WHAT I HAVE WRITTEN thus far about my father’s house, about the village of Rinkenberg and the Jaunfeld Plain, must have been clearly present to my mind a quarter of a century ago in the Jesenice station, but I couldn’t have told it to anyone. What I felt within me were mere impulses without sound, rhythms without tone, short and long rises and falls without the corresponding syllables, a mighty reverberation of periods without the requisite words, the slow, sweeping, stirring, steady flow of a poetic meter without lines to go with it, a general surge that found no beginning, jolts in the void, a confused epic without a name, without the innermost voice, without the coherence of script. What I had experienced at the age of twenty was not yet a memory. And memory meant not that what-had-been recurred but that what-had-been situated itself by recurring. If I remembered, I knew that an experience was thus and so, exactly thus; in being remembered, it first became known to me, nameable, voiced, speakable; accordingly, I look on memory as more than a haphazard thinking back — as work; the work of memory situates experience in a sequence that keeps it alive, a story which can open out into free storytelling, greater life, invention.
It is strange that even then, as often as I in my booth looked toward the bar, the waitress looked back, as though my way of looking, sitting, moving, tapping my fingers on the table, told her the whole story for which I have only now found the words, as though there were no need for me to tell her anything more. For hours, wordlessly busy with my story, I had been fiddling with my empty bottle and the woman at the bar had been twirling an empty ashtray to the same rhythm. Unlike my enemy’s aping, this parallel twisting and turning invigorated me. And another reason why I felt no pressure to get up and go was that some men were still playing dice in the next booth; as long as they were playing, I could sit there. It pleased me that I could not understand the language the invisible men were speaking and that I, a foreigner, was able now and then to pick up a die that had fallen on the floor and hand it to these men, who almost certainly were no more at home in Jesenice than I was (Serbs, Croats, or Macedonians, no doubt; wouldn’t they, otherwise, have gone home long ago?), fancying as I did so that I was someone from a neighboring village showing a group of real foreigners, who had drifted in from the ends of the earth, the way. And it gave me special pleasure that by looking at the waitress I would for a while be seeing a recovered, vivacious, healthy version of my mother. Of course I must have been tired, but the sight of her kept me awake, so I can’t remember any tiredness. It was only when the dice players had gone that the actress playing the part of my mother broke the spell by reverting to waitress and coming from behind the bar. Her movements now running counter to mine, she asked me to leave: “It’s almost midnight.”
My fatigue didn’t hit me until I was out on the street. It wasn’t the different place but the transition. I had gone through it without stopping, as though there were nothing there, and after a few steps the surroundings of the last few hours had disappeared. I was no longer anywhere, and what now stopped was my breath.
I couldn’t go back to the station and I didn’t know where else to go. I stood still. This was not a contemplative standing-there as when I arrived, but a blind loitering in no way connected with my first day in another country. How often in my life before and since I’ve stood around like that! Where would I go next? What was the solution? There was one and it had to be found. Distraught, I turned this way and that, describing a pattern of aimlessness. How often in my life I’ve wandered like that, even in my own house, my own room, with my eyes in a clothes cupboard, my hand in a tool drawer.
By then there were no buses running, only a file of Yugoslavian army trucks, one after another, all headed for the border. The tarps were open and in the caves thus created I saw soldiers sitting back to back on both lengthwise benches. The two in the foreground at the edge of the platform were resting their arms on the cross strap barring the exit from the cave. Even in this detail, each truck was a repeat of the one preceding it. The straps were narrow and sagged, and yet the soldiers’ arms resting on them were as inert, as motionless as if they had been tied fast, not by cords, but by fatigue. I followed the column out of town northward, in the direction from which I had just come. A smaller patrol car rolled slowly past me. The occupants looked at me but didn’t stop. Remembering my Humtschach persecutors, I raised my hand in a quick salute, which was actually returned; a fugitive from the army wouldn’t have looked like me. Then more covered wagons with their pyramids of backs, their rigid double heads, their arms supported by straps, their dangling hands; this caravan would never end. And then, almost disappointingly, there came a last truck, open at the back like the rest, but empty, and this empty cave reminded me of a particular tunnel through the Karawanken Mountains, the exit of which, as I looked back from the last car of a train a few hours ago — seen through the Jesenice night, that moment was already part of a meaningless past — had been as far away from me as the black semicircle was now. No more army trucks. The road was deserted. But a trail of fatigue and exhaustion seemed to cover the whole width of the valley, a cloud of smoke — incomparably more stifling than that of the big iron foundries in the south — which blotted out the last patch of sky and, like the legendary army of the air, attacked me momentarily from above, applying screws to my temples and straps to my forehead, and pushed me past the last houses of the town, into no-man’s — land.
This first night in a foreign country might perhaps be told briefly, but in my memory it has become the longest in my life, decades long. At the age of twenty I wouldn’t have dreamed of stopping at a hotel — and not only because I wanted to save money. Yet my only thought was sleep, and the tunnel did not strike me as an insane idea. I would go in where my train had just carried me out. All that mattered was a niche to sleep in.
Unseeing, I found the path alongside the tracks; unseeing, I found the hole in the fence, as though it were bound to be there. Already I was in the tunnel, as though in a house, and there, as I had foreseen, I found a niche, a recess in the rock, screened off from the tracks by a concrete parapet. “My stall,” I thought. With the flashlight I had brought with me to search for some trace of my brother in a cave farther south (that at least was my youthful fancy), I lit up the clay floor, which looked rather like a brook with glittering mica along its banks. The concrete wall revealed nothing but a bit of hair clinging to it, an eyelash, which made me think of my history teacher in Villach at the Austrian end of the tunnel. Only that afternoon he had told me that the vehicular tunnel running parallel to mine had been built by prisoners during the last World War, and that many had died, some of them murdered; he had even advised me, though only in jest, to spend the night there if I found no other place. The sleep of one “still innocent,” he said, “would help to purify the place of injustice, to banish the evil spirits, to blow away the horror”; he was writing just such a fairy tale, he told me. Since the last war, he said, he had seen something sinister in all tunnels, even the innocent Jesenice tunnel built under the Empire.
I began, in the darkness, by eating a piece of bread and an apple, the smell of which dispelled my initial queasiness, as though the fruit gave off a breath of fresh air. Then I lay down and curled up. But I could not sleep, or if I did, it was only to have instantaneous and interminable nightmares. My father’s house lay empty, a ruin. The Drava rose from its deep valley and overflowed the whole plain. The sun shone on the Dobrawa heather and war had been declared. But I also woke up drenched in sweat because I had lost one of my shoes, because all of a sudden the part in my hair was on the left side instead of the right, because the soil in all our flowerpots at home had cracked and the flowers had dried out. Once, what made me start up was no dream but a night train, which sped by with an enormous din, scarcely a step from the parapet. It could only be an international express on its way to Belgrade, Istanbul, or Athens, and I thought of my schoolmates bound for Greece, who would be sleeping out of doors in their tents or sleeping bags, a good deal farther south no doubt. Excited by their evening expedition through a foreign town, by the warm night, and by the unaccustomed company of the boy or girl who sat beside them in class, they would talk and talk, and those who had already dozed off would be slumbering peacefully, free from nightmares, under the protection of their comrades. And I cursed myself for not being with them.