Repetition (24 page)
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.
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 cloudsâspeaking 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 earâthere 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.
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.
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.
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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 Sre
ko Kosovel, who when hardly more than a child celebrated the curative properties of his region's pine trees, stones, and quiet paths, andâat the end of the war, when the alien monarchy ended and Yugoslavia beganâentered (“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 Karstâsee his conspicuous jug-earâwas not long for this world.
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 Sre
ko Kosovel, who when hardly more than a child celebrated the curative properties of his region's pine trees, stones, and quiet paths, andâat the end of the war, when the alien monarchy ended and Yugoslavia beganâentered (“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”(tiÅ¡ina,
his favorite word) of the Karstâsee his conspicuous jug-earâwas 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 lastâand I didn't always succeedâI smiled at her from deep inside me; and even my teacher, who understood everything, once saidâwhen 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!âwell, 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 manageâaddressing me in the third person as in eighteenth-century dialoguesâto 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 audienceâso perhaps the so-called sense of humor is nothing other than a happy alertness. Though once, toward the end of my stayâthe two of us were sitting at the kitchen table and I was just looking silently out into the yardâshe 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.
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 lastâand I didn't always succeedâI smiled at her from deep inside me; and even my teacher, who understood everything, once saidâwhen 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!âwell, 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 manageâaddressing me in the third person as in eighteenth-century dialoguesâto 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 audienceâso perhaps the so-called sense of humor is nothing other than a happy alertness. Though once, toward the end of my stayâthe two of us were sitting at the kitchen table and I was just looking silently out into the yardâshe 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 receptiveâthough I must have heard itâto the sound I loved best, the rustling of the trees, different from one variety to another. A chore could be ever so easyâ“Take the milk cans down to the stand,” “Help me fold the sheets”âand 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.
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