Repetition

Two — THE EMPTY COW PATHS

WHAT I HAVE WRITTEN thus far about my father’s house, about the village of Rinkenberg and the Jaunfeld Plain, must have been clearly present to my mind a quarter of a century ago in the Jesenice station, but I couldn’t have told it to anyone. What I felt within me were mere impulses without sound, rhythms without tone, short and long rises and falls without the corresponding syllables, a mighty reverberation of periods without the requisite words, the slow, sweeping, stirring, steady flow of a poetic meter without lines to go with it, a general surge that found no beginning, jolts in the void, a confused epic without a name, without the innermost voice, without the coherence of script. What I had experienced at the age of twenty was not yet a memory. And memory meant not that what-had-been recurred but that what-had-been situated itself by recurring. If I remembered, I knew that an experience was thus and so, exactly thus; in being remembered, it first became known to me, nameable, voiced, speakable; accordingly, I look on memory as more than a haphazard thinking back — as work; the work of memory situates experience in a sequence that keeps it alive, a story which can open out into free storytelling, greater life, invention.

It is strange that even then, as often as I in my booth looked toward the bar, the waitress looked back, as though my way of looking, sitting, moving, tapping my fingers on the table, told her the whole story for which I have only now found the words, as though there were no need for me to tell her anything more. For hours, wordlessly busy with my story, I had been fiddling with my empty bottle and the woman at the bar had been twirling an empty ashtray to the same rhythm. Unlike my enemy’s aping, this parallel twisting and turning invigorated me. And another reason why I felt no pressure to get up and go was that some men were still playing dice in the next booth; as long as they were playing, I could sit there. It pleased me that I could not understand the language the invisible men were speaking and that I, a foreigner, was able now and then to pick up a die that had fallen on the floor and hand it to these men, who almost certainly were no more at home in Jesenice than I was (Serbs, Croats, or Macedonians, no doubt; wouldn’t they, otherwise, have gone home long ago?), fancying as I did so that I was someone from a neighboring village showing a group of real foreigners, who had drifted in from the ends of the earth, the way. And it gave me special pleasure that by looking at the waitress I would for a while be seeing a recovered, vivacious, healthy version of my mother. Of course I must have been tired, but the sight of her kept me awake, so I can’t remember any tiredness. It was only when the dice players had gone that the actress playing the part of my mother broke the spell by reverting to waitress and coming from behind the bar. Her movements now running counter to mine, she asked me to leave: “It’s almost midnight.”

My fatigue didn’t hit me until I was out on the street. It wasn’t the different place but the transition. I had gone through it without stopping, as though there were nothing there, and after a few steps the surroundings of the last few hours had disappeared. I was no longer anywhere, and what now stopped was my breath.

I couldn’t go back to the station and I didn’t know where else to go. I stood still. This was not a contemplative standing-there as when I arrived, but a blind loitering in no way connected with my first day in another country. How often in my life before and since I’ve stood around like that! Where would I go next? What was the solution? There was one and it had to be found. Distraught, I turned this way and that, describing a pattern of aimlessness. How often in my life I’ve wandered like that, even in my own house, my own room, with my eyes in a clothes cupboard, my hand in a tool drawer.

By then there were no buses running, only a file of Yugoslavian army trucks, one after another, all headed for the border. The tarps were open and in the caves thus created I saw soldiers sitting back to back on both lengthwise benches. The two in the foreground at the edge of the platform were resting their arms on the cross strap barring the exit from the cave. Even in this detail, each truck was a repeat of the one preceding it. The straps were narrow and sagged, and yet the soldiers’ arms resting on them were as inert, as motionless as if they had been tied fast, not by cords, but by fatigue. I followed the column out of town northward, in the direction from which I had just come. A smaller patrol car rolled slowly past me. The occupants looked at me but didn’t stop. Remembering my Humtschach persecutors, I raised my hand in a quick salute, which was actually returned; a fugitive from the army wouldn’t have looked like me. Then more covered wagons with their pyramids of backs, their rigid double heads, their arms supported by straps, their dangling hands; this caravan would never end. And then, almost disappointingly, there came a last truck, open at the back like the rest, but empty, and this empty cave reminded me of a particular tunnel through the Karawanken Mountains, the exit of which, as I looked back from the last car of a train a few hours ago — seen through the Jesenice night, that moment was already part of a meaningless past — had been as far away from me as the black semicircle was now. No more army trucks. The road was deserted. But a trail of fatigue and exhaustion seemed to cover the whole width of the valley, a cloud of smoke — incomparably more stifling than that of the big iron foundries in the south — which blotted out the last patch of sky and, like the legendary army of the air, attacked me momentarily from above, applying screws to my temples and straps to my forehead, and pushed me past the last houses of the town, into no-man’s — land.

This first night in a foreign country might perhaps be told briefly, but in my memory it has become the longest in my life, decades long. At the age of twenty I wouldn’t have dreamed of stopping at a hotel — and not only because I wanted to save money. Yet my only thought was sleep, and the tunnel did not strike me as an insane idea. I would go in where my train had just carried me out. All that mattered was a niche to sleep in.

Unseeing, I found the path alongside the tracks; unseeing, I found the hole in the fence, as though it were bound to be there. Already I was in the tunnel, as though in a house, and there, as I had foreseen, I found a niche, a recess in the rock, screened off from the tracks by a concrete parapet. “My stall,” I thought. With the flashlight I had brought with me to search for some trace of my brother in a cave farther south (that at least was my youthful fancy), I lit up the clay floor, which looked rather like a brook with glittering mica along its banks. The concrete wall revealed nothing but a bit of hair clinging to it, an eyelash, which made me think of my history teacher in Villach at the Austrian end of the tunnel. Only that afternoon he had told me that the vehicular tunnel running parallel to mine had been built by prisoners during the last World War, and that many had died, some of them murdered; he had even advised me, though only in jest, to spend the night there if I found no other place. The sleep of one “still innocent,” he said, “would help to purify the place of injustice, to banish the evil spirits, to blow away the horror”; he was writing just such a fairy tale, he told me. Since the last war, he said, he had seen something sinister in all tunnels, even the innocent Jesenice tunnel built under the Empire.

I began, in the darkness, by eating a piece of bread and an apple, the smell of which dispelled my initial queasiness, as though the fruit gave off a breath of fresh air. Then I lay down and curled up. But I could not sleep, or if I did, it was only to have instantaneous and interminable nightmares. My father’s house lay empty, a ruin. The Drava rose from its deep valley and overflowed the whole plain. The sun shone on the Dobrawa heather and war had been declared. But I also woke up drenched in sweat because I had lost one of my shoes, because all of a sudden the part in my hair was on the left side instead of the right, because the soil in all our flowerpots at home had cracked and the flowers had dried out. Once, what made me start up was no dream but a night train, which sped by with an enormous din, scarcely a step from the parapet. It could only be an international express on its way to Belgrade, Istanbul, or Athens, and I thought of my schoolmates bound for Greece, who would be sleeping out of doors in their tents or sleeping bags, a good deal farther south no doubt. Excited by their evening expedition through a foreign town, by the warm night, and by the unaccustomed company of the boy or girl who sat beside them in class, they would talk and talk, and those who had already dozed off would be slumbering peacefully, free from nightmares, under the protection of their comrades. And I cursed myself for not being with them.

What tormented me most was not this place I had got myself into, this dark, supposedly haunted tunnel, but a sense of guilt. Not because I had left my family in the lurch, but because I was alone. That night, I discovered that even if I had done no particular wrong, it was a crime to be alone of my own free will. I had known that before and would learn it again in the future. A crime against whom? Against myself. Even the company of enemies would now have been a lesser evil. And hadn’t my girlfriend, who unlike myself was fluent in Slovene, offered any number of times to guide Filip Kobal through his legendary homeland? Could I conceive of anything better at this moment than our two bodies breathing together? Than to lie beside her all night and wake up in the morning with my hand on her belly?

But the real nightmares were still to come. The story interrupted when I left the station restaurant went on in my sleep, but now it was different from what it was in my waking state — it was violent, abrupt, incoherent. It no longer poured out of me with an “and,” a “then,” and a “when,” but chased me, harried me, drove me, sat on my chest, choked me until the only words I could get out consisted entirely of consonants. Worst of all, no sentence was ever completed, all my sentences broke off in the middle, rejected, maimed, garbled, disqualified, while at the same time I was forbidden to stop talking and, without pausing for breath, I had to keep starting all over, trying again, as though chained for life to a verbose, senseless rhythm which brought forth no meaning but with its retrograde movement destroyed and devalued what meaning I had arrived at during the day. Dragged into a dream light, the storyteller in me, only a short time before seen as the secret king, had become a forced laborer. Caught in the embrace, which would end only with death, of a story that had struck me when awake as the soul of gentleness but had now become a cruel monster, I was powerless to frame a single serviceable sentence. How malignant the spirit of storytelling could be!

And then, after a long onslaught, I suddenly succeeded in turning out two clear sentences, the one following naturally from the other, and in the same moment the pressure on me was relieved, I had a companion again. In my dream, this companion was a child; true, the child corrected me, improved on my story, but in so doing commended the teller. After that a tree, laden branch after branch not with fruit but with stones, which if not for the child would have signified “disaster,” proved to be a miracle tree; a number of confident swimmers including myself disported themselves in the raging flood, and the sleeper felt the ground under his cheek to be a book.

Thus, my longest night included an enjoyable hour of half sleep, during which I was able to stretch out. Part of my pleasure consisted in lying on my back with my hands clasped under my neck, listening to the dripping from the ceiling of the tunnel. For a change, I didn’t have to lie on my left side to feel at peace with myself. I had crept into the tunnel as a refuge, and now I made myself at home, using my brother’s overcoat as a blanket. The darkness around me was a good deal lighter than long ago in the potato cellar. From the nearby exit, gray on gray, glowworms kept flying in and out. Holding one in the palm of my hand, I lit up an astonishingly large circle around me. I always associate the sleep of the exhausted Odysseus on reaching the isle of the Phaeacians with this sort of sheltered feeling.

But when the hour was over, my sleep suddenly fell away from me, and it was then that I began to feel alone for good. Half sleep had been, as it were, my last companion in solitude, my guide and protector. And now from one minute to the next it proved to be a delusion. My word-mangling dream had been a whirligig of ghosts, and now my waking seemed to be the punishment it threatened. And this punishment consisted not in being exposed to the elements in an undoubtedly inhospitable place, but in being stricken dumb. Here, far from human society, objects ceased to have a language and became enemies, executioners in fact. Yet what was destroying me was not that the iron bar protruding from the tunnel wall reminded me of torture or execution — but that, though sound of body, I was without company and, stricken mute, no longer company to myself. True, I saw the bar bent in the shape of the letter S, of the figure 8, of a treble-clef sign, but that was once upon a time; the fairy tale of the S, the 8, and the treble-clef sign had lost its symbolic meaning.

So I fled. Not from dread of the tunnel’s history, not from the silence or the stifling air, or for fear of a cave-in or a lineman — I’d have been only too glad if the lineman had grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and cursed me in every known and unknown language — but in a single impulse of horror at the otherworldly speechlessness that was pressing in on me, for over and above bodily death it meant destruction of the soul, which, now that I am trying to speak of it, is recurring more violently, more devastatingly than ever. Then I had only to run a few steps to be out in the open, whereas today I am confined to the tunnel; there is no escape, no niche, no parapet, and my only way to humankind is to equip the objects of a mute planet, whose prisoner I have become through wishing (mea culpa) to be a storyteller, with eyes that look at me forgivingly. And that is why I now see the little knot of glowworms in the grass outside the tunnel blown up into a fire-spewing dragon guarding the entrance to the underworld — whether to defend a treasure there or for my protection, I do not know.

But what the upper world, or just the world, can be, I learned on the way back. Though it was still a long time till morning and there was no moon, I could see the contours of the valley clearly. The river that went with it, the Sava Dolinka (or, as my father would have said in German, “die Wurzener Save”), was a dull glow moving between the sparsely wooded banks. On a sloping meadow leading down to the water, a horse was standing beside a tree; though it was too early for flies, the horse was swishing its tail. The sound it made in pulling up grass was the dominant sound of the countryside, accompanied by the faint murmur of the river and the rumbling in the distant freight yards. Between the railroad line and the bottom of the valley, the meadow merged into a cluster of small gardens, which in my memory have remained “the hanging gardens of Jesenice.” They formed a pattern of vegetable patches and fruit trees, surrounded by low fences; in the center of each one, there was a wooden hut with a bench in front of it. This pattern, partly sloping, partly terraced, continued down to the river, from which the gardens seemed to draw their water. Their color, already growing visible, was a yellowish white: in the trees, early apples, and in the gardens, beans. The path beside the tracks where I was walking was soft — the dust was so deep, so dense and yielding, that it didn’t even retain my shoe prints; and the dew didn’t moisten it but collected in little balls that stayed on the surface. With my first step out of the tunnel, a stone weight had fallen from my shoulders and the taste of metal was gone from my teeth; my eyes were washed, not by the dew, but by the strange sight of it. The previous night, I had taken in the details of the valley, but now I saw them as letters, as a series of signs, beginning with the grass-pulling horse and combining to form a coherent script. I now interpreted this land before my eyes, with the objects, whether lying, standing, or leaning, which rose up from it, this describable earth, as “the world”; and I was able to address this land, without special reference to the valley of the Sava or to Yugoslavia, as “my country.” And at the same time this manifestation of the world was the only conception of a God that I have managed over the years to arrive at.

And so my further progress in that predawn hour became a deciphering, a continued reading, a transcribing, a silent taking of notes. (But hadn’t I as a child, to the ridicule of my family, been in the habit of writing in the air?) And I then distinguished two bearers of the world: on the one hand, the earth’s surface that supported the horse, the hanging gardens, and the wooden huts; and on the other hand, the decipherer, who had shouldered these things in the form of their hallmarks and signs. And I literally felt my shoulders broaden in my brother’s too-spacious coat and — because the perception and combination of signs operated as a counterweight to the burden of material things — straighten up as though my deciphering transformed the weight of the earth into a single freely flying word, consisting entirely of vowels, such a word as the Latin Eoae, translatable as “At the time of Eos,” “At dawn,” or simply, “In the morning.”

Long before sunrise, I saw the valley plunged into another sun, the sun of letters, which receded into the tunnel of night and there provided a kind of expiation by joining the cracks in the clay of my sleeping place — suffused with a bronze glow — into a regular script of polygons, a memorial tablet befitting the place. Since then, whenever I’ve taken the train through the Karawanken Mountains, I’ve stood by the window, waiting in the darkness for the first glimmer of daylight from the Yugoslavian end. And quickly as the train leaves the tunnel, I always have time to glimpse the clay niche, usually strewn with leaves that have blown in, and in it the curled-up twenty-year-old with his cylindrical sea bag, an air sculpture. To me the place is then not so much the scene of war crime or the cave of speechlessness that it was that night, as my shelter. “Eoae!” Wherever I chance to be in the morning, when I first look out of any window, that has become a rousing cry — aloud or only in thought — whereby the vowels that pour from me are translated back into the things outside me, this tree, the neighbor’s house over there, the road between them, the airfield in the distance, the line of the horizon, thus opening up my senses to the new, literal, and describable day.

