The soldier sat down at a table with the othersâa 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 â¦
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 endâgrooves shining in the lightâI 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.
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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 lungsâ“No finer death than death in the field!”âall 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.
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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 calmlyâwhatever happened now could only have a fairy-tale qualityâbade 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 socksâunlike 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 yearsâshow 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 sleepâa transition resembling none before or afterâand 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?
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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.