Repetition

Three — THE SAVANNA OF FREEDOM AND THE NINTH COUNTRY

THAT DAY I stayed on the plateau until the after-image of the sun left my retina. An axle seemed to be turning inside me, more and more slowly, bringing the things behind me into my field of vision. Beyond the northern mountains I saw a fiery cloud, which I situated exactly over the house of my parents. Heart, diamond, spade, and club shapes had been cut out of the west wall of the barn to let air in, and my father’s centuries-old desolation came blowing out of the black holes.

I left the place, backing away; and later, while walking, I kept turning back toward it. A little bird rose high over the edge of the plateau — as though it had just slipped from the hand of the dwarf who had hoped with its help to win the stone-throwing contest with the giant — and plummeted to the ground as though shot. The lake at the end of the valley looked like jelly in the dying light, and I fancied it full of drowning bees, circling around with transparent wings.

Each time, I went there with head bowed and came back with head erect. A tablet was affixed to one of the houses at the entrance to this village. On such and such a day in the year 1941, it said, a meeting held here passed the first resolution on resistance to Fascism. (In every Slovene town or village I was to pass through, I found a house bearing the same inscription.) I, too, wanted to put up resistance. I made my decision not in a cellar but out on the street, without a meeting, all by myself. “Form a sentence with ‘fight’ in it,” I said to myself. Only then did I realize that there already was such a sentence and that it had as many meanings as an oracle. Once, in such a mood, I went into a wooden hut and brought the ax down on the chopping block with all my might. An elderly woman came in and asked me to split a pile of sawed logs. I struck so hard that the pieces flew in all directions — I can still feel one grazing my forehead. In one hour I earned an evening meal and a few locutions such as “to split light” for “to chop kindling.” Another time, a soccer ball bounced across my path and I kicked it so well that I was asked to join the game (to this day, I sometimes dream that I’m a forward on the national team). My shoes supported my ankles, and my father’s leather strap, no longer a mere wristlet, strengthened my hand.

In the evenings, Filip Kobal had his corner place in the Black Earth Hotel. No one, not even the militia on its constant rounds, asked me my name; everyone called me “the guest”; even the picture of Tito had been turned away from me and was looking up at a squadron of bombers. On the tables, instead of baskets piled high with variously shaped Austrian rolls, which at times could remind one of corpses thrown headlong into a mass grave, there were simple stacks of sliced white bread on the napkins that used to be called “bread cloths.” It was midsummer and sometimes warm enough for serving meals outside. I was usually so overheated when I got back that the breeze from the torrent made me feel pleasantly fanned. There was a stool by the open window of the dining room, and the waiter stood on it to take the dishes that the cook handed him. Next to the stool there was a concrete surface with deep grooves that looked something like piano keys: a bicycle stand, usually empty. This was where the lightning rod ended; the fact is that a day seldom passed without a storm, and the evenings in the open were brightened by the summer lightning, for which, as a secondary-school graduate, I knew the ancient Greek term “space eye.” July came, and the fireflies which had just been flitting through the bushes crept into the grass and vanished.

The waiter was slightly younger than myself and may have come straight from trade school. Short, lean, with a brown, narrow, almost triangular face, he must, I felt sure, have come from a rocky, sparsely populated, inland region — one of a smallholder’s many children, born on a farm surrounded by stone walls and growing up a shepherd or picker of wild fruit, which he knew exactly where to find. Other people had called my girlfriend beautiful; this waiter was the only person to whom I applied the word in my own thoughts. Apart from greeting, ordering, and thanking, I never spoke to him; he never chatted with the guests and said only what was strictly necessary. His beauty was not so much in his features as in his constant attentiveness, his friendly vigilance. One never had to call him or even to raise one’s hand; standing in the farthermost corner of the dining room or garden — as he did when not busy — seemingly lost in some faraway dream, he kept an eye on his whole realm and anticipated the slightest flicker of an eyelid; in other words, he was a model of the courtesy and helpfulness lauded in books of etiquette. In the morning, he set the tables under the chestnut trees even if it was thundering, and had them cleared before the first drops began to fall. Sometimes, to my surprise, I’d see him alone in the dining room, putting each chair in its proper place, as though arranging for some festivity, a baptism or wedding, and allowing for the special quirks of every single guest. I also marveled at the care with which he handled the cheapest and shabbiest objects (there were no others in that hotel), at his way of lining up the tin knives and forks and wiping the plastic cap of the condiment bottle. Once in the late afternoon I saw him standing motionless in the bare, empty room, looking into space; then he stepped over to a far corner and gave a carafe an affectionate little turn that filled the whole house with an aura of hospitality. Another time, when the dining room was full, as it often was at dinner, he set down a cup of coffee on the bar before bringing it to the table and carefully aligned the handle; then with an elegant gesture he took hold of the tiny cup and carried it directly to the guest’s table. I was also struck by the dead seriousness with which he gave a light to anyone, even to a drunk, always with a single, unbroken movement, and by the way his half-closed eyes would light up every time.

Alone during the day, in my room or out of doors, I thought about the waiter more than about my parents; as I now realize, it was a kind of love. I had no desire for contact, I wanted only to be near him, and I missed him on his day off. When he finally reappeared, his black-and-white attire brought life into the room and I acquired a sense of color. He always kept his distance, even when off duty, and that may have accounted for my affection. One day I ran into him in his street clothes at the bus-station buffet, now in the role of a guest, and there was no difference between the waiter at the hotel and the young man in the gray suit with a raincoat over his arm, resting one foot on the railing and slowly munching a sausage while watching the departing buses. And perhaps this aloofness in combination with his attentiveness and poise were the components of the beauty that so moved me. Even today, in a predicament, I think about that waiter’s poise; it doesn’t usually help much, but it brings back his image, and for the moment at least I regain my composure.

Toward midnight, on my last day in the Black Earth Hotel — all the guests and the cook, too, had left — I passed the open kitchen on my way to my room and saw the waiter sitting by a tub full of dishes, using a tablecloth to dry them. Later, when I looked out of my window, he was standing in his shirtsleeves on the bridge across the torrent, holding a pile of dishes under his right arm. With his left hand, he took one after another and with a smooth graceful movement sent them sailing into the water like so many Frisbees.

Young Filip Kobal’s nights in his four-bed room at the Black Earth Hotel were almost entirely dreamless. Years before, penned into the dormitory at the seminary, nailed to his pillow by a persistent headache, he had often thought of lying alone in his bed under the open sky, in the midst of a raging snowstorm. His blanket, which he had pulled up to his ears, kept him warm, and only the dragon in his head had turned to ice. And now my wish was fulfilled in a different way by the thundering torrent, which pushed open the door of my room and took the place of dreams.

Only once did I dream of my father (who had earned a pension as a flood-control worker) or perhaps only of the copybook in which I had wanted him to write the story of our family. It had turned into a genuine book, which did not as in reality consist of that one shaky line — my brother’s APO number and my laundry mark — but was crammed full of text, not handwritten, but printed. The flood-control worker had become a peasant author, the updated successor to those Slovenian peasants at the turn of the century whose stories had been collected and who, because they usually told their stories in the evening, are known (in rough translation) as “evening people,” a term which before they made their appearance may have referred to evening winds or moths and since then can only have applied to the evening papers. And the attentive reader of my father’s book was the young waiter.

The morning wind was blowing when I stood with my blue sea bag and hazelwood stick on the platform of the Bohinjska Bistrica station. I was heading farther south. From where I stood, the tunnel through the mountain chain could be seen in the distance. As in Mittlern across the border, here, too, there were living quarters on the second floor of the building, and here, too, geranium petals came fluttering down on the roadbed from window boxes; in the meantime, I had come to like the smell. The small railroad stations of both countries had a good deal in common, even the inscription on the little enamel plaques indicating so and so many “feet above the Adriatic Sea”; they all displayed one and the same emblem: that of the old Austro — Hungarian Empire. A stone portal led to the toilet; the door was painted blue like the sky in the wayside shrines at home (but, inside, the only equipment was an unadorned hole). Cow’s horns as big as a buffalo’s were nailed to a wooden hut. The vegetable garden belonging to the station ended in a triangular herb garden surrounded by pole beans and dominated by the feathery green of dillweed; at the tip of the triangle a cherry tree, the ground below it dark with spots of fruit. Swallows were screaming in the chestnut trees outside the station, unseen except for a trembling in the leaves. The floor of the waiting room was of black polished wood, which along with the tall iron stove repeated the bus station at home; unoccupied as usual, it had windows on both sides, and the light inside it suggested a living room. Near the entrance, half buried in a layer of concrete, a footscraper of imperial cast steel, resembling an upturned knife blade, was framed left and right by richly ornamented miniature pillars. The room as a whole seemed spacious and yet well finished in every detail, and in it I sensed the breath of a gentle spirit, the spirit of those who long ago, in the days of the Empire, had designed it and made use of it. And the man who was looking after it now was no scoundrel either.

A group of soldiers were waiting there along with me, dried sweat on their unshaven faces, their boots caked with clay up to the ankles. From them I looked up to the southern mountain range, the peaks of which were already in the sunlight; for once, the sky over the Bohinj was cloudless. In that moment, I decided to cross the mountains on foot, and started off at once. “No more tunnels,” I said to myself, and: “I’ve got plenty of time.” With my decision a jolt passed through the country, and with that the day seemed to begin. Didn’t “jolt” mean “fight” in the other language?

The only high mountain I had known up until then was Mount Petzen, which was a little higher than these mountains; sometimes even in the summer there were patches of snow in its shaded cirques. But I had always gone there with my father and, because of the slow climb, it seemed quite a distance. Halfway up, we would spend the night in a dusty hay barn, after which my eyes were too swollen to take in the view. If we came anywhere near a farm, a dog would come running, followed by its owner shouting and brandishing a stick — the mountain peasants had an ingrained distrust of the smallholders down in the plain, who trampled their pastures, frightened the cattle, and stripped the woods of mushrooms. They would calm down only when we came closer and one of the strangers proved to be the carpenter known throughout the region, who, as it happened, had raised the peasant’s roof, after which we would be invited in for bacon, bread, and cider. One day on the crest dividing Austria from Yugoslavia, my father spread his legs, one foot on this side, one foot on the other, and made one of his short speeches: “See, this is what our name means, not straddler but border person. Your brother is a man of the interior; we two are border people. A Kobal is someone who crawls on all fours, and at the same time a light-footed climber. A border person is an extreme case, but that doesn’t make him marginal.”

On my way up I often turned around, as though in gratitude to the strange country where, so very differently from at home, no one was suspicious of me and the few questions I had been asked were not designed to trap me. The rest of the time I kept my head down, gazed at the summery meadow passing by in silent flight, and thought of my brother, who, while marching to war, had heard no birds and had ceased to see “what flowered by the roadside.” I felt that the steady climb was strengthening my body for the events of the autumn, whether military service or study, and for my encounter with my next enemy. The lizards rolled away like round stones or swished into the bushes like birds. The last sign of human life I was to see for some time was the dark wet bundle of washing outside the end house of a mountain village (the Slovene language, I reflected, has a special word for someone living in such an “end house”). After that, I followed traces in the grass, which often turned out to be animal tracks leading into impenetrable tangles, and all I heard was a monotonous buzzing of insects that made me think of a population gradually receding into the distance. At my back the valley had vanished, but on the horizon before me I could see the Julian Alps and in the midst of them the Triglav, the highest mountain in Yugoslavia; ahead of me and behind me, only wilderness.

Again I attempted a shortcut, supposedly a straight line, where the workings of the water made a straight line impossible. I had started out cautiously, but now I rushed headlong through underbrush and over rocky debris. At the tree line, the bare crest seemed to be coming closer, and the grass, which up until then had been knee-high, became short and stubbly. Suddenly I saw ahead of me an utterly motionless cloud, and at the same moment the first flash of lightning darted out of it. I was not untroubled; to tell the truth, I was terrified — only the day before, there had been talk at the hotel about someone being killed by lightning. Yet I kept on climbing. Since then, I have often run straight into danger as though hypnotized by it, not the least bit cheerful, let alone happy about it, panic-stricken in fact, humming some hit song or counting out numbers. That day, I was so terrified that I even heard the flapping of my trousers as thunder. What from a distance I had taken for a stone hut on the summit turned out, when I got there, to be the remains of a fort; the windows proved to be embrasures. Even so, the ruin provided shelter. A jolt, and equanimity took over; calmly, I looked down on a distant field that was white with hailstones when everywhere else it was raining. So great was my exhaustion that my eyes forgot their perspective and saw the white patch as a sheet spread out to bleach. Sitting there, I toppled over. In a letter written after a forced march, my brother speaks of a faint as “involuntary sleep.”

Night was falling when I came to; most of the embrasures were aimed at the southern valley, and looking out, I saw the lights of a few houses. I walked up and down in the rain outside and then decided to stay; in the dying day the honeycomb cells of the fort seemed positively inviting, like small hotel rooms. The mists coming up over the ridge were clouds — I had never been in a cloud before. When I looked down at the grass, the little mountain flowers would vanish in the mist and reappear a moment later; the motionless wings of a falcon drifting with the clouds looked frayed. Inside the fort, reclining on a bed of old newspapers, I ate some of the food I had brought with me. Nothing more could happen to me, not that day at least; I thought of the story about the goblin who, safe in his rocky niche, stuck out his tongue at the elements; but then, his attention diverted by a malignant human, he was struck by lightning.