E-O-A-E: I made my way in darkness over a strip of land between the railroad line and the river. Though I didn’t see a living soul, the country seemed alive and inhabited, because what spoke to my senses was all man-made and, as it were, ready for action. Near the station, work had actually begun in a few warehouses and workshops. A switchboard was lit up, while the rest of the room was still in darkness; the needles of gauges trembled and advanced; a regular thumping in every corner. A big steel wheel was set in motion and turned faster and faster, until the spokes disappeared and the whole wheel became a solid circle on the back wall. A lamp on a table in a dark office lit up a telephone, a slide rule, an alarm clock. The door of a loading ramp stood half open; the ramp opened out on a railroad yard with signals that changed colors. One nighttime image after another, it seemed to me, of unremitting activity. There was no one to be seen, though I assumed the presence of workers. Only once was the “work” series broken — by a cloth lampshade, a yellow dome behind a single curtain, it, too, untended by any human being — but resumed at once with the clatter of a warehouse ventilator, a fast-moving belt sliding back and forth on its slippery bed, and the shadows cast by puffs of chimney smoke on the road — on which I was now walking, because there was no other way of getting ahead.

I had seen similar things at home on the other side of the border, especially on the periphery of the few cities I knew, and I wondered why there I had always felt excluded, whereas here I had no difficulty in sensing the vibration from these enclosed shops; and the one room with the dome-shaped lampshade, very differently from anything I ever experienced at home, caught my imagination as an embodiment of ease and comfort, as the luminous center of the series, a temple of safety and warmth. I was reminded of a conversation heard the day before among a group of workers who had been sitting on a bench at the Austrian frontier station in Rosenbach, waiting for their bus. It went roughly as follows: “Another day.”—“Thursday already.”—“But then it’ll start all over.”—“It’ll soon be fall.”—“And then it won’t be long till winter.”—“At least it’s not Monday.” —“When I get up, it’s dark; when I come home, it’s dark again. I haven’t seen my house yet this year.”

Why did this at first sight so inhospitable predawn industrial zone here in Yugoslavia, kept in motion by invisible hands as though for all time, give me an entirely different impression of workers, in fact of human beings in general, from anything I had ever known in my own country? No, it was not, as we had been taught, the “fundamentally different economic and social system” (though I’d gladly have been faceless, with a number instead of a name, and even given up my supposed freedom); nor was it only that this was a foreign country (though, on my very first day there, many of the usual sights had struck me as stimulating novelties): it was something more than a mere thought or feeling — it was the certainty that at last, after almost twenty years in a non-place, in a frosty, unfriendly, cannibalistic village, I was standing on the threshold of a country which, unlike my so-called native land, did not lay claim to me in the name of compulsory education or compulsory military service, but to which, on the contrary, I could lay claim as the land of my forefathers, which thus, however strange, was at least my own country! At last I was stateless; at last, instead of being always present, I could be lightheartedly absent; at last, though there wasn’t a soul in sight, I felt that I was among my people. Hadn’t a child pointed at me on the platform in Rosenbach and shouted at the top of his lungs: “Look, somebody from down there!” (“Down there” meant Yugoslavia, while Germany or Vienna was “out there.”) The free world, it was generally agreed, was the world from which I had come — for me at the moment, it was the world that I had so literally before me.

That this was a delusion I knew even then. But I didn’t want that kind of knowledge, or rather: I wanted to get rid of it; I recognized this wanting-to-get-rid-of it as my life-feeling; and the inspiration I gained from that delusion is still with me.

When I think back on that hour, it was not the machines, whether operating or standing in readiness, which deluded me into thinking that there, unseen, my people were indefatigably at work, but, most of all, the lights, that of the shaded lamp in the one dwelling, that of the office lamp on the desk, and especially the white, dusty, floury, fluorescent light, reproduced from workshop to workshop as from room to room in a flour mill. Into harness! Shoulder a wheel! Join in! Most surprising was this urge to be active in someone who otherwise, according to my father, was “just about useless for any kind of work.” And it wasn’t because there was no one around who might have watched me (for as a rule, again according to my father, being watched “made me all thumbs”); no, here, I was sure, it wasn’t at all like at home; anyone who wanted to could watch me and I wouldn’t feel observed. Every one of my movements would be “right.”

But was it this empty vision of light that attracted me to those workshops, to those invisibly at work there? Was I not in reality drawn to a very different kind of working together which expressed itself most clearly in my silhouette entering the picture from outside, from the edge, from the road, and being fleetingly sketched into it as I passed? No, my father’s leather strap, his travel amulet, was not tied around my wrist to give me a better grip but, if for any purpose, for warmth; my sense of oneness with the workers came less from any desire to work with them than from pleasurable, unburdened passing-by.

Thus I learned the differences between conformity, consonance, and congruence. Conformity: I have always found it intolerable to keep in step with others, even with one person; if I found myself in step with someone, I had to stop instantly or quicken my pace, or move to one side; even when my girlfriend and I chanced to fall into step, I saw us as two soulless marchers-against-the-world. And consonance, too, was impossible for me: if anyone else, and not only in singing, gave me the keynote, I was incapable of taking it up and sustaining it; or conversely, if someone else took up my intonation, I was immediately thrown off; only the dissonance of the quarrel to which this prompted me saved me from falling silent (such quarrels were often brought on by my girlfriend speaking of us as “we,” a word I could never bring myself to utter).

Congruence was a different matter, a powerful experience; I felt this, for instance, one morning when I turned the window handle and simultaneously heard in the distance the closing of a car door, the scraping of a snow shovel, and a train whistle screeching at the horizon; or another time, when a bowl was put down on the stove just as I was opening a letter; or when I now look up from my writing and, as often happens at this time of day, a sunbeam strikes the darkened painting on the opposite wall and moves from left to right like a spotlight, making every tree, every sparkle on the water, every fork in the road, every fringe of cloud stand out from the somber surface. And I had the same experience that day, when before daybreak, carrying my sea bag with my brother’s two books, a welcome burden, I passed the pounding, whistling, or just silently bright industrial installations of Jesenice. I even strode more firmly in order to set this congruence in motion — no, I wasn’t going to let any big or little enemy kick me in the legs from behind — and then, just as I had caught sight of the empty workshops, I glimpsed the first human being of the day, the outline of a bus driver in a dark, otherwise empty bus, moving at high speed, as though it were already expected at every bus stop in the valley, and then the first couple, a man and a woman at the window of a tall building, she standing in a housecoat, he sitting in his undershirt. What has remained most clearly in my memory over the years is the mist on the windowpane, which made me guess that the man up there was not about to set out for work but had just come home from his job, sweating, breathing heavily after a night of labor, which transferred itself to me as though it were my own.

A single unset table and an oilcloth-covered kitchen chair were standing in front of a restaurant, diagonally across from the station. I sat down in the chair and let the day break. My seat was slightly below the level of the tracks and of the street and sidewalk, from which a few steps led down to a small, polygonal concrete surface which was bordered on the other side by a semicircle of houses, each wall of which formed a different angle with the next, thus giving the impression of a bay sheltered on all sides and offering a protected vantage point from which one looked not down as usual but upward from below and instead of a panorama saw a proximate but all the more impressive view, as though from the bottom of a hollow. The houses were low and old, but each dated from a different period. Just behind them began the sloping valley with its mass of dark foliage, above which the tips of the spruces were gradually coming into sight.

In my hollow, it would long be night. Was I dreaming that tiny bird, a motionless silhouette up on the edge of the sidewalk? I had never seen a day bird at night. The street looked like a wall with this wren sitting on it. The restaurant opened early; the first customers were railroad workers; they drank their coffee or schnapps — I could see them over my shoulder — in one gulp and were gone. The sky, which had looked rainy in the first light, was cloudless and radiant. An aged waitress with the furrowed face of a man brought me a pot of coffee with milk and a plate piled with thick slices of white bread. The skin on the coffee reminded me of my brother, who, so I was told, had always detested those rubbery blobs. When, on his first leave from the front, my mother, supposing the war had cured him of his fussiness, served him the usual coffee, he had pushed the cup away, saying: “Don’t bother me.” I saw the milk welling up and forming a skin that broke into islets on the dark surface, which then grew lighter. The mound of white bread beside it didn’t last long. Fresh as it was, it took in air after being compressed in cutting, and swelled up under my hungry eyes. I ate it, razed and demolished it in one go. That white bread has meant “Yugoslavia” to me ever since.

When I looked up after eating, droves of people were passing on the sidewalk up above; the street had become a dike. Summer vacation couldn’t have begun yet, there were too many schoolchildren among the passersby, leaning into the wind. It was indeed windy, and the tall meadow grass at the edge of the dike sighed like dune grass. Though I have never been at the seashore, I couldn’t help thinking that the Atlantic dunes must begin right after the railroad tracks.

An old man came out of the restaurant with a second kitchen chair and sat down at some distance from me; to enjoy the view, he had no need of a table. Without exchanging so much as a word, we watched developments together; we both looked at the same thing, we studied it for the same length of time, then, simultaneously, passed on to something else. I have never known such a view as on that morning after my longest night, never beheld such space and such a horizon as in that seeing, which I knew to be one with that of the man beside me. We immersed ourselves in the glow on the throat of a pigeon which was crossing the concrete bay above us, or turned our heads back to the dike, where clouds of smoke from the steel mill were drifting up the valley in the direction of the tunnel, as though to smoke out the whole length of it.

When at home, before my trip, I had looked southward in clear weather, it seemed certain that, under the bluing sky beyond the mountains, there could only be cities resplendent with color, spreading out over a wide plain, unobstructed by any chain of hills, the one merging with the next all the way to the sea. And yet the industrial city of Jesenice now, gray on gray, squeezed into a narrow valley, shut in between two shade-casting mountains, fully confirmed my anticipation. Looking up at the dike, I saw a man with a gleaming red saw in each hand, followed by two children eating ice cream and a woman in an advanced state of pregnancy, wearing an airy dress and clogs. The perpetual clatter of the long-distance trucks on the single strip of unasphalted cobblestones reminded me again of my brother, who in his prewar letters spoke of a similar stretch of road between Maribor and Trieste. On every one of his excursions to the Adriatic, the car (the school principal’s) had been “thoroughly shaken for a short while,” and after that he had felt “bathed in salt air.”

In Yugoslavia, time as well as space seems to be measured differently than it is beyond the northern mountains. Comparable to sedimentary rock, the buildings before my eyes pointed to strata of the architectural past, from the foundations of Imperial Austria to the bay windows of the kingdom of the south Slavs and the smooth, unornamented upper stories of the present People’s Republic of Slovenia, not omitting holes for flagpoles just below the attic windows. While looking at one of these façades, I suddenly wished with all my might that my missing brother would push open the decrepit terrace door, with its opaque grooved glass, and show himself. I even thought in words: “Forefather, show thyself,” and saw the head of the old man beside me turn toward the bay window. And for a moment, as though my call were its own fulfillment, I caught sight of my brother, full-grown (as I had never known him), broad-shouldered, brown-skinned, his thick, dark, curly hair combed straight back, his imposing forehead and his eyes so deep in their sockets that his white blindness remained hidden. A shudder ran through me, as though I were seeing my king, a shudder of awe, but even more of terror, which made me leave my place in the hollow without delay and slip into the torrent of passersby on the street above.

It received me at once. My impression from below was false; it was not a torrent at all but an astonishingly leisurely flow in which my excitement over my successful evocation of an ancestor was appeased by an unhurried present.

To walk in such a flow was something new to me at the age of twenty. The village knew nothing of the kind — the best it could do was a struggling step-by-step or the marking time of holiday processions and funerals; at the seminary, one walked either alone or in a compulsory group (even our Sunday walks had to be taken in a group, in columns of two, with those behind treading on the heels of those in front of them, and anyone who thought of drifting away was instantly detected and whistled back); and in the small towns of Austria — those were the only ones I knew, for Vienna, the capital, when we went there on a school excursion, was hidden from me by the shoulders of my schoolmates and the index fingers of the teachers — I could only trot along on the fringe with my eyes to the ground. On those streets, I immediately grew skittish (perhaps a more concrete word than the usual “shy”); that is, I didn’t know which way to look, or else I looked in all directions, anything but straight ahead. In the small towns — not at all as in the village of Rinkenberg — my gaze was either distracted at every step by shop windows, advertising posters, and, above all, newspaper headlines, or, as happened once when I directed it toward the vanishing point of the street, it fell, or so I imagined, straight into the eye trap of someone coming in the opposite direction. The trap was not just a look; it was a stare, or rather an eyeless, faceless blank, with no organ attached to it but a monstrous trunklike mouth which with a single word, always monosyllabic, always inaudible, that I could always lip-read even in its typical dialect form, sucked me in and snapped shut over me. Yes, in the towns of my native land it was not possible, when one stepped out into the street, to merge with a flow of people; one was immediately, so it seemed to me, hemmed in and pocketed by people who had been trudging in a vicious circle with their dogs since the world began, who, as usual with people condemned to move in such circles, unfailingly felt themselves to be in the right and in their proper place. Is it mere imagination that, to this day, certain “Grüss Gott”s fired at me in my native land strike me more as threats than as greetings (“Out with the password, or else!”), and that especially when they are bellowed by children, I often involuntarily fling both my hands into the air? Whether walking on the side or in the middle of the street, I always felt myself appraised, judged, found guilty by the Austrian crowd, the Austrian majority, and time and again I accepted their verdict, though with no idea of what I was guilty of. What a relief to be walking down a street, convinced that some member of the eye-trapper gang must be studying me from the side, and then to look up and see nothing but the vacant eyes of a doll in a shop window.

On this Yugoslavian street there was no majority, and accordingly no minority, but only a varied and yet harmonious bustle such as, apart from the small town of Jesenice, I have known only in big cities. And here, for the present, I was the foreigner, to whom, in the streets of Carinthia beyond the mountains, I have always been grateful, because he distracts attention from me, but who here had his place in the crowd, among the people of the street. While back there I would be constantly changing place, getting clumsily out of the way, bumping into people, here I just walked along, and each one of my steps, unaccustomed as I was to the crowding, found room on the pavement. At last I didn’t trot or shuffle (as all of us did in the corridors of the seminary), but found my natural gait; I felt my feet rolling from the toes over the balls to the heels; now and then, in passing, I kicked some little thing aside with a feeling of quiet impudence which, as I discovered only after I had done it a few times, harked back to my childhood long ago. And what delighted me most about this crowd, when I compared it to other crowds I knew, was what it lacked, the things that were missing: the chamois beards, the hartshorn buttons, the loden suits, the lederhosen; in short, no one in it wore a costume. These people in the street were free not only from costume but also from insignia, from marks of caste; even the uniforms of the policemen did not stand out, but rather, as was only fitting, suggested public service. It was a blessing to be relieved of my skittishness, to be able to raise my eyes and look straight ahead, at eyes which, instead of appraising me, merely showed their colors, and these colors, black with brown with gray, revealed “the world.” Another thing that contributed to my newfound pride — and in this I was no longer a foreigner — was that I recognized my inner and outer resemblance, something no mirror could have shown me, to the other people in the crowd. Like them, I was gaunt, bony, awkward, with rough-hewn features and arms that dangled inelegantly, and my nature like theirs was compliant, willing, undemanding, the nature of a people who had been kingless and stateless down through the centuries, a people of journeymen and hired hands (not a noble, not a master among them) — and yet we children of darkness were radiant with beauty, self-reliant, bold, rebellious, independent, each man of us the next man’s hero.

