a, or Isonzo.
I had been roaming about for two days, and now in security I thought, as I often did later on “arriving safely,” that I hadn’t wandered nearly long enough. Security? In my whole life, I have never once felt myself in security.
I spent only a night and a day in the Upper Isonzo Valley. I slept in Tolmin, the largest town in the valley; its coat-of-arms shows the river’s meanders, crisscrossed by the pitchforks of the peasant uprising. I found shelter in the basement of a private house, where there were rooms for rent. There were spiders on the ceiling, and after midnight the cellar smell was fortified by the stench of vomit. In the next room a man retched loudly, wordlessly, and uninterruptedly until dawn. When I got up, there was no one in the kitchen-living room but a mute child with a cat on his lap; his parents had already gone out to work. I put the money on the table, took breakfast at the inn, and breathed deeply at the sight of the bread.
An old road leads along the terrace where the villages are situated. I headed up the river for Kobarid, or Karfreit; at first the Isonzo lay far below me, then it came closer; on the far side of it I saw pastureland, with windowless and chimneyless huts for hay. At a place where the road touched the meandering river, I went down to the bank, took my clothes off in the rain, and let myself down from an overhanging rock into the current, which from a distance had looked so furious but wasn’t so bad once I was in it. Up ahead of me, the river split in two. The water was up to my shoulders; having just come down from the mountains, it was ice-cold; for a moment it stabbed me in the pit of my stomach. I swam against the stream with all my might and noticed after a hundred counted strokes that I was still on a level with the stone where I had left my clothes. I stood up and with my head barely above water surveyed the countryside, which, seen in that perspective, became part of a strange continent, a single shimmering flow from all sides, subdivided only by tongue-shaped gravel banks, surmounted by swaths of mist and fringed by mountains dark with conifers and veiled in rain, the ever-active watershed for these nameless streams. Soa? Isonzo? The desolation that extended from the tip of my chin to a bow-shaped peak lit by a distant sun, nothing but cold river water and warm rain, made me think of a primeval world that doesn’t want to be named but only to stand alone for itself. But then in the middle of the river I sighted, one after another, three fellow swimmers, evidently — to judge by the outline of their undershirts on their otherwise brown arms — workers taking a midday break. They were swimming fast and shouting, one louder than the next; they soon disappeared from view (I saw them later on the road in a file of gravel trucks). Soa or Isonzo? Which suited the river better, the feminine Slovene or the masculine Italian name? For me, I thought, masculine would be better; for the three workers, feminine. As I resumed my march on the road, I felt a warming hand between my shoulder blades, and my shoes became slowly gliding dugout canoes.
Later on, when for the first time I heard the name Kobarid pronounced by a native, it sounded to me as if a child had said it. Yes, time and again, names have rejuvenated the world. When I got there, it was different from anything I had ever seen at home. This was no village; all of a sudden I was surrounded by a fragment of a metropolis; a forest jutted into the center with its bookstore and flower shop, and there were wet cows right next to the factory on the periphery. Though in the foothills of the Alps, Kobarid, or Karfreit, struck me then as the embodiment of the south, with its oleander bushes at the entrances to houses, laurel trees outside the church, stone buildings, and streets of multicolored cobbles (which, to be sure, led after a few steps into the evergreen forests of Central Europe).
The people spoke a jumble of Slovene and Italian, just as the houses were a jumble of wood, stone, and marble; all that together had a spark of daring about it. At my inn, which like the others was named after a mountain, two men were playing cards; at the end of the game, one showed his opponent his winning card with a quick smile. A woman on a curved balcony snipped the faded flowers from the geraniums that ran the whole length of the house, and then put a gleaming red flowerpot down beside the other pots. “This place is my source.” That was my decree.
The bus from the north that I was waiting for came around the corner. But it wasn’t the right one; unlike Yugoslavian buses, it gleamed with enamel in which, when it stopped, the lanceolate leaves of the oleanders were reflected; when I looked up, I saw the whole population of my home village, in window after window a familiar profile. Involuntarily I moved away, looking for a place where I wouldn’t be seen. Were the villagers really perched up so high? Weren’t they, rather, huddling or crouching? And when they rose to their feet, weren’t they actually picking themselves up off the floor? Painfully, as though crippled, they crawled out of the bus, and the driver had to help several of them down from the doorstep. Outside, gathered together in the bend of the street, they sought one another with their eyes, as though afraid of getting lost. Though it was a weekday, they were festively dressed, they had even put on their peasant costumes; only the priest shepherding the tour was wearing his traveling habit and a white collar. The men were wearing hats and under their brown suits velvet vests with metal buttons; the women, in fringed rainbow-colored shawls, all had enormous handbags, all of the same shape. Even the oldest among the women had braided their hair and wound the braids around their heads like wreaths. I was sitting half in shadow at a distance, on a chopping block under an outside staircase. A few of them glanced in my direction, but none of these people knew me; only the priest had a moment’s pause, and it seemed to me that the sight of this stranger may have put him in mind of Kobal, Filip, apostate and fugitive from the seminary. Where, I wonder, could that fellow be now?
Then one by one they stepped into the inn and stayed a long while. I decided to wait for them; there would be a later bus to the Karst, which was probably where my search for my brother’s traces would end. Beside me, there was a woodpile with a pyramidal tunnel at the bottom resembling a kennel; on the wall above it, the remains of a Latin inscription: UNCERTAIN THE HOUR. It seemed to me that I could tell by the look of the villagers that my mother was well; just the sight of those familiar handbags reassured me.
I was left undisturbed in my place; the fact that I so obviously had time seemed identification enough. When the Rinkenbergers came out into the open, the old men had flushed cheeks. They were not drunk but were all seized with a strangely awkward exhilaration. From them I heard the language of the land, for the first time spoken purely, with clear voices, without the garble and swallowing of syllables usual in our village. Before getting into their bus, they all, as though on command, turned back toward the wall of the house, which, windowless at that point, was only a large yellow surface with horizontal grooves. The dark backs of the villagers stood out clearly against it, and I saw some of the women, regardless of age, holding one another by the hand, while some of the men threw their arms over one another’s shoulders. They all sagged at the knees, and it occurred to me that not only we, the Kobals, were exiles, but all the smallholders, and that the whole village of Rinkenberg had always been a village of exile, all its inhabitants equally servile, equally wretched, equally out of place; here with the others even the priest struck me, not as a man of the cloth, but as a close-cropped convict. Most likely they stopped to look at the house because they had been served so well and cheaply there, but in my eyes they were looking up at the grooves of a wailing wall, and at the same time they were pilgrims (Pelegrin was a common name in the village), and that fitted in with the solemnity of the hairdos and costumes. For the first time I saw meaning in these costumes (as I would on a future occasion in the picture of an old woman standing with half-closed eyes outside her stone hut, holding her black-and-white shroud, her old wedding dress, over her arm). The group included a child, who now jumped nimbly up onto the window ledge, then, clinging to the grooves with his fingers and toes, climbed halfway up the wall and, applauded by the grownups, dropped to the ground: end of trip, signal for return.