Repetition

by Peter Handke

  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 Xαîρε—Greetings—on 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 eyes—yes, 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.

  The blind window was, far and wide, the only one of its kind. It owed its effect to the absence of something ordinarily present: to its opacity. Thanks to its extreme vagueness, it reflected my gaze; and the muddle of languages, the confusion of voices within me fell silent: my whole being fell silent, and read.

  I had never thought it possible that I would lose this blind window; I had felt it to be an unalterable sign. Yet one side glance sufficed: the light emanating from it was gone. The window next to it—a “sighted” window, as it were—was pushed open and closed again, by hands belonging to two different people, a very old woman, then a young one. The old woman—as I recognized in the same moment—was more than old, she was dying; with a last burst of revolt she had tried to get out of the room where she was being held fast, to escape through the window grating from death; a face convulsed with horror, with sucked-in lower lip and wide-open eyes, which would never again close unaided.

  The window remained empty, the morning sun was reflected in it, but the light which had been bright only a moment before had not just gone out, it had been swallowed up. The child had vanished, too, as if he had been a phantom, and the oblique grooves on the house and the hillside now appeared to be shadows. “Filip Kobal has a thing about appearances.” My history teacher had often said that—a mixture of praise and blame. Today, once again, the “appearance” had been dispelled. Already the grimace of a little girl crying with all her might came my way, and after that there was nothing female, male, or childlike about the crowd. On the sidewalk there was nothing but a huge, hard, bony mass of repulsive yokels, pushing, shoving, getting in one another’s way, under the vigilant eye, peering from every possible angle, of the Chief of State, who, whether as a young partisan leader in an automobile factory, as a white-clad admiral, as an imposing dinner-jacket-wearer on the arm of his equally imposing wife in the lobby of a movie theater, as an imperator’s head cast in concrete in the courtyard of a school, was now the sole ruler over us all. A last searching glance up at the blind window merely reinforced the authority of the state, for, as though I had attracted suspicion with that glance, a policeman beckoned me with a slow movement of his curved forefinger to the other side of the street, where he asked for my papers. Later, it occurred to me that this policeman was the same young man, about my age, who had examined my passport on my arrival the day before. But in that hour of solar eclipse no one seemed to recognize anyone else; it was as though we had all lost our memories.

  Counting my steps, I entered the station. A damp stairway led down to the toilets as to a bunker. The usual bunker woman was sitting there; nothing was missing but the bunch of keys at her waist. In the lockless cubicle, I looked in vain for the usual graffiti and drawings; they would have helped me on. There was no faucet over the washbasin, only a hole in the wall. The waiting room upstairs was dark and stank. The first thing I noticed about the other people sitting there was the whiteness of a striking number of bound or plastered limbs. The light didn’t come from the station platform but from the dark corridor in between. Later, I distinguished, here and there, a leather cot over an injured thumb, and the man sitting next to me had a scab in his hair. (I’m not exaggerating, such things caught my eye.) In myself as well, I noticed only what was repellent: the caked clay on my shoes, the black rings under my fingernails. Anyone would have known that I had spent the night in my clothes and hadn’t washed. My scalp itched, and so, though it was midsummer, did the seminary chilblains on my toes. I tried in vain to decipher my next destination on the map; the light that fell was barely enough for the white of the lowlands and the pale blue of the glaciers.

  I went out on the platform, where a worker was cracking open the concrete with a pneumatic drill. The morning train to Austria was on the opposite track, ready to leave. The compartments were bright, clean, and almost empty (this train was not yet used, as in later years, by many Yugoslavs for shopping trips to Villach). Again, blue-uniformed train men were standing by the locomotive, along with Austrian border guards, not recognizable as such because they were out of uniform; in their shirtsleeves, with their jackets slung over their shoulders, they all seemed to be waiting for a tardy passenger. All at once, though I didn’t stir from the spot, I was in a hurry. Make up your mind! I felt an almost irresistible urge to return across the border, to go home to my village, my room, my bed, and get my sleep out. But my most immediate refuge was the language, my familiar native German on the side of the locomotive. Heimatbahnhof (home station) would do—for it wasn’t the meaning that mattered but the look of the word—or the legend Arbeitsrichtung (working direction) over the arrow.

  Undecided as I was, I felt utterly confused. The pneumatic drill was making star-shaped cracks, as when one walks on the surface of a frozen puddle. One of the cracks reached almost to the soles of my shoes. Shaken by the sound of the drill, I looked down and found the blind window in the gray of the concrete. Again it was a friendly sign meaning “to have time.” Hadn’t I wanted too much with my “kingdom of the world”? Who was I, actually? Looking at the pavement, I saw once and for all who I was: a foreigner, someone who might have some business here but who had no say. I had no claim to so-called human dignity as I did at home in my own country. This realization brought me something more than relief—it brought me serenity.

