I left the place, backing away; and later, while walking, I kept turning back toward it. A little bird rose high over the edge of the plateau — as though it had just slipped from the hand of the dwarf who had hoped with its help to win the stone-throwing contest with the giant — and plummeted to the ground as though shot. The lake at the end of the valley looked like jelly in the dying light, and I fancied it full of drowning bees, circling around with transparent wings.
Each time, I went there with head bowed and came back with head erect. A tablet was affixed to one of the houses at the entrance to this village. On such and such a day in the year 1941, it said, a meeting held here passed the first resolution on resistance to Fascism. (In every Slovene town or village I was to pass through, I found a house bearing the same inscription.) I, too, wanted to put up resistance. I made my decision not in a cellar but out on the street, without a meeting, all by myself. “Form a sentence with ‘fight’ in it,” I said to myself. Only then did I realize that there already was such a sentence and that it had as many meanings as an oracle. Once, in such a mood, I went into a wooden hut and brought the ax down on the chopping block with all my might. An elderly woman came in and asked me to split a pile of sawed logs. I struck so hard that the pieces flew in all directions — I can still feel one grazing my forehead. In one hour I earned an evening meal and a few locutions such as “to split light” for “to chop kindling.” Another time, a soccer ball bounced across my path and I kicked it so well that I was asked to join the game (to this day, I sometimes dream that I’m a forward on the national team). My shoes supported my ankles, and my father’s leather strap, no longer a mere wristlet, strengthened my hand.
In the evenings, Filip Kobal had his corner place in the Black Earth Hotel. No one, not even the militia on its constant rounds, asked me my name; everyone called me “the guest”; even the picture of Tito had been turned away from me and was looking up at a squadron of bombers. On the tables, instead of baskets piled high with variously shaped Austrian rolls, which at times could remind one of corpses thrown headlong into a mass grave, there were simple stacks of sliced white bread on the napkins that used to be called “bread cloths.” It was midsummer and sometimes warm enough for serving meals outside. I was usually so overheated when I got back that the breeze from the torrent made me feel pleasantly fanned. There was a stool by the open window of the dining room, and the waiter stood on it to take the dishes that the cook handed him. Next to the stool there was a concrete surface with deep grooves that looked something like piano keys: a bicycle stand, usually empty. This was where the lightning rod ended; the fact is that a day seldom passed without a storm, and the evenings in the open were brightened by the summer lightning, for which, as a secondary-school graduate, I knew the ancient Greek term “space eye.” July came, and the fireflies which had just been flitting through the bushes crept into the grass and vanished.
The waiter was slightly younger than myself and may have come straight from trade school. Short, lean, with a brown, narrow, almost triangular face, he must, I felt sure, have come from a rocky, sparsely populated, inland region — one of a smallholder’s many children, born on a farm surrounded by stone walls and growing up a shepherd or picker of wild fruit, which he knew exactly where to find. Other people had called my girlfriend beautiful; this waiter was the only person to whom I applied the word in my own thoughts. Apart from greeting, ordering, and thanking, I never spoke to him; he never chatted with the guests and said only what was strictly necessary. His beauty was not so much in his features as in his constant attentiveness, his friendly vigilance. One never had to call him or even to raise one’s hand; standing in the farthermost corner of the dining room or garden — as he did when not busy — seemingly lost in some faraway dream, he kept an eye on his whole realm and anticipated the slightest flicker of an eyelid; in other words, he was a model of the courtesy and helpfulness lauded in books of etiquette. In the morning, he set the tables under the chestnut trees even if it was thundering, and had them cleared before the first drops began to fall. Sometimes, to my surprise, I’d see him alone in the dining room, putting each chair in its proper place, as though arranging for some festivity, a baptism or wedding, and allowing for the special quirks of every single guest. I also marveled at the care with which he handled the cheapest and shabbiest objects (there were no others in that hotel), at his way of lining up the tin knives and forks and wiping the plastic cap of the condiment bottle. Once in the late afternoon I saw him standing motionless in the bare, empty room, looking into space; then he stepped over to a far corner and gave a carafe an affectionate little turn that filled the whole house with an aura of hospitality. Another time, when the dining room was full, as it often was at dinner, he set down a cup of coffee on the bar before bringing it to the table and carefully aligned the handle; then with an elegant gesture he took hold of the tiny cup and carried it directly to the guest’s table. I was also struck by the dead seriousness with which he gave a light to anyone, even to a drunk, always with a single, unbroken movement, and by the way his half-closed eyes would light up every time.
Alone during the day, in my room or out of doors, I thought about the waiter more than about my parents; as I now realize, it was a kind of love. I had no desire for contact, I wanted only to be near him, and I missed him on his day off. When he finally reappeared, his black-and-white attire brought life into the room and I acquired a sense of color. He always kept his distance, even when off duty, and that may have accounted for my affection. One day I ran into him in his street clothes at the bus-station buffet, now in the role of a guest, and there was no difference between the waiter at the hotel and the young man in the gray suit with a raincoat over his arm, resting one foot on the railing and slowly munching a sausage while watching the departing buses. And perhaps this aloofness in combination with his attentiveness and poise were the components of the beauty that so moved me. Even today, in a predicament, I think about that waiter’s poise; it doesn’t usually help much, but it brings back his image, and for the moment at least I regain my composure.
Toward midnight, on my last day in the Black Earth Hotel — all the guests and the cook, too, had left — I passed the open kitchen on my way to my room and saw the waiter sitting by a tub full of dishes, using a tablecloth to dry them. Later, when I looked out of my window, he was standing in his shirtsleeves on the bridge across the torrent, holding a pile of dishes under his right arm. With his left hand, he took one after another and with a smooth graceful movement sent them sailing into the water like so many Frisbees.
Young Filip Kobal’s nights in his four-bed room at the Black Earth Hotel were almost entirely dreamless. Years before, penned into the dormitory at the seminary, nailed to his pillow by a persistent headache, he had often thought of lying alone in his bed under the open sky, in the midst of a raging snowstorm. His blanket, which he had pulled up to his ears, kept him warm, and only the dragon in his head had turned to ice. And now my wish was fulfilled in a different way by the thundering torrent, which pushed open the door of my room and took the place of dreams.
Only once did I dream of my father (who had earned a pension as a flood-control worker) or perhaps only of the copybook in which I had wanted him to write the story of our family. It had turned into a genuine book, which did not as in reality consist of that one shaky line — my brother’s APO number and my laundry mark — but was crammed full of text, not handwritten, but printed. The flood-control worker had become a peasant author, the updated successor to those Slovenian peasants at the turn of the century whose stories had been collected and who, because they usually told their stories in the evening, are known (in rough translation) as “evening people,” a term which before they made their appearance may have referred to evening winds or moths and since then can only have applied to the evening papers. And the attentive reader of my father’s book was the young waiter.