The passersby were the consonants that went with the vowels which things awakened in me, though no words sprang from their union; I was merely seized by a second wind, independent of my own lungs, a wind of enthusiasm which suddenly enabled me to read the sober headings of a Slovenian paper being carried past me, no screaming headlines as in my German paper, but just news, as refreshing as the absence of costumes. And all at once I began to understand much of what was being said in the crowd. Was it because here in the street no one spoke to me? Did it mean that since my days at elementary school, where I had been obliged to speak the foreign language with my teacher, I had not become forgetful — but only obstinate? Jutro was still morning, danes today, delo work, cesta road, predor tunnel. I was also able to read the names of the shops; they were all so simple. Unlike the shops in the north, with their loud, pretentious signs, the dairy was identified simply by the word for milk, the bakery by the word for bread, and I didn’t translate the words mleko and kruh into a different language, but back into images, into the childhood of words, my first images of milk and bread. The bank, banka, that followed was the same old word, but it, too, took on an original character because its windows were not showcases, there were no displays; the space which in my native land might contain a pyramid of bright-colored strongboxes was empty — with an emptiness that stood open to me, and to which I could address myself as I could to the empty faces of the passersby. Among them I had no need, as at home, to look for a relative or a fellow villager to deliver me with a smile of recognition from that file of mere masks. The emptiness of the faces here meant they were not wearing masks. I have before me a picture of some young fellows squeezed into a tractor trailer, swathed from top to toe in fur disguises. They are on their way to an Alpine city to take part in the traditional hunt. Before entering the city, they are not yet holding the necessary rods and chains, and the enormous terror-instilling masks they will pull over their heads are still at their feet. Protruding from their fur ruffs, the faces of these young fellows, peasants no doubt, seem thin, soft, approachable! In much the same way, I was able to look into the procession of faces in Jesenice as into a single face, and it gave me the dignity I had never experienced at home, either in myself or in anyone else — well yes, in my father, during the Easter vigil in the Rinkenberg church, when, clad in a floor-length purple robe, he, along with a few other villagers, knelt beside the hollow that was supposed to represent the tomb of the resurrected Christ, then in one movement threw himself down in front of it and, covered by his candlewax-spotted robe, lay unrecognizably still on his belly. And just as my father named the instruments in the radio concert, I was now able, through the roar of the traffic and factories, to distinguish clearly the sound of colliding buffers in the railroad yards, the rattling of carts in the supermarket, the hissing of steam from an escape valve, the scraping of a stiletto heel, the pounding of a hammer, and the sound of myself inhaling and exhaling. And strangely enough, it occurred to me, this, too, this surprisingly acute hearing resulted from something that was not here, something that was absent in this Slovenian factory town. It was the absence of the usual striking church clocks that sharpened my hearing of the things around me. So it was not just any country, but this particular one, this country of deficiencies, which could be compared to and distinguished from my usual country and thus deciphered as “world.”

But the kingdom of the world that I perceived in this way exceeded the limits of present-day Yugoslavia and all the kingdoms and empires of olden times, and gradually its signs lost their definition. The Cyrillic letters on the newspapers of certain passersby were still clear, the vestiges of an old Austrian inscription on a public building were legible, as was the ancient Greek Xαîρε—Greetings — on the tympanum of a villa; but, on the other hand, the word PETROL on a gas station, which, seen through the branches of a tree, reminded me of a China known to me only from dreams, was ambiguous, and an equally exotic Sinai Desert opened up to me behind the high-rise buildings at the sight of a dusty long-distance bus, on the front of which the roller indicating its destination had stopped exactly in the middle between two illegible place names. As it passed, a fragment of a Hebrew scroll struck my eyes — yes, struck my eyes, for the landscape that opened up around the script was fraught with terror.

The vagueness was underlined by a blind window, to which my gaze was now drawn as to the center of the world. It was fairly high up the slope on the sunny side of a large house, which I fancied to be the manor belonging to the porter’s lodge across the border. It stood by itself; in front of it there was only a single spruce, whose fur-brown bark brought out the massiveness of the yellow façade. A steep stone stairway led across a strip of meadow to the entrance. A child was on the stairway with his back to me; one foot a step lower than the other, he seemed hesitant; the steps were too big for a child. The slope was hatched, so to speak, with strange oblique grooves, small terraces overgrown with grass, whose fine shadow pattern was repeated in the oblique grooves of the façade. This made the house behind the spruce look more like a yellow rock than like a building. It seemed uninhabited. The child on the steps was in the entrance not to a house but to a playground.

The blind window was, far and wide, the only one of its kind. It owed its effect to the absence of something ordinarily present: to its opacity. Thanks to its extreme vagueness, it reflected my gaze; and the muddle of languages, the confusion of voices within me fell silent: my whole being fell silent, and read.

I had never thought it possible that I would lose this blind window; I had felt it to be an unalterable sign. Yet one side glance sufficed: the light emanating from it was gone. The window next to it — a “sighted” window, as it were — was pushed open and closed again, by hands belonging to two different people, a very old woman, then a young one. The old woman — as I recognized in the same moment — was more than old, she was dying; with a last burst of revolt she had tried to get out of the room where she was being held fast, to escape through the window grating from death; a face convulsed with horror, with sucked-in lower lip and wide-open eyes, which would never again close unaided.

The window remained empty, the morning sun was reflected in it, but the light which had been bright only a moment before had not just gone out, it had been swallowed up. The child had vanished, too, as if he had been a phantom, and the oblique grooves on the house and the hillside now appeared to be shadows. “Filip Kobal has a thing about appearances.” My history teacher had often said that — a mixture of praise and blame. Today, once again, the “appearance” had been dispelled. Already the grimace of a little girl crying with all her might came my way, and after that there was nothing female, male, or childlike about the crowd. On the sidewalk there was nothing but a huge, hard, bony mass of repulsive yokels, pushing, shoving, getting in one another’s way, under the vigilant eye, peering from every possible angle, of the Chief of State, who, whether as a young partisan leader in an automobile factory, as a white-clad admiral, as an imposing dinner-jacket-wearer on the arm of his equally imposing wife in the lobby of a movie theater, as an imperator’s head cast in concrete in the courtyard of a school, was now the sole ruler over us all. A last searching glance up at the blind window merely reinforced the authority of the state, for, as though I had attracted suspicion with that glance, a policeman beckoned me with a slow movement of his curved forefinger to the other side of the street, where he asked for my papers. Later, it occurred to me that this policeman was the same young man, about my age, who had examined my passport on my arrival the day before. But in that hour of solar eclipse no one seemed to recognize anyone else; it was as though we had all lost our memories.

Counting my steps, I entered the station. A damp stairway led down to the toilets as to a bunker. The usual bunker woman was sitting there; nothing was missing but the bunch of keys at her waist. In the lockless cubicle, I looked in vain for the usual graffiti and drawings; they would have helped me on. There was no faucet over the washbasin, only a hole in the wall. The waiting room upstairs was dark and stank. The first thing I noticed about the other people sitting there was the whiteness of a striking number of bound or plastered limbs. The light didn’t come from the station platform but from the dark corridor in between. Later, I distinguished, here and there, a leather cot over an injured thumb, and the man sitting next to me had a scab in his hair. (I’m not exaggerating, such things caught my eye.) In myself as well, I noticed only what was repellent: the caked clay on my shoes, the black rings under my fingernails. Anyone would have known that I had spent the night in my clothes and hadn’t washed. My scalp itched, and so, though it was midsummer, did the seminary chilblains on my toes. I tried in vain to decipher my next destination on the map; the light that fell was barely enough for the white of the lowlands and the pale blue of the glaciers.

I went out on the platform, where a worker was cracking open the concrete with a pneumatic drill. The morning train to Austria was on the opposite track, ready to leave. The compartments were bright, clean, and almost empty (this train was not yet used, as in later years, by many Yugoslavs for shopping trips to Villach). Again, blue-uniformed train men were standing by the locomotive, along with Austrian border guards, not recognizable as such because they were out of uniform; in their shirtsleeves, with their jackets slung over their shoulders, they all seemed to be waiting for a tardy passenger. All at once, though I didn’t stir from the spot, I was in a hurry. Make up your mind! I felt an almost irresistible urge to return across the border, to go home to my village, my room, my bed, and get my sleep out. But my most immediate refuge was the language, my familiar native German on the side of the locomotive. Heimatbahnhof (home station) would do — for it wasn’t the meaning that mattered but the look of the word — or the legend Arbeitsrichtung (working direction) over the arrow.

Undecided as I was, I felt utterly confused. The pneumatic drill was making star-shaped cracks, as when one walks on the surface of a frozen puddle. One of the cracks reached almost to the soles of my shoes. Shaken by the sound of the drill, I looked down and found the blind window in the gray of the concrete. Again it was a friendly sign meaning “to have time.” Hadn’t I wanted too much with my “kingdom of the world”? Who was I, actually? Looking at the pavement, I saw once and for all who I was: a foreigner, someone who might have some business here but who had no say. I had no claim to so-called human dignity as I did at home in my own country. This realization brought me something more than relief — it brought me serenity.

The Austrian train pulled out. Hadn’t the conductor given me a questioning look? The station became large and luminous. The sparrows, which landed abruptly on the pavement at my feet and were already off again, had sat on the bushes of Rinkenberg only a moment before, and the oval plantain leaf in the roadbed also came from there, a so-called garden escape. With long strides, like decision incarnate, I went into the station and bought a ticket; with long strides, like a man who knows at last that what he is doing is not for himself alone, I took the underpass to the far platform and, after a quick wash at the pump, leapt resolutely into the southwest-bound train as though my jaunt across the border was over and I was now starting on my real journey. I had no sooner settled in my window seat than I fell asleep. If I still preserve an image of the adolescent I was then, with the torn-up pavement under my feet, it is perhaps because the pavement just then was threatening to keel over, just as certain objects impress themselves on our minds only when at the last moment we save them from falling and they rest in our trembling hands, available for examination.

I spent the next few days in the Bohinj region, studying my brother’s two books. Whenever I opened my eyes in the train for fear of missing my stop, I saw in the meadows those long, narrow wooden frames known as “hay harps”: two wooden posts (perhaps made of concrete today) rammed into the ground, and embedded in them a number of parallel bars, on which, under a shingle roof, the first hay of the year was drying. This first crop was full of spring flowers, and the gray mass of hay was shot through with color. The bars extended beyond the posts and suggested bundles of road signs, all pointing in the same direction. The train seemed to be following these closely spaced arrows, which from valley to valley inclined farther westward, and in my sleep the harps on both sides of the tracks took on the shape of an enormous chariot which carries the passengers to their destination without passage of time.

I no longer spent the night in the open, but stayed at a hotel in Bohinjska Bistrica, the biggest village of the region. This I decided to do after seeing the low prices and counting my money. It occurred to me later that, thanks to my teacher’s gift, to some tutoring I had done, and to a story I had sold to a newspaper (“Did you write that yourself?” asked a classmate, shaking his head), I might perfectly well have gone to Greece with the others.

Actually, it was this story I had published, far more than any shortage of money, that had kept me out of the group trip. It was about a young fellow repairing a bicycle in a courtyard. The setting was described in detail, the light, the wind, the rustling of the trees, the rain that was beginning to fall. In the end the hero hears a cry and rushes into the house, where, on the floor of an empty room, he finds his father or his mother — I don’t remember which — dying, his or her eyes reflecting the outside world for the last time. It wasn’t the content that mattered; what alienated my classmates was the mere fact of my writing. Some of them, it’s true, belonged to a drama group, but that I should write and publish my writing struck them all as strange, to say the least. My girlfriend, too. Before even reading my story — she had barely had time to see the page with the title and my name on it — she gave me a strange, disapproving look, which, after she read it, turned to a complex expression compounded of incomprehension, pity, surprise, and, above all, reserve. Later on, I kept remembering that her neck stiffened when I tried to draw her close to me.

But hadn’t I myself provoked this general revulsion? Hadn’t I, on the day when the newspaper appeared, eyed everyone who opened it as someone who would immediately learn of my crime and disgrace me by telling others about it? Much as I had looked forward to publishing this story — a project instigated by my fairy-tale-writing history teacher and promoted by a reporter who wrote local notes — to how at last they’d all see who I was, it struck me afterward as a stigma, and luckily the one place where it did not follow me was the village where in those days — today an advertisement at the entrance to the village announces “Rinkenberg reads The …”—I never saw a newspaper even at the presbytery. But in the places where up until then I had felt most at home, as a commuter in trains and buses, I had disgraced myself forever in my own eyes. Where I had managed to be inconspicuous even to myself, a Nobody, I was now on display as “a certain” So-and-so. In emerging from obscurity I had forfeited my element. The sense of well-being I had known in crowded places, especially while standing in the corridor of a railroad car or in the center aisle of a bus, gave way to a feeling of intense discomfort; I had become identifiable, exposed to a spotlight that singled me out, thus condemning me — and this is what shamed me most of all — to intrude on the privacy of my fellow passengers. Was that why in the last few weeks I had gone to school on my bicycle, a trip which, there and back, had taken me half a day? There were many motives that may have impelled me to take this solitary journey; but one of them was certain: to make people forget that, whether in reality or only in my imagination, I had betrayed myself by becoming a public figure. And now, with every hour in which I was privileged to be unknown, I felt oblivion spreading around me, a feeling that became more salutary with every passing mile. Immediately after my arrival in the Bohinj, I was drawn to a hamlet, marked on the map as Pozabljeno, meaning roughly “the forgotten place” or “forgetfulness.” And in whatever strange places I walked, stood, sat, lay, or ran in the days that followed, people left me alone as though that were the natural thing to do.

Only the teacher in Villach still haunted this no-man’s — landscape, repeating over and over what, when he first saw my story in print, he had cried out with a gesture as though giving a musician his entrance: “Filip Kobal!”—just my name, the first time I ever heard it in that form, Christian name before family name, for up until then I had been addressed exclusively as “Kobal, Filip”; at my recent army medical, for instance. “Forget it” was my silent answer. Yes, I was resolved never to appear in the paper again; never again to expose myself, my family, and my fellow villagers to such disgrace. My dream of fame was a thing of the past. Hadn’t I always known, especially when surrounded by people in the train or bus, even when I myself was reading a book, fascinated by a report of a new invention, enjoying a piece of music, that I would never amount to anything, that sooner or later I was bound to fail, that, as a fortuneteller at a fair, undoubtedly convinced that she was flattering this countrywoman and her son who was patently unfit for farm work, had told my mother, with luck I’d get to be a bookkeeper or some sort of clerk who wouldn’t have to deal with anything but numbers. So wasn’t it part of my destiny to be counting money in a Slovenian hotel room?

