Read Online Newcomers by Lojze Kovacic - Free Book Online

owls or falcons. Even the twins held their tongues around him … Jože and I once hitched a team to the delivery wagon with its tall sides and drove to the slaughterhouse … All the cows and even horses they had standing outside in pens under the acacias!… Inside there were big, cool rooms with white tile and red floors, perhaps so the blood wouldn’t be so visible … I watched them slaughtering cows, bulls, calves. The butchers were dressed in white from head to toe, withmasks over their mouths and noses like surgeons. Jože preferred not to look. He even turned his head away, toward the pegs in the coatroom. The butchers, all giants with faces as plump as women’s, grinned at him, not meanly, but in a way that showed they respected him … They killed the cattle with a rod that had electricity in it, or with a tube that shot out a little dart as thin as a needle. They looked for the place on their foreheads: bzzzz … and in an instant the animal, tied by the legs and horns, toppled onto its side … Sometimes it also staggered, each of its four legs separately, like a mardi gras horse with two men hidden inside who can’t agree whether to go straight or in a circle … The animal collapsed and stretched its head far forward … like a skull drying on the Sava’s gravel … At first I thought that it had passed out, but then I saw that it kept pressing farther down onto the floor, as though it wanted to sink through it. It really was dead … They dragged it off like a swollen carpet over the floor, to skin it … Then they sprayed water on the floor and brought in another. Sometimes an animal would resist … while it mooed they would shove it from behind with a kind of ram and pull it from in front by the rings in its nostrils. Sometimes the calves would bolt … and they would have to go chasing after them all through the hall … Meat and skins alike hung from hooks … like clothes in a closet … the horns, the hooves, bits of tail would be stacked up in the corners by individual butchers … Jože gave me a pail to collect hot blood in … they made a strong soup out of it … now and then I also got a piece of meat, some tripe, a soup bone … On Saturdays there would be crowds of poor people and women holding assorted pots standing out under the trees aroundthe slaughterhouse … You always got something, if not for free, then for not much money … At times I did fine as I watched the gigantic animals fall to the floor, as if hit by lightning … yes, this was proof that death was the same for all … at others the recollection of Liska, Dimka or the warm, sticky smell of blood drove me out under the acacias to vomit …

 
    V ATI WENT EVERY DAY to read the
Morning
and the
Slovene
on the bulletin board across from the baker’s where they got posted … Afterschool he would send me to read the afternoon edition and the
Slovene Nation
. I was supposed to read just what he specifically told me to read: the war … foreign affairs … the want ads, the for sale ads … the prices. I couldn’t always find everything or understand it … There were too many maps and headlines, especially on the first few pages, which were full of exclamation and question marks … I liked reading the captions under the photos best. An armored division in Spain, where fat General Franco in that silly army cap had won … little Japanese tanks somewhere far away, on the other side of the world in Manchuria, where rice grew with snakes all around … a complex roller device that Hitler’s bomber pilots were using to learn to hit their targets more accurately … One day toward the end of August there were a lot of people crowding around the bulletin board … a dark thicket, in trench coats, shirtsleeves, caps, holding ice cream cones … I stood at the back, unable to see anything through a layer of people reading that was ten feet thick … They were