Peter Handke - Repetition

I opened my eyes again, and again walked back and forth outside the barn, faster and faster as though taking a running leap. Again I stopped. Sensing that my chest had become an instrument, I shouted. Filip Kobal — whose voice was so soft that he could never make himself heard, whom the prefects at the seminary had scolded because his prayers didn’t “carry”—shouted so loud that all who knew him would have looked at him with new eyes.

Something comparable had happened only once, at that same seminary. I had convinced myself that I was unable to sing, and then one day the teacher called on me to sing. With my heart in my mouth I had stood up and taken a deep breath. Then, in the midst of the sullenly brooding class, I had drawn from my innermost soul a strange and tender song, which had provoked first laughter, then awed embarrassment in my listeners, and which, it seemed to me, must always have been inside me. Now on the plateau, where I was alone, what came out of me was not singing, nor was it a bellowing or calling; it was a clear shout, imperiously demanding my right. With all my might I shouted the laconic or lyrical, monosyllabic or polysyllabic words of my brother’s book. The words went out over the countryside, calling forth on the empty cow paths an echo whose other name was “world sound.” And at every shout I saw the open ears of my forebears, the amused arching of their eyebrows, their joyful faces.

I propped up the book, touched it with my lips, and bowed down to the place. I cut a branch from the hazel bush near one corner of the barn, scratched the name of the place and the date into it: “Dobrava, Slovenija, Jugoslavija 1960,” and declared it to be our stele, the record of a new and different family history. How little hope I had of a future at the age of twenty (never would my king appear), how firm were my expectations concerning the present; and how weak or cautious is my voice now as I repeat the young man’s experience. Wasn’t it drowned out long ago by shouts converging on the plateau from all directions, by shouts of command on drill grounds, by field-gray soldiers on firing ranges, by the scraping of shovels in the village graveyard? No, wherever I may be, the blind windows and empty cow paths strike me as the hallmarks of a kingdom of recurrence, where a locomotive whistle can become equally well the cry of a pigeon or the shriek of an Indian. I can still feel on my shoulder the cord of my sea bag with the book of words in it. Mother, your son is still walking under the open sky.

Then, flinging myself upon the ground, I discovered once and for all what the spirit is.

THAT DAY I stayed on the plateau until the after-image of the sun left my retina. An axle seemed to be turning inside me, more and more slowly, bringing the things behind me into my field of vision. Beyond the northern mountains I saw a fiery cloud, which I situated exactly over the house of my parents. Heart, diamond, spade, and club shapes had been cut out of the west wall of the barn to let air in, and my father’s centuries-old desolation came blowing out of the black holes.

I left the place, backing away; and later, while walking, I kept turning back toward it. A little bird rose high over the edge of the plateau — as though it had just slipped from the hand of the dwarf who had hoped with its help to win the stone-throwing contest with the giant — and plummeted to the ground as though shot. The lake at the end of the valley looked like jelly in the dying light, and I fancied it full of drowning bees, circling around with transparent wings.

Each time, I went there with head bowed and came back with head erect. A tablet was affixed to one of the houses at the entrance to this village. On such and such a day in the year 1941, it said, a meeting held here passed the first resolution on resistance to Fascism. (In every Slovene town or village I was to pass through, I found a house bearing the same inscription.) I, too, wanted to put up resistance. I made my decision not in a cellar but out on the street, without a meeting, all by myself. “Form a sentence with ‘fight’ in it,” I said to myself. Only then did I realize that there already was such a sentence and that it had as many meanings as an oracle. Once, in such a mood, I went into a wooden hut and brought the ax down on the chopping block with all my might. An elderly woman came in and asked me to split a pile of sawed logs. I struck so hard that the pieces flew in all directions — I can still feel one grazing my forehead. In one hour I earned an evening meal and a few locutions such as “to split light” for “to chop kindling.” Another time, a soccer ball bounced across my path and I kicked it so well that I was asked to join the game (to this day, I sometimes dream that I’m a forward on the national team). My shoes supported my ankles, and my father’s leather strap, no longer a mere wristlet, strengthened my hand.

In the evenings, Filip Kobal had his corner place in the Black Earth Hotel. No one, not even the militia on its constant rounds, asked me my name; everyone called me “the guest”; even the picture of Tito had been turned away from me and was looking up at a squadron of bombers. On the tables, instead of baskets piled high with variously shaped Austrian rolls, which at times could remind one of corpses thrown headlong into a mass grave, there were simple stacks of sliced white bread on the napkins that used to be called “bread cloths.” It was midsummer and sometimes warm enough for serving meals outside. I was usually so overheated when I got back that the breeze from the torrent made me feel pleasantly fanned. There was a stool by the open window of the dining room, and the waiter stood on it to take the dishes that the cook handed him. Next to the stool there was a concrete surface with deep grooves that looked something like piano keys: a bicycle stand, usually empty. This was where the lightning rod ended; the fact is that a day seldom passed without a storm, and the evenings in the open were brightened by the summer lightning, for which, as a secondary-school graduate, I knew the ancient Greek term “space eye.” July came, and the fireflies which had just been flitting through the bushes crept into the grass and vanished.

The waiter was slightly younger than myself and may have come straight from trade school. Short, lean, with a brown, narrow, almost triangular face, he must, I felt sure, have come from a rocky, sparsely populated, inland region — one of a smallholder’s many children, born on a farm surrounded by stone walls and growing up a shepherd or picker of wild fruit, which he knew exactly where to find. Other people had called my girlfriend beautiful; this waiter was the only person to whom I applied the word in my own thoughts. Apart from greeting, ordering, and thanking, I never spoke to him; he never chatted with the guests and said only what was strictly necessary. His beauty was not so much in his features as in his constant attentiveness, his friendly vigilance. One never had to call him or even to raise one’s hand; standing in the farthermost corner of the dining room or garden — as he did when not busy — seemingly lost in some faraway dream, he kept an eye on his whole realm and anticipated the slightest flicker of an eyelid; in other words, he was a model of the courtesy and helpfulness lauded in books of etiquette. In the morning, he set the tables under the chestnut trees even if it was thundering, and had them cleared before the first drops began to fall. Sometimes, to my surprise, I’d see him alone in the dining room, putting each chair in its proper place, as though arranging for some festivity, a baptism or wedding, and allowing for the special quirks of every single guest. I also marveled at the care with which he handled the cheapest and shabbiest objects (there were no others in that hotel), at his way of lining up the tin knives and forks and wiping the plastic cap of the condiment bottle. Once in the late afternoon I saw him standing motionless in the bare, empty room, looking into space; then he stepped over to a far corner and gave a carafe an affectionate little turn that filled the whole house with an aura of hospitality. Another time, when the dining room was full, as it often was at dinner, he set down a cup of coffee on the bar before bringing it to the table and carefully aligned the handle; then with an elegant gesture he took hold of the tiny cup and carried it directly to the guest’s table. I was also struck by the dead seriousness with which he gave a light to anyone, even to a drunk, always with a single, unbroken movement, and by the way his half-closed eyes would light up every time.