Repetition

by Peter Handke

  My fatigue didn’t hit me until I was out on the street. It wasn’t the different place but the transition. I had gone through it without stopping, as though there were nothing there, and after a few steps the surroundings of the last few hours had disappeared. I was no longer anywhere, and what now stopped was my breath.

  I couldn’t go back to the station and I didn’t know where else to go. I stood still. This was not a contemplative standing-there as when I arrived, but a blind loitering in no way connected with my first day in another country. How often in my life before and since I’ve stood around like that! Where would I go next? What was the solution? There was one and it had to be found. Distraught, I turned this way and that, describing a pattern of aimlessness. How often in my life I’ve wandered like that, even in my own house, my own room, with my eyes in a clothes cupboard, my hand in a tool drawer.

  By then there were no buses running, only a file of Yugoslavian army trucks, one after another, all headed for the border. The tarps were open and in the caves thus created I saw soldiers sitting back to back on both lengthwise benches. The two in the foreground at the edge of the platform were resting their arms on the cross strap barring the exit from the cave. Even in this detail, each truck was a repeat of the one preceding it. The straps were narrow and sagged, and yet the soldiers’ arms resting on them were as inert, as motionless as if they had been tied fast, not by cords, but by fatigue. I followed the column out of town northward, in the direction from which I had just come. A smaller patrol car rolled slowly past me. The occupants looked at me but didn’t stop. Remembering my Humtschach persecutors, I raised my hand in a quick salute, which was actually returned; a fugitive from the army wouldn’t have looked like me. Then more covered wagons with their pyramids of backs, their rigid double heads, their arms supported by straps, their dangling hands; this caravan would never end. And then, almost disappointingly, there came a last truck, open at the back like the rest, but empty, and this empty cave reminded me of a particular tunnel through the Karawanken Mountains, the exit of which, as I looked back from the last car of a train a few hours ago—seen through the Jesenice night, that moment was already part of a meaningless past—had been as far away from me as the black semicircle was now. No more army trucks. The road was deserted. But a trail of fatigue and exhaustion seemed to cover the whole width of the valley, a cloud of smoke—incomparably more stifling than that of the big iron foundries in the south—which blotted out the last patch of sky and, like the legendary army of the air, attacked me momentarily from above, applying screws to my temples and straps to my forehead, and pushed me past the last houses of the town, into no-man’s -land.

  This first night in a foreign country might perhaps be told briefly, but in my memory it has become the longest in my life, decades long. At the age of twenty I wouldn’t have dreamed of stopping at a hotel—and not only because I wanted to save money. Yet my only thought was sleep, and the tunnel did not strike me as an insane idea. I would go in where my train had just carried me out. All that mattered was a niche to sleep in.

  Unseeing, I found the path alongside the tracks; unseeing, I found the hole in the fence, as though it were bound to be there. Already I was in the tunnel, as though in a house, and there, as I had foreseen, I found a niche, a recess in the rock, screened off from the tracks by a concrete parapet. “My stall,” I thought. With the flashlight I had brought with me to search for some trace of my brother in a cave farther south (that at least was my youthful fancy), I lit up the clay floor, which looked rather like a brook with glittering mica along its banks. The concrete wall revealed nothing but a bit of hair clinging to it, an eyelash, which made me think of my history teacher in Villach at the Austrian end of the tunnel. Only that afternoon he had told me that the vehicular tunnel running parallel to mine had been built by prisoners during the last World War, and that many had died, some of them murdered; he had even advised me, though only in jest, to spend the night there if I found no other place. The sleep of one “still innocent,” he said, “would help to purify the place of injustice, to banish the evil spirits, to blow away the horror”; he was writing just such a fairy tale, he told me. Since the last war, he said, he had seen something sinister in all tunnels, even the innocent Jesenice tunnel built under the Empire.

  I began, in the darkness, by eating a piece of bread and an apple, the smell of which dispelled my initial queasiness, as though the fruit gave off a breath of fresh air. Then I lay down and curled up. But I could not sleep, or if I did, it was only to have instantaneous and interminable nightmares. My father’s house lay empty, a ruin. The Drava rose from its deep valley and overflowed the whole plain. The sun shone on the Dobrawa heather and war had been declared. But I also woke up drenched in sweat because I had lost one of my shoes, because all of a sudden the part in my hair was on the left side instead of the right, because the soil in all our flowerpots at home had cracked and the flowers had dried out. Once, what made me start up was no dream but a night train, which sped by with an enormous din, scarcely a step from the parapet. It could only be an international express on its way to Belgrade, Istanbul, or Athens, and I thought of my schoolmates bound for Greece, who would be sleeping out of doors in their tents or sleeping bags, a good deal farther south no doubt. Excited by their evening expedition through a foreign town, by the warm night, and by the unaccustomed company of the boy or girl who sat beside them in class, they would talk and talk, and those who had already dozed off would be slumbering peacefully, free from nightmares, under the protection of their comrades. And I cursed myself for not being with them.

