by Peter Handke
As for the “people,” so designated and so fetishized by my countrymen, I didn’t miss them in the Karst, nor did I find any banished king to feel sorry for; and here there was no need to look, as I do in my home surroundings, for the marks of the defunct Empire, for empty cow paths and blind windows; here the houses can get along without pedestals and volutes. And looking northward to where my Central European cloudbank has piled up beyond Mount Nanos, I say: They not only can but should!
Where, with my very first look around, did that sense of freedom come from? How can a countryside mean “freedom” or anything of the kind? In the last quarter century I have many times carried knapsacks across the Karst (where I’ve never seen anyone else carrying such a thing), or satchels or suitcases. Why is it that I’ve always felt as if my arms and hands were free? And why is it that my very first day there I felt as if the sea bag that I carried with me wherever I went had vanished from my shoulders?
The only answer that occurs to me offhand is the Karst wind (and perhaps the sun as well). It comes from the southwest, rises up from the Adriatic, and in blowing over the plateau becomes a steady breeze that one barely notices when sitting or standing. In this breeze one gains an intimation of the sea, which can be glimpsed only from a few almost secret spots in the Karst, a powerful, never-ebbing intimation, far more reliable and more effective than if one were actually on the shore or sailing along on the open sea. Undoubtedly, the feel of salt on one’s face is imaginary, but not so the wild herbs by the roadside, the sage and thyme and rosemary (all smaller, hardier, more primitive—every leaf or needle the very essence of the spice—than in our kitchen gardens), the concentrated, almost African fragrance of the gnarled mint, the labiate blossoms of the flowering ash, the spruce resin dripping from the trees, the juniper berries that put one in mind of a strong drink (without threatening drunkenness). This is an upwind, not only because it rises from the sea but because it takes hold of you, ever so gently, under the armpits, so that walking, even in the opposite direction, you feel buoyed by it. Are there not, especially in the south, old coastal peoples whose most festive holiday it is to withdraw at certain times to the deserted high plateaus, where they worship the wind in secret and let it initiate them into the law of the world?
Time and again, the Karst wind has given me such an initiation—but into what law? Or was it a law? Once my mother told me about the moment of my birth: though her last child, after my brother and my sister, I had been overdue and had stopped moving inside her; then finally I was delivered into the daylight; after a first whimpering, I let out a scream, which the midwife called a victory fanfare. My mother may have wanted to please me with this story, but I was as horrified as if she had been talking about my death rather than my birth. Instead of my first moments, she had described my last; my throat tightened as though that fanfare were the signal to drag me to my execution. The fact is, I had often reproached my mother for bringing me into the world. I said this without thinking, it just popped out of me, not so much a curse as a reflex, first when my enemy was persecuting me, sometimes when suffering from chilblains or a mere hangnail, sometimes when I was just looking out the window. My mother took my plaint to heart and burst into tears, but I never really meant it; my moods of disgust and anger were opposed by something constant in my makeup, a sense of anticipation, which, however, found no expression because it had no object. The Karst landscape now provided me with such an object, and though it may have been too late, I could have said to my mother: I have no objection to being born. And what of the Karst wind? I have no qualms about saying: It baptized me then (as it repeatedly baptizes me now) to the tips of my hair. However, the baptismal wind gave names, not to me—wasn’t “nameless” implicit in “joy”?—but to the strip of grass in the middle of the wagon track, to the sounds of the various trees (each called something different), to the bird feather floating on a puddle, to the perforated stone, the dolina of corn, the dolina of clover, the dolina with the three sunflowers, to everything in the vicinity. From that gently fanning wind I learned more than from the ablest of teachers: sharpening all my senses at once, it showed me, amid the apparent confusion of desert wilderness, form after form, each distinct from the last, complementing the last; it taught me the value of the most useless thing in the world and enabled me to give names to all things; without the Karst wind, I would not have been able to speak of the rather windless Carinthian village as I do; there would be no running inscription on my stele. Doesn’t that amount to a law?
