Even on Sunday, apart from the afternoon card game, the peace associated with the day visited our house only on our return from Mass, when he put on his glasses and opened the weekly Slovenian church gazette, the only newspaper he read. He moved his lips soundlessly at every word, as though not only reading but studying the lines, and in the course of time his slowness engendered a calm that surrounded him and filled the house. During this reading period, my father at last found his placeâin sunny weather on the bench in the yard; otherwise, on the backless stool by the east
window, where with a childlike, scholarly look he studied letter after letter. As often as I evoke that image, I feel that I'm still sitting there with him.
To tell the truth, we didn't even eat together at that time. As though my father were still working outside, his food was brought to him in a tightly closed mess kit, either at the house of the mountain peasants or at his place beside one of the mountain torrents; my mother ate at the stove while cooking; my sister, as befitted a confused person, spooned her food out of a bowl on the doorstep; and I ate wherever I happened to be. We all longed for the arrival of the card players, and not only because my father regularly won: his calm as he sat there, carrying off one daring coup after another, gave rise to a merriment which encompassed the losers as well as the winner. Whenever the so uncommon, neither malicious nor commiserating but simply triumphal laughter of the player whose daring had brought him success erupted, all were glad to join in. And the others were my father's friends, underlings like himself, village notables, natives, who all became equal at the card table, talkers, storytellers, with no one over them. But friendship lasted only as long as the game; when the game was over, they broke up without delay, and all went home, as isolated as ever, mere neighbors, acquaintances, villagers known to one another chiefly by their weaknesses and odditiesâthe skirtchaser, the skinflint, the sleepwalker. And my father, though he stayed at the table holding a deck of cards in one hand and counting his winnings with the other, had again lost his place. When the lamp over the card table was turned off, the light in the house seemed to flicker and threaten to go out at any moment, for in
those days before the whole country was electrified, our region was supplied with a feeble, uneven current by a small power plant on the Drava that wasn't even as big as a water mill.
Though my fatherâmason, carpenter, and cabinetmaker in oneâhad built the house with his own hands, he was not its master. Because this self-driven laborer was incapable of stepping back from his work and contemplating it for so much as a moment, he could not regard himself as its creator. Though he took a certain pride in other construction he'd had a hand inâthe roof of the church tower, for instanceâhe never so much as glanced at anything he had made in his own home; while putting up a wall with the utmost care, he would stare blindly into space; and instead of stopping to look at a stool he had just finished, he would busy himself with wood for the next one. Still a young man, my father slaved for years, building, almost unaided, the first house the Kobal family had owned in more than two centuries. And yet I cannot conceive of his climbing to the edge of the forest and looking proudly down on the village of Rinkenberg with the house he had built for himself and his family in its midst; I cannot even conceive of a housewarming with Kobal, the proud owner, lifting a mug of cider.
More than anything else, it was this incapacity of my father's for living in his house that spoiled my homecomings in my last years at school. Even if my walk from the railroad station or bus stop had gone well, even if, still full of my journey in the midst of unknown, warmth-giving shadows, I had overcome the obstacle that was the village, I was seized with a malaise on entering our property: my scalp itched, my arms
stiffened, my feet felt bulbousâand there was nothing I could do about it. Not that I had conjured up some image on my way, not that I had been daydreaming, drunk as it were with self-absorption; well, to tell the truth, I had been daydreaming, but only about the things around me, the night, the falling snow, the rustling in the corn, the wind in my eye hollows, and all this, because my journey was still going on in my mind, more clearly than usual, paradigmatically, symbolically. The milk can on the stand became a sign; the successive puddles gleaming in the darkness joined to form a line. But near the house the signs lost their force, objects their singularity. Often I stood for a long while at the door, trying in vain to catch my breath. What had been so clear became confused. No longer able to dream, I could no longer see. The elder bush, which on the path rose from limb to limb like a Jacob's ladder, disappeared in the garden, becoming a mere part of a hedge; the constellations overhead, each decipherable only a moment before, were now a meaningless glow. With the help of my sister, who had come to meet me, I might possibly cross the threshold safely; she distracted me like a dog or cat; like a dog or cat, she fitted into my dreamlike sequence of signs. But, in the hall at the very latest, I seemed to hear my father's morose pottering in every room, a mood which instantly spread to me, not so much sobering me as infecting me with such gloom that my only desire was to go to bed then and there.
It was only when my mother fell sick that my father learned to live in the house. In the course of those months, the house became a home for the rest of us as well. They kept her in the hospital after her operation,
and it was then that he moved, as it were, from his workshop to the house. He no longer worked in wordless fury for himself aloneâevery gesture an expression of despair that no one understood him and no one could help him anyway. Now he would pause for a time, say what was on his mind, and even ask for help in his distress. Throwing off the clumsiness which, because of his impatience, had always overcome me when asked to help him, I worked beside him with as sure a hand as if I had been alone. And my sister, overlooked and shrugged off until then, but now suddenly treated as an equal by her father, proved to be the soul of reason; all she had needed was to be spoken to and taken seriously. Just as a word can suffice to make a person stricken with paralysis for some unfathomable reason jump up and run, our father's “Do this, do that” transformed my confused sister from one minute to the next into a young woman who was far from stupid. She understood him without his having to explain, she was transformed from a bothersome bystander into an active human being who didn't see through me and look on the dark side of everything but rather foresaw what would be needed and did what had to be done. She still sat most of the time, but now she sat by the stove, over the cabbage pot, at the bread oven, next to the currant bush, and our father would sit beside her, often doing nothing. Even when working, he didn't seem solitary or possessed; his work was done with the same thoughtful deliberation as his reading, in harmony with something which as I saw it was the light shining into the house, the luminous brown of the windowsill, or the color of his own eyes, which only then became clear to me, a deep blue suggesting the backgrounds of wayside shrines.
