Billiards at the Hotel Dobray
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In the northern Slovenian city of Murska Sobota stands the renowned Hotel Dobray, once the gathering place of townspeople of all nationalities and social strata who lived in this typical Pannonian panorama on the fringe of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Due to its historical and geographical particularities, the town had always been home to numerous ethnically and culturally mixed communities that gave it the charm and melos of Central-European identity. But now, in the thick of World War II, the town is occupied by the Hungarian army. Franz Schwartzs wife, Ellsie has for the past month been preparing their son Isaac, a gifted violinist, for his first solo concert, which is to take place at Hotel Dobray. Isaac is to perform on his bar mitzvah and his 13th birthday on April 26, 1944. When the German army marches into town and forces all Jews to display yellow stars on their clothes, Ellsie advises her husband that the family should flee the town and escape to Switzerland. Schwartz promises her he will obtain forged documents, but not before Isaac performs his concert at the hotel. A year later, in March 1945, Schwartz returns, on foot, from the concentration camp as one of the few survivors.
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A Lullaby
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The fiddle on the train, which was just now crossing the Mura River, had nearly stopped reverberating. But now it started up again. The train was rumbling across the iron bridge without slowing down. Everybody was still on board. That morning, nobody had fled. The only one who remained on this side of the river, in a forgotten, stagnant pool, was the dead fiddler.
The old porcelain sky was polished to a shine. It lay motionless above the black earth. Like a coffee cup someone had long ago turned upside down on its saucer. Perhaps this was the work of one of the many fortune tellers who read coffee grounds. Now the black sediment had covered the saucer, and high above it, in the blue of the sky, only small traces could be seen, broken signs and mysterious shapes, which only the most inspired could interpret. That morning one of these women kept glancing at the black sludge as if she was looking at the sky; then she’d merely shake her head and spit out a thick, grimy dollop of phlegm. She was sitting on the front steps of the Hotel Dobray and every so often would turn her eyes away from the witchery in her right hand and look up Main Street. There was nobody to be seen, which was a good omen. For it was best, the women said, if the person they saw in the coffee grounds was never seen by living eyes. Then, with a deep, rasping sound, she hawked up phlegm from her entire torso, so much that the child she carried inside might soon be left dry, and she spat all this life into her free hand. She squeezed and rolled the glob around in her hand a few moments, then opened it. The thing she held in her hand now slowly started to expand, like rising dough or boiling milk. At that very moment, in the empty, glazed sky, a speck appeared, or rather, a shadow the size of an eye. Now the woman fixed her eyes directly on that nearly imperceptible shadow in the sky and mumbled: ‘Chicken, chicken coop, chicken eye, I see ya, I’m looking right at ya …’
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