Repetition (10 page)
When I looked up after eating, droves of people were passing on the sidewalk up above; the street had become a dike. Summer vacation couldn't have begun yet, there were too many schoolchildren among the passersby, leaning into the wind. It was indeed windy, and the tall meadow grass at the edge of the dike sighed like dune grass. Though I have never been at the seashore, I couldn't help thinking that the Atlantic dunes must begin right after the railroad tracks.
An old man came out of the restaurant with a second kitchen chair and sat down at some distance from me; to enjoy the view, he had no need of a table. Without exchanging so much as a word, we watched
developments together; we both looked at the same thing, we studied it for the same length of time, then, simultaneously, passed on to something else. I have never known such a view as on that morning after my longest night, never beheld such space and such a horizon as in that seeing, which I knew to be one with that of the man beside me. We immersed ourselves in the glow on the throat of a pigeon which was crossing the concrete bay above us, or turned our heads back to the dike, where clouds of smoke from the steel mill were drifting up the valley in the direction of the tunnel, as though to smoke out the whole length of it.
developments together; we both looked at the same thing, we studied it for the same length of time, then, simultaneously, passed on to something else. I have never known such a view as on that morning after my longest night, never beheld such space and such a horizon as in that seeing, which I knew to be one with that of the man beside me. We immersed ourselves in the glow on the throat of a pigeon which was crossing the concrete bay above us, or turned our heads back to the dike, where clouds of smoke from the steel mill were drifting up the valley in the direction of the tunnel, as though to smoke out the whole length of it.
When at home, before my trip, I had looked southward in clear weather, it seemed certain that, under the bluing sky beyond the mountains, there could only be cities resplendent with color, spreading out over a wide plain, unobstructed by any chain of hills, the one merging with the next all the way to the sea. And yet the industrial city of Jesenice now, gray on gray, squeezed into a narrow valley, shut in between two shade-casting mountains, fully confirmed my anticipation. Looking up at the dike, I saw a man with a gleaming red saw in each hand, followed by two children eating ice cream and a woman in an advanced state of pregnancy, wearing an airy dress and clogs. The perpetual clatter of the long-distance trucks on the single strip of unasphalted cobblestones reminded me again of my brother, who in his prewar letters spoke of a similar stretch of road between Maribor and Trieste. On every one of his excursions to the Adriatic, the car (the school principal's) had been “thoroughly shaken for a short while,” and after that he had felt “bathed in salt air.”
In Yugoslavia, time as well as space seems to be measured differently than it is beyond the northern mountains. Comparable to sedimentary rock, the buildings before my eyes pointed to strata of the architectural past, from the foundations of Imperial Austria to the bay windows of the kingdom of the south Slavs and the smooth, unornamented upper stories of the present People's Republic of Slovenia, not omitting holes for flagpoles just below the attic windows. While looking at one of these façades, I suddenly wished with all my might that my missing brother would push open the decrepit terrace door, with its opaque grooved glass, and show himself. I even thought in words: “Forefather, show thyself,” and saw the head of the old man beside me turn toward the bay window. And for a moment, as though my call were its own fulfillment, I caught sight of my brother, full-grown (as I had never known him), broad-shouldered, brown-skinned, his thick, dark, curly hair combed straight back, his imposing forehead and his eyes so deep in their sockets that his white blindness remained hidden. A shudder ran through me, as though I were seeing my king, a shudder of awe, but even more of terror, which made me leave my place in the hollow without delay and slip into the torrent of passersby on the street above.
It received me at once. My impression from below was false; it was not a torrent at all but an astonishingly leisurely flow in which my excitement over my successful evocation of an ancestor was appeased by an unhurried present.
