Peter Handke - Repetition

At one stroke, not only the children’s company but the square itself was closed to me. Something drove me to the strip of land on the edge of the village, known locally as “behind the gardens.” This area, though inhabited, was not really part of the village. Unmarried persons lived there — the roadmender, for example. He occupied a one-room house with thick dark-yellow walls, suggesting the porter’s lodge of a nonexistent manor house (there had never been such a manor in or near any of the villages). I never once set foot in the house and altogether kept my distance from the man. He was the only person in the village with a secret, which, however, he displayed freely and had no need to hide. Maintaining the village streets and pathways was only his everyday occupation. But there were days when he abandoned the gravel box out on the desolate highway and metamorphosed into a sign painter, stood, for instance, on a ladder over the entrance to the inn at the center of the village. As I watched him adding a shadowy line to a finished letter with a strikingly slow brushstroke, aerating, as it were, a thick letter with a few hair-thin lines, and then conjuring up the next letter from the blank surface, as though it had been there all along and he was only retracing it, I saw in this nascent script the emblem of a hidden, nameless, all the more magnificent and above all unbounded kingdom, in the presence of which the village did not disappear but emerged from its insignificance as the innermost circle of this kingdom, irradiated by the shapes and colors of the sign at its center. At such moments, even the painter’s ladder took on a special quality. It didn’t lean, it towered. The curbstone at its feet gleamed. A haywagon passed, its strands of hay plaited into garlands. The hooks on the shutters did not just hang down, they pointed in definite directions. The door of the inn became a portal, and those who entered looked up at the sign and bared their heads in obeisance. The foot of a chicken scratching about in the background became the yellow claw of a heraldic animal. The road where the sign painter was standing led, not to the small town nearby, but out into the country and at the same time straight toward the tip of his brush. On certain other days, amid the blowing leaves of autumn, the driving snows of winter, the flowery clouds of spring, the heat lightning of summer nights, I had perceived the wide world as a pure Now; but on signposting days there was something more: an exalted Now, an Era.

And I saw the roadmender in still another avatar, touching up the paint on the wayside shrines. One of these was shaped like a chapel, with an inner room, but this room was so small it would have been impossible to take a single step in it. Time and again I found him at work, squeezed into this little box at a remote crossroads, visible only from his head to one elbow, which he rested on the frame of the little window that opened outward. The shrine made me think of a hollow tree trunk, an engineer’s cab, a sentry box; and I had the impression that the man had carried it into the wilderness on his shoulders. The painter didn’t even have room enough to take a step backward and examine his work. But his serenity, as he stood there with his hat on his head, not for one moment put off by my presence, showed that he had no need of more room. The mural he was retouching was invisible from outside; to see what it represented, a passerby would have to lean over the window ledge. Only the dominant color was suffused in the little house, a luminous blue, in which, if I kept looking, every one of the painter’s movements struck me as exemplary. I resolved that at some future date I, too, would do my work so slowly, so thoughtfully, so silently, uninfluenced by anyone who happened to be present, in perfect independence, without encouragement, without praise, expecting nothing, demanding nothing, without ulterior motive of any kind. Whatever this future work might be, it would have to be comparable to this painting, which ennobled the painter and with him the chance witness.

It was during those years — when it was brought home to me day after day that since the premature, abrupt breaking off of my childhood there could be no renewed contact, no continuation, no permanence for me in the village — that my confused sister came closer to me for the first time. The odd part of it is that since earliest childhood I had felt drawn to all the idiots in the vicinity, and they to me. In their perpetual wanderings, they often came to the window and pressed their noses and lips to the pane. And during my schooldays in Bleiburg, the one place to which I was drawn time and again was the mental home. After school, I would regularly make the detour that took me there. The idiots would greet me through the fence by screaming and waving their arms — I also remember their hugging the air — whereupon I, intermittently screaming and waving my arms on the deserted highway, would go happily home. In a sense, the mentally deranged and feebleminded were my guardian angels, and when I hadn’t seen any of them in a long time, the sight of an idiot gave me a sudden burst of health and strength.

