Read Online Newcomers by Lojze Kovacic - Free Book Online Page A

standing so close together, leg to leg, pocket to pocket, that I couldn’t squeeze through them … This had to be big news, because everyone came away with faces that looked like what they’d just read was some sort of food they were still trying to swallow … From the end of the fence I began to move toward the start of the bulletin board … from the last page of the newspaper toward the first … They wouldn’t let me get near it … they were leaning into the board with their arms … their heads dangling over the front page like pears, as glue continued to drip thickly off the board from under the newsprint like honey … Finally I shoved my way past the front edge to the row of pages … and was greeted by a lot of grumbling, they wanted to chase me off to the children’s corner … A picture showed Hitler and that other scary man. The one with the low forehead and the fringe-like hair from the caricatures, who led the Jews and the communists, Stalin. NON-AGGRESSION PACT BETWEEN THIRD REICH AND SOVIET UNION  … A photo showed German foreign minister von Ribbentrop in a uniform and Mongol-faced Russian minister Molotov in a black suit … “Has Europe been divided into spheres of influence?” it said … At the bottom of the page was a picture that showed Hitler in his short mustache and Stalin in his bushy one, each grabbing from either side parts of a jigsaw puzzle labeled “Poland” … Vati was so surprised when I told him about the pact that he dropped everything and ran outside in his house robe to look at the bulletin board … He came back looking confused. “Juden und Deutsche zusammen! Im Traum hätte ich das nicht geglaubt …” * The tavern on Bohorič buzzed like a beehive … Everyone was buying newspapers … crowding around radios … talking in clusters on the sidewalks … trench coats fluttering at the street corners … Two superpowers had united … Now it was Poland’s turn!… What response would England and France have? Chamberlain and Marshal Pétain?… And America? Roosevelt?… I knew we were going to move soon. That worried me a lot more. To Town Square, the house of Mrs. Hamman … into a big apartment … there in the center of town Vati’s fur business was going to prosper a lot more. They coached me for it … from now on I was going to have towork harder and be a lot better behaved … Or else they would put me in a reformatory, and that sort of education – oh boy! – that was like being in the army … for every infraction the schoolmasters beat you with a belt … they had already got me transferred to my new school, Graben … There at the very least I was going to have to earn Bs, not like now when my report card showed nothing but Cs … I had already asked around about the man who was going to be my new teacher, named Mlekuž. A strict, unbending man! He would have what it took to tame children …
    Then, after the big news that had struck everyone like an axe to the head, the newspaper wrote: Blitzkrieg … Germany attacks Poland … A photo showed Polish cavalry consisting of white-clad horsemen with lances attacking German tanks … Bombardments. Stukas. Two pursuit aircraft flying over Warsaw … The Germans dismantling a border crossing … Germany gained 190,000 square kilometers, the Soviet Union 180,000 … of Poland … Great Britain and France declared war on Germany, but they didn’t help Poland … Vati and I went to Šiška to sell furs to a merchant who had a house near a train crossing … His pink round house with columns and a grocery store on the ground floor stood on a corner … upstairs the merchant had his nice home: a big living room with oil paintings in frames. While Vati and he were talking, his son Oto and I played tag all through the house … up and down the steps that wound like a snail shell … outside in their yard, with bags and crates lying