An odd thing about our family was that stories were seldom told about anyone’s childhood but my father’s. Over and over again (though none of us had been present and it was all a matter of hearsay), we would tell one another how as a child the old man sitting there had walked in his sleep. One night he had got up and taken his blanket to the table where the others were still sitting. Leaving his blanket there, he had gone back to bed and started wailing that he was cold. Or how the child would roam around for days, remembering nothing. In the end, he found his way home, but, afraid to go in, started in the gray of dawn to sweep the yard as though in preparation for Sunday, to show that he was back. Or how, even as a small child, he had had such a temper that one day, when someone made him angry, he had run out of the house, come back with half a tree trunk that he could hardly drag through the doorway, and with it attacked whoever had aroused his anger; most frightening of all had been the gesture with which he threw the tree trunk down at the other’s feet! Another strange thing was how much my father enjoyed hearing this family folklore about his childhood (usually told by his daughter); he would chuckle or tears would come to his eyes, or he’d clench his fists as though his rage were still with him; and in the end he would cast a triumphant look around: the winner!
Concerning my brother’s childhood, on the other hand, I have retained only one anecdote. It seems that he once walked from end to end of the village with his sister, farting for her benefit the whole way. Apart from that, there was only the sad story of how he had lost his eye. He does not appear in an active role until the age of seventeen, when he set out for the agricultural school across the border. But then, on his very first vacation, he presented himself to the family as a discoverer, not only of new farming methods but, above all, of the Slovene language. Up until then, Slovene larded with German had been his dialect, the dialect of our region; now it became his written language, which he used in his notebooks and in letters and jottings. For these he always carried about with him a dictionary, a pencil, and slips of paper, in addition to the usual penknife and bits of string, and continued to do so later on, from one battlefield to the next. He wanted everyone else in the family to imitate him and at last show loyalty to their origins, whether in the city, in public offices, or on the train. My father, however, didn’t want to; his wife couldn’t; my sister was mute at the time, preoccupied with her broken heart; and I myself hadn’t been born yet. Though our mother’s Slovene was negligible, my brother calls it “our mother tongue” in his first letter from Maribor, and adds: “We are what we are, and no one can force us to be Germans.” He was almost an adult when he left home, and unlike me, he went of his own free will. He saw nothing foreign in the foreign country; instead, he found “our most essential possession” (this in a letter) — namely, his language; after seventeen years of silence and farting, he had become a self-assured speaker; in fact, as some of his slips of paper showed, he had turned out to be a glib punster (which fits in with the photo of him standing in the middle of the village with his hat askew, supporting himself on one foot and holding the other far to one side). He was the first in the family who, at least during his school days in the south, did not suffer from homesickness. The school, not far from the “big city” of Maribor, was his second home. And it was he who returned from his travels through Slovenia with the story of the executed peasant revolutionary Gregor Kobal. Kobal was one of the most common names in the Kobarid graveyard. He had looked it up in the local baptismal registers, going further and further back, until at the end of the seventeenth century he found the record of the rebel’s birth. Whereupon he appointed Gregor Kobal our ancestor.
Yet my brother never actually became an insurrectionary; even during the war, later on, he never quite made it. He was reputed to be the gentlest of the family, and to judge by his letters, he was something else that I’ve met with only in a few children: pious. He often used the word “holy”; in his usage, however, it applied not to the church, heaven, or any other place outside the world, but always to everyday life — getting up in the morning, going to work, meals, routine activities. “At home, where everything is done in so lively and holy a way,” he wrote in a letter from the Russian front. Once again, I’m reminded of his “holiest and merriest” walk around the Easter bonhre — and Pentecost was for him the feast day when “it’s glorious to go out to the fields bright and early to mow in the holy hours.” A white cloth spread on a table for a soldiers’ Mass was “something to fortify my poor soul”; at home he sang the Hallelujah aloud in chorus with the others, but at the front he “mumbled it softly to myself.” And in his last letter he wrote: “I have seen and experienced the filth of the world, and there is nothing more beautiful than our faith.” (According to him, to be sure, faith came alive only in one’s mother tongue; when after the end of the First Republic one was allowed to pray and sing only in German, to his ears that was no longer “holy,” just a “caterwauling that I can’t bear to hear.”) Another aspect of his piety was the fervid irony with which he spoke of home when he was far away. He refers to our few acres as our “lands,” or as the “Kobal estate”; the rooms in the house, including kitchen, barn, and stable, became “apartments”; and he calls on his “revered family to gather around the table and study” his letters.
It was this irony that deterred him from active rebellion during the war; his indignation was expressed only in his letters. Hearing that a neighborhood family had been deported to Germany, he wrote that he had “but one wish … to tear that man limb from limb … but the thought of my parents, my brother and sister, holds back my rage.” Thus, it was probably legend when my mother told us that, after a so-called farm leave, her son had deserted to join the partisans and become a fighter. My guess is that he simply disappeared, no one knows where. It is inconceivable that he would ever have joined in bellowing warlike partisan songs at the top of his lungs — but quite possible that he and a few others made their way to some hidden clearing, a secret patch of farmland, and that from there, looking over his shoulder, he addressed the following speech to the warlords: “I will now say to you the word that is often heard at the bowling alley at home, when the ball misses the tenpins!” That, in one of his letters from the front, is his euphemistic way of saying “Shit!” He was indeed a singer, but not a regimented one — you might have caught him singing with friends after a few drinks; he was a dancer too, but not a stamping, heavy-footed one, more a merry wag, dancing on one foot at the edge of the dance floor.
After his disappearance, the village thought him dead, and like all the village dead he was soon forgotten, except by a priest or two; few of the boys his own age who might have talked about him came home from the war, and the girl who was thought to be his fiancee married someone else and never spoke of him. He had left home too early to be remembered as a maypole climber or as a soloist in church, and soon after his return from school the young peasant with the apron became “the soldier Gregor Kobal,” exchanging, as the saying went, “field blue-denim for field gray.”