Peter Handke - Repetition

Yet my brother never actually became an insurrectionary; even during the war, later on, he never quite made it. He was reputed to be the gentlest of the family, and to judge by his letters, he was something else that I’ve met with only in a few children: pious. He often used the word “holy”; in his usage, however, it applied not to the church, heaven, or any other place outside the world, but always to everyday life — getting up in the morning, going to work, meals, routine activities. “At home, where everything is done in so lively and holy a way,” he wrote in a letter from the Russian front. Once again, I’m reminded of his “holiest and merriest” walk around the Easter bonhre — and Pentecost was for him the feast day when “it’s glorious to go out to the fields bright and early to mow in the holy hours.” A white cloth spread on a table for a soldiers’ Mass was “something to fortify my poor soul”; at home he sang the Hallelujah aloud in chorus with the others, but at the front he “mumbled it softly to myself.” And in his last letter he wrote: “I have seen and experienced the filth of the world, and there is nothing more beautiful than our faith.” (According to him, to be sure, faith came alive only in one’s mother tongue; when after the end of the First Republic one was allowed to pray and sing only in German, to his ears that was no longer “holy,” just a “caterwauling that I can’t bear to hear.”) Another aspect of his piety was the fervid irony with which he spoke of home when he was far away. He refers to our few acres as our “lands,” or as the “Kobal estate”; the rooms in the house, including kitchen, barn, and stable, became “apartments”; and he calls on his “revered family to gather around the table and study” his letters.

It was this irony that deterred him from active rebellion during the war; his indignation was expressed only in his letters. Hearing that a neighborhood family had been deported to Germany, he wrote that he had “but one wish … to tear that man limb from limb … but the thought of my parents, my brother and sister, holds back my rage.” Thus, it was probably legend when my mother told us that, after a so-called farm leave, her son had deserted to join the partisans and become a fighter. My guess is that he simply disappeared, no one knows where. It is inconceivable that he would ever have joined in bellowing warlike partisan songs at the top of his lungs — but quite possible that he and a few others made their way to some hidden clearing, a secret patch of farmland, and that from there, looking over his shoulder, he addressed the following speech to the warlords: “I will now say to you the word that is often heard at the bowling alley at home, when the ball misses the tenpins!” That, in one of his letters from the front, is his euphemistic way of saying “Shit!” He was indeed a singer, but not a regimented one — you might have caught him singing with friends after a few drinks; he was a dancer too, but not a stamping, heavy-footed one, more a merry wag, dancing on one foot at the edge of the dance floor.

After his disappearance, the village thought him dead, and like all the village dead he was soon forgotten, except by a priest or two; few of the boys his own age who might have talked about him came home from the war, and the girl who was thought to be his fiancee married someone else and never spoke of him. He had left home too early to be remembered as a maypole climber or as a soloist in church, and soon after his return from school the young peasant with the apron became “the soldier Gregor Kobal,” exchanging, as the saying went, “field blue-denim for field gray.”

But at home he was honored. During my childhood he was so much talked of that it seems to me now as though he were there the whole time, as though I even heard an additional voice in every conversation, as though all heads kept turning toward the absent figure in the empty corner. It was chiefly my mother who brought him alive with her talk, while my father was the custodian of his belongings, not only of his orchard but also of his clothes and his two books. Only later did it occur to me that my parents’ forehead-to-forehead whisperings in the sickroom may have been less an expression of married love than a union in mourning for their dearly beloved son and that their two foreheads may have been meant to form a bridge for his still-hoped-for return. It is certain that man and wife, each in his own way, worshipped their missing son as an “example”—these were the words of my godless mother—“of the son of man,” and that at news of his coming she would immediately have prepared “his apartment,” scrubbed the threshold, and hung a wreath over the front door, while my father would have borrowed the neighbor’s white horse, harnessed it to the spit-and-polished barouche, and, with tears of joy running down his nose, driven to meet him.

Only my sister opposed this worship (because, or so my parents believed, she blamed him for the shipwreck of her love). She contended that he had definitely cast his one eye on women, but had had no luck with them because of his disfigurement; that he had complained incessantly when tilling the soil, especially in the heat on the steeper slopes (“stinking business”); that he had come home from agricultural school as a propagandist for the Slovenian language and sowed dissension in house and village; that, in particular, he had sinned against his beloved Holy Ghost by giving up hope long before the war, and refusing to marry (after the girl had literally proposed to him) on the ground that he was sure to die young.

It is true that my brother’s letters and jottings over the years are outspoken in their despair. First because of machines—“It looks as if they will soon replace us all, and then there will be no need for me to come home”; then, at the beginning of the war, he expressed the belief that he would be “a soldier forever.” His written curses become more and more frequent. On all-day marches in the fine spring weather he “hears no birdsong,” “sees no flowers by the roadside,” and fears that he is losing his voice: “In another year I won’t be able to talk. Even now we are as shy as animals in the high mountains; we disappear when we hear someone coming. Our temperament needs harmony; without harmony, nothing can give us pleasure.” Every day the same, no sign of any Sunday or holiday. He refuses to think about the past “and would like best to do everything in reverse.” In the end, he curses not only the war but the world as well: “I curse the world!”

I for my part, whether as listener or as reader, have never brought myself to believe in a brother who had lost hope. Haven’t appearances (“Filip Kobal has a thing about appearances”) always impressed me more than the most established fact? And what were these appearances? Didn’t they include the way my sister paused, slowed down, and grew thoughtful when she spoke against her missing brother? She stopped making faces the moment her brother came up in the conversation, and her usual blinking, ordinarily so persistent and violent, became much less frequent. She seemed to wake up. A moment before, her speech had been muddled and cottony as though she’d been talking in her sleep, and now she drew a breath before opening her mouth, tilted her head slightly, and paid attention to every word she said.

Another such “appearance” was especially evident in Gregor’s writing. Even when it dealt with the irrevocable past, it gave me, along with a plaint, a living image. Instead of saying something directly, like “When I was still happy …,” he would write (I translate literally): “When the birds still sang for me …” In speaking of springtime at home, he wrote: “When the bees were wearing trousers [of pollen].” Instead of saying “It’s an ill wind …” he wrote: “Ugly mother, good food.” Looking up his first name in the dictionary, he found the meaning “Skin on milk,” which made him retch. And then his way of using colors, every one of which could depict a wide range of things and creatures: “How is Spotty getting along?” could refer to a pear, a cow, a goat, a chicken, or a variety of green pea.