The Bohinj is a broad valley surrounded on all sides by mountain ranges, once the base of a glacier, which on its western edge left the large, tranquil, and almost always deserted Bohinj Lake behind it. From its northern bank rises the massif of the Julian Alps, culminating in the still glacier-covered Triglav, or three-headed mountain, a model of which on the lakeshore is used by vacationing children to play on. The mountain range in the south is the last barrier of any size between there and the sea; there the Isonzo (the Slovenian Soa) has its source, and the slopes between which it flows from then on show no tree line. Difficult of access, the Bohinj basin has been remote from the world down through the ages; mule tracks were its only link with the Isonzo Valley and the Friulian Plain, and the eastern route by which I had come had been opened up only when the railroad was built.

Because I grew up on the great Jaunfeld Plain at some distance from the mountains, I have always found it surprising that Austria should be regarded as an Alpine country and dubbed the “Alpine Republic.” (Hardly anyone in our village owned skis, and there was only one sled track, from the edge of the forest down to the road, so gently sloping that you’d hardly got started when you came to a stop.) But in the Bohinj I found myself really surrounded by mountains and felt that I was in an Alpine country, which, to be sure, did not mean chasms, ravines, a sunny and a shady slope, and a narrow sky; despite the dip in the ground, I was on a high plateau with a wide view. If I now close my eyes, what opens up before me is a valley centered on the empty fjord-blue lake, sheltered by the mountains, subdivided by moraine waves.

And yet the Bohinj, at least as seen from the slightly raised railway station, is a busy region. When I first got out of the train, I saw and smelled hardly anything but wood. On the freight siding I saw piles of whole tree trunks, of beams, boards, and laths, and in among the houses I heard power saws. In all the days I spent there, I never saw an idle person; anyone who appeared at first sight to be doing nothing proved to be waiting for a bus at one of the unmarked bus stops (a board fence, a weighbridge), waiting for a sawed pine tree to fall, for fine weather in which to turn the hay, or merely, like the old cook at the inn, for milk to come to a boil or whatever she was cooking to be done. The soldier I saw one day standing quietly by the side of the road proved, when I came closer, to be holding a radio to his ear, and the children who seemed to be tearing leaves off the bushes for no apparent purpose turned out to be scouts learning to follow a trail. The church was in the middle of a meadow and was big enough to be a cathedral. On Sunday, a long line formed outside the confessional. If anyone left the church after unloading his sins, he took barely time enough for a breather before going back to his prie-dieu to say his penance. The people in this valley did not emanate the tranquil assurance of old settlers; theirs was the impatience, the alertness, the constant guardedness of newcomers, which often, in the light of its geographical situation, made me look upon the Bohinj as a separate European country. I almost deplored the lack of an idiot or a drunkard, who might for a moment, in moving about this industrious community, have distracted these people from their hardworking seriousness. But then one day, while looking for places in which to study my two books, while pausing, looking back, turning off the path, feeling the grass here and there (was it soft enough to sit on?), leaning against a tree, tearing myself loose from the resin and staggering on, I realized that I myself might have been mistaken for just such a one.

The hotel where I was staying was called the Black Earth after a peak in the mountain range to the south, a big house, dating from before the World Wars, in which I began at once to look for the blind window. As the only guests apart from myself were a few mountain climbers, I had a room with four beds, enough for a whole family, to myself. It was on the second floor, above the entrance; from one window I looked out on a row of spruces, perhaps what was left of a forest, which ran straight through the village, and from the other side on a torrent which passed right next to the house, with a wild roar that drowned out all the trucks and power saws. The only sound that came through was an occasional train whistle or the sudden boom of a military plane. I could see the spruces (but not the water) sitting down, so I moved the little wooden table to the window on that side, and tried the different chairs. As I couldn’t make up my mind in favor of any of them, I lined them up at the table and switched from time to time.

The first day, I unpacked the two books but didn’t open them. I left my room door open, because, what with the roaring of the brook, a closed room would have made me feel cut off from the world; as it was, a clatter or some shrill sound rose up to me now and then from the kitchen or dining room. On the wall of the corridor, just across from my door, hung a black-and-brown stuffed grouse in an attitude of courtship — outstretched neck, swollen from screeching, eyes closed — just as it had been shot. The keyboard next to it, bearing keys of every imaginable shape behind a glass pane, looked something like an almost complete butterfly collection. At the very first moment, I had the impression that I had seen all this before, or better still, that I had returned here not to an earlier life but to one dimly foreseen, though more real, more palpable than anything I could have imagined. Was it because of the table, chairs, and bedsteads, which reminded me of my father as carpenter, because of the spray outside the windows, which reminded me of my father as flood-control worker? Or because of my brother’s letter, in which he had used the odd expression “ancestral country” in speaking of the Bohinj? For it wasn’t just my room and the house that I seemed to have rediscovered so palpably, but also the town of Bistrica, the “transparent,” the “clear,” the “brook village,” and the whole valley: a child marvels at it, a man of twenty contemplates it, a man of forty-five surveys it, and in this moment all three are one and ageless. And Bistrica was very different from the usual village; it was more like the suburb of a city, which would grow as a number of such suburbs coalesced; a development that seemed foreshadowed by the few big buildings, the self-service store on the periphery, and the cathedral in the meadow.

It seemed so inappropriate for the son of a poor countryman to sit down at a table in a restaurant and expect the waiter to serve him that at first, apart from crackers and cookies from the self-service store, my daily fare consisted of the bread and apples my sister had put into my sea bag. They were the last apples of the year before, so old that I had only to pick one up and the seeds would rattle. I didn’t eat bread and apples because I had to but because they were, and remained for many years, my favorite food; the word “delicious,” I felt, applied to nothing so much as to the tart sweetness of apples eaten along with caraway-seasoned, barely salted rye bread. Bread, the apples, and my clasp knife were lined up on my windowsill. Looking at the floured loaf, I thought of the far side of the moon, though of course it waned more in a week than the planet in a month, and soon the lesser moons would be gone, too; the last slices were so thin that, held up to the light, they suggested a network of transparent snow crystals, and before long they, too, had melted away.

But my story became a real fairy tale only when I opened the books and found a bank note inserted in each of them like an endpaper. It was then that I remembered my sister saying that on my travels I should “eat one hot meal every day”; then at least my stomach “won’t feel that it’s away from home.” As in the dream of finding money, which I often had in those days, I began to see bank notes everywhere, and regretted that my sister hadn’t baked one into the bread or pushed one under the skin of an apple. Folding the bank notes and sticking them into my back trouser pocket — no one in the family possessed a billfold — I noticed that I was repeating the gesture with which my father, after every game, casting a long look of triumph and vengeance around him, would pocket his winnings. This enabled me to regard the money his daughter had filched from him as my winnings and to change it into dinars. That same evening, I ordered a hot meal with an unwavering voice and, as I thought, no accent. In the waiter’s face I detected an attentive look, which today I interpret as a smile.

The first of the two books was a copybook with hard covers in which my brother had made notes during his studies at the agricultural school in Maribor. Because it was thick and with its hard cover smelled like a genuine book, I had always regarded it as one. Along with the other tome, a big Slovenian — German dictionary published in the nineteenth century, a packet of letters, a uniform cap from the Second World War (son), a bayonet and a gas mask from the First World War (father), it had ordinarily been kept in the chest that stood on the wooden balcony under the eaves of our house. Until I began to read, these were the only books in the house, and they were always kept in the blue chest, half out of doors. When I looked at them, I never took them into the living room, but sat on the chest, as though exposure to the weather were inseparable from such reading — the wind on the pages, the changing light, and getting spattered now and then by the rain blowing under the overhang of the roof. Where these books had their place was also my place, for my father, normal as he found it to study the Sunday paper by the living-room window, wanted no books in the house; he muttered angrily whenever he caught me indoors with a book, and a moment later my page would be streaked with whitish trails.

How, over the years, I searched for places in which to read books! I would sit behind the milk stand at the roadside, on the bench by the distant wayside shrine, on a spit of land above the sluice in the Drava, at my feet the dammed-up river, so smooth that the water below me resembled the sky overhead … Once I climbed Rinken Hill; shortly before the top, in a fern-overgrown clearing with a single pine tree in the middle, I found the place that every reader must have dreamed of: close to the tree a patch of the soft grass locally known as lady-hair, a bed of natural cushions, no bed of vice but a throne of the spirit, which, I was confident, would blow upon me from a book named Fear and Trembling. But I didn’t get beyond the first page or, rather, the first sentence of it. My eyes were not opened to the sentences that followed until one afternoon in the school corridor, where I was sitting with other students who were doing their homework. And, along with the words, I took in the details of my surroundings, the grain of the wooden bench, the part in the hair of the boy in front of me, the lamp at the end of the corridor, and then at last I heard the wind in the pine tree, which had suddenly died down as I opened the book in the clearing. That place, all places, however pleasing, however inviting to the reader, disappeared as soon as I tried to settle into them; made illiterate by my father’s grumbling, I crept away. To this day, I have known no settled reading place but that chest, long ago chopped up for firewood, on the balcony of my father’s house. While looking for reading places, I learned only one thing; namely, that I could not withdraw into solitude, and especially not with a book.

And so, after the usual wanderings, I tried the station waiting room in its ring of chestnut trees, the graveyard, beside a tombstone with a falling airplane scratched into it, the stone bridge over the outlet of the lake. In the end, I studied my brother’s copybook in my room at the inn with the grouse, dark, in the corner of one eye, and in the other, bright, the washstand with its bowl and pitcher. Before me, the tip of a spruce guided my gaze to a neighboring house with roof tiles running from left to right like the lines in the copybook.

Of course, I had looked at the book any number of times before that, but had been unable to make sense of it, because the classes in the agricultural school were conducted in Slovenian. What had interested me were the drawings, and above all the handwriting. It was clear and even; the long, narrow letters leaned slightly to the left and, as I leafed through the book, gave the impression of steadily falling, endless rain. As there were no curlicues or loops, no shortcuts or sloppiness, and never an unconnected letter, standing alone in the middle of a word, there had been no need to resort to block letters. Yet this script differed from the picturesque calligraphy of a nineteenth-century document by its smoothness, which also characterized the drawings that went with it. In looking at this writing, I had the impression that it did more than record something, that it moved hand in hand with its subject, each lined-up letter carrying its image, unerringly, toward a goal. And here in the Bohinj, it seemed to me that my brother’s handwriting was right for this new country; the handwriting of a settler, of a man about to start on a journey, whose writing is an intrinsic part of this starting-out and not the mere record of a continued action.

In one of his letters he observes that a handwriting expert would find that “all our [the family‘s] scribblings have something in common.” I have always seen pride and presumption in that sentence. His handwriting had never been childlike; even in his earliest school copybook, he had written like someone who takes a responsible part in an action, a leader, a discoverer.

Actually, the whole family was famous, even outside the village, for its, to quote the roadmender and sign painter, “masterful” handwriting (“The Kobals don’t write just with their hands,” he said, holding out his arm in a grandiose gesture), which, partly because there was no recognized “master” in the whole region, brought us the reputation of being a noble, self-confident family; and this we showed by writing as we did — not “like painting,” not “like printing,” but precisely with the unmistakable “Kobal gesture.” As I’ve said, my mother was much in demand as a letter writer and was regarded almost as an official. If I questioned one of our neighbors about my brother, he would usually, after telling a few anecdotes, talk about Gregor Kobal and his orchard, “as carefully, generously, and inventively laid out as his handwriting” (so the roadmender). Even my sister awoke from her confusion and sat very straight, a picture of authority, when she signed “Ursula Kobal” on the receipt for her early pension.

The only exceptions were the oldest and the youngest members of the family, my father and I. The one had too heavy, the other too uneven a hand. It was obvious that my father had had no proper schooling; in writing as in reading, he seemed to spell out the words. To the long letters my mother wrote me at the seminary, he added at the most one word, signature and greeting in one: “Father.” For a while, after he was pensioned, he didn’t know what to do with himself. I thought it might be a good idea to give him a copybook and encourage him to write the story of his life; for, when he tried to talk about it, he would falter time and again. Often after a long silence he would make a start, begin with a deep-voiced “And then …”—and finally break off, saying: “It can’t be told. It’s got to be written.” But a few months later, when I looked at the copybook, I found not a single word, though he had had a whole winter’s time, but only numbers, my brother’s APO number, my laundry-mark number, our house number, and all our birth dates, gouged into the paper like cuneiform. (It was only with his carpenter’s pencil that he could make light lines; before you knew it, he could draw a complete diagram on the wood he was going to work with.)

As for me, I often changed my handwriting; in the middle of a word my letters would get bigger, I’d push them back, then forward again. I’d begin every paragraph with the utmost care and then — as one can tell now by looking at the writing — start racing in my impatience to finish it. The worst of it was that I didn’t really regard my handwriting as my own; today it has become regular, but it still strikes me as artificial, as an imitation; unlike my brother, I have never had a handwriting of my own, my present style was copied from him; the moment I stop concentrating, it loses its affected regularity and degenerates into a formless scribble that I myself am unable to read, a picture of harassed helplessness in place of the grandiose family gesture. It took the typewriter to teach me to write properly. Before that, the only writing that suited me was in the air, without any instrument, using my forefinger for a pencil. I couldn’t see what I was writing, the movement of my finger sufficed and that was what gave me the feeling that I had a personal handwriting with a rhythm of its own. And besides, when I wrote in the air, I could be slow, pause, break off. But otherwise, convulsively clutching the foreign instrument, the mere sound of which threw me off, bent over the paper instead of sitting erect, I rushed from line to line, not knowing what I was doing, giving off sour, unproductive sweat, incapable of raising my head, with no eyes for my surroundings. It was only when I concentrated on my subject that my writing looked at all natural to me; then script and content seemed to take shape side by side.

And where, when writing, could I concentrate on my subject? In the dark, for one thing. There, stroke by stroke, pencil and fingers grew together and a writer’s hand developed, beautifully heavy and deliberate, no idle scribble but a recording. Then, when I looked in the light at what I had written, I saw my thought framed in a script that seemed to combine my brother’s fine inventive hand and my father’s halting, self-educated one.

My brother’s copybook dealt mostly with fruit growing. With the help of the dictionary, I managed to get the gist of it. Though the work of a man who was not yet twenty, it did not consist of lecture notes but was, rather, the record of a young scientist’s independent research. A second section was a kind of treatise, made up of reflections on the subject, and the end a catalogue of rules and suggestions. The whole was a student’s notes and a textbook in one.

