Repetition (9 page)
But what the upper world, or just the world, can be, I learned on the way back. Though it was still a long time till morning and there was no moon, I could see the contours of the valley clearly. The river that
went with it, the Sava Dolinka (or, as my father would have said in German,
“die Wurzener Save”),
was a dull glow moving between the sparsely wooded banks. On a sloping meadow leading down to the water, a horse was standing beside a tree; though it was too early for flies, the horse was swishing its tail. The sound it made in pulling up grass was the dominant sound of the countryside, accompanied by the faint murmur of the river and the rumbling in the distant freight yards. Between the railroad line and the bottom of the valley, the meadow merged into a cluster of small gardens, which in my memory have remained “the hanging gardens of Jesenice.” They formed a pattern of vegetable patches and fruit trees, surrounded by low fences; in the center of each one, there was a wooden hut with a bench in front of it. This pattern, partly sloping, partly terraced, continued down to the river, from which the gardens seemed to draw their water. Their color, already growing visible, was a yellowish white: in the trees, early apples, and in the gardens, beans. The path beside the tracks where I was walking was softâthe dust was so deep, so dense and yielding, that it didn't even retain my shoe prints; and the dew didn't moisten it but collected in little balls that stayed on the surface. With my first step out of the tunnel, a stone weight had fallen from my shoulders and the taste of metal was gone from my teeth; my eyes were washed, not by the dew, but by the strange sight of it. The previous night, I had taken in the details of the valley, but now I saw them as letters, as a series of signs, beginning with the grass-pulling horse and combining to form a coherent script. I now interpreted this land before my eyes, with the objects, whether lying, standing, or leaning, which rose
up from it, this describable earth, as “the world”; and I was able to address this land, without special reference to the valley of the Sava or to Yugoslavia, as “my country.” And at the same time this manifestation of the world was the only conception of a God that I have managed over the years to arrive at.
went with it, the Sava Dolinka (or, as my father would have said in German,
“die Wurzener Save”),
was a dull glow moving between the sparsely wooded banks. On a sloping meadow leading down to the water, a horse was standing beside a tree; though it was too early for flies, the horse was swishing its tail. The sound it made in pulling up grass was the dominant sound of the countryside, accompanied by the faint murmur of the river and the rumbling in the distant freight yards. Between the railroad line and the bottom of the valley, the meadow merged into a cluster of small gardens, which in my memory have remained “the hanging gardens of Jesenice.” They formed a pattern of vegetable patches and fruit trees, surrounded by low fences; in the center of each one, there was a wooden hut with a bench in front of it. This pattern, partly sloping, partly terraced, continued down to the river, from which the gardens seemed to draw their water. Their color, already growing visible, was a yellowish white: in the trees, early apples, and in the gardens, beans. The path beside the tracks where I was walking was softâthe dust was so deep, so dense and yielding, that it didn't even retain my shoe prints; and the dew didn't moisten it but collected in little balls that stayed on the surface. With my first step out of the tunnel, a stone weight had fallen from my shoulders and the taste of metal was gone from my teeth; my eyes were washed, not by the dew, but by the strange sight of it. The previous night, I had taken in the details of the valley, but now I saw them as letters, as a series of signs, beginning with the grass-pulling horse and combining to form a coherent script. I now interpreted this land before my eyes, with the objects, whether lying, standing, or leaning, which rose
up from it, this describable earth, as “the world”; and I was able to address this land, without special reference to the valley of the Sava or to Yugoslavia, as “my country.” And at the same time this manifestation of the world was the only conception of a God that I have managed over the years to arrive at.
And so my further progress in that predawn hour became a deciphering, a continued reading, a transcribing, a silent taking of notes. (But hadn't I as a child, to the ridicule of my family, been in the habit of writing in the air?) And I then distinguished two bearers of the world: on the one hand, the earth's surface that supported the horse, the hanging gardens, and the wooden huts; and on the other hand, the decipherer, who had shouldered these things in the form of their hallmarks and signs. And I literally felt my shoulders broaden in my brother's too-spacious coat andâbecause the perception and combination of signs operated as a counterweight to the burden of material thingsâstraighten up as though my deciphering transformed the weight of the earth into a single freely flying word, consisting entirely of vowels, such a word as the Latin
Eoae
, translatable as “At the time of Eos,” “At dawn,” or simply, “In the morning.”
Eoae
, translatable as “At the time of Eos,” “At dawn,” or simply, “In the morning.”