  What tormented me most was not this place I had got myself into, this dark, supposedly haunted tunnel, but a sense of guilt. Not because I had left my family in the lurch, but because I was alone. That night, I discovered that even if I had done no particular wrong, it was a crime to be alone of my own free will. I had known that before and would learn it again in the future. A crime against whom? Against myself. Even the company of enemies would now have been a lesser evil. And hadn’t my girlfriend, who unlike myself was fluent in Slovene, offered any number of times to guide Filip Kobal through his legendary homeland? Could I conceive of anything better at this moment than our two bodies breathing together? Than to lie beside her all night and wake up in the morning with my hand on her belly?

  But the real nightmares were still to come. The story interrupted when I left the station restaurant went on in my sleep, but now it was different from what it was in my waking state—it was violent, abrupt, incoherent. It no longer poured out of me with an “and,” a “then,” and a “when,” but chased me, harried me, drove me, sat on my chest, choked me until the only words I could get out consisted entirely of consonants. Worst of all, no sentence was ever completed, all my sentences broke off in the middle, rejected, maimed, garbled, disqualified, while at the same time I was forbidden to stop talking and, without pausing for breath, I had to keep starting all over, trying again, as though chained for life to a verbose, senseless rhythm which brought forth no meaning but with its retrograde movement destroyed and devalued what meaning I had arrived at during the day. Dragged into a dream light, the storyteller in me, only a short time before seen as the secret king, had become a forced laborer. Caught in the embrace, which would end only with death, of a story that had struck me when awake as the soul of gentleness but had now become a cruel monster, I was powerless to frame a single serviceable sentence. How malignant the spirit of storytelling could be!

  And then, after a long onslaught, I suddenly succeeded in turning out two clear sentences, the one following naturally from the other, and in the same moment the pressure on me was relieved, I had a companion again. In my dream, this companion was a child; true, the child corrected me, improved on my story, but in so doing commended the teller. After that a tree, laden branch after branch not with fruit but with stones, which if not for the child would have signified “disaster,” proved to be a miracle tree; a number of confident swimmers
including myself disported themselves in the raging flood, and the sleeper felt the ground under his cheek to be a book.

  Thus, my longest night included an enjoyable hour of half sleep, during which I was able to stretch out. Part of my pleasure consisted in lying on my back with my hands clasped under my neck, listening to the dripping from the ceiling of the tunnel. For a change, I didn’t have to lie on my left side to feel at peace with myself. I had crept into the tunnel as a refuge, and now I made myself at home, using my brother’s overcoat as a blanket. The darkness around me was a good deal lighter than long ago in the potato cellar. From the nearby exit, gray on gray, glowworms kept flying in and out. Holding one in the palm of my hand, I lit up an astonishingly large circle around me. I always associate the sleep of the exhausted Odysseus on reaching the isle of the Phaeacians with this sort of sheltered feeling.

  But when the hour was over, my sleep suddenly fell away from me, and it was then that I began to feel alone for good. Half sleep had been, as it were, my last companion in solitude, my guide and protector. And now from one minute to the next it proved to be a delusion. My word-mangling dream had been a whirligig of ghosts, and now my waking seemed to be the punishment it threatened. And this punishment consisted not in being exposed to the elements in an undoubtedly inhospitable place, but in being stricken dumb. Here, far from human society, objects ceased to have a language and became enemies, executioners in fact. Yet what was destroying me was not that the iron bar protruding from the tunnel wall reminded me of torture or execution—but that, though sound of body, I was without company and, stricken mute, no longer company to myself. True, I saw the bar bent in the shape of the letter S, of the figure 8, of a treble-clef sign, but that was once upon a time; the fairy tale of the S, the 8, and the treble-clef sign had lost its symbolic meaning.

  So I fled. Not from dread of the tunnel’s history, not from the silence or the stifling air, or for fear of a cave-in or a lineman—I’d have been only too glad if the lineman had grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and cursed me in every known and unknown language—but in a single impulse of horror at the otherworldly speechlessness that was pressing in on me, for over and above bodily death it meant destruction of the soul, which, now that I am trying to speak of it, is recurring more violently, more devastatingly than ever. Then I had only to run a few steps to be out in the open, whereas today I am confined to the tunnel; there is no escape, no niche, no parapet, and my only way to humankind is to equip the objects of a mute planet, whose prisoner I have become through wishing (mea culpa) to be a storyteller, with eyes that look at me forgivingly. And that is why I now see the little knot of glowworms in the grass outside the tunnel blown up into a fire-spewing dragon guarding the entrance to the underworld—whether to defend a treasure there or for my protection, I do not know.