Â
To walk in such a flow was something new to me at the age of twenty. The village knew nothing of the kindâ
the best it could do was a struggling step-by-step or the marking time of holiday processions and funerals; at the seminary, one walked either alone or in a compulsory group (even our Sunday walks had to be taken in a group, in columns of two, with those behind treading on the heels of those in front of them, and anyone who thought of drifting away was instantly detected and whistled back); and in the small towns of Austriaâthose were the only ones I knew, for Vienna, the capital, when we went there on a school excursion, was hidden from me by the shoulders of my schoolmates and the index fingers of the teachersâI could only trot along on the fringe with my eyes to the ground. On those streets, I immediately grew skittish (perhaps a more concrete word than the usual “shy”); that is, I didn't know which way to look, or else I looked in all directions, anything but straight ahead. In the small townsânot at all as in the village of Rinkenbergâmy gaze was either distracted at every step by shop windows, advertising posters, and, above all, newspaper headlines, or, as happened once when I directed it toward the vanishing point of the street, it fell, or so I imagined, straight into the eye trap of someone coming in the opposite direction. The trap was not just a look; it was a stare, or rather an eyeless, faceless blank, with no organ attached to it but a monstrous trunklike mouth which with a single word, always monosyllabic, always inaudible, that I could always lip-read even in its typical dialect form, sucked me in and snapped shut over me. Yes, in the towns of my native land it was not possible, when one stepped out into the street, to merge with a flow of people; one was immediately, so it seemed to me, hemmed in and pocketed by people who had been
trudging in a vicious circle with their dogs since the world began, who, as usual with people condemned to move in such circles, unfailingly felt themselves to be in the right and in their proper place. Is it mere imagination that, to this day, certain “
Grüss
Gott
”s fired at me in my native land strike me more as threats than as greetings (“Out with the password, or else!”), and that especially when they are bellowed by children, I often involuntarily fling both my hands into the air? Whether walking on the side or in the middle of the street, I always felt myself appraised, judged, found guilty by the Austrian crowd, the Austrian majority, and time and again I accepted their verdict, though with no idea of what I was guilty of. What a relief to be walking down a street, convinced that some member of the eye-trapper gang must be studying me from the side, and then to look up and see nothing but the vacant eyes of a doll in a shop window.
the best it could do was a struggling step-by-step or the marking time of holiday processions and funerals; at the seminary, one walked either alone or in a compulsory group (even our Sunday walks had to be taken in a group, in columns of two, with those behind treading on the heels of those in front of them, and anyone who thought of drifting away was instantly detected and whistled back); and in the small towns of Austriaâthose were the only ones I knew, for Vienna, the capital, when we went there on a school excursion, was hidden from me by the shoulders of my schoolmates and the index fingers of the teachersâI could only trot along on the fringe with my eyes to the ground. On those streets, I immediately grew skittish (perhaps a more concrete word than the usual “shy”); that is, I didn't know which way to look, or else I looked in all directions, anything but straight ahead. In the small townsânot at all as in the village of Rinkenbergâmy gaze was either distracted at every step by shop windows, advertising posters, and, above all, newspaper headlines, or, as happened once when I directed it toward the vanishing point of the street, it fell, or so I imagined, straight into the eye trap of someone coming in the opposite direction. The trap was not just a look; it was a stare, or rather an eyeless, faceless blank, with no organ attached to it but a monstrous trunklike mouth which with a single word, always monosyllabic, always inaudible, that I could always lip-read even in its typical dialect form, sucked me in and snapped shut over me. Yes, in the towns of my native land it was not possible, when one stepped out into the street, to merge with a flow of people; one was immediately, so it seemed to me, hemmed in and pocketed by people who had been
trudging in a vicious circle with their dogs since the world began, who, as usual with people condemned to move in such circles, unfailingly felt themselves to be in the right and in their proper place. Is it mere imagination that, to this day, certain “
Grüss
Gott
”s fired at me in my native land strike me more as threats than as greetings (“Out with the password, or else!”), and that especially when they are bellowed by children, I often involuntarily fling both my hands into the air? Whether walking on the side or in the middle of the street, I always felt myself appraised, judged, found guilty by the Austrian crowd, the Austrian majority, and time and again I accepted their verdict, though with no idea of what I was guilty of. What a relief to be walking down a street, convinced that some member of the eye-trapper gang must be studying me from the side, and then to look up and see nothing but the vacant eyes of a doll in a shop window.