Essentially, the book revolved around my brother’s experience of planting and improving apple trees in his own orchard at home. He spoke of suitable soil (“loose and rich,” “flat, slightly vaulted ground”), orientation (“east to west, but sheltered from the wind”), the best times for the various operations (often determined by the equinoxes or the rising of certain constellations, or by rural holidays).

I couldn’t help reading my brother’s observations on grafting and on transplanting young trees as in part a Bildungsroman. He had carried the young plants from the nursery to his garden “along with their earth” and arranged them in the same order as in the nursery, though much farther apart, because the branches of one tree should never touch those of another. He had woven the root branches into protective baskets before inserting them in their holes. The trees grown from seed on the spot had proved more resistant but also less fruitful than the transplants. Leafy crowns were advantageous, as they provided a roof under which more fruit would form. Branches that inclined toward the ground bore more fruit than those that soared skyward (though the fruit hanging higher up was less likely to rot). As for grafting, he used only branches pointing eastward. They were pencil-shaped and the cuts chamfered to let the rainwater run off. The cutting itself was done not with a blow but by pulling the knife through so the bark would remain intact. He had always chosen scions that had once borne fruit, “because otherwise we shall have worked not for a yield but for shade,” and he had never inserted a scion in a fork between two other scions, for, if he did, it would draw nourishment away from them. Of pruning, he wrote that the earlier he did it, the more “wood” he obtained; the later, the more “fruit”; the wood just “shot up,” while the fruit would “bow down.”

At the beginning of the copybook he explained that originally there had been only one tree in his orchard; it had run wild and bore no fruit. He had driven a spike into the bark at the spot that was freest from lichen; from the festering wound had sprung a shoot with one promising eye after another. The spike, his own invention, had been more like an auger — instead of hole-plugging dust, it produced shavings that could be blown out. (Beside the description was a drawing of a “Kobal auger.”)

But what made a deeper impression on me than such incidental pedagogic metaphors, such allusive meanings, were the concrete details, the mere mention of things which up until then had been only a jumble to me. The bast my brother used to tie his scion to the branch, the wood splint (not round but square) that held it straight, the pebbles that moderated the temperature of the soil at the roots and protected them from the groundwater, took on a radiance that held my attention. Thus a light fell on the orchard, which has been neglected since then and run wild like the tree with which it began, and in the manuscript I caught sight of a blue-bordered enclosure, where, confronted with the rich diversity of “my thing” (as my brother called his orchard), I gazed around and around as though I stood in my brother’s place at the center of it. “We shall not have worked for shade”—that was the battle cry which now, at the table beside the window, I shouted into the roaring of the torrent, as the black grouse in the corner of one eye and the white washbasin in the other swung across my field of vision like two intersecting pendulums.

Undoubtedly, the words owed some of their power to the fact that I did not immediately understand them but had to translate them, not from a foreign language into my own, but directly from an intimation — incomprehensible as much of the Slovene was to me, it seemed somehow familiar — into an image: into the orchard, a branch prop, a piece of wire. My brother referred to certain of his activities, such as removing sterile shoots, as “blind work.” Possibly such translation transformed blind reading into sighted reading, an unseeing activity into intelligent work. It seemed to me that even my father, if he had come into the room, would have left his grumbling on the threshold and, at the sight of my sparkling translator’s eyes, expressed his satisfaction with his son: “Yes, that is his game!”

Even where in the second part of his copybook my brother passed from his particular orchard to a general discussion of different varieties of apple, it was his own trees that appeared to me; where he was merely describing a method, I continued to read a story about a place and its hero; and it was also to them that the concluding remarks addressed to every fruit grower referred, to the effect that in a “thing” so closely akin to wisdom there could be neither professors nor students, and that what mattered most in fruit growing was “the master’s presence.”

What distinguished my brother’s orchard from others was its situation outside the village, surrounded by fields and pastureland, bounded on one side by a small mixed forest, whereas most gardens and orchards began right behind the houses and, seen from the road, gave the impression of long rows of trees, ending, as one was bound to suppose, in fallow land, with Rinkenberg as an island of apples and pears at its edge. My brother’s trees were small as in a plantation, and each tree, except for the usual plum and cider-pear trees at the entrance (intended, one might have thought, to mask the nature of the orchard), bore fruit of a different taste; on some trees, indeed, the variety changed from one tier of branches to the next. And most extraordinary of all: among the cider-pear trees there was one secret branch, known only to the family, that bore fruit which looked deceptively like that of the next branch but which, when you bit into it, did not — as we said in the family—“pucker your asshole” but opened your eyes.

The whole orchard, if you entered it from the side opposite the forest, had a more and more experimental arrangement, which had many advantages. After the first corner, marked by a lone poplar, which looked odd among the fruit trees, it spread out until at the edge of the forest it was several rows wide. Though unfenced like the village orchards, which thus had the air of public woodland, the area beyond the poplar was hidden. One reason for this was that, crossing the open fields, one suddenly, without having seen a single house, came across branches laden with the finest apples; and another was the hollow in which my brother had laid out his orchard. From flat ground one unexpectedly stepped down into the orchard and then at its end just as abruptly up into the little forest. The hollow was not deep; one became aware of it only at its edge, and only there did one glimpse the tops of the small fruit trees on a level with the tips of one’s shoes; from far off, from the village or the road, one saw only the strange poplar, sometimes transformed into a torch by lightning, rising from treeless fields.

That depression — so the geography teacher had taught me — was formed by a prehistoric brook, an offshoot of the groundwater which in this particular plain does not stand still but flows down to the Drava in a regular, unbroken stream, hardly “the length of a walking stick” below the earth’s surface. At the site of the present orchard, this stream of groundwater had welled up, carrying the soil with it, and washed out a bowl, whence it had dug a narrow ditch leading down to the river. Then the brook had seeped away — the ditch was locally known as the “still brook”—so that the bottom of the oval bowl formed by the spring was dry; the water was no longer a visible single stream but had sunk and joined the endless underground flow or, in the form of “sky water” (a literal translation of what my brother called rain in his copybook), carried the fertile decomposed soil from the walls to the bottom of the bowl. (The bowl, to be sure, had its vegetation-clogged outlet where the ditch began.)

Around the trees grew orchard grass, more sparse than meadow grass, and hardly any flowers. Where it arrived at the poplar tree, the sand track, which led across the fields to the edge of the hollow, acquired a middle strip of grass; on the way downhill, it narrowed and deep shining ruts made by braking cart wheels appeared; in among the rows of trees, it became a solid strip of grass, the “green track” (as we called it in the family), which ran straight as an arrow over the slightly vaulted bottom of the bowl to the farthermost tree of the orchard, not only distinctly lighter than the ground around it, but positively luminous beside it.

In its hollow, the orchard was sheltered from the wind; only the warm fall winds from the south touched its bottom. Thus, the trunks of the trees were perfectly straight, while the branches, most noticeably in the winter, grew evenly in all directions. The orchard was also sheltered from noise, from either the village or the road; apart from church bells and sirens, one heard only its own sounds, in particular the buzzing not so much of flies as of bees in the blossoms or of wasps in the fallen fruit. It had a smell of its own, heavy, cidery, which came more from the windfall fruit fermenting in the grass than from the trees; it was not until autumn, in the cellar, that the remaining apples became truly fragrant; before that, only if you held them up to your nose (but then the smell was something!). In the spring the blossoms were a solid white, but in the summer the orchard’s color changed from tree to tree; the pale green of the early apples, to which passersby were free to help themselves, was the first to disappear.

Waiting for the different kinds of fruit to ripen was a part of childhood. Especially after a storm, I was eager to run out to the orchard, where at least one marvelous apple (or, under the improved cider branch, a pear) would be lying in the grass. Often there would be a race with my sister, who was long past childhood. We both knew in advance under which tree we’d be likely to find something, and each of us wanted to be first; it was not so much a matter of having and eating as of finding and holding in our hands. Autumn fruit picking was one of the few physical occupations in which I did not reach out blindly (and as often as not miss my aim). The trees were so small that one hardly needed the ladders generally associated with orchards. Our chief implement was a long pole, to the top of which a sack with stiff, jagged edges was attached. Even today, at this very moment, I can feel in my arms the jolt that occurred when an apple fell from its branch and rolled down to the other apples in the sack.

The crates being filled at the foot of the trees were also a part of my childhood, the lemon-yellow in one, and in the next the special wine-red, whose veins one could see extending from the peel through the flesh to the core of the fruit. Only the cider-pear trees could be shaken; then a loud rat-tat-tat resounded through the whole orchard. Instead of crates, there would be a ring of thick sacks around the pear trees.

Later came my deprived youth, my years at the seminary, during which I missed the fruit harvest; no more piled crates; at the most, a few apples would go into my suitcase before I left home and a few others in the course of the year, more and more shriveled as time went on.

Then my mother’s illness, my father’s stiffening limbs, my unlearning (yes, that is the word) of almost every kind of physical work which, after all, had contributed no less than my reading on the balcony to my childhood dreams — chopping wood, mending roofs, driving cattle, binding sheaves (for me at least, these activities never represented hard work, or, if they did, it never lasted more than a few hours).

Then came the decades of absence, during which the orchard was utterly neglected; only my sister kept going there for a time with a small basket and picking what apples she could reach with her bare hands; and then she, too, stopped going. Just one more dream about my brother’s orchard: early apples lying pale yellow on the snow, and the family sitting at a table in the sun nearby.

In the years after my return, I visited the orchard now and then. There is still no house in the vicinity, and the old sand track leading to it, like the green track down in the hollow, has become solid grass. The trees are covered over with lichen.

The last time I was there, the rain had washed away what was left of the dam my brother had built of sticks, stones, and clay outside the hole leading to the ditch. It was a winter’s day and the prevailing color in the orchard was the green of the lichen which completely covered every one of the trees and in places had destroyed the bark. The lichen seemed to weigh down the trees, and indeed there were broken branches, shaped like antlers, lying in the grass. The grass was no grass, it was moss; the few blades that pretended to be grass were colorless and as hard as bast, entangled with blackberry trailers that had crept in from the forest and the ditch. The most striking sight was the ash, an intruder from the forest, which had literally taken possession of one apple tree. Its seed must have taken root at the foot of the apple tree, and in growing, the young ash had half enfolded the old fruit tree. Through a slit in the living tree, one could see the dead one, from which the bark had been stripped. The graft scions, previously recognizable on the smooth, shining bark, had long been completely hidden by lichen; only at one point was their presence indicated by a square wooden splint fastened to a branch and lying on top of it. Over the years, a strange reversal had occurred; this branch, first the thinner of the two, had thickened and now carried the former splint wrapped in rusty wire on its back as a useless appendage.

The whole bowl was now shot through with gray; the only color in it, apart from the green track, was the very different green, the verdigris green of the clumps of mistletoe in the split crowns of the trees. The few shriveled apples on the branches were left over from previous years; those lying in the moss below burst like puffballs if one stepped on them.

Only one tree, leafless, was full of this year’s apples that no one had picked; but time and again their yellow was blotted out by the gray and black of the starlings and blackbirds, which laid claim to every single apple and filled the orchard with their incessant pecking and beak-smacking. I was thankful for the train whistle in the distance, the crowing of a cock, the rat-tat-tat of a moped. Through the wild grapevines that covered the drain hole I seemed to hear, as though amplified by the narrow passage, the roar of the river far below.

I thought of running away from this world-forsaken hollow, but decided to stay. The shed on the slope leading up to the forest, formerly a shelter from the rain or midday sun, had vanished. Its remains at the edge of the green track, along with a pile of cast-off support poles, looked like something halfway between a pyre and a “hay harp.” I stood there and waited, for nothing in particular.

It began to snow, just a few isolated flakes, which fell abruptly from the clouds, described great curves in the air, and disappeared. I remembered my father’s habit of walking up and down the green track before every important decision, such as whether to make a will or to spend any considerable sum of money, and now I did likewise. I remembered one of the sayings that he used to direct at the corner where his missing son’s picture hung: “The custodian of a run-down orchard — that’s what I am.”

Turning at the end of the track, I raised my head. In the pile of planks and poles I glimpsed a crucifix towering into the sky and knelt before it in thought. When I went closer, the crucifix turned into a sculpture, and in the same way the rows of trees became in my eyes, as I thought literally, a “monument to my noble ancestors.”

The longer I stayed there, walked back and forth, changed direction, stood still, turned my head, the more distinctly the site, a moribund orchard, was transformed in my mind into a work, a form transmitting and honoring the human hand and offering the advantage of being translatable into another form by another hand, for example, into written characters on the side of that bowl, traversed by abandoned cow paths — white and still whiter lines, gradually making their appearance in the snow. Behind the ring of lichen and mistletoe, the eyes of the branches were rejuvenated; the dingy light on the roots was shot through with flint sparks; and from the frame at the center of the garden came a south wind, which later arose time and again in the closed rooms of the house.

Then, at the sight of the fungus shaped like a peaked cap on one of the tree trunks, I thought of one of my brother’s letters, in which he mentioned just such a goba which he was carrying in the dusk of a Holy Saturday while walking around the Easter bonfire. That, he said, was the “holiest and merriest” part; after that “the feast was over, and not even the sausages could give me so much pleasure.” And at the sight of the poles, I thought of the forked hazel branch on which my father, who was often cruel to animals, had once spitted a snake he had cut in two while mowing: and now the snake, which all that day and down through the years had waited on that hazel branch, a more lasting emblem of the place than any sun-drenched fruit, vanished. Then, turning to my forefathers in the emptiest corner of the garden and at the same time searching for the eyes of a child, diverted by the monotone of the lamentation for the dead and led out of the “eternal kingdom of separation” (my brother’s words), I spoke in a tone of defeat rather than triumph. My exact words were: “Yes, I will tell you.”

For each of the three years my brother spent at the agricultural school, there is one class photo. In the first, the young men all have open shirt collars, rolled-up sleeves, and dark, knee-length aprons; they are standing or sitting on a broad, sunny path bordered by fruit trees in such full bloom that not a single leaf can be seen. In the background, the vertical rows of a vineyard just beginning to put forth shoots lead upward to the chapel on the hill. The white of the flowering trees is repeated in the spring clouds. The shadows are short. It’s during the midday break, my brother hasn’t even found time to comb his hair, a strand of which is hanging down over his forehead; as soon as the picture is taken, they will all go back to work. The group is pressed close together; a few of the boys are resting one arm on the shoulder of a neighbor, who, however, never responds to this gesture; one, the youngest, is holding on to both his neighbors. Because of the sun, none of the boys’ eyes can be seen. My brother is the one at the back, slightly taller than the others, or possibly it’s only his thick mat of hair that makes him look taller; his face alone is cut off by the head in front of it; as though he had moved into that position at the last moment. An airily dressed woman is walking down the path behind the group.