  The Austrian train pulled out. Hadn’t the conductor given me a questioning look? The station became large and luminous. The sparrows, which landed abruptly on the pavement at my feet and were already off again, had sat on the bushes of Rinkenberg only a moment before, and the oval plantain leaf in the roadbed also came from there, a so-called garden escape. With long strides, like decision incarnate, I went into the station and bought a ticket; with long strides, like a man who knows at last that what he is doing is not for himself alone, I took the underpass to the far platform and, after a quick wash at the pump, leapt resolutely into the southwest-bound train as though my jaunt across the border was over and I was now starting on my real journey. I had no sooner settled in my window seat than I fell asleep. If I still preserve an image of the adolescent I was then, with the torn-up pavement under my feet, it is perhaps because the pavement just then wa
s threatening to keel over, just as certain objects impress themselves on our minds only when at the last moment we save them from falling and they rest in our trembling hands, available for examination.

  I spent the next few days in the Bohinj region, studying my brother’s two books. Whenever I opened my eyes in the train for fear of missing my stop, I saw in the meadows those long, narrow wooden frames known as “hay harps”: two wooden posts (perhaps made of concrete today) rammed into the ground, and embedded in them a number of parallel bars, on which, under a shingle roof, the first hay of the year was drying. This first crop was full of spring flowers, and the gray mass of hay was shot through with color. The bars extended beyond the posts and suggested bundles of road signs, all pointing in the same direction. The train seemed to be following these closely spaced arrows, which from valley to valley inclined farther westward, and in my sleep the harps on both sides of the tracks took on the shape of an enormous chariot which carries the passengers to their destination without passage of time.

  I no longer spent the night in the open, but stayed at a hotel in Bohinjska Bistrica, the biggest village of the region. This I decided to do after seeing the low prices and counting my money. It occurred to me later that, thanks to my teacher’s gift, to some tutoring I had done, and to a story I had sold to a newspaper (“Did you write that yourself?” asked a classmate, shaking his head), I might perfectly well have gone to Greece with the others.

  Actually, it was this story I had published, far more than any shortage of money, that had kept me out of the group trip. It was about a young fellow repairing a bicycle in a courtyard. The setting was described in detail, the light, the wind, the rustling of the trees, the rain that was beginning to fall. In the end the hero hears a cry and rushes into the house, where, on the floor of an empty room, he finds his father or his mother—I don’t remember which—dying, his or her eyes reflecting the outside world for the last time. It wasn’t the content that mattered; what alienated my classmates was the mere fact of my writing. Some of them, it’s true, belonged to a drama group, but that I should write and publish my writing struck them all as strange, to say the least. My girlfriend, too. Before even reading my story—she had barely had time to see the page with the title and my name on it—she gave me a strange, disapproving look, which, after she read it, turned to a complex expression compounded of incomprehension, pity, surprise, and, above all, reserve. Later on, I kept remembering that her neck stiffened when I tried to draw her close to me.

  But hadn’t I myself provoked this general revulsion ? Hadn’t I, on the day when the newspaper appeared, eyed everyone who opened it as someone who would immediately learn of my crime and disgrace me by telling others about it? Much as I had looked forward to publishing this story—a project instigated by my fairy-tale-writing history teacher and promoted by a reporter who wrote local notes—to how at last they’d all see who I was, it struck me afterward as a stigma, and luckily the one place where it did not follow me was the village where in those days—today an advertisement at the entrance to the village announces “Rinkenberg reads The …”—I never saw a newspaper even at the presbytery. But in the places where up until then I had felt most at home, as a commuter in trains and buses, I had disgraced myself forever in my own eyes. Where I had managed to be inconspicuous even to myself, a Nobody, I was now on display as “a certain” So-and-so. In emerging from obscurity I had forfeited my element. The sense of well-being I had known in crowded places, especially while standing in the corridor of a railroad car or in the center aisle of a bus, gave way to a feeling of intense discomfort; I had become identifiable, exposed to a spotlight that singled me out, thus condemning me—and this is what shamed me most of all—to intrude on the privacy of my fellow passengers. Was that why in the last few weeks I had gone to school on my bicycle, a trip which, there and back, had taken me half a day? There were many motives that may have impelled me to take this solitary journey; but one of them was certain: to make people forget that, whether in reality or only in my imagination, I had betrayed myself by becoming a public figure. And now, with every hour in which I was privileged to be unknown, I felt oblivion spreading around me, a feeling that became more salutary with every passing mile. Immediately after my arrival in the Bohinj, I was drawn to a hamlet, marked on the map as Pozabljeno, meaning roughly “the forgotten place” or “forgetfulness.” And in whatever strange places I walked, stood, sat, lay, or ran in the days that followed, people left me alone as though that were the natural thing to do.

