by Peter Handke
Reassured, I went my way, with myself on my back, not as a burden, but as protection. I had no sooner reached the forest than I heard a crashing behind me, and a boulder came hurtling between the trees. In the moss a buzzing, as if a swarm of flies had been shooed away from a dung heap—that was a moss-green snake rearing its head and hissing at me. I brought myself to admire it. The skeleton under the pile of brushwood was a roebuck’s; it had horns on its head; I took head and horns with me for a while, then I threw them away. While crossing a pathless clearing covered with chest-high ferns, I took time to listen to the humming of the invisible and otherwise soundless birds in the ferns at my feet. It was not inconsistent with my carefree mood that I was glad to catch sight of an overgrown path, which in descending widened into an old road, and was even happier to see the first fresh wagon tracks and the groove made by the brake claw—it was that steep—in the middle strip of grass. At the sight of this groove, of the clods of mud ripped up by the brake, the oily water in the deep black, glistening wheel ruts, the horseshoe marks, the boot prints of the driver walking beside the wagon (the writing on the soles had left a clear imprint), it even seemed to me that a whole orchestra was starting to play, and this most delicate of all melodies has remained to this day my ideal of music. Then came the first cheeping of sparrows and the barking of dogs. Though it was beginning to rain again, I sat down by the roadside and ate a few blackberries, which here on the southern slope were beginning to ripen. I took off my shoes and let the “sky water” wash my aching feet. I was so hot that the sweat was steaming off me. The shiny handle of my flashlight showed me a face plastered with pine needles. Since the berries failed to quench my thirst, I drank of the warm rainwater as I walked. The elder bush at the entrance to the village was already sprinkled black; next to it, bearing fruit that seemed to grow straight out of its branches, an adventure: my first fig tree. At the foot of the village terrace a desert of white stone, with a bright green stripe twining through it—the Soa, or Isonzo.
I had been roaming about for two days, and now in security I thought, as I often did later on “arriving safely,” that I hadn’t wandered nearly long enough. Security? In my whole life, I have never once felt myself in security.
I spent only a night and a day in the Upper Isonzo Valley. I slept in Tolmin, the largest town in the valley; its coat-of-arms shows the river’s meanders, crisscrossed by the pitchforks of the peasant uprising. I found shelter in the basement of a private house, where there were rooms for rent. There were spiders on the ceiling, and after midnight the cellar smell was fortified by the stench of vomit. In the next room a man retched loudly, wordlessly, and uninterruptedly until dawn. When I got up, there was no one in the kitchen-living room but a mute child with a cat on his lap; his parents had already gone out to work. I put the money on the table, took breakfast at the inn, and breathed deeply at the sight of the bread.
An old road leads along the terrace where the villages are situated. I headed up the river for Kobarid, or Karfreit; at first the Isonzo lay far below me, then it came closer; on the far side of it I saw pastureland, with windowless and chimneyless huts for hay. At a place where the road touched the meandering river, I went down to the bank, took my clothes off in the rain, and let myself down from an overhanging rock into the current, which from a distance had looked so furious but wasn’t so bad once I was in it. Up ahead of me, the river split in two. The water was up to my shoulders; having just come down from the mountains, it was ice-cold; for a moment it stabbed me in the pit of my stomach. I swam against the stream with all my might and noticed after a hundred counted strokes that I was still on a level with the stone where I had left my clothes. I stood up and with my head barely above water surveyed the countryside, which, seen in that perspective, became part of a strange continent, a single shimmering flow from all sides, subdivided only by tongue-shaped gravel banks, surmounted by swaths of mist and fringed by mountains dark with conifers and veiled in rain, the ever-active watershed for these nameless streams. Soa? Isonzo? The desolation that extended from the tip of my chin to a bow-shaped peak lit by a distant sun, nothing but cold river water and warm rain, made me think of a primeval world that doesn’t want to be named but only to stand alone for itself. But then in the middle of the river I sighted, one after another, three fellow swimmers, evidently—to judge by the outline of their undershirts on their otherwise brown arms—workers taking a midday break. They were swimming fast and shouting, one louder than the next; they soon disappeared from view (I saw them later on the road in a file of gravel trucks). Soa or Isonzo? Which suited the river better, the feminine Slovene or the masculine Italian name? For me, I thought, masculine would be better; for the three workers, feminine. As I resumed my march on the road, I felt a warming hand between my shoulder blades, and my shoes became slowly gliding dugout canoes.