On this Yugoslavian street there was no majority, and accordingly no minority, but only a varied and yet harmonious bustle such as, apart from the small town of Jesenice, I have known only in big cities. And here, for the present, I was the foreigner, to whom, in the streets of Carinthia beyond the mountains, I have always been grateful, because he distracts attention from me, but who here had his place in the crowd, among the people of the street. While back there I would be constantly changing place, getting clumsily out of the way, bumping into people, here I just walked along, and each one of my steps, unaccustomed as I was to the crowding, found room on the pavement. At last I didn't trot or shuffle (as all of us did in the corridors of the seminary), but found my natural gait; I felt my feet
rolling from the toes over the balls to the heels; now and then, in passing, I kicked some little thing aside with a feeling of quiet impudence which, as I discovered only after I had done it a few times, harked back to my childhood long ago. And what delighted me most about this crowd, when I compared it to other crowds I knew, was what it lacked, the things that were missing: the chamois beards, the hartshorn buttons, the loden suits, the lederhosen; in short, no one in it wore a costume. These people in the street were free not only from costume but also from insignia, from marks of caste; even the uniforms of the policemen did not stand out, but rather, as was only fitting, suggested public service. It was a blessing to be relieved of my skittishness, to be able to raise my eyes and look straight ahead, at eyes which, instead of appraising me, merely showed their colors, and these colors, black with brown with gray, revealed “the world.” Another thing that contributed to my newfound prideâand in this I was no longer a foreignerâwas that I recognized my inner and outer resemblance, something no mirror could have shown me, to the other people in the crowd. Like them, I was gaunt, bony, awkward, with rough-hewn features and arms that dangled inelegantly, and my nature like theirs was compliant, willing, undemanding, the nature of a people who had been kingless and stateless down through the centuries, a people of journeymen and hired hands (not a noble, not a master among them)âand yet we children of darkness were radiant with beauty, self-reliant, bold, rebellious, independent, each man of us the next man's hero.
rolling from the toes over the balls to the heels; now and then, in passing, I kicked some little thing aside with a feeling of quiet impudence which, as I discovered only after I had done it a few times, harked back to my childhood long ago. And what delighted me most about this crowd, when I compared it to other crowds I knew, was what it lacked, the things that were missing: the chamois beards, the hartshorn buttons, the loden suits, the lederhosen; in short, no one in it wore a costume. These people in the street were free not only from costume but also from insignia, from marks of caste; even the uniforms of the policemen did not stand out, but rather, as was only fitting, suggested public service. It was a blessing to be relieved of my skittishness, to be able to raise my eyes and look straight ahead, at eyes which, instead of appraising me, merely showed their colors, and these colors, black with brown with gray, revealed “the world.” Another thing that contributed to my newfound prideâand in this I was no longer a foreignerâwas that I recognized my inner and outer resemblance, something no mirror could have shown me, to the other people in the crowd. Like them, I was gaunt, bony, awkward, with rough-hewn features and arms that dangled inelegantly, and my nature like theirs was compliant, willing, undemanding, the nature of a people who had been kingless and stateless down through the centuries, a people of journeymen and hired hands (not a noble, not a master among them)âand yet we children of darkness were radiant with beauty, self-reliant, bold, rebellious, independent, each man of us the next man's hero.
