Then came the decades of absence, during which the orchard was utterly neglected; only my sister kept going there for a time with a small basket and picking what apples she could reach with her bare hands; and then she, too, stopped going. Just one more dream about my brother's orchard: early apples lying pale yellow on the snow, and the family sitting at a table in the sun nearby.
In the years after my return, I visited the orchard now and then. There is still no house in the vicinity, and the old sand track leading to it, like the green track down in the hollow, has become solid grass. The trees are covered over with lichen.
The last time I was there, the rain had washed away what was left of the dam my brother had built of sticks, stones, and clay outside the hole leading to the ditch. It was a winter's day and the prevailing color in the orchard was the green of the lichen which completely covered every one of the trees and in places had destroyed the bark. The lichen seemed to weigh down the trees, and indeed there were broken branches,
shaped like antlers, lying in the grass. The grass was no grass, it was moss; the few blades that pretended to be grass were colorless and as hard as bast, entangled with blackberry trailers that had crept in from the forest and the ditch. The most striking sight was the ash, an intruder from the forest, which had literally taken possession of one apple tree. Its seed must have taken root at the foot of the apple tree, and in growing, the young ash had half enfolded the old fruit tree. Through a slit in the living tree, one could see the dead one, from which the bark had been stripped. The graft scions, previously recognizable on the smooth, shining bark, had long been completely hidden by lichen; only at one point was their presence indicated by a square wooden splint fastened to a branch and lying on top of it. Over the years, a strange reversal had occurred; this branch, first the thinner of the two, had thickened and now carried the former splint wrapped in rusty wire on its back as a useless appendage.
The whole bowl was now shot through with gray; the only color in it, apart from the green track, was the very different green, the verdigris green of the clumps of mistletoe in the split crowns of the trees. The few shriveled apples on the branches were left over from previous years; those lying in the moss below burst like puffballs if one stepped on them.
Only one tree, leafless, was full of this year's apples that no one had picked; but time and again their yellow was blotted out by the gray and black of the starlings and blackbirds, which laid claim to every single apple and filled the orchard with their incessant pecking and beak-smacking. I was thankful for the train whistle in the distance, the crowing of a cock, the rat-tat-tat of a
moped. Through the wild grapevines that covered the drain hole I seemed to hear, as though amplified by the narrow passage, the roar of the river far below.
I thought of running away from this world-forsaken hollow, but decided to stay. The shed on the slope leading up to the forest, formerly a shelter from the rain or midday sun, had vanished. Its remains at the edge of the green track, along with a pile of cast-off support poles, looked like something halfway between a pyre and a “hay harp.” I stood there and waited, for nothing in particular.
It began to snow, just a few isolated flakes, which fell abruptly from the clouds, described great curves in the air, and disappeared. I remembered my father's habit of walking up and down the green track before every important decision, such as whether to make a will or to spend any considerable sum of money, and now I did likewise. I remembered one of the sayings that he used to direct at the corner where his missing son's picture hung: “The custodian of a run-down orchardâthat's what I am.”
Turning at the end of the track, I raised my head. In the pile of planks and poles I glimpsed a crucifix towering into the sky and knelt before it in thought. When I went closer, the crucifix turned into a sculpture, and in the same way the rows of trees became in my eyes, as I thought literally, a “monument to my noble ancestors.”
The longer I stayed there, walked back and forth, changed direction, stood still, turned my head, the more distinctly the site, a moribund orchard, was transformed in my mind into a work, a form transmitting and honoring the human hand and offering the advantage of being translatable into another form by another hand,
for example, into written characters on the side of that bowl, traversed by abandoned cow pathsâwhite and still whiter lines, gradually making their appearance in the snow. Behind the ring of lichen and mistletoe, the eyes of the branches were rejuvenated; the dingy light on the roots was shot through with flint sparks; and from the frame at the center of the garden came a south wind, which later arose time and again in the closed rooms of the house.
