by Peter Handke
Undoubtedly, the words owed some of their power to the fact that I did not immediately understand them but had to translate them, not from a foreign language into my own, but directly from an intimation—incomprehensible as much of the Slovene was to me, it seemed somehow familiar—into an image: into the orchard, a branch prop, a piece of wire. My brother referred to certain of his activities, such as removing sterile shoots, as “blind work.” Possibly such translation transformed blind reading into sighted reading, an unseeing activity into intelligent work. It seemed to me that even my father, if he had come into the room, would have left his grumbling on the threshold and, at the sight of my sparkling translator’s eyes, expressed his satisfaction with his son: “Yes, that is his game!”
Even where in the second part of his copybook my brother passed from his particular orchard to a general discussion of different varieties of apple, it was his own trees that appeared to me; where he was merely describing a method, I continued to read a story about a place and its hero; and it was also to them that the concluding remarks addressed to every fruit grower referred, to the effect that in a “thing” so closely akin to wisdom there could be neither professors nor students, and that what mattered most in fruit growing was “the master’s presence.”
What distinguished my brother’s orchard from others was its situation outside the village, surrounded by fields and pastureland, bounded on one side by a small mixed forest, whereas most gardens and orchards began right behind the houses and, seen from the road, gave the impression of long rows of trees, ending, as one was bound to suppose, in fallow land, with Rinkenberg as an island of apples and pears at its edge. My brother’s trees were small as in a plantation, and each tree, except for the usual plum and cider-pear trees at the entrance (intended, one might have thought, to mask the nature of the orchard), bore fruit of a different taste; on some trees, indeed, the variety changed from one tier of branches to the next. And most extraordinary of all: among the cider-pear trees there was one secret branch, known only to the family, that bore fruit which looked deceptively like that of the next branch but which, when you bit into it, did not—as we said in the family—“pucker your asshole” but opened your eyes.
The whole orchard, if you entered it from the side opposite the forest, had a more and more experimental arrangement, which had many advantages. After the first corner, marked by a lone poplar, which looked odd among the fruit trees, it spread out until at the edge of the forest it was several rows wide. Though unfenced like the village orchards, which thus had the air of public woodland, the area beyond the poplar was hidden. One reason for this was that, crossing the open fields, one suddenly, without having seen a single house, came across branches laden with the finest apples; and another was the hollow in which my brother had laid out his orchard. From flat ground one unexpectedly stepped down into the orchard and then at its end just as abruptly up into the little forest. The hollow was not deep; one became aware of it only at its edge, and only there did one glimpse the tops of the small fruit trees on a level with the tips of one’s shoes; from far off, from the village or the road, one saw only the strange poplar, sometimes transformed into a torch by lightning, rising from treeless fields.
That depression—so the geography teacher had taught me—was formed by a prehistoric brook, an offshoot of the groundwater which in this particular plain does not stand still but flows down to the Drava in a regular, unbroken stream, hardly “the length of a walking stick” below the earth’s surface. At the site of the present orchard, this stream of groundwater had welled up, carrying the soil with it, and washed out a bowl, whence it had dug a narrow ditch leading down to the river. Then the brook had seeped away—the ditch was locally known as the “still brook”—so that the bottom of the oval bowl formed by the spring was dry; the water was no longer a visible single stream but had sunk and joined the endless underground flow or, in the form of “sky water” (a literal translation of what my brother called rain in his copybook), carried the fertile decomposed soil from the walls to the bottom of the bowl. (The bowl, to be sure, had its vegetation-clogged outlet where the ditch began.)
Around the trees grew orchard grass, more sparse than meadow grass, and hardly any flowers. Where it arrived at the poplar tree, the sand track, which led across the fields to the edge of the hollow, acquired a middle strip of grass; on the way downhill, it narrowed and deep shining ruts made by braking cart wheels appeared; in among the rows of trees, it became a solid strip of grass, the “green track” (as we called it in the family), which ran straight as an arrow over the slightly vaulted bottom of the bowl to the farthermost tree of the orchard, not only distinctly lighter than the ground around it, but positively luminous beside it.
In its hollow, the orchard was sheltered from the wind; only the warm fall winds from the south touched its bottom. Thus, the trunks of the trees were perfectly straight, while the branches, most noticeably in the winter, grew evenly in all directions. The orchard was also sheltered from noise, from either the village or the road; apart from church bells and sirens, one heard only its own sounds, in particular the buzzing not so much of flies as of bees in the blossoms or of wasps in the fallen fruit. It had a smell of its own, heavy, cidery, which came more from the windfall fruit fermenting in the grass than from the trees; it was not until autumn, in the cellar, that the remaining apples became truly fragrant; before that, only if you held them up to your nose (but then the smell was something!). In the spring the blossoms were a solid white, but in the summer the orchard’s color changed from tree to tree; the pale green of the early apples, to which passersby were free to help themselves, was the first to disappear.
