Peter Handke - Repetition

In very much the same way, I kept seeing the passengers who got out at the bus stops and hurried away into the darkness. These stops were also stages; the scenes enacted on them consisted solely of people coming, going, and waiting. Some, before turning away, lingered a while in the circle of light, as though in no hurry to go home (I was one of these); the others had barely got out of the bus when (like children sometimes in a dream) they vanished as though for all time. And the emptiness they left behind was marked by a warm seat beside me, condensed breath on the windowpane, fingerprints and hair smudges.

At that time, my favorite stage was the area around the municipal bus station and a side street parallel to the railroad line, with its ticket office and a long row of ports from which buses left for different parts of the country and on certain days even for Yugoslavia and Italy. Here I had the impression of being at the center of action. This action, to be sure, was only the smell of the glossy-black wooden ticket office floor, the roaring of the cast-iron stoves, the banging of doors, the flapping of posters against the busports outside, the trembling of a starting bus, the crackling and banging of another that was parking, the blowing of dust, leaves, snow, and newspapers through the windy street. And what these things were doing, or the mere fact that they were there, the faint yellow streetlights high up in the trees, the cracked supports of the ports, the rusting sheet-metal signs indicating destinations — that was enough action for me, no need for anything more to happen, that was plenty. If a face emerged from the darkness and became personally recognizable, it was too much. It was worse than a nuisance, it destroyed the magic. I couldn’t help making up stories about this, and the hero was always someone who claimed to be God, or an idiot who, ridiculed by all when he got in, avenged himself during the night ride by steering the bus off a precipice. Even my girlfriend merely cut off my view when she turned toward me as her bus was pulling out on the other side of the street. I couldn’t respond to her wave until she was out of the picture and the square was empty again. Then, to be sure, the whole country was full of her; I accompanied her on her trip and she me on mine.

Yes, trains and buses, railroad stations and bus stops were my home in my days as a commuting student. The homesickness of my years at the seminary was a thing of the past; on days when there was no school, something drew me to the road with its bus shelters, which, unlike the village, deserved to be called “places.” I longed to be always on the move, a vagrant, without fixed abode. My old homesickness, the most painful of all the sufferings I had thus far experienced, a torment which unlike other torments fell from a clear sky on me alone, while the whole world around me remained bright, and which, also unlike other torments, was irremediable, had given way to a carefreeness which, as long as it had no goal, I identified with boredom, but once it had a goal, with wanderlust: pleasure in place of torment.

During my commuting days, it came to me that my parents were also strangers in the village. They were so regarded not by other villagers but by themselves. Outside the house, they were respected. My father was given honorific positions (in Rinkenberg, these were almost always connected with the church). My mother was regarded as an expert in dealings with the authorities and with the outside world in general; she was a kind of village scribe, who wrote letters and petitions for neighbors. But at home, once they were alone and especially when neither was working, they would grow restless, or sit and brood, as though they were there against their will, prisoners or exiles.

The memory of my father pacing the floor, rushing over to the little radio, scowling as he turned the tuning knob, makes me think of a soldier given up for lost in an advance post, trying desperately to pick up a signal telling him to come in. At first I thought this was brought on by the silence of the stable, which had emptied over the years, and of the barn, where the old farm implements had ceased to be anything more than souvenirs or junk. But then I saw that what drove him to keep on making strictly rectilinear chairs and tables, without a trace of ornament, in his old workshop behind the house, though he had no orders, was incurable rage and indignation provoked by an injustice. I’d sometimes look in through the windows and see how he worked without a glance at what he was making. Either he’d be staring into space, or he’d raise his head abruptly, and for a moment there’d be defiance in his eyes, followed by a look of prolonged resignation. When he was working, his bursts of temper, which had become legendary in the region, gave way to a sustained rage that made him trace thick, heavy lines, hammer nails ferociously, and make his corners as sharp as possible. Later on, I thought it was because, twenty years after my brother’s disappearance, our house was still a house of mourning; because a disappearance, unlike an unquestionable death, leaves a family no peace; every day he died again for them, and there was nothing whatever they could do about it.

But that wasn’t it, either; at any rate, not that alone. Their feeling, deforming, as it were, every corner of the farm, that this was not their home, that this village had been inflicted on them as a punishment, was much older. It was a — our only — family tradition, handed down from father to son, perhaps most clearly exemplified in a saying that had been passed from generation to generation: “No, I won’t go in, because if I do, there won’t be anyone there.”

Our family legend was rooted in a historical event. It seems that we really were descended from Gregor Kobal, the instigator of the Tolmin peasant revolt. The story is that after his execution his descendants were driven out of the Isonzo Valley, and that one of them crossed the Karawanken Mountains to Carinthia. Henceforward, every firstborn male was baptized with the name of Gregor. The part of this story that counted for my father was not that his ancestor had been a rebel and guerrilla leader, but that he had been executed and that his family had been banished. Since then, we had been a family of hirelings, of itinerant workers, homeless and condemned to remain so. The only right we retained, in which we could find brief moments of peace, was the right to gamble. And when my father gambled, even as an old man, he hadn’t his equal in the village. As he saw it, another aspect of the sentence of banishment was that in his home he was obliged not only to give another language precedence over Slovene, which had after all been the language of his ancestors, but to ban the use of Slovene altogether. As he regularly showed when talking to himself, often very loudly, in his workshop, he himself spoke it in his innermost consciousness, but he felt forbidden to let it out or pass it on to his children. Thus, it had been no more than justice when he married a woman of the hostile, German-speaking nation. He behaved as if a supreme will, more powerful than that of the Emperor who many years ago had ordered the execution of our ancestor Gregor Kobal, decreed that after the disappearance of his eldest son, the last of that name, he must suppress any Slovene sound in his house. Thus, when others were present, his language escaped him only in curses or in moments of overpowering emotion. He spoke it freely only when gambling, when drawing a card, when bowling, when imploring a curling stone to slide straight to its goal. At such times he felt entitled to speak Slovene as much as he pleased, and then he, who otherwise never opened his mouth, spoke more than anyone else. Otherwise, when he was not totally silent, he spoke German, a German free from the slightest tinge of dialect, which he passed on to everyone else in the family and for which, in every part of the country, I was later upbraided, as if I were speaking a forbidden foreign language. (I must own that my father’s way of speaking German, serious, graphic, laboriously pondering every word as though intimidated by the presence of foreigners, still sounds in my ears as the clearest, purest, least garbled, and most human-sounding voice I have ever heard in Austria.)