Repetition

by Peter Handke

  The hotel where I was staying was called the Black Earth after a peak in the mountain range to the south, a big house, dating from before the World Wars, in which I began at once to look for the blind window. As the only guests apart from myself were a few mountain climbers, I had a room with four beds, enough for a whole family, to myself. It was on the second floor, above the entrance; from one window I looked out on a row of spruces, perhaps what was left of a forest, which ran straight through the village, and from the other side on a torrent which passed right next to the house, with a wild roar that drowned out all the trucks and power saws. The only sound that came through was an occasional train whistle or the sudden boom of a military plane. I could see the spruces (but not the water) sitting down, so I moved the little wooden table to the window on that side, and tried the different chairs. As I couldn’t make up my mind in favor of any of them, I lined them up at the table and switched from time to time.

  The first day, I unpacked the two books but didn’t open them. I left my room door open, because, what with the roaring of the brook, a closed room would have made me feel cut off from the world; as it was, a clatter or some shrill sound rose up to me now and then from the kitchen or dining room. On the wall of the corridor, just across from my door, hung a black-and-brown stuffed grouse in an attitude of courtship—outstretched neck, swollen from screeching, eyes closed—just as it had been shot. The keyboard next to it, bearing keys of every imaginable shape behind a glass pane, looked something like an almost complete butterfly collection. At the very first moment, I had the impression that I had seen all this before, or better still, that I had returned here not to an earlier life but to one dimly foreseen, though more real, more palpable than anything I could have imagined. Was it because of the table, chairs, and bedsteads, which reminded me of my father as carpenter, because of the spray outside the windows, which reminded me of my father as flood-control worker? Or because of my brother’s letter, in which he had used the odd expression “ancestral country” in speaking of the Bohinj? For it wasn’t just my room and the house that I seemed to have rediscovered so palpably, but also the town of Bistrica, the “transparent,” the “clear,” the “brook village,” and the whole valley: a child marvels at it, a man of twenty contemplates it, a man of forty-five surveys it, and in this moment all three are one and ageless. And Bistrica was very different from the usual village; it was more like the suburb of a city, which would grow as a number of such suburbs coalesced; a development that seemed foreshadowed by the few big buildings, the self-service store on the periphery, and the cathedral in the meadow.

  It seemed so inappropriate for the son of a poor countryman to sit down at a table in a restaurant and expect the waiter to serve him that at first, apart from crackers and cookies from the self-service store, my daily fare consisted of the bread and apples my sister had put into my sea bag. They were the last apples of the year before, so old that I had only to pick one up and the seeds would rattle. I didn’t eat bread and apples because I had to but because they were, and remained for many years, my favorite food; the word “delicious,” I felt, applied to nothing so much as to the tart sweetness of apples eaten along with caraway-seasoned, barely salted rye bread. Bread, the apples, and my clasp knife were lined up on my windowsill. Looking at the floured loaf, I thought of the far side of the moon, though of course it waned more in a week than the planet in a month, and soon the lesser moons would be gone, too; the last slices were so thin that, held up to the light, they suggested a network of transparent snow crystals, and before long they, too, had melted away.

  But my story became a real fairy tale only when I opened the books and found a bank note inserted in each of them like an endpaper. It was then that I remembered my sister saying that on my travels I should “eat one hot meal every day”; then at least my stomach “won’t feel that it’s away from home.” As in the dream of finding money, which I often had in those days, I began to see bank notes everywhere, and regretted that my sister hadn’t baked one into the bread or pushed one under the skin of an apple. Folding the bank notes and sticking them into my back trouser pocket—no one in the family possessed a billfold—I noticed that I was repeating the gesture with which my father, after every game, casting a long look of triumph and vengeance around him, would pocket his winnings. This enabled me to regard the money his daughter had filched from him as my winnings and to change it into dinars. That same evening, I ordered a hot meal with an unwavering voice and, as I thought, no accent. In the waiter’s face I detected an attentive look, which today I interpret as a smile.

  The first of the two books was a copybook with hard covers in which my brother had made notes during his studies at the agricultural school in Maribor. Because it was thick and with its hard cover smelled like a genuine book, I had always regarded it as one. Along with the other tome, a big Slovenian—German dictionary published in the nineteenth century, a packet of letters, a uniform cap from the Second World War (son), a bayonet and a gas mask from the First World War (father), it had ordinarily been kept in the chest that stood on the wooden balcony under the eaves of our house. Until I began to read, these were the only books in the house, and they were always kept in the blue chest, half out of doors. When I looked at them, I never took them into the living room, but sat on the chest, as though exposure to the weather were inseparable from such reading—the wind on the pages, the changing light, and getting spattered now and then by the rain blowing under the overhang of the roof. Where these books had their place was also my place, for my father, normal as he found it to study the Sunday paper by the living-room window, wanted no books in the house; he muttered angrily whenever he caught me indoors with a book, and a moment later my page would be streaked with whitish trails.