Waiting for the different kinds of fruit to ripen was a part of childhood. Especially after a storm, I was eager to run out to the orchard, where at least one marvelous apple (or, under the improved cider branch, a pear) would be lying in the grass. Often there would be a race with my sister, who was long past childhood. We both knew in advance under which tree we’d be likely to find something, and each of us wanted to be first; it was not so much a matter of having and eating as of finding and holding in our hands. Autumn fruit picking was one of the few physical occupations in which I did not reach out blindly (and as often as not miss my aim). The trees were so small that one hardly needed the ladders generally associated with orchards. Our chief implement was a long pole, to the top of which a sack with stiff, jagged edges was attached. Even today, at this very moment, I can feel in my arms the jolt that occurred when an apple fell from its branch and rolled down to the other apples in the sack.
The crates being filled at the foot of the trees were also a part of my childhood, the lemon-yellow in one, and in the next the special wine-red, whose veins one could see extending from the peel through the flesh to the core of the fruit. Only the cider-pear trees could be shaken; then a loud rat-tat-tat resounded through the whole orchard. Instead of crates, there would be a ring of thick sacks around the pear trees.
Later came my deprived youth, my years at the seminary, during which I missed the fruit harvest; no more piled crates; at the most, a few apples would go into my suitcase before I left home and a few others in the course of the year, more and more shriveled as time went on.
Then my mother’s illness, my father’s stiffening limbs, my unlearning (yes, that is the word) of almost every kind of physical work which, after all, had contributed no less than my reading on the balcony to my childhood dreams—chopping wood, mending roofs, driving cattle, binding sheaves (for me at least, these activities never represented hard work, or, if they did, it never lasted more than a few hours).
Then came the decades of absence, during which the orchard was utterly neglected; only my sister kept going there for a time with a small basket and picking what apples she could reach with her bare hands; and then she, too, stopped going. Just one more dream about my brother’s orchard: early apples lying pale yellow on the snow, and the family sitting at a table in the sun nearby.
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br /> In the years after my return, I visited the orchard now and then. There is still no house in the vicinity, and the old sand track leading to it, like the green track down in the hollow, has become solid grass. The trees are covered over with lichen.
The last time I was there, the rain had washed away what was left of the dam my brother had built of sticks, stones, and clay outside the hole leading to the ditch. It was a winter’s day and the prevailing color in the orchard was the green of the lichen which completely covered every one of the trees and in places had destroyed the bark. The lichen seemed to weigh down the trees, and indeed there were broken branches, shaped like antlers, lying in the grass. The grass was no grass, it was moss; the few blades that pretended to be grass were colorless and as hard as bast, entangled with blackberry trailers that had crept in from the forest and the ditch. The most striking sight was the ash, an intruder from the forest, which had literally taken possession of one apple tree. Its seed must have taken root at the foot of the apple tree, and in growing, the young ash had half enfolded the old fruit tree. Through a slit in the living tree, one could see the dead one, from which the bark had been stripped. The graft scions, previously recognizable on the smooth, shining bark, had long been completely hidden by lichen; only at one point was their presence indicated by a square wooden splint fastened to a branch and lying on top of it. Over the years, a strange reversal had occurred; this branch, first the thinner of the two, had thickened and now carried the former splint wrapped in rusty wire on its back as a useless appendage.
The whole bowl was now shot through with gray; the only color in it, apart from the green track, was the very different green, the verdigris green of the clumps of mistletoe in the split crowns of the trees. The few shriveled apples on the branches were left over from previous years; those lying in the moss below burst like puffballs if one stepped on them.
Only one tree, leafless, was full of this year’s apples that no one had picked; but time and again their yellow was blotted out by the gray and black of the starlings and blackbirds, which laid claim to every single apple and filled the orchard with their incessant pecking and beak-smacking. I was thankful for the train whistle in the distance, the crowing of a cock, the rat-tat-tat of a moped. Through the wild grapevines that covered the drain hole I seemed to hear, as though amplified by the narrow passage, the roar of the river far below.
I thought of running away from this world-forsaken hollow, but decided to stay. The shed on the slope leading up to the forest, formerly a shelter from the rain or midday sun, had vanished. Its remains at the edge of the green track, along with a pile of cast-off support poles, looked like something halfway between a pyre and a “hay harp.” I stood there and waited, for nothing in particular.
It began to snow, just a few isolated flakes, which fell abruptly from the clouds, described great curves in the air, and disappeared. I remembered my father’s habit of walking up and down the green track before every important decision, such as whether to make a will or to spend any considerable sum of money, and now I did likewise. I remembered one of the sayings that he used to direct at the corner where his missing son’s picture hung: “The custodian of a run-down orchard—that’s what I am.”
Turning at the end of the track, I raised my head. In the pile of planks and poles I glimpsed a crucifix towering into the sky and knelt before it in thought. When I went closer, the crucifix turned into a sculpture, and in the same way the rows of trees became in my eyes, as I thought literally, a “monument to my noble ancestors.”