Though my father was strictly orthodox in his religious beliefs, there was something superstitious, as I see it now, in the almost grim deliberation with which he performed certain routine actions, as though each one were calculated to combat my mother's illnessâthe tying of a knot to strangle it, the driving of a nail to stop it from spreading, the plugging of a barrel to shut up the pain, the propping of a branch to give her strength; when he dragged a sack through a doorway, it was to bring her out of the hospital; when he cut a rotten spot out of an apple, it was ⦠and so on.
Once my father “made himself at home,” life in the house became natural for the first time. Every time I returned from school, I slipped easily into our family life, while my sister, who for years had been immured in her love story, the collapse of which, attributed to my father, had supposedly been responsible for her confused condition, forgot all about it and became a social animal, even when she was not working. She challenged the champion card player to game after game, lost every time, and invariably grew as angry as only a person of sound mind can. Biting her lips, even bursting into tears in her angerâher grief was forgottenâshe appeared perfectly sane, and to me, the adolescent boy, it seemed that weâthe young woman sweeping the cards off the table, my triumphantly laughing father, and myselfâwere all the same age.
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Of course this daily life of ours was marginal. We were like stand-ins, who in all their activities never cease to wait for the regulars to come back and take things in hand. The house regained its center only when my mother was brought back from the hospital. After that,
the regular workers were not some mere strangers but our very own selves; the stand-ins gave themselves a jolt and became, each in his accustomed place, regulars. We had been told that the patient hadn't long to live, but how were we to know? She was free from pain and lay or sat up in her bed, hardly noticeable, quite unlike the healthy woman who, while doing certain kinds of work, had moaned and groaned for no reason. It never occurred to me that she was going to die. Nor, apparently, to my father and sister. My father, who since retiring some years past had scarcely stirred from the farm, now took to going farther and farther afield, first walking to the neighboring villages of Rinkolach and Dob, which for a man of his stamp amounted to crossing a border, then actually to the north, across the Drava “to the Germans,” where to his mind the innermost circle of “foreign parts” began. My sister dressed with care, kept herself and the house neat and clean, and most of all functioned as the experienced cook who conjured up still nameless dishes that had never been seen in our house before. And this, too, seemed to suit the bedridden woman in the center. She let my father tell herâit was late springâabout the progress of the fruit blossoms, and the grain, the level of the Drava, the thaw on Mount Petzen; let my sister, who was at last good for something, wait on her, as though this were what she had been longing for all her life, and devoured the ceremoniously served dishes with shining eyes (for a brief moment the smell of the cooking made us forget the smell of my mother's medicines). And what about me? I, too, had my role in the ceremonyâand God help anyone who muffed his partâthe role of storyteller. At last I was able, without being questioned,
to sit down beside her bedâat the middle, because, as the superstition had it, the angels of death stood at the head and footâand tell stories to drive them out of the house. And what did I tell my mother? My wishes. And when her eyes mocked them, that only made me start over again, start further back, circle around them in other words. And when word and wish became one, a warmth invaded my whole body and suddenly something akin to belief would appear in the eyes of the incredulous listenerâa quieter, purer color, a glimmer of thoughtfulness.
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But the leading role in this ceremony was played by the house. Every hitherto sullen, uncomfortable corner of it now proved to be livable, the right place for such thoughtfulness. The wood and the walls had a tone; the space between bed and table, window and door, fireplace and water tap widened. My father had built a house where, whatever part of it one moved or sat still in, it was good to be, a house where hitherto inconceivable things became possible. He himself proved it, for instance by playing us a concert of classical music on the radio, and calling each instrument by name as it emerged from the farthermost corner of the room, in such a way that I distinguished their different sounds as I would later in a concert hall. And then he surprised us by doing something in the daylight that he normally did only in church by candlelight. Coming home from one of his forays, he threw himself on his knees, both knees at once, and for a long time touched his forehead to my mother's. Often in later years I saw this grouping of man and wife in two mountains of the Karawanken range, the pointed Hochobir and the broad Koschuta.
It was only at night that the ark which sheltered us during those months broke apart. Especially in the hours before dawn, I would start up, awakened by a soundless bursting, and lie awake with the others, who, I knew as though there had been no walls, were also lying awake. My mother hadn't moaned. No mirror had shatteredâthere were no mirrors in our house; no owl had hooted in the woods behind the house. No clock was tickingâthere were no clocks in the house; and no train was rumbling across the Jaunfeld Plain. Nor was it my own breathing that I heard, but only a whispering, arising, it seemed to me, from the troughlike valley deep down in the plain where the Drava flowed. My sister lay downstairs in the former dairy, where the drain still gave off a sour smell; my father, with wide-open eyes and toothless mouth, lay beside my mother, who alone was asleep or at least had not been awakened, and the slightest creaking resounded through the house like the crack of a whip, to which other sounds, which unlike the strokes of the church clock could not be counted, responded echolike from indeterminate directions. And when my father, before the first birdsong, went out on one of his rambles, I felt that he was running away from his dying wife and leaving us alone in his nightmare house.
During one such night I dreamed that we were all walking back and forth in the dark, deserted living room, and that my brother was standing in the middle, shedding tears of gratitude because we loved him. Looking around, I saw the others weeping, too, and my father in a corner weeping because he had finally been found out, exposed as someone who loved his family and no one else. And it was only thus, weeping, moving
back and forth with dangling arms in the deserted room, forbidden to approach one another, forbidden to touch one another, that we Kobals could be a family, and that only in a dream. But what did I mean by “only in a dream”?