Peter Handke - Repetition

At first I only thrashed about, rather like a swimmer in fear of drowning. My enemy didn’t get out of the way; on the contrary, he held out his face in a gesture of defiance. His mask was as close to me as the sidewalk might be in a dream of falling. My grabbing at it was not a defensive reflex; it was the statement, the admission, the confession the world had been waiting for: I was no better than he; at last, by my act of violence, I had admitted that I was my enemy’s still more evil enemy. And true enough, at the touch of his saliva and nasal mucus, I had a twofold feeling of violence and injustice, an experience I never want to repeat. Before my eyes a mask of triumph: “You’ve passed the point of no return!” Then I kicked him in the behind, I put my whole heart into it. He didn’t defend himself but stood his ground with an indelible grin. He had attained his aim: from that day on, I was “his aggressor,” so to speak, in the eyes of all. Now he had every reason and right to hound me. Our hitherto secret enmity had blossomed into a war, which had to be fought openly and could only end in the damnation of us both. One day his father saw me beating his son. He came running, separated us, threw me to the ground, and trampled me with his stable boots (subjecting me to a long, high-pitched litany of names such as escaped my own father only when he felt the need of warding off landslides, lightning, hail, or household and garden pests).

This beating was a lucky thing for me, the only good luck, I might say, that came my way for the next ten years. It loosed my tongue; I managed to tell my mother (yes, my mother) about my enemy. My story began with the command: “Listen!” and ended with another command: “Do something!” As usual in our family, it was my mother who did something. Her action consisted in taking her twelve-year-old son, under the pretext that the priest and the teacher had won her over, to be examined for admission to the seminary.

In Klagenfurt, on the way back from the examination, we missed the last train to Bleiburg. We walked out of town and stood on the road in the rain and darkness, though I have no recollection of getting wet. After a while, the driver of a small truck on his way to Maribor on the lower Drava in Yugoslavia, stopped and picked us up. There were no seats in the back, and we sat on the floor. As my mother had told the man in Slovene where we were going, he tried at first to chat with her. But when it became apparent that her Slovene amounted only to formulas of greeting and snatches of a few folk songs, he fell silent. From this silent ride through the night on the metal floor of the truck, I preserved a feeling of oneness with my mother which remained in force at least throughout my ensuing seminary years. My mother had got a permanent for the trip; for once she wasn’t wearing her head scarf, and despite the heaviness of her fifty-year-old body, her face, touched now and then by a beam of light, looked youthful to me. She sat there hugging her knees, with her handbag beside her. On the outside, the raindrops ran obliquely down the windowpanes, and inside, tools, packages of nails, and empty jerricans collided with us. For the first time in my life, I felt a kind of release, of impetuous joy within me — something on the order of confidence. With my mother’s help, I had been put on the path that was right for me. This woman was a stranger to me, I had often literally denied her and have often denied her since — the word “mother” had seldom crossed my lips — but on that summer evening in 1952 it struck me for once as self-evident that I had a mother and was her son. That evening she was not the peasant woman, the farm worker, the stable maid, the churchgoer she often impersonated in the village, but revealed what was behind all this: manager rather than housewife, traveler rather than stay-at-home, woman of action rather than onlooker.

Where the road turned off to Rinkenberg, the driver let us out. I didn’t even notice that my mother had taken my arm until she turned around. The rain had stopped, and at the edge of the plain Mount Petzen rose in the moonlight, every detail as sharp as a hieroglyphic: the ravines, the cliffs, the tree line, the cirques, the line of peaks: “Our mountain!” My mother told me that down there along the mountainside, my brother, long before the war, had traveled in the same direction as “our driver,” southwest across the border, on his way to agricultural school in Maribor.

My five years at the seminary are not worth the telling. The words “homesickness,” “oppression,” “cold,” and “collective confinement” suffice. Never for one moment had the priesthood, at which we were all ostensibly aiming, appealed to me as a calling, and few of the children seemed to have the vocation; here at the seminary the mystery which in the village church had still emanated from the Sacrament was dispelled from morning to night. None of the priests at the school impressed me as a shepherd of souls; either they sat withdrawn in their warm private rooms — and if they sent for one of us, it was at the most to warn, to threaten, or to pump — or else they would move about the buildings, always in their black, floor-length cassock-uniforms, acting as wardens and prefects. Even at the altar, celebrating the daily Mass, far from being transformed into the priests they had once been consecrated as, they executed every detail of the ceremony in the role of policemen: when they stood silently with their backs turned and their arms raised heavenward, they seemed to be listening to what was going on behind their backs, and when they turned around, supposedly to bless us all, their true purpose was to catch me red-handed. How different it had been with the village priest: before my eyes he had just carried crates full of apples down to the cellar, listened to the news on the radio, cut hairs out of his ears; and now in the house of God he stood in his vestments, never mind his creaking joints, before the Holy of Holies — removed from the rest of us, who thus became a congregation.

The only good company I had at the seminary I enjoyed alone, when studying. In my solitary study, every word I remembered, every formula I applied correctly, every watercourse I learned to draw from memory, anticipated my one overriding desire: to be out in the open. If asked what the word “kingdom” meant to me, I would not have named any particular country but only the “kingdom of freedom.”

And to my mind the man who in my last year at the seminary became my great friend was the embodiment of this “kingdom” which thus far I had glimpsed only in study. He was not a contemporary but an adult, and he was not a priest but a man from outside, from the world, a lay teacher. He was still very young; having just completed his studies, he lived in the so-called teachers’ house, which, apart from the seminary building and the bishops’ tomb embedded in the hillside, was the only structure on the secluded, treeless knoll. Inconspicuous as I was to everyone else (years later, when I ran into former classmates, I always heard the same description: “quiet, aloof, self-absorbed,” in which I did not recognize myself), he noticed me at once. Everything he said in class was addressed to me, as though he were giving me a private lesson; and his tone was not that of a teacher; rather, he seemed in every sentence to be asking me if I agreed with his way of organizing his subject matter. He spoke as if I had long been familiar with the material and he was only waiting for me to assure him with a nod that he was not misleading the others. Once, when I went so far as to correct him, he did not look the other way but expressed his delight that a pupil should know better than his teacher; that, he said, was what he had always wished for. Not for one moment did I feel flattered. This was something very different: I felt recognized. I had been overlooked for years, and now at last someone had taken notice of me. In so doing, he had awakened me, and I awoke with exuberance. For a time all went well with me, my classmates, and above all the young teacher. Every day in my thoughts I went over to the teachers’ house after class; I passed from the stuffy religious dungeon into the airy realm of study, research, and contemplation of the world, into a solitude which struck me as glorious at the time. When he went away on weekends, my thoughts were with him in the city, where he did nothing but compose himself for his schooldays; and when he stayed at the seminary, the one lighted window in the teachers’ house was for me an eternal light very different from the trembling little flame beside the altar of the dark seminary chapel.