But what of the contrary wind, the ill-famed burja or bora from the north, an incessant frosty roaring over the high plateau; on such days, all fragrance was gone and one was completely stupefied. If you were out of doors on such days, you could go down into the dolinas, where you were sheltered from the wind and where, without fear of one another, the beasts of the Karst could assemble, a stocky little roe deer along with a hare and a herd of wild pigs; at the top of the bowl all the trees were bent at the same angle, while at the bottom the stubbly grass hardly trembled, the bean or potato plants hardly swayed. But even if you were out in the storm without the protection of a dolina, you had only to sit down behind one of the numerous stone walls, and from one minute to the next you had escaped from the icy blast into a quiet warm bath. In such shelters I had time either to think of the ancient battle in which the bora carried the arrows and spears of one army over the heads of the other, and stopped those of the other army in midflight; or else, as in the gentle west wind, I acquired a feeling for the things of nature and eyes for the works of man, stone walls as well as the little latticework gates leading through them, a pattern of parallel sticks cut from the bushes nearby, so thin, so bent, with such ample interstices that the prototype of a door, a gate, a portal could be discerned in them. Just as nature needs interstices in which to form crystals, so does the searching eye need them for the perception of prototypes. Even the path, which proceeded to lose itself in steppe grass and desert rock (the whole Karst was traversed by promising trails of this sort), was not just any path, it was the path, man-made, for, at least up to the level of the tilled fields, the oasis, and the dolina, it revealed a distinct triad of boundary walls, beaten roadways, and vaulted middle strip.
These visions, isolated in the wasteland—for there was no desert inn on the plateau—coalesced in the villages. The bora drove people together, showing that self-defense and beauty can be one. The north façades, stone dovetailed with stone, broken only by an occasional tiny gap, though many were as long as the nave of a church, curving gently away from the storm wind and thus elegantly evading it, and the farmyard walls, higher than many of the fig trees behind them, rounded at the top, with marble portals as wide as a princely coach (complete with the appropriate white edgestones and the monogram IHS at the top), enclose a square courtyard which, half blinded and deafened by the storm, one entered as one might enter a showroom, a bazaar full of precious objects, where the sawhorse harmonized with the vines, the faggots with the corncob wall and the piles of pumpkins, the wicker cart with the wooden balustrade, the tent of bean poles with the logs (put your hazel rod and the cloth with the mushrooms on the bench along with the rest, they will fit into the picture). The houses of the Karst, fortified castles seen from the outside, one interlocking with the next, surmounted by chimneys that are houses in themselves, were often all the more gracefully furnished inside; they need no barrel vaulting; it suffices that their outer walls are slightly curved to resist the wind.
In none of the houses there did I see what is called a work of art. How, then, did it happen that almost every time I looked into a farmhouse—even when I merely passed by—my heart leapt up as at the sight of the most magnificent paintings, and that a stool, barely big enough for a small child’s behind, positively invited me to sit down? One cannot fail to see how much of what the Karst people make reproduces the most essential feature of the landscape, the dolina or bowl; that all the slender baskets, basket-shaped carts, rounded stools, hay rake
s with an arc at the end, seemed to celebrate the one fruitful thing in the country, Mother Dolina, and the belly of the wooden medieval Madonna in one of the churches shows the same rounding.
Without the furniture and implements of the Karst I would never have learned to appreciate the heritage of my forebears, neither my brother’s orchard nor my father’s roofs and cupboards. Up until then, I had always wanted to see our house adorned not only with a blind window but also with a statue in the blind window and perhaps beside the statue a fragment of a centuries-old fresco, and inside the house an ornamental carpet or a remnant of a Roman mosaic; my brother’s accordion, in a corner with its mother-of-pearl keys, was in itself a magnificent adornment, and it was an event when every few years a paint roller impressed a fresh pattern on the walls. The inhabitants of our plain were reputed to be sober-minded, concerned only with utility and the greatest possible simplicity. But in this utilitarian simplicity I now recognized the effect I had felt so much in need of and which I had hoped to obtain from additions and embellishments: my father’s table and chairs, crossed window bars and doorframe not only made the room inhabitable but radiated warmth and good taste; they not only bore witness to a careful hand but communicated something which the man, often brusque, irascible, unfeeling, could impart only in this way, and which alone was the whole man; embarrassed and intimidated by his person, I breathed easy in the presence of the things he made, and acquired an eye for proportion. The letters IHS over portals in the Karst became connected in my mind with the date my father had sawed into the gable of the wooden barn to provide air holes for the hay. I had always seen this pattern, which seemed burned into the weather-beaten, light-gray wooden triangle, as something unique, such as only a work of art can be, and after that I needed no other ornament in the house. Short as it was, the green track in my brother’s orchard culminated in the Karst middle strip, which encompassed all the roads of the north and led straight as an arrow to the ocean horizon, just as the stone dam at the entrance to the orchard, which my brother had once built to preserve the topsoil but which had since then been reduced to a ruin, was now extended in the unbroken, even, curved boundary walls of the Karst—as though it had simply sunk into the earth up there in its alpine land and reemerged here not far from the sea, intact as on the first day, bedecked by the southern sun as though for a roof raising, nobler than before, thus making it manifest that our continent is traversed by the European counterpart of the Great Wall of China.
