As for me, I often changed my handwriting; in the middle of a word my letters would get bigger, I'd push them back, then forward again. I'd begin every paragraph with the utmost care and thenâas one can tell now by looking at the writingâstart racing in my impatience to finish it. The worst of it was that I didn't really regard my handwriting as my own; today it has become regular, but it still strikes me as artificial, as an imitation; unlike my brother, I have never had a handwriting of my own, my present style was copied from him; the moment I stop concentrating, it loses its affected regularity and degenerates into a formless scribble that I myself am unable to read, a picture of harassed helplessness in place of the grandiose family gesture. It took the typewriter to teach me to write properly. Before that, the only writing that suited me was in the air, without any instrument, using my forefinger for a pencil. I couldn't see what I was writing, the movement of my finger sufficed and that was what gave me the feeling that I had a personal handwriting with a rhythm of its own. And besides, when I wrote in the air, I could be slow, pause, break off. But otherwise, convulsively clutching the foreign instrument, the mere sound of which threw me off, bent over the paper instead of sitting erect, I rushed from line to line, not knowing what I was doing, giving off sour, unproductive sweat, incapable of raising my head, with no eyes for my surroundings. It was only when I concentrated on my subject that my writing looked at all natural to me; then script and content seemed to take shape side by side.
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And where, when writing, could I concentrate on my subject? In the dark, for one thing. There, stroke by stroke, pencil and fingers grew together and a writer's hand developed, beautifully heavy and deliberate, no idle scribble but a recording. Then, when I looked in the light at what I had written, I saw my thought framed in a script that seemed to combine my brother's fine inventive hand and my father's halting, self-educated one.
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My brother's copybook dealt mostly with fruit growing. With the help of the dictionary, I managed to get the gist of it. Though the work of a man who was not yet twenty, it did not consist of lecture notes but was, rather, the record of a young scientist's independent research. A second section was a kind of treatise, made up of reflections on the subject, and the end a catalogue of rules and suggestions. The whole was a student's notes and a textbook in one.
Essentially, the book revolved around my brother's experience of planting and improving apple trees in his own orchard at home. He spoke of suitable soil (“loose and rich,” “flat, slightly vaulted ground”), orientation (“east to west, but sheltered from the wind”), the best times for the various operations (often determined by the equinoxes or the rising of certain constellations, or by rural holidays).
I couldn't help reading my brother's observations on grafting and on transplanting young trees as in part a
Bildungsroman.
He had carried the young plants from the nursery to his garden “along with their earth” and arranged them in the same order as in the nursery, though much farther apart, because the branches of
one tree should never touch those of another. He had woven the root branches into protective baskets before inserting them in their holes. The trees grown from seed on the spot had proved more resistant but also less fruitful than the transplants. Leafy crowns were advantageous, as they provided a roof under which more fruit would form. Branches that inclined toward the ground bore more fruit than those that soared skyward (though the fruit hanging higher up was less likely to rot). As for grafting, he used only branches pointing eastward. They were pencil-shaped and the cuts chamfered to let the rainwater run off. The cutting itself was done not with a blow but by pulling the knife through so the bark would remain intact. He had always chosen scions that had once borne fruit, “because otherwise we shall have worked not for a yield but for shade,” and he had never inserted a scion in a fork between two other scions, for, if he did, it would draw nourishment away from them. Of pruning, he wrote that the earlier he did it, the more “wood” he obtained; the later, the more “fruit”; the wood just “shot up,” while the fruit would “bow down.”
At the beginning of the copybook he explained that originally there had been only one tree in his orchard; it had run wild and bore no fruit. He had driven a spike into the bark at the spot that was freest from lichen; from the festering wound had sprung a shoot with one promising eye after another. The spike, his own invention, had been more like an augerâinstead of hole-plugging dust, it produced shavings that could be blown out. (Beside the description was a drawing of a “Kobal auger.”)
But what made a deeper impression on me than
such incidental pedagogic metaphors, such allusive meanings, were the concrete details, the mere mention of things which up until then had been only a jumble to me. The bast my brother used to tie his scion to the branch, the wood splint (not round but square) that held it straight, the pebbles that moderated the temperature of the soil at the roots and protected them from the groundwater, took on a radiance that held my attention. Thus a light fell on the orchard, which has been neglected since then and run wild like the tree with which it began, and in the manuscript I caught sight of a blue-bordered enclosure, where, confronted with the rich diversity of “my thing” (as my brother called his orchard), I gazed around and around as though I stood in my brother's place at the center of it. “We shall not have worked for shade”âthat was the battle cry which now, at the table beside the window, I shouted into the roaring of the torrent, as the black grouse in the corner of one eye and the white washbasin in the other swung across my field of vision like two intersecting pendulums.
Undoubtedly, the words owed some of their power to the fact that I did not immediately understand them but had to translate them, not from a foreign language into my own, but directly from an intimationâincomprehensible as much of the Slovene was to me, it seemed somehow familiarâinto an image: into the orchard, a branch prop, a piece of wire. My brother referred to certain of his activities, such as removing sterile shoots, as “blind work.” Possibly such translation transformed blind reading into sighted reading, an unseeing activity into intelligent work. It seemed to me that even my father, if he had come into the room, would have left
his grumbling on the threshold and, at the sight of my sparkling translator's eyes, expressed his satisfaction with his son: “Yes, that is his game!”
Even where in the second part of his copybook my brother passed from his particular orchard to a general discussion of different varieties of apple, it was his own trees that appeared to me; where he was merely describing a method, I continued to read a story about a place and its hero; and it was also to them that the concluding remarks addressed to every fruit grower referred, to the effect that in a “thing” so closely akin to wisdom there could be neither professors nor students, and that what mattered most in fruit growing was “the master's presence.”