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Long before sunrise, I saw the valley plunged into another sun, the sun of letters, which receded into the tunnel of night and there provided a kind of expiation by joining the cracks in the clay of my sleeping placeâsuffused with a bronze glowâinto a regular script of polygons, a memorial tablet befitting the place. Since then, whenever I've taken the train through the Karawanken Mountains, I've stood by the window, waiting
in the darkness for the first glimmer of daylight from the Yugoslavian end. And quickly as the train leaves the tunnel, I always have time to glimpse the clay niche, usually strewn with leaves that have blown in, and in it the curled-up twenty-year-old with his cylindrical sea bag, an air sculpture. To me the place is then not so much the scene of war crime or the cave of speechlessness that it was that night, as my shelter.
“Eoae!”
Wherever I chance to be in the morning, when I first look out of any window, that has become a rousing cryâaloud or only in thoughtâwhereby the vowels that pour from me are translated back into the things outside me, this tree, the neighbor's house over there, the road between them, the airfield in the distance, the line of the horizon, thus opening up my senses to the new, literal, and describable day.
in the darkness for the first glimmer of daylight from the Yugoslavian end. And quickly as the train leaves the tunnel, I always have time to glimpse the clay niche, usually strewn with leaves that have blown in, and in it the curled-up twenty-year-old with his cylindrical sea bag, an air sculpture. To me the place is then not so much the scene of war crime or the cave of speechlessness that it was that night, as my shelter.
“Eoae!”
Wherever I chance to be in the morning, when I first look out of any window, that has become a rousing cryâaloud or only in thoughtâwhereby the vowels that pour from me are translated back into the things outside me, this tree, the neighbor's house over there, the road between them, the airfield in the distance, the line of the horizon, thus opening up my senses to the new, literal, and describable day.
E-O-A-E: I made my way in darkness over a strip of land between the railroad line and the river. Though I didn't see a living soul, the country seemed alive and inhabited, because what spoke to my senses was all man-made and, as it were, ready for action. Near the station, work had actually begun in a few warehouses and workshops. A switchboard was lit up, while the rest of the room was still in darkness; the needles of gauges trembled and advanced; a regular thumping in every corner. A big steel wheel was set in motion and turned faster and faster, until the spokes disappeared and the whole wheel became a solid circle on the back wall. A lamp on a table in a dark office lit up a telephone, a slide rule, an alarm clock. The door of a loading ramp stood half open; the ramp opened out on a railroad yard with signals that changed colors. One nighttime image after another, it seemed to me, of unremitting
activity. There was no one to be seen, though I assumed the presence of workers. Only once was the “work” series brokenâby a cloth lampshade, a yellow dome behind a single curtain, it, too, untended by any human beingâbut resumed at once with the clatter of a warehouse ventilator, a fast-moving belt sliding back and forth on its slippery bed, and the shadows cast by puffs of chimney smoke on the roadâon which I was now walking, because there was no other way of getting ahead.
activity. There was no one to be seen, though I assumed the presence of workers. Only once was the “work” series brokenâby a cloth lampshade, a yellow dome behind a single curtain, it, too, untended by any human beingâbut resumed at once with the clatter of a warehouse ventilator, a fast-moving belt sliding back and forth on its slippery bed, and the shadows cast by puffs of chimney smoke on the roadâon which I was now walking, because there was no other way of getting ahead.
I had seen similar things at home on the other side of the border, especially on the periphery of the few cities I knew, and I wondered why there I had always felt excluded, whereas here I had no difficulty in sensing the vibration from these enclosed shops; and the one room with the dome-shaped lampshade, very differently from anything I ever experienced at home, caught my imagination as an embodiment of ease and comfort, as the luminous center of the series, a temple of safety and warmth. I was reminded of a conversation heard the day before among a group of workers who had been sitting on a bench at the Austrian frontier station in Rosenbach, waiting for their bus. It went roughly as follows: “Another day.”â“Thursday already.”â“But then it'll start all over.”â“It'll soon be fall.”â“And then it won't be long till winter.”â“At least it's not Monday.” â“When I get up, it's dark; when I come home, it's dark again. I haven't seen my house yet this year.”
Why did this at first sight so inhospitable predawn industrial zone here in Yugoslavia, kept in motion by invisible hands as though for all time, give me an entirely different impression of workers, in fact of human beings in general, from anything I had ever known in my own
country? No, it was not, as we had been taught, the “fundamentally different economic and social system” (though I'd gladly have been faceless, with a number instead of a name, and even given up my supposed freedom); nor was it only that this was a foreign country (though, on my very first day there, many of the usual sights had struck me as stimulating novelties): it was something more than a mere thought or feelingâit was the certainty that at last, after almost twenty years in a non-place, in a frosty, unfriendly, cannibalistic village, I was standing on the threshold of a country which, unlike my so-called native land, did not lay claim to me in the name of compulsory education or compulsory military service, but to which, on the contrary, I could lay claim as the land of my forefathers, which thus, however strange, was at least my own country! At last I was stateless; at last, instead of being always present, I could be lightheartedly absent; at last, though there wasn't a soul in sight, I felt that I was among my people. Hadn't a child pointed at me on the platform in Rosenbach and shouted at the top of his lungs: “Look, somebody from down there!” (“Down there” meant Yugoslavia, while Germany or Vienna was “out there.”) The free world, it was generally agreed, was the world from which I had comeâfor me at the moment, it was the world that I had so literally before me.
