My mother, however, the Slovene by marriage, the foreigner, took an entirely different view of the clan tradition. To her, it was not a sad story of unsuccessful struggle and banishment but, in a manner of speaking, an attestation of the family’s aim and aspiration, a promise. And, unlike my father, she did not expect salvation from any outside agency. She demanded it of ourselves. Whereas my father, always in vain, put his trust in God and in blind acceptance of fate, she was resolutely godless and wherever possible lived by her own law (which she, too, derived from her experience of the two World Wars). And this law decreed that her family, by which she meant her children, had for centuries had their home on the other side of the Karawanken Mountains, and would someday, by their own efforts, make good their claim to it. There they must go, to the southwest, to take back their land, whatever it might amount to. And that would wipe out the disgrace that had once been inflicted on “us” through the murder of our ancestor by the authorities. (My mother, the foundling, the foreigner, used the most imperious “we” for the family that had given her asylum.) And she epitomized the revenge we would take on the Emperor, on the counts, the powers that be, in short, the “Austrians”—for this Austrian woman an expression of supreme contempt — in a pun on the name of the village in the Isonzo Valley, where we were supposed to have originated. After our return home, our resurrection from a thousand years of servitude, this village, called Karfreit in German but properly, that is, in Slovene, Kobarid,[1] would be renamed Kobalid, to which my father replied scornfully that this name could also be translated “To clear out on horseback,” and she should kindly, as befitted the likes of us, let it go at Karfreit, or at least at Kobarid, which can be interpreted to mean an aggregation of crystals or a cluster of hazelnuts, and my mother would counter by asking whether he, who seemed to have degenerated once and for all into a subject, had forgotten that the last news of his son, the resistance fighter, had come from the celebrated “Kobarid Republic,” where in the midst of the war a single village had proclaimed itself an anti-Fascist republic and for a time had remained one; to which, in turn, my father replied only that he knew nothing of any such news or any such resistance.
The two of them, it is true, would meet time and again in front of the only picture we had (except for the enlarged photograph of my brother in the crucifix-and-radio corner): it hung in the entrance and was a map of Slovenia. But here, too, my parents usually stood and argued. My mother, ordinarly so godless and blasphemous, would lift up her voice and chant names from the map, syllable after syllable, on a hovering, tremulous high note, while my father shook his head at her pronunciation of the foreign words when he didn’t curtly and gruffly correct her. Though her lips twitched like a rabbit’s and her tongue froze, she persisted in her Slavic litany, chanted Ljubljana instead of Laibach, Ptuj instead of Pettau, Kranj instead of Krainburg, Gorica[2] instead of Görz, Bistrica instead of Feistritz, Postojna instead of Adelsberg, Ajdovš
ina (the sound of which I awaited with special eagerness) instead of Haidenschaft. Unlike her other singing, strangely enough, my mother’s litany of place names, however faulty her pronunciation, sounded beautiful to me. Each of these names struck me as an invocation, as all seemed to merge in a single, tender, high-pitched entreaty, which my father, as far as I can remember, did not contradict, but responded to in the role of the people — the common people; and the entrance hall, with its wooden floor, its banister-framed wooden stairway leading to the cellar, and its door opening out on the wooden balcony, became a nave, more imposing than the nave of the village church had ever been.
Yet my mother had never been across the border. The Yugoslavian towns were known to her chiefly from her husband’s stories, and to him these names still embodied nothing but the war. Actually, he spoke much less of towns and villages than of one and the same rocky hill that kept being stormed, lost, retaken, and so on, over the years. According to him, the World War had taken place on just such a bare, chalk-white mountain ridge, with a front line that moved a stone’s throw forward or backward from battle to battle, and if other veterans in the village were to be believed, that was how they had all seen it. My father was always shivering, but he seemed to shiver still more when he spoke of the deep clefts in the mountain, which even in the summer were full of snow. He had known many kinds of fear, but his overriding fear had been and still was that he might have killed a man. He showed his numerous wounds, in the shin, the thigh, the shoulder, with indifference; it was only when the conversation turned to the Italian at whom he had leveled his gun when ordered to do so that he lost his composure. “I aimed over his head,” my father said. “But after my shot went off he jumped up in the air like this, with his arms outstretched. And then I didn’t see him anymore.” Wide-eyed, he came back time and again to this one moment; for even after thirty, forty, fifty years, the man kept jumping up in the air, and it would never be known for sure whether he had let himself drop back into the trench or had toppled into it. “Stinking mess,” my father cried and repeated the sentiment in Slovene—“Svinjerija”—as though that language were better able to express his hatred of history, the world, and all earthly existence. Be that as it may, he had seldom seen a town or village during the war; at the most he had been “near” or “on the road to” one. Only Gorica meant something more to my father than a battlefield. “Now that’s a city,” he said. “Compared with it, our Klagenfurt is nothing.” But if questions were asked, his only answer would be: “There are palm trees in the parks and there’s a king buried in the monastery crypt.”
What in my father’s stories was no more than the heartbreaking and infuriating names of battlefields stimulated my mother’s inventiveness. What with him was a curse—“damned Ternovan Forest!”—she transformed into a place of promise. From mere place names she created, for my benefit (my sister wouldn’t do), a country that had nothing in common with the reality of Slovenia; it was built up exclusively from the names of the battles or scenes of misery mentioned casually or with horror by my father. This country, which consisted entirely of towns with magical names such as Lipica, Temnica, Vipava, Doberdob, Tomaj, Tabor, Kopriva, became in her mouth a land of peace where we, the Kobal family, would at last recapture our true selves. Yet this transfiguration may have resulted not so much from the sound of words or the family legend as from the few letters received from my brother when he was in Yugoslavia during the years between the wars. Often he would prefix with a word of praise the very place names through which his father had cursed the world as a whole: “The holy [Mount] Nanos,” “the holy [River] Timavo.” From the start my mother’s fantasies, remote as they may have been from experience, made a stronger impression on me, the second, late-born son, than did my father’s war stories. When I think back on the two of them, I see one weeping and one laughing storyteller, one standing aside, the other center stage, asserting our rights.
The household’s present, however, its daily life, was dominated by my father’s prisoner mentality. His being a stranger in the village made him a domestic tyrant. Because he was nowhere at home, he bullied the rest of us; he drove us from our places or at least poisoned them for us. When my father entered the living room, the atmosphere became unpleasant. He had only to stand at the window for the rest of us to be seized with a nervousness that made our movements spasmodic. At such times, even my seated sister could not assert her power; peace of mind gave way to a breathless rigidity. And his uneasiness was contagious: a small man walking in circles in the big room; around him, more and more eyes, heads, limbs began to twitch. Often this twitching would infect us if he merely opened the door, let his look of injured hopelessness rest on the members of his family, and disappeared, or if we sensed that he was standing motionless in the hall, as though waiting at once for his savior and for the landslide that would bury him along with his house and garden. Once he was back in his workshop, we breathed easy, but even then we could hear his cries of rage, and though we had got used to them over the years, they still gave us a start; not even in his place of work, where he might have felt independent and free, did my father feel at home.