Repetition

by Peter Handke

  Concerning my brother’s childhood, on the other hand, I have retained only one anecdote. It seems that he once walked from end to end of the village with his sister, farting for her benefit the whole way. Apart from that, there was only the sad story of how he had lost his eye. He does not appear in an active role until the age of seventeen, when he set out for the agricultural school across the border. But then, on his very first vacation, he presented himself to the family as a discoverer, not only of new farming methods but, above all, of the Slovene language. Up until then, Slovene larded with German had been his dialect, the dialect of our region; now it became his written language, which he used in his notebooks and in letters and jottings. For these he always carried about with him a dictionary, a pencil, and slips of paper, in addition to the usual penknife and bits of string, and continued to do so later on, from one battlefield to the next. He wanted everyone else in the family to imitate him and at last show loyalty to their origins, whether in the city, in public offices, or on the train. My father, however, didn’t want to; his wife couldn’t; my sister was mute at the time, preoccupied with her broken heart; and I myself hadn’t been born yet. Though our mother’s Slovene was negligible, my brother calls it “our mother tongue” in his first letter from Maribor, and adds: “We are what we are, and no one can force us to be Germans.” He was almost an adult when he left home, and unlike me, he went of his own free will. He saw nothing foreign in the foreign country; instead, he found “our most essential possession” (this in a letter)—namely, his language; after seventeen years of silence and farting, he had become a self-assured speaker; in fact, as some of his slips of paper showed, he had turned out to be a glib punster (which fits in with the photo of him standing in the middle of the village with his hat askew, supporting himself on one foot and holding the other far to one side). He was the first in the family who, at least during his school days in the south, did not suffer from homesickness. The school, not far from the “big city” of Maribor, was his second home. And it was he who returned from his travels through Slovenia with the story of the executed peasant revolutionary Gregor Kobal. Kobal was one of the most common names in the Kobarid graveyard. He had looked it up in the local baptismal registers, going further and further back, until at the end of the seventeenth century he found the record of the rebel’s birth. Whereupon he appointed Gregor Kobal our ancestor.

  Yet my brother never actually became an insurrectionary ; even during the war, later on, he never quite made it. He was reputed to be the gentlest of the family, and to judge by his letters, he was something else that I’ve met with only in a few children: pious. He often used the word “holy”; in his usage, however, it applied not to the church, heaven, or any other place outside the world, but always to everyday life—getting up in the morning, going to work, meals, routine activities. “At home, where everything is done in so lively and holy a way,” he wrote in a letter from the Russian front. Once again, I’m reminded of his “holiest and merriest” walk around the Easter bonhre—and Pentecost was for him the feast day when “it’s glorious to go out to the fields bright and early to mow in the holy hours.” A white cloth spread on a table for a soldiers’ Mass was “something to fortify my poor soul”; at home he sang the Hallelujah aloud in chorus with the others, but at the front he “mumbled it softly to myself.” And in his last letter he wrote: “I have seen and experienced the filth of the world, and there is nothing more beautiful than our faith.” (According to him, to be sure, faith came alive only in one’s mother tongue; when after the end of the First Republic one was allowed to pray and sing only in German, to his ears that was no longer “holy,” just a “caterwauling that I can’t bear to hear.”) Another aspect of his piety was the fervid irony with which he spoke of home when he was far away. He refers to our few acres as our “lands,” or as the “Kobal estate”; the rooms in the house, including kitchen, barn, and stable, became “apartments”; and he calls on his “revered family to gather around the table and study” his letters.

  It was this irony that deterred him from active rebellion during the war; his indignation was expressed only in his letters. Hearing that a neighborhood family had been deported to Germany, he wrote that he had “but one wish … to tear that man limb from limb … but the thought of my parents, my brother and sister, holds back my rage.” Thus, it was probably legend when my mother told us that, after a so-called farm leave, her son had deserted to join the partisans and become a fighter. My guess is that he simply disappeared, no one knows where. It is inconceivable that he would ever have joined in bellowing warlike partisan songs at the top of his lungs—but quite possible that he and a few others made their way to some hidden clearing, a secret patch of farmland, and that from there, looking over his shoulder, he addressed the following speech to the warlords: “I will now say to you the word that is often heard at the bowling alley at home, when the ball misses the tenpins!” That, in one of his letters from the front, is his euphemistic way of saying “Shit!” He was indeed a singer, but not a regimented one—you might have caught him singing with friends after a few drinks; he was a dancer too, but not a stamping, heavy-footed one, more a merry wag, dancing on one foot at the edge of the dance floor.

  After his disappearance, the village thought him dead, and like all the village dead he was soon forgotten, except by a priest or two; few of the boys his own age who might have talked about him came home from the war, and the girl who was thought to be his fiancee married someone else and never spoke of him. He had left home too early to be remembered as a maypole climber or as a soloist in church, and soon after his return from school the young peasant with the apron became “the soldier Gregor Kobal,” exchanging, as the saying went, “field blue-denim for field gray.”

