Bijelo cuffed a twin. 'Give the linguist your chair and get another,' he said. Both Gavro and Lutvo went looking.
When my father sat down, Baba said, 'Oh, get him!'
'Go on, if you want,' said Julka.
Gavro and Lutvo came back with a chair each.
'They're dumb,' Baba said.
'Dummies,' said Julka.
'They share one brain between them,' Todor said. 'It's a small allowance to live on.'
'Enough humor, Todor,' Bijelo said, and Todor sat mum with the twins, who sat puzzling over the extra chair.
When the young Dabrinka turned around, my father felt his wineglass was too heavy to lift.
And that was how Vratno Javotnik met the Slivnica family horde, odd-job artists for the Ustashi terrorists - who had use for a linguist.
The Ustashi had touchy sort of work in mind. In fact, this job was so delicate that the Slivnicas had been surprisingly inactive for the past two weeks, pending the discovery of just the right man. The Slivnicas were probably quite restless for work - or for work less random than linguist-looking. Their last job had called on the services of the entire family and had gratified everyone. A French newspaperman, unauthorized in Yugoslavia, had
sought a home experience with a typical Slovenjgradec family - to learn for himself the degree of fascism and Italo-German sentiments in the average Slovene or Croat. The Ustashi were not interested in this sort of publicity, feeling that the French were sore headed enough about Minister Barthou's assassination. So the Ustashi selected the Slivnicas as the typical family for the French newspaperman.
But this Monsieur Pecile didn't think the Slivnicas were average, or wished, at least, to live with a family that didn't have twin mutes and did have a living mother and father. Perhaps he doubted, as Vratno had, the possibility of natural genitors; or perhaps he made a pass at Dabrinka - and with Baba and Julka offering it so freely, the Slivnica family feelings were hurt. At any rate, the gleeful twins, Gavro and Lutvo, described in drawings, on the dusty hood of the Frenchman's car, the spectacular rocklike plummeting of Monsieur Pecile into the Mislinja River.
Now there was a job that had involved them all - a real family project. But this linguist hunt had been something else. Todor confessed it to be so tedious that he feared his humor had soured.
Oh yes, the job that Ustashi terrorists had for Vratno was indeed more delicate than the mere disposal of an unauthorized Frenchman. This new subject was a German named Gottlob Wut, as authorized in Yugoslavia as the rest of his horde, and the particular job asked of Vratno - for the moment, at least - was not a disposal. Gottlob Wut was scout-outfit leader of Motorcycle Unit Balkan 4, and the Ustashi weren't looking for any trouble with the Germans. Chiefly, they wanted my father to make a fast friend of Gottlob Wut.
The Slivnicas were to prepare my father for this considerable task; Gottlob Wut, as far as anyone knew, had never had a friend.
Poor Wut had been uprooted by the war, which isn't a thing you could say for all Germans. Gottlob had left an art for a service, and the Ustashi were interested in what Gottlob Wut might reveal of his mysterious past, to a friend, in his presently low-key, nostalgic condition.
It's not clear what the Ustashi had against Gottlob, but I suspect it was an issue of wounded pride. Gottlob Wut had been a racing mechanic for the NSU motorcycle factory at Neckarsulm before the war. The motorcycle world was always saying that Wut had a mystical touch. The Ustashi also thought he had a violent touch, even a certain criminal touch - because a new-model NSU racer surprisingly won the Grand Prix of Italy in 1930, with Britisher Freddy Harrell doing the driving, and the Ustashi argued that Gottlob had more of a hand in the victory than his precise genius with valve control. The Italian counterpart of the Ustashi produced some evidence that Gottlob Wut had tinkered effectively with more than hairpin valve springs. Allegedly, Gottlob Wut had tinkered with the head of the Italian favorite, Guido Maggiacomo, whose body was found after the race in the Grand Prix body shop - lying peacefully beside his highly touted Velocette, which had missed the race. Guido Maggiacomo's temple was severely dented, authorities claimed, by an Amal racing carburetor found at the scene of the crime. It was said of Gottlob Wut, in those days, that he was never without an Amal racing carburetor. The new NSU racer had attained a new speed by successfully tilting these carburetors at a slightly downdraft angle.
Unfortunately, the Italian counterpart of the Ustashi had backed a number of syndicates who put their money on Guido Maggiacomo and his highly touted Velocette. When the betting turnover was tabulated, it appeared that the NSU team of Britisher Freddy Harrell and German Klaus Worfer had made a killing. But the record has it that all the betting was done by the mystical mechanic Gottlob Wut. It was Wut who took away the booty.
But that was in 1930, and if the Ustashi were to reveal this crime to Wut's Nazi superiors, the Germans certainly wouldn't care. Gottlob Wut was a valuable scout-outfit leader of Motorcycle Unit Balkan 4.
This unit itself didn't seem to be very valuable at the moment. The Germans had found their motorcycle scouts rather obsolete in the Yugoslav campaign. They were easy targets to pot off in the Serbian mountains; the way those Chetniks hid and fought, motorcycles were easy to spot. But to keep Gottlob Wut's unit in Slovenjgradec wasn't very vital either. There wasn't a real war in Slovenia or Croatia - just an easy occupation; for police work, there were better means than motorcycles available.
Gottlob's rough riders looked a bit silly in a quiet city.
Of course, the Ustashi had more in mind about Gottlob than an old financial grudge. They thought it would be nice to catch the old mystic at a new crime, and one which could be presented as anti-German. They already knew of a small scandal. If Gottlob Wut didn't have a friend, he did have a woman - a Serbian woman, who was something of a political outlaw in Slovenjgradec. Gottlob Wut, it might be shown, was taking his German blood rather lightly. In fact, he didn't seem to give a damn for the whole war.
All of which was how the get-the-goods-on-Wut campaign began, with my father studying motorcycle memorabilia on the Slivnicas' kitchen table. Vratno learned the names of racers and the dates of races; Vratno learned the bores and strokes, and the significant compression ratios; Vratno distinguished the side-valve model from the supercharged double-overhead-cam twin in sizes 350 and 500 cc. My father had never been on a motorcycle before, so the Slivnicas helped where they could.
Broad Todor went down on all fours, and my father mounted. Todor gave his elbows for handlebars; he demonstrated cornering. Bijelo called out the road conditions.
'Corner sharp right,' Bijelo said.
'Lean from your spine,' said Todor. 'Don't move those elbows, you never want to steer a bike, the handles are just for holding on. You got to lean a bike, hips and head. Now tip me a little right.'
'Corner sharp left,' Bijelo said, and watched my father gingerly lean left off the broad back, his knees slipping.
'You wouldn't have made that one,' said Todor. 'You'd have gone wild, Vratno, my boy. Let's feel those knees, now, give me a squeeze.'
And Baba giggled. 'I'll be the bike,' she said. 'Let me.'