The longer I stayed there, walked back and forth, changed direction, stood still, turned my head, the more distinctly the site, a moribund orchard, was transformed in my mind into a work, a form transmitting and honoring the human hand and offering the advantage of being translatable into another form by another hand, for example, into written characters on the side of that bowl, traversed by abandoned cow paths—white and still whiter lines, gradually making their appearance in the snow. Behind the ring of lichen and mistletoe, the eyes of the branches were rejuvenated; the dingy light on the roots was shot through with flint sparks; and from the frame at the center of the garden came a south wind, which later arose time and again in the closed rooms of the house.
Then, at the sight of the fungus shaped like a peaked cap on one of the tree trunks, I thought of one of my brother’s letters, in which he mentioned just such a goba which he was carrying in the dusk of a Holy Saturday while walking around the Easter bonfire. That, he said, was the “holiest and merriest” part; after that “the feast was over, and not even the sausages could give me so much pleasure.” And at the sight of the poles, I thought of the forked hazel branch on which my father, who was often cruel to animals, had once spitted a snake he had cut in two while mowing: and now the snake, which all that day and down through the years had waited on that hazel branch, a more lasting emblem of the place than any sun-drenched fruit, vanished. Then, turning to my forefathers in the emptiest corner of the garden and at the same time searching for the eyes of a child, diverted by the monotone of the lamentation for the dead and led out of the “eternal kingdom of separation” (my brother’s words), I spoke in a tone of defeat rather than triumph. My exact words were: “Yes, I will tell you.”
For each of the three years my brother spent at the agricultural school, there is one class photo. In the first, the young men all have open shirt collars, rolled-up sleeves, and dark, knee-length aprons; they are standing or sitting on a broad, sunny path bordered by fruit trees in such full bloom that not a single leaf can be seen. In the background, the vertical rows of a vineyard just beginning to put forth shoots lead upward to the chapel on the hill. The white of the flowering trees is repeated in the spring clouds. The shadows are short. It’s during the midday break, my brother hasn’t even found time to comb his hair, a strand of which is hanging down over his forehead; as soon as the picture is taken, they will all go back to work. The group is pressed close together; a few of the boys are resting one arm on the shoulder of a neighbor, who, however, never responds to this gesture; one, the youngest, is holding on to both his neighbors. Because of the sun, none of the boys’ eyes can be seen. My brother is the one at the back, slightly taller than the others, or possibly it’s only his thick mat of hair that makes him look taller; his face alone is cut off by the head in front of it; as though he had moved into that position at the last moment. An airily dressed woman is walking down the path behind the group.
The next picture shows much less of the surroundings but more of the class. The setting is a path flanked by a row of spruces with a lamppost in front of it and a tiled roof behind it. None of the group is without a jacket; some are even wearing ties with enormous knots, and some show watch chains extending from vest button down to vest pocket. In the foreground, a student is sitting cross-legged, with a small keg of wine on his lap and a tilted bottle in his hand. The faded flowers by the side of the path give the picture an autumnal look, corroborated by the boy with an ear of wheat in his breast pocket instead of a handkerchief or fountain pen. My brother, sitting in the front row, is among those with an open shirt collar; one oversized lapel of his jacket is visible, but neither breast pocket nor buttonhole. He alone is resting his hands, one on top of the other, on one knee. He is looking to one side of the picture, and though sitting erect, he seems relaxed; he is not posing, that is his natural self. These are no longer youngsters as they were last year, but young men; it’s not just for the photographer that they’ve closed their mouths and that one has propped his hands on his hips.
In the last picture, the class is smaller; they are standing outside the school building, of which one sees only a wall and a bit of the windows. In the front, on round chairs, sit the teachers, who, except for the pale priest, look more like rich peasants, older relatives, or godparents than teachers. All the students are wearing ties; none has his arm around anyone’s shoulder; they are grown men now; my brother, too, is twenty and holds his hands behind his
back. Having learned the farmer’s trade, he will now go back to a country where a different language from his own is spoken. He is looking southward, not to the north, where he belongs. All the young Slovene peasants of the class of ’38 are looking straight ahead; not a single jutting chin, as though they embodied, perhaps not a state, but something else. My brother’s face has filled out; his good eye has narrowed and, seen from the side, looks like a cleft; only the blind one protrudes round and white, as though it had always seen more than the other.
An odd thing about our family was that stories were seldom told about anyone’s childhood but my father’s. Over and over again (though none of us had been present and it was all a matter of hearsay), we would tell one another how as a child the old man sitting there had walked in his sleep. One night he had got up and taken his blanket to the table where the others were still sitting. Leaving his blanket there, he had gone back to bed and started wailing that he was cold. Or how the child would roam around for days, remembering nothing. In the end, he found his way home, but, afraid to go in, started in the gray of dawn to sweep the yard as though in preparation for Sunday, to show that he was back. Or how, even as a small child, he had had such a temper that one day, when someone made him angry, he had run out of the house, come back with half a tree trunk that he could hardly drag through the doorway, and with it attacked whoever had aroused his anger; most frightening of all had been the gesture with which he threw the tree trunk down at the other’s feet! Another strange thing was how much my father enjoyed hearing this family folklore about his childhood (usually told by his daughter); he would chuckle or tears would come to his eyes, or he’d clench his fists as though his rage were still with him; and in the end he would cast a triumphant look around: the winner!