  But at home he was honored. During my childhood he was so much talked of that it seems to me now as though he were there the whole time, as though I even heard an additional voice in every conversation, as though all heads kept turning toward the absent figure in the empty corner. It was chiefly my mother who brought him alive with her talk, while my father was the custodian of his belongings, not only of his orchard but also of his clothes and his two books. Only later did it occur to me that my parents’ forehead-to-forehead whisperings in the sickroom may have been less an expression of married love than a union in mourning for their dearly beloved son and that their two foreheads may have been meant to form a bridge for his still-hoped-for return. It is certain that man and wife, each in his own way, worshipped their missing son as an “example”—these were the words of my godless mother—“of the son of man,” and that at news of his coming she would immediately have prepared “his apartment,” scrubbed the threshold, and hung a wreath over the front door, while my father would have borrowed the neighbor’s white horse, harnessed it to the spit-and-polished barouche, and, with tears of joy running down his nose, driven to meet him.

  Only my sister opposed this worship (because, or so my parents believed, she blamed him for the shipwreck of her love). She contended that he had definitely cast his one eye on women, but had had no luck with them because of his disfigurement; that he had complained incessantly when tilling the soil, especially in the heat on the steeper slopes (“stinking business”); that he had come home from agricultural school as a propagandist for the Slovenian language and sowed dissension in house and village; that, in particular, he had sinned against his beloved Holy Ghost by giving up hope long before the war, and refusing to marry (after the girl had literally proposed to him) on the ground that he was sure to die young.

  It is true that my brother’s letters and jottings over the years are outspoken in their despair. First because of machines—“It looks as if they will soon replace us all, and then there will be no need for me to come home”; then, at the beginning of the war, he expressed the belief that he would be “a soldier forever.” His written curses become more and more frequent. On all-day marches in the fine spring weather he “hears no birdsong,” “sees no
flowers by the roadside,” and fears that he is losing his voice: “In another year I won’t be able to talk. Even now we are as shy as animals in the high mountains; we disappear when we hear someone coming. Our temperament needs harmony; without harmony, nothing can give us pleasure.” Every day the same, no sign of any Sunday or holiday. He refuses to think about the past “and would like best to do everything in reverse.” In the end, he curses not only the war but the world as well: “I curse the world!”

  I for my part, whether as listener or as reader, have never brought myself to believe in a brother who had lost hope. Haven’t appearances (“Filip Kobal has a thing about appearances”) always impressed me more than the most established fact? And what were these appearances? Didn’t they include the way my sister paused, slowed down, and grew thoughtful when she spoke against her missing brother? She stopped making faces the moment her brother came up in the conversation, and her usual blinking, ordinarily so persistent and violent, became much less frequent. She seemed to wake up. A moment before, her speech had been muddled and cottony as though she’d been talking in her sleep, and now she drew a breath before opening her mouth, tilted her head slightly, and paid attention to every word she said.

  Another such “appearance” was especially evident in Gregor’s writing. Even when it dealt with the irrevocable past, it gave me, along with a plaint, a living image. Instead of saying something directly, like “When I was still happy … ,” he would write (I translate literally): “When the birds still sang for me …” In speaking of springtime at home, he wrote: “When the bees were wearing trousers [of pollen].” Instead of saying “It’s an ill wind …” he wrote: “Ugly mother, good food.” Looking up his first name in the dictionary, he found the meaning “Skin on milk,” which made him retch. And then his way of using colors, every one of which could depict a wide range of things and creatures: “How is Spotty getting along?” could refer to a pear, a cow, a goat, a chicken, or a variety of green pea.

  But what seemed to me in reading to go beyond such images, and to transcend my own present, were sentences written in a particular tense, which my brother used with striking frequency, the so-called future perfect—because it doesn’t exist in Slovene, he would switch to German whenever he wanted to use it: “We shall have walked on the green track.” “The boundary stone will have been moved to the edge.” “By the time the buckwheat is sowed, I shall have worked, sung, danced, and slept with a woman.”

  I realize, of course, that an appearance may have resulted from a twofold deficiency: my brother’s papers are not complete, and I have no memory of him. His legacy is so fragmentary that I am in the position of a scholar dealing with the few fragments that have come down to us from the early Greek seekers after truth (this, at least, is how I visualize them—wringing their hands, stammering, and finally uttering their cry of joy). Two separate words taken out of context, such as “dancing” and “weeping,” reveal a halo around them and irradiate the world; they derive their radiance from, among other things, not being shut up in a complete sentence or in an “explanation.” And because, when I think about my missing brother, no picture of a living man, no smell, no tone of voice, no footfall, no particularity whatever intervenes, it has been possible for my brother to become a hero to me, an indestructible phantasm. True, after being appointed my godfather in his absence, he saw me once when home on leave; but I, barely two years old at the time, have no recollection of the meeting. “I shall have bent over my godchild,” he wrote in his next letter from the front.