  How, over the years, I searched for places in which to read books! I would sit behind the milk stand at the roadside, on the bench by the distant wayside shrine, on a spit of land above the sluice in the Drava, at my feet the dammed-up river, so smooth that the water below me resembled the sky overhead … Once I climbed Rinken Hill; shortly before the top, in a fern-overgrown clearing with a single pine tree in the middle, I found the place that every reader must have dreamed of: close to the tree a patch of the soft grass locally known as lady-hair, a bed of natural cushions, no bed of vice but a throne of the spirit, which, I was confident, would blow upon me from a book named Fear and Trembling. But I didn’t get beyond the first page or, rather, the first sentence of it. My eyes were not opened to the sentences that followed until one afternoon in the school corridor, where I was sitting with other students who were doing their homework. And, along with the words, I took in the details of my surroundings, the grain of the wooden bench, the part in the hair of the boy in front of me, the lamp at the end of the corridor, and then at last I heard the wind in the pine tree, which had suddenly died down as I opened the book in the clearing. That place, all places, however pleasing, however inviting to the reader, disappeared as soon as I tried to settle into them; made illiterate by my father’s grumbling, I crept away. To this day, I have known no settled reading place but that chest, long ago chopped up for firewood, on the balcony of my father’s house. While looking for reading places, I learned only one thing; namely, that I could not withdraw into solitude, and especially not with a book.

  And so, after the usual wanderings, I tried the station waiting room in its ring of chestnut trees, the graveyard, beside a tombstone with a falling airplane scratched into it, the stone bridge over the outlet of the lake. In the end, I studied my brother’s copybook in my room at the inn with the grouse, dark, in the corner of one eye, and in the other, bright, the washstand with its bowl and pitcher. Before me, the tip of a spruce guided my gaze to a neighboring house with roof tiles running from left to right like the lines in the copybook.

  Of course, I had looked at the book any number of times before that, but had been unable to make sense of it, because the classes in the agricultural school were conducted in Slovenia
n. What had interested me were the drawings, and above all the handwriting. It was clear and even; the long, narrow letters leaned slightly to the left and, as I leafed through the book, gave the impression of steadily falling, endless rain. As there were no curlicues or loops, no shortcuts or sloppiness, and never an unconnected letter, standing alone in the middle of a word, there had been no need to resort to block letters. Yet this script differed from the picturesque calligraphy of a nineteenth-century document by its smoothness, which also characterized the drawings that went with it. In looking at this writing, I had the impression that it did more than record something, that it moved hand in hand with its subject, each lined-up letter carrying its image, unerringly, toward a goal. And here in the Bohinj, it seemed to me that my brother’s handwriting was right for this new country; the handwriting of a settler, of a man about to start on a journey, whose writing is an intrinsic part of this starting-out and not the mere record of a continued action.

  In one of his letters he observes that a handwriting expert would find that “all our [the family‘s] scribblings have something in common.” I have always seen pride and presumption in that sentence. His handwriting had never been childlike; even in his earliest school copybook, he had written like someone who takes a responsible part in an action, a leader, a discoverer.

  Actually, the whole family was famous, even outside the village, for its, to quote the roadmender and sign painter, “masterful” handwriting (“The Kobals don’t write just with their hands,” he said, holding out his arm in a grandiose gesture), which, partly because there was no recognized “master” in the whole region, brought us the reputation of being a noble, self-confident family; and this we showed by writing as we did—not “like painting,” not “like printing,” but precisely with the unmistakable “Kobal gesture.” As I’ve said, my mother was much in demand as a letter writer and was regarded almost as an official. If I questioned one of our neighbors about my brother, he would usually, after telling a few anecdotes, talk about Gregor Kobal and his orchard, “as carefully, generously, and inventively laid out as his handwriting” (so the roadmender). Even my sister awoke from her confusion and sat very straight, a picture of authority, when she signed “Ursula Kobal” on the receipt for her early pension.

  The only exceptions were the oldest and the youngest members of the family, my father and I. The one had too heavy, the other too uneven a hand. It was obvious that my father had had no proper schooling; in writing as in reading, he seemed to spell out the words. To the long letters my mother wrote me at the seminary, he added at the most one word, signature and greeting in one: “Father.” For a while, after he was pensioned, he didn’t know what to do with himself. I thought it might be a good idea to give him a copybook and encourage him to write the story of his life; for, when he tried to talk about it, he would falter time and again. Often after a long silence he would make a start, begin with a deep-voiced “And then …”—and finally break off, saying: “It can’t be told. It’s got to be written.” But a few months later, when I looked at the copybook, I found not a single word, though he had had a whole winter’s time, but only numbers, my brother’s APO number, my laundry-mark number, our house number, and all our birth dates, gouged into the paper like cuneiform. (It was only with his carpenter’s pencil that he could make light lines; before you knew it, he could draw a complete diagram on the wood he was going to work with.)