Night was long in coming; the twilight outlines of things merely dissolved into a more and more formless brightness, the only contour in it being my blue sea bag. “Sea bag on the mountain ridge,” I caught myself mumbling as I was falling asleep. Then I swam for hours in the Arctic Ocean, which froze solid around me. Suddenly I felt fingertips on my face, no contact could have been warmer or more real, and a familiar voice said to me: “My dearest!” But when I opened my eyes in the darkness, no one was there; only a crackling that grew louder and louder, closer and closer; then a crash, but the wild beast proved to be my sea bag, which had tipped over.

I got up before first light and made my way along the ridge, step by step. That’s how I wanted it; I wanted at last, like the barefoot child on the path beside my father at the border between night and day, to pick out every detail signifying the start of day and everything else besides; I wanted at last to repeat the adventure of “existence.” But it didn’t work. In my childhood, the primordial world had imprinted itself on my mind along with the separate drops of early-morning rain, which dug tiny craters in the dust of the path; but now everything was the primordial world — the rain gushing out of the dark sky as it had been falling since the world began, the smoke rising from the black earth as though from clefts in lava, the gray-on-gray of the wet, cold rock, the creepers catching at my feet, the absent wind — thus, nothing could take the form of that pattern in the dust. Perhaps the hand-in-hand-with-my-father was lacking or the closeness to the ground, something the present narrator can sense but not so the child’s successor up there on the mountain ridge; in that case, might it not be possible to renew an experience not so much by imitating or aping it as by retracing and actively reliving it? Instead of the glow rising from the dust craters, as though the sun itself were rising right here on the planet, I perceived nothing on my solitary march but a dismal dawning in which all shapes, even those of the night, dissolved, and no feeling of a sun, however distant, was born; and now, stumbling over rocks and roots in the gray of dawn, freezing and sweating at once, soaked to the skin, my wet, lumpy sea bag growing heavier and heavier on my back, I found myself repeating, not my childhood walks with my father, but my soldier-brother’s plodding through a wasteland into a battle that was lost in advance; instead of a path through fields, a military highway. Though I was sure of going westward, I thought with anger that I was being sent to the east like my brother years ago, and though I was heading exactly for my desired destination, I was plagued by the thought that every step was carrying me farther away from the place that was my one and all. Was the first warning cry of the marmot addressed not to its fellows but to me? Wasn’t the albino-pale mountain hare, darting out of the clouds and passing me by with a squeak, a symbol of catastrophic flight?

Such were my angry, oppressive thoughts, yet nothing could deflect me from my path. At daybreak the rain let up and I started the descent into the still-hidden Isonzo Valley. There was no discernible trail, but I would make one. And, to be sure, I discovered in myself the light-footedness of my father’s speech on the mountain crest, a quick, steady leaping from boulder to boulder, without halt or hesitation. It even gave me pleasure, a pleasure which increased in one place where a bit of rock climbing became necessary. There, Father, I was on all fours, but erect; I felt a simultaneous pull in my fingertips and the balls of my feet, as I never did in the physical labors you gave me to do. I reached the foot of the little wall alive, and plunged into the light of the sun, which actually appeared at that moment.

That brought me to the southern tree line. I still had a long, but easy, hike ahead of me. As I went on, I was overcome with something different from fear of lightning or wild beasts or falling. In telling me about his solitary expeditions as a young geographer, my teacher said that he hadn’t felt free until he left “the last signs of hunters” behind him. I, on the contrary, far from any settlement, in a spot where I could be almost certain that no one else would turn up (and no one knew I was there), fell a prey to anxiety, to fear of a monster — and I myself was the monster. Vanished was every contact with a world; instead, a pallid light, through which, harried by the bloodhound that had suddenly erupted within me, the monster named Alone wandered blindly. And then another jolt, which was at the same time recollection. Had I given myself that jolt, or did it just happen? It happened, and it was I who gave it to my wandering self. Sometimes, as a boy, I had encountered myself in that way, usually on waking, and always at times when I felt threatened. My anxiety turned to terror, as if the end had come, and my terror into a dread with which, reduced to a tumor, I waited — unable to stir a muscle — for the tumor to be removed. But it wasn’t. Instead, an utter stranger appeared and that stranger was I. It was “I,” written with a capital letter, because it wasn’t just anybody; gigantic and space-filling it stood over me, paralyzing my tongue and my limbs; it was my written name. My dread became amazement (to which for once the word “boundless” applied), the evil spirit became a good one, the tumor became a creature, toward which in my imagination, instead of the ominous one finger, a whole kindly hand pointed — and with the appearance of this “I,” it was as though I had just been created: wide-open eyes, ears that were pure listening. (Today, alas, my wonderment at that incomprehensible “total I” refuses to reappear; it seems to have departed from me forever, and this may have something to do with the guilt which has become a part of me at the age of forty-five, and leaves me alone with my often depressing reason, whereas I see my twenty-year-old “I” in a state of grace, in the madness of innocence. Madness? There in the wilderness it was madness that cured me of my fear.)

Reassured, I went my way, with myself on my back, not as a burden, but as protection. I had no sooner reached the forest than I heard a crashing behind me, and a boulder came hurtling between the trees. In the moss a buzzing, as if a swarm of flies had been shooed away from a dung heap — that was a moss-green snake rearing its head and hissing at me. I brought myself to admire it. The skeleton under the pile of brushwood was a roebuck’s; it had horns on its head; I took head and horns with me for a while, then I threw them away. While crossing a pathless clearing covered with chest-high ferns, I took time to listen to the humming of the invisible and otherwise soundless birds in the ferns at my feet. It was not inconsistent with my carefree mood that I was glad to catch sight of an overgrown path, which in descending widened into an old road, and was even happier to see the first fresh wagon tracks and the groove made by the brake claw — it was that steep — in the middle strip of grass. At the sight of this groove, of the clods of mud ripped up by the brake, the oily water in the deep black, glistening wheel ruts, the horseshoe marks, the boot prints of the driver walking beside the wagon (the writing on the soles had left a clear imprint), it even seemed to me that a whole orchestra was starting to play, and this most delicate of all melodies has remained to this day my ideal of music. Then came the first cheeping of sparrows and the barking of dogs. Though it was beginning to rain again, I sat down by the roadside and ate a few blackberries, which here on the southern slope were beginning to ripen. I took off my shoes and let the “sky water” wash my aching feet. I was so hot that the sweat was steaming off me. The shiny handle of my flashlight showed me a face plastered with pine needles. Since the berries failed to quench my thirst, I drank of the warm rainwater as I walked. The elder bush at the entrance to the village was already sprinkled black; next to it, bearing fruit that seemed to grow straight out of its branches, an adventure: my first fig tree. At the foot of the village terrace a desert of white stone, with a bright green stripe twining through it — the Soa, or Isonzo.

I had been roaming about for two days, and now in security I thought, as I often did later on “arriving safely,” that I hadn’t wandered nearly long enough. Security? In my whole life, I have never once felt myself in security.

I spent only a night and a day in the Upper Isonzo Valley. I slept in Tolmin, the largest town in the valley; its coat-of-arms shows the river’s meanders, crisscrossed by the pitchforks of the peasant uprising. I found shelter in the basement of a private house, where there were rooms for rent. There were spiders on the ceiling, and after midnight the cellar smell was fortified by the stench of vomit. In the next room a man retched loudly, wordlessly, and uninterruptedly until dawn. When I got up, there was no one in the kitchen-living room but a mute child with a cat on his lap; his parents had already gone out to work. I put the money on the table, took breakfast at the inn, and breathed deeply at the sight of the bread.

An old road leads along the terrace where the villages are situated. I headed up the river for Kobarid, or Karfreit; at first the Isonzo lay far below me, then it came closer; on the far side of it I saw pastureland, with windowless and chimneyless huts for hay. At a place where the road touched the meandering river, I went down to the bank, took my clothes off in the rain, and let myself down from an overhanging rock into the current, which from a distance had looked so furious but wasn’t so bad once I was in it. Up ahead of me, the river split in two. The water was up to my shoulders; having just come down from the mountains, it was ice-cold; for a moment it stabbed me in the pit of my stomach. I swam against the stream with all my might and noticed after a hundred counted strokes that I was still on a level with the stone where I had left my clothes. I stood up and with my head barely above water surveyed the countryside, which, seen in that perspective, became part of a strange continent, a single shimmering flow from all sides, subdivided only by tongue-shaped gravel banks, surmounted by swaths of mist and fringed by mountains dark with conifers and veiled in rain, the ever-active watershed for these nameless streams. Soa? Isonzo? The desolation that extended from the tip of my chin to a bow-shaped peak lit by a distant sun, nothing but cold river water and warm rain, made me think of a primeval world that doesn’t want to be named but only to stand alone for itself. But then in the middle of the river I sighted, one after another, three fellow swimmers, evidently — to judge by the outline of their undershirts on their otherwise brown arms — workers taking a midday break. They were swimming fast and shouting, one louder than the next; they soon disappeared from view (I saw them later on the road in a file of gravel trucks). Soa or Isonzo? Which suited the river better, the feminine Slovene or the masculine Italian name? For me, I thought, masculine would be better; for the three workers, feminine. As I resumed my march on the road, I felt a warming hand between my shoulder blades, and my shoes became slowly gliding dugout canoes.

Later on, when for the first time I heard the name Kobarid pronounced by a native, it sounded to me as if a child had said it. Yes, time and again, names have rejuvenated the world. When I got there, it was different from anything I had ever seen at home. This was no village; all of a sudden I was surrounded by a fragment of a metropolis; a forest jutted into the center with its bookstore and flower shop, and there were wet cows right next to the factory on the periphery. Though in the foothills of the Alps, Kobarid, or Karfreit, struck me then as the embodiment of the south, with its oleander bushes at the entrances to houses, laurel trees outside the church, stone buildings, and streets of multicolored cobbles (which, to be sure, led after a few steps into the evergreen forests of Central Europe).

The people spoke a jumble of Slovene and Italian, just as the houses were a jumble of wood, stone, and marble; all that together had a spark of daring about it. At my inn, which like the others was named after a mountain, two men were playing cards; at the end of the game, one showed his opponent his winning card with a quick smile. A woman on a curved balcony snipped the faded flowers from the geraniums that ran the whole length of the house, and then put a gleaming red flowerpot down beside the other pots. “This place is my source.” That was my decree.

The bus from the north that I was waiting for came around the corner. But it wasn’t the right one; unlike Yugoslavian buses, it gleamed with enamel in which, when it stopped, the lanceolate leaves of the oleanders were reflected; when I looked up, I saw the whole population of my home village, in window after window a familiar profile. Involuntarily I moved away, looking for a place where I wouldn’t be seen. Were the villagers really perched up so high? Weren’t they, rather, huddling or crouching? And when they rose to their feet, weren’t they actually picking themselves up off the floor? Painfully, as though crippled, they crawled out of the bus, and the driver had to help several of them down from the doorstep. Outside, gathered together in the bend of the street, they sought one another with their eyes, as though afraid of getting lost. Though it was a weekday, they were festively dressed, they had even put on their peasant costumes; only the priest shepherding the tour was wearing his traveling habit and a white collar. The men were wearing hats and under their brown suits velvet vests with metal buttons; the women, in fringed rainbow-colored shawls, all had enormous handbags, all of the same shape. Even the oldest among the women had braided their hair and wound the braids around their heads like wreaths. I was sitting half in shadow at a distance, on a chopping block under an outside staircase. A few of them glanced in my direction, but none of these people knew me; only the priest had a moment’s pause, and it seemed to me that the sight of this stranger may have put him in mind of Kobal, Filip, apostate and fugitive from the seminary. Where, I wonder, could that fellow be now?

Then one by one they stepped into the inn and stayed a long while. I decided to wait for them; there would be a later bus to the Karst, which was probably where my search for my brother’s traces would end. Beside me, there was a woodpile with a pyramidal tunnel at the bottom resembling a kennel; on the wall above it, the remains of a Latin inscription: UNCERTAIN THE HOUR. It seemed to me that I could tell by the look of the villagers that my mother was well; just the sight of those familiar handbags reassured me.

