Peter Handke - Repetition

But the kingdom of the world that I perceived in this way exceeded the limits of present-day Yugoslavia and all the kingdoms and empires of olden times, and gradually its signs lost their definition. The Cyrillic letters on the newspapers of certain passersby were still clear, the vestiges of an old Austrian inscription on a public building were legible, as was the ancient Greek Xαîρε—Greetings — on the tympanum of a villa; but, on the other hand, the word PETROL on a gas station, which, seen through the branches of a tree, reminded me of a China known to me only from dreams, was ambiguous, and an equally exotic Sinai Desert opened up to me behind the high-rise buildings at the sight of a dusty long-distance bus, on the front of which the roller indicating its destination had stopped exactly in the middle between two illegible place names. As it passed, a fragment of a Hebrew scroll struck my eyes — yes, struck my eyes, for the landscape that opened up around the script was fraught with terror.

The vagueness was underlined by a blind window, to which my gaze was now drawn as to the center of the world. It was fairly high up the slope on the sunny side of a large house, which I fancied to be the manor belonging to the porter’s lodge across the border. It stood by itself; in front of it there was only a single spruce, whose fur-brown bark brought out the massiveness of the yellow façade. A steep stone stairway led across a strip of meadow to the entrance. A child was on the stairway with his back to me; one foot a step lower than the other, he seemed hesitant; the steps were too big for a child. The slope was hatched, so to speak, with strange oblique grooves, small terraces overgrown with grass, whose fine shadow pattern was repeated in the oblique grooves of the façade. This made the house behind the spruce look more like a yellow rock than like a building. It seemed uninhabited. The child on the steps was in the entrance not to a house but to a playground.

The blind window was, far and wide, the only one of its kind. It owed its effect to the absence of something ordinarily present: to its opacity. Thanks to its extreme vagueness, it reflected my gaze; and the muddle of languages, the confusion of voices within me fell silent: my whole being fell silent, and read.

I had never thought it possible that I would lose this blind window; I had felt it to be an unalterable sign. Yet one side glance sufficed: the light emanating from it was gone. The window next to it — a “sighted” window, as it were — was pushed open and closed again, by hands belonging to two different people, a very old woman, then a young one. The old woman — as I recognized in the same moment — was more than old, she was dying; with a last burst of revolt she had tried to get out of the room where she was being held fast, to escape through the window grating from death; a face convulsed with horror, with sucked-in lower lip and wide-open eyes, which would never again close unaided.

The window remained empty, the morning sun was reflected in it, but the light which had been bright only a moment before had not just gone out, it had been swallowed up. The child had vanished, too, as if he had been a phantom, and the oblique grooves on the house and the hillside now appeared to be shadows. “Filip Kobal has a thing about appearances.” My history teacher had often said that — a mixture of praise and blame. Today, once again, the “appearance” had been dispelled. Already the grimace of a little girl crying with all her might came my way, and after that there was nothing female, male, or childlike about the crowd. On the sidewalk there was nothing but a huge, hard, bony mass of repulsive yokels, pushing, shoving, getting in one another’s way, under the vigilant eye, peering from every possible angle, of the Chief of State, who, whether as a young partisan leader in an automobile factory, as a white-clad admiral, as an imposing dinner-jacket-wearer on the arm of his equally imposing wife in the lobby of a movie theater, as an imperator’s head cast in concrete in the courtyard of a school, was now the sole ruler over us all. A last searching glance up at the blind window merely reinforced the authority of the state, for, as though I had attracted suspicion with that glance, a policeman beckoned me with a slow movement of his curved forefinger to the other side of the street, where he asked for my papers. Later, it occurred to me that this policeman was the same young man, about my age, who had examined my passport on my arrival the day before. But in that hour of solar eclipse no one seemed to recognize anyone else; it was as though we had all lost our memories.

Counting my steps, I entered the station. A damp stairway led down to the toilets as to a bunker. The usual bunker woman was sitting there; nothing was missing but the bunch of keys at her waist. In the lockless cubicle, I looked in vain for the usual graffiti and drawings; they would have helped me on. There was no faucet over the washbasin, only a hole in the wall. The waiting room upstairs was dark and stank. The first thing I noticed about the other people sitting there was the whiteness of a striking number of bound or plastered limbs. The light didn’t come from the station platform but from the dark corridor in between. Later, I distinguished, here and there, a leather cot over an injured thumb, and the man sitting next to me had a scab in his hair. (I’m not exaggerating, such things caught my eye.) In myself as well, I noticed only what was repellent: the caked clay on my shoes, the black rings under my fingernails. Anyone would have known that I had spent the night in my clothes and hadn’t washed. My scalp itched, and so, though it was midsummer, did the seminary chilblains on my toes. I tried in vain to decipher my next destination on the map; the light that fell was barely enough for the white of the lowlands and the pale blue of the glaciers.

I went out on the platform, where a worker was cracking open the concrete with a pneumatic drill. The morning train to Austria was on the opposite track, ready to leave. The compartments were bright, clean, and almost empty (this train was not yet used, as in later years, by many Yugoslavs for shopping trips to Villach). Again, blue-uniformed train men were standing by the locomotive, along with Austrian border guards, not recognizable as such because they were out of uniform; in their shirtsleeves, with their jackets slung over their shoulders, they all seemed to be waiting for a tardy passenger. All at once, though I didn’t stir from the spot, I was in a hurry. Make up your mind! I felt an almost irresistible urge to return across the border, to go home to my village, my room, my bed, and get my sleep out. But my most immediate refuge was the language, my familiar native German on the side of the locomotive. Heimatbahnhof (home station) would do — for it wasn’t the meaning that mattered but the look of the word — or the legend Arbeitsrichtung (working direction) over the arrow.

Undecided as I was, I felt utterly confused. The pneumatic drill was making star-shaped cracks, as when one walks on the surface of a frozen puddle. One of the cracks reached almost to the soles of my shoes. Shaken by the sound of the drill, I looked down and found the blind window in the gray of the concrete. Again it was a friendly sign meaning “to have time.” Hadn’t I wanted too much with my “kingdom of the world”? Who was I, actually? Looking at the pavement, I saw once and for all who I was: a foreigner, someone who might have some business here but who had no say. I had no claim to so-called human dignity as I did at home in my own country. This realization brought me something more than relief — it brought me serenity.

The Austrian train pulled out. Hadn’t the conductor given me a questioning look? The station became large and luminous. The sparrows, which landed abruptly on the pavement at my feet and were already off again, had sat on the bushes of Rinkenberg only a moment before, and the oval plantain leaf in the roadbed also came from there, a so-called garden escape. With long strides, like decision incarnate, I went into the station and bought a ticket; with long strides, like a man who knows at last that what he is doing is not for himself alone, I took the underpass to the far platform and, after a quick wash at the pump, leapt resolutely into the southwest-bound train as though my jaunt across the border was over and I was now starting on my real journey. I had no sooner settled in my window seat than I fell asleep. If I still preserve an image of the adolescent I was then, with the torn-up pavement under my feet, it is perhaps because the pavement just then was threatening to keel over, just as certain objects impress themselves on our minds only when at the last moment we save them from falling and they rest in our trembling hands, available for examination.