Of course it was only for a moment that this picture writing shimmered on the mountain slope; then all was reliefless emptiness and the sun had set. But I knew I could bring the picture writing back, that unlike grief it could be willed; the empty forms both of the cow paths and of the blind windows could be relied on; they were the seal of our right. “Brother, you must have walked there in the gray blueness.”
I shut my eyes. Only then did I notice that they were wet. But I was not weeping for myself or my family; no, the source of those tears was things and their words.
Behind my closed eyelids, the after-image of the cow paths: a stone-gray pattern. Now, a quarter of a century later, I see, there on the plateau, a man of indeterminate age. Barefoot, wearing an overcoat that's too big for him, he begins to wave his arms. His arm waving becomes a continuous movement which, if it
were not done with the whole hand, including the fist, would be something like writing. Was this “he” or “I”? It is still I. I no longer write in the air as I did as a child; instead, like a scientist who is at the same time a manual laborer, I make hatch marks on a sheet of paper lying on the stone-gray steps. That is the movement I have chosen for my story. Letter for letter, word for word, as chiseled in stone long years ago, I want the inscription to appear on my paper; I want it to be handed down recognizably thanks to my light hatch marks. Yes, I want my soft pencil strokes to join with the hardness of the stone as did the language of my forebears, in which the term for “the monotonous note of the finch” is derived from the word for “a single letter.” For, without the refuge of words, the earth, the black, red, greening earth, would be just one great desert, and I will no longer acknowledge any drama, any history other than the drama of the things and words of this beloved worldâand I pray that the bomb which is threatening the cow-path pyramid will strike softly in the form of the word for “an elongated pear.” I shall find a word for the dark interior of a white chestnut blossom, the yellow of clay under the wet snow, the bit of blossom that clings to the apple, and the sound of a river fish leaping out of the water.
I opened my eyes again, and again walked back and forth outside the barn, faster and faster as though taking a running leap. Again I stopped. Sensing that my chest had become an instrument, I shouted. Filip Kobalâwhose voice was so soft that he could never make himself heard, whom the prefects at the seminary had scolded because his prayers didn't “carry”âshouted so loud that all who knew him would have looked at him with new eyes.
Something comparable had happened only once, at that same seminary. I had convinced myself that I was unable to sing, and then one day the teacher called on me to sing. With my heart in my mouth I had stood up and taken a deep breath. Then, in the midst of the sullenly brooding class, I had drawn from my innermost soul a strange and tender song, which had provoked first laughter, then awed embarrassment in my listeners, and which, it seemed to me, must always have been inside me. Now on the plateau, where I was alone, what came out of me was not singing, nor was it a bellowing or calling; it was a clear shout, imperiously demanding my right. With all my might I shouted the laconic or lyrical, monosyllabic or polysyllabic words of my brother's book. The words went out over the countryside, calling forth on the empty cow paths an echo whose other name was “world sound.” And at every shout I saw the open ears of my forebears, the amused arching of their eyebrows, their joyful faces.
I propped up the book, touched it with my lips, and bowed down to the place. I cut a branch from the hazel bush near one corner of the barn, scratched the name of the place and the date into it: “Dobrava, Slovenija, Jugoslavija 1960,” and declared it to be our stele, the record of a new and different family history. How little hope I had of a future at the age of twenty (never would my king appear), how firm were my expectations concerning the present; and how weak or cautious is my voice now as I repeat the young man's experience. Wasn't it drowned out long ago by shouts converging on the plateau from all directions, by shouts of command on drill grounds, by field-gray soldiers on firing ranges, by the scraping of shovels in the village graveyard? No, wherever I may be, the blind windows
and empty cow paths strike me as the hallmarks of a kingdom of recurrence, where a locomotive whistle can become equally well the cry of a pigeon or the shriek of an Indian. I can still feel on my shoulder the cord of my sea bag with the book of words in it. Mother, your son is still walking under the open sky.
Then, flinging myself upon the ground, I discovered once and for all what the spirit is.
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 plateauâas 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 giantâand 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.
Â
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 âfight' 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 directionsâI 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.
Â
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 regionâone 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 gardenâas he did when not busyâseemingly 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 Hotelâall the guests and the cook, too, had leftâI 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.
Â
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 lineâmy brother's APO number and my laundry markâbut 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.
Â
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 AustroâHungarian 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?
Â
Â
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 stickâthe 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.