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What distinguished my brother's orchard from others was its situation outside the village, surrounded by fields and pastureland, bounded on one side by a small mixed forest, whereas most gardens and orchards began right behind the houses and, seen from the road, gave the impression of long rows of trees, ending, as one was bound to suppose, in fallow land, with Rinkenberg as an island of apples and pears at its edge. My brother's trees were small as in a plantation, and each tree, except for the usual plum and cider-pear trees at the entrance (intended, one might have thought, to mask the nature of the orchard), bore fruit of a different taste; on some trees, indeed, the variety changed from one tier of branches to the next. And most extraordinary of all: among the cider-pear trees there was one secret branch, known only to the family, that bore fruit which looked deceptively like that of the next branch but which, when you bit into it, did notâas we said in the familyâ“pucker your asshole” but opened your eyes.
The whole orchard, if you entered it from the side opposite the forest, had a more and more experimental arrangement, which had many advantages. After the first corner, marked by a lone poplar, which looked odd among the fruit trees, it spread out until at the edge of the forest it was several rows wide. Though unfenced like the village orchards, which thus had the air of public woodland, the area beyond the poplar was hidden. One reason for this was that, crossing the open fields, one suddenly, without having seen a single house, came across branches laden with the finest apples; and another was the hollow in which my brother had laid out his orchard. From flat ground one unexpectedly stepped down into the orchard and then at its end just as abruptly up into the little forest. The hollow was not deep; one became aware of it only at its edge, and only there did one glimpse the tops of the small fruit trees on a level with the tips of one's shoes; from far off, from the village or the road, one saw only the strange poplar, sometimes transformed into a torch by lightning, rising from treeless fields.
That depressionâso the geography teacher had taught meâwas formed by a prehistoric brook, an offshoot of the groundwater which in this particular plain does not stand still but flows down to the Drava in a regular, unbroken stream, hardly “the length of a walking stick” below the earth's surface. At the site of the present orchard, this stream of groundwater had welled up, carrying the soil with it, and washed out a bowl, whence it had dug a narrow ditch leading down to the river. Then the brook had seeped awayâthe ditch was locally known as the “still brook”âso that the bottom of the oval bowl formed by the spring was dry; the water was no longer a visible single stream but had
sunk and joined the endless underground flow or, in the form of “sky water” (a literal translation of what my brother called rain in his copybook), carried the fertile decomposed soil from the walls to the bottom of the bowl. (The bowl, to be sure, had its vegetation-clogged outlet where the ditch began.)
Around the trees grew orchard grass, more sparse than meadow grass, and hardly any flowers. Where it arrived at the poplar tree, the sand track, which led across the fields to the edge of the hollow, acquired a middle strip of grass; on the way downhill, it narrowed and deep shining ruts made by braking cart wheels appeared; in among the rows of trees, it became a solid strip of grass, the “green track” (as we called it in the family), which ran straight as an arrow over the slightly vaulted bottom of the bowl to the farthermost tree of the orchard, not only distinctly lighter than the ground around it, but positively luminous beside it.
In its hollow, the orchard was sheltered from the wind; only the warm fall winds from the south touched its bottom. Thus, the trunks of the trees were perfectly straight, while the branches, most noticeably in the winter, grew evenly in all directions. The orchard was also sheltered from noise, from either the village or the road; apart from church bells and sirens, one heard only its own sounds, in particular the buzzing not so much of flies as of bees in the blossoms or of wasps in the fallen fruit. It had a smell of its own, heavy, cidery, which came more from the windfall fruit fermenting in the grass than from the trees; it was not until autumn, in the cellar, that the remaining apples became truly fragrant; before that, only if you held them up to your nose (but then the smell was something!). In the spring
the blossoms were a solid white, but in the summer the orchard's color changed from tree to tree; the pale green of the early apples, to which passersby were free to help themselves, was the first to disappear.
Waiting for the different kinds of fruit to ripen was a part of childhood. Especially after a storm, I was eager to run out to the orchard, where at least one marvelous apple (or, under the improved cider branch, a pear) would be lying in the grass. Often there would be a race with my sister, who was long past childhood. We both knew in advance under which tree we'd be likely to find something, and each of us wanted to be first; it was not so much a matter of having and eating as of finding and holding in our hands. Autumn fruit picking was one of the few physical occupations in which I did not reach out blindly (and as often as not miss my aim). The trees were so small that one hardly needed the ladders generally associated with orchards. Our chief implement was a long pole, to the top of which a sack with stiff, jagged edges was attached. Even today, at this very moment, I can feel in my arms the jolt that occurred when an apple fell from its branch and rolled down to the other apples in the sack.
The crates being filled at the foot of the trees were also a part of my childhood, the lemon-yellow in one, and in the next the special wine-red, whose veins one could see extending from the peel through the flesh to the core of the fruit. Only the cider-pear trees could be shaken; then a loud rat-tat-tat resounded through the whole orchard. Instead of crates, there would be a ring of thick sacks around the pear trees.
Later came my deprived youth, my years at the seminary, during which I missed the fruit harvest; no
more piled crates; at the most, a few apples would go into my suitcase before I left home and a few others in the course of the year, more and more shriveled as time went on.
Then my mother's illness, my father's stiffening limbs, my unlearning (yes, that is the word) of almost every kind of physical work which, after all, had contributed no less than my reading on the balcony to my childhood dreamsâchopping wood, mending roofs, driving cattle, binding sheaves (for me at least, these activities never represented hard work, or, if they did, it never lasted more than a few hours).