Then, at the sight of the fungus shaped like a peaked cap on one of the tree trunks, I thought of one of my brother's letters, in which he mentioned just such a
goba
which he was carrying in the dusk of a Holy Saturday while walking around the Easter bonfire. That, he said, was the “holiest and merriest” part; after that “the feast was over, and not even the sausages could give me so much pleasure.” And at the sight of the poles, I thought of the forked hazel branch on which my father, who was often cruel to animals, had once spitted a snake he had cut in two while mowing: and now the snake, which all that day and down through the years had waited on that hazel branch, a more lasting emblem of the place than any sun-drenched fruit, vanished. Then, turning to my forefathers in the emptiest corner of the garden and at the same time searching for the eyes of a child, diverted by the monotone of the lamentation for the dead and led out of the “eternal kingdom of separation” (my brother's words), I spoke in a tone of defeat rather than triumph. My exact words were: “Yes, I will tell you.”
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For each of the three years my brother spent at the agricultural school, there is one class photo. In the first, the young men all have open shirt collars, rolled-up
sleeves, and dark, knee-length aprons; they are standing or sitting on a broad, sunny path bordered by fruit trees in such full bloom that not a single leaf can be seen. In the background, the vertical rows of a vineyard just beginning to put forth shoots lead upward to the chapel on the hill. The white of the flowering trees is repeated in the spring clouds. The shadows are short. It's during the midday break, my brother hasn't even found time to comb his hair, a strand of which is hanging down over his forehead; as soon as the picture is taken, they will all go back to work. The group is pressed close together; a few of the boys are resting one arm on the shoulder of a neighbor, who, however, never responds to this gesture; one, the youngest, is holding on to both his neighbors. Because of the sun, none of the boys' eyes can be seen. My brother is the one at the back, slightly taller than the others, or possibly it's only his thick mat of hair that makes him look taller; his face alone is cut off by the head in front of it; as though he had moved into that position at the last moment. An airily dressed woman is walking down the path behind the group.
The next picture shows much less of the surroundings but more of the class. The setting is a path flanked by a row of spruces with a lamppost in front of it and a tiled roof behind it. None of the group is without a jacket; some are even wearing ties with enormous knots, and some show watch chains extending from vest button down to vest pocket. In the foreground, a student is sitting cross-legged, with a small keg of wine on his lap and a tilted bottle in his hand. The faded flowers by the side of the path give the picture an autumnal look, corroborated by the boy with an ear of wheat in his
breast pocket instead of a handkerchief or fountain pen. My brother, sitting in the front row, is among those with an open shirt collar; one oversized lapel of his jacket is visible, but neither breast pocket nor buttonhole. He alone is resting his hands, one on top of the other, on one knee. He is looking to one side of the picture, and though sitting erect, he seems relaxed; he is not posing, that is his natural self. These are no longer youngsters as they were last year, but young men; it's not just for the photographer that they've closed their mouths and that one has propped his hands on his hips.
In the last picture, the class is smaller; they are standing outside the school building, of which one sees only a wall and a bit of the windows. In the front, on round chairs, sit the teachers, who, except for the pale priest, look more like rich peasants, older relatives, or godparents than teachers. All the students are wearing ties; none has his arm around anyone's shoulder; they are grown men now; my brother, too, is twenty and holds his hands behind his back. Having learned the farmer's trade, he will now go back to a country where a different language from his own is spoken. He is looking southward, not to the north, where he belongs. All the young Slovene peasants of the class of '38 are looking straight ahead; not a single jutting chin, as though they embodied, perhaps not a state, but something else. My brother's face has filled out; his good eye has narrowed and, seen from the side, looks like a cleft; only the blind one protrudes round and white, as though it had always seen more than the other.
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An odd thing about our family was that stories were seldom told about anyone's childhood but my father's.