However, I didn’t regard my sister as one of the happy band of the feebleminded or insane. She had always been solitary and gloomy, and as long as I can remember I had feared her and avoided her. The look in her eyes did not seem confused to me, as I had been told, but fixed; not empty, but clear; not lost, but always alert. Those eyes were constantly appraising me, and not at all favorably. And the gauge (for I regarded that fixed stare as a gauge) did not register my mistakes or misdeeds, but my basic failing: falsehood; I was not what I purported to be, I wasn’t authentic, I wasn’t anything, I was only pretending. And indeed, it was impossible to be friends with her; whatever I did — even if I was only looking into space — I had the feeling that I was trying to put something over on her or myself, and making a bad job of it at that. For a while at least, she had mocked me now and then with her almost pitying giggle; later she would keep a malicious silence after those crushing moments of appraisal. Consequently, I kept out of her way when possible (but then I might suddenly discover her on the balcony, where she had set her appraisal trap).

Another thing that may have put me off was that she was so much older than I. Between her and my brother there was only a year’s difference; but between her and me it was two decades. When I was very little, I actually took her for a stranger in the house, a mysterious intruder, who would someday pull a pin out of her hair and stick it into me. And then, when I got back from the seminary, she did indeed take the pins out of her hair, by which I mean that she let her hair down and opened up to me. She developed a feeling for me, a kind of enthusiasm. With enthusiasm she crossed the fields to meet me when I came from the train; with enthusiasm she carried my bag; with enthusiasm she handed me a bird’s feather, brought me an apple, served me a glass of cider. I had denied it all the while, and now at last I was what I was: at last she wasn’t the only confused one who didn’t belong anywhere; now I, too, was just that. At last she had an accomplice, an ally, and it was possible for her to be with me. Instead of blasting me, her eyes rested on me, and while hitherto they had foreseen nothing but calamity for me, they now proclaimed pure joy in my, her, our presence; but they were never obtrusive; when I needed it, they merely gave me a look that escaped everyone else, a mere hint, a sign.

To my mind, the right posture for my sister is sitting, a tranquil, erect sitting, with her hands beside her on the bench. Though every house had a bench in front of it, it was usually the men, especially the old ones, who sat there. I remember my father only as old, but I have no recollection of him seated. As for the women of the village, I saw them “always on their feet,” as housekeepers were said to be: walking in the street, bending over in the garden, and indoors actually running. It may have been my imagination, but it seemed to me that no Slovene woman could move from one place to another without running. Short as the distance might be, a Slovene woman ran from table to stove, from stove to sideboard, from sideboard to table. This running in small spaces was a quick sequence of skipping, flitting on tiptoes, running in place, changing feet, turning, and skipping some more; seen as a whole, it was a kind of clumsy dancing, the dancing of women who had been servants for many years. The young girls as well, no sooner back home from school, took to running; vying with their elders, they galloped like servants around their kitchen-living rooms. Even my mother, who was not a Slovene, had acquired the native custom; just to bring me a cup of tea, she would hop with downcast eyes and bated breath, as though I were an unexpected noble guest. Yet I can’t remember any such guest ever coming to our house, not even the parish priest. But my sister, alone among the village women, appears to me seated. She sat on the bench in front of the house; there she sat for all to see, and all she did was sit. I regarded her, just as I did the roadmender, as a model. Sitting there, playing with her fingers, without the usual rosary, she transformed herself into a phantom, seen only by him whom she herself chose to see; that is, by me. Excluded like the sign painter from the dance, she, too, in her fool’s freedom, embodied the center of the village. And it seemed to me that the age-old little stone statue, which dwelt, ignored by all, in a dark niche in the church wall, might have sat there as she did. Now it was reduced to a torso, a hand, and a head, and the only protuberances on the weather-beaten face were the eyes and the broadly smiling mouth, both closed. Here in the open, eyelids, lips, and the hand with the stone ball reflected the sunlight, and the whole image receded into the shimmering wall, its pedestal.