country? No, it was not, as we had been taught, the “fundamentally different economic and social system” (though I'd gladly have been faceless, with a number instead of a name, and even given up my supposed freedom); nor was it only that this was a foreign country (though, on my very first day there, many of the usual sights had struck me as stimulating novelties): it was something more than a mere thought or feelingâit was the certainty that at last, after almost twenty years in a non-place, in a frosty, unfriendly, cannibalistic village, I was standing on the threshold of a country which, unlike my so-called native land, did not lay claim to me in the name of compulsory education or compulsory military service, but to which, on the contrary, I could lay claim as the land of my forefathers, which thus, however strange, was at least my own country! At last I was stateless; at last, instead of being always present, I could be lightheartedly absent; at last, though there wasn't a soul in sight, I felt that I was among my people. Hadn't a child pointed at me on the platform in Rosenbach and shouted at the top of his lungs: “Look, somebody from down there!” (“Down there” meant Yugoslavia, while Germany or Vienna was “out there.”) The free world, it was generally agreed, was the world from which I had comeâfor me at the moment, it was the world that I had so literally before me.
That this was a delusion I knew even then. But I didn't want that kind of knowledge, or rather: I wanted to get rid of it; I recognized this wanting-to-get-rid-of it as my life-feeling; and the inspiration I gained from that delusion is still with me.
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When I think back on that hour, it was not the machines, whether operating or standing in readiness, which deluded
me into thinking that there, unseen, my people were indefatigably at work, but, most of all, the lights, that of the shaded lamp in the one dwelling, that of the office lamp on the desk, and especially the white, dusty, floury, fluorescent light, reproduced from workshop to workshop as from room to room in a flour mill. Into harness! Shoulder a wheel! Join in! Most surprising was this urge to be active in someone who otherwise, according to my father, was “just about useless for any kind of work.” And it wasn't because there was no one around who might have watched me (for as a rule, again according to my father, being watched “made me all thumbs”); no, here, I was sure, it wasn't at all like at home; anyone who wanted to could watch me and I wouldn't feel observed. Every one of my movements would be “right.”
me into thinking that there, unseen, my people were indefatigably at work, but, most of all, the lights, that of the shaded lamp in the one dwelling, that of the office lamp on the desk, and especially the white, dusty, floury, fluorescent light, reproduced from workshop to workshop as from room to room in a flour mill. Into harness! Shoulder a wheel! Join in! Most surprising was this urge to be active in someone who otherwise, according to my father, was “just about useless for any kind of work.” And it wasn't because there was no one around who might have watched me (for as a rule, again according to my father, being watched “made me all thumbs”); no, here, I was sure, it wasn't at all like at home; anyone who wanted to could watch me and I wouldn't feel observed. Every one of my movements would be “right.”
But was it this empty vision of light that attracted me to those workshops, to those invisibly at work there? Was I not in reality drawn to a very different kind of working together which expressed itself most clearly in my silhouette entering the picture from outside, from the edge, from the road, and being fleetingly sketched into it as I passed? No, my father's leather strap, his travel amulet, was not tied around my wrist to give me a better grip but, if for any purpose, for warmth; my sense of oneness with the workers came less from any desire to work with them than from pleasurable, unburdened passing-by.
Thus I learned the differences between conformity, consonance, and congruence. Conformity: I have always found it intolerable to keep in step with others, even with one person; if I found myself in step with someone, I had to stop instantly or quicken my pace, or move to one side; even when my girlfriend and I chanced to fall
into step, I saw us as two soulless marchers-against-the-world. And consonance, too, was impossible for me: if anyone else, and not only in singing, gave me the keynote, I was incapable of taking it up and sustaining it; or conversely, if someone else took up my intonation, I was immediately thrown off; only the dissonance of the quarrel to which this prompted me saved me from falling silent (such quarrels were often brought on by my girlfriend speaking of us as “we,” a word I could never bring myself to utter).
into step, I saw us as two soulless marchers-against-the-world. And consonance, too, was impossible for me: if anyone else, and not only in singing, gave me the keynote, I was incapable of taking it up and sustaining it; or conversely, if someone else took up my intonation, I was immediately thrown off; only the dissonance of the quarrel to which this prompted me saved me from falling silent (such quarrels were often brought on by my girlfriend speaking of us as “we,” a word I could never bring myself to utter).