The next picture shows much less of the surroundings but more of the class. The setting is a path flanked by a row of spruces with a lamppost in front of it and a tiled roof behind it. None of the group is without a jacket; some are even wearing ties with enormous knots, and some show watch chains extending from vest button down to vest pocket. In the foreground, a student is sitting cross-legged, with a small keg of wine on his lap and a tilted bottle in his hand. The faded flowers by the side of the path give the picture an autumnal look, corroborated by the boy with an ear of wheat in his breast pocket instead of a handkerchief or fountain pen. My brother, sitting in the front row, is among those with an open shirt collar; one oversized lapel of his jacket is visible, but neither breast pocket nor buttonhole. He alone is resting his hands, one on top of the other, on one knee. He is looking to one side of the picture, and though sitting erect, he seems relaxed; he is not posing, that is his natural self. These are no longer youngsters as they were last year, but young men; it’s not just for the photographer that they’ve closed their mouths and that one has propped his hands on his hips.

In the last picture, the class is smaller; they are standing outside the school building, of which one sees only a wall and a bit of the windows. In the front, on round chairs, sit the teachers, who, except for the pale priest, look more like rich peasants, older relatives, or godparents than teachers. All the students are wearing ties; none has his arm around anyone’s shoulder; they are grown men now; my brother, too, is twenty and holds his hands behind his back. Having learned the farmer’s trade, he will now go back to a country where a different language from his own is spoken. He is looking southward, not to the north, where he belongs. All the young Slovene peasants of the class of ’38 are looking straight ahead; not a single jutting chin, as though they embodied, perhaps not a state, but something else. My brother’s face has filled out; his good eye has narrowed and, seen from the side, looks like a cleft; only the blind one protrudes round and white, as though it had always seen more than the other.

An odd thing about our family was that stories were seldom told about anyone’s childhood but my father’s. Over and over again (though none of us had been present and it was all a matter of hearsay), we would tell one another how as a child the old man sitting there had walked in his sleep. One night he had got up and taken his blanket to the table where the others were still sitting. Leaving his blanket there, he had gone back to bed and started wailing that he was cold. Or how the child would roam around for days, remembering nothing. In the end, he found his way home, but, afraid to go in, started in the gray of dawn to sweep the yard as though in preparation for Sunday, to show that he was back. Or how, even as a small child, he had had such a temper that one day, when someone made him angry, he had run out of the house, come back with half a tree trunk that he could hardly drag through the doorway, and with it attacked whoever had aroused his anger; most frightening of all had been the gesture with which he threw the tree trunk down at the other’s feet! Another strange thing was how much my father enjoyed hearing this family folklore about his childhood (usually told by his daughter); he would chuckle or tears would come to his eyes, or he’d clench his fists as though his rage were still with him; and in the end he would cast a triumphant look around: the winner!

Concerning my brother’s childhood, on the other hand, I have retained only one anecdote. It seems that he once walked from end to end of the village with his sister, farting for her benefit the whole way. Apart from that, there was only the sad story of how he had lost his eye. He does not appear in an active role until the age of seventeen, when he set out for the agricultural school across the border. But then, on his very first vacation, he presented himself to the family as a discoverer, not only of new farming methods but, above all, of the Slovene language. Up until then, Slovene larded with German had been his dialect, the dialect of our region; now it became his written language, which he used in his notebooks and in letters and jottings. For these he always carried about with him a dictionary, a pencil, and slips of paper, in addition to the usual penknife and bits of string, and continued to do so later on, from one battlefield to the next. He wanted everyone else in the family to imitate him and at last show loyalty to their origins, whether in the city, in public offices, or on the train. My father, however, didn’t want to; his wife couldn’t; my sister was mute at the time, preoccupied with her broken heart; and I myself hadn’t been born yet. Though our mother’s Slovene was negligible, my brother calls it “our mother tongue” in his first letter from Maribor, and adds: “We are what we are, and no one can force us to be Germans.” He was almost an adult when he left home, and unlike me, he went of his own free will. He saw nothing foreign in the foreign country; instead, he found “our most essential possession” (this in a letter) — namely, his language; after seventeen years of silence and farting, he had become a self-assured speaker; in fact, as some of his slips of paper showed, he had turned out to be a glib punster (which fits in with the photo of him standing in the middle of the village with his hat askew, supporting himself on one foot and holding the other far to one side). He was the first in the family who, at least during his school days in the south, did not suffer from homesickness. The school, not far from the “big city” of Maribor, was his second home. And it was he who returned from his travels through Slovenia with the story of the executed peasant revolutionary Gregor Kobal. Kobal was one of the most common names in the Kobarid graveyard. He had looked it up in the local baptismal registers, going further and further back, until at the end of the seventeenth century he found the record of the rebel’s birth. Whereupon he appointed Gregor Kobal our ancestor.

Yet my brother never actually became an insurrectionary; even during the war, later on, he never quite made it. He was reputed to be the gentlest of the family, and to judge by his letters, he was something else that I’ve met with only in a few children: pious. He often used the word “holy”; in his usage, however, it applied not to the church, heaven, or any other place outside the world, but always to everyday life — getting up in the morning, going to work, meals, routine activities. “At home, where everything is done in so lively and holy a way,” he wrote in a letter from the Russian front. Once again, I’m reminded of his “holiest and merriest” walk around the Easter bonhre — and Pentecost was for him the feast day when “it’s glorious to go out to the fields bright and early to mow in the holy hours.” A white cloth spread on a table for a soldiers’ Mass was “something to fortify my poor soul”; at home he sang the Hallelujah aloud in chorus with the others, but at the front he “mumbled it softly to myself.” And in his last letter he wrote: “I have seen and experienced the filth of the world, and there is nothing more beautiful than our faith.” (According to him, to be sure, faith came alive only in one’s mother tongue; when after the end of the First Republic one was allowed to pray and sing only in German, to his ears that was no longer “holy,” just a “caterwauling that I can’t bear to hear.”) Another aspect of his piety was the fervid irony with which he spoke of home when he was far away. He refers to our few acres as our “lands,” or as the “Kobal estate”; the rooms in the house, including kitchen, barn, and stable, became “apartments”; and he calls on his “revered family to gather around the table and study” his letters.

It was this irony that deterred him from active rebellion during the war; his indignation was expressed only in his letters. Hearing that a neighborhood family had been deported to Germany, he wrote that he had “but one wish … to tear that man limb from limb … but the thought of my parents, my brother and sister, holds back my rage.” Thus, it was probably legend when my mother told us that, after a so-called farm leave, her son had deserted to join the partisans and become a fighter. My guess is that he simply disappeared, no one knows where. It is inconceivable that he would ever have joined in bellowing warlike partisan songs at the top of his lungs — but quite possible that he and a few others made their way to some hidden clearing, a secret patch of farmland, and that from there, looking over his shoulder, he addressed the following speech to the warlords: “I will now say to you the word that is often heard at the bowling alley at home, when the ball misses the tenpins!” That, in one of his letters from the front, is his euphemistic way of saying “Shit!” He was indeed a singer, but not a regimented one — you might have caught him singing with friends after a few drinks; he was a dancer too, but not a stamping, heavy-footed one, more a merry wag, dancing on one foot at the edge of the dance floor.

After his disappearance, the village thought him dead, and like all the village dead he was soon forgotten, except by a priest or two; few of the boys his own age who might have talked about him came home from the war, and the girl who was thought to be his fiancee married someone else and never spoke of him. He had left home too early to be remembered as a maypole climber or as a soloist in church, and soon after his return from school the young peasant with the apron became “the soldier Gregor Kobal,” exchanging, as the saying went, “field blue-denim for field gray.”

But at home he was honored. During my childhood he was so much talked of that it seems to me now as though he were there the whole time, as though I even heard an additional voice in every conversation, as though all heads kept turning toward the absent figure in the empty corner. It was chiefly my mother who brought him alive with her talk, while my father was the custodian of his belongings, not only of his orchard but also of his clothes and his two books. Only later did it occur to me that my parents’ forehead-to-forehead whisperings in the sickroom may have been less an expression of married love than a union in mourning for their dearly beloved son and that their two foreheads may have been meant to form a bridge for his still-hoped-for return. It is certain that man and wife, each in his own way, worshipped their missing son as an “example”—these were the words of my godless mother—“of the son of man,” and that at news of his coming she would immediately have prepared “his apartment,” scrubbed the threshold, and hung a wreath over the front door, while my father would have borrowed the neighbor’s white horse, harnessed it to the spit-and-polished barouche, and, with tears of joy running down his nose, driven to meet him.

Only my sister opposed this worship (because, or so my parents believed, she blamed him for the shipwreck of her love). She contended that he had definitely cast his one eye on women, but had had no luck with them because of his disfigurement; that he had complained incessantly when tilling the soil, especially in the heat on the steeper slopes (“stinking business”); that he had come home from agricultural school as a propagandist for the Slovenian language and sowed dissension in house and village; that, in particular, he had sinned against his beloved Holy Ghost by giving up hope long before the war, and refusing to marry (after the girl had literally proposed to him) on the ground that he was sure to die young.

It is true that my brother’s letters and jottings over the years are outspoken in their despair. First because of machines—“It looks as if they will soon replace us all, and then there will be no need for me to come home”; then, at the beginning of the war, he expressed the belief that he would be “a soldier forever.” His written curses become more and more frequent. On all-day marches in the fine spring weather he “hears no birdsong,” “sees no flowers by the roadside,” and fears that he is losing his voice: “In another year I won’t be able to talk. Even now we are as shy as animals in the high mountains; we disappear when we hear someone coming. Our temperament needs harmony; without harmony, nothing can give us pleasure.” Every day the same, no sign of any Sunday or holiday. He refuses to think about the past “and would like best to do everything in reverse.” In the end, he curses not only the war but the world as well: “I curse the world!”

I for my part, whether as listener or as reader, have never brought myself to believe in a brother who had lost hope. Haven’t appearances (“Filip Kobal has a thing about appearances”) always impressed me more than the most established fact? And what were these appearances? Didn’t they include the way my sister paused, slowed down, and grew thoughtful when she spoke against her missing brother? She stopped making faces the moment her brother came up in the conversation, and her usual blinking, ordinarily so persistent and violent, became much less frequent. She seemed to wake up. A moment before, her speech had been muddled and cottony as though she’d been talking in her sleep, and now she drew a breath before opening her mouth, tilted her head slightly, and paid attention to every word she said.

Another such “appearance” was especially evident in Gregor’s writing. Even when it dealt with the irrevocable past, it gave me, along with a plaint, a living image. Instead of saying something directly, like “When I was still happy …,” he would write (I translate literally): “When the birds still sang for me …” In speaking of springtime at home, he wrote: “When the bees were wearing trousers [of pollen].” Instead of saying “It’s an ill wind …” he wrote: “Ugly mother, good food.” Looking up his first name in the dictionary, he found the meaning “Skin on milk,” which made him retch. And then his way of using colors, every one of which could depict a wide range of things and creatures: “How is Spotty getting along?” could refer to a pear, a cow, a goat, a chicken, or a variety of green pea.

But what seemed to me in reading to go beyond such images, and to transcend my own present, were sentences written in a particular tense, which my brother used with striking frequency, the so-called future perfect — because it doesn’t exist in Slovene, he would switch to German whenever he wanted to use it: “We shall have walked on the green track.” “The boundary stone will have been moved to the edge.” “By the time the buckwheat is sowed, I shall have worked, sung, danced, and slept with a woman.”

I realize, of course, that an appearance may have resulted from a twofold deficiency: my brother’s papers are not complete, and I have no memory of him. His legacy is so fragmentary that I am in the position of a scholar dealing with the few fragments that have come down to us from the early Greek seekers after truth (this, at least, is how I visualize them — wringing their hands, stammering, and finally uttering their cry of joy). Two separate words taken out of context, such as “dancing” and “weeping,” reveal a halo around them and irradiate the world; they derive their radiance from, among other things, not being shut up in a complete sentence or in an “explanation.” And because, when I think about my missing brother, no picture of a living man, no smell, no tone of voice, no footfall, no particularity whatever intervenes, it has been possible for my brother to become a hero to me, an indestructible phantasm. True, after being appointed my godfather in his absence, he saw me once when home on leave; but I, barely two years old at the time, have no recollection of the meeting. “I shall have bent over my godchild,” he wrote in his next letter from the front.

Through these words, so much more concrete than my memory, I felt my brother bend over me time and again. He was often a foil to my mother: whereas she would have liked best to veil her eyes from the future she foresaw for me, his good eye studies me with friendly attentiveness and enjoys the sunshine with me, while his blind eye — because it’s blind — is none the wiser. The heaviness of my mother’s face bent over me as opposed to my brother’s airy radiance — that is my battle to this day. And that is why I call this person who has the same parents as I my “forebear”; yes, I have appointed Gregor Kobal — the peaceable descendant of an insurrectionary, a man who, as even his sister admitted, “never brandished a whip”—to be my ancestor, although I myself, in my thoughts at least, always keep a whip ready for one enemy or another. And indeed, precisely in certain crucial moments, a peace descended on me in which I not only saw my elective ancestor bent over me in kindness but myself embodied him. Of course I could not when threatened summon him to give me peace; it was the other way around: I found peace by myself, and he was present to bolster me; accordingly it was impossible to lean on my forebears (the only effective forebear, this much I know, is the sentence preceding the one I am writing now).

And yet, though it may be mere appearance, with an ancestor in me I am no longer alone; I sit more erect, walk in a different way; do and refrain from doing, say and leave unsaid what should be done or not done, said or left unsaid in a situation of danger. What are facts compared to such appearances? My brother writes in his last letter: “When I am able to project my thoughts into the distance, I picture the Kobal clan sitting at the table together, reading my scribblings.” Long live appearances! Let them be my subject!

As I recall, it often rained in the Bohinj, and it can’t be just the roaring of the torrent outside my window that makes me think so. On a forest path, my feet sink into the clayey mud. The plastic bags hung on the fruit trees to frighten the birds away are plumped up with water. I’m sitting with a family of vacationers under the roof of a “hay harp,” watching the road; a peasant woman is leading a horse by the bridle, the horse is pulling a hay wagon. The rain bounces back so violently from the road that the woman seems to be moving without legs, the horse without hooves, and the wagon without wheels. The walls of the houses are aglow with the lightning. Then the sun shines again; it has been shining a long time, and along the shore of the otherwise quiet lake the water sparkles with the drops falling from overhanging branches.

In spite of the rain, I left the village every afternoon, always with a definite goal, a kind of plateau which, like the big pine forest at home in the Jaunfeld, is called Dobrava (roughly, “place of the oak trees”) but is bare except for an isolated pine or oak here and there, and hardly cultivated, presenting the appearance — strange so near the bottom of the valley — of an upland pasture.

