But at home he was honored. During my childhood he was so much talked of that it seems to me now as though he were there the whole time, as though I even heard an additional voice in every conversation, as though all heads kept turning toward the absent figure in the empty corner. It was chiefly my mother who brought him alive with her talk, while my father was the custodian of his belongings, not only of his orchard but also of his clothes and his two books. Only later did it occur to me that my parents’ forehead-to-forehead whisperings in the sickroom may have been less an expression of married love than a union in mourning for their dearly beloved son and that their two foreheads may have been meant to form a bridge for his still-hoped-for return. It is certain that man and wife, each in his own way, worshipped their missing son as an “example”—these were the words of my godless mother—“of the son of man,” and that at news of his coming she would immediately have prepared “his apartment,” scrubbed the threshold, and hung a wreath over the front door, while my father would have borrowed the neighbor’s white horse, harnessed it to the spit-and-polished barouche, and, with tears of joy running down his nose, driven to meet him.
Only my sister opposed this worship (because, or so my parents believed, she blamed him for the shipwreck of her love). She contended that he had definitely cast his one eye on women, but had had no luck with them because of his disfigurement; that he had complained incessantly when tilling the soil, especially in the heat on the steeper slopes (“stinking business”); that he had come home from agricultural school as a propagandist for the Slovenian language and sowed dissension in house and village; that, in particular, he had sinned against his beloved Holy Ghost by giving up hope long before the war, and refusing to marry (after the girl had literally proposed to him) on the ground that he was sure to die young.
It is true that my brother’s letters and jottings over the years are outspoken in their despair. First because of machines—“It looks as if they will soon replace us all, and then there will be no need for me to come home”; then, at the beginning of the war, he expressed the belief that he would be “a soldier forever.” His written curses become more and more frequent. On all-day marches in the fine spring weather he “hears no birdsong,” “sees no flowers by the roadside,” and fears that he is losing his voice: “In another year I won’t be able to talk. Even now we are as shy as animals in the high mountains; we disappear when we hear someone coming. Our temperament needs harmony; without harmony, nothing can give us pleasure.” Every day the same, no sign of any Sunday or holiday. He refuses to think about the past “and would like best to do everything in reverse.” In the end, he curses not only the war but the world as welclass="underline" “I curse the world!”
I for my part, whether as listener or as reader, have never brought myself to believe in a brother who had lost hope. Haven’t appearances (“Filip Kobal has a thing about appearances”) always impressed me more than the most established fact? And what were these appearances? Didn’t they include the way my sister paused, slowed down, and grew thoughtful when she spoke against her missing brother? She stopped making faces the moment her brother came up in the conversation, and her usual blinking, ordinarily so persistent and violent, became much less frequent. She seemed to wake up. A moment before, her speech had been muddled and cottony as though she’d been talking in her sleep, and now she drew a breath before opening her mouth, tilted her head slightly, and paid attention to every word she said.
Another such “appearance” was especially evident in Gregor’s writing. Even when it dealt with the irrevocable past, it gave me, along with a plaint, a living image. Instead of saying something directly, like “When I was still happy …,” he would write (I translate literally): “When the birds still sang for me …” In speaking of springtime at home, he wrote: “When the bees were wearing trousers [of pollen].” Instead of saying “It’s an ill wind …” he wrote: “Ugly mother, good food.” Looking up his first name in the dictionary, he found the meaning “Skin on milk,” which made him retch. And then his way of using colors, every one of which could depict a wide range of things and creatures: “How is Spotty getting along?” could refer to a pear, a cow, a goat, a chicken, or a variety of green pea.
But what seemed to me in reading to go beyond such images, and to transcend my own present, were sentences written in a particular tense, which my brother used with striking frequency, the so-called future perfect — because it doesn’t exist in Slovene, he would switch to German whenever he wanted to use it: “We shall have walked on the green track.” “The boundary stone will have been moved to the edge.” “By the time the buckwheat is sowed, I shall have worked, sung, danced, and slept with a woman.”
I realize, of course, that an appearance may have resulted from a twofold deficiency: my brother’s papers are not complete, and I have no memory of him. His legacy is so fragmentary that I am in the position of a scholar dealing with the few fragments that have come down to us from the early Greek seekers after truth (this, at least, is how I visualize them — wringing their hands, stammering, and finally uttering their cry of joy). Two separate words taken out of context, such as “dancing” and “weeping,” reveal a halo around them and irradiate the world; they derive their radiance from, among other things, not being shut up in a complete sentence or in an “explanation.” And because, when I think about my missing brother, no picture of a living man, no smell, no tone of voice, no footfall, no particularity whatever intervenes, it has been possible for my brother to become a hero to me, an indestructible phantasm. True, after being appointed my godfather in his absence, he saw me once when home on leave; but I, barely two years old at the time, have no recollection of the meeting. “I shall have bent over my godchild,” he wrote in his next letter from the front.
Through these words, so much more concrete than my memory, I felt my brother bend over me time and again. He was often a foil to my mother: whereas she would have liked best to veil her eyes from the future she foresaw for me, his good eye studies me with friendly attentiveness and enjoys the sunshine with me, while his blind eye — because it’s blind — is none the wiser. The heaviness of my mother’s face bent over me as opposed to my brother’s airy radiance — that is my battle to this day. And that is why I call this person who has the same parents as I my “forebear”; yes, I have appointed Gregor Kobal — the peaceable descendant of an insurrectionary, a man who, as even his sister admitted, “never brandished a whip”—to be my ancestor, although I myself, in my thoughts at least, always keep a whip ready for one enemy or another. And indeed, precisely in certain crucial moments, a peace descended on me in which I not only saw my elective ancestor bent over me in kindness but myself embodied him. Of course I could not when threatened summon him to give me peace; it was the other way around: I found peace by myself, and he was present to bolster me; accordingly it was impossible to lean on my forebears (the only effective forebear, this much I know, is the sentence preceding the one I am writing now).
And yet, though it may be mere appearance, with an ancestor in me I am no longer alone; I sit more erect, walk in a different way; do and refrain from doing, say and leave unsaid what should be done or not done, said or left unsaid in a situation of danger. What are facts compared to such appearances? My brother writes in his last letter: “When I am able to project my thoughts into the distance, I picture the Kobal clan sitting at the table together, reading my scribblings.” Long live appearances! Let them be my subject!
As I recall, it often rained in the Bohinj, and it can’t be just the roaring of the torrent outside my window that makes me think so. On a forest path, my feet sink into the clayey mud. The plastic bags hung on the fruit trees to frighten the birds away are plumped up with water. I’m sitting with a family of vacationers under the roof of a “hay harp,” watching the road; a peasant woman is leading a horse by the bridle, the horse is pulling a hay wagon. The rain bounces back so violently from the road that the woman seems to be moving without legs, the horse without hooves, and the wagon without wheels. The walls of the houses are aglow with the lightning. Then the sun shines again; it has been shining a long time, and along the shore of the otherwise quiet lake the water sparkles with the drops falling from overhanging branches.