Congruence was a different matter, a powerful experience; I felt this, for instance, one morning when I turned the window handle and simultaneously heard in the distance the closing of a car door, the scraping of a snow shovel, and a train whistle screeching at the horizon; or another time, when a bowl was put down on the stove just as I was opening a letter; or when I now look up from my writing and, as often happens at this time of day, a sunbeam strikes the darkened painting on the opposite wall and moves from left to right like a spotlight, making every tree, every sparkle on the water, every fork in the road, every fringe of cloud stand out from the somber surface. And I had the same experience that day, when before daybreak, carrying my sea bag with my brother's two books, a welcome burden, I passed the pounding, whistling, or just silently bright industrial installations of Jesenice. I even strode more firmly in order to set this congruence in motionâno, I wasn't going to let any big or little enemy kick me in the legs from behindâand then, just as I had caught sight of the empty workshops, I glimpsed the first human being of the day, the outline of a bus driver in a dark, otherwise empty bus, moving at high speed, as
though it were already expected at every bus stop in the valley, and then the first couple, a man and a woman at the window of a tall building, she standing in a housecoat, he sitting in his undershirt. What has remained most clearly in my memory over the years is the mist on the windowpane, which made me guess that the man up there was not about to set out for work but had just come home from his job, sweating, breathing heavily after a night of labor, which transferred itself to me as though it were my own.
though it were already expected at every bus stop in the valley, and then the first couple, a man and a woman at the window of a tall building, she standing in a housecoat, he sitting in his undershirt. What has remained most clearly in my memory over the years is the mist on the windowpane, which made me guess that the man up there was not about to set out for work but had just come home from his job, sweating, breathing heavily after a night of labor, which transferred itself to me as though it were my own.
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A single unset table and an oilcloth-covered kitchen chair were standing in front of a restaurant, diagonally across from the station. I sat down in the chair and let the day break. My seat was slightly below the level of the tracks and of the street and sidewalk, from which a few steps led down to a small, polygonal concrete surface which was bordered on the other side by a semicircle of houses, each wall of which formed a different angle with the next, thus giving the impression of a bay sheltered on all sides and offering a protected vantage point from which one looked not down as usual but upward from below and instead of a panorama saw a proximate but all the more impressive view, as though from the bottom of a hollow. The houses were low and old, but each dated from a different period. Just behind them began the sloping valley with its mass of dark foliage, above which the tips of the spruces were gradually coming into sight.
In my hollow, it would long be night. Was I dreaming that tiny bird, a motionless silhouette up on the edge of the sidewalk? I had never seen a day bird at night. The street looked like a wall with this wren
sitting on it. The restaurant opened early; the first customers were railroad workers; they drank their coffee or schnappsâI could see them over my shoulderâin one gulp and were gone. The sky, which had looked rainy in the first light, was cloudless and radiant. An aged waitress with the furrowed face of a man brought me a pot of coffee with milk and a plate piled with thick slices of white bread. The skin on the coffee reminded me of my brother, who, so I was told, had always detested those rubbery blobs. When, on his first leave from the front, my mother, supposing the war had cured him of his fussiness, served him the usual coffee, he had pushed the cup away, saying: “Don't bother me.” I saw the milk welling up and forming a skin that broke into islets on the dark surface, which then grew lighter. The mound of white bread beside it didn't last long. Fresh as it was, it took in air after being compressed in cutting, and swelled up under my hungry eyes. I ate it, razed and demolished it in one go. That white bread has meant “Yugoslavia” to me ever since.
sitting on it. The restaurant opened early; the first customers were railroad workers; they drank their coffee or schnappsâI could see them over my shoulderâin one gulp and were gone. The sky, which had looked rainy in the first light, was cloudless and radiant. An aged waitress with the furrowed face of a man brought me a pot of coffee with milk and a plate piled with thick slices of white bread. The skin on the coffee reminded me of my brother, who, so I was told, had always detested those rubbery blobs. When, on his first leave from the front, my mother, supposing the war had cured him of his fussiness, served him the usual coffee, he had pushed the cup away, saying: “Don't bother me.” I saw the milk welling up and forming a skin that broke into islets on the dark surface, which then grew lighter. The mound of white bread beside it didn't last long. Fresh as it was, it took in air after being compressed in cutting, and swelled up under my hungry eyes. I ate it, razed and demolished it in one go. That white bread has meant “Yugoslavia” to me ever since.
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