On this plateau I was all alone, but not outside the world, for even more than at the inn with its roaring torrent, one sensed that civilization was near: foresters’ tractors, hay turners, blowers in the lumber-drying sheds; rising smoke and glinting windshields could be seen on all sides, a single crowded rowboat on the lake below. Not only the power lines but even the birds in the air and the bees nearby indicated the presence of unseen humans at the foot of the moraine. I had come up here almost in spite of myself, guided by the pathways, at first an old road, no longer used by vehicles, with meadow grass sprouting through cracks in the asphalt, then uphill over what had formerly been the bed of a brook but was now carpeted with short, soft grass. Here, too, I had as usual to find my place. As in the song: the hill was too high for me, the dale was too low, the sun was too hot, the shade too cool, the lee too sheltered, the open too windy, the boulder too eccentric, the tumbledown apiary too picturesque. In the end I sat down in the grass, leaning against the wooden wall of a field barn. It was the south wall, and when the sun was shining, it seemed to me that the weather-beaten wood gave off “just the right warmth.” Indeed, the whole place was just right. The eaves had just enough overhang to enable me to stretch my legs without their getting wet, and the few drops that came my way reminded me of the balcony at home, where the corner I sat in, as here, was at the border between inside and outside — with the difference that there, because our outhouse was situated at one end of the balcony, with a chute leading down to the dung heap, the smells were not the same as here on the plateau.

And again I had a book with me, my brother’s big dictionary; everything else had been removed from my waterproof sea bag. The orchard copybook had been suitable reading matter for the four walls of my hotel room; and now, here in the open, the dictionary released its arrows of meaning. Odd that a young man of twenty should spend whole afternoons in a foreign country leaning against a secluded barn, immersed in a dictionary — no, in a single page; no, a single word; that he should look up from that word, shake his head, laugh, drum his heels on the ground, clap his hands (scaring away the grasshoppers and butterflies), jump now and then to his feet and take a turn in the rain. When the people at the inn and in the village saw me start on my daily expedition with my sea bag, they took me for “a budding scientist” or “a young painter” (with its lake and solitary church the Bohinj had attracted droves of landscape painters in the nineteenth century); yet that young fellow sitting there hunched over his book, then suddenly starting to sing at the top of his voice, could only be an idiot.

And yet my senses — of sight as well as hearing — have never been so sharp as then, as I read those columns of unconnected words. Could you call it reading? Wasn’t it more a discovering, and wasn’t it the joy of discovery that made me shout the foreign words and phrases? (Out into the landscape with them!) But what was there to discover?

Foreign languages had fascinated me as a child. The one coffee tin in our house, with the curly-black-haired dancing girl on it, led me years later to study the dark beauty’s language — Spanish; and I copied at least the first lessons of the Hungarian grammar I had brought home from the seminary, which attracted me first by its smell and then by the exotic look of its words. The Slovene language, on the other hand, which I heard every day in the village, had rather repelled me. Not so much because of its Slavic sound as because of the many German words that kept intruding; I heard the dialect of the villagers not as a language but as a ridiculous hodgepodge. My father would often humiliate his fellow cardplayers by imitating their manner of speaking — a mumbling, a gargling, a barbaric spitting out of gutturals — and following up with a sentence of his own pure, melodious Slovene (thus once again showing himself to be the master of the group). But even where the standard language was spoken, it usually sounded menacing to my ears, chiefly because the places where it was used suggested official announcements rather than communication. On the radio, the short daily broadcast in the foreign language was cut in like news of a disaster; in school, meaningless sentences served only to drum grammar into our heads; and in church, the priest, as he delivered his sermon, often switched in spite of himself to German, which seemed far better suited to his purpose, and continued quietly what in the Slavic language he had had to thunder out, sentence by sentence, in a tone of condemnation.

Only the litanies, even more than the hymns, made me prick up my ears. I joined with all my heart in entreating the Saviour to have mercy on us and the saints to pray for us. In the dark nave, filled with the now unrecognizable silhouettes of the villagers turned with their voices toward the altar, the Slovene syllables — those of the priest changing, those of the congregation unchanging — resounded with infinite fervor. It was as though we were all lying prostrate, addressing our supplication to a closed heaven. Those foreign sequences could never be long enough for me; I wanted them to go on and on, and when the litany came to an end, I experienced not a dying away but a breaking off.

I lost this feeling at the seminary, where the few Slovene-speakers aroused antagonism and suspicion in the others. Unlike the voices in school, on the radio, and in church, they spoke their language softly, hardly above a whisper, and this in a far corner of the study hall, so that the rest of us heard no more than an incomprehensible hissing. The rectangle of desks in which they stood as though entrenched, with their backs to the world, gave them a conspiratorial air, accentuated by the shouts coming from all sides. And what about me? Did I envy them their huddled heads? Did I begrudge them their evident solidarity? No, my feeling went deeper. It was abhorrence. At the sight of this conceited band of the elect, dissociating themselves from the rest of us, from the mob among which I — alone, jostled, jostling back, warmed only by the blue cavern of my desk and by sleep — had to count myself. I wanted these no-good Slovenes to shut up and crawl out of their entrenchment, I wanted every single one of them to feel as homeless in his assigned seat as I did, with some stinking, panting, scratching foreign body beside him. I wanted him to go out and exercise in silence, without the comforting whispers of his fellow conspirators in his ears, but only the splashing of the seminary fountain, to share the lot of Filip Kobal, who finds your clannish minority even more nauseating than the speechless, disunited, directionless majority standing around with hanging heads and clenched fists.

Not until much later did one of these Slovene-speakers tell me the truth: that they did not band together against the rest of us; meeting in their corner had been their only way of hearing their own language after a day of having to talk in a foreign tongue, for their language was frowned upon not only by the German-speaking pupils but by the prefects as well. If they spoke softly, it was for fear of giving offense, and they spoke only of indifferent matters, the weather, school, the packages of sausage and ham they received from home, though even such conversation had been a great comfort to them. The familiar sounds they offered one another were like “the bread and wine of Communion”; the few moments of the day when they could at last be among themselves with their persecuted language were for them “hallowed moments” even if they had deliberately spoken only of the most commonplace things. “Doesn’t it make a difference,” cried my informant, “if I can say njiva instead of field, or jabolko instead of apple?”

But for me as a growing child it was only the litanies and the thought of my missing brother, my hero, that deterred me from regarding the region’s second language — for many their first — as a personal assault on me; and even now, toward the end of the century, the German majority, often in spite of themselves, feel the same way.

It was the old dictionary that first helped me over this prejudice. It was published in the last years of the past century, in 1895 to be exact, the year of my father’s birth. Aiming at completeness, it was a collection of words and phrases from every part of Slovenia. Just as the sun inching over the darkened landscape opposite my desk helps me now to perceive the minutest objects and figures and the spaces between them — the bent arm of the girl sitting by the water, a bowed tree on the horizon, a boy at the end of the path with his face turned toward the girl — so then, under the eaves of the barn, words helped me to see the little things which up until then had almost always been lacking when I tried to visualize a childhood. The first thing that happened was that word by word — my brother had ticked many of them, so I was able to skip quite a lot — a people took shape before my eyes. Its members were an exact replica of the villagers at home, but they did not, as in the usual stories and anecdotes, shrivel into types, caricatures, and clichés; I saw only the glowing outlines of people and things. These words sprang from a rural people whose metaphors had their source in country life: “He uses his tongue the way a cow uses her tail.” “You’re as slow as fog on a windless day.” “Your house is as cold as a burned-out barn.” But cities didn’t frighten them, they were waiting to be conquered. The country-folk would “rattle” to town in the wagon or “glide” there in the sleigh. The vocabulary of profanity was rich and varied; “he swore his last” was a way of saying “he died.” These people had any number of terms for dying, but even more for the female sex organ. From one valley to the next, the names for varieties of apple and pear changed, they were as numerous as the stars in the sky (which were named after farm implements or called “reapers” or “mowers,” or simply, like the Pleiades, the “Densely Sowed Ones”). As the Slovenes had never set up a government of their own, they had to resort to literal translations from the German or Latin of their overlords for everything connected with politics, public life, or, for that matter, conceptual thought — which seemed as stilted as if I were to say “far-writer” for telegraph; on the other hand, the language had familiar names, nicknames as it were, for all ordinary objects, and not just the useful ones. Everything indoors seemed to have been named by women, and everything outside by men. A kind of bread baked under hot ashes was called, to translate literally, “underash,” and a variety of pear, “the little woman.” It is typical of this language that the addition of a mere syllable, and not of another word, can transform words for large areas into diminutives, which serve as names for the things and creatures in these areas. The area becomes, as it were, a refuge and hiding place for the creatures that bear its name. A wood, for example, harbored “woodsies,” a word that could designate not only a human inhabitant of the wood but equally well, wood rushes, a particular species of forest flower, a wild cherry tree, a wild apple tree, a wood nymph, and — the heart as it were of the forest — the coal titmouse. It was through finding unaccustomed names for things in the dictionary that I first acquired a feeling for them.

Thus I discovered a people as tender as they were crude, a people with many different ways of scoffing at those who were quick to think and slow to act; an industrious people (“When it comes to work, we Slovenes are miles ahead,” my brother wrote in a letter) whose adult language is shot through with children’s expressions; taciturn and almost mute in despair, voluble and almost eloquent in joy and yearning; without aristocracy, without military marches, without land (their land was leased), without kings, their only king being the legendary hero who wandered about in disguise, showing himself only briefly. But, on second thought, what words made me aware of was not specifically the Slovene people or a people at the turn of the century, but rather an indeterminate, timeless, extrahistorical people — or better still, a people living in an eternal present, regulated only by the seasons, in an immanent world obedient to the laws of weather, of sowing, reaping, and animal diseases, a world apart from, before, or alongside of history. (I am aware that my brother’s tick marks contributed to this static image.) How could I help wanting to count myself among this unknown people that has none but borrowed words for war, authority, and triumphal processions, but devises names for the humblest things — indoors for the space under the windowsill, out of doors for the shiny trace of a braked wagon wheel on a stone nag — and is at its most creative when it comes to naming hiding places, places for refuge and survival, such as only children can think up — nests in the underbrush, the cave behind the cave, the fertile field deep in the woods — yet never feels obliged to call itself “the chosen people” and distance itself from “the nations” (for, as their every word shows, this people inhabits and cultivates its land)?

Just as my brother’s copybook, without excursions through another language, translated itself directly into his work, his orchard, so now his dictionary led me beyond the orchard into the whole landscape of childhood. Childhood? Was it my particular childhood? Was it my personal places and things that I discovered through names? Unquestionably, the scene of action was my father’s house. With the help of the word for the space behind the stove, for the beam under the cider barrel in the cellar, for the stone-rimmed watering trough in the stable, for the last furrow in plowing, I visualized the corresponding object in or around our own house. It took only a word to evoke the broad end of “our” scythe, or “our” cling peaches, or the blue mist on “our” plums; and to lift even our subsoil — the layer of gravel under the humus, the pit where we stored our fodder beets — into a realm of light and air. And there were many words that communicated images of things which I had never seen but which must nevertheless have related to our life at home. Our horse, for instance, had never had an eelback, but once I had the word for it, I saw a horse with just such dark stripes in the village paddock. Nor had I ever heard the voice of the queen bee, which now, thanks to the onomatopoeic verb, resounded from within my father’s abandoned apiary and penetrated my innermost being, followed by the sound, “as of boiling plum butter,” of a whole swarm of “our” bees. Yes, “one who produces whirring sounds on a birchwood flute” was I myself, the reader of the one word for all that, and likewise it was I who, immersed in “the blade of grass on which strawberries are strung,” emerge forthwith from our community forest beyond the Seven Mountains, holding that same blade of grass in my hand.

At that point I thought of my teacher, the writer of fairy tales, who precisely because he was absent had been a kind of prop to me in the course of my journey. There was never any plot in his fairy tales; they were mere descriptions of objects, and each story dealt with only one thing, a thing which, as accessory or scene of action, must have been familiar to readers of folk tales. The subject of one tale was a hut in the forest, but without a witch, without lost children, without fire (except at the most for a puff of chimney smoke, soon carried away by the cold wind); and beyond the Seven Mountains there was nothing but a brook, so clear that its bed could be mistaken at first sight for a road — fish could be seen swimming over its dark elongated paving stones until at last the water, rushing over a round protruding rock, gave forth an endless sound. The only one of his fairy tales in which anything “happened” was a description of a bramblebush (of course without a struggling Jew tearing himself to pieces in it); this bush is in the middle of an impenetrable wilderness but is surrounded by a large circle of sand where, in the final sentence, a first-person narrator suddenly turns up and throws a handful of sand, “and then another, and still another, and so forth and so on,” into the brambles. According to the author, these “one-thing tales” were supposed to be “sun tales” and manage without the usual “moonlight of spooky additives”; “sun and subject,” he thought, were fairy tale enough; they were the “situation.” A single glance at a treetop, he held, sufficed to produce a fairy-tale atmosphere.

Seen as a collection of one-word fairy tales, the dictionary did the same thing for me: it gave me images of the world, even when, as in the case of the strawberries strung on their blade of grass, I had not actually experienced them. Around every word I came across in my ruminations, a world took shape, as much around “an empty chestnut husk” as around “the wet tobacco left at the bottom of a pipe” or even “a sunshower” or “the white weasel,” which also means “a saucy beautiful girl.” And just as certain passages in my brother’s letters, comparable to the fragments from the Greek seekers after truth, had a kind of halo around them, so now isolated words traced circles that made me think of a prehistoric figure who lived in the hazy centuries before those early stammerers, namely, of the legendary Orpheus. Only a few of his idiosyncratic terms had survived; neither his poems nor his songs had been thought worth collecting, only his peculiar names for things: “woven chains” for the furrows in fields, “bent shuttles” for plows, “threads” for seed grains, “Aphrodite” for the sowing season, “the tears of Zeus” for rain.

On me, too, word circles had the effect of fairy tales, for though the terrible, the repellent, and the evil were amply represented in them, they were only a component which took its place in the whole and, in the dictionary at least, could never win out. My teacher found fault with the stories I had been writing at the time, saying that I had a weakness for the macabre, that I was positively addicted to the gloomy and gruesome; the law of writing, by contrast, was to create, letter after letter, syllable after syllable, the brightest of brightnesses; even a last breath, he said, must be transformed into the breath of life. And now, immersed in the dictionary’s “rain of blood,” “rat turds,” “spittle of disgust,” “the fecal sausages of the earthworm,” “shoes moldering in a corner,” a beast named “understone” (a viper), a place called “land of moles” (the grave), I felt free from my addiction to the gruesome or even to the tragic and found in the contemplation of names a pattern in the world, a plan, which transformed country people and a village house into world people and a big-city house. Every word circle a world circle! The crux of the matter was that every circle emanated from a single foreign word. When people felt unable to communicate an experience, weren’t they always wailing: “Oh, if there were only a word for it!” And in moments of recognition, weren’t they much less likely to say “Yes, that’s it!” than “Yes, that’s the word!”

But wasn’t I taking the side of a foreign language against my own? Wasn’t I attributing this one-word magic exclusively to Slovene, at the expense of my native German? No, it was both languages together, the single words on the left and the circumlocutions on the right which — sign after sign — curved, inflected, measured, circumscribed, constructed space. How fortunate was the existence of different languages, how meaningful was the allegedly so destructive Babylonian confusion! Wasn’t the Tower of Babel actually built, though in secret, and didn’t it, after all, reach up into the heavens?

