Peter Handke - Repetition

Yes, there was the moment with the children in the dusk, the moment of the painter working without witnesses, the moments when my sister and fellow conspirator was sitting in the sun. Yet all these moments could not in the long run take the place of the village I had lost.

The dream was over. Other dreams had to help out, big ones and little ones, by day and by night. But in those years I failed to make a place for myself in the city. Though I no longer felt at home in the village and instead of coming straight home after school I often took the last train, I remained in every respect an outsider in the city. I went neither to cafes nor to the movies and killed time drifting or sitting on park benches. It may have been partly due to the geography of Klagenfurt that I had nowhere to go. The lake was too far for walking, and this city, which seemed enormous to me, the capital of a whole province, had no river running through it, with banks to stroll along or bridges to stand on. Apart from the railroad station, the only building that offered me any kind of shelter was the school. I spent whole afternoons alone in my classroom or, when it was being cleaned, in a side room off the lobby, where unused tables and benches were stored. Sometimes there were other out-of-town students, and there, as the enormous deserted building grew steadily darker and quieter, we formed a little class of our own, sitting on the windowsills and standing in the corners. It was there that I met the girl with whom I once went to the movies, after all; she lived as far away as I did, in the opposite direction, in a village which, quite otherwise than in my days at the seminary, I conceived to be infinitely more alluring than my own. Her face glowed in the failing light of the corridor, and I fancied that she could only be the daughter of a noble house, living on a magnificent street.

With my classmates, on the other hand, it was only during our lessons together that I felt an affinity. In the schoolroom I spoke up (sometimes I was actually the spokesman for the class or the one who was consulted in doubtful cases). But after school I was left alone. The others all lived in town, with their parents or with local families. And they were all the children of lawyers, doctors, manufacturers, or businessmen. I was the only one who could not have said what his father did for a living. Was I the son of a “carpenter,” a “farmer,” a “flood-control worker” (over the years, my father had been all of these); or would it suffice for me to answer evasively that my father was “retired”? Regardless of how I concealed my origins, of how I might ennoble or debase them or pass them over, as though — and that is what I should have preferred — I had no origins at all, I nevertheless recognized what I had long dimly felt in my dealings with the children of the teacher, the policeman, the postmaster, the bank clerk in Bleiburg; namely, that I was not one of them, that we really had nothing in common, that we were not of the same world. They had social grace, I had none. I found their parties, to which they politely invited me at first, not only odd but positively repellent. Standing at the door of the dancing school, listening to the teacher counting out the time in a voice of command, I’d have said that the people in there were convicts who had actually chosen a life term in this place, and when I touched the door handle, it had the feel of a handcuff. Once at a garden party someone threw a hammock over my head, and there I sat with my knees drawn up, as in a net from which there was no escaping, surrounded by Chinese and storm lanterns, under the spell of soft music and splashing fountains, encircled by dancing or chatting couples.

Outside the classroom, I was always out of place. Wherever I turned, I was in the way; by stumbling before every sentence, I brought lively, witty conversations to a halt. While the others walked in the middle of the sidewalk with head high, I slunk bent forward along walls and fences, and when, no matter where, they stopped in the doorway to let themselves be seen, I took advantage of that moment to slip in unnoticed beside them (a stratagem which sometimes, as the laughter in the room indicated, really succeeded in calling attention to me). Altogether, though I alone was aware of it, the time I spent out of school with my fellow students was poisoned by my obtuseness. Years later a man seen in a streetcar recalled to me the picture I had of myself in those days: he was sitting with a group of friends who were telling jokes. He regularly joined in their laughter, but always just a little too late; then suddenly he would stop laughing, freeze, and, much too loudly, rejoin the chorus of laughers. None of the others noticed what was instantly obvious to me, the outsider. He seemed to get the gist of the jokes, but without understanding what was funny about them. Missing the double meanings and allusions, he took everything he heard seriously. During moments of silence I saw by his dismayed look that he took every detail of their stories for literal truth. And that day in the streetcar I said to myself: That is exactly the way I behaved with my schoolmates, and only an outsider such as I am now could have noticed that one of us was not really a member of the group.

