Peter Handke - Repetition

Now and then I helped her with her work. Together we hoed the little family dolina, dug the first potatoes out of the red earth, sawed firewood for the winter. I drafted her daily letters to her daughter in Germany and whitewashed the daughter’s room (as though she were ever going to come back). At the bottom of the dolinas, as I found out, there is no breeze to dry the salty sweat. It was the same as at home, all physical exertion cost me an enormous effort; once started, to be sure, I often warmed to the task, but even then the thought of getting it over with was never far from my mind. I can’t say that I showed more skill than in the past, but since the old woman, quite unlike my father, left me alone, she opened my eyes to my mistakes; in the main she showed me what I was like and how I moved when I anticipated having to start working.

She taught me to recognize that I had seldom been at hand when there was work to do, and had almost always had to be called from some distant hiding place. But my seeming laziness was in reality a fear of failure. I was afraid not only of being no help but, worse, of getting in the way and making things harder for the person I was supposed to be helping, afraid that a false move of mine might ruin the work of a day or even of a whole summer. (How often my father would summon me to his workshop with loud oaths, and then after my very first hammerblow send me away without a word.) When I was supposed to fit things together, I forced them; when I was supposed to take them apart, I wrenched them; when I was supposed to put things into a box, I stuffed them; regardless of who might be holding the other end of the saw, I couldn’t adjust to his rhythm; if someone handed me a roofing tile, I dropped it; and the moment I turned my back, my woodpile would start sliding. Even when there was no need for haste, I hurried frantically. I might seem to be moving fast, but my partner, with one slow movement following from the last, was always done before me. Because I tried to do everything at once, there was no coordination. In short, I was a bungler. If I was expert at anything, it was at making mistakes; where another needed one blow of the hammer, I missed my aim so often that whatever I was working on would be either damaged or broken; if I’d been a burglar, I’d have left dozens of fingerprints on the smallest object. I realize now that the moment I was expected to make myself useful I would go into a daze and have eyes for nothing more, least of all for my work. I would blindly shake, tug, kick, rummage, until, often enough, both work and tool were in pieces.

I was deafened by what I took to be other people at work, the gentle swishing of the scythe or the soft sound of potatoes tumbling from a crate into a cart; I ceased to be receptive — though I must have heard it — to the sound I loved best, the rustling of the trees, different from one variety to another. A chore could be ever so easy—“Take the milk cans down to the stand,” “Help me fold the sheets”—and before I knew it, I’d be out of breath and red in the face, my tongue would be hanging out. Suddenly, regardless of whether I was walking, reading, studying, or just sitting there, my body ceased to be all of a piece, my torso lost its connection with my abdomen; bending over to gather mushrooms or to pick up an apple, for instance, became a marionette-like jerking instead of a smooth movement.

Most of all, I came to understand while working with the Karst squaw that my problem began the moment I was asked to help, even if I had plenty of time to prepare myself. Instead of getting ready, I would brace my fingers and arms against my body as though in self-defense, and even arch my toes in my shoes. Perhaps, I thought, my horror of physical labor came from the look of my parents’ bodies. Even as a child, I had been ashamed of my father’s flat chest and sagging knees, and of my mother’s heavy buttocks, and during my last two school years the poise and elegance shown by lawyers, doctors, architects, and their wives, even when asking one another how their children were getting along, made me still more ashamed of my parents.

And now my recognition of what was wrong with my way of working helped me to control my body, so that with each passing day I enjoyed my daily labor more. Watching the old woman, I learned to pause in my movements; the transitions, at first forced and spasmodic, became easy and natural, and my working place, the red earth or the white wall, appeared to me in full color. Once when I started home with a handful of terra rossa, I even found a fragrance in it. Command to myself: Get away from your father.

One day my hostess took me through the wilderness outside the village to a field that was not in a dolina, a rarity in the Karst. Enclosed by a low wall, it was overgrown with weeds, but the light-red earth shone through and furrows were still discernible. Access was barred by a wooden stile, beside which there were stone steps leading over the wall. At the bottom of the wall there was a square opening, through which rainwater could drain from the path into the field. Here the woman stretched out her arm and said: “To je vaša njiva” (“This is your field”).

I climbed over the wall and bent down to the earth, which was loose, as if it had been plowed not too long before. The field was narrow and slightly vaulted in the middle, ending in a row of fruit trees, each of a different sort. Had the old woman simply made a mistake, or was she pulling my leg? Or, as I had asked myself when I first laid eyes on her, was she mad? When I turned around to her, she was laughing all over her broad face, with the little delighted sounds of a very young girl — a laugh deserving of the name.

Not only the squaw, everyone in the hundred villages treated me like an old friend or the son of an old friend; I had to be something of the kind, because strangers never came to the Karst. And just as Odysseus was often full of wine, so I, his son, in the course of my search for him, once lay on the ground dead-drunk. At home, we never drank anything stronger than cider, and that only when thirsty; and I had always steered clear of my roistering classmates, especially after one of them, on our class trip to Vienna, after groaning and retching for hours in his upper bunk, had spewed a great flood of sour vomit down on me. The mere smell of liquor, the peculiar glug-glug, and worst of all its devastating effect on the drinker’s behavior, repelled me. Up until then, I had barely tasted wine; but here in the Karst, in the open air, in the sun, in the spicy wind, I began to — what was the word again? — to savor it. I drank swallow after swallow, putting down my glass after each one. Often after the very first swallow I felt at one with the world and at the same time, as though the two pans of the scales were at last evenly balanced, experienced a sense of justice. Afterward, I saw more clearly, dreamed astutely, perceived connections, took pleasure in precisely staggered intervals, which composed a well-ordered globe, rotating clockwise; I had no need to rotate with it. Incredible that anyone should slander wine as “liquor.”

That’s the way it was when I drank by myself. But in company — remember that companions flocked to Telemachus — I usually lost all sense of proportion. I didn’t guzzle, I didn’t drain my glass at one gulp as the others often did, but I did down my wine without tasting it, and I especially liked to stay on until everyone else had gone home. One night — a cock was already crowing, my companions had all drifted away — I got up from the table and noticed that for the first time in my life I was drunk. I took a few steps and collapsed. I lay face down in the grass, unable to stir a finger. I had never felt so close to the earth; I smelled it, felt it on my cheek, I heard the roar of the underground river, the Timavo, and laughed to myself as though I had accomplished something. Later, when they lifted me up by my arms and legs and carried me home, I was able to give my accomplishment a name: at last I, who had all my life set so much store by independence, was making a display of my helplessness; at last I, who had always made a secret of my indignation that no one came to my assistance, had allowed myself, unresisting, to be helped — a deliverance, in a way.