The passersby were the consonants that went with the vowels which things awakened in me, though no
words sprang from their union; I was merely seized by a second wind, independent of my own lungs, a wind of enthusiasm which suddenly enabled me to read the sober headings of a Slovenian paper being carried past me, no screaming headlines as in my German paper, but just news, as refreshing as the absence of costumes. And all at once I began to understand much of what was being said in the crowd. Was it because here in the street no one spoke to me? Did it mean that since my days at elementary school, where I had been obliged to speak the foreign language with my teacher, I had not become forgetfulâbut only obstinate? Jutro was still morning,
danes
today,
delo
work,
cesta
road,
predor
tunnel. I was also able to read the names of the shops; they were all so simple. Unlike the shops in the north, with their loud, pretentious signs, the dairy was identified simply by the word for milk, the bakery by the word for bread, and I didn't translate the words
mleko
and
kruh
into a different language, but back into images, into the childhood of words, my first images of milk and bread. The bank,
banka,
that followed was the same old word, but it, too, took on an original character because its windows were not showcases, there were no displays; the space which in my native land might contain a pyramid of bright-colored strongboxes was emptyâwith an emptiness that stood open to me, and to which I could address myself as I could to the empty faces of the passersby. Among them I had no need, as at home, to look for a relative or a fellow villager to deliver me with a smile of recognition from that file of mere masks. The emptiness of the faces here meant they were not wearing masks. I have before me a picture of some young fellows squeezed into a tractor trailer, swathed from top to toe in fur disguises. They are on
their way to an Alpine city to take part in the traditional hunt. Before entering the city, they are not yet holding the necessary rods and chains, and the enormous terror-instilling masks they will pull over their heads are still at their feet. Protruding from their fur ruffs, the faces of these young fellows, peasants no doubt, seem thin, soft, approachable! In much the same way, I was able to look into the procession of faces in Jesenice as into a single face, and it gave me the dignity I had never experienced at home, either in myself or in anyone elseâwell yes, in my father, during the Easter vigil in the Rinkenberg church, when, clad in a floor-length purple robe, he, along with a few other villagers, knelt beside the hollow that was supposed to represent the tomb of the resurrected Christ, then in one movement threw himself down in front of it and, covered by his candlewax-spotted robe, lay unrecognizably still on his belly. And just as my father named the instruments in the radio concert, I was now able, through the roar of the traffic and factories, to distinguish clearly the sound of colliding buffers in the railroad yards, the rattling of carts in the supermarket, the hissing of steam from an escape valve, the scraping of a stiletto heel, the pounding of a hammer, and the sound of myself inhaling and exhaling. And strangely enough, it occurred to me, this, too, this surprisingly acute hearing resulted from something that was not here, something that was absent in this Slovenian factory town. It was the absence of the usual striking church clocks that sharpened my hearing of the things around me. So it was not just any country, but this particular one, this country of deficiencies, which could be compared to and distinguished from my usual country and thus deciphered as “world.”
words sprang from their union; I was merely seized by a second wind, independent of my own lungs, a wind of enthusiasm which suddenly enabled me to read the sober headings of a Slovenian paper being carried past me, no screaming headlines as in my German paper, but just news, as refreshing as the absence of costumes. And all at once I began to understand much of what was being said in the crowd. Was it because here in the street no one spoke to me? Did it mean that since my days at elementary school, where I had been obliged to speak the foreign language with my teacher, I had not become forgetfulâbut only obstinate? Jutro was still morning,
danes
today,
delo
work,
cesta
road,
predor
tunnel. I was also able to read the names of the shops; they were all so simple. Unlike the shops in the north, with their loud, pretentious signs, the dairy was identified simply by the word for milk, the bakery by the word for bread, and I didn't translate the words
mleko
and
kruh
into a different language, but back into images, into the childhood of words, my first images of milk and bread. The bank,
banka,
that followed was the same old word, but it, too, took on an original character because its windows were not showcases, there were no displays; the space which in my native land might contain a pyramid of bright-colored strongboxes was emptyâwith an emptiness that stood open to me, and to which I could address myself as I could to the empty faces of the passersby. Among them I had no need, as at home, to look for a relative or a fellow villager to deliver me with a smile of recognition from that file of mere masks. The emptiness of the faces here meant they were not wearing masks. I have before me a picture of some young fellows squeezed into a tractor trailer, swathed from top to toe in fur disguises. They are on