I was left undisturbed in my place; the fact that I so obviously had time seemed identification enough. When the Rinkenbergers came out into the open, the old men had flushed cheeks. They were not drunk but were all seized with a strangely awkward exhilaration. From them I heard the language of the land, for the first time spoken purely, with clear voices, without the garble and swallowing of syllables usual in our village. Before getting into their bus, they all, as though on command, turned back toward the wall of the house, which, windowless at that point, was only a large yellow surface with horizontal grooves. The dark backs of the villagers stood out clearly against it, and I saw some of the women, regardless of age, holding one another by the hand, while some of the men threw their arms over one another’s shoulders. They all sagged at the knees, and it occurred to me that not only we, the Kobals, were exiles, but all the smallholders, and that the whole village of Rinkenberg had always been a village of exile, all its inhabitants equally servile, equally wretched, equally out of place; here with the others even the priest struck me, not as a man of the cloth, but as a close-cropped convict. Most likely they stopped to look at the house because they had been served so well and cheaply there, but in my eyes they were looking up at the grooves of a wailing wall, and at the same time they were pilgrims (Pelegrin was a common name in the village), and that fitted in with the solemnity of the hairdos and costumes. For the first time I saw meaning in these costumes (as I would on a future occasion in the picture of an old woman standing with half-closed eyes outside her stone hut, holding her black-and-white shroud, her old wedding dress, over her arm). The group included a child, who now jumped nimbly up onto the window ledge, then, clinging to the grooves with his fingers and toes, climbed halfway up the wall and, applauded by the grownups, dropped to the ground: end of trip, signal for return.

When the excursion bus, after describing a loop, drove away to the north, in the direction of the so-called Alpine Republic, it grew smaller, as though seen by tired eyes, began to buzz, and turned into a toy bus, in which the servile villagers, on their way from their mother country to their place of banishment, disappeared forever. How fine, how distinguished the lost band had seemed (even the veins on their hands a noble design), and how crude and profane, for all their southern verve, were the native Yugoslavs with their incessant cigar puffing, phlegm spitting, and scratching of private parts.

Crossing the empty square to the wall, I, too, began to look at it. Seen from the outside as I followed the grooves and leaned back to study the overhang of the roof, I was someone examining a building of the Imperial Age. But seen from inside myself, I raised both arms skyward and felt them to be stumps. Thoughts of cursing and spitting. Nothing that led upward; the wailing wall was imaginary; there was only a structure of horizontal parallels, no guidelines, only concave forms smudged with street dust, and spiderwebs on both corners of the house, both north and south, bordered by nothing. “My source?” Let the wall, seen from close up as a yellow flickering, crumble and cave in — on me, for all I cared. But is the southern flame-shaped cypress on one side, brightened by its cones, filled with the piping of the ubiquitous sparrows — ogling one another in their hiding places — are the oleander blossoms with their vanilla smell, nothing? “Oleander,” “cypress,” “laurel”—these are not my words — I didn’t grow up with them — I’ve never lived near the things they signify — laurel, or bay, is known to our people only as a dried leaf in soup. And once again description only makes matters worse: if I wanted to describe a palm tree that meant something to me when I stood looking at it, the foreign word “palm” would get in the way; the tree itself with its scaly trunk and rattling fans would vanish. Over and over again I can name the snow, for instance, which at this moment is flying past my north and south windows; I can name the wind, the grass, the spruces, the firs (my father’s lumber), geraniums, dill; but as soon as I, who grew up inland, try to evoke the sea, of which I have had such varied experience in the meantime, it escapes me along with the word “sea,” which does not belong to me. It still makes me uneasy to speak of things that were mere names to me as a child. Having spent my whole childhood in the country, I even have difficulty in adjusting my lips or hand to things connected with the city, things such as a boulevard, streetcar, park, or high-rise building. Even to tell a story involving the tree I have come to love, whose bright-splotched trunk and dangling seed capsules have so often cheered me, shaken me out of my villager’s lethargy, which to my mind embodies south and city in one, the plane tree, I have to shake myself to down a feeling of presumption — and the same goes for the cypress, which meant “nothing” to me and yet spoke to me, just as the apparent wailing wall with the sky above it gave me the command that I now give myself: “It must mean something. These things in a foreign country belong to me as much as the wayside shrines and the box trees at home.”

Being able to think this over calmly meant that my plea was answered; as though it were only in the calm that inevitably followed my cursing that I could make myself heard. But what an absurd expedition to rediscover the law governing the naming of every object of experience. God bless you believers! Damned border person! Hasn’t the other language a word for “one who wanders endlessly on the face of the earth,” and the corresponding adage: “Strangers will slam their doors in your face”?

The afternoon bus had become a night bus long before it reached the Vipava Plain after the last pass and before the coastal highland of the Karst. Shining in through the window in the roof, the moon hardly moved; at last, the road was straight. With all the curves and detours, I had lost my sense of direction, which returned only at the sight of an inn sign at one of the stops, painted with a still life of fishes and grapes. Then, shining out of the darkness like a landmark, the first vine, immediately followed by the shimmering bottom rows of the great vineyards. The bus was full and all the passengers were talking at once; the driver was talking too, with the man beside him on a folding seat, the conductor (strange idea in a long-distance bus). At the same time a radio program blared from loudspeakers, folk music in time with the speeding bus, interrupted now and then by the news. Most noticeable among the passengers were the soldiers, jammed into the middle aisle and sitting on one another’s lap in the rear seats. A horde would burst in at one stop, surge out at the next, and vanish instantly behind a stone wall. In the course of the long trip, not an hour passed without a rest stop. The driver would halt outside a restaurant or bar and announce the length of the stay: “Five minutes”; “Ten minutes.” Each time, I got out and sipped the wine, which the natives drained at one gulp. I soon felt that I belonged now and forever to this squeaking night bus with its ripped seats and lidless chewing-gum-plastered ashtrays, in which all was speed and at the same time unhurried ease, and to these chattering, incurious, nondescript passengers, and as if I had found my itinerary for life. Haven’t I now and then felt myself in security, after all?

When we piled back in after the last rest stop, a new soldier was with us, in uniform but without a cap. He was carrying a packaged rifle, which during the trip he held upright between his knees. He sat separate from the other soldiers, in the row ahead of me. The moment I looked at him, not at his rifle but at his profile, I knew that something was going to happen. To us? To the soldier? To me? All attention, I looked at the irregular crown of his head and in it saw myself from behind. Bristling close-cropped hair that yielded a double image of a young soldier and of a No one the same age. At last this No one would find out who he was. (Described by third parties, he had always known himself to be under- or overestimated, he had never trusted his own self-image — when he succeeded in forming one — and yet the question “Who am I?” had often become as urgent as a cry for help.) At last I had before me that protagonist of my childhood, my double, who, somewhere in the world, of this I was quite certain, had grown up along with me, and would someday turn up and be my true friend, who, instead of seeing through me as even my own parents did, would understand me without a word and acquit me, just as I would acquit him with a look of recognition or a mere sigh of relief. At last I was looking into an infallible mirror!

Anyone would have taken to that soldier’s looks. He was quite inconspicuous, hardly distinguishable from other young men of his age. Still, he differed from the others by keeping to himself, though without rebuffing anyone. Nothing in his surroundings escaped him, yet he paid attention only to the things that interested him. Never a side glance, throughout the trip his head pointed straight ahead. He sat perfectly still, and his half-closed eyes with their rarely blinking lids suggested contemplative alertness. His thoughts could be far away, yet without a break in his fantasy he would calmly catch the parcel which, unnoticed by anyone else, had fallen from the baggage net just over his neighbor’s head; before anyone knew it, he would put it back in the net and, as if nothing had happened, carry on with his peculiar blinking, which may have been connected with a mountain in Antarctica. It was chiefly his ears that expressed the young man’s ability to keep track of the present along with the absent. While registering every sound in the moving bus, they were equally aware of the glacier that was calving at the same time, of the blind feeling their way in the cities of every continent, or of the brook flowing now as always through his native village. They had no distinguishing feature except that, thin, transparent, glassy, they protruded a little; nor did they move; my impression that they were unceasingly active, more active in fact than anything else far and wide, a reservoir of internal and external impulses, that this man was literally all ears, resulted no doubt largely from his statuelike posture, preserved throughout the trip, the posture of one who was waiting, and who was prepared for anything. Whatever happened, he would be ready for it; it might affect him, but it would not take him by surprise.

That was the trip. Of course, arrival in the garrison town dissipated the statue; all that remained was shifting images, different with every glance. In later years I have often been in Vipava, and have learned to know the village, the city, the “domain” at the foot of the “holy” Slovene Mount Nanos (a white limestone ridge, the hiker’s companion on his way, turning and changing its shape, food for the soul, but also the trademark of numerous profane local products), along with the like-named body of water (several contiguous springs, seeping soundlessly from fissures in the rock, gather as soundlessly in pits, then suddenly merge into one roaring stream, which thunders amid stone houses and rushes under one stone bridge after another, carries off the branches of wild fig trees like a whirlwind, spreads out foaming into the broad valley and there soon calms itself). I have come to know it and the wine named after it (white, grassy, almost bitter) as a place I would like to see as often and as long as possible, as a means of remembering that I can become the world and owe it both to myself and to the world to do so. But on my first visit I had eyes only for the soldier, whom, agitated but at the same time cool and on my guard like a detective, I could not have helped shadowing until it happened. I have had various experiences since, but none so amazing as this encounter with my double. Still, there was no need for caution; I could have kicked the heels off his shoes and he would still have gone straight ahead without looking around. He still held his rifle in his left hand, but now I attached even greater significance to his free right hand, the thumb and forefinger of which formed a circle. First I followed him to the movies, where for a time he was one of the laughing crowd, then to a bar named Partizan, where the waiter and myself were the only civilians. What did I represent myself as? No one asked this question but me; the soldiers ignored me.

The soldier sat down at a table with the others — a mere listener. Then the images began to change. Sometimes when half asleep I see a face that changes its expression as fast as a tenth-of-a-second clock face. That is what my double, whom I didn’t take my eyes off for a moment, did now. Seriousness changed to merriment, merriment to mockery, mockery to contempt, contempt to pity, pity to indifference, indifference to desolation, desolation to despair, despair to gloom, gloom to beatitude, beatitude to carefreeness, carefreeness to levity.

Sometimes he didn’t listen at all, and allowed himself to be distracted by a fly or by the Ping-Pong players out in the corridor, or transported by the jukebox thundering through the room. But when he did listen, he became the supreme authority; soldiers came to consult him, and when one group turned away, others took their places. Even when he sat alone for a time, his comrades kept eyeing him as though waiting either for a sign from him, or, better, for a weak spot. Yes, he struck me as vulnerable, as a man whom the others were always watching, because he was many things in one but nothing permanently, because, one way or another, they were eager to measure themselves against him. Of this he was aware, as he had not been in the bus, and little by little he lost what had most distinguished him, his composure. After that, nothing came natural to him, and most unnatural of all was himself. Not only did his expression change constantly, but his posture as well; he would cross his legs, stretch them out, tuck them under his chair, experiment with resting his bent right leg negligently on his left knee, but not for long. Gone was the pleasing conjunction of presence and absence, which left the beholder with an impression of equanimity, attentiveness, gentleness, and above all of purity; instead, a disfiguring, repellent jumble of rigid eyes, red ears, crooked shoulders, and a clenched fist, which reached for a glass and knocked it over. Was I like that? Last stop, end of dream? My question changed to horror, horror to disgust, disgust to recognition of disgust (with oneself, with others, with existence) as the disease of our clan; the recognition turned to amazement, and there the process stopped. Who, then, was this double? A friend such as I had hoped for as a child? An enemy, the most terrible of enemies, my companion from now to the end of my life? Even the answer yielded a multiple-aspect picture: friendenemy, friendenemy-enemyfriend …

It was getting on to midnight and the bar was emptying. The archaic Wurlitzer along the back wall was surmounted by a glass dome in which, steeped in a garish light, hoisted by a gripping arm, upright as a wagon wheel, a black disk was turning; a sight so overpowering that the music, whatever it happened to be, could only be its accompaniment. The soldier and I looked in the same direction, across the large, somber room, and along with the circling wheel at the other end — grooves shining in the light — I again saw the part in the soldier’s hair, as many-fingered as a delta.

We both left the bar, I once again following; we stood on the deserted square, the far side of which was bordered by a delegation of diminutive stone figures dating back to the Empire, looked at the asphalt, our ground; up at the moon, our domestic animal; to one side, where there was nothing. O Slovene language which (what other living language can show anything of the kind?) has a special form for what two people do or omit to do, the dual, there, too, dying out of late and used only in writing.

On our way to the barracks we detoured along the river, the distance between us steadily increasing. On a sandbank I found not the soldier but only the imprint of his rubber-soled shoes, stamped every which way, often one print over another, all blurred, and spattered mud around the edges, as though a fight to the death had just taken place there.

I saw him next at one of the barracks windows. He was in darkness, but I recognized him by his silhouette. He was holding a spherical object that could have been an apple and could have been a stone all ready to be thrown. When he drew on his cigarette, his face, as familiar as it was uncanny, stood out for a moment, and again, as in the bus, I saw his searching eyes. But I thought of the eyes of a researcher who doesn’t want to discover anything but wants, rather, to make something unknown, to pace off and enlarge the realm of the unknown.

It was a warm, quiet night. I crept into a parked bus that I found open. I stretched out on the back seat, which extended the whole width of the bus, again using my sea bag as a pillow; after initial discomfort, this was my place.