Later on, when for the first time I heard the name Kobarid pronounced by a native, it sounded to me as if a child had said it. Yes, time and again, names have rejuvenated the world. When I got there, it was different from anything I had ever seen at home. This was no village; all of a sudden I was surrounded by a fragment of a metropolis; a forest jutted into the center with its bookstore and flower shop, and there were wet cows right next to the factory on the periphery. Though in the foothills of the Alps, Kobarid, or Karfreit, struck me then as the embodiment of the south, with its oleander bushes at the entrances to houses, laurel trees outside the church, stone buildings, and streets of multicolored cobbles (which, to be sure, led after a few steps into the evergreen forests of Central Europe).
The people spoke a jumble of Slovene and Italian, just as the houses were a jumble of wood, stone, and marble; all that together had a spark of daring about it. At my inn, which like the others was named after a mountain, two men were playing cards; at the end of the game, one showed his opponent his winning card with a quick smile. A woman on a curved balcony snipped the faded flowers from the geraniums that ran the whole length of the house, and then put a gleaming red flowerpot down beside the other pots. “This place is my source.” That was my decree.
The bus from the north that I was waiting for came around the corner. But it wasn’t the right one; unlike Yugoslavian buses, it gleamed with enamel in which, when it stopped, the lanceolate leaves of the oleanders were reflected; when I looked up, I saw the whole population of my home village, in window after window a familiar profile. Involuntarily I moved away, looking for a place where I wouldn’t be seen. Were the villagers really perched up so high? Weren’t they, rather, huddling or crouching? And when they rose to their feet, weren’t they actually picking themselves up off the floor? Painfully, as though crippled, they crawled out of the bus, and the driver had to help several of them down from the doorstep. Outside, gathered together in the bend of the street, they sought one another with their eyes, as though afraid of getting lost. Though it was a weekday, they were festively dressed, they had even put on their peasant costumes; only the priest shepherding the tour was wearing his traveling habit and a white collar. The men were wearing hats and under their brown suits velvet vests with metal buttons; the women, in fringed rainbow-colored shawls, all had enormous handbags, all of the same shape. Even the oldest among the women had braided their hair and wound the braids around their heads like wreaths. I was sitting half in shadow at a distance, on a chopping block under an outside staircase. A few of them glanced in my direction, but none of these people knew me; only the priest had a moment’s pause, and it seemed to me that the sight of this stranger may have put him in mind of Kobal, Filip, apostate and fugitive from the seminary. Where, I wonder, could that fellow be now?
Then one by one they stepped into the inn and stayed a long while. I decided to wait for them; there would be a later bus to the Karst, which was probably where my search for my brother’s traces would end. Beside me, there was a woodpile with a pyramidal tunnel at the bottom resembling a kennel; on the wall above it, the remains of a Latin inscription: UNCERTAIN THE HOUR
. It seemed to me that I could tell by the look of the villagers that my mother was well; just the sight of those familiar handbags reassured me.
