Peter Handke - Repetition

The next day, in the homeward-bound train, a sudden storming of the compartments as though this were the last possibility of flight. (And yet only the pilot trains had been canceled.) Wedged between strange bodies, as though armless and legless, even my chin dislocated for fear of contact with other chins, I felt more and more cheerful as time went on. In this crowd I was at home. Even my cramped position gave me a certain sense of well-being. And I wasn’t the only one. One man, for instance, though no better off than I, found room to read a book; one woman was knitting; and a child was eating an apple. Then, as we neared the border, I had the whole car almost to myself. A dreary luxury.

It made me happy to see Austria again. I realized that even in the Karst I had missed the Central European green; it was in my blood. It did me good to see Mount Petzen, “our mountain,” again from the familiar side. And the mere thought that, after struggling for weeks to get my tongue around a foreign language (especially when tired), I was again in the midst of my familiar German made me feel sheltered. In the sunset sky on the way from the border station to the town of Bleiburg, I saw a second, deeper sky, wreathed in many-colored clouds and as resplendent as a glory. And as I walked, I vowed to be friendly while demanding nothing and expecting nothing, as befitted someone who was a stranger even in the land of his birth. The crowns of the trees broadened my shoulders. No sooner in the small town than I found myself in the hustle and bustle of local society, which, so it seemed to me, had been going the rounds during my absence, on the lookout for a victim. And now the unconscionable enemy was back again. Even on my way into town, they overtook me in their cars and informed others of my arrival. The commando was waiting for me, disguised as evening strollers. The leashes dangling from their necks were really rifle slings, their whistling and shouting at every street corner were only a stratagem to surround me. But that day they were powerless against their adversary. I looked them in the eye as though telling them about a country so remote that they either greeted me in spite of themselves or looked the other way, at the Plague Column, for instance, and when they turned around to see what their dogs were up to, it was mainly out of fear, as much for themselves as for their four-footed friends. And indeed, with every step through the town, my hatred and disgust redoubled, until, instead of a heart in my breast, I felt only a boiling and bubbling. I wanted to spew fire at them as they marched, swaggered, minced, crept, shuffled, as they grinned at one another from the protection of their cars, as their voices (beside which the creaking of a branch, the scraping of a woodworm was delightful), malicious, whining, sanctimonious, wiped the blue from the sky and the green from the earth, and every word they said was a cliche, one more hateful than the next, from “remove from circulation” to “a poem or something.” These people were neat and clean, well barbered, fashionably dressed, they had gleaming badges on their lapels, they were scented with this and that, excellently manicured, shoes shined to a high polish (the first thing I noticed was that their welcoming glances were aimed at my dusty shoes), and yet the whole procession had a guilty, hangdog ugliness and formlessness. That, it seemed to me, was because of their colorless eyes; the colors had been washed away by their stubborn malignance. I asked myself if that couldn’t be my imagination and in that same moment I was struck by a sidelong glance which, helpless with rage at being unable to kill the first comer, shifted to the next. And then it occurred to me that not a few members of this crowd were descended from people who had tortured and murdered, or at least laughed approvingly, and whose descendants would carry on the tradition faithfully and without a qualm. Now the revanchist losers were marching along, sulking because peace had been going on too long. They had probably been busy all day, but their work had given them no joy — at best, they had enjoyed sending someone to jail or giving someone something to remember them by; so they hated themselves and were at war with the times. I thirsted for a Christian glance to which I could have responded. Idiots, cripples, madmen: breathe life into this procession of ghosts, you alone are the bards of the homeland. But it took an animal, appearing to me as the symbol of all the small-town persecuted, to comfort me and show me, the villager, a vast country with steppe, seacoast, and sea beyond this petty state. Suddenly, in the dusk, a hare appeared at the edge of the town, ran straight across the main square, zigzagging between cars and pedestrians, and vanished, unnoticed by anyone. Hare, heraldic animal of the harried and persecuted.

I followed the hare and came to a bar. Up until then I’d known it only from hearsay as a meeting place for drunks. At that bar I came across members of the philistine procession. Sitting among the derelicts and misfits, they were transformed. As if they had finally changed to civvies, they radiated friendliness and trust. They were burning to tell stories, and not only about war. In my memory I hear them give vent to a strangely gentle lament and song of thanksgiving about the sweetness of childhood and their stolen youth, and I see them as isolated fugitives and exiles. They had suffered at being involved with the philistines; they dreamed of being accepted, not by some high-class club, but by this noisy gathering. Noisy? Maybe they all talked at once, but it seemed to me that I understood every word. My dominant impression of this smoky cavern was one of transparent order, regulated by the interaction between individual exuberance and an urgent collective seriousness. When the waitress appeared, a path was made for her, and the cook’s hand with a plate in it would pop out of the mist as from a cloud. The sound of cards being shuffled suggested the flapping of dogs’ ears and the whirring of birds’ wings, and rolling dice supplied the music. Whenever the telephone rang, everyone looked up, hoping it was for him. The proprietress behind the bar had eyes that nothing could surprise. A peasant woman came in, incongruous in those surroundings, put a bundle down beside her son, who had slumped over the table — his washing that she had just done — ordered a glass of schnapps for herself, and proceeded to drink it very slowly. The man beside me asked me who I was and I told him. We were standing shoulder to shoulder. At the back, one looked out on a vegetable garden, and in front on the street. Cars sped by and a dark bus overtook a lighted one as in a free and nameless metropolis.

Homeward across the deserted plain, under a starry, moonless sky. As always when I approached my village after being absent for any length of time, I was excited. My mood was positively festive. I was drawn to my village as by a magnet, but I commanded my heart to beat slowly. The night was unusually mild for that part of the country, and the only sound was the barking of dogs here and there, which put me in mind of a big estate, though big estates were a thing of the past. There were so many stars (even the spiral galaxies were clearly visible) that the constellations merged, suggesting a cosmic city girdling the earth. The Milky Way was its main thoroughfare, and the stars on the edge of the city bordered the runway of its airport; the whole city was getting ready for a reception. I thought of the mountain on Mars, almost twice as high as Mount Everest, with the suburbs of the heavenly city on its slopes.

Back to earth. In the distance, the few lighted windows of the village of Rinkenberg seemed embedded in Rinken Hill, as though the hill were a prehistoric formation converted into a modern housing complex. At the crossroads with the milk stand, which marked the village boundary, I was glad to be weighed down by my sea bag with the heavy books in it, for without it I might have flown away. The roofs of the houses, especially those made of weather-beaten shingles, had a silvery sheen that made them look like pagodas. The roadmender was a silhouette standing in the doorway of his porter’s lodge; his greeting to me, in a quavering voice that seemed to come from a great distance and didn’t wait for an answer, had the liturgical sound of a muezzin’s exhortations high up on his minaret. Outside a house at the end of an avenue of fruit trees far from the road, a whole family of villagers were sitting on a bench, knee to knee, plunged in a consensual silence, as though the essence of a summer night had been translated into human terms. I made a detour to the graveyard: no fresh graves (until my subsequent homecomings, but then more and more of them). On the way to our house, a neighbor woman passed me, mute, with arms half upraised; a poignant sign of helplessness. I couldn’t tell whether the buzzing in my ears came from the ventilator at the inn or from my blood.