Once several of us were sitting at a table, talking. At first I joined in, but then, suddenly, it was all over between me and the others, the group on one side, myself on the other. I could hear them talking, but I couldn’t see them; at the most, a limb or two flashed across the corner of my eye. But that made my hearing all the sharper; I could have reproduced the intonation as well as the words of every sentence with terrifying accuracy and more realistically than the best tape recorder. They were only saying the usual things, amusing themselves. But the mere fact of their saying such things and their way of saying them infuriated me. Hadn’t I just been trying to join in? Yes, but now I was sitting deathly still on the fringe, wanting them to question me about my silence. And they, it seemed to me, were talking all the more glibly past me, over my head, as though their only purpose were to show me that they were something special and that I didn’t exist for them. Yes, by talking and talking without the slightest pause while I sat there reduced to silence, these sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie meant to rebuff me and my class. And even if an unfriendly word was never dropped, their way of speaking, their flat, glib singsong, was directed against me. I felt the energy that had accumulated inside me before this get-together — the urge to say something for once — reverse itself behind my forehead and strike back at me, benumbing my whole brain. That was my first experience of “loneliness,” which up until then had been a mere word to me. Then and there I resolved that I would never go in for this sort of society; and wasn’t it a silent triumph to be unable to join in such talk, to be different? I left the table without saying goodbye, and the talk didn’t subside for so much as a moment. Later, when the story got around, it came to my ears that I hadn’t had a good upbringing, as they put it, “a proper nursery,” and it occurred to me that, sure enough, there hadn’t been a separate room for the children in our house. These incidents left me with a habit that I had to break myself of later; when I got into an argument, I invariably addressed my adversary, however singular, by the second person plural.

I came to feel at home while on the move, riding in trains, waiting at railroad stations and bus stops. My daily ninety kilometers, or, counting distances covered on foot, three hours back and forth between village and city, gave me the time and space I needed to live in. I heaved a sigh of relief every time I was restored to the society of my mostly unknown fellow travelers, whom I had no need to classify and who did not classify me. During the trip we were neither rich nor poor, neither better nor worse than anyone else, neither German nor Slovene; if anything, we were young and old — and on the return journey in the evening it seemed to me that even age had ceased to count. What were we, then? In the classless local train we were simply passengers, and the same was true of the bus. Sometimes, for various reasons, I preferred the bus; for one thing, the trip took longer; moreover, it was dark; and lastly, in the bus even people I knew only too well seemed transformed. In the village or in Bleiburg I identified these people by their voices, their way of walking, the look in their eyes, their way of leaning their elbows on the windowsill, of turning their heads to look at a passerby, or by what I knew of their families or past history, but once they boarded the bus, they became indefinable. And being indefinable, they were something more in my eyes than they would otherwise have been; shorn of their particularities, they appeared at last alone and unique in the here and now; in the roaring, lurching bus, ennobled as it were by the journey together, they seemed more in their place than in the pews they maintained in church at home. Grown indefinable, they revealed themselves. They hinted at something that I could not interpret, and this was their reality; their greetings from passenger to passenger were true greeting, their questions were a real wanting to know, and though I could not hold on to these things, I ought to have! How sheltered, as though among my own kind, I felt with these people, consisting almost always of persons alone or of a child with adults, being conveyed by a reliable driver (who at home may have been a morose neighbor) over roads and city streets, all bound together, not by some excursion or pleasure trip, but by a necessity which carried them away from house and garden to the doctor, to school, to market, or to some administrative office. And this feeling did not always need the protection of darkness. One bright morning I sat behind some women who were carrying on a conversation from side to side of the bus about the relatives they were all on their way to visit in the hospital. Their talk of illness, a distinct sequence of voices, one loud, one soft, one plaintive, one calm, each in turn setting the tone, transformed the moving bus into a stage belonging exclusively to these women, a glass cage in which the light of a whole country had accumulated, and this light, the light of another country which was nevertheless present and traveling along with the bus, dispersed and spiritualized everything that was heavy and corporeal. The women’s head scarves shimmered, and bunches of garden flowers peered out of their handbags.