around … among the columns that we designated as home … Nobody scolded us, nobody shouted … Oto walked into the store … bottles of champagne, fish, foie gras inmayonnaise lined up on the shelves and in the display cases … He took a tall jar of chocolate candies off of a shelf and gave me a whole handful … the saleswomen stood by with their hands behind their backs and didn’t even say “boo” … It was immediately apparent that, when his father wasn’t around, Oto represented the owner here … That’s how I would have liked to live … have a well-stocked grocery store several paces away where I could go whenever I felt like it and take whatever I wanted … The merchant was still a young man and serious. “What had to happen has happened,” he said to Vati. He pointed down to his courtyard where the bags and crates were. “Now at least for a while my people need to keep their mouths shut …”
We moved after ten p.m. when the streetcars ran less frequently and there were no gawkers out in the street to make fun of our meager worldly possessions … So long, faucet and old witch! So long, Mrs. Guček! Tobacconist lady!… Goodbye, Jože! Mr. Ham! Zdravko!… We moved using a cart that Mrs. Hamman had loaned us … the tables, the hammocks, the chairs, the wicker chest, the boxes, the sewing machine, the bunches of patterns, the box with pots and eating utensils … We had accumulated quite a bit … We had to make three trips there and back … Carrying our clothes, bedsheets and Gisela, Clairi and mother walked on the sidewalk behind Vati and me as we pushed the cart … When we arrived in the vaulted entryway of the wide house, which had a glass-enclosed porch framed in white-painted wood as part of its facade, and began to carry our things up the dark staircase and then down the long, squeaky courtyard veranda protected by a glass roof and metal poles (there in the corner was whereold Mrs. Hamman lived), through a vestibule into a big, empty room with two windows that faced out onto Town Square, from which a streetlight cast a dim glow onto the dark parquet floor, where we set each item carefully down, to avoid hurting our hands, but also so they wouldn’t drop and wake up the people who lived in the house … I remembered similar moves that we’d made in Basel … from the green house in Gerbergässli to the ruin that we lived in in Steinenvorstadt, from there to the Rue de Bourg alongside an arcade you could take to get to the Rhine … from there to beautiful rue Helder with its fountain in the middle of the road, and then from there to the square near the Mission school and finally back to the green house in Gerbergässli …
In the darkness we used matches to quickly inspect the apartment … From the veranda a glass door led up steps to a long, cold, high-ceilinged room where the red plaster was peeling … A bit farther on, under a vault, was the true, legal entrance to the apartment, a door with a window that was covered with waxed paper printed with roses … First was a dark hallway … the kitchen with a gas stove to the left, and on the right that big red room and next to it a spacious cave for the bathroom with no tub … Then there were two doors … between the first and the second was an antechamber with built-in cupboards … which led into the big room where we set our things down … Outside the windows there were cables, the trolley ran here … Each of the houses on the right and left sides of the square had at least one shop in it … This reminded me of the house I was born in on Elisabethplatz.
* Jews and Germans together! I would never have dreamed it could happen.
I SPENT THE FIRST FEW DAYS LEANING against the window … As a trolley went by, the wires tautened all down the street … On the other side there were shops: Zos’s for ready to wear and shoes with a little arcade in the middle … A
We moved after ten p.m. when the streetcars ran less frequently and there were no gawkers out in the street to make fun of our meager worldly possessions … So long, faucet and old witch! So long, Mrs. Guček! Tobacconist lady!… Goodbye, Jože! Mr. Ham! Zdravko!… We moved using a cart that Mrs. Hamman had loaned us … the tables, the hammocks, the chairs, the wicker chest, the boxes, the sewing machine, the bunches of patterns, the box with pots and eating utensils … We had accumulated quite a bit … We had to make three trips there and back … Carrying our clothes, bedsheets and Gisela, Clairi and mother walked on the sidewalk behind Vati and me as we pushed the cart … When we arrived in the vaulted entryway of the wide house, which had a glass-enclosed porch framed in white-painted wood as part of its facade, and began to carry our things up the dark staircase and then down the long, squeaky courtyard veranda protected by a glass roof and metal poles (there in the corner was whereold Mrs. Hamman lived), through a vestibule into a big, empty room with two windows that faced out onto Town Square, from which a streetlight cast a dim glow onto the dark parquet floor, where we set each item carefully down, to avoid hurting our hands, but also so they wouldn’t drop and wake up the people who lived in the house … I remembered similar moves that we’d made in Basel … from the green house in Gerbergässli to the ruin that we lived in in Steinenvorstadt, from there to the Rue de Bourg alongside an arcade you could take to get to the Rhine … from there to beautiful rue Helder with its fountain in the middle of the road, and then from there to the square near the Mission school and finally back to the green house in Gerbergässli …
In the darkness we used matches to quickly inspect the apartment … From the veranda a glass door led up steps to a long, cold, high-ceilinged room where the red plaster was peeling … A bit farther on, under a vault, was the true, legal entrance to the apartment, a door with a window that was covered with waxed paper printed with roses … First was a dark hallway … the kitchen with a gas stove to the left, and on the right that big red room and next to it a spacious cave for the bathroom with no tub … Then there were two doors … between the first and the second was an antechamber with built-in cupboards … which led into the big room where we set our things down … Outside the windows there were cables, the trolley ran here … Each of the houses on the right and left sides of the square had at least one shop in it … This reminded me of the house I was born in on Elisabethplatz.
* Jews and Germans together! I would never have dreamed it could happen.
I SPENT THE FIRST FEW DAYS LEANING against the window … As a trolley went by, the wires tautened all down the street … On the other side there were shops: Zos’s for ready to wear and shoes with a little arcade in the middle … A
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