat back uphill or die here on the spot. And why shouldn’t I die? Alive or dead, I was in some sort of paradise here … I never imagined that a tunnel like this would await me in Vati’s country … full of branches, endless, dark and with no way out. Here and there to the left or right I smelled something that was ready to leap to my rescue … It was the stench of rotting trees and human excrement … but there was no way I was going to be able to get off the smooth shoulders of this slippery earthworm that I was sliding down. Various things that I had just barely avoided or at least forced into submission resumed their former shape behind me and turned wild again. No, there were no insidious ravines like this even in the hills around Urach. If I could only slide downhill using my rear as a sled, it would have been safer and so much more fun …

  Suddenly the path became lighter and I heard a hollow, insistent sound. Mother was already standing … I stepped onto level, slushy ground … the humid air was just as heavy from the rain as the ground was wet with it … I saw Vati, transformed into a shadow against the bright ground … So this was probably the meadow with molehills, and next to it some other flat space was splashing, spraying and pounding … Water! I stumbled over to the suitcase, then to Vati, who was standing far away. His suit reeked and hung from him like a tent. Out of the dark he said to me in his usual voice, “Das ist der grosse Fluß.”j The river! The same one he had told me about? I ran over to see it … Right next to some trees and bushes turned upside down on their heads an enormous, wide body of water was gushing … leaping and racing past like the back of some gigantic lizard … a dance floor wildly spinning all the way to its middle, where a black shadow fell out of the sky over the unseen far bank … But here it was spraying the trees and bushes with its foam, gurgling in the grass around my shoes, as though it were washing the trees … In life you only rarely see anything as awful and glorious as this. My eyes practically fell out of their sockets trying to see more. So for once Vati hadn’t pulled the wool over my eyes.

  There was a little path wending its way under the trees by the water … and father was first to set out on it … It was slushier, as though it had been sprinkled with pebbles … It led toward some black shadows that loomed tall and round against a brighter sky … Like thrones, fortress walls, and big theater balconies … Or maybe also like a jungle or an upland plateau … A real exotic landscape! There was a winter chill but also such a cheerful sound wafting to us from the water, that I could have had ice cream just as though it were summer … On the far side there was emptiness – a big, strange, soft meadow that suddenly rose up in the vicinity of some shrub-like shadows … not too far off, since otherwise our voices wouldn’t have echoed as they did. It was clipped off even by a white line at the top, and above that there was a sort of mountain that ate the white line. In a way it resembled a machine I had seen before. Only its dimensions weren’t such that people were like dwarves alongside it. I ran to catch up with Vati. His soaked suit and shoes made slapping sounds as he walked. He turned his head back, “Das ist die Eisenbahn mit dem Tunnel.”k How could I be so stupid! Of course, this was a hillside with railroad tracks and a tunnel that went through the hill. Like the picture on the cover of the box for my train set in Basel. I was only now seeing it in its proper dimensions and from close up for the first time. This … not some dumpy train station with schedules and wooden waiting rooms, was the proper domicile for a locomotive that roamed the whole world …

  *What have you done with the children? Kicked them out into the hallway with all of the suitcases? This is downright crazy and an outrage.

  †Say something!

  ‡So what? So what if it’s already twelve, nobody else has asked for the room.

  §Father, are we going to go see the castle?

  ‖Yes, after lunch.

  aThere won’t be any time left.

  bWe have to catch the first train.

  cNo, no, I’m still looking.

  dKeep up with us, will you? We have a lot of things to take care of.

  eThat’s the boarding house.

  fIs that suit made of gold?

  gIt appears to be.

  hWe have to go down this side, I think.

  iI don’t know any other way.

  jThat’s the big river.

  kThat’s the railroad and one of its tunnels.

