The Bohinj is a broad valley surrounded on all sides by mountain ranges, once the base of a glacier, which on its western edge left the large, tranquil, and almost always deserted Bohinj Lake behind it. From its northern bank rises the massif of the Julian Alps, culminating in the still glacier-covered Triglav, or three-headed mountain, a model of which on the lakeshore is used by vacationing children to play on. The mountain range in the south is the last barrier of any size between there and the sea; there the Isonzo (the Slovenian So
a) has its source, and the slopes between which it flows from then on show no tree line. Difficult of access, the Bohinj basin has been remote from the world down through the ages; mule tracks were its only link with the Isonzo Valley and the Friulian Plain, and the eastern route by which I had come had been opened up only when the railroad was built.
Because I grew up on the great Jaunfeld Plain at some distance from the mountains, I have always found it surprising that Austria should be regarded as an Alpine country and dubbed the “Alpine Republic.” (Hardly anyone in our village owned skis, and there was only one sled track, from the edge of the forest down to the road, so gently sloping that you’d hardly got started when you came to a stop.) But in the Bohinj I found myself really surrounded by mountains and felt that I was in an Alpine country, which, to be sure, did not mean chasms, ravines, a sunny and a shady slope, and a narrow sky; despite the dip in the ground, I was on a high plateau with a wide view. If I now close my eyes, what opens up before me is a valley centered on the empty fjord-blue lake, sheltered by the mountains, subdivided by moraine waves.
And yet the Bohinj, at least as seen from the slightly raised railway station, is a busy region. When I first got out of the train, I saw and smelled hardly anything but wood. On the freight siding I saw piles of whole tree trunks, of beams, boards, and laths, and in among the houses I heard power saws. In all the days I spent there, I never saw an idle person; anyone who appeared at first sight to be doing nothing proved to be waiting for a bus at one of the unmarked bus stops (a board fence, a weighbridge), waiting for a sawed pine tree to fall, for fine weather in which to turn the hay, or merely, like the old cook at the inn, for milk to come to a boil or whatever she was cooking to be done. The soldier I saw one day standing quietly by the side of the road proved, when I came closer, to be holding a radio to his ear, and the children who seemed to be tearing leaves off the bushes for no apparent purpose turned out to be scouts learning to follow a trail. The church was in the middle of a meadow and was big enough to be a cathedral. On Sunday, a long line formed outside the confessional. If anyone left the church after unloading his sins, he took barely time enough for a breather before going back to his prie-dieu to say his penance. The people in this valley did not emanate the tranquil assurance of old settlers; theirs was the impatience, the alertness, the constant guardedness of newcomers, which often, in the light of its geographical situation, made me look upon the Bohinj as a separate European country. I almost deplored the lack of an idiot or a drunkard, who might for a moment, in moving about this industrious community, have distracted these people from their hardworking seriousness. But then one day, while looking for places in which to study my two books, while pausing, looking back, turning off the path, feeling the grass here and there (was it soft enough to sit on?), leaning against a tree, tearing myself loose from the resin and staggering on, I realized that I myself might have been mistaken for just such a one.
The hotel where I was staying was called the Black Earth after a peak in the mountain range to the south, a big house, dating from before the World Wars, in which I began at once to look for the blind window. As the only guests apart from myself were a few mountain climbers, I had a room with four beds, enough for a whole family, to myself. It was on the second floor, above the entrance; from one window I looked out on a row of spruces, perhaps what was left of a forest, which ran straight through the village, and from the other side on a torrent which passed right next to the house, with a wild roar that drowned out all the trucks and power saws. The only sound that came through was an occasional train whistle or the sudden boom of a military plane. I could see the spruces (but not the water) sitting down, so I moved the little wooden table to the window on that side, and tried the different chairs. As I couldn’t make up my mind in favor of any of them, I lined them up at the table and switched from time to time.
The first day, I unpacked the two books but didn’t open them. I left my room door open, because, what with the roaring of the brook, a closed room would have made me feel cut off from the world; as it was, a clatter or some shrill sound rose up to me now and then from the kitchen or dining room. On the wall of the corridor, just across from my door, hung a black-and-brown stuffed grouse in an attitude of courtship — outstretched neck, swollen from screeching, eyes closed — just as it had been shot. The keyboard next to it, bearing keys of every imaginable shape behind a glass pane, looked something like an almost complete butterfly collection. At the very first moment, I had the impression that I had seen all this before, or better still, that I had returned here not to an earlier life but to one dimly foreseen, though more real, more palpable than anything I could have imagined. Was it because of the table, chairs, and bedsteads, which reminded me of my father as carpenter, because of the spray outside the windows, which reminded me of my father as flood-control worker? Or because of my brother’s letter, in which he had used the odd expression “ancestral country” in speaking of the Bohinj? For it wasn’t just my room and the house that I seemed to have rediscovered so palpably, but also the town of Bistrica, the “transparent,” the “clear,” the “brook village,” and the whole valley: a child marvels at it, a man of twenty contemplates it, a man of forty-five surveys it, and in this moment all three are one and ageless. And Bistrica was very different from the usual village; it was more like the suburb of a city, which would grow as a number of such suburbs coalesced; a development that seemed foreshadowed by the few big buildings, the self-service store on the periphery, and the cathedral in the meadow.
It seemed so inappropriate for the son of a poor countryman to sit down at a table in a restaurant and expect the waiter to serve him that at first, apart from crackers and cookies from the self-service store, my daily fare consisted of the bread and apples my sister had put into my sea bag. They were the last apples of the year before, so old that I had only to pick one up and the seeds would rattle. I didn’t eat bread and apples because I had to but because they were, and remained for many years, my favorite food; the word “delicious,” I felt, applied to nothing so much as to the tart sweetness of apples eaten along with caraway-seasoned, barely salted rye bread. Bread, the apples, and my clasp knife were lined up on my windowsill. Looking at the floured loaf, I thought of the far side of the moon, though of course it waned more in a week than the planet in a month, and soon the lesser moons would be gone, too; the last slices were so thin that, held up to the light, they suggested a network of transparent snow crystals, and before long they, too, had melted away.