Still, I could not fall asleep. The bus creaked as if it were about to drive off, and the moon shone into my closed eyes, as glaring as a searchlight. I thought of the autumn and of my military service, which then for the first time became imaginable. All the strenuous things I had done in my life I had done alone; once I caught my breath, it was as though nothing had happened, for there is no satisfaction in solitary experience. But, it seemed to me, when soldiers had crossed a mountain range or built a bridge together, they assured one another of what they had done simply by stretching out by the roadside together, all equally exhausted. I wanted to wear myself out over and over again; exhaustion could be my only justification for not remaining a villager and not becoming a laborer.

But then I remembered the speech that a physical-training officer from headquarters had made to the country boys after our medical. Bouncing on one heel and banging the desk with his fist, he had stared into the distance and felt the icy tundra wind blowing over the heroes’ graves, filled his lungs with it, and bellowed an interminable harangue at the weaklings and cowards at his feet. After a last blood-curdling blast from his iron lungs—“No finer death than death in the field!”—all of us together had sung (often stumped for the words) the national anthem, whereupon, clicking his heels and touching the edge of his hand to his brow, he had dropped through a trapdoor and disappeared into his hell. For Filip Kobal this was his first encounter with a dangerous lunatic, while for the other boys of his age it was a natural phenomenon, under which, as then in the “multipurpose” auditorium of the district capital, they may be cringing to this day. But didn’t the experience of loneliness also give forth a liberating light?

Reclining in the bus, I finally saw a road along the seashore, and war had been declared. No one was left in the world but two sentries, one on either side of the bay, both far out in the water on small disks rocking in the waves. And I heard a voice saying that it would soon be made known why wars were the only reality in the world.

When I awoke, I didn’t know where I was. No fear, only enchantment. The bus was standing still, but in a strange, differently colored region; the moon, which had been so bright, had become a pale daytime moon, a cloud, the only cloud in the sky, small and round, exactly opposite a small round sun. I had no idea how I had got from one place to the other; all I remembered was a frequent shifting of gears and bushes brushing against the windows. The folding door was open, and outside I found the driver, who calmly — whatever happened now could only have a fairy-tale quality — bade me good morning and, as if I were an old friend, offered to share his breakfast with me.

The bus was on the open road, but from there a dirt track led to a village such as I had never seen before; that was where the passengers came from, all at once, apparently from the same house; this must have been the terminus. They moved in a body and were dressed for their working day in some other place, among them a gendarme whose uniform made him look like the Marshal. Once these people disappeared inside the bus, the village seemed uninhabited as it had been when I first saw it, a light-gray stone monument, one with the empty, windy country around it. But coming closer, I heard a radio, smelled gasoline, and met a dispiritingly ugly woman, who threw a letter into the usual yellow mailbox. Why did she greet me as “the son of the late blacksmith, returned home at last,” invite me to sit on the bench in a courtyard sheltered from the wind by high walls, bring me a basin of water to wash in, sew the missing buttons on my jacket and darn my socks — unlike my brother, I’d never been capable of taking care of my clothes; the very first time I put it on I had torn a shirt that was as good as new after he had worn it for ten years — show me a picture of her daughter, and offer to put me up in her house? As though complying with the fairy-tale rules, I asked no questions, asked the name neither of the village nor of this airy, free country, whose border I had crossed in my sleep — a transition resembling none before or after — and where, for the first time on my journey, nothing looked familiar to me; even so, I knew I was in the Karst.

My anguished wonderment at being in a fairy tale soon gave way at the sight of the oilcloth-covered kitchen table, of a newspaper headline (no longer rendered obscure by the different language), of the cistern with a plaque on it saying that resistance fighters had used it as a clandestine radio transmitter during the World War. Nevertheless, the Karst, along with my missing brother, is my motive for writing this story. But is it possible to tell a story about a region?

Even in my childhood, the attraction of the Karst began with a mistake. I had always thought of the bowl-shaped depression in which my brother’s orchard was located as a dolina, the most conspicuous feature of the Karst. This alone was what made our unimpressive Jaunfeld Plain interesting; the few bomb craters in the Dobrawa Forest were hardly big enough for garbage pits, and the Drava was so deeply hidden in its trough-shaped valley, navigated neither by ships nor by small boats (though perhaps at night by partisans in washtubs), that hardly anyone in the village of Rinkenberg was conscious of living near a real and important river. The hollow in the plain was the only “sight” in our part of the country, not so much because of its conformation as because it was the only one of its kind. Here, I thought with pride as a schoolboy, so far north of the Karst, an underground cave had collapsed, earth had slid in from above and created this fertile bowl. Where something had once happened, such was my childlike belief, something would happen in the future, something entirely different, and I looked into the supposed dolina with expectant awe.

Later on, by the time my history and geography teacher enlightened me, my years-long belief had done its work, and if my wanderlust had a goal, it was the Karst. Yet I formed no picture of it, except as naked rock interspersed with enormous numbers of dolina craters with red earth at the bottom. Once, when I was sitting at home on the window seat, I burst into tears at the thought of the unknown coastal plateau beyond all the mountains. Much more violent than the usual child’s weeping jag, my outburst had the force of a shout. Those tears, it is now clear to me, were the first statement I had ever made unasked, the first that was strictly my own.

It is that same teacher’s method that I am now adopting in my attempt to give my Karst story a beginning (though there is a voice within me which, in keeping with my tears that day on the window seat, would rather content itself with exclaiming “O Inspired Rock!”). True, he would introduce his favorite story, that of the Maya, with an exclamation, but he would go on to ground it not in any historical event but in the nature of the subsoil. This history of a people, so he said, was predetermined by the nature of the soil and could only be told properly if the soil played a part in every phase; every true historian, he contended, must also be a geographer, and he was firmly convinced that, given the geological configuration of a country, he could calculate its historical cycle and determine whether its inhabitants would even be able to form cycles or a nation. The Yucatan Peninsula, he went on, the land of the Maya, was also a karst, a hollowed-out limestone plateau, but differed from the Karst, from “Mother Karst,” the high plateau above the Gulf of Trieste, from which all comparable phenomena in the world take their name, in being its mirror image. The concave craters of the European Karst became in the tropics convex towers and cones; while in Europe not only the scant rainfall but also the rivers flowing down from the interior are absorbed on the spot by the fissured limestone, the torrential Central American rain is spewed from holes in the stone and even produces fountains of fresh water offshore in the salty Atlantic (the Maya, in their day, would row out to gather it in their water jugs).

Thus, according to the teacher’s theory, the people in the “Ur-Karst” must have been the mirror image of the Maya. Instead of climbing up to terraces when going to work the fields, they went down to the dolinas; instead of hiding in the jungle, their temples showed themselves plainly on bare hilltops; their grottoes served as refuges, whereas the Maya performed human sacrifices in theirs; all buildings, the huts as well as the temples of the Ur-Karst, chicken coop as well as mansion, threshold as well as roof, were built not of wood and corn husks but of solid rock.

Nevertheless, the people going to the bus stop on the dirt road, even the fat woman who took me in, and all who followed her, became in my memory a procession of Indians. Were they a people? Whether they were Italians or Slovenes struck me as of secondary importance. But the Karst had too few inhabitants to form a nation of their own despite the size of their territory and their many villages. Or perhaps they were not so few: in any case, I have never seen more than one, two, or three people at a time; anything resembling a crowd only at church, in the bus or train, or at the movies. There’d be one person in the graveyard; one or two (usually man and wife) hoeing down in their dolina; three (usually war veterans) playing cards in the stone tavern. I’ve never seen them in a group or club, gathered for a common purpose; I have to admit, there was no lack of portraits of Tito, but I had the impression that, up there on the plateau, state power and political system had only a formal existence; so rare and small were the patches of fertile ground in that barren country that collective farming was out of the question. The field no larger than the shadow of an apple tree at the bottom of a dolina far outside the village could only be the property of an individual. Why, then, had the peasant uprising of Tolmin spread to the Karst, where the peasants had fought not only for the “old right” but “to be free at last,” proclaiming: “We don’t want rights, we want war, and the whole country will join us.” Why in the years that followed were more schools built here than anywhere else? Why do I imagine that if the waiter from the Bohinj and the soldier from Vipava were to pass each other in a faceless crowd, they would recognize each other at a glance as displaced persons from their native high plateau, where the earth is still seen not as a modern globe but as a disk? Nevertheless: I have in the Karst encountered not a separate people (with a historical cycle) but a population for whom everything in all directions is either “below” or “outside,” having a sense of community and place worthy of a metropolis, with differences between villages as between neighborhoods in a big city (in my brother’s dictionary, the Karst was cited as the source of more words than any other part of Slovenia), except that every neighborhood is isolated in a no-man’s-land an hour’s walk from the next, and none is known as a slum or as a middle- or upper-class neighborhood. The roads (few of them named) leading to the villages all run uphill; on the southern edge of the city you’re likely to find a cedar outside the church instead of the chestnut tree on the northern edge, and on the western rim perhaps one more Italian name on the monument to the war dead. A poorhouse and a villa are equally inconceivable; the only castle (erected by the Venetians, who, like the Romans before them, deforested the region to build their ships, so completing the work of making this a region of water-swallowing stone) stands ruined and forsaken on its rocky dome, the curved battlements of the Venetian Republic incongruous ornaments in a monotonous rectilinear landscape.

As for the “people,” so designated and so fetishized by my countrymen, I didn’t miss them in the Karst, nor did I find any banished king to feel sorry for; and here there was no need to look, as I do in my home surroundings, for the marks of the defunct Empire, for empty cow paths and blind windows; here the houses can get along without pedestals and volutes. And looking northward to where my Central European cloudbank has piled up beyond Mount Nanos, I say: They not only can but should!

Where, with my very first look around, did that sense of freedom come from? How can a countryside mean “freedom” or anything of the kind? In the last quarter century I have many times carried knapsacks across the Karst (where I’ve never seen anyone else carrying such a thing), or satchels or suitcases. Why is it that I’ve always felt as if my arms and hands were free? And why is it that my very first day there I felt as if the sea bag that I carried with me wherever I went had vanished from my shoulders?

The only answer that occurs to me offhand is the Karst wind (and perhaps the sun as well). It comes from the southwest, rises up from the Adriatic, and in blowing over the plateau becomes a steady breeze that one barely notices when sitting or standing. In this breeze one gains an intimation of the sea, which can be glimpsed only from a few almost secret spots in the Karst, a powerful, never-ebbing intimation, far more reliable and more effective than if one were actually on the shore or sailing along on the open sea. Undoubtedly, the feel of salt on one’s face is imaginary, but not so the wild herbs by the roadside, the sage and thyme and rosemary (all smaller, hardier, more primitive — every leaf or needle the very essence of the spice — than in our kitchen gardens), the concentrated, almost African fragrance of the gnarled mint, the labiate blossoms of the flowering ash, the spruce resin dripping from the trees, the juniper berries that put one in mind of a strong drink (without threatening drunkenness). This is an upwind, not only because it rises from the sea but because it takes hold of you, ever so gently, under the armpits, so that walking, even in the opposite direction, you feel buoyed by it. Are there not, especially in the south, old coastal peoples whose most festive holiday it is to withdraw at certain times to the deserted high plateaus, where they worship the wind in secret and let it initiate them into the law of the world?

Time and again, the Karst wind has given me such an initiation — but into what law? Or was it a law? Once my mother told me about the moment of my birth: though her last child, after my brother and my sister, I had been overdue and had stopped moving inside her; then finally I was delivered into the daylight; after a first whimpering, I let out a scream, which the midwife called a victory fanfare. My mother may have wanted to please me with this story, but I was as horrified as if she had been talking about my death rather than my birth. Instead of my first moments, she had described my last; my throat tightened as though that fanfare were the signal to drag me to my execution. The fact is, I had often reproached my mother for bringing me into the world. I said this without thinking, it just popped out of me, not so much a curse as a reflex, first when my enemy was persecuting me, sometimes when suffering from chilblains or a mere hangnail, sometimes when I was just looking out the window. My mother took my plaint to heart and burst into tears, but I never really meant it; my moods of disgust and anger were opposed by something constant in my makeup, a sense of anticipation, which, however, found no expression because it had no object. The Karst landscape now provided me with such an object, and though it may have been too late, I could have said to my mother: I have no objection to being born. And what of the Karst wind? I have no qualms about saying: It baptized me then (as it repeatedly baptizes me now) to the tips of my hair. However, the baptismal wind gave names, not to me — wasn’t “nameless” implicit in “joy”?—but to the strip of grass in the middle of the wagon track, to the sounds of the various trees (each called something different), to the bird feather floating on a puddle, to the perforated stone, the dolina of corn, the dolina of clover, the dolina with the three sunflowers, to everything in the vicinity. From that gently fanning wind I learned more than from the ablest of teachers: sharpening all my senses at once, it showed me, amid the apparent confusion of desert wilderness, form after form, each distinct from the last, complementing the last; it taught me the value of the most useless thing in the world and enabled me to give names to all things; without the Karst wind, I would not have been able to speak of the rather windless Carinthian village as I do; there would be no running inscription on my stele. Doesn’t that amount to a law?