But could the objects in a countryside and the works of its inhabitants be relied on for any length of time? What of those windless days which occurred in the Karst at every time of year, worldless days without sun or cloud formation, without contour or sound or shimmering color on this disk of earth, when all life seemed to have died out overnight and I myself was the last creature that still breathed; and this forlornness was not as in other places confined to the moment of waking, was not dispelled by the crowing of cocks or the bells of high noon, all equally tinny, converging from the hundred sectors of the city (the television sets blaring in abandoned houses, the empty roaring buses, black rattletraps with drivers looking as if they’d been burned to a crisp long ago and were held together only by their uniforms). No dead satellite could be more lifeless on such days than a Karst that seemed covered by bone ash, the so-called karren fields where innumerable knife-sharp bones protruded and wouldn’t allow you to tread on them. But that, too, taught me something which only a metropolis can teach a visitor; namely, a way of walking.
At home in the village, walking was just a way of going from one place to another as directly as possible, alert to every shortcut, every detour a mistake. Only unhappy, desperate people walked aimlessly. As though in a fit, they would suddenly rush out across the fields, blindly into the woods, through the creeper-clogged ditch, somehow down to the river. When somebody rushed off like that, it was to be feared that he wouldn’t come back alive. When my mother was told of her illness, her first impulse was to run out of the village; we had to lock her up in the house, and she almost tore off the door handle. The sauntering step of the idler and the resolute stride of the hiker were also alien to the villagers, who wouldn’t have dreamed of climbing mountains or stalking game for sport; a hunter always came from somewhere else. You walked to work or to church, with a possible stop at the bar, and you came home; the legs, by and large, were a mere means of locomotion; the body sat stiffly on top of them, and it was only in dancing that its parts worked together. Except in a cripple or an idiot, a conspicuous gait struck the people of Rinkenberg as pretentious; in their Slovene dialect they called it “stirring up wind while walking.”
Thus, walking, too, stirred up wind in the Karst when there was none, and with it all brooding ceased. That great thought, more liberating than anything else in the world—“Friend, you have time”—turned me outward again. And it was having time that taught me my particular gait, a way of walking which, with every rise of the shoulders, every swing of the arms and turn of the head, was designed, not to catch the eye of any particular person, but to carry me deeper into the country (just as sometimes the peculiar gaze of a person or animal can make one look around to see what amazing thing this other may be gazing at, which, to judge by his elated expression, must be something pleasant). One feature of walking in this way is that from time to time the walker himself, involuntarily but quite consciously, turned around, not for fear of a pursuer, but out of pure delight in moving about, the more aimlessly the better, with the certainty of discovering a form behind him, if only a crack in the pavement. Yes, the certainty of finding a way of walking, of being all walker and thus becoming a discoverer, set the Karst apart from the few other free regions I have known. True, the impulse to “get up and go” has proved itself elsewhere, in dried streambeds as on roads leading out of big cities, in bright daylight and (even more effectively) in pitch darkness—but I have never set out for the Karst without the conviction that there I would not only fill my lungs with air but also encounter something new. So firm is my trust in the power of the Karst wind to bring someone who has time for it an archetype, a primordial form, the essence of some thing, that I am not far from speaking of piety; the baptismal wind blows as on the first day, and the walker, caught up in it, still feels himself to be a child of the world. Obviously, he won’t barge ahead like a tourist; he will slacken his pace, turn around in circles, pause, bend down: discoveries are usually to be found below eye level. No need to drive himself; before he knows it, landscape and wind have given him his due. Conscious of having time, I never hurried in the Karst; I ran only when I was getting tired, and then it was a slow run.
