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).
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 motion — no, I wasn’t going to let any big or little enemy kick me in the legs from behind — and 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.
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 schnapps — I could see them over my shoulder — in 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.
When I looked up after eating, droves of people were passing on the sidewalk up above; the street had become a dike. Summer vacation couldn’t have begun yet, there were too many schoolchildren among the passersby, leaning into the wind. It was indeed windy, and the tall meadow grass at the edge of the dike sighed like dune grass. Though I have never been at the seashore, I couldn’t help thinking that the Atlantic dunes must begin right after the railroad tracks.
An old man came out of the restaurant with a second kitchen chair and sat down at some distance from me; to enjoy the view, he had no need of a table. Without exchanging so much as a word, we watched developments together; we both looked at the same thing, we studied it for the same length of time, then, simultaneously, passed on to something else. I have never known such a view as on that morning after my longest night, never beheld such space and such a horizon as in that seeing, which I knew to be one with that of the man beside me. We immersed ourselves in the glow on the throat of a pigeon which was crossing the concrete bay above us, or turned our heads back to the dike, where clouds of smoke from the steel mill were drifting up the valley in the direction of the tunnel, as though to smoke out the whole length of it.
When at home, before my trip, I had looked southward in clear weather, it seemed certain that, under the bluing sky beyond the mountains, there could only be cities resplendent with color, spreading out over a wide plain, unobstructed by any chain of hills, the one merging with the next all the way to the sea. And yet the industrial city of Jesenice now, gray on gray, squeezed into a narrow valley, shut in between two shade-casting mountains, fully confirmed my anticipation. Looking up at the dike, I saw a man with a gleaming red saw in each hand, followed by two children eating ice cream and a woman in an advanced state of pregnancy, wearing an airy dress and clogs. The perpetual clatter of the long-distance trucks on the single strip of unasphalted cobblestones reminded me again of my brother, who in his prewar letters spoke of a similar stretch of road between Maribor and Trieste. On every one of his excursions to the Adriatic, the car (the school principal’s) had been “thoroughly shaken for a short while,” and after that he had felt “bathed in salt air.”
In Yugoslavia, time as well as space seems to be measured differently than it is beyond the northern mountains. Comparable to sedimentary rock, the buildings before my eyes pointed to strata of the architectural past, from the foundations of Imperial Austria to the bay windows of the kingdom of the south Slavs and the smooth, unornamented upper stories of the present People’s Republic of Slovenia, not omitting holes for flagpoles just below the attic windows. While looking at one of these façades, I suddenly wished with all my might that my missing brother would push open the decrepit terrace door, with its opaque grooved glass, and show himself. I even thought in words: “Forefather, show thyself,” and saw the head of the old man beside me turn toward the bay window. And for a moment, as though my call were its own fulfillment, I caught sight of my brother, full-grown (as I had never known him), broad-shouldered, brown-skinned, his thick, dark, curly hair combed straight back, his imposing forehead and his eyes so deep in their sockets that his white blindness remained hidden. A shudder ran through me, as though I were seeing my king, a shudder of awe, but even more of terror, which made me leave my place in the hollow without delay and slip into the torrent of passersby on the street above.