But what of the contrary wind, the ill-famed burja or bora from the north, an incessant frosty roaring over the high plateau; on such days, all fragrance was gone and one was completely stupefied. If you were out of doors on such days, you could go down into the dolinas, where you were sheltered from the wind and where, without fear of one another, the beasts of the Karst could assemble, a stocky little roe deer along with a hare and a herd of wild pigs; at the top of the bowl all the trees were bent at the same angle, while at the bottom the stubbly grass hardly trembled, the bean or potato plants hardly swayed. But even if you were out in the storm without the protection of a dolina, you had only to sit down behind one of the numerous stone walls, and from one minute to the next you had escaped from the icy blast into a quiet warm bath. In such shelters I had time either to think of the ancient battle in which the bora carried the arrows and spears of one army over the heads of the other, and stopped those of the other army in midflight; or else, as in the gentle west wind, I acquired a feeling for the things of nature and eyes for the works of man, stone walls as well as the little latticework gates leading through them, a pattern of parallel sticks cut from the bushes nearby, so thin, so bent, with such ample interstices that the prototype of a door, a gate, a portal could be discerned in them. Just as nature needs interstices in which to form crystals, so does the searching eye need them for the perception of prototypes. Even the path, which proceeded to lose itself in steppe grass and desert rock (the whole Karst was traversed by promising trails of this sort), was not just any path, it was the path, man-made, for, at least up to the level of the tilled fields, the oasis, and the dolina, it revealed a distinct triad of boundary walls, beaten roadways, and vaulted middle strip.

These visions, isolated in the wasteland — for there was no desert inn on the plateau — coalesced in the villages. The bora drove people together, showing that self-defense and beauty can be one. The north façades, stone dovetailed with stone, broken only by an occasional tiny gap, though many were as long as the nave of a church, curving gently away from the storm wind and thus elegantly evading it, and the farmyard walls, higher than many of the fig trees behind them, rounded at the top, with marble portals as wide as a princely coach (complete with the appropriate white edgestones and the monogram IHS at the top), enclose a square courtyard which, half blinded and deafened by the storm, one entered as one might enter a showroom, a bazaar full of precious objects, where the sawhorse harmonized with the vines, the faggots with the corncob wall and the piles of pumpkins, the wicker cart with the wooden balustrade, the tent of bean poles with the logs (put your hazel rod and the cloth with the mushrooms on the bench along with the rest, they will fit into the picture). The houses of the Karst, fortified castles seen from the outside, one interlocking with the next, surmounted by chimneys that are houses in themselves, were often all the more gracefully furnished inside; they need no barrel vaulting; it suffices that their outer walls are slightly curved to resist the wind.

In none of the houses there did I see what is called a work of art. How, then, did it happen that almost every time I looked into a farmhouse — even when I merely passed by — my heart leapt up as at the sight of the most magnificent paintings, and that a stool, barely big enough for a small child’s behind, positively invited me to sit down? One cannot fail to see how much of what the Karst people make reproduces the most essential feature of the landscape, the dolina or bowl; that all the slender baskets, basket-shaped carts, rounded stools, hay rakes with an arc at the end, seemed to celebrate the one fruitful thing in the country, Mother Dolina, and the belly of the wooden medieval Madonna in one of the churches shows the same rounding.

Without the furniture and implements of the Karst I would never have learned to appreciate the heritage of my forebears, neither my brother’s orchard nor my father’s roofs and cupboards. Up until then, I had always wanted to see our house adorned not only with a blind window but also with a statue in the blind window and perhaps beside the statue a fragment of a centuries-old fresco, and inside the house an ornamental carpet or a remnant of a Roman mosaic; my brother’s accordion, in a corner with its mother-of-pearl keys, was in itself a magnificent adornment, and it was an event when every few years a paint roller impressed a fresh pattern on the walls. The inhabitants of our plain were reputed to be sober-minded, concerned only with utility and the greatest possible simplicity. But in this utilitarian simplicity I now recognized the effect I had felt so much in need of and which I had hoped to obtain from additions and embellishments: my father’s table and chairs, crossed window bars and doorframe not only made the room inhabitable but radiated warmth and good taste; they not only bore witness to a careful hand but communicated something which the man, often brusque, irascible, unfeeling, could impart only in this way, and which alone was the whole man; embarrassed and intimidated by his person, I breathed easy in the presence of the things he made, and acquired an eye for proportion. The letters IHS over portals in the Karst became connected in my mind with the date my father had sawed into the gable of the wooden barn to provide air holes for the hay. I had always seen this pattern, which seemed burned into the weather-beaten, light-gray wooden triangle, as something unique, such as only a work of art can be, and after that I needed no other ornament in the house. Short as it was, the green track in my brother’s orchard culminated in the Karst middle strip, which encompassed all the roads of the north and led straight as an arrow to the ocean horizon, just as the stone dam at the entrance to the orchard, which my brother had once built to preserve the topsoil but which had since then been reduced to a ruin, was now extended in the unbroken, even, curved boundary walls of the Karst — as though it had simply sunk into the earth up there in its alpine land and reemerged here not far from the sea, intact as on the first day, bedecked by the southern sun as though for a roof raising, nobler than before, thus making it manifest that our continent is traversed by the European counterpart of the Great Wall of China.

But could the objects in a countryside and the works of its inhabitants be relied on for any length of time? What of those windless days which occurred in the Karst at every time of year, worldless days without sun or cloud formation, without contour or sound or shimmering color on this disk of earth, when all life seemed to have died out overnight and I myself was the last creature that still breathed; and this forlornness was not as in other places confined to the moment of waking, was not dispelled by the crowing of cocks or the bells of high noon, all equally tinny, converging from the hundred sectors of the city (the television sets blaring in abandoned houses, the empty roaring buses, black rattletraps with drivers looking as if they’d been burned to a crisp long ago and were held together only by their uniforms). No dead satellite could be more lifeless on such days than a Karst that seemed covered by bone ash, the so-called karren fields where innumerable knife-sharp bones protruded and wouldn’t allow you to tread on them. But that, too, taught me something which only a metropolis can teach a visitor; namely, a way of walking.

At home in the village, walking was just a way of going from one place to another as directly as possible, alert to every shortcut, every detour a mistake. Only unhappy, desperate people walked aimlessly. As though in a fit, they would suddenly rush out across the fields, blindly into the woods, through the creeper-clogged ditch, somehow down to the river. When somebody rushed off like that, it was to be feared that he wouldn’t come back alive. When my mother was told of her illness, her first impulse was to run out of the village; we had to lock her up in the house, and she almost tore off the door handle. The sauntering step of the idler and the resolute stride of the hiker were also alien to the villagers, who wouldn’t have dreamed of climbing mountains or stalking game for sport; a hunter always came from somewhere else. You walked to work or to church, with a possible stop at the bar, and you came home; the legs, by and large, were a mere means of locomotion; the body sat stiffly on top of them, and it was only in dancing that its parts worked together. Except in a cripple or an idiot, a conspicuous gait struck the people of Rinkenberg as pretentious; in their Slovene dialect they called it “stirring up wind while walking.”

Thus, walking, too, stirred up wind in the Karst when there was none, and with it all brooding ceased. That great thought, more liberating than anything else in the world—“Friend, you have time”—turned me outward again. And it was having time that taught me my particular gait, a way of walking which, with every rise of the shoulders, every swing of the arms and turn of the head, was designed, not to catch the eye of any particular person, but to carry me deeper into the country (just as sometimes the peculiar gaze of a person or animal can make one look around to see what amazing thing this other may be gazing at, which, to judge by his elated expression, must be something pleasant). One feature of walking in this way is that from time to time the walker himself, involuntarily but quite consciously, turned around, not for fear of a pursuer, but out of pure delight in moving about, the more aimlessly the better, with the certainty of discovering a form behind him, if only a crack in the pavement. Yes, the certainty of finding a way of walking, of being all walker and thus becoming a discoverer, set the Karst apart from the few other free regions I have known. True, the impulse to “get up and go” has proved itself elsewhere, in dried streambeds as on roads leading out of big cities, in bright daylight and (even more effectively) in pitch darkness — but I have never set out for the Karst without the conviction that there I would not only fill my lungs with air but also encounter something new. So firm is my trust in the power of the Karst wind to bring someone who has time for it an archetype, a primordial form, the essence of some thing, that I am not far from speaking of piety; the baptismal wind blows as on the first day, and the walker, caught up in it, still feels himself to be a child of the world. Obviously, he won’t barge ahead like a tourist; he will slacken his pace, turn around in circles, pause, bend down: discoveries are usually to be found below eye level. No need to drive himself; before he knows it, landscape and wind have given him his due. Conscious of having time, I never hurried in the Karst; I ran only when I was getting tired, and then it was a slow run.

But didn’t my finds relate to a time long past, weren’t they the last remnants, leftovers, shards of something irretrievably lost, which no artifice could put together again, and which took on a radiance only in the imagination of a childish finder? Was it not the same with these elementary particles as with the dripstones which in their grotto, in the flickering candlelight, give promise of a treasure, but, once broken off and exposed to the daylight, are nothing more in the hands of the thief than grayish stone potatoes worth less than any plastic glass? No. Because these finds could not be carried away; these were not things you could stuff into your pockets, but rather their prototypes, which impressed themselves upon their discoverer’s inner self by letting him know where, unlike the dripstones, they could flower and bear fruit, telling him that they could be removed to any country whatever, most enduringly to the land of storytelling. Yes, if, in the Karst, nature and the works of men were archaic, they were so in the sense, not of “Once upon a time,” but of a beginning. Just as I’ve never thought “medieval” when looking at a stone roof-gutter but, as never in the presence of a modern building in either country: “Now!” (heavenly thought), so at the sight of a dolina I never thought of the prehistoric moment when the earth suddenly settled, but time and again saw something future rising from the empty bowl, swath by swath, a primal form that merely had to be held fast. Nowhere, up until now, have I found a country which with all its divers components (not excluding a few tractors, factories, and supermarkets) struck me, like the Karst, as a possible model for the future.

One day I got lost — as I often did on purpose, impelled by curiosity, thirst for knowledge — on a pathless steppe interspersed with thickets and loose rock. Before long, I had no idea where I was; there were no detailed maps (apart from secret military ones) of this frontier region. As usual once you take a few steps across country, the wind brought no sign of life from any of the hundred villages, no barking of dogs or children’s screams (which carry the farthest). For hours I struggled on, obstinately, zigzagging around dolina after dolina, which lay fallow, their red-earth bottoms strewn with pale boulders, between which here and there great trees shot up, their tops level with my feet. Here I could speak of wilderness and here I learned that this whole waterless country was an immense desert, merely pretending, by putting forth vegetation, to be fertile, a land in whose gentle breeze many an inexperienced traveler had doubtless died of thirst, possibly hearing to the last the soft sound of flowering ash trees, while — supreme irony — a clear mountain stream may have been flowing not far away. For a long time I had heard no sound of a bird (actually, even on the fringe of the villages, one seldom heard a peep); I hadn’t even seen a lizard or a snake. After struggling through a dense thicket, I found myself hopelessly lost in the waning afternoon, at the edge of an immense dolina, as big as a football stadium, barred at the top by a tall, dense palisade of virgin timber, which I noticed only at the moment when I had forced my way through to it. The dolina seemed uncommonly deep, partly because of the walled terrace ledges that divided the evenly gentle slopes; on every level a different green, varying with the crop grown on it, the most intense green shining from the uncultivated empty ring of ground at the bottom, more magical than the floodlit grass of an Olympic stadium. Of all the dolinas I had seen thus far, only one or two were in use. Here, to my amazement, I was confronted by a whole population. On every one of the terraces from top to bottom, there were small fields or gardens, all with several people working on them. They worked with consummate slowness, there was charm even in the way they bent over or squatted with legs spread. From the whole wide circle arose, softly and evenly, what has remained in my ears as the pervasive sound of the Karst: the sound of hoeing. On the vineyard terrace I saw only standing persons, half hidden by a roof of foliage, tying vine shoots to strikingly crooked posts or spraying them, while in the tiny olive field only hands were visible. On every level I saw at least one tree, on every level a different variety, among them, though it seemed almost inconceivable so far from any running water, such meadow trees as elders and willows (of which I once heard an inhabitant of the Alps say, “They’re no trees, just junk; now take a spruce or an oak, that’s a tree”). I distinguished so many different greens that I could have given each a different name; all of them together, dear Pindar, would have added up to a new Olympian Ode. The last light seemed to gather in the dolina as in a lens, which sharply outlined and magnified the details. This enabled me to notice that no wall was like any other; one consisted of two tiers of stones, the next had a layer of earth between the two, while what looked like a boulder at the edge of the bottom circle was a conical hut, built of stone blocks growing smaller toward the top, with a keystone in the shape of an animal’s skull and a roof gutter, from which a long pipe led down to a rain barrel; the hole in the ground was no accident, it was the entrance to the “casita” and had a lintel the length of an eagle’s wing with a sundial scratched into it.

