The morning wind was blowing when I stood with my blue sea bag and hazelwood stick on the platform of the Bohinjska Bistrica station. I was heading farther south. From where I stood, the tunnel through the mountain chain could be seen in the distance. As in Mittlern across the border, here, too, there were living quarters on the second floor of the building, and here, too, geranium petals came fluttering down on the roadbed from window boxes; in the meantime, I had come to like the smell. The small railroad stations of both countries had a good deal in common, even the inscription on the little enamel plaques indicating so and so many “feet above the Adriatic Sea”; they all displayed one and the same emblem: that of the old Austro — Hungarian Empire. A stone portal led to the toilet; the door was painted blue like the sky in the wayside shrines at home (but, inside, the only equipment was an unadorned hole). Cow’s horns as big as a buffalo’s were nailed to a wooden hut. The vegetable garden belonging to the station ended in a triangular herb garden surrounded by pole beans and dominated by the feathery green of dillweed; at the tip of the triangle a cherry tree, the ground below it dark with spots of fruit. Swallows were screaming in the chestnut trees outside the station, unseen except for a trembling in the leaves. The floor of the waiting room was of black polished wood, which along with the tall iron stove repeated the bus station at home; unoccupied as usual, it had windows on both sides, and the light inside it suggested a living room. Near the entrance, half buried in a layer of concrete, a footscraper of imperial cast steel, resembling an upturned knife blade, was framed left and right by richly ornamented miniature pillars. The room as a whole seemed spacious and yet well finished in every detail, and in it I sensed the breath of a gentle spirit, the spirit of those who long ago, in the days of the Empire, had designed it and made use of it. And the man who was looking after it now was no scoundrel either.
A group of soldiers were waiting there along with me, dried sweat on their unshaven faces, their boots caked with clay up to the ankles. From them I looked up to the southern mountain range, the peaks of which were already in the sunlight; for once, the sky over the Bohinj was cloudless. In that moment, I decided to cross the mountains on foot, and started off at once. “No more tunnels,” I said to myself, and: “I’ve got plenty of time.” With my decision a jolt passed through the country, and with that the day seemed to begin. Didn’t “jolt” mean “fight” in the other language?
The only high mountain I had known up until then was Mount Petzen, which was a little higher than these mountains; sometimes even in the summer there were patches of snow in its shaded cirques. But I had always gone there with my father and, because of the slow climb, it seemed quite a distance. Halfway up, we would spend the night in a dusty hay barn, after which my eyes were too swollen to take in the view. If we came anywhere near a farm, a dog would come running, followed by its owner shouting and brandishing a stick — the mountain peasants had an ingrained distrust of the smallholders down in the plain, who trampled their pastures, frightened the cattle, and stripped the woods of mushrooms. They would calm down only when we came closer and one of the strangers proved to be the carpenter known throughout the region, who, as it happened, had raised the peasant’s roof, after which we would be invited in for bacon, bread, and cider. One day on the crest dividing Austria from Yugoslavia, my father spread his legs, one foot on this side, one foot on the other, and made one of his short speeches: “See, this is what our name means, not straddler but border person. Your brother is a man of the interior; we two are border people. A Kobal is someone who crawls on all fours, and at the same time a light-footed climber. A border person is an extreme case, but that doesn’t make him marginal.”
On my way up I often turned around, as though in gratitude to the strange country where, so very differently from at home, no one was suspicious of me and the few questions I had been asked were not designed to trap me. The rest of the time I kept my head down, gazed at the summery meadow passing by in silent flight, and thought of my brother, who, while marching to war, had heard no birds and had ceased to see “what flowered by the roadside.” I felt that the steady climb was strengthening my body for the events of the autumn, whether military service or study, and for my encounter with my next enemy. The lizards rolled away like round stones or swished into the bushes like birds. The last sign of human life I was to see for some time was the dark wet bundle of washing outside the end house of a mountain village (the Slovene language, I reflected, has a special word for someone living in such an “end house”). After that, I followed traces in the grass, which often turned out to be animal tracks leading into impenetrable tangles, and all I heard was a monotonous buzzing of insects that made me think of a population gradually receding into the distance. At my back the valley had vanished, but on the horizon before me I could see the Julian Alps and in the midst of them the Triglav, the highest mountain in Yugoslavia; ahead of me and behind me, only wilderness.
Again I attempted a shortcut, supposedly a straight line, where the workings of the water made a straight line impossible. I had started out cautiously, but now I rushed headlong through underbrush and over rocky debris. At the tree line, the bare crest seemed to be coming closer, and the grass, which up until then had been knee-high, became short and stubbly. Suddenly I saw ahead of me an utterly motionless cloud, and at the same moment the first flash of lightning darted out of it. I was not untroubled; to tell the truth, I was terrified — only the day before, there had been talk at the hotel about someone being killed by lightning. Yet I kept on climbing. Since then, I have often run straight into danger as though hypnotized by it, not the least bit cheerful, let alone happy about it, panic-stricken in fact, humming some hit song or counting out numbers. That day, I was so terrified that I even heard the flapping of my trousers as thunder. What from a distance I had taken for a stone hut on the summit turned out, when I got there, to be the remains of a fort; the windows proved to be embrasures. Even so, the ruin provided shelter. A jolt, and equanimity took over; calmly, I looked down on a distant field that was white with hailstones when everywhere else it was raining. So great was my exhaustion that my eyes forgot their perspective and saw the white patch as a sheet spread out to bleach. Sitting there, I toppled over. In a letter written after a forced march, my brother speaks of a faint as “involuntary sleep.”
Night was falling when I came to; most of the embrasures were aimed at the southern valley, and looking out, I saw the lights of a few houses. I walked up and down in the rain outside and then decided to stay; in the dying day the honeycomb cells of the fort seemed positively inviting, like small hotel rooms. The mists coming up over the ridge were clouds — I had never been in a cloud before. When I looked down at the grass, the little mountain flowers would vanish in the mist and reappear a moment later; the motionless wings of a falcon drifting with the clouds looked frayed. Inside the fort, reclining on a bed of old newspapers, I ate some of the food I had brought with me. Nothing more could happen to me, not that day at least; I thought of the story about the goblin who, safe in his rocky niche, stuck out his tongue at the elements; but then, his attention diverted by a malignant human, he was struck by lightning.