In spite of the rain, I left the village every afternoon, always with a definite goal, a kind of plateau which, like the big pine forest at home in the Jaunfeld, is called Dobrava (roughly, “place of the oak trees”) but is bare except for an isolated pine or oak here and there, and hardly cultivated, presenting the appearance — strange so near the bottom of the valley — of an upland pasture.
On this plateau I was all alone, but not outside the world, for even more than at the inn with its roaring torrent, one sensed that civilization was near: foresters’ tractors, hay turners, blowers in the lumber-drying sheds; rising smoke and glinting windshields could be seen on all sides, a single crowded rowboat on the lake below. Not only the power lines but even the birds in the air and the bees nearby indicated the presence of unseen humans at the foot of the moraine. I had come up here almost in spite of myself, guided by the pathways, at first an old road, no longer used by vehicles, with meadow grass sprouting through cracks in the asphalt, then uphill over what had formerly been the bed of a brook but was now carpeted with short, soft grass. Here, too, I had as usual to find my place. As in the song: the hill was too high for me, the dale was too low, the sun was too hot, the shade too cool, the lee too sheltered, the open too windy, the boulder too eccentric, the tumbledown apiary too picturesque. In the end I sat down in the grass, leaning against the wooden wall of a field barn. It was the south wall, and when the sun was shining, it seemed to me that the weather-beaten wood gave off “just the right warmth.” Indeed, the whole place was just right. The eaves had just enough overhang to enable me to stretch my legs without their getting wet, and the few drops that came my way reminded me of the balcony at home, where the corner I sat in, as here, was at the border between inside and outside — with the difference that there, because our outhouse was situated at one end of the balcony, with a chute leading down to the dung heap, the smells were not the same as here on the plateau.
And again I had a book with me, my brother’s big dictionary; everything else had been removed from my waterproof sea bag. The orchard copybook had been suitable reading matter for the four walls of my hotel room; and now, here in the open, the dictionary released its arrows of meaning. Odd that a young man of twenty should spend whole afternoons in a foreign country leaning against a secluded barn, immersed in a dictionary — no, in a single page; no, a single word; that he should look up from that word, shake his head, laugh, drum his heels on the ground, clap his hands (scaring away the grasshoppers and butterflies), jump now and then to his feet and take a turn in the rain. When the people at the inn and in the village saw me start on my daily expedition with my sea bag, they took me for “a budding scientist” or “a young painter” (with its lake and solitary church the Bohinj had attracted droves of landscape painters in the nineteenth century); yet that young fellow sitting there hunched over his book, then suddenly starting to sing at the top of his voice, could only be an idiot.
And yet my senses — of sight as well as hearing — have never been so sharp as then, as I read those columns of unconnected words. Could you call it reading? Wasn’t it more a discovering, and wasn’t it the joy of discovery that made me shout the foreign words and phrases? (Out into the landscape with them!) But what was there to discover?
Foreign languages had fascinated me as a child. The one coffee tin in our house, with the curly-black-haired dancing girl on it, led me years later to study the dark beauty’s language — Spanish; and I copied at least the first lessons of the Hungarian grammar I had brought home from the seminary, which attracted me first by its smell and then by the exotic look of its words. The Slovene language, on the other hand, which I heard every day in the village, had rather repelled me. Not so much because of its Slavic sound as because of the many German words that kept intruding; I heard the dialect of the villagers not as a language but as a ridiculous hodgepodge. My father would often humiliate his fellow cardplayers by imitating their manner of speaking — a mumbling, a gargling, a barbaric spitting out of gutturals — and following up with a sentence of his own pure, melodious Slovene (thus once again showing himself to be the master of the group). But even where the standard language was spoken, it usually sounded menacing to my ears, chiefly because the places where it was used suggested official announcements rather than communication. On the radio, the short daily broadcast in the foreign language was cut in like news of a disaster; in school, meaningless sentences served only to drum grammar into our heads; and in church, the priest, as he delivered his sermon, often switched in spite of himself to German, which seemed far better suited to his purpose, and continued quietly what in the Slavic language he had had to thunder out, sentence by sentence, in a tone of condemnation.
Only the litanies, even more than the hymns, made me prick up my ears. I joined with all my heart in entreating the Saviour to have mercy on us and the saints to pray for us. In the dark nave, filled with the now unrecognizable silhouettes of the villagers turned with their voices toward the altar, the Slovene syllables — those of the priest changing, those of the congregation unchanging — resounded with infinite fervor. It was as though we were all lying prostrate, addressing our supplication to a closed heaven. Those foreign sequences could never be long enough for me; I wanted them to go on and on, and when the litany came to an end, I experienced not a dying away but a breaking off.
I lost this feeling at the seminary, where the few Slovene-speakers aroused antagonism and suspicion in the others. Unlike the voices in school, on the radio, and in church, they spoke their language softly, hardly above a whisper, and this in a far corner of the study hall, so that the rest of us heard no more than an incomprehensible hissing. The rectangle of desks in which they stood as though entrenched, with their backs to the world, gave them a conspiratorial air, accentuated by the shouts coming from all sides. And what about me? Did I envy them their huddled heads? Did I begrudge them their evident solidarity? No, my feeling went deeper. It was abhorrence. At the sight of this conceited band of the elect, dissociating themselves from the rest of us, from the mob among which I — alone, jostled, jostling back, warmed only by the blue cavern of my desk and by sleep — had to count myself. I wanted these no-good Slovenes to shut up and crawl out of their entrenchment, I wanted every single one of them to feel as homeless in his assigned seat as I did, with some stinking, panting, scratching foreign body beside him. I wanted him to go out and exercise in silence, without the comforting whispers of his fellow conspirators in his ears, but only the splashing of the seminary fountain, to share the lot of Filip Kobal, who finds your clannish minority even more nauseating than the speechless, disunited, directionless majority standing around with hanging heads and clenched fists.
Not until much later did one of these Slovene-speakers tell me the truth: that they did not band together against the rest of us; meeting in their corner had been their only way of hearing their own language after a day of having to talk in a foreign tongue, for their language was frowned upon not only by the German-speaking pupils but by the prefects as well. If they spoke softly, it was for fear of giving offense, and they spoke only of indifferent matters, the weather, school, the packages of sausage and ham they received from home, though even such conversation had been a great comfort to them. The familiar sounds they offered one another were like “the bread and wine of Communion”; the few moments of the day when they could at last be among themselves with their persecuted language were for them “hallowed moments” even if they had deliberately spoken only of the most commonplace things. “Doesn’t it make a difference,” cried my informant, “if I can say njiva instead of field, or jabolko instead of apple?”