Now a stooped figure is coming out, a boy with a book in his hand; he straightens up to become a man, and I am again immersed in the wood smell and summer warmth of my father’s shed; I’ve gone directly to the fields from school, and I’m sitting there at the table with my homework, barefoot; in one corner I see a napkin-covered basket with bacon and bread in it and a jug of cider; in the other the dead nettle plant from which, though there isn’t a breath of air in the room, cloud after cloud of pollen puffs trace on the floor the pattern of sunlight formed by the cracks and knotholes in the boards. I hear the voices of my parents as they work toward each other from the two ends of the field (monosyllabic greeting, followed by an exchange of words — Father cursing, Mother laughing at him — all leading up to their afternoon snack together in the field); I play solitaire, listen to the rumbling of the thunder, stretch out on the bench, dream, am awakened by the droning of a hornet as a whole squadron of bombers comes shooting out of the mist, eat an apple, the skin of which shows the bright image of the leaf that shaded it, and on the stem the shriveled blossom, go outside, straighten up in my turn into a grownup, a man, take a deep breath, and recognize the hut as the center of the world, where the storyteller sits in a cave no larger than a wayside shrine and tells his story.

So friendly was the room into which I now looked down, and such power rose up from it that even the Big Bang, so it seemed to me, would be powerless to harm this dolina; both blast and radiation would pass over it. And looking ahead, I saw the people at work in that fertile bowl at my feet as the remnant of mankind after the catastrophe, starting to farm again. Yes, this place tucked away in the dead desert struck me as a self-sufficient farm where the earth still fed its inhabitants. And no thing in the world had been lost; true, abundance was a thing of the past, but there was at least one viable exemplar of every basic substance and of every basic form. And since every necessity was both on hand and a rarity, it showed the beauty of the beginning. And precious was not only what was at hand but also everything that could be seen, the grain in the fields as well as the shadow on the stone — and in this imagining I was reinforced by the people of the Karst, for, living in want and menaced by the void since time immemorial, had they not a hundred names for a corncob, an ear of wheat, a bunch of grapes, and just as many for every one of their few birds, all sounding like nicknames (though neither “throttler” nor “mockingbird,” neither “wolf’s milk” nor “kitchen bell”[4] was among them), as though the many names were intended to fence the thing in and preserve it. The image of this plantation sunk into the Karst earth, protected from any enemy incursion, secure from atom bombs, under the open sky, as a goal to strive for is still with me, nor have I forgotten the tootling of the transistor in the stone hut — its prize song. Image? Chimera? Fata morgana? No, image, because it is still in force.

Although my time in the Karst was entirely made up of walking, stopping, and going on, I never had my usual guilty conscience about being a good-for-nothing idler. My sense of freedom every time I arrived somewhere was not the consequence of a release. I had no feeling of detachment; on the contrary, I knew that I had at last become attached. Didn’t I secretly say to myself immediately after crossing the threshold of the plateau: “Now we are here!”; didn’t I see my solitary self in the plural? Just as my father’s daily chores, plugging a hole, unwinding a rope, chopping kindling, were for a time rituals designed to make my mother get well, so I imagined that by investigating the Karst I was serving a cause, and not only a good cause but a great and glorious one. Many motives were at work together: to prove myself in my own way worthy of my forebears and to save what they stood for; the desire to be the disciple — his only one, no doubt — my teacher so longed for; an irresistible feint in my duel — a strange obsession — with my enemy; to earn the love of the most lovable of women precisely by going into the desert and enduring all manner of hardships — but transcending all this there was something that I call the desire or appetite for an orgy. What sort of orgy? I have always believed in dreams, so I shall answer with the story of a dream. In a glass cage, intercity bus and funicular in one, the same passengers kept meeting time and time again for a group trip to the Empire of the Karst. Not a single word was spoken. The crossing was marked by a shimmering, towering Indian mountain, which any child could have climbed, under the bluest of skies. This was the last stopping place. Our group was now complete. From here on, nothing could be seen of the country; there was only the vehicle, moving as quietly as if it were standing still, and with it the passengers all at a distance from one another, no two together. True, this one and that one were known to me from the street; the man at the ticket window, “my shoemaker,” a shopgirl; ordinarily we greeted one another, but once we boarded this vehicle, none of us gave any sign of recognition. Instead of exchanging glances, we sat motionless, united in expectation. The more often we set out on this trip, always from a busy station accessible to all, the more festive became the light in the cage. Rapture awaited us at the end of our journey, in the heart of the Empire, the greatest joy a human being could know; the bliss of being gathered into nothingness. Of course it never happened, we never even came near it. On the last journey, however, one of my traveling companions smiled at me, so giving himself to be recognized and at the same time recognizing me. An orgy of recognition: instead of rapture and confluence, shock and oneness, with the verb corresponding to “orgy” translated as “to yearn steadfastly,” and the place name Orgas as “Land of Demeter” or “Meadow” or “Fruitland.”

In reality, the Karst is a land of want and the crossing is not marked by a strange Indian mountain. It’s long after the border before you notice, to your surprise, that you are climbing and that something has changed. First the wind, then the flowing brooks are gone, there’s not even a trickle of water; dark pines have replaced light-colored deciduous trees; conversely, the brown clay and gray-black stone, so long the companions of your journey, have abruptly given way to a massive chalk-white, covered by only the scantest of sod; stubbly pasture has taken the place of succulent meadows. Though the plain down below is still near, the towns and rivers still clearly visible — you can even see an airfield with a steeply rising jet plane and a drill ground with hopping soldiers — the plateau is as quiet as if you were far out on the open sea. At first you had sparrows flying ahead of you; now it’s butterflies. It’s so still that you hear the sound when a butterfly chasing a falling leaf grazes the ground with its wings. You hear last year’s dry pinecones crackling, one high overhead, the next at eye level, and so on, a graduated sequence, a constant chirping until sunset, while from this year’s fresh pinecones the resin drips steadily — dark spots in the dust of the path, getting larger and larger.

Stick to the path; even so, you won’t meet anyone; the dark men escorting you to the left and right, fanning out now and then into the pale savanna, are juniper bushes. Hours, days, years later, you will be standing at the foot of a white-flowering wild cherry tree, with a honeybee in one blossom, a bumblebee in another, in the third a fly, in the fourth a beetle, in the sixth a butterfly. What glitters like a water hole on the path up ahead is a silvery snakeskin. You pass long rows of woodpiles, which on closer scrutiny prove to be camouflaged ammunition dumps; you pass round heaps of stones, which turn out to be the entrances to underground storehouses; if you touch them with your foot, the rock is cardboard. At every step, grasshoppers will squirt up at you from the middle strip of grass. A dead black-and-yellow salamander moves almost imperceptibly along the wagon rut. When you bend over, you discover that it’s being carried by a procession of dung beetles. After all these tiny creatures, the first animal of any size, a white-faced fox, a dormouse wrapped around a branch, will look to you like a brother. That breeze in the solitary tree over there — a moment later you feel it on your face. Your resting place is a cave; to explore it you won’t need a lamp, because daylight shines in from the far end and through a few holes in the roof. Water will drip on your overheated forehead, and in a niche there are quail’s eggs, not bullets but stone balls, rounder and lighter in color than in any mountain stream. As you go your way, you shake them in your hand, and their smell, quite unlike the stinking heaps of bat’s dung, will bring the widely ramified clay chambers of the Karst caves into your room as long as you live.

Now you can go naked; the wild sow, one enormous black-brown hump, which bursts grunting and panting out of the underbrush on your right, followed by two piglets no bigger than hares, and crashes on into the underbrush on your left, has no eyes for you. Your feet stamp the ground, your shoulders soar, and your eyeballs touch the sky.

At your next resting place, you hear a long-drawn-out croaking of frogs in the stillness; a delicate monotone in the desert. You will go toward it and come to a puddle that takes up a long stretch of the path. The water is clear, a single feather is floating on it. The deep-red bottom shows a hexagonal crack, the hoof prints of two deer, any number of arrow-shaped bird tracks pointing in all directions, a cuneiform inscription that asks to be deciphered. You find its counterpart in the sky where a patch of azure blue the size of your big toe appears in the middle of honeycomb clouds — speaking of cirrus clouds, the Karst people say: “The sky is blossoming,” just as they say: “The ocean is cascading,” where we would speak of a rough sea. The feather will blow away, the wind will raise a swell in the long puddle. Stretch out on the bank, using your bundle of clothes as a pillow. You’ll fall asleep. One of your hands will pass between your knees and take root in the earth, you will hold the other to one ear (the torn corners of our eyes, brother, come from listening). In your dream you will hear the pond spoken of as a lake, and see a boat with your hazel stick as a rudder in the rushes by the shore; a dolphin will spring up from nowhere, its back bent into a dolina by the weight of the fruit it is carrying. Your sleep will be short but refreshing, and you will be roused by raindrops on your ear — there can be no gentler awakener. You will get up and dress. You will not have been out of the world, but for once wholly in it. And sure enough, a duck from the savanna will come flying low, land gently on the puddle, and swim back and forth in front of you; and a cow that has lost its way will stop and drink. You will let the rain fall on you. It will make you so calm that butterflies will alight on you, one on your knee, another on the back on your hand, while a third will shade your brow.

As you continue on your way through the Karst, the sky will turn blue again (only the usual black pileup to the north, beyond Mount Nanos, will give you a feeling of “weather”); the trees will sough clockwise, each with its own music, and you will understand why, when the rustling of the oak trees was especially loud and penetrating, the ancients heard it as the voice of the oracle. You will take notes, and the scraping of your pen will be one of the most peaceful sounds under the sun. It will lead you back to the hundred villages and city quarters (the Karst movie house, the Karst dance hall, the Karst Wurlitzer), which, when night falls and the sky is again overcast, will be recognizable in the soundless wilderness by the circular glow here and there on the cloud cover. There you will be regaled with white bread, Karst wine, and that special ham that will give you an aftertaste of your walk with all its smells, from the rosemary of the middle strip to the thyme at the foot of boundary walls and the juniper berries of the savanna. You will need no more for the present. And one day in the course of your years, you will come to the place where the sunlit patch of fog on the horizon far below you will be the Adriatic; and knowing the region as you do, you will be able to distinguish the freighters and sailboats in the Gulf of Trieste from the cranes in the shipyards of Monfalcone, the castles of Miramar and Duino, and the domes of the basilica of San Giovanni di Timavo. And then, at the bottom of the dolina at your feet, between two boulders, you will discover the ultra-real, many-seated, half-rotted boat, rudder and all, and involuntarily, taking the part for the whole (you will then be free enough), name it ARK OF THE COVENANT.

A time will come of course when walking, even walking in the heartland, will no longer be possible, or no longer effective. But then the story will be here and reenact the walking.

On that first trip, I was in the Karst for barely two weeks, on just about every day of which I was someone else. I was not only a seeker after traces but also a day laborer, a bridegroom, a drunk, a village scribe, a member of a wake. In Gabrovica I saw the bell that had fallen out of the church tower; it had dug deep into the ground and children were playing on top of it; in Skopo, emerging from the wilderness, I frightened the solitary old woman hoeing in the dolina; in Pliskovica I went into the only church that was unlocked on weekdays, and sketched the black-and-yellow hornet that was crawling over the altar cloth; in Hrusevica, brookless like every other village in the Karst, I marveled at the stone statue of St. John of Nepomuk, who as a rule is found only on bridges; in Komen I stepped out of the movies into a moonlit night, brighter and more silent than the Mojave Desert, through which Richard Widmark had just fought his way; got lost in the chestnut forests of Kostanjevica, home of the only tall trees in the Karst, where the ankle-deep rustling of past years’ leaves and the crunching of nutshells underfoot can be compared to no other sound in the world; strode through the freestanding portal of Temnica, which from the edge of the footpath leads out into the steppe and wilderness; bowed my head in Tomaj before the house where died the Slovene poet Sreko Kosovel, who when hardly more than a child celebrated the curative properties of his region’s pine trees, stones, and quiet paths, and — at the end of the war, when the alien monarchy ended and Yugoslavia began — entered (“clanked into”) his capital city of Ljubljana, where he, the brother of my waiter and my soldier, made himself the herald of the new era and, perhaps in the long run not brazen enough for that sort of thing, too much affected by the “stillness” (tišina, his favorite word) of the Karst — see his conspicuous jug-ear — was not long for this world.

An Indian squaw took me in, mistaking me for the son of the dead blacksmith in the next village. I never disabused her. She spoke with such certainty that I was glad to be taken for someone else, and in the end I was playing with conviction the role of a man who had returned to his home country after a long absence. When I spoke of incidents in my Karst childhood, the old woman shook her head and nodded by turns, a reaction that could only signify amazement at a story both incredible and credible. As I soon noticed, I took pleasure in my fabrications, all of which, to be sure, had some basis in fact and had to be both consistent and imaginative. Such invention was a part of my joy at being for once free; invention and freedom were one.

