Thus, according to the teacher’s theory, the people in the “Ur-Karst” must have been the mirror image of the Maya. Instead of climbing up to terraces when going to work the fields, they went down to the dolinas; instead of hiding in the jungle, their temples showed themselves plainly on bare hilltops; their grottoes served as refuges, whereas the Maya performed human sacrifices in theirs; all buildings, the huts as well as the temples of the Ur-Karst, chicken coop as well as mansion, threshold as well as roof, were built not of wood and corn husks but of solid rock.
Nevertheless, the people going to the bus stop on the dirt road, even the fat woman who took me in, and all who followed her, became in my memory a procession of Indians. Were they a people? Whether they were Italians or Slovenes struck me as of secondary importance. But the Karst had too few inhabitants to form a nation of their own despite the size of their territory and their many villages. Or perhaps they were not so few: in any case, I have never seen more than one, two, or three people at a time; anything resembling a crowd only at church, in the bus or train, or at the movies. There’d be one person in the graveyard; one or two (usually man and wife) hoeing down in their dolina; three (usually war veterans) playing cards in the stone tavern. I’ve never seen them in a group or club, gathered for a common purpose; I have to admit, there was no lack of portraits of Tito, but I had the impression that, up there on the plateau, state power and political system had only a formal existence; so rare and small were the patches of fertile ground in that barren country that collective farming was out of the question. The field no larger than the shadow of an apple tree at the bottom of a dolina far outside the village could only be the property of an individual. Why, then, had the peasant uprising of Tolmin spread to the Karst, where the peasants had fought not only for the “old right” but “to be free at last,” proclaiming: “We don’t want rights, we want war, and the whole country will join us.” Why in the years that followed were more schools built here than anywhere else? Why do I imagine that if the waiter from the Bohinj and the soldier from Vipava were to pass each other in a faceless crowd, they would recognize each other at a glance as displaced persons from their native high plateau, where the earth is still seen not as a modern globe but as a disk? Nevertheless: I have in the Karst encountered not a separate people (with a historical cycle) but a population for whom everything in all directions is either “below” or “outside,” having a sense of community and place worthy of a metropolis, with differences between villages as between neighborhoods in a big city (in my brother’s dictionary, the Karst was cited as the source of more words than any other part of Slovenia), except that every neighborhood is isolated in a no-man’s-land an hour’s walk from the next, and none is known as a slum or as a middle- or upper-class neighborhood. The roads (few of them named) leading to the villages all run uphill; on the southern edge of the city you’re likely to find a cedar outside the church instead of the chestnut tree on the northern edge, and on the western rim perhaps one more Italian name on the monument to the war dead. A poorhouse and a villa are equally inconceivable; the only castle (erected by the Venetians, who, like the Romans before them, deforested the region to build their ships, so completing the work of making this a region of water-swallowing stone) stands ruined and forsaken on its rocky dome, the curved battlements of the Venetian Republic incongruous ornaments in a monotonous rectilinear landscape.
As for the “people,” so designated and so fetishized by my countrymen, I didn’t miss them in the Karst, nor did I find any banished king to feel sorry for; and here there was no need to look, as I do in my home surroundings, for the marks of the defunct Empire, for empty cow paths and blind windows; here the houses can get along without pedestals and volutes. And looking northward to where my Central European cloudbank has piled up beyond Mount Nanos, I say: They not only can but should!
Where, with my very first look around, did that sense of freedom come from? How can a countryside mean “freedom” or anything of the kind? In the last quarter century I have many times carried knapsacks across the Karst (where I’ve never seen anyone else carrying such a thing), or satchels or suitcases. Why is it that I’ve always felt as if my arms and hands were free? And why is it that my very first day there I felt as if the sea bag that I carried with me wherever I went had vanished from my shoulders?
The only answer that occurs to me offhand is the Karst wind (and perhaps the sun as well). It comes from the southwest, rises up from the Adriatic, and in blowing over the plateau becomes a steady breeze that one barely notices when sitting or standing. In this breeze one gains an intimation of the sea, which can be glimpsed only from a few almost secret spots in the Karst, a powerful, never-ebbing intimation, far more reliable and more effective than if one were actually on the shore or sailing along on the open sea. Undoubtedly, the feel of salt on one’s face is imaginary, but not so the wild herbs by the roadside, the sage and thyme and rosemary (all smaller, hardier, more primitive — every leaf or needle the very essence of the spice — than in our kitchen gardens), the concentrated, almost African fragrance of the gnarled mint, the labiate blossoms of the flowering ash, the spruce resin dripping from the trees, the juniper berries that put one in mind of a strong drink (without threatening drunkenness). This is an upwind, not only because it rises from the sea but because it takes hold of you, ever so gently, under the armpits, so that walking, even in the opposite direction, you feel buoyed by it. Are there not, especially in the south, old coastal peoples whose most festive holiday it is to withdraw at certain times to the deserted high plateaus, where they worship the wind in secret and let it initiate them into the law of the world?
Time and again, the Karst wind has given me such an initiation — but into what law? Or was it a law? Once my mother told me about the moment of my birth: though her last child, after my brother and my sister, I had been overdue and had stopped moving inside her; then finally I was delivered into the daylight; after a first whimpering, I let out a scream, which the midwife called a victory fanfare. My mother may have wanted to please me with this story, but I was as horrified as if she had been talking about my death rather than my birth. Instead of my first moments, she had described my last; my throat tightened as though that fanfare were the signal to drag me to my execution. The fact is, I had often reproached my mother for bringing me into the world. I said this without thinking, it just popped out of me, not so much a curse as a reflex, first when my enemy was persecuting me, sometimes when suffering from chilblains or a mere hangnail, sometimes when I was just looking out the window. My mother took my plaint to heart and burst into tears, but I never really meant it; my moods of disgust and anger were opposed by something constant in my makeup, a sense of anticipation, which, however, found no expression because it had no object. The Karst landscape now provided me with such an object, and though it may have been too late, I could have said to my mother: I have no objection to being born. And what of the Karst wind? I have no qualms about saying: It baptized me then (as it repeatedly baptizes me now) to the tips of my hair. However, the baptismal wind gave names, not to me — wasn’t “nameless” implicit in “joy”?—but to the strip of grass in the middle of the wagon track, to the sounds of the various trees (each called something different), to the bird feather floating on a puddle, to the perforated stone, the dolina of corn, the dolina of clover, the dolina with the three sunflowers, to everything in the vicinity. From that gently fanning wind I learned more than from the ablest of teachers: sharpening all my senses at once, it showed me, amid the apparent confusion of desert wilderness, form after form, each distinct from the last, complementing the last; it taught me the value of the most useless thing in the world and enabled me to give names to all things; without the Karst wind, I would not have been able to speak of the rather windless Carinthian village as I do; there would be no running inscription on my stele. Doesn’t that amount to a law?