Peter Handke - Repetition

Then one by one they stepped into the inn and stayed a long while. I decided to wait for them; there would be a later bus to the Karst, which was probably where my search for my brother’s traces would end. Beside me, there was a woodpile with a pyramidal tunnel at the bottom resembling a kennel; on the wall above it, the remains of a Latin inscription: UNCERTAIN THE HOUR. It seemed to me that I could tell by the look of the villagers that my mother was well; just the sight of those familiar handbags reassured me.

I was left undisturbed in my place; the fact that I so obviously had time seemed identification enough. When the Rinkenbergers came out into the open, the old men had flushed cheeks. They were not drunk but were all seized with a strangely awkward exhilaration. From them I heard the language of the land, for the first time spoken purely, with clear voices, without the garble and swallowing of syllables usual in our village. Before getting into their bus, they all, as though on command, turned back toward the wall of the house, which, windowless at that point, was only a large yellow surface with horizontal grooves. The dark backs of the villagers stood out clearly against it, and I saw some of the women, regardless of age, holding one another by the hand, while some of the men threw their arms over one another’s shoulders. They all sagged at the knees, and it occurred to me that not only we, the Kobals, were exiles, but all the smallholders, and that the whole village of Rinkenberg had always been a village of exile, all its inhabitants equally servile, equally wretched, equally out of place; here with the others even the priest struck me, not as a man of the cloth, but as a close-cropped convict. Most likely they stopped to look at the house because they had been served so well and cheaply there, but in my eyes they were looking up at the grooves of a wailing wall, and at the same time they were pilgrims (Pelegrin was a common name in the village), and that fitted in with the solemnity of the hairdos and costumes. For the first time I saw meaning in these costumes (as I would on a future occasion in the picture of an old woman standing with half-closed eyes outside her stone hut, holding her black-and-white shroud, her old wedding dress, over her arm). The group included a child, who now jumped nimbly up onto the window ledge, then, clinging to the grooves with his fingers and toes, climbed halfway up the wall and, applauded by the grownups, dropped to the ground: end of trip, signal for return.

When the excursion bus, after describing a loop, drove away to the north, in the direction of the so-called Alpine Republic, it grew smaller, as though seen by tired eyes, began to buzz, and turned into a toy bus, in which the servile villagers, on their way from their mother country to their place of banishment, disappeared forever. How fine, how distinguished the lost band had seemed (even the veins on their hands a noble design), and how crude and profane, for all their southern verve, were the native Yugoslavs with their incessant cigar puffing, phlegm spitting, and scratching of private parts.

Crossing the empty square to the wall, I, too, began to look at it. Seen from the outside as I followed the grooves and leaned back to study the overhang of the roof, I was someone examining a building of the Imperial Age. But seen from inside myself, I raised both arms skyward and felt them to be stumps. Thoughts of cursing and spitting. Nothing that led upward; the wailing wall was imaginary; there was only a structure of horizontal parallels, no guidelines, only concave forms smudged with street dust, and spiderwebs on both corners of the house, both north and south, bordered by nothing. “My source?” Let the wall, seen from close up as a yellow flickering, crumble and cave in — on me, for all I cared. But is the southern flame-shaped cypress on one side, brightened by its cones, filled with the piping of the ubiquitous sparrows — ogling one another in their hiding places — are the oleander blossoms with their vanilla smell, nothing? “Oleander,” “cypress,” “laurel”—these are not my words — I didn’t grow up with them — I’ve never lived near the things they signify — laurel, or bay, is known to our people only as a dried leaf in soup. And once again description only makes matters worse: if I wanted to describe a palm tree that meant something to me when I stood looking at it, the foreign word “palm” would get in the way; the tree itself with its scaly trunk and rattling fans would vanish. Over and over again I can name the snow, for instance, which at this moment is flying past my north and south windows; I can name the wind, the grass, the spruces, the firs (my father’s lumber), geraniums, dill; but as soon as I, who grew up inland, try to evoke the sea, of which I have had such varied experience in the meantime, it escapes me along with the word “sea,” which does not belong to me. It still makes me uneasy to speak of things that were mere names to me as a child. Having spent my whole childhood in the country, I even have difficulty in adjusting my lips or hand to things connected with the city, things such as a boulevard, streetcar, park, or high-rise building. Even to tell a story involving the tree I have come to love, whose bright-splotched trunk and dangling seed capsules have so often cheered me, shaken me out of my villager’s lethargy, which to my mind embodies south and city in one, the plane tree, I have to shake myself to down a feeling of presumption — and the same goes for the cypress, which meant “nothing” to me and yet spoke to me, just as the apparent wailing wall with the sky above it gave me the command that I now give myself: “It must mean something. These things in a foreign country belong to me as much as the wayside shrines and the box trees at home.”

Being able to think this over calmly meant that my plea was answered; as though it were only in the calm that inevitably followed my cursing that I could make myself heard. But what an absurd expedition to rediscover the law governing the naming of every object of experience. God bless you believers! Damned border person! Hasn’t the other language a word for “one who wanders endlessly on the face of the earth,” and the corresponding adage: “Strangers will slam their doors in your face”?

The afternoon bus had become a night bus long before it reached the Vipava Plain after the last pass and before the coastal highland of the Karst. Shining in through the window in the roof, the moon hardly moved; at last, the road was straight. With all the curves and detours, I had lost my sense of direction, which returned only at the sight of an inn sign at one of the stops, painted with a still life of fishes and grapes. Then, shining out of the darkness like a landmark, the first vine, immediately followed by the shimmering bottom rows of the great vineyards. The bus was full and all the passengers were talking at once; the driver was talking too, with the man beside him on a folding seat, the conductor (strange idea in a long-distance bus). At the same time a radio program blared from loudspeakers, folk music in time with the speeding bus, interrupted now and then by the news. Most noticeable among the passengers were the soldiers, jammed into the middle aisle and sitting on one another’s lap in the rear seats. A horde would burst in at one stop, surge out at the next, and vanish instantly behind a stone wall. In the course of the long trip, not an hour passed without a rest stop. The driver would halt outside a restaurant or bar and announce the length of the stay: “Five minutes”; “Ten minutes.” Each time, I got out and sipped the wine, which the natives drained at one gulp. I soon felt that I belonged now and forever to this squeaking night bus with its ripped seats and lidless chewing-gum-plastered ashtrays, in which all was speed and at the same time unhurried ease, and to these chattering, incurious, nondescript passengers, and as if I had found my itinerary for life. Haven’t I now and then felt myself in security, after all?