Day after day, I opened the book of wisdom more excitedly. Is there any word for the adventures I was experiencing? What can one say to express the simultaneous experience of childhood and landscape? There is a word, a German word, and that word is Kindschaft![3] I clap my hands in amazement!

Time and again in my afternoons on the plateau I applauded the epic of words. And I laughed as well, not the laughter of ridicule, but the laughter of recognition and complicity. Yes, there is a word for the bright spot in a cloudy sky, a word for the way an ox runs back and forth on a hot day when he’s stung by a horsefly, for flame suddenly bursting from a stove, for the juice of stewed pears, for the star on a bull’s forehead, for a man on all fours extracting himself from the snow, for a woman stocking up on summer clothes, for the sloshing of liquid in a half-empty bucket, for the trickling of seeds out of seedpods, for the skipping of a flat stone over the surface of a pond, for icicles hanging from a tree, for the raw spot in a boiled potato, for a puddle in clayey ground. Yes, that’s the word!

But was my plan still valid? Wasn’t the word for “the sound of two alternating flails” obsolete, since the corresponding implements had for years been hanging inactive in the museums? Wasn’t “the sound of a falling body” the meaning that survived? Didn’t the term which in the past century designated only “emigration” lose its innocence when the events of the last war changed its meaning to forced “resettlement”? Didn’t the old book suffer from the absence of resistance fighters, of partisans, for whom the “partisan,” that obsolete, halberd-like weapon, was hardly a substitute? And even back at the time when the dictionary was compiled, were there not a striking number of designations for places where something had been but was no longer — for fallow land “where barley formerly grew,” for the place “where the barn used to be,” the stone surface “where bushes used to grow”? And even at that time, were footnotes not appended to certain particularly inventive designations, to the effect that they were no longer in use? And hadn’t the scholars included in their book any number of words which even their source, the oldest inhabitant in the most remote valley, had stopped using except in word games? So, instead of saying that words had fairy-tale magic, wouldn’t it be wiser to say that they performed the function of a questionnaire: What is my situation? What is our situation? What is the present situation?

Yet, at the same time, they were fairy tales; for in answer to every word that questioned me, even if I had never seen the thing it stood for and even if it had long departed this world, the thing invariably gave rise to an image, or more precisely, a radiance.

One afternoon on the plateau I came across the last word my brother had ticked. As in many other cases, the date and place were supplied: “At the front.” In the early stages of the war he always carried the book with him; it was only at the end that he left it home, along with his jacket, “as a baptismal present.” The rest of the dictionary, more than half of it, showed no further pencil marks and seemed never to have been opened; there were no prewar blades of grass or wartime flies pressed between the pages.

There I sat, contemplating the one word, leafing back to the others: was this a map of the areas of the earth or only of their memory — or perhaps even their obituary? Was it only the fault of the wars that human language in the time I was living in, in my time, was so inexpressive that we speakers always had to emphasize something? Why, at the age of twenty, did I feel tired at the mere thought that some interlocutor might open his mouth? Why did speech — even my own — often banish me to a muffled middle-class living room (where the windows might be “deaf” rather than “blind”)? Why had words lost all meaning? Why was it only the rare mot juste that made me feel that I had a soul?

In the village, on my way to this spot, I always passed a house, one wall of which merged seamlessly with a boulder. Similarly, when I now looked up from the old words, I saw the upper edge of the book merging directly with the air. The book formed a ramp guiding my gaze to the foot of the southern chain of mountains (one Slovene name for which, in literal translation, was “underwing”). There I saw a bare declivity, somewhat veiled by distance, which, however, because of the spruce at the edge of my little plateau, seemed only a stone’s throw away. The slope, overgrown with grass, was hatched to the very top with a dense pattern of disused cow paths. These looked something like stairways, which occupied the whole breadth of the slope and crisscrossed to form nets. The large horizontal pattern was broken by a smaller one of vertical grooves, in which the clay-yellow water of the afternoon rain was now flowing. Seen from a distance, the water moved so slowly that I thought of oozing stalactites. The dead sloping pasture made me think of the cows which had climbed up and down it in the past, an image of slowness, of hulking bodies, stopping now and then to pull up grass, not jumping over any of the steps as sheep or dogs might have done, their udders grazing the tips of the grass, their hooves often getting stuck in the mud. Sometimes they slipped from level to level, thus gouging out channels for the rainwater. One beast jumped up on the one ahead and was dragged a bit of the way on its back. One raised its tail and urinated so violently that I almost thought I heard it, followed by a plopping of dung. And then I actually saw the steaming of urine on the paths. So slow was the procession that it called to mind the crossing of a great mountain range, the baggage train of a migration that had been going on since the beginning of time. And precisely the emptiness — the empty network, the deserted crisscrossing paths, the empty, slightly irregular serpentines — reinforced my impression of animal clumsiness. Here, in contrast to the terraces of a mine or gravel pit, there were no helmeted men with machines moving busily up and down the slope, but an aimless mass almost marking time, with lowered heads, on all fours or slithering on their hind parts, a caravan of carriers and slaves, coming from nowhere and heading nowhere, for which the slope was not even a stopping place, except in the event of a broken leg or an emergency slaughtering.

I thought again of my teacher. As a historian, he took a special interest in peoples who had vanished from the face of the earth. He began his course almost ritually with an example taken from his study of the Maya (because of which the students had given him a related nickname). As a student he had explored the Yucatan for years: “As a geographer,” he said, “I grew tan, and as a historian, pale — as pale as I am now.” The Maya, he said, had never succeeded in building a state, because their peninsula “lacks a great river. Think of the Euphrates and the Tigris, or of the Nile.” Nor had they known the wheel or the pulley or the windlass; the only form of Mayan wheel ever found had been part of a small toy. But what most impeded their political development was their inability to construct a supporting arch; they knew only “pseudo-arches,” incapable of sustaining the roof of a room, let alone a hall. Their one element of cohesion had been religion. Instead of the wheel, they had had the roller, and with it they built roads, used only for processions to their sanctuaries in the jungle. But every peasant’s hut was also regarded as a temple. All life was governed by the heavenly bodies, which were looked upon as sacred, because instructions for daily life could be read from them. The steles dedicated to the sun indicated the time to sow; the hieroglyphics engraved in the stone served as a clock. In these ancient inscriptions, ancestors were also honored; the popular religion demanded that every family should know its origin; the first man, the ancestor common to all, had been made of corn.

The decline of the Maya began when public religion gave way to private worship. “You see,” the teacher went on, “the families were rather unsociable, each kept to itself; the only bond between them had been public worship. But then they began to build chapels of their own, each for itself, at a distance from the others; forgotten was the idea that the house as such was hallowed. The bond was broken. It was then that the hieroglyphics on the steles came to an abrupt end. In the year 900 of our era,” said the teacher, “the last inscription was chiseled into a pillar not far from the grassy area which the Spaniards were to call the ‘Savanna of Freedom.’ Imagine the sparks in the flint, which was what most of the steles were made of.” The end of this people is most strikingly symbolized by the stairs on one of the pyramids: step after step richly decorated with sacred reliefs and glyphs, the sign for the morning star, the sign for the tree that gives the villagers shade, the signs for sun and day, which taken together signify “time”—but on the topmost step only “a few muddled, scratchy chisel marks.”

That stairway appeared to me in the empty sloping pasture. Much larger than the mound in our orchard at home, it actually had the shape of a pyramid and seemed with its hundred-odd steps, tapering toward the top, to reach the sky. I saw the words my brother had ticked climb the slope and then break off. Every line on the slope was an overturned hieroglyphic pillar, lying face down in the mud. The clayey brooks, welling up from scars in the earth, washed syllable after syllable away, until the whole place smoked like a field of ruins where not even the usual cherry trees had been spared. Seized with a need to mourn, I stood up, still holding my brother’s book. Nothing more was moving on the empty steps, not even a blade of grass; even the water stood still; and hadn’t being alive always meant simply being able to breathe with the flowing water, the waving grass, a rising branch? But what I wanted to mourn was not just a solitary death, it was something more: an annihilation. To annihilate means to do away not only with a particular human being but also with what gives the world its cohesion. To eliminate someone like my brother — who, unlike the great mass of those who speak and write, had the gift of bringing words and through them things to life, who never ceased to exercise that gift and to point out examples as he was doing now to me — was to kill language itself, the living tradition, the tradition of peace; it was the most unforgivable of crimes, the most barbarous of world wars.

But I was unable to mourn as I had wished. Instead, the phrase that had been the peasants’ watchword in their earliest uprising—“Our old right!”—kept spinning around in my head. Yes, from time immemorial we had raised a claim that should not have been allowed to lapse. And it had lapsed, because we ceased to raise it. And why did we always demand our right of someone else, some of an emperor, others of a God? Why didn’t we take it for ourselves, essential as it was for our self preservation, letting no one else intervene? There at last was a game in which we wouldn’t have had to measure ourselves against anyone, a lonely game, a wild game — Father, the great game!

Back from the empty cow paths to put my thoughts in order, back to the book. I had been sitting and standing barefoot, and barefoot I strode back and forth outside the barn. The last word my brother had ticked had a double meaning. Translated, it meant both “to fortify oneself” and “to sing psalms.” (Immersing myself in these words was the exact opposite of my usual immersion in so-called breathtaking stories; time and again the words made me raise my head and my eyes.) I stopped and raised my head. By way of a ford marked by a tree, I was carried back to the bluish cavern of my seminary desk. Its back wall was the grooved mountain slope. A sun shone on it, low in the sky as shortly before setting and made brighter by the unlit spruce in front of it. The steps were thick bars of shadow leading to the summit, on which lay a thoroughly earthly glow. The light pinpointed the smallest shapes on the slope — a clump of grass, a half-overgrown hoof print, a molehill, a line of birds along a rivulet, a wild hare nearby — and connected them with one another by distinct interstices. I went on reading, my eyes at once in the book and on the mountain. My staring became a watching, as when in a strange crowd one knows that a familiar face or two must be present. Here in the sun, the resounding litany of the faithful which had begun in the dark church was resumed in a silent litany of words, with their many meanings. To breathe deeply was to yearn was to tense the strongest muscle. Violent anger was sobbing. Fireflies were June was a variety of cherry. The mower was a sandpiper was the belt of Orion. The grasshopper was the bridge of a violin was the inner partition of a nut was the upper part of a whip … A change of one letter transformed the word for a slight breeze into the word for a powerful flow, and another into a tempest, which was also the name for flying sand … At last, silent invocations took on human form, and I saw the absent ones appear on the steps, silhouetted by the word-light: my mother as “the woman who had ceased to be a handmaiden”; my father as “the man who never ceased to be a servant”; my sister as “the madwoman,” which, with a slight sound shift, became “the blessed”; my girlfriend as “the quiet one”; my teacher as “bitter sweetheart”; the village idiot as “he who stirs up wind while walking”; my enemy in the form of “a bruised heel”; and ahead of them all my brother “the pious,” a word which also designated “the serene.” And I? — I recognized myself, reader and onlooker in one, as the third party on whom everything hinged, without whom there could be no game, and who thus found in himself the salient features of the other players: my father’s white, servant’s feet and the torn corners of my brother’s eyes.

Of course it was only for a moment that this picture writing shimmered on the mountain slope; then all was reliefless emptiness and the sun had set. But I knew I could bring the picture writing back, that unlike grief it could be willed; the empty forms both of the cow paths and of the blind windows could be relied on; they were the seal of our right. “Brother, you must have walked there in the gray blueness.”

I shut my eyes. Only then did I notice that they were wet. But I was not weeping for myself or my family; no, the source of those tears was things and their words.

Behind my closed eyelids, the after-image of the cow paths: a stone-gray pattern. Now, a quarter of a century later, I see, there on the plateau, a man of indeterminate age. Barefoot, wearing an overcoat that’s too big for him, he begins to wave his arms. His arm waving becomes a continuous movement which, if it were not done with the whole hand, including the fist, would be something like writing. Was this “he” or “I”? It is still I. I no longer write in the air as I did as a child; instead, like a scientist who is at the same time a manual laborer, I make hatch marks on a sheet of paper lying on the stone-gray steps. That is the movement I have chosen for my story. Letter for letter, word for word, as chiseled in stone long years ago, I want the inscription to appear on my paper; I want it to be handed down recognizably thanks to my light hatch marks. Yes, I want my soft pencil strokes to join with the hardness of the stone as did the language of my forebears, in which the term for “the monotonous note of the finch” is derived from the word for “a single letter.” For, without the refuge of words, the earth, the black, red, greening earth, would be just one great desert, and I will no longer acknowledge any drama, any history other than the drama of the things and words of this beloved world — and I pray that the bomb which is threatening the cow-path pyramid will strike softly in the form of the word for “an elongated pear.” I shall find a word for the dark interior of a white chestnut blossom, the yellow of clay under the wet snow, the bit of blossom that clings to the apple, and the sound of a river fish leaping out of the water.

I opened my eyes again, and again walked back and forth outside the barn, faster and faster as though taking a running leap. Again I stopped. Sensing that my chest had become an instrument, I shouted. Filip Kobal — whose voice was so soft that he could never make himself heard, whom the prefects at the seminary had scolded because his prayers didn’t “carry”—shouted so loud that all who knew him would have looked at him with new eyes.

Something comparable had happened only once, at that same seminary. I had convinced myself that I was unable to sing, and then one day the teacher called on me to sing. With my heart in my mouth I had stood up and taken a deep breath. Then, in the midst of the sullenly brooding class, I had drawn from my innermost soul a strange and tender song, which had provoked first laughter, then awed embarrassment in my listeners, and which, it seemed to me, must always have been inside me. Now on the plateau, where I was alone, what came out of me was not singing, nor was it a bellowing or calling; it was a clear shout, imperiously demanding my right. With all my might I shouted the laconic or lyrical, monosyllabic or polysyllabic words of my brother’s book. The words went out over the countryside, calling forth on the empty cow paths an echo whose other name was “world sound.” And at every shout I saw the open ears of my forebears, the amused arching of their eyebrows, their joyful faces.

I propped up the book, touched it with my lips, and bowed down to the place. I cut a branch from the hazel bush near one corner of the barn, scratched the name of the place and the date into it: “Dobrava, Slovenija, Jugoslavija 1960,” and declared it to be our stele, the record of a new and different family history. How little hope I had of a future at the age of twenty (never would my king appear), how firm were my expectations concerning the present; and how weak or cautious is my voice now as I repeat the young man’s experience. Wasn’t it drowned out long ago by shouts converging on the plateau from all directions, by shouts of command on drill grounds, by field-gray soldiers on firing ranges, by the scraping of shovels in the village graveyard? No, wherever I may be, the blind windows and empty cow paths strike me as the hallmarks of a kingdom of recurrence, where a locomotive whistle can become equally well the cry of a pigeon or the shriek of an Indian. I can still feel on my shoulder the cord of my sea bag with the book of words in it. Mother, your son is still walking under the open sky.

Then, flinging myself upon the ground, I discovered once and for all what the spirit is.