But didn’t my finds relate to a time long past, weren’t they the last remnants, leftovers, shards of something irretrievably lost, which no artifice could put together again, and which took on a radiance only in the imagination of a childish finder? Was it not the same with these elementary particles as with the dripstones which in their grotto, in the flickering candlelight, give promise of a treasure, but, once broken off and exposed to the daylight, are nothing more in the hands of the thief than grayish stone potatoes worth less than any plastic glass? No. Because these finds could not be carried away; these were not things you could stuff into your pockets, but rather their prototypes, which impressed themselves upon their discoverer’s inner self by letting him know where, unlike the dripstones, they could flower and bear fruit, telling him that they could be removed to any country whatever, most enduringly to the land of storytelling. Yes, if, in the Karst, nature and the works of men were archaic, they were so in the sense, not of “Once upon a time,” but of a beginning. Just as I’ve never thought “medieval” when looking at a stone roof-gutter but, as never in the presence of a modern building in either country: “Now!” (heavenly thought), so at the sight of a dolina I never thought of the prehistoric moment when the earth suddenly settled, but time and again saw something future rising from the empty bowl, swath by swath, a primal form that merely had to
be held fast. Nowhere, up until now, have I found a country which with all its divers components (not excluding a few tractors, factories, and supermarkets) struck me, like the Karst, as a possible model for the future.
One day I got lost—as I often did on purpose, impelled by curiosity, thirst for knowledge—on a pathless steppe interspersed with thickets and loose rock. Before long, I had no idea where I was; there were no detailed maps (apart from secret military ones) of this frontier region. As usual once you take a few steps across country, the wind brought no sign of life from any of the hundred villages, no barking of dogs or children’s screams (which carry the farthest). For hours I struggled on, obstinately, zigzagging around dolina after dolina, which lay fallow, their red-earth bottoms strewn with pale boulders, between which here and there great trees shot up, their tops level with my feet. Here I could speak of wilderness and here I learned that this whole waterless country was an immense desert, merely pretending, by putting forth vegetation, to be fertile, a land in whose gentle breeze many an inexperienced traveler had doubtless died of thirst, possibly hearing to the last the soft sound of flowering ash trees, while—supreme irony—a clear mountain stream may have been flowing not far away. For a long time I had heard no sound of a bird (actually, even on the fringe of the villages, one seldom heard a peep); I hadn’t even seen a lizard or a snake. After struggling through a dense thicket, I found myself hopelessly lost in the waning afternoon, at the edge of an immense dolina, as big as a football stadium, barred at the top by a tall, dense palisade of virgin timber, which I noticed only at the moment when I had forced my way through to it. The dolina seemed uncommonly deep, partly because of the walled terrace ledges that divided the evenly gentle slopes; on every level a different green, varying with the crop grown on it, the most intense green shining from the uncultivated empty ring of ground at the bottom, more magical than the floodlit grass of an Olympic stadium. Of all the dolinas I had seen thus far, only one or two were in use. Here, to my amazement, I was confronted by a whole population. On every one of the terraces from top to bottom, there were small fields or gardens, all with several people working on them. They worked with consummate slowness, there was charm even in the way they bent over or squatted with legs spread. From the whole wide circle arose, softly and evenly, what has remained in my ears as the pervasive sound of the Karst: the sound of hoeing. On the vineyard terrace I saw only standing persons, half hidden by a roof of foliage, tying vine shoots to strikingly crooked posts or spraying them, while in the tiny olive field only hands were visible. On every level I saw at least one tree, on every level a different variety, among them, though it seemed almost inconceivable so far from any running water, such meadow trees as elders and willows (of which I once heard an inhabitant of the Alps say, “They’re no trees, just junk; now take a spruce or an oak, that’s a tree”). I distinguished so many different greens that I could have given each a different name; all of them together, dear Pindar, would have added up to a new Olympian Ode. The last light seemed to gather in the dolina as in a lens, which sharply outlined and magnified the details. This enabled me to notice that no wall was like any other; one consisted of two tiers of stones, the next had a layer of earth between the two, while what looked like a boulder at the edge of the bottom circle was a conical hut, built of stone blocks growing smaller toward the top, with a keystone in the shape of an animal’s skull and a roof gutter, from which a long pipe led down to a rain barrel; the hole in the ground was no accident, it was the entrance to the “casita” and had a lintel the length of an eagle’s wing with a sundial scratched into it.