It was a warm, quiet night. I crept into a parked bus that I found open. I stretched out on the back seat, which extended the whole width of the bus, again using my sea bag as a pillow; after initial discomfort, this was my place.
Still, I could not fall asleep. The bus creaked as if it were about to drive off, and the moon shone into my closed eyes, as glaring as a searchlight. I thought of the autumn and of my military service, which then for the first time became imaginable. All the strenuous things I had done in my life I had done alone; once I caught my breath, it was as though nothing had happened, for there is no satisfaction in solitary experience. But, it seemed to me, when soldiers had crossed a mountain range or built a bridge together, they assured one another of what they had done simply by stretching out by the roadside together, all equally exhausted. I wanted to wear myself out over and over again; exhaustion could be my only justification for not remaining a villager and not becoming a laborer.
But then I remembered the speech that a physical-training officer from headquarters had made to the country boys after our medical. Bouncing on one heel and banging the desk with his fist, he had stared into the distance and felt the icy tundra wind blowing over the heroes’ graves, filled his lungs with it, and bellowed an interminable harangue at the weaklings and cowards at his feet. After a last blood-curdling blast from his iron lungs—“No finer death than death in the field!”—all of us together had sung (often stumped for the words) the national anthem, whereupon, clicking his heels and touching the edge of his hand to his brow, he had dropped through a trapdoor and disappeared into his hell. For Filip Kobal this was his first encounter with a dangerous lunatic, while for the other boys of his age it was a natural phenomenon, under which, as then in the “multipurpose” auditorium of the district capital, they may be cringing to this day. But didn’t the experience of loneliness also give forth a liberating light?
Reclining in the bus, I finally saw a road along the seashore, and war had been declared. No one was left in the world but two sentries, one on either side of the bay, both far out in the water on small disks rocking in the waves. And I heard a voice saying that it would soon be made known why wars were the only reality in the world.
When I awoke, I didn’t know where I was. No fear, only enchantment. The bus was standing still, but in a strange, differently colored region; the moon, which had been so bright, had become a pale daytime moon, a cloud, the only cloud in the sky, small and round, exactly opposite a small round sun. I had no idea how I had got from one place to the other; all I remembered was a frequent shifting of gears and bushes brushing against the windows. The folding door was open, and outside I found the driver, who calmly — whatever happened now could only have a fairy-tale quality — bade me good morning and, as if I were an old friend, offered to share his breakfast with me.
The bus was on the open road, but from there a dirt track led to a village such as I had never seen before; that was where the passengers came from, all at once, apparently from the same house; this must have been the terminus. They moved in a body and were dressed for their working day in some other place, among them a gendarme whose uniform made him look like the Marshal. Once these people disappeared inside the bus, the village seemed uninhabited as it had been when I first saw it, a light-gray stone monument, one with the empty, windy country around it. But coming closer, I heard a radio, smelled gasoline, and met a dispiritingly ugly woman, who threw a letter into the usual yellow mailbox. Why did she greet me as “the son of the late blacksmith, returned home at last,” invite me to sit on the bench in a courtyard sheltered from the wind by high walls, bring me a basin of water to wash in, sew the missing buttons on my jacket and darn my socks — unlike my brother, I’d never been capable of taking care of my clothes; the very first time I put it on I had torn a shirt that was as good as new after he had worn it for ten years — show me a picture of her daughter, and offer to put me up in her house? As though complying with the fairy-tale rules, I asked no questions, asked the name neither of the village nor of this airy, free country, whose border I had crossed in my sleep — a transition resembling none before or after — and where, for the first time on my journey, nothing looked familiar to me; even so, I knew I was in the Karst.
My anguished wonderment at being in a fairy tale soon gave way at the sight of the oilcloth-covered kitchen table, of a newspaper headline (no longer rendered obscure by the different language), of the cistern with a plaque on it saying that resistance fighters had used it as a clandestine radio transmitter during the World War. Nevertheless, the Karst, along with my missing brother, is my motive for writing this story. But is it possible to tell a story about a region?
Even in my childhood, the attraction of the Karst began with a mistake. I had always thought of the bowl-shaped depression in which my brother’s orchard was located as a dolina, the most conspicuous feature of the Karst. This alone was what made our unimpressive Jaunfeld Plain interesting; the few bomb craters in the Dobrawa Forest were hardly big enough for garbage pits, and the Drava was so deeply hidden in its trough-shaped valley, navigated neither by ships nor by small boats (though perhaps at night by partisans in washtubs), that hardly anyone in the village of Rinkenberg was conscious of living near a real and important river. The hollow in the plain was the only “sight” in our part of the country, not so much because of its conformation as because it was the only one of its kind. Here, I thought with pride as a schoolboy, so far north of the Karst, an underground cave had collapsed, earth had slid in from above and created this fertile bowl. Where something had once happened, such was my childlike belief, something would happen in the future, something entirely different, and I looked into the supposed dolina with expectant awe.
Later on, by the time my history and geography teacher enlightened me, my years-long belief had done its work, and if my wanderlust had a goal, it was the Karst. Yet I formed no picture of it, except as naked rock interspersed with enormous numbers of dolina craters with red earth at the bottom. Once, when I was sitting at home on the window seat, I burst into tears at the thought of the unknown coastal plateau beyond all the mountains. Much more violent than the usual child’s weeping jag, my outburst had the force of a shout. Those tears, it is now clear to me, were the first statement I had ever made unasked, the first that was strictly my own.
It is that same teacher’s method that I am now adopting in my attempt to give my Karst story a beginning (though there is a voice within me which, in keeping with my tears that day on the window seat, would rather content itself with exclaiming “O Inspired Rock!”). True, he would introduce his favorite story, that of the Maya, with an exclamation, but he would go on to ground it not in any historical event but in the nature of the subsoil. This history of a people, so he said, was predetermined by the nature of the soil and could only be told properly if the soil played a part in every phase; every true historian, he contended, must also be a geographer, and he was firmly convinced that, given the geological configuration of a country, he could calculate its historical cycle and determine whether its inhabitants would even be able to form cycles or a nation. The Yucatan Peninsula, he went on, the land of the Maya, was also a karst, a hollowed-out limestone plateau, but differed from the Karst, from “Mother Karst,” the high plateau above the Gulf of Trieste, from which all comparable phenomena in the world take their name, in being its mirror image. The concave craters of the European Karst became in the tropics convex towers and cones; while in Europe not only the scant rainfall but also the rivers flowing down from the interior are absorbed on the spot by the fissured limestone, the torrential Central American rain is spewed from holes in the stone and even produces fountains of fresh water offshore in the salty Atlantic (the Maya, in their day, would row out to gather it in their water jugs).