  Only the teacher in Villach still haunted this no-man’s -landscape, repeating over and over what, when he first saw my story in print, he had cried out with a gesture as though giving a musician his entrance: “Filip Kobal!”—just my name, the first time I ever heard it in that form, Christian name before family name, for up until then I had been addressed exclusively as “Kobal, Filip”; at my recent army medical, for instance. “Forget it” was my silent answer. Yes, I was resolved never to appear in the paper again; never again to expose myself, my family, and my fellow villagers to such disgrace. My dream of fame was a thing of the past. Hadn’t I always known, especially when surrounded by people in the train or bus, even when I myself was reading a book, fascinated by a report of a new invention, enjoying a piece of music, that I would never amount to anything, that sooner or later I was bound to fail, that, as a fortuneteller at a fair, undoubtedly convinced that she was flattering this countrywoman and her son who was patently unfit for farm work, had told my mother, with luck I’d get to be a bookkeeper or some sort of clerk who wouldn’t have to deal with anything but numbers. So wasn’t it part of my destiny to be counting money in a Slovenian hotel room?

  The Bohinj is a broad valley surrounded on all sides by mountain ranges, once the base of a glacier, which on its western edge left the large, tranquil, and almost always deserted Bohinj Lake behind it. From its northern bank rises the massif of the Julian Alps, culminating in the still glacier-covered Triglav, or three-headed mountain, a model of which on the lakeshore is used by vacationing children to play on. The mountain range in the south is the last barrier of any size between there and the sea; there the Isonzo (the Slovenian Soa) has its source, and the slopes between which it flows from then on show no tree line. Difficult of access, the Bohinj basin has been remote from the world down through the ages; mule tracks were its only link with the Isonzo Valley and the Friulian Plain, and the eastern route by which I had come had been opened up only when the railroad was built.

  Because I grew up on the great Jaunfeld Plain at some distance from the mountains, I have always found it surprising that Austria should be regarded as an Alpine country and dubbed the “Alpine Republic.” (Hardly anyone in our village owned skis, and there was only one sled track, from the edge of the forest down to the road, so gently sloping that you’d hardly got started when you came to a stop.) But in the Bohinj I found myself really surrounded by mountains and felt that I was in an Alpine country, which, to be sure, did not mean chasms, ravines, a sunny and a shady slope, and a narrow sky; despite the dip in the ground, I was on a high plateau with a wide view. If I now close my eyes, what opens up before me is a valley centered on the empty fjord-blue lake, sheltered by the mountains, subdivided by moraine waves.

  And yet the Bohinj, at least as seen from the slightly raised railway station, is a busy region. When I first got out of the train, I saw and smelled hardly anything but wood. On the freight siding I saw piles of whole tree trunks, of beams, boards, and laths, and in among the houses I heard power saws. In all the days I spent there, I never saw an idle person; anyone who appeared at first sight to be doing nothing proved to be waiting for a bus at one of the unmarked bus stops (a board fence, a weighbridge), waiting for a sawed pine tree to fall, for fine weather in which to turn the hay, or merely, like the old cook at the inn, for milk to come to a boil or whatever she was cooking to be done. The soldier I saw one day standing quietly by the side of the road proved, when I came closer, to
be holding a radio to his ear, and the children who seemed to be tearing leaves off the bushes for no apparent purpose turned out to be scouts learning to follow a trail. The church was in the middle of a meadow and was big enough to be a cathedral. On Sunday, a long line formed outside the confessional. If anyone left the church after unloading his sins, he took barely time enough for a breather before going back to his prie-dieu to say his penance. The people in this valley did not emanate the tranquil assurance of old settlers; theirs was the impatience, the alertness, the constant guardedness of newcomers, which often, in the light of its geographical situation, made me look upon the Bohinj as a separate European country. I almost deplored the lack of an idiot or a drunkard, who might for a moment, in moving about this industrious community, have distracted these people from their hardworking seriousness. But then one day, while looking for places in which to study my two books, while pausing, looking back, turning off the path, feeling the grass here and there (was it soft enough to sit on?), leaning against a tree, tearing myself loose from the resin and staggering on, I realized that I myself might have been mistaken for just such a one.