  As for me, I often changed my handwriting; in the middle of a word my letters would get bigger, I’d push them back, then forward again. I’d begin every paragraph with the utmost care and then—as one can tell now by looking at the writing—start racing in my impatience to finish it. The worst of it was that I didn’t really regard my handwriting as my own; today it has become regular, but it still strikes me as artificial, as an imitation; unlike my brother, I have never had a handwriting of my own, my present style was copied from him; the moment I stop concentrating, it loses its affected regularity and degenerates into a formless scribble that I myself am unable to read, a picture of harassed helplessness in place of the grandiose family gesture. It took the typewriter to teach me to write properly. Before that, the only writing that suited me was in the air, without any instrument, using my forefinger for a pencil. I couldn’t see what I was writing, the movement of my finger sufficed and that was what gave me the feeling that I had a personal handwriting with a rhythm of its own. And besides, when I wrote in the air, I could be slow, pause, break off. But otherwise, convulsively clutching the foreign instrument, the mere sound of which threw me off, bent over the paper instead of sitting erect, I rushed from line to line, not knowing what I was doing, giving off sour, unproductive sweat, incapable of raising my head, with no eyes for my surroundings. It was only when I concentrated on my subject that my writing looked at all natural to me; then script and content seemed to take shape side by side.

  And where, when writing, could I concentrate on my subject? In the dark, for one thing. There, stroke by stroke, pencil and fingers grew together and a writer’s hand developed, beautifully heavy and deliberate, no idle scribble but a recording. Then, when I looked in the light at what I had written, I saw my thought framed in a script that seemed to combine my brother’s fine inventive hand and my father’s halting, self-educated one.

  My brother’s copybook dealt mostly with fruit growing. With the help of the dictionary, I managed to get the gist of it. Though the work of a man who was not yet twenty, it did not consist of lecture notes but was, rather, the record of a young scientist’s independent research. A second section was a kind of treatise, made up of reflections on the subject, and the end a catalogue of rules and suggestions. The whole was a student’s notes and a textbook in one.

  Essentially, the book revolved around my brother’s experience of planting and improving apple trees in his own orchard at home. He spoke of suitable soil (“loose and rich,” “flat, slightly vaulted ground”), orientation (“east to west, but sheltered from the wind”), the best times for the various operations (often determined by the equinoxes or the rising of certain constellations, or by rural holidays).

  I couldn’t help reading my brother’s observations on grafting and on transplanting young trees as in part a Bildungsroman. He had carried the young plants from the nursery to his garden “along with their earth” and arranged them in the same order as in the nursery, though much farther apart, because the branches of one tree should never touch those of another. He had woven the root branches into protective baskets before inserting them in their holes. The trees grown from seed on the spot had proved more resistant but also less fruitful than the transplants. Leafy crowns were advantageous, as they provided a roof under which more fruit would form. Branches that inclined toward the ground bore more fruit than those that soared skyward (though the fruit hanging higher up was less likely to rot). As for grafting, he used only branches pointing eastward. They were pencil-shaped and the cuts chamfered to let the rainwater run off. The cutting itself was done not with a blow but by pulling the knife through so the bark would remain intact. He had always chosen scions that had once borne fruit, “because otherwise we shall have worked not for a yield but for shade,” and he had never inserted a scion in a fork between two other scions, for, if he did, it would draw nourishment away from them. Of pruning, he wrote that the earlier he did it, the more “wood” he obtained; the later, the more “fruit”; the wood just “shot up,” while the fruit would “bow down.”

  At the beginning of the copybook he explained that originally there had been only one tree in his orchard; it had run wild and bore no fruit. He had driven a spike into the bark at the spot that was freest from lichen; from the festering wound had sprung a shoot with one promising eye after another. The spike, his own invention, had been more like an auger—instead of hole-plugging dust, it produced shavings that could be blown out. (Beside the description was a drawing of a “Kobal auger.”)

  But what made a deeper impression on me than such incide
ntal pedagogic metaphors, such allusive meanings, were the concrete details, the mere mention of things which up until then had been only a jumble to me. The bast my brother used to tie his scion to the branch, the wood splint (not round but square) that held it straight, the pebbles that moderated the temperature of the soil at the roots and protected them from the groundwater, took on a radiance that held my attention. Thus a light fell on the orchard, which has been neglected since then and run wild like the tree with which it began, and in the manuscript I caught sight of a blue-bordered enclosure, where, confronted with the rich diversity of “my thing” (as my brother called his orchard), I gazed around and around as though I stood in my brother’s place at the center of it. “We shall not have worked for shade”—that was the battle cry which now, at the table beside the window, I shouted into the roaring of the torrent, as the black grouse in the corner of one eye and the white washbasin in the other swung across my field of vision like two intersecting pendulums.