  But what the upper world, or just the world, can be, I learned on the way back. Though it was still a long time till morning and there was no moon, I could see the contours of the valley clearly. The river that went with it, the Sava Dolinka (or, as my father would have said in German, “die Wurzener Save”), was a dull glow moving between the sparsely wooded banks. On a sloping meadow leading down to the water, a horse was standing beside a tree; though it was too early for flies, the horse was swishing its tail. The sound it made in pulling up grass was the dominant sound of the countryside, accompanied by the faint murmur of the river and the rumbling in the distant freight yards. Between the railroad line and the bottom of the valley, the meadow merged into a cluster of small gardens, which in my memory have remained “the hanging gardens of Jesenice.” They formed a pattern of vegetable patches and fruit trees, surrounded by low fences; in the center of each one, there was a wooden hut with a bench in front of it. This pattern, partly sloping, partly terraced, continued down to the river, from which the gardens seemed to draw their water. Their color, already growing visible, was a yellowish white: in the trees, early apples, and in the gardens, beans. The path beside the tracks where I was walking was soft—the dust was so deep, so dense and yielding, that it didn’t even retain my shoe prints; and the dew didn’t moisten it but collected in little balls that stayed on the surface. With my first step out of the tunnel, a stone weight had fallen from my shoulders and the taste of metal was gone from my teeth; my eyes were washed, not by the dew, but by the strange sight of it. The previous night, I had taken in the details of the valley, but now I saw them as letters, as a series of signs, beginning with the grass-pulling horse and combining to form a coherent script. I now interpreted this land before my eyes, with the objects, whether lying, standing, or leaning, which rose up from it, this describable earth, as “the world”; and I was able to address this land, without special reference to the valley of the Sava or to Yugoslavia, as “my country.” And at the same time this manifestation of the world was the only conception of a God that I have managed over the years to arrive at.

  And so my further progress in that predawn hour became a deciphering, a continued reading, a transcribing, a silent taking of notes. (But hadn’t I as a child, to the ridicule of my family, been in the habit of writing in the air?) And I then distinguished two bearers of the world: on the one hand, the earth’s surface that supported the horse, the hanging gardens, and the wooden huts; and on the other hand, the decipherer, who had shouldered these things in the form of their hallmarks and signs. And I literally felt my shoulders broaden in my brother’s too-spacious coat and—because the perception and combination of signs operated as a counterweight to the burden of material things—straighten up as though my deciphering transformed the weight of the earth into a single freely flying word, consisting entirely of vowels, such a word as the Latin Eoae, translatable as “At the time of Eos,” “At dawn,” or simply, “In the morning.”

  Long before sunrise, I saw the valley plunged into another sun, the sun of letters, which receded into the tunnel of night and there provided a kind of expiation by joining the cracks in the clay of my sleeping place—suffused with a bronze glow—into a regular script of polygons, a memorial tablet befitting the place. Since then, whenever I’ve taken the train through the Karawanken Mountains, I’ve stood by the window, waiting in the darkness for the first glimmer of daylight from the Yugoslavian end. And quickly as the train leaves the tunnel, I always have time to glimpse the clay niche, usually strewn with leaves that have blown in, and in it the curled-up twenty-year-old with his cylindrical sea bag, an air sculpture. To me the place is then not so much the scene of war crime or the cave of speechlessness that it was that night, as my shelter. “Eoae!” Wherever I chance to be in the morning, when I first look out of any window, that has become a rousing cry—aloud or only in thought—whereby the vowels that pour from me are translated back into the things outside me, this tree, the neighbor’s house over there, the road between them, the airfield in the distance, the line of the horizon, thus opening up my senses to the new, literal, and describable day.

  E-O-A-E: I made my way in darkness over a strip of land between the railroad line and the river. Though I didn’t see a living soul, the country seemed alive and inhabited, because what spoke to my senses was all man-made and, as it were, ready for action. Near the station, work had actually begun in a few warehouses and workshops. A switchboard was lit up, while the rest of the room was still in darkness; the needles of gauges trembled and advanced; a regular thumping in every corner. A big steel wheel was set in motion and turned faster and faster, until the spokes disappeared and the whole wheel became a solid circle on the back wall. A lamp on a table in a dark office lit up a telephone, a slide rule, an alarm clock. The door of a loading ramp stood half open; the ramp opened out on a railroad yard with signals that changed colors. One nighttime image after another, it seemed to me, of unremitting activity. There was no one to be seen, though I assumed the presence of workers. Only once was the “work” series broken—by a cloth lampshade, a yellow dome behind a single curtain, it, too, untended by any human being—but resumed at once
with the clatter of a warehouse ventilator, a fast-moving belt sliding back and forth on its slippery bed, and the shadows cast by puffs of chimney smoke on the road—on which I was now walking, because there was no other way of getting ahead.

  I had seen similar things at home on the other side of the border, especially on the periphery of the few cities I knew, and I wondered why there I had always felt excluded, whereas here I had no difficulty in sensing the vibration from these enclosed shops; and the one room with the dome-shaped lampshade, very differently from anything I ever experienced at home, caught my imagination as an embodiment of ease and comfort, as the luminous center of the series, a temple of safety and warmth. I was reminded of a conversation heard the day before among a group of workers who had been sitting on a bench at the Austrian frontier station in Rosenbach, waiting for their bus. It went roughly as follows: “Another day.”—“Thursday already.”—“But then it’ll start all over.”—“It’ll soon be fall.”—“And then it won’t be long till winter.”—“At least it’s not Monday.” —“When I get up, it’s dark; when I come home, it’s dark again. I haven’t seen my house yet this year.”