But what of the contrary wind, the ill-famed burja or bora from the north, an incessant frosty roaring over the high plateau; on such days, all fragrance was gone and one was completely stupefied. If you were out of doors on such days, you could go down into the dolinas, where you were sheltered from the wind and where, without fear of one another, the beasts of the Karst could assemble, a stocky little roe deer along with a hare and a herd of wild pigs; at the top of the bowl all the trees were bent at the same angle, while at the bottom the stubbly grass hardly trembled, the bean or potato plants hardly swayed. But even if you were out in the storm without the protection of a dolina, you had only to sit down behind one of the numerous stone walls, and from one minute to the next you had escaped from the icy blast into a quiet warm bath. In such shelters I had time either to think of the ancient battle in which the bora carried the arrows and spears of one army over the heads of the other, and stopped those of the other army in midflight; or else, as in the gentle west wind, I acquired a feeling for the things of nature and eyes for the works of man, stone walls as well as the little latticework gates leading through them, a pattern of parallel sticks cut from the bushes nearby, so thin, so bent, with such ample interstices that the prototype of a door, a gate, a portal could be discerned in them. Just as nature needs interstices in which to form crystals, so does the searching eye need them for the perception of prototypes. Even the path, which proceeded to lose itself in steppe grass and desert rock (the whole Karst was traversed by promising trails of this sort), was not just any path, it was the path, man-made, for, at least up to the level of the tilled fields, the oasis, and the dolina, it revealed a distinct triad of boundary walls, beaten roadways, and vaulted middle strip.
These visions, isolated in the wasteland — for there was no desert inn on the plateau — coalesced in the villages. The bora drove people together, showing that self-defense and beauty can be one. The north façades, stone dovetailed with stone, broken only by an occasional tiny gap, though many were as long as the nave of a church, curving gently away from the storm wind and thus elegantly evading it, and the farmyard walls, higher than many of the fig trees behind them, rounded at the top, with marble portals as wide as a princely coach (complete with the appropriate white edgestones and the monogram IHS at the top), enclose a square courtyard which, half blinded and deafened by the storm, one entered as one might enter a showroom, a bazaar full of precious objects, where the sawhorse harmonized with the vines, the faggots with the corncob wall and the piles of pumpkins, the wicker cart with the wooden balustrade, the tent of bean poles with the logs (put your hazel rod and the cloth with the mushrooms on the bench along with the rest, they will fit into the picture). The houses of the Karst, fortified castles seen from the outside, one interlocking with the next, surmounted by chimneys that are houses in themselves, were often all the more gracefully furnished inside; they need no barrel vaulting; it suffices that their outer walls are slightly curved to resist the wind.
In none of the houses there did I see what is called a work of art. How, then, did it happen that almost every time I looked into a farmhouse — even when I merely passed by — my heart leapt up as at the sight of the most magnificent paintings, and that a stool, barely big enough for a small child’s behind, positively invited me to sit down? One cannot fail to see how much of what the Karst people make reproduces the most essential feature of the landscape, the dolina or bowl; that all the slender baskets, basket-shaped carts, rounded stools, hay rakes with an arc at the end, seemed to celebrate the one fruitful thing in the country, Mother Dolina, and the belly of the wooden medieval Madonna in one of the churches shows the same rounding.
Without the furniture and implements of the Karst I would never have learned to appreciate the heritage of my forebears, neither my brother’s orchard nor my father’s roofs and cupboards. Up until then, I had always wanted to see our house adorned not only with a blind window but also with a statue in the blind window and perhaps beside the statue a fragment of a centuries-old fresco, and inside the house an ornamental carpet or a remnant of a Roman mosaic; my brother’s accordion, in a corner with its mother-of-pearl keys, was in itself a magnificent adornment, and it was an event when every few years a paint roller impressed a fresh pattern on the walls. The inhabitants of our plain were reputed to be sober-minded, concerned only with utility and the greatest possible simplicity. But in this utilitarian simplicity I now recognized the effect I had felt so much in need of and which I had hoped to obtain from additions and embellishments: my father’s table and chairs, crossed window bars and doorframe not only made the room inhabitable but radiated warmth and good taste; they not only bore witness to a careful hand but communicated something which the man, often brusque, irascible, unfeeling, could impart only in this way, and which alone was the whole man; embarrassed and intimidated by his person, I breathed easy in the presence of the things he made, and acquired an eye for proportion. The letters IHS over portals in the Karst became connected in my mind with the date my father had sawed into the gable of the wooden barn to provide air holes for the hay. I had always seen this pattern, which seemed burned into the weather-beaten, light-gray wooden triangle, as something unique, such as only a work of art can be, and after that I needed no other ornament in the house. Short as it was, the green track in my brother’s orchard culminated in the Karst middle strip, which encompassed all the roads of the north and led straight as an arrow to the ocean horizon, just as the stone dam at the entrance to the orchard, which my brother had once built to preserve the topsoil but which had since then been reduced to a ruin, was now extended in the unbroken, even, curved boundary walls of the Karst — as though it had simply sunk into the earth up there in its alpine land and reemerged here not far from the sea, intact as on the first day, bedecked by the southern sun as though for a roof raising, nobler than before, thus making it manifest that our continent is traversed by the European counterpart of the Great Wall of China.
But could the objects in a countryside and the works of its inhabitants be relied on for any length of time? What of those windless days which occurred in the Karst at every time of year, worldless days without sun or cloud formation, without contour or sound or shimmering color on this disk of earth, when all life seemed to have died out overnight and I myself was the last creature that still breathed; and this forlornness was not as in other places confined to the moment of waking, was not dispelled by the crowing of cocks or the bells of high noon, all equally tinny, converging from the hundred sectors of the city (the television sets blaring in abandoned houses, the empty roaring buses, black rattletraps with drivers looking as if they’d been burned to a crisp long ago and were held together only by their uniforms). No dead satellite could be more lifeless on such days than a Karst that seemed covered by bone ash, the so-called karren fields where innumerable knife-sharp bones protruded and wouldn’t allow you to tread on them. But that, too, taught me something which only a metropolis can teach a visitor; namely, a way of walking.