I was left undisturbed in my place; the fact that I so obviously had time seemed identification enough. When the Rinkenbergers came out into the open, the old men had flushed cheeks. They were not drunk but were all seized with a strangely awkward exhilaration. From them I heard the language of the land, for the first time spoken purely, with clear voices, without the garble and swallowing of syllables usual in our village. Before getting into their bus, they all, as though on command, turned back toward the wall of the house, which, windowless at that point, was only a large yellow surface with horizontal grooves. The dark backs of the villagers stood out clearly against it, and I saw some of the women, regardless of age, holding one another by the hand, while some of the men threw their arms over one another’s shoulders. They all sagged at the knees, and it occurred to me that not only we, the Kobals, were exiles, but all the smallholders, and that the whole village of Rinkenberg had always been a village of exile, all its inhabitants equally servile, equally wretched, equally out of place; here with the others even the priest struck me, not as a man of the cloth, but as a close-cropped convict. Most likely they stopped to look at the house because they had been served so well and cheaply there, but in my eyes they were looking up at the grooves of a wailing wall, and at the same time they were pilgrims (Pelegrin was a common name in the village), and that fitted in with the solemnity of the hairdos and costumes. For the first time I saw meaning in these costumes (as I would on a future occasion in the picture of an old woman standing with half-closed eyes outside her stone hut, holding her black-and-white shroud, her old wedding dress, over her arm). The group included a child, who now jumped nimbly up onto the window ledge, then, clinging to the grooves with his fingers and toes, climbed halfway up the wall and, applauded by the grownups, dropped to the ground: end of trip, signal for return.
When the excursion bus, after describing a loop, drove away to the north, in the direction of the so-called Alpine Republic, it grew smaller, as though seen by tired eyes, began to buzz, and turned into a toy bus, in which the servile villagers, on their way from their mother country to their place of banishment, disappeared forever. How fine, how distinguished the lost band had seemed (even the veins on their hands a noble design), and how crude and profane, for all their southern verve, were the native Yugoslavs with their incessant cigar puffing, phlegm spitting, and scratching of private parts.
Crossing the empty square to the wall, I, too, began to look at it. Seen from the outside as I followed the grooves and leaned back to study the overhang of the roof, I was someone examining a building of the Imperial Age. But seen from inside myself, I raised both arms skyward and felt them to be stumps. Thoughts of cursing and spitting. Nothing that led upward; the wailing wall was imaginary; there was only a structure of horizontal parallels, no guidelines, only concave forms smudged with street dust, and spiderwebs on both corners of the house, both north and south, bordered by nothing. “My source?” Let the wall, seen from close up as a yellow flickering, crumble and cave in—on me, for all I cared. But is the southern flame-shaped cypress on one side, brightened by its cones, filled with the piping of the ubiquitous sparrows—ogling one another in their hiding places—are the oleander blossoms with their vanilla smell, nothing? “Oleander,” “cypress,” “laurel”—these are not my words—I didn’t grow up with them—I’ve never lived near the things they signify—laurel, or bay, is known to our people only as a dried leaf in soup. And once again description only makes matters worse: if I wanted to describe a palm tree that meant something to me when I stood looking at it, the foreign word “palm” would get in the way; the tree itself with its scaly trunk and rattling fans would vanish. Over and over again I can name the snow, for instance, which at this moment is flying past my north and south windows; I can name the wind, the grass, the spruces, the firs (my father’s lumber), geraniums, dill; but as soon as I, who grew up inland, try to evoke the sea, of which I have had such varied experience in the meantime, it escapes me along with the word “sea,” which does not belong to me. It still makes me uneasy to speak of things that were mere names to me as a child. Having spent my whole childhood in the country, I even have difficulty in adjusting my lips or hand to things connected with the city, things such as a boulevard, streetcar, park, or high-rise building. Even to tell a story involving the tree I have come to love, whose bright-splotched trunk and dangling seed capsules have so often cheered me, shaken me out of my villager’s lethargy, which to my mind embodies south and city in one, the plane tree, I have to shake myself to down a feeling of presumption—and the same goes for the cypress, which meant “nothing” to me and yet spoke to me, just as the apparent wailing wall with the sky above it gave me the command that I now give myself: “It must mean something. These things in a foreign country belong to me as much as the wayside shrines and the box trees at home.”
Being able to think this over calmly meant that my plea was answered; as though it were only in the calm that inevitably followed my cursing that I could make myself heard. But what an absurd expedition to rediscover the law governing the naming of every object of experience. God bless you believers! Damned border person! Hasn’t the other language a word for “one who wanders endlessly on the face of the earth,” and the corresponding adage: “Strangers will slam their doors in your face”?
