A Swarm of Dust. Evald Flisar

didn’t keep up. The mother did not help, she had fallen ill and was drifting through the trees like a shadow. Finally, when the timber was all in a heap, Hudorovec silently chose a space near the other houses and began building.

      Then the Baranjas, Horvats and Šarkezis came and said that they would help, and that they had quite a bit of experience, and they’d do the roof first, and a lot more mud would be needed … and here and there … and this and that … Hudorovec didn’t say a word, but they helped and he didn’t drive them away. They kneaded the mud, adding wheat husks they had acquired from nearby farms. It wasn’t long before the Hudorovec family had a new home.

      The priest didn’t know exactly when the young Hudorovec began to trouble him. Certainly not until the mother brought him to church. That was when he began to stand out in his mind. But it possibly began before, during conversations with village teachers who spoke with fear of the boy’s strange qualities. Although the other schoolchildren reacted with him in a relaxed way, he seemed too taciturn. He was completely different from the other Roma children. They represented a good third of the school and were a special branch on their own. Even their appearance was different from the farmers’ children: ragged and dirty, their books and exercise books tatty and creased, they were as careless as you could imagine, although they were clearly bright. They liked getting into fights and were always causing trouble. But from the first day, Hudorovec was a surprise. He was placid, hard-working, different. He came to school in poor, but clean clothes. He gave the impression that he simply didn’t care what was happening in school. He never listened and during lessons he stared thoughtfully at the bench in front of him. But whenever the teacher asked him a question he answered quietly, slightly hoarsely, without any awkwardness, and always gave the answer that was expected and sometimes more.

      Yet he always spoke coldly, looking at no one, staring into space, as if he saw in front of him nothing but air. The priest’s eyes were immediately opened after the first mass that the mother attended, bringing the boy with her. He spoke to Geder about it that very evening and was almost a little excited, which was unusual for him.

      ‘You know, Geder,’ he said, ‘on Sunday I met the Hudorovec family. Actually, not all of them, the father wasn’t there. Her and the boy. And that boy, I tell you … In the presence of the mother I asked him if he sincerely believed in God and he stared at me for a while as if wanting to take a good look at me, and what I felt was akin to horror, because he wasn’t really looking at me and didn’t see me. Then he suddenly said, very calmly: “I don’t know, Father”. I was stunned by his honest reply. When I chatted with him I realised that this child – for he’s still really a child – lives in a strange state of obsession, which he clearly cannot grasp rationally, or else is afraid of. He reminded me of someone who is about to act, but still does not know whether he will do so or not. And I get the impression that he does not know what the action should be. He looks as if he is caught up in this tension, this suffering! If you could see his face! Take a look at him some time, look in his eyes and you’ll see a kind of disgust, as if he has been completely shocked by something. And yet when he stares like that into the distance, his eyes almost glow, as if he is longing for something beautiful. To say that the boy is torn would not fully describe it, since it’s not that simple. And listen: evidently he’s the best pupil in the school. I asked him what the teachers were like, how they got on and he said: “I give them the answers they want to hear”. I looked at him in disbelief: “Surely you answer what you think is right, don’t you?” And after a while he shakes his head. “Why ever not?” I asked him. Now he replied very decisively: “What they say does not come from them, but from elsewhere, and it seems to me that what they don’t know is different … They scare me. I want that other thing, what I call theirs, even though it scares me … ” That’s roughly what he said, Geder. I couldn’t repeat his exact words, I was a bit shaken. But imagine! The child seems intelligent, but Geder, I’ll say this only to you: I get the impression that he’s not quite right. A strange child, strange and mistrustful. That also worries me, Geder, because you never know when it might grow into something sinister.’

      It was the last day of May. Young Hudorovec was sitting on the hill and looking at the land below. He was crouching on the grassy edge of the fields that sloped down towards the valley and among which were houses, vineyards and orchards. He could see the plain all the way to the horizon, but on the right the outline of the mountains was very hazy because of the mist; you could see them properly only when the air was very clear. On the plain were villages, woods and fields; far away were two bell towers, indicating a small town. He liked these strange places very much, for where he had lived until now everything was very different. For quite some time he had enjoyed coming up here in the evenings, to get away from the settlement. As soon as he got accustomed to the idea that the distant horizon was new to him and in his mind he began to seek other new things, then his thoughts strayed to the past of their own accord and images, events, faces appeared before him.

      Where he grew up there was no plain, there were hills everywhere, although not so high, and when you climbed to the top of one you saw more of the same. There, the view was always interrupted. Here, when he looked into the distance nothing disturbed his view. You could see where the earth met the sky. He soon noticed something interesting about this; when they first came to the plain his mother said that the people there, whenever they were thinking about something, looked straight in front of them as if staring into the distance; but in their old home, when people were thinking, they looked down, or even up at the sky, as if they couldn’t see into the distance and this had become part of their habits.

      This was the first thing that gave him pleasure: that he could look ahead and see no end in front of him. He quite enjoyed staring into space. Everyone said he thought too much. Now, when there was no longer any barrier before him, the images in his mind became denser, more visible – as if they had come closer. Sometimes he reached out his hand, because he had the feeling that he could touch everything that he could see in front of him. He felt relaxed in some way, whereas where he’d lived before everything felt more cramped. Of course, he never thought about this fully consciously. It was just a feeling flowing in his veins. The new world had possessed him so completely that past events, even though not all that remote, seemed wreathed in mist. Although his thoughts often strayed to the past there was quite a bit of effort involved, he had to try hard to extract the image from the mist. When he looked more clearly he saw that it wasn’t actually mist, but rather traces of this new world obscuring the images from the past. It was as if the new world was preventing him from looking at the past. But this was again only a surface appearance that he could barely penetrate. It wasn’t the new world that was holding him back, but he himself, unwilling as he was to return to the anxiety of the past. He was not clearly aware of any of this. But within him floated an uncertain awareness that there must be something in the past that he was afraid of and wished to save himself from. For on remembering the past he felt anxious, whereas as soon as was submerged in his new environment he felt a relaxed sense of joy.

      But the more he tried to suppress the past with the new world, the more he actually uncovered it, or it revealed itself to him, for in spite of the fear of anxiety, there was a desire for it somewhere inside him, probably because it wasn’t merely anxiety, but was mixed with longing. He noticed that in this new environment it wasn’t only him who changed, but also his mother. In a special way, she distanced herself from him; it felt as if she was no longer near. She was like a performance in front of him, but one that tormented him with a physical closeness that he no longer perceived. His father, on the other hand, had not changed at all; he still saw him as a rough body right beside him, he could smell his sweat, his words rang in his ears like hammer blows, his laugh was just like it was in the old place.

      There had been no settlement in the old place: they had lived in a ramshackle house in the woods and the nearest gypsy family was five kilometres away. Below the wood was a village. The village children chased him, threw stones, called him ‘smelly gypo’ and accused him and his family of stealing things. He didn’t like going into the village, he only went to church, as he had been taught, and to school. Otherwise he wandered through the woods, saying little, growing up solitary and wild. He had a sister who was two years older than him; she was different, she enjoyed meeting up with the village rascals, she was mean and rude, she beat him as much as their father,