Yet this woman was the first person by whom I felt appreciated as well as recognized. In the eyes of my parents, I was always “too serious” (my mother) or “too dreamy” (my father); my sister, it is true, regarded me as the secret ally of her craziness; my girlfriend’s gaze when we met was often rigid with an embarrassment that melted only when at last — and I didn’t always succeed — I smiled at her from deep inside me; and even my teacher, who understood everything, once said — when in the course of a class excursion I had suddenly run off across the fields and into a thicket, just to get away! to be alone! — well, when I came back, he said with an undertone of irrevocable judgment: “Filip, you’re not right in the head.” The squaw of the Karst, on the other hand, gave me, heartwarmingly, the trust at first sight which, after a few days in her house, became an expectation, a wordless refutation of my constant self-disparagement (“I’ll never amount to anything”); an acquittal as surprising as it was reasonable; encouraging and protective; and so it has remained. And it was she who, before I had even opened my mouth, gave me credit for a sense of humor. At home I had often forbidden my mother to laugh, because her laugh reminded me of the way women guffawed when men were telling dirty jokes, and my school friends thought I was a killjoy, because when someone was telling a joke I’d point out a scratch in the tabletop or a loose button on his jacket just as he was coming to the punch line. Only my girlfriend, when we had been alone for a while, would sometimes manage — addressing me in the third person as in eighteenth-century dialogues — to cry out in astonishment: “Why, he is an amusing fellow!” But whereas she had reacted to some little random remark of mine, my way of looking and listening was enough for my present hostess, and whatever she showed me or told me, she did it with the joyful gusto that an actor absorbs from an alert audience — so perhaps the so-called sense of humor is nothing other than a happy alertness. Though once, toward the end of my stay — the two of us were sitting at the kitchen table and I was just looking silently out into the yard — she said something different. Something contradictory? Or complementary? She said that I had inside me a great, silent, passionate tearfulness; it wasn’t just there, it was raging to get out, and that was my strength. She went on to tell me that once in Lipa, when it was almost dark in the church, a man had stood there alone and erect, and sung the Psalms in a firm yet delicate voice. What had struck her most was that he had held his eyes shut with the fingers of one hand. She stood up to act out the scene for me, and we both burst into tears over that absent man.

Now and then I helped her with her work. Together we hoed the little family dolina, dug the first potatoes out of the red earth, sawed firewood for the winter. I drafted her daily letters to her daughter in Germany and whitewashed the daughter’s room (as though she were ever going to come back). At the bottom of the dolinas, as I found out, there is no breeze to dry the salty sweat. It was the same as at home, all physical exertion cost me an enormous effort; once started, to be sure, I often warmed to the task, but even then the thought of getting it over with was never far from my mind. I can’t say that I showed more skill than in the past, but since the old woman, quite unlike my father, left me alone, she opened my eyes to my mistakes; in the main she showed me what I was like and how I moved when I anticipated having to start working.

She taught me to recognize that I had seldom been at hand when there was work to do, and had almost always had to be called from some distant hiding place. But my seeming laziness was in reality a fear of failure. I was afraid not only of being no help but, worse, of getting in the way and making things harder for the person I was supposed to be helping, afraid that a false move of mine might ruin the work of a day or even of a whole summer. (How often my father would summon me to his workshop with loud oaths, and then after my very first hammerblow send me away without a word.) When I was supposed to fit things together, I forced them; when I was supposed to take them apart, I wrenched them; when I was supposed to put things into a box, I stuffed them; regardless of who might be holding the other end of the saw, I couldn’t adjust to his rhythm; if someone handed me a roofing tile, I dropped it; and the moment I turned my back, my woodpile would start sliding. Even when there was no need for haste, I hurried frantically. I might seem to be moving fast, but my partner, with one slow movement following from the last, was always done before me. Because I tried to do everything at once, there was no coordination. In short, I was a bungler. If I was expert at anything, it was at making mistakes; where another needed one blow of the hammer, I missed my aim so often that whatever I was working on would be either damaged or broken; if I’d been a burglar, I’d have left dozens of fingerprints on the smallest object. I realize now that the moment I was expected to make myself useful I would go into a daze and have eyes for nothing more, least of all for my work. I would blindly shake, tug, kick, rummage, until, often enough, both work and tool were in pieces.

I was deafened by what I took to be other people at work, the gentle swishing of the scythe or the soft sound of potatoes tumbling from a crate into a cart; I ceased to be receptive — though I must have heard it — to the sound I loved best, the rustling of the trees, different from one variety to another. A chore could be ever so easy—“Take the milk cans down to the stand,” “Help me fold the sheets”—and before I knew it, I’d be out of breath and red in the face, my tongue would be hanging out. Suddenly, regardless of whether I was walking, reading, studying, or just sitting there, my body ceased to be all of a piece, my torso lost its connection with my abdomen; bending over to gather mushrooms or to pick up an apple, for instance, became a marionette-like jerking instead of a smooth movement.

Most of all, I came to understand while working with the Karst squaw that my problem began the moment I was asked to help, even if I had plenty of time to prepare myself. Instead of getting ready, I would brace my fingers and arms against my body as though in self-defense, and even arch my toes in my shoes. Perhaps, I thought, my horror of physical labor came from the look of my parents’ bodies. Even as a child, I had been ashamed of my father’s flat chest and sagging knees, and of my mother’s heavy buttocks, and during my last two school years the poise and elegance shown by lawyers, doctors, architects, and their wives, even when asking one another how their children were getting along, made me still more ashamed of my parents.

And now my recognition of what was wrong with my way of working helped me to control my body, so that with each passing day I enjoyed my daily labor more. Watching the old woman, I learned to pause in my movements; the transitions, at first forced and spasmodic, became easy and natural, and my working place, the red earth or the white wall, appeared to me in full color. Once when I started home with a handful of terra rossa, I even found a fragrance in it. Command to myself: Get away from your father.

One day my hostess took me through the wilderness outside the village to a field that was not in a dolina, a rarity in the Karst. Enclosed by a low wall, it was overgrown with weeds, but the light-red earth shone through and furrows were still discernible. Access was barred by a wooden stile, beside which there were stone steps leading over the wall. At the bottom of the wall there was a square opening, through which rainwater could drain from the path into the field. Here the woman stretched out her arm and said: “To je vaša njiva” (“This is your field”).

I climbed over the wall and bent down to the earth, which was loose, as if it had been plowed not too long before. The field was narrow and slightly vaulted in the middle, ending in a row of fruit trees, each of a different sort. Had the old woman simply made a mistake, or was she pulling my leg? Or, as I had asked myself when I first laid eyes on her, was she mad? When I turned around to her, she was laughing all over her broad face, with the little delighted sounds of a very young girl — a laugh deserving of the name.

Not only the squaw, everyone in the hundred villages treated me like an old friend or the son of an old friend; I had to be something of the kind, because strangers never came to the Karst. And just as Odysseus was often full of wine, so I, his son, in the course of my search for him, once lay on the ground dead-drunk. At home, we never drank anything stronger than cider, and that only when thirsty; and I had always steered clear of my roistering classmates, especially after one of them, on our class trip to Vienna, after groaning and retching for hours in his upper bunk, had spewed a great flood of sour vomit down on me. The mere smell of liquor, the peculiar glug-glug, and worst of all its devastating effect on the drinker’s behavior, repelled me. Up until then, I had barely tasted wine; but here in the Karst, in the open air, in the sun, in the spicy wind, I began to — what was the word again? — to savor it. I drank swallow after swallow, putting down my glass after each one. Often after the very first swallow I felt at one with the world and at the same time, as though the two pans of the scales were at last evenly balanced, experienced a sense of justice. Afterward, I saw more clearly, dreamed astutely, perceived connections, took pleasure in precisely staggered intervals, which composed a well-ordered globe, rotating clockwise; I had no need to rotate with it. Incredible that anyone should slander wine as “liquor.”

That’s the way it was when I drank by myself. But in company — remember that companions flocked to Telemachus — I usually lost all sense of proportion. I didn’t guzzle, I didn’t drain my glass at one gulp as the others often did, but I did down my wine without tasting it, and I especially liked to stay on until everyone else had gone home. One night — a cock was already crowing, my companions had all drifted away — I got up from the table and noticed that for the first time in my life I was drunk. I took a few steps and collapsed. I lay face down in the grass, unable to stir a finger. I had never felt so close to the earth; I smelled it, felt it on my cheek, I heard the roar of the underground river, the Timavo, and laughed to myself as though I had accomplished something. Later, when they lifted me up by my arms and legs and carried me home, I was able to give my accomplishment a name: at last I, who had all my life set so much store by independence, was making a display of my helplessness; at last I, who had always made a secret of my indignation that no one came to my assistance, had allowed myself, unresisting, to be helped — a deliverance, in a way.

The next day I was told that my drunkenness hadn’t even been noticed; I had only been “very stiff and proud”; my eyes had “sparkled”; I had “told them all off”; and in the end I had made a speech about grammar, especially the “suffering form” (the passive voice), which did not exist in the Slovene language, for which reason the Slovenes should stop feeling sorry for themselves and calling themselves “the people of suffering.”

In the course of those weeks, I saw someone die for the first time in my life. On my way through a village, I was almost knocked down by a woman who came running out of a house. She threw herself down in the street, writhing, screaming, and hugging her knees as though in labor. They laid her on a bench, where she stretched out, letting her head dangle. I have never heard such deep, agonizing sounds as her last breaths. For a time, her lower lip moved as though to suck in air; it slowed and stopped; it seemed to me in the deafening silence that her lip had written something, and that her writing had now run its course. I felt as if I had known her, and her family took it for granted that I should watch through the night with them, though with all their mumbling of rosaries I could hardly keep awake. The corpse’s face was smooth; but all her suffering was still written in her distorted, shriveled eyelids. Strange what veneration I felt for this unknown dead woman; strange my vow to be worthy of her.

It was such a promise of fidelity that I then, as a twenty-year-old in the Karst, celebrated as my “wedding.” This happened on a Sunday after Mass, in the walled-in yard of an inn, under a broad-leafed mulberry tree. I was sitting there over a glass of wine when a small mixed group in holiday dress came through the gate — in a festive mood, as though still enfolded by the blessing of the “Go in peace.” The children ran or hopped about in a ring, the grownups kept turning to one another, a one-legged man and a dwarf woman completed the round. After greeting me, the stranger, with a natural grace, the men by lifting their hats, the women with a smile, they sat down at a long table requiring several tablecloths, which billowed in the Karst wind and reddened with the hours, not only from spilled wine but also from the soft fallen mulberries. In this company — they talked a good deal, though none raised his voice or held forth — I noticed a young woman who remained silent the whole time, a mere listener, her eyes almost unblinking in their attentiveness. At last, she turned her head slightly and looked at me. Her face revealed a gravity as the listener became a speaker, and it was I she spoke to. No smile, no crinkling of the lips, only two eyes, looking at me and saying: “It’s you.” I was so startled that I almost turned aside, but I stood up to her gaze, recovered my composure, and fought through to a seriousness that came as a kind of shock, as though I had for two decades been leading an unworthy life, without soul or consciousness, and had just now, thanks to my meeting with these eyes, come to myself and the world. Yes, that was a world-shattering event; this was the face of my wife! And to this woman I was now wedded, in a meticulous, gradual, solemn, exalting—Sursum corda! — ceremony, presided over by the Karst sun and the sea wind and perceptible only to the two of us. Without a word or gesture, keeping a diffident distance, joined in the look of our eyes, without a witness, with no other document than this story. Eye to eye, in intermittent jolts, we came closer, until you were I and I you, adorable woman under the mulberry tree. From no other woman has a secret voice come to me saying: I am yours.

Twice during that time, I glimpsed my brother. My night in the railroad tunnel had taught me that the essence of a place is often best perceived through another, neighboring place — that of the torture tunnel through the tunnel I pioneered. Thus, I deliberately avoided the Karst villages mentioned in my brother’s letters, in the belief that I would be able to get a clearer idea of them by studying the neighboring villages. Places whose names I heard day after day in my childhood, places which I approached but never got to, had much more of an aura than those that I actually knew. On the eastern edge of the Jaunfeld, for instance, there was the hamlet of Sankta Luzia, consisting of little more than a church; my parents often mentioned it because that was where they were married. I was never there, but I circled it on all sides, and because my perception of it amounted to no more than the edge of a field seen from the woods, church bells in the evening, or the crowing of a cock, I have a feeling to this day that there, hardly an hour’s walk from home, a new world began. And so it was that in a sunny hour, once again outside an inn, in just such a neighboring village, I saw my brother stepping through the door to the yard. He appeared to me in a crowd, because the parish was celebrating its saint’s day and people had come from the whole Karst plateau. Did he really come in? No, he just stood in the doorway, and despite the constant coming and going, an empty space formed around him which, as it seemed to me then, brought back his time, the years preceding the World War. My brother was younger than I, his twenty-year-old descendant, and this was the last holiday of his youth. He was wearing the jacket with the wide lapels, which since then had been handed down to me, and his deep-sunken eyes — both had their sight — projected an infinite dream. Though I remained seated with my companions, I also had the impression that I got up to make sure it was he. His eyes were the blackest black, the black of the elderberries that had ripened all about during those summer days, and shone with their living light. Neither of us moved; we stood facing each other for an eternity, at a distance, beyond reach, unapproachable, united in grief and serenity, merriment and forlornness. I felt the sun and wind on the bones of my forehead, saw the festive bustle on both sides of the dark passage with my brother’s image in it, and knew we were in midyear. Holy forebear, youthful martyr, dear child.

