Peter Handke - Repetition

I spent the next few days in the Bohinj region, studying my brother’s two books. Whenever I opened my eyes in the train for fear of missing my stop, I saw in the meadows those long, narrow wooden frames known as “hay harps”: two wooden posts (perhaps made of concrete today) rammed into the ground, and embedded in them a number of parallel bars, on which, under a shingle roof, the first hay of the year was drying. This first crop was full of spring flowers, and the gray mass of hay was shot through with color. The bars extended beyond the posts and suggested bundles of road signs, all pointing in the same direction. The train seemed to be following these closely spaced arrows, which from valley to valley inclined farther westward, and in my sleep the harps on both sides of the tracks took on the shape of an enormous chariot which carries the passengers to their destination without passage of time.

I no longer spent the night in the open, but stayed at a hotel in Bohinjska Bistrica, the biggest village of the region. This I decided to do after seeing the low prices and counting my money. It occurred to me later that, thanks to my teacher’s gift, to some tutoring I had done, and to a story I had sold to a newspaper (“Did you write that yourself?” asked a classmate, shaking his head), I might perfectly well have gone to Greece with the others.

Actually, it was this story I had published, far more than any shortage of money, that had kept me out of the group trip. It was about a young fellow repairing a bicycle in a courtyard. The setting was described in detail, the light, the wind, the rustling of the trees, the rain that was beginning to fall. In the end the hero hears a cry and rushes into the house, where, on the floor of an empty room, he finds his father or his mother — I don’t remember which — dying, his or her eyes reflecting the outside world for the last time. It wasn’t the content that mattered; what alienated my classmates was the mere fact of my writing. Some of them, it’s true, belonged to a drama group, but that I should write and publish my writing struck them all as strange, to say the least. My girlfriend, too. Before even reading my story — she had barely had time to see the page with the title and my name on it — she gave me a strange, disapproving look, which, after she read it, turned to a complex expression compounded of incomprehension, pity, surprise, and, above all, reserve. Later on, I kept remembering that her neck stiffened when I tried to draw her close to me.

But hadn’t I myself provoked this general revulsion? Hadn’t I, on the day when the newspaper appeared, eyed everyone who opened it as someone who would immediately learn of my crime and disgrace me by telling others about it? Much as I had looked forward to publishing this story — a project instigated by my fairy-tale-writing history teacher and promoted by a reporter who wrote local notes — to how at last they’d all see who I was, it struck me afterward as a stigma, and luckily the one place where it did not follow me was the village where in those days — today an advertisement at the entrance to the village announces “Rinkenberg reads The … ”—I never saw a newspaper even at the presbytery. But in the places where up until then I had felt most at home, as a commuter in trains and buses, I had disgraced myself forever in my own eyes. Where I had managed to be inconspicuous even to myself, a Nobody, I was now on display as “a certain” So-and-so. In emerging from obscurity I had forfeited my element. The sense of well-being I had known in crowded places, especially while standing in the corridor of a railroad car or in the center aisle of a bus, gave way to a feeling of intense discomfort; I had become identifiable, exposed to a spotlight that singled me out, thus condemning me — and this is what shamed me most of all — to intrude on the privacy of my fellow passengers. Was that why in the last few weeks I had gone to school on my bicycle, a trip which, there and back, had taken me half a day? There were many motives that may have impelled me to take this solitary journey; but one of them was certain: to make people forget that, whether in reality or only in my imagination, I had betrayed myself by becoming a public figure. And now, with every hour in which I was privileged to be unknown, I felt oblivion spreading around me, a feeling that became more salutary with every passing mile. Immediately after my arrival in the Bohinj, I was drawn to a hamlet, marked on the map as Pozabljeno, meaning roughly “the forgotten place” or “forgetfulness.” And in whatever strange places I walked, stood, sat, lay, or ran in the days that followed, people left me alone as though that were the natural thing to do.

Only the teacher in Villach still haunted this no-man’s — landscape, repeating over and over what, when he first saw my story in print, he had cried out with a gesture as though giving a musician his entrance: “Filip Kobal!”—just my name, the first time I ever heard it in that form, Christian name before family name, for up until then I had been addressed exclusively as “Kobal, Filip”; at my recent army medical, for instance. “Forget it” was my silent answer. Yes, I was resolved never to appear in the paper again; never again to expose myself, my family, and my fellow villagers to such disgrace. My dream of fame was a thing of the past. Hadn’t I always known, especially when surrounded by people in the train or bus, even when I myself was reading a book, fascinated by a report of a new invention, enjoying a piece of music, that I would never amount to anything, that sooner or later I was bound to fail, that, as a fortuneteller at a fair, undoubtedly convinced that she was flattering this countrywoman and her son who was patently unfit for farm work, had told my mother, with luck I’d get to be a bookkeeper or some sort of clerk who wouldn’t have to deal with anything but numbers. So wasn’t it part of my destiny to be counting money in a Slovenian hotel room?

The Bohinj is a broad valley surrounded on all sides by mountain ranges, once the base of a glacier, which on its western edge left the large, tranquil, and almost always deserted Bohinj Lake behind it. From its northern bank rises the massif of the Julian Alps, culminating in the still glacier-covered Triglav, or three-headed mountain, a model of which on the lakeshore is used by vacationing children to play on. The mountain range in the south is the last barrier of any size between there and the sea; there the Isonzo (the Slovenian So a) has its source, and the slopes between which it flows from then on show no tree line. Difficult of access, the Bohinj basin has been remote from the world down through the ages; mule tracks were its only link with the Isonzo Valley and the Friulian Plain, and the eastern route by which I had come had been opened up only when the railroad was built.

Because I grew up on the great Jaunfeld Plain at some distance from the mountains, I have always found it surprising that Austria should be regarded as an Alpine country and dubbed the “Alpine Republic.” (Hardly anyone in our village owned skis, and there was only one sled track, from the edge of the forest down to the road, so gently sloping that you’d hardly got started when you came to a stop.) But in the Bohinj I found myself really surrounded by mountains and felt that I was in an Alpine country, which, to be sure, did not mean chasms, ravines, a sunny and a shady slope, and a narrow sky; despite the dip in the ground, I was on a high plateau with a wide view. If I now close my eyes, what opens up before me is a valley centered on the empty fjord-blue lake, sheltered by the mountains, subdivided by moraine waves.