Peter Handke - Repetition

Around the trees grew orchard grass, more sparse than meadow grass, and hardly any flowers. Where it arrived at the poplar tree, the sand track, which led across the fields to the edge of the hollow, acquired a middle strip of grass; on the way downhill, it narrowed and deep shining ruts made by braking cart wheels appeared; in among the rows of trees, it became a solid strip of grass, the “green track” (as we called it in the family), which ran straight as an arrow over the slightly vaulted bottom of the bowl to the farthermost tree of the orchard, not only distinctly lighter than the ground around it, but positively luminous beside it.

In its hollow, the orchard was sheltered from the wind; only the warm fall winds from the south touched its bottom. Thus, the trunks of the trees were perfectly straight, while the branches, most noticeably in the winter, grew evenly in all directions. The orchard was also sheltered from noise, from either the village or the road; apart from church bells and sirens, one heard only its own sounds, in particular the buzzing not so much of flies as of bees in the blossoms or of wasps in the fallen fruit. It had a smell of its own, heavy, cidery, which came more from the windfall fruit fermenting in the grass than from the trees; it was not until autumn, in the cellar, that the remaining apples became truly fragrant; before that, only if you held them up to your nose (but then the smell was something!). In the spring the blossoms were a solid white, but in the summer the orchard’s color changed from tree to tree; the pale green of the early apples, to which passersby were free to help themselves, was the first to disappear.

Waiting for the different kinds of fruit to ripen was a part of childhood. Especially after a storm, I was eager to run out to the orchard, where at least one marvelous apple (or, under the improved cider branch, a pear) would be lying in the grass. Often there would be a race with my sister, who was long past childhood. We both knew in advance under which tree we’d be likely to find something, and each of us wanted to be first; it was not so much a matter of having and eating as of finding and holding in our hands. Autumn fruit picking was one of the few physical occupations in which I did not reach out blindly (and as often as not miss my aim). The trees were so small that one hardly needed the ladders generally associated with orchards. Our chief implement was a long pole, to the top of which a sack with stiff, jagged edges was attached. Even today, at this very moment, I can feel in my arms the jolt that occurred when an apple fell from its branch and rolled down to the other apples in the sack.

The crates being filled at the foot of the trees were also a part of my childhood, the lemon-yellow in one, and in the next the special wine-red, whose veins one could see extending from the peel through the flesh to the core of the fruit. Only the cider-pear trees could be shaken; then a loud rat-tat-tat resounded through the whole orchard. Instead of crates, there would be a ring of thick sacks around the pear trees.

Later came my deprived youth, my years at the seminary, during which I missed the fruit harvest; no more piled crates; at the most, a few apples would go into my suitcase before I left home and a few others in the course of the year, more and more shriveled as time went on.

Then my mother’s illness, my father’s stiffening limbs, my unlearning (yes, that is the word) of almost every kind of physical work which, after all, had contributed no less than my reading on the balcony to my childhood dreams — chopping wood, mending roofs, driving cattle, binding sheaves (for me at least, these activities never represented hard work, or, if they did, it never lasted more than a few hours).

Then came the decades of absence, during which the orchard was utterly neglected; only my sister kept going there for a time with a small basket and picking what apples she could reach with her bare hands; and then she, too, stopped going. Just one more dream about my brother’s orchard: early apples lying pale yellow on the snow, and the family sitting at a table in the sun nearby.

In the years after my return, I visited the orchard now and then. There is still no house in the vicinity, and the old sand track leading to it, like the green track down in the hollow, has become solid grass. The trees are covered over with lichen.

The last time I was there, the rain had washed away what was left of the dam my brother had built of sticks, stones, and clay outside the hole leading to the ditch. It was a winter’s day and the prevailing color in the orchard was the green of the lichen which completely covered every one of the trees and in places had destroyed the bark. The lichen seemed to weigh down the trees, and indeed there were broken branches, shaped like antlers, lying in the grass. The grass was no grass, it was moss; the few blades that pretended to be grass were colorless and as hard as bast, entangled with blackberry trailers that had crept in from the forest and the ditch. The most striking sight was the ash, an intruder from the forest, which had literally taken possession of one apple tree. Its seed must have taken root at the foot of the apple tree, and in growing, the young ash had half enfolded the old fruit tree. Through a slit in the living tree, one could see the dead one, from which the bark had been stripped. The graft scions, previously recognizable on the smooth, shining bark, had long been completely hidden by lichen; only at one point was their presence indicated by a square wooden splint fastened to a branch and lying on top of it. Over the years, a strange reversal had occurred; this branch, first the thinner of the two, had thickened and now carried the former splint wrapped in rusty wire on its back as a useless appendage.

The whole bowl was now shot through with gray; the only color in it, apart from the green track, was the very different green, the verdigris green of the clumps of mistletoe in the split crowns of the trees. The few shriveled apples on the branches were left over from previous years; those lying in the moss below burst like puffballs if one stepped on them.

Only one tree, leafless, was full of this year’s apples that no one had picked; but time and again their yellow was blotted out by the gray and black of the starlings and blackbirds, which laid claim to every single apple and filled the orchard with their incessant pecking and beak-smacking. I was thankful for the train whistle in the distance, the crowing of a cock, the rat-tat-tat of a moped. Through the wild grapevines that covered the drain hole I seemed to hear, as though amplified by the narrow passage, the roar of the river far below.

I thought of running away from this world-forsaken hollow, but decided to stay. The shed on the slope leading up to the forest, formerly a shelter from the rain or midday sun, had vanished. Its remains at the edge of the green track, along with a pile of cast-off support poles, looked like something halfway between a pyre and a “hay harp.” I stood there and waited, for nothing in particular.

It began to snow, just a few isolated flakes, which fell abruptly from the clouds, described great curves in the air, and disappeared. I remembered my father’s habit of walking up and down the green track before every important decision, such as whether to make a will or to spend any considerable sum of money, and now I did likewise. I remembered one of the sayings that he used to direct at the corner where his missing son’s picture hung: “The custodian of a run-down orchard — that’s what I am.”

Turning at the end of the track, I raised my head. In the pile of planks and poles I glimpsed a crucifix towering into the sky and knelt before it in thought. When I went closer, the crucifix turned into a sculpture, and in the same way the rows of trees became in my eyes, as I thought literally, a “monument to my noble ancestors.”