The other time, it was an empty bed that spoke to me of Gregor. I often took the train in the Karst, and sometimes I just hung around one of the extraordinary stations. Most of these were in the wilds, far from the villages, and could be reached only by paths without signposts. Some of them, at night, were plunged in total darkness; the only way to find them was to feel your way slowly, if possible under the guidance of a native. But then, just before the train pulled in (even if I, as happened often enough, was the only prospective passenger), the whole area lit up, revealing a large, diversified building, as big as a factory and as majestic as a manor house: light-colored gravel, fountains under a cedar tree, resplendent façades covered by clusters of fragrant, light-blue wisteria, heraldic blind windows. Here again, the upper floor was inhabited, and while the stationmaster sat in his office downstairs at the brightly lighted switchboard as in a space capsule, his wife upstairs passed window after window on her way from room to room. Time and again, the telephone bell jangled in the desert stillness. And then at last came the imperious signal that a train was coming. Since the tracks were encased in the Karst rock as in a canyon, the rattling and rumbling of approaching trains reverberated as in a subway tunnel. As often as not, the station bell began to ring immediately after the great clatter in the wilderness, as though the train would instantly shoot out of its grotto; but then it would lose itself in one of the countless looping ravines and much later, when I was beginning to think my ears had deceived me, I’d hear it again from an unexpected direction, accompanied by the repeated melodious tooting of a departing overseas steamer, and then at last the thundering organ of the Karst would come bursting out of the pitch darkness, whistling, roaring, trilling, booming in every register, recognizable by the triangle of eyes at the front of the locomotive, the one in the forehead going out as it came closer. Almost more fantastic were the freight trains passing through, with their massive, unlit cars, sometimes of varying length, among them a string of empty undercarriages with jutting rods, an apparently endless procession, with a powerful pounding, hammering, knocking, and drumming, leaving behind it in the void a wake compounded of metallic smell, buzzing and singing, as though the world of men were unconquerable.

On such a night I was waiting in one of the Karst stations for the last passenger train. As I still had a long time to wait, I sat in the grass by the cedar tree, walked up and down on the gravel, sketched the grain of the table in the waiting room with my stick lying on top of it, looked at the green-painted cast-iron stove, the pipe of which was missing. Outside, under the stars, the shadows of bats. A warm night as usual; the smell of the wisteria, more delicate than that of any lilac. I still remembered the plan drawn up under the Empire to build the Slovenian stretch of the Vienna — Trieste line underground, cutting through the caves of the Karst. As I was pacing back and forth, I passed a lighted basement window that I hadn’t noticed before. I bent over and looked down into a big room, comfortably furnished with bookshelves all along one wall, and a bed. The bed was made up and the coverlet turned down, as though ready for someone to get into it; the bedside lamp cast a circle of light on the pillow. So that was where my deserter brother was hiding. I stepped back and saw a woman’s silhouette in one of the tall windows of the upper story. She cared for him; he was happy in her house.

I saw myself at a goal. My purpose had been not to find my brother but to tell a story about him. And another memory took hold of me: in one of his letters from the front, Gregor speaks of the legendary country, which in the language of our Slovene forebears is called the “Ninth Country,” as the goal of our collective longings. “May we all meet again someday,” he wrote, “in the festive Easter vigil carriage on its way to the wedding of the Ninth King in the Ninth Country. Hear, O Lord, my prayer!” I now saw a possible fulfillment of his pious wish: in writing. Just as I would transpose the empty bed from the basement of the station, so also would I move the thermometer on the outer wall of the station, fashioned by a Vienna instrument maker at the turn of the century, the three-legged stool next to it, the vine pattern of the waiting room, and the chirping of the crickets to our family home. Thus, my train approached, meandering through the wasteland, roaring, fading, welling up, headlights shining from the gullies and ranging far ahead, then itself coming into sight, the locomotive halting at last, chinks and joints traced by all the lights inside it, a crackling, fabulous monster, bursting with power, and the cars full of people returning home from the cities, from the sea, from abroad, snoring, working crossword puzzles, knitting.

As bright as were my waking moments, by night as by day, so dark were my dreams. They banished me from my supposed paradise and flung me into a hell where, without other company, I was the damned and the tormentor in one. I was afraid of falling asleep, because my guilt at not being at home with my people figured in every dream. I kept seeing our home but never a human being in it. And the house was a ruin, the roof had caved in, the garden was all weeds and jumping snakes; not a sign of my family, only their plaintive, receding voices, or a few spots in the dust, as of melted ice cubes. From time to time I woke up, an outcast. In time even the sun, the baptismal wind, my walking, the piles of onions drying under my window (they reminded me of fishermen’s nets) lost their power, and I decided from one minute to the next to escape homeward.

Not until I was on my way did I regain the calm needed for the last station on my Yugoslavian journey. I went to Maribor (or Marburg) to look for my brother’s school. But there was no need to look for it; from the train window I saw the hill with the chapel on it, familiar to me from the prewar photo. Even when I came closer, nothing seemed to have changed in the last quarter of a century; nothing had been destroyed, and nothing new had been built. Only the big painted apiary had fallen into disrepair; in its place there were bright-colored little boxes on the grass among the fruit trees. I walked around the spacious, airy grounds, looked at the palm tree outside the main building, the Virginia creeper twining in and out of the clefts in a poplar, the initials that had grown immoderately with the smooth bark of a hornbeam, the many steps leading up to the door of one of the smaller buildings (“there he sat in the evening with the others”), and wished when I was done that this activity, this plantation, this admirable country had been my seminary. Time and again, as I climbed to the top of the vineyard — the clay under my feet became thicker and thicker — I felt the need to bend down, to reach into the earth, to collect, to take something with me. Keep it, keep it, keep it! Bits of coal were encrusted in the slate. I dug them out and today, a quarter of a century later, I am drawing quavering black lines on my white paper with them: You have earned your keep.

The chapel was on the top of a rocky hill. It was as devastated as the agricultural school down below — the treetops, the shimmering leaves of an olive grove, the brown tile roofs, each patterned like a secret script — was unscathed. It was like entering the roofless, deserted house of my nightmares. The altar stone was shattered, the frescoes smeared with the names of peak stormers (the barest vestige of the celestial wayside-shrine blue); on the floor, buried under rubble and boards, the statue of a Christ fallen from the cross, lying headless, his crown of thorns replaced by barbed wire; the threshold cracked by tree roots. I wasn’t alone for long; a young man came and stood beside me; he folded his hands, and after that I heard only his breathing; later, a group passed by, part of a factory excursion, I thought. Rather randomly they turned aside to the chapel, stood with legs spread in front of it, considered the ruin and the young man at prayer with an utterly uncomprehending, unbelieving look, which as they went on became a frozen collective grin, not so much of mockery as of surprise and embarrassment. Only then was I jolted out of my timeless dream and given a clear picture of history, the history at least of this country, and what I wanted was not “no history” but a different history, and the one worshipper struck me as its embodiment, its nation, erect, alert, radiant, composed, undaunted, unconquerable, childlike, vindicated.

Outside, on the façade, I found my brother’s name. In capital letters, in his finest handwriting, he had scratched it into the plaster, so high that he must have been standing on the ledge: GREGOR KOBAL. That had been the day before he left the school to go back to his hostile country, where he was awaited not by a loved one but by a foreign language and a war, in which he would be fighting against the boys who had become his friends over the years. I was surrounded by silence; in the grass a crackling of rain, produced by the wings of a pair of dragonflies.

Late in the afternoon, I was in the town below, standing on the big bridge across the Drava. Less than a hundred kilometers east of my native village, it had become a different river. At home, sunk in its trough-like valley, hidden by rank growth, its banks almost inaccessible, its flow almost soundless, it emerged here in Maribor as the glittering artery of the plain, visible from far off, flowing swiftly, with a wind of its own and sandy coves here and there, which offered a foretaste of the Black Sea. Looking at it through my brother’s eyes, I thought it regal, as though adorned with innumerable pennants, and its ruffled waters seemed to repeat the empty cow paths, just as the shadows of the railroad cars on the parallel railroad bridge seemed to repeat the blind windows of the hidden kingdom. The rafts of prewar times drifted downstream, one after another. Close-of-business bustle on the bridge, more and more people, all in a hurry, their eyes widened by the wind. The globes of the lamps glowed white. The bridge had those lateral salients which at that time I looked for in all bridges. The endless flow behind me shook the ground under my feet; I clutched the railing in both hands, until I had transposed the bridge, the wind, the night, the lamps, and the passersby to myself. And I thought: “No, we are not homeless.”

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

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

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

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

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

There was light in our house, in every room. My sister was sitting by herself on the bench outside. Her eyes recognized me but gave me no greeting. In her face I saw a sorrow so pure that at first I mistook it for sublime happiness. But it came to me later on that she was sorrowing not so much for her dying mother as for her lost love, decades old, undying. “Grieving dancer.” Never had I seen a more beautiful woman. I wanted to kiss the sorrow away from my sister’s face, and — overwhelming event! — I was aroused by compassion; but she was untouchable.

Under the espaliered tree, the pears were lying in piles, unharvested, rotting. I went to the window and saw my parents lying on the bed. Side by side, holding each other tight; his leg on her hip. They rolled this way and that; I kept seeing first one face, then the other. For once, I saw my hard father softened by weakness, at last holding his wife in his arms. Over his shoulders he was wearing the purple robe beneath which he had stretched out on the church floor during those Easter vigils; my mother’s eyes were wide with the fear of death; she wanted her husband’s embrace to keep her alive. — Years later, where the bed had been, I found a thriving rubber plant in the warm sunlight; it was then that I remembered that scene of suffering most keenly and foresaw a time when the rubber plant would again give way to a human being in pain.

A hundred times I walked back and forth in the night outside the house before I was able to go in to those two people whom, grateful to have been born, I loved. And to this day I have no image of what followed, but only something hot and huge — my empty hands in which to gather, now and forever, the looks of my parents’ eyes.

I have often mentioned numbers in this story, numbers of years, kilometers, people and things, and it has cost me a struggle every time, as though numbers were incompatible with the spirit of my story. For this reason I shall speak once again of my fairy-tale-writing teacher. He is now retired and I go to see him now and then. He has set up a garden outside the town with a hut in it, where he sometimes spends the night. The pale historian’s face has again become the sunburned face of the geographer. His mother is still living, but she is very old and, as often as I’ve been there, I’ve never once laid eyes on her; I hear her talking to her only son through some doors, no longer in words as before, but with tapped signals, which he interprets by counting them. He has given up writing fairy tales; their place has been taken by counting. Even in childhood, he was always counting to himself, often unconsciously. In those days he had thought it an ailment. But then, on his solitary expeditions in the jungle of the Yucatán, he had discovered that counting, now consciously, his steps and breaths could be a means of survival; it had often helped him in danger, a more powerful “medicine” than any fairy tale, and more effective than any prayer. Now in his old age he felt increasingly allergic to the public notices and posters that were taking over, and more at ease with numbers, even price tags and the luminous figures in gas stations. Hadn’t the archaic poet said that number was more powerful than any ruse. Counting, he said, moderated him, slowed him down, regulated him, and cared for him; in counting he recovered from the world of headlines. His sacred numbers were those of the Maya: 9 and 13. Nine times he scraped his shoes before coming into the house; he would not start work until thirteen birds had flown across the garden; now and then he needed a nine-minute breather; and he walked around in a circle nine times thirteen times before going to bed.

So much for the old man. At the end of this story, however, though I may die before the day is out, I find myself in middle life; I look at the spring sun on my blank paper, think back on the autumn and winter, and write: Storytelling, there is nothing more worldly than you, nothing more just, my holy of holies. Storytelling, patron saint of long-range combat, my lady. Storytelling, most spacious of all vehicles, heavenly chariot. Eye of my story, reflect me, for you alone know me and appreciate me. Blue of heaven, descend into the plain, thanks to my storytelling. Storytelling, music of sympathy, forgive us, forgive and dedicate us. Story, give the letters another shake, blow through the word sequences, order yourself into script, and give us, through your particular pattern, our common pattern. Story, repeat, that is, renew, postpone, again and again, a decision that must not be. Blind windows and empty cow paths, be the incentive and hallmark of my story. Long live my storytelling! It must go on. May the sun of my storytelling stand forever over the Ninth Country, which can perish only with the last breath of life. Exiles from the land of storytelling, come back from dismal Pontus. Descendant, when I am here no longer, you will reach me in the land of storytelling, the Ninth Country. Storyteller in your misshapen hut, you with the sense of locality, fall silent if you will, silent down through the centuries, harkening to the outside, delving into your own soul, but then, King, Child, get hold of yourself, sit up straight, prop yourself on your elbows, smile all around you, take a deep breath, and start all over again with your all-appeasing “And then …”