their way to an Alpine city to take part in the traditional hunt. Before entering the city, they are not yet holding the necessary rods and chains, and the enormous terror-instilling masks they will pull over their heads are still at their feet. Protruding from their fur ruffs, the faces of these young fellows, peasants no doubt, seem thin, soft, approachable! In much the same way, I was able to look into the procession of faces in Jesenice as into a single face, and it gave me the dignity I had never experienced at home, either in myself or in anyone elseâwell yes, in my father, during the Easter vigil in the Rinkenberg church, when, clad in a floor-length purple robe, he, along with a few other villagers, knelt beside the hollow that was supposed to represent the tomb of the resurrected Christ, then in one movement threw himself down in front of it and, covered by his candlewax-spotted robe, lay unrecognizably still on his belly. And just as my father named the instruments in the radio concert, I was now able, through the roar of the traffic and factories, to distinguish clearly the sound of colliding buffers in the railroad yards, the rattling of carts in the supermarket, the hissing of steam from an escape valve, the scraping of a stiletto heel, the pounding of a hammer, and the sound of myself inhaling and exhaling. And strangely enough, it occurred to me, this, too, this surprisingly acute hearing resulted from something that was not here, something that was absent in this Slovenian factory town. It was the absence of the usual striking church clocks that sharpened my hearing of the things around me. So it was not just any country, but this particular one, this country of deficiencies, which could be compared to and distinguished from my usual country and thus deciphered as “world.”
But the kingdom of the world that I perceived in
this way exceeded the limits of present-day Yugoslavia and all the kingdoms and empires of olden times, and gradually its signs lost their definition. The Cyrillic letters on the newspapers of certain passersby were still clear, the vestiges of an old Austrian inscription on a public building were legible, as was the ancient Greek XαîÏεâGreetingsâon the tympanum of a villa; but, on the other hand, the word PETROL on a gas station, which, seen through the branches of a tree, reminded me of a China known to me only from dreams, was ambiguous, and an equally exotic Sinai Desert opened up to me behind the high-rise buildings at the sight of a dusty long-distance bus, on the front of which the roller indicating its destination had stopped exactly in the middle between two illegible place names. As it passed, a fragment of a Hebrew scroll struck my eyesâyes,
struck
my eyes, for the landscape that opened up around the script was fraught with terror.
this way exceeded the limits of present-day Yugoslavia and all the kingdoms and empires of olden times, and gradually its signs lost their definition. The Cyrillic letters on the newspapers of certain passersby were still clear, the vestiges of an old Austrian inscription on a public building were legible, as was the ancient Greek XαîÏεâGreetingsâon the tympanum of a villa; but, on the other hand, the word PETROL on a gas station, which, seen through the branches of a tree, reminded me of a China known to me only from dreams, was ambiguous, and an equally exotic Sinai Desert opened up to me behind the high-rise buildings at the sight of a dusty long-distance bus, on the front of which the roller indicating its destination had stopped exactly in the middle between two illegible place names. As it passed, a fragment of a Hebrew scroll struck my eyesâyes,
struck
my eyes, for the landscape that opened up around the script was fraught with terror.
The vagueness was underlined by a blind window, to which my gaze was now drawn as to the center of the world. It was fairly high up the slope on the sunny side of a large house, which I fancied to be the manor belonging to the porter's lodge across the border. It stood by itself; in front of it there was only a single spruce, whose fur-brown bark brought out the massiveness of the yellow façade. A steep stone stairway led across a strip of meadow to the entrance. A child was on the stairway with his back to me; one foot a step lower than the other, he seemed hesitant; the steps were too big for a child. The slope was hatched, so to speak, with strange oblique grooves, small terraces overgrown with grass, whose fine shadow pattern was repeated in the oblique grooves of the façade. This made the house
behind the spruce look more like a yellow rock than like a building. It seemed uninhabited. The child on the steps was in the entrance not to a house but to a playground.
behind the spruce look more like a yellow rock than like a building. It seemed uninhabited. The child on the steps was in the entrance not to a house but to a playground.
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