  WHEN WE GOT TO A TREE, we were in the deepest shadow. The path had suddenly narrowed and the water was
gurgling very close by, as if somebody was brushing his teeth on the far side of the shrubs … Vati sparked a match from his little pack. In front of us was a huge cliff face, wide and black, looming progressively farther out over us the higher it reached up into the trees … With its belly it shoved the path out closer to the water, and us, too … Vati pressed close to the rock face, he hugged it, and with the hand that he used to carry the suitcase, he lit a match … the tiny, useless flame of an innocent match from Basel illuminated his mud-encrusted face and the black cliff that was thrusting its chest out, but most of all a multitude of various kinds of leaves that came fluttering down like a waterfall … Suddenly Vati was gone from the cliff … “Wo bist du?”* mother called out tearfully. He had vanished. “Vati!” I shouted. All we could hear was the crackle of branches and kerplunk … father was drowning amidst bushes and toads!… “Mama, Vati kommt um!”† I hollered … Suddenly another little flame appeared … We saw Vati’s face above us, pale and with muddy streams of sweat running from the lenses of his eyeglasses on down … he was standing over a part of the path that had been washed out. He was carrying something … “Steine!”‡ he announced. He tossed them down onto the path beneath him, on the place where it went underwater … white, gray, round, square. Any second he was going to slip and fall … “Hast du dich verirrt?”§ mother asked. “Nein, nein,” he answered through clenched teeth. “Hier geht der richtige Weg ins Dorf.”‖ He climbed down, stepped on the stones and reached out his hand. “Gib mir die kleine Zwetschge.”a I thought … all right, now Gisela was going to make a ruckus, because she didn’t like Vati, who was always arguing with Clairi over her … But Gisela had character! She leaned forward and let him pick her up. For the first time ever father was carrying Gisela in his arms! Just imagine! He climbed up onto the far side of the path, which was veinous with roots, and set her down on the suitcase … Now it was mother’s turn. She was soaked through with sweat. She clung onto the rock face while it shook down a rain of leaves, as though they were being dumped out of a cloud … I shoved off after her, stepping over Vati’s stones, which were jutting out of the water. The path reached up to my chin, so they took hold of me and pulled me up and there I was, next to a tree that was half-entwined in clematis. Here the path was firmer, there were pines growing on both sides, and my stockings felt like bags full of mud … Nothing had been like I’d imagined it, but this dangerous path, that fearsome cliff, these raging waters … oh, this had been fun!

  Now there were big, fat stones underfoot. The tree growth was below us and the river had split in two like a peaceful lake, but a little farther on still more jagged rock faces loomed … “Jetzt kommen wir in den Steinbruch,”b Vati said. “Was?”c Why on earth did mother have to shout back a question each time? I walked right behind her coat and Gisela, whose head hung over her shoulder, would tug at my hair … The path emerging from under mother’s feet refused to end. Suddenly it inclined downward, with rock faces rising on both sides. They resembled high cliffs and the ground underneath them reflected gray triangles … Vati suddenly came to a stop. “Vorsichtig und ganz still - da ist das Zigeunerlager,”d he whispered. We huddled closely together, seizing onto each other’s clothes and buttons, and Gisela kept hold of my hair … We stood there, each of us looking in a different direction, in case someone was about to attack us … Behind us was the stone chute, and up ahead of us the chute descended even farther into a chasm between cliffs … It was the quietest quiet. After a while we moved forward and down … the path leveled off and merged with rocks all around … Gray outlines stood pitched in all the shadowy corners – these were supposedly tents made of canvas. Inside them lurked Gypsies who weren’t as noble as Indians … I heard a high-pitched, giggling voice … “Pferde,” Vati explained. Indeed, I saw some shaggy shadows or other, the outline of a head … horses … and wheels, so those were their wagons. If they were going to attack us now, we were lost! My buttocks tightened and my heart held still. It became a tiny, hard nut. I knew that it could burst any second … The path unspooled along the bottom of the ravine … we lifted our legs at the knees, practically up to our chins … I couldn’t make out anything as we passed the tents … but I did pick up some revolting smell. “Verbranntes Schmalz,” mother whispered … Thank God, it was burnt tallow, at least something kitchen-related … But despite our precautions while walking, the stones underfoot began to crunch. This was a bad part of the trail. We were in a ravine that wasn’t just dangerous at the bottom, but also up at the top. The path suddenly softened and rose … Vati began to ascend toward the sky … and I pressed my head toward mother’s back in order to leave all this nonsense behind me as soon as possible … until finally the vagabond path leveled out.