Back from the empty cow paths to put my thoughts in order, back to the book. I had been sitting and standing barefoot, and barefoot I strode back and forth outside the barn. The last word my brother had ticked had a double meaning. Translated, it meant both “to fortify oneself” and “to sing psalms.” (Immersing myself in these words was the exact opposite of my usual immersion in so-called breathtaking stories; time and again the words made me raise my head and my eyes.) I stopped and raised my head. By way of a ford marked by a tree, I was carried back to the bluish cavern of my seminary desk. Its back wall was the grooved mountain slope. A sun shone on it, low in the sky as shortly before setting and made brighter by the unlit spruce in front of it. The steps were thick bars of shadow leading to the summit, on which lay a thoroughly earthly glow. The light pinpointed the smallest shapes on the slope — a clump of grass, a half-overgrown hoof print, a molehill, a line of birds along a rivulet, a wild hare nearby — and connected them with one another by distinct interstices. I went on reading, my eyes at once in the book and on the mountain. My staring became a watching, as when in a strange crowd one knows that a familiar face or two must be present. Here in the sun, the resounding litany of the faithful which had begun in the dark church was resumed in a silent litany of words, with their many meanings. To breathe deeply was to yearn was to tense the strongest muscle. Violent anger was sobbing. Fireflies were June was a variety of cherry. The mower was a sandpiper was the belt of Orion. The grasshopper was the bridge of a violin was the inner partition of a nut was the upper part of a whip … A change of one letter transformed the word for a slight breeze into the word for a powerful flow, and another into a tempest, which was also the name for flying sand … At last, silent invocations took on human form, and I saw the absent ones appear on the steps, silhouetted by the word-light: my mother as “the woman who had ceased to be a handmaiden”; my father as “the man who never ceased to be a servant”; my sister as “the madwoman,” which, with a slight sound shift, became “the blessed”; my girlfriend as “the quiet one”; my teacher as “bitter sweetheart”; the village idiot as “he who stirs up wind while walking”; my enemy in the form of “a bruised heel”; and ahead of them all my brother “the pious,” a word which also designated “the serene.” And I? — I recognized myself, reader and onlooker in one, as the third party on whom everything hinged, without whom there could be no game, and who thus found in himself the salient features of the other players: my father’s white, servant’s feet and the torn corners of my brother’s eyes.
Of course it was only for a moment that this picture writing shimmered on the mountain slope; then all was reliefless emptiness and the sun had set. But I knew I could bring the picture writing back, that unlike grief it could be willed; the empty forms both of the cow paths and of the blind windows could be relied on; they were the seal of our right. “Brother, you must have walked there in the gray blueness.”
I shut my eyes. Only then did I notice that they were wet. But I was not weeping for myself or my family; no, the source of those tears was things and their words.
Behind my closed eyelids, the after-image of the cow paths: a stone-gray pattern. Now, a quarter of a century later, I see, there on the plateau, a man of indeterminate age. Barefoot, wearing an overcoat that’s too big for him, he begins to wave his arms. His arm waving becomes a continuous movement which, if it were not done with the whole hand, including the fist, would be something like writing. Was this “he” or “I”? It is still I. I no longer write in the air as I did as a child; instead, like a scientist who is at the same time a manual laborer, I make hatch marks on a sheet of paper lying on the stone-gray steps. That is the movement I have chosen for my story. Letter for letter, word for word, as chiseled in stone long years ago, I want the inscription to appear on my paper; I want it to be handed down recognizably thanks to my light hatch marks. Yes, I want my soft pencil strokes to join with the hardness of the stone as did the language of my forebears, in which the term for “the monotonous note of the finch” is derived from the word for “a single letter.” For, without the refuge of words, the earth, the black, red, greening earth, would be just one great desert, and I will no longer acknowledge any drama, any history other than the drama of the things and words of this beloved world — and I pray that the bomb which is threatening the cow-path pyramid will strike softly in the form of the word for “an elongated pear.” I shall find a word for the dark interior of a white chestnut blossom, the yellow of clay under the wet snow, the bit of blossom that clings to the apple, and the sound of a river fish leaping out of the water.
I opened my eyes again, and again walked back and forth outside the barn, faster and faster as though taking a running leap. Again I stopped. Sensing that my chest had become an instrument, I shouted. Filip Kobal — whose voice was so soft that he could never make himself heard, whom the prefects at the seminary had scolded because his prayers didn’t “carry”—shouted so loud that all who knew him would have looked at him with new eyes.
Something comparable had happened only once, at that same seminary. I had convinced myself that I was unable to sing, and then one day the teacher called on me to sing. With my heart in my mouth I had stood up and taken a deep breath. Then, in the midst of the sullenly brooding class, I had drawn from my innermost soul a strange and tender song, which had provoked first laughter, then awed embarrassment in my listeners, and which, it seemed to me, must always have been inside me. Now on the plateau, where I was alone, what came out of me was not singing, nor was it a bellowing or calling; it was a clear shout, imperiously demanding my right. With all my might I shouted the laconic or lyrical, monosyllabic or polysyllabic words of my brother’s book. The words went out over the countryside, calling forth on the empty cow paths an echo whose other name was “world sound.” And at every shout I saw the open ears of my forebears, the amused arching of their eyebrows, their joyful faces.
I propped up the book, touched it with my lips, and bowed down to the place. I cut a branch from the hazel bush near one corner of the barn, scratched the name of the place and the date into it: “Dobrava, Slovenija, Jugoslavija 1960,” and declared it to be our stele, the record of a new and different family history. How little hope I had of a future at the age of twenty (never would my king appear), how firm were my expectations concerning the present; and how weak or cautious is my voice now as I repeat the young man’s experience. Wasn’t it drowned out long ago by shouts converging on the plateau from all directions, by shouts of command on drill grounds, by field-gray soldiers on firing ranges, by the scraping of shovels in the village graveyard? No, wherever I may be, the blind windows and empty cow paths strike me as the hallmarks of a kingdom of recurrence, where a locomotive whistle can become equally well the cry of a pigeon or the shriek of an Indian. I can still feel on my shoulder the cord of my sea bag with the book of words in it. Mother, your son is still walking under the open sky.
Then, flinging myself upon the ground, I discovered once and for all what the spirit is.
Three — THE SAVANNA OF FREEDOM AND THE NINTH COUNTRY
THAT DAY I stayed on the plateau until the after-image of the sun left my retina. An axle seemed to be turning inside me, more and more slowly, bringing the things behind me into my field of vision. Beyond the northern mountains I saw a fiery cloud, which I situated exactly over the house of my parents. Heart, diamond, spade, and club shapes had been cut out of the west wall of the barn to let air in, and my father’s centuries-old desolation came blowing out of the black holes.