It received me at once. My impression from below was false; it was not a torrent at all but an astonishingly leisurely flow in which my excitement over my successful evocation of an ancestor was appeased by an unhurried present.
To walk in such a flow was something new to me at the age of twenty. The village knew nothing of the kind — the best it could do was a struggling step-by-step or the marking time of holiday processions and funerals; at the seminary, one walked either alone or in a compulsory group (even our Sunday walks had to be taken in a group, in columns of two, with those behind treading on the heels of those in front of them, and anyone who thought of drifting away was instantly detected and whistled back); and in the small towns of Austria — those were the only ones I knew, for Vienna, the capital, when we went there on a school excursion, was hidden from me by the shoulders of my schoolmates and the index fingers of the teachers — I could only trot along on the fringe with my eyes to the ground. On those streets, I immediately grew skittish (perhaps a more concrete word than the usual “shy”); that is, I didn’t know which way to look, or else I looked in all directions, anything but straight ahead. In the small towns — not at all as in the village of Rinkenberg — my gaze was either distracted at every step by shop windows, advertising posters, and, above all, newspaper headlines, or, as happened once when I directed it toward the vanishing point of the street, it fell, or so I imagined, straight into the eye trap of someone coming in the opposite direction. The trap was not just a look; it was a stare, or rather an eyeless, faceless blank, with no organ attached to it but a monstrous trunklike mouth which with a single word, always monosyllabic, always inaudible, that I could always lip-read even in its typical dialect form, sucked me in and snapped shut over me. Yes, in the towns of my native land it was not possible, when one stepped out into the street, to merge with a flow of people; one was immediately, so it seemed to me, hemmed in and pocketed by people who had been trudging in a vicious circle with their dogs since the world began, who, as usual with people condemned to move in such circles, unfailingly felt themselves to be in the right and in their proper place. Is it mere imagination that, to this day, certain “Grüss Gott”s fired at me in my native land strike me more as threats than as greetings (“Out with the password, or else!”), and that especially when they are bellowed by children, I often involuntarily fling both my hands into the air? Whether walking on the side or in the middle of the street, I always felt myself appraised, judged, found guilty by the Austrian crowd, the Austrian majority, and time and again I accepted their verdict, though with no idea of what I was guilty of. What a relief to be walking down a street, convinced that some member of the eye-trapper gang must be studying me from the side, and then to look up and see nothing but the vacant eyes of a doll in a shop window.
On this Yugoslavian street there was no majority, and accordingly no minority, but only a varied and yet harmonious bustle such as, apart from the small town of Jesenice, I have known only in big cities. And here, for the present, I was the foreigner, to whom, in the streets of Carinthia beyond the mountains, I have always been grateful, because he distracts attention from me, but who here had his place in the crowd, among the people of the street. While back there I would be constantly changing place, getting clumsily out of the way, bumping into people, here I just walked along, and each one of my steps, unaccustomed as I was to the crowding, found room on the pavement. At last I didn’t trot or shuffle (as all of us did in the corridors of the seminary), but found my natural gait; I felt my feet rolling from the toes over the balls to the heels; now and then, in passing, I kicked some little thing aside with a feeling of quiet impudence which, as I discovered only after I had done it a few times, harked back to my childhood long ago. And what delighted me most about this crowd, when I compared it to other crowds I knew, was what it lacked, the things that were missing: the chamois beards, the hartshorn buttons, the loden suits, the lederhosen; in short, no one in it wore a costume. These people in the street were free not only from costume but also from insignia, from marks of caste; even the uniforms of the policemen did not stand out, but rather, as was only fitting, suggested public service. It was a blessing to be relieved of my skittishness, to be able to raise my eyes and look straight ahead, at eyes which, instead of appraising me, merely showed their colors, and these colors, black with brown with gray, revealed “the world.” Another thing that contributed to my newfound pride — and in this I was no longer a foreigner — was that I recognized my inner and outer resemblance, something no mirror could have shown me, to the other people in the crowd. Like them, I was gaunt, bony, awkward, with rough-hewn features and arms that dangled inelegantly, and my nature like theirs was compliant, willing, undemanding, the nature of a people who had been kingless and stateless down through the centuries, a people of journeymen and hired hands (not a noble, not a master among them) — and yet we children of darkness were radiant with beauty, self-reliant, bold, rebellious, independent, each man of us the next man’s hero.
The passersby were the consonants that went with the vowels which things awakened in me, though no words sprang from their union; I was merely seized by a second wind, independent of my own lungs, a wind of enthusiasm which suddenly enabled me to read the sober headings of a Slovenian paper being carried past me, no screaming headlines as in my German paper, but just news, as refreshing as the absence of costumes. And all at once I began to understand much of what was being said in the crowd. Was it because here in the street no one spoke to me? Did it mean that since my days at elementary school, where I had been obliged to speak the foreign language with my teacher, I had not become forgetful — but only obstinate? Jutro was still morning, danes today, delo work, cesta road, predor tunnel. I was also able to read the names of the shops; they were all so simple. Unlike the shops in the north, with their loud, pretentious signs, the dairy was identified simply by the word for milk, the bakery by the word for bread, and I didn’t translate the words mleko and kruh into a different language, but back into images, into the childhood of words, my first images of milk and bread. The bank, banka, that followed was the same old word, but it, too, took on an original character because its windows were not showcases, there were no displays; the space which in my native land might contain a pyramid of bright-colored strongboxes was empty — with an emptiness that stood open to me, and to which I could address myself as I could to the empty faces of the passersby. Among them I had no need, as at home, to look for a relative or a fellow villager to deliver me with a smile of recognition from that file of mere masks. The emptiness of the faces here meant they were not wearing masks. I have before me a picture of some young fellows squeezed into a tractor trailer, swathed from top to toe in fur disguises. They are on their way to an Alpine city to take part in the traditional hunt. Before entering the city, they are not yet holding the necessary rods and chains, and the enormous terror-instilling masks they will pull over their heads are still at their feet. Protruding from their fur ruffs, the faces of these young fellows, peasants no doubt, seem thin, soft, approachable! In much the same way, I was able to look into the procession of faces in Jesenice as into a single face, and it gave me the dignity I had never experienced at home, either in myself or in anyone else — well yes, in my father, during the Easter vigil in the Rinkenberg church, when, clad in a floor-length purple robe, he, along with a few other villagers, knelt beside the hollow that was supposed to represent the tomb of the resurrected Christ, then in one movement threw himself down in front of it and, covered by his candlewax-spotted robe, lay unrecognizably still on his belly. And just as my father named the instruments in the radio concert, I was now able, through the roar of the traffic and factories, to distinguish clearly the sound of colliding buffers in the railroad yards, the rattling of carts in the supermarket, the hissing of steam from an escape valve, the scraping of a stiletto heel, the pounding of a hammer, and the sound of myself inhaling and exhaling. And strangely enough, it occurred to me, this, too, this surprisingly acute hearing resulted from something that was not here, something that was absent in this Slovenian factory town. It was the absence of the usual striking church clocks that sharpened my hearing of the things around me. So it was not just any country, but this particular one, this country of deficiencies, which could be compared to and distinguished from my usual country and thus deciphered as “world.”