Peter Handke - Repetition

My brother’s copybook dealt mostly with fruit growing. With the help of the dictionary, I managed to get the gist of it. Though the work of a man who was not yet twenty, it did not consist of lecture notes but was, rather, the record of a young scientist’s independent research. A second section was a kind of treatise, made up of reflections on the subject, and the end a catalogue of rules and suggestions. The whole was a student’s notes and a textbook in one.

Essentially, the book revolved around my brother’s experience of planting and improving apple trees in his own orchard at home. He spoke of suitable soil (“loose and rich,” “flat, slightly vaulted ground”), orientation (“east to west, but sheltered from the wind”), the best times for the various operations (often determined by the equinoxes or the rising of certain constellations, or by rural holidays).

I couldn’t help reading my brother’s observations on grafting and on transplanting young trees as in part a Bildungsroman. He had carried the young plants from the nursery to his garden “along with their earth” and arranged them in the same order as in the nursery, though much farther apart, because the branches of one tree should never touch those of another. He had woven the root branches into protective baskets before inserting them in their holes. The trees grown from seed on the spot had proved more resistant but also less fruitful than the transplants. Leafy crowns were advantageous, as they provided a roof under which more fruit would form. Branches that inclined toward the ground bore more fruit than those that soared skyward (though the fruit hanging higher up was less likely to rot). As for grafting, he used only branches pointing eastward. They were pencil-shaped and the cuts chamfered to let the rainwater run off. The cutting itself was done not with a blow but by pulling the knife through so the bark would remain intact. He had always chosen scions that had once borne fruit, “because otherwise we shall have worked not for a yield but for shade,” and he had never inserted a scion in a fork between two other scions, for, if he did, it would draw nourishment away from them. Of pruning, he wrote that the earlier he did it, the more “wood” he obtained; the later, the more “fruit”; the wood just “shot up,” while the fruit would “bow down.”

At the beginning of the copybook he explained that originally there had been only one tree in his orchard; it had run wild and bore no fruit. He had driven a spike into the bark at the spot that was freest from lichen; from the festering wound had sprung a shoot with one promising eye after another. The spike, his own invention, had been more like an auger — instead of hole-plugging dust, it produced shavings that could be blown out. (Beside the description was a drawing of a “Kobal auger.”)

But what made a deeper impression on me than such incidental pedagogic metaphors, such allusive meanings, were the concrete details, the mere mention of things which up until then had been only a jumble to me. The bast my brother used to tie his scion to the branch, the wood splint (not round but square) that held it straight, the pebbles that moderated the temperature of the soil at the roots and protected them from the groundwater, took on a radiance that held my attention. Thus a light fell on the orchard, which has been neglected since then and run wild like the tree with which it began, and in the manuscript I caught sight of a blue-bordered enclosure, where, confronted with the rich diversity of “my thing” (as my brother called his orchard), I gazed around and around as though I stood in my brother’s place at the center of it. “We shall not have worked for shade”—that was the battle cry which now, at the table beside the window, I shouted into the roaring of the torrent, as the black grouse in the corner of one eye and the white washbasin in the other swung across my field of vision like two intersecting pendulums.

Undoubtedly, the words owed some of their power to the fact that I did not immediately understand them but had to translate them, not from a foreign language into my own, but directly from an intimation — incomprehensible as much of the Slovene was to me, it seemed somehow familiar — into an image: into the orchard, a branch prop, a piece of wire. My brother referred to certain of his activities, such as removing sterile shoots, as “blind work.” Possibly such translation transformed blind reading into sighted reading, an unseeing activity into intelligent work. It seemed to me that even my father, if he had come into the room, would have left his grumbling on the threshold and, at the sight of my sparkling translator’s eyes, expressed his satisfaction with his son: “Yes, that is his game!”

Even where in the second part of his copybook my brother passed from his particular orchard to a general discussion of different varieties of apple, it was his own trees that appeared to me; where he was merely describing a method, I continued to read a story about a place and its hero; and it was also to them that the concluding remarks addressed to every fruit grower referred, to the effect that in a “thing” so closely akin to wisdom there could be neither professors nor students, and that what mattered most in fruit growing was “the master’s presence.”

What distinguished my brother’s orchard from others was its situation outside the village, surrounded by fields and pastureland, bounded on one side by a small mixed forest, whereas most gardens and orchards began right behind the houses and, seen from the road, gave the impression of long rows of trees, ending, as one was bound to suppose, in fallow land, with Rinkenberg as an island of apples and pears at its edge. My brother’s trees were small as in a plantation, and each tree, except for the usual plum and cider-pear trees at the entrance (intended, one might have thought, to mask the nature of the orchard), bore fruit of a different taste; on some trees, indeed, the variety changed from one tier of branches to the next. And most extraordinary of all: among the cider-pear trees there was one secret branch, known only to the family, that bore fruit which looked deceptively like that of the next branch but which, when you bit into it, did not — as we said in the family—“pucker your asshole” but opened your eyes.

The whole orchard, if you entered it from the side opposite the forest, had a more and more experimental arrangement, which had many advantages. After the first corner, marked by a lone poplar, which looked odd among the fruit trees, it spread out until at the edge of the forest it was several rows wide. Though unfenced like the village orchards, which thus had the air of public woodland, the area beyond the poplar was hidden. One reason for this was that, crossing the open fields, one suddenly, without having seen a single house, came across branches laden with the finest apples; and another was the hollow in which my brother had laid out his orchard. From flat ground one unexpectedly stepped down into the orchard and then at its end just as abruptly up into the little forest. The hollow was not deep; one became aware of it only at its edge, and only there did one glimpse the tops of the small fruit trees on a level with the tips of one’s shoes; from far off, from the village or the road, one saw only the strange poplar, sometimes transformed into a torch by lightning, rising from treeless fields.

That depression — so the geography teacher had taught me — was formed by a prehistoric brook, an offshoot of the groundwater which in this particular plain does not stand still but flows down to the Drava in a regular, unbroken stream, hardly “the length of a walking stick” below the earth’s surface. At the site of the present orchard, this stream of groundwater had welled up, carrying the soil with it, and washed out a bowl, whence it had dug a narrow ditch leading down to the river. Then the brook had seeped away — the ditch was locally known as the “still brook”—so that the bottom of the oval bowl formed by the spring was dry; the water was no longer a visible single stream but had sunk and joined the endless underground flow or, in the form of “sky water” (a literal translation of what my brother called rain in his copybook), carried the fertile decomposed soil from the walls to the bottom of the bowl. (The bowl, to be sure, had its vegetation-clogged outlet where the ditch began.)