Peter Handke - Repetition

The next day I was told that my drunkenness hadn’t even been noticed; I had only been “very stiff and proud”; my eyes had “sparkled”; I had “told them all off”; and in the end I had made a speech about grammar, especially the “suffering form” (the passive voice), which did not exist in the Slovene language, for which reason the Slovenes should stop feeling sorry for themselves and calling themselves “the people of suffering.”

In the course of those weeks, I saw someone die for the first time in my life. On my way through a village, I was almost knocked down by a woman who came running out of a house. She threw herself down in the street, writhing, screaming, and hugging her knees as though in labor. They laid her on a bench, where she stretched out, letting her head dangle. I have never heard such deep, agonizing sounds as her last breaths. For a time, her lower lip moved as though to suck in air; it slowed and stopped; it seemed to me in the deafening silence that her lip had written something, and that her writing had now run its course. I felt as if I had known her, and her family took it for granted that I should watch through the night with them, though with all their mumbling of rosaries I could hardly keep awake. The corpse’s face was smooth; but all her suffering was still written in her distorted, shriveled eyelids. Strange what veneration I felt for this unknown dead woman; strange my vow to be worthy of her.

It was such a promise of fidelity that I then, as a twenty-year-old in the Karst, celebrated as my “wedding.” This happened on a Sunday after Mass, in the walled-in yard of an inn, under a broad-leafed mulberry tree. I was sitting there over a glass of wine when a small mixed group in holiday dress came through the gate — in a festive mood, as though still enfolded by the blessing of the “Go in peace.” The children ran or hopped about in a ring, the grownups kept turning to one another, a one-legged man and a dwarf woman completed the round. After greeting me, the stranger, with a natural grace, the men by lifting their hats, the women with a smile, they sat down at a long table requiring several tablecloths, which billowed in the Karst wind and reddened with the hours, not only from spilled wine but also from the soft fallen mulberries. In this company — they talked a good deal, though none raised his voice or held forth — I noticed a young woman who remained silent the whole time, a mere listener, her eyes almost unblinking in their attentiveness. At last, she turned her head slightly and looked at me. Her face revealed a gravity as the listener became a speaker, and it was I she spoke to. No smile, no crinkling of the lips, only two eyes, looking at me and saying: “It’s you.” I was so startled that I almost turned aside, but I stood up to her gaze, recovered my composure, and fought through to a seriousness that came as a kind of shock, as though I had for two decades been leading an unworthy life, without soul or consciousness, and had just now, thanks to my meeting with these eyes, come to myself and the world. Yes, that was a world-shattering event; this was the face of my wife! And to this woman I was now wedded, in a meticulous, gradual, solemn, exalting— Sursum corda! — ceremony, presided over by the Karst sun and the sea wind and perceptible only to the two of us. Without a word or gesture, keeping a diffident distance, joined in the look of our eyes, without a witness, with no other document than this story. Eye to eye, in intermittent jolts, we came closer, until you were I and I you, adorable woman under the mulberry tree. From no other woman has a secret voice come to me saying: I am yours.

Twice during that time, I glimpsed my brother. My night in the railroad tunnel had taught me that the essence of a place is often best perceived through another, neighboring place — that of the torture tunnel through the tunnel I pioneered. Thus, I deliberately avoided the Karst villages mentioned in my brother’s letters, in the belief that I would be able to get a clearer idea of them by studying the neighboring villages. Places whose names I heard day after day in my childhood, places which I approached but never got to, had much more of an aura than those that I actually knew. On the eastern edge of the Jaunfeld, for instance, there was the hamlet of Sankta Luzia, consisting of little more than a church; my parents often mentioned it because that was where they were married. I was never there, but I circled it on all sides, and because my perception of it amounted to no more than the edge of a field seen from the woods, church bells in the evening, or the crowing of a cock, I have a feeling to this day that there, hardly an hour’s walk from home, a new world began. And so it was that in a sunny hour, once again outside an inn, in just such a neighboring village, I saw my brother stepping through the door to the yard. He appeared to me in a crowd, because the parish was celebrating its saint’s day and people had come from the whole Karst plateau. Did he really come in? No, he just stood in the doorway, and despite the constant coming and going, an empty space formed around him which, as it seemed to me then, brought back his time, the years preceding the World War. My brother was younger than I, his twenty-year-old descendant, and this was the last holiday of his youth. He was wearing the jacket with the wide lapels, which since then had been handed down to me, and his deep-sunken eyes — both had their sight — projected an infinite dream. Though I remained seated with my companions, I also had the impression that I got up to make sure it was he. His eyes were the blackest black, the black of the elderberries that had ripened all about during those summer days, and shone with their living light. Neither of us moved; we stood facing each other for an eternity, at a distance, beyond reach, unapproachable, united in grief and serenity, merriment and forlornness. I felt the sun and wind on the bones of my forehead, saw the festive bustle on both sides of the dark passage with my brother’s image in it, and knew we were in midyear. Holy forebear, youthful martyr, dear child.

The other time, it was an empty bed that spoke to me of Gregor. I often took the train in the Karst, and sometimes I just hung around one of the extraordinary stations. Most of these were in the wilds, far from the villages, and could be reached only by paths without signposts. Some of them, at night, were plunged in total darkness; the only way to find them was to feel your way slowly, if possible under the guidance of a native. But then, just before the train pulled in (even if I, as happened often enough, was the only prospective passenger), the whole area lit up, revealing a large, diversified building, as big as a factory and as majestic as a manor house: light-colored gravel, fountains under a cedar tree, resplendent façades covered by clusters of fragrant, light-blue wisteria, heraldic blind windows. Here again, the upper floor was inhabited, and while the stationmaster sat in his office downstairs at the brightly lighted switchboard as in a space capsule, his wife upstairs passed window after window on her way from room to room. Time and again, the telephone bell jangled in the desert stillness. And then at last came the imperious signal that a train was coming. Since the tracks were encased in the Karst rock as in a canyon, the rattling and rumbling of approaching trains reverberated as in a subway tunnel. As often as not, the station bell began to ring immediately after the great clatter in the wilderness, as though the train would instantly shoot out of its grotto; but then it would lose itself in one of the countless looping ravines and much later, when I was beginning to think my ears had deceived me, I’d hear it again from an unexpected direction, accompanied by the repeated melodious tooting of a departing overseas steamer, and then at last the thundering organ of the Karst would come bursting out of the pitch darkness, whistling, roaring, trilling, booming in every register, recognizable by the triangle of eyes at the front of the locomotive, the one in the forehead going out as it came closer. Almost more fantastic were the freight trains passing through, with their massive, unlit cars, sometimes of varying length, among them a string of empty undercarriages with jutting rods, an apparently endless procession, with a powerful pounding, hammering, knocking, and drumming, leaving behind it in the void a wake compounded of metallic smell, buzzing and singing, as though the world of men were unconquerable.