Peter Handke - Repetition

When we piled back in after the last rest stop, a new soldier was with us, in uniform but without a cap. He was carrying a packaged rifle, which during the trip he held upright between his knees. He sat separate from the other soldiers, in the row ahead of me. The moment I looked at him, not at his rifle but at his profile, I knew that something was going to happen. To us? To the soldier? To me? All attention, I looked at the irregular crown of his head and in it saw myself from behind. Bristling close-cropped hair that yielded a double image of a young soldier and of a No one the same age. At last this No one would find out who he was. (Described by third parties, he had always known himself to be under- or overestimated, he had never trusted his own self-image — when he succeeded in forming one — and yet the question “Who am I?” had often become as urgent as a cry for help.) At last I had before me that protagonist of my childhood, my double, who, somewhere in the world, of this I was quite certain, had grown up along with me, and would someday turn up and be my true friend, who, instead of seeing through me as even my own parents did, would understand me without a word and acquit me, just as I would acquit him with a look of recognition or a mere sigh of relief. At last I was looking into an infallible mirror!

Anyone would have taken to that soldier’s looks. He was quite inconspicuous, hardly distinguishable from other young men of his age. Still, he differed from the others by keeping to himself, though without rebuffing anyone. Nothing in his surroundings escaped him, yet he paid attention only to the things that interested him. Never a side glance, throughout the trip his head pointed straight ahead. He sat perfectly still, and his half-closed eyes with their rarely blinking lids suggested contemplative alertness. His thoughts could be far away, yet without a break in his fantasy he would calmly catch the parcel which, unnoticed by anyone else, had fallen from the baggage net just over his neighbor’s head; before anyone knew it, he would put it back in the net and, as if nothing had happened, carry on with his peculiar blinking, which may have been connected with a mountain in Antarctica. It was chiefly his ears that expressed the young man’s ability to keep track of the present along with the absent. While registering every sound in the moving bus, they were equally aware of the glacier that was calving at the same time, of the blind feeling their way in the cities of every continent, or of the brook flowing now as always through his native village. They had no distinguishing feature except that, thin, transparent, glassy, they protruded a little; nor did they move; my impression that they were unceasingly active, more active in fact than anything else far and wide, a reservoir of internal and external impulses, that this man was literally all ears, resulted no doubt largely from his statuelike posture, preserved throughout the trip, the posture of one who was waiting, and who was prepared for anything. Whatever happened, he would be ready for it; it might affect him, but it would not take him by surprise.

That was the trip. Of course, arrival in the garrison town dissipated the statue; all that remained was shifting images, different with every glance. In later years I have often been in Vipava, and have learned to know the village, the city, the “domain” at the foot of the “holy” Slovene Mount Nanos (a white limestone ridge, the hiker’s companion on his way, turning and changing its shape, food for the soul, but also the trademark of numerous profane local products), along with the like-named body of water (several contiguous springs, seeping soundlessly from fissures in the rock, gather as soundlessly in pits, then suddenly merge into one roaring stream, which thunders amid stone houses and rushes under one stone bridge after another, carries off the branches of wild fig trees like a whirlwind, spreads out foaming into the broad valley and there soon calms itself). I have come to know it and the wine named after it (white, grassy, almost bitter) as a place I would like to see as often and as long as possible, as a means of remembering that I can become the world and owe it both to myself and to the world to do so. But on my first visit I had eyes only for the soldier, whom, agitated but at the same time cool and on my guard like a detective, I could not have helped shadowing until it happened. I have had various experiences since, but none so amazing as this encounter with my double. Still, there was no need for caution; I could have kicked the heels off his shoes and he would still have gone straight ahead without looking around. He still held his rifle in his left hand, but now I attached even greater significance to his free right hand, the thumb and forefinger of which formed a circle. First I followed him to the movies, where for a time he was one of the laughing crowd, then to a bar named Partizan, where the waiter and myself were the only civilians. What did I represent myself as? No one asked this question but me; the soldiers ignored me.

The soldier sat down at a table with the others — a mere listener. Then the images began to change. Sometimes when half asleep I see a face that changes its expression as fast as a tenth-of-a-second clock face. That is what my double, whom I didn’t take my eyes off for a moment, did now. Seriousness changed to merriment, merriment to mockery, mockery to contempt, contempt to pity, pity to indifference, indifference to desolation, desolation to despair, despair to gloom, gloom to beatitude, beatitude to carefreeness, carefreeness to levity.

Sometimes he didn’t listen at all, and allowed himself to be distracted by a fly or by the Ping-Pong players out in the corridor, or transported by the jukebox thundering through the room. But when he did listen, he became the supreme authority; soldiers came to consult him, and when one group turned away, others took their places. Even when he sat alone for a time, his comrades kept eyeing him as though waiting either for a sign from him, or, better, for a weak spot. Yes, he struck me as vulnerable, as a man whom the others were always watching, because he was many things in one but nothing permanently, because, one way or another, they were eager to measure themselves against him. Of this he was aware, as he had not been in the bus, and little by little he lost what had most distinguished him, his composure. After that, nothing came natural to him, and most unnatural of all was himself. Not only did his expression change constantly, but his posture as well; he would cross his legs, stretch them out, tuck them under his chair, experiment with resting his bent right leg negligently on his left knee, but not for long. Gone was the pleasing conjunction of presence and absence, which left the beholder with an impression of equanimity, attentiveness, gentleness, and above all of purity; instead, a disfiguring, repellent jumble of rigid eyes, red ears, crooked shoulders, and a clenched fist, which reached for a glass and knocked it over. Was I like that? Last stop, end of dream? My question changed to horror, horror to disgust, disgust to recognition of disgust (with oneself, with others, with existence) as the disease of our clan; the recognition turned to amazement, and there the process stopped. Who, then, was this double? A friend such as I had hoped for as a child? An enemy, the most terrible of enemies, my companion from now to the end of my life? Even the answer yielded a multiple-aspect picture: friendenemy, friendenemy-enemyfriend …

It was getting on to midnight and the bar was emptying. The archaic Wurlitzer along the back wall was surmounted by a glass dome in which, steeped in a garish light, hoisted by a gripping arm, upright as a wagon wheel, a black disk was turning; a sight so overpowering that the music, whatever it happened to be, could only be its accompaniment. The soldier and I looked in the same direction, across the large, somber room, and along with the circling wheel at the other end — grooves shining in the light — I again saw the part in the soldier’s hair, as many-fingered as a delta.