Over and over again (though none of us had been present and it was all a matter of hearsay), we would tell one another how as a child the old man sitting there had walked in his sleep. One night he had got up and taken his blanket to the table where the others were still sitting. Leaving his blanket there, he had gone back to bed and started wailing that he was cold. Or how the child would roam around for days, remembering nothing. In the end, he found his way home, but, afraid to go in, started in the gray of dawn to sweep the yard as though in preparation for Sunday, to show that he was back. Or how, even as a small child, he had had such a temper that one day, when someone made him angry, he had run out of the house, come back with half a tree trunk that he could hardly drag through the doorway, and with it attacked whoever had aroused his anger; most frightening of all had been the gesture with which he threw the tree trunk down at the other's feet! Another strange thing was how much my father enjoyed hearing this family folklore about his childhood (usually told by his daughter); he would chuckle or tears would come to his eyes, or he'd clench his fists as though his rage were still with him; and in the end he would cast a triumphant look around: the winner!
Concerning my brother's childhood, on the other hand, I have retained only one anecdote. It seems that he once walked from end to end of the village with his sister, farting for her benefit the whole way. Apart from that, there was only the sad story of how he had lost his eye. He does not appear in an active role until the age of seventeen, when he set out for the agricultural school across the border. But then, on his very first vacation, he presented himself to the family as a discoverer,
not only of new farming methods but, above all, of the Slovene language. Up until then, Slovene larded with German had been his dialect, the dialect of our region; now it became his written language, which he used in his notebooks and in letters and jottings. For these he always carried about with him a dictionary, a pencil, and slips of paper, in addition to the usual penknife and bits of string, and continued to do so later on, from one battlefield to the next. He wanted everyone else in the family to imitate him and at last show loyalty to their origins, whether in the city, in public offices, or on the train. My father, however, didn't want to; his wife couldn't; my sister was mute at the time, preoccupied with her broken heart; and I myself hadn't been born yet. Though our mother's Slovene was negligible, my brother calls it “our mother tongue” in his first letter from Maribor, and adds: “We are what we are, and no one can force us to be Germans.” He was almost an adult when he left home, and unlike me, he went of his own free will. He saw nothing foreign in the foreign country; instead, he found “our most essential possession” (this in a letter)ânamely, his language; after seventeen years of silence and farting, he had become a self-assured speaker; in fact, as some of his slips of paper showed, he had turned out to be a glib punster (which fits in with the photo of him standing in the middle of the village with his hat askew, supporting himself on one foot and holding the other far to one side). He was the first in the family who, at least during his school days in the south, did not suffer from homesickness. The school, not far from the “big city” of Maribor, was his second home. And it was he who returned from his travels through Slovenia with the
story of the executed peasant revolutionary Gregor Kobal. Kobal was one of the most common names in the Kobarid graveyard. He had looked it up in the local baptismal registers, going further and further back, until at the end of the seventeenth century he found the record of the rebel's birth. Whereupon he appointed Gregor Kobal our ancestor.
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Yet my brother never actually became an insurrectionary ; even during the war, later on, he never quite made it. He was reputed to be the gentlest of the family, and to judge by his letters, he was something else that I've met with only in a few children: pious. He often used the word “holy”; in his usage, however, it applied not to the church, heaven, or any other place outside the world, but
always
to everyday lifeâgetting up in the morning, going to work, meals, routine activities. “At home, where everything is done in so lively and holy a way,” he wrote in a letter from the Russian front. Once again, I'm reminded of his “holiest and merriest” walk around the Easter bonhreâand Pentecost was for him the feast day when “it's glorious to go out to the fields bright and early to mow in the holy hours.” A white cloth spread on a table for a soldiers' Mass was “something to fortify my poor soul”; at home he sang the Hallelujah aloud in chorus with the others, but at the front he “mumbled it softly to myself.” And in his last letter he wrote: “I have seen and experienced the filth of the world, and there is nothing more beautiful than our faith.” (According to him, to be sure, faith came alive only in one's mother tongue; when after the end of the First Republic one was allowed to pray and sing only in German, to his ears that was no longer “holy,” just a “caterwauling that I can't bear to hear.”) Another
aspect of his piety was the fervid irony with which he spoke of home when he was far away. He refers to our few acres as our “lands,” or as the “Kobal estate”; the rooms in the house, including kitchen, barn, and stable, became “apartments”; and he calls on his “revered family to gather around the table and study” his letters.