  Through these words, so much more concrete than my memory, I felt my brother bend over me time and again. He was often a foil to my mother: whereas she would have liked best to veil her eyes from the future she foresaw for me, his good eye studies me with friendly attentiveness and enjoys the sunshine with me, while his blind eye—because it’s blind—is none the wiser. The heaviness of my mother’s face bent over me as opposed to my brother’s airy radiance—that is my battle to this day. And that is why I call this person who has the same parents as I my “forebear”; yes, I have appointed Gregor Kobal—the peaceable descendant of an insurrectionary, a man who, as even his sister admitted, “never brandished a whip”—to be my ancestor, although I myself, in my thoughts at least, always keep a whip ready for one enemy or another. And indeed, precisely in certain crucial moments, a peace descended on me in which I not only saw my elective ancestor bent over me in kindness but myself embodied him. Of course I could not when threatened summon him to give me peace; it was the other way around: I found peace by myself, and he was present to bolster me; accordingly it was impossible to lean on my forebears (the only effective forebear, this much I know, is the sentence preceding the one I am writing now).

  And yet, though it may be mere appearance, with an ancestor in me I am no longer alone; I sit more erect, walk in a different way; do and refrain from doing, say and leave unsaid what should be done or not done, said or left unsaid in a situation of danger. What are facts compared to such appearances? My brother writes in his last letter: “When I am able to project my thoughts into the distance, I picture the Kobal clan sitting at the table together, reading my scribblings.” Long live appearances! Let them be my subject!

  As I recall, it often rained in the Bohinj, and it can’t be just the roaring of the torrent outside my window that makes me think so. On a forest path, my feet sink into the clayey mud. The plastic bags hung on the fruit trees to frighten the birds away are plumped up with water. I’m sitting with a family of vacationers under the roof of a “hay harp,” watching the road; a peasant woman is leading a horse by the bridle, the horse is pulling a hay wagon. The rain bounces back so violently from the road that the woman seems to be moving without legs, the horse without hooves, and the wagon without wheels. The walls of the houses are aglow with the lightning. Then the sun shines again; it has been shining a long time, and along the shore of the otherwise quiet lake the water sparkles with the drops falling from overhanging branches.

  In spite of the rain, I left the village every afternoon, always with a definite goal, a kind of plateau which, like the big pine forest at home in the Jaunfeld, is called Dobrava (roughly, “place of the oak trees”) but is bare except for an isolated pine or oak here and there, and hardly cultivated, presenting the appearance—strange so near the bottom of the valley—of an upland pasture.

  On this plateau I was all alone, but not outside the world, for even more than at the inn with its roaring torrent, one sensed that civilization was near: foresters’ tractors, hay turners, blowers in the lumber-drying sheds; rising smoke and glinting windshields could be seen on all sides, a single crowded rowboat on the lake below. Not only the power lines but even the birds in the air and the bees nearby indicated the presence of unseen humans at the foot of the moraine. I had come up here almost in spite of myself, guided by the pathways, at first an old road, no longer used by vehicles, with meadow grass sprouting through cracks in the asphalt, then uphill over what had formerly been the bed of a brook but was now carpeted with short, soft grass. Here, too, I had as usual to find my place. As in the song: the hill was too high for me, the dale was too low, the sun was too hot, the shade too cool, the lee too sheltered, the open too windy, the boulder too eccentric, the tumbledown apiary too picturesque. In the end I sat down in the grass, leaning against the wooden wall of a field barn. It was the south wall, and when the sun was shining, it seemed to me that the weather-beaten wood gave off “just the right warmth.” Indeed, the whole place was just right. The eaves had just enough overhang to enable me to stretch my legs without their getting wet, and the few drops that came my way reminded me of the balcony at home, where the corner I sat in, as here, was at the border between inside and outside—with the difference that there, because our outhouse was situated at one end of the balcony, with a chute leading down to the dung heap, the smells were not the same as here on the plateau.

  And again I had a book with me, my brother’s big dictionary; everything e
lse had been removed from my waterproof sea bag. The orchard copybook had been suitable reading matter for the four walls of my hotel room; and now, here in the open, the dictionary released its arrows of meaning. Odd that a young man of twenty should spend whole afternoons in a foreign country leaning against a secluded barn, immersed in a dictionary—no, in a single page; no, a single word; that he should look up from that word, shake his head, laugh, drum his heels on the ground, clap his hands (scaring away the grasshoppers and butterflies), jump now and then to his feet and take a turn in the rain. When the people at the inn and in the village saw me start on my daily expedition with my sea bag, they took me for “a budding scientist” or “a young painter” (with its lake and solitary church the Bohinj had attracted droves of landscape painters in the nineteenth century); yet that young fellow sitting there hunched over his book, then suddenly starting to sing at the top of his voice, could only be an idiot.

  And yet my senses—of sight as well as hearing—have never been so sharp as then, as I read those columns of unconnected words. Could you call it reading? Wasn’t it more a discovering, and wasn’t it the joy of discovery that made me shout the foreign words and phrases? (Out into the landscape with them!) But what was there to discover?