The afternoon bus had become a night bus long before it reached the Vipava Plain after the last pass and before the coastal highland of the Karst. Shining in through the window in the roof, the moon hardly moved; at last, the road was straight. With all the curves and detours, I had lost my sense of direction, which returned only at the sight of an inn sign at one of the stops, painted with a still life of fishes and grapes. Then, shining out of the darkness like a landmark, the first vine, immediately followed by the shimmering bottom rows of the great vineyards. The bus was full and all the passengers were talking at once; the driver was talking too, with the man beside him on a folding seat, the conductor (strange idea in a long-distance bus). At the same time a radio program blared from loudspeakers, folk music in time with the speeding bus, interrupted now and then by the news. Most noticeable among the passengers were the soldiers, jammed into the middle aisle and sitting on one another’s lap in the rear seats. A horde would burst in at one stop, surge out at the next, and vanish instantly behind a stone wall. In the course of the long trip, not an hour passed without a rest stop. The driver would halt outside a restaurant or bar and announce the length of the stay: “Five minutes”; “Ten minutes.” Each time, I got out and sipped the wine, which the natives drained at one gulp. I soon felt that I belonged now and forever to this squeaking night bus with its ripped seats and lidless chewing-gum-plastered ashtrays, in which all was speed and at the same time unhurried ease, and to these chattering, incurious, nondescript passengers, and as if I had found my itinerary for life. Haven’t I now and then felt myself in security, after all?
When we piled back in after the last rest stop, a new soldier was with us, in uniform but without a cap. He was carrying a packaged rifle, which during the trip he held upright between his knees. He sat separate from the other soldiers, in the row ahead of me. The moment I looked at him, not at his rifle but at his profile, I knew that something was going to happen. To us? To the soldier? To me? All attention, I looked at the irregular crown of his head and in it saw myself from behind. Bristling close-cropped hair that yielded a double image of a young soldier and of a No one the same age. At last this No one would find out who he was. (Described by third parties, he had always known himself to be under- or overestimated, he had never trusted his own self-image—when he succeeded in forming one—and yet the question “Who am I?” had often become as urgent as a cry for help.) At last I had before me that protagonist of my childhood, my double, who, somewhere in the world, of this I was quite certain, had grown up along with me, and wo
uld someday turn up and be my true friend, who, instead of seeing through me as even my own parents did, would understand me without a word and acquit me, just as I would acquit him with a look of recognition or a mere sigh of relief. At last I was looking into an infallible mirror!
Anyone would have taken to that soldier’s looks. He was quite inconspicuous, hardly distinguishable from other young men of his age. Still, he differed from the others by keeping to himself, though without rebuffing anyone. Nothing in his surroundings escaped him, yet he paid attention only to the things that interested him. Never a side glance, throughout the trip his head pointed straight ahead. He sat perfectly still, and his half-closed eyes with their rarely blinking lids suggested contemplative alertness. His thoughts could be far away, yet without a break in his fantasy he would calmly catch the parcel which, unnoticed by anyone else, had fallen from the baggage net just over his neighbor’s head; before anyone knew it, he would put it back in the net and, as if nothing had happened, carry on with his peculiar blinking, which may have been connected with a mountain in Antarctica. It was chiefly his ears that expressed the young man’s ability to keep track of the present along with the absent. While registering every sound in the moving bus, they were equally aware of the glacier that was calving at the same time, of the blind feeling their way in the cities of every continent, or of the brook flowing now as always through his native village. They had no distinguishing feature except that, thin, transparent, glassy, they protruded a little; nor did they move; my impression that they were unceasingly active, more active in fact than anything else far and wide, a reservoir of internal and external impulses, that this man was literally all ears, resulted no doubt largely from his statuelike posture, preserved throughout the trip, the posture of one who was waiting, and who was prepared for anything. Whatever happened, he would be ready for it; it might affect him, but it would not take him by surprise.