An Indian squaw took me in, mistaking me for the son of the dead blacksmith in the next village. I never disabused her. She spoke with such certainty that I was glad to be taken for someone else, and in the end I was playing with conviction the role of a man who had returned to his home country after a long absence. When I spoke of incidents in my Karst childhood, the old woman shook her head and nodded by turns, a reaction that could only signify amazement at a story both incredible and credible. As I soon noticed, I took pleasure in my fabrications, all of which, to be sure, had some basis in fact and had to be both consistent and imaginative. Such invention was a part of my joy at being for once free; invention and freedom were one.
Yet this woman was the first person by whom I felt appreciated as well as recognized. In the eyes of my parents, I was always “too serious” (my mother) or “too dreamy” (my father); my sister, it is true, regarded me as the secret ally of her craziness; my girlfriend’s gaze when we met was often rigid with an embarrassment that melted only when at last — and I didn’t always succeed — I smiled at her from deep inside me; and even my teacher, who understood everything, once said — when in the course of a class excursion I had suddenly run off across the fields and into a thicket, just to get away! to be alone! — well, when I came back, he said with an undertone of irrevocable judgment: “Filip, you’re not right in the head.” The squaw of the Karst, on the other hand, gave me, heartwarmingly, the trust at first sight which, after a few days in her house, became an expectation, a wordless refutation of my constant self-disparagement (“I’ll never amount to anything”); an acquittal as surprising as it was reasonable; encouraging and protective; and so it has remained. And it was she who, before I had even opened my mouth, gave me credit for a sense of humor. At home I had often forbidden my mother to laugh, because her laugh reminded me of the way women guffawed when men were telling dirty jokes, and my school friends thought I was a killjoy, because when someone was telling a joke I’d point out a scratch in the tabletop or a loose button on his jacket just as he was coming to the punch line. Only my girlfriend, when we had been alone for a while, would sometimes manage — addressing me in the third person as in eighteenth-century dialogues — to cry out in astonishment: “Why, he is an amusing fellow!” But whereas she had reacted to some little random remark of mine, my way of looking and listening was enough for my present hostess, and whatever she showed me or told me, she did it with the joyful gusto that an actor absorbs from an alert audience — so perhaps the so-called sense of humor is nothing other than a happy alertness. Though once, toward the end of my stay — the two of us were sitting at the kitchen table and I was just looking silently out into the yard — she said something different. Something contradictory? Or complementary? She said that I had inside me a great, silent, passionate tearfulness; it wasn’t just there, it was raging to get out, and that was my strength. She went on to tell me that once in Lipa, when it was almost dark in the church, a man had stood there alone and erect, and sung the Psalms in a firm yet delicate voice. What had struck her most was that he had held his eyes shut with the fingers of one hand. She stood up to act out the scene for me, and we both burst into tears over that absent man.
Now and then I helped her with her work. Together we hoed the little family dolina, dug the first potatoes out of the red earth, sawed firewood for the winter. I drafted her daily letters to her daughter in Germany and whitewashed the daughter’s room (as though she were ever going to come back). At the bottom of the dolinas, as I found out, there is no breeze to dry the salty sweat. It was the same as at home, all physical exertion cost me an enormous effort; once started, to be sure, I often warmed to the task, but even then the thought of getting it over with was never far from my mind. I can’t say that I showed more skill than in the past, but since the old woman, quite unlike my father, left me alone, she opened my eyes to my mistakes; in the main she showed me what I was like and how I moved when I anticipated having to start working.
She taught me to recognize that I had seldom been at hand when there was work to do, and had almost always had to be called from some distant hiding place. But my seeming laziness was in reality a fear of failure. I was afraid not only of being no help but, worse, of getting in the way and making things harder for the person I was supposed to be helping, afraid that a false move of mine might ruin the work of a day or even of a whole summer. (How often my father would summon me to his workshop with loud oaths, and then after my very first hammerblow send me away without a word.) When I was supposed to fit things together, I forced them; when I was supposed to take them apart, I wrenched them; when I was supposed to put things into a box, I stuffed them; regardless of who might be holding the other end of the saw, I couldn’t adjust to his rhythm; if someone handed me a roofing tile, I dropped it; and the moment I turned my back, my woodpile would start sliding. Even when there was no need for haste, I hurried frantically. I might seem to be moving fast, but my partner, with one slow movement following from the last, was always done before me. Because I tried to do everything at once, there was no coordination. In short, I was a bungler. If I was expert at anything, it was at making mistakes; where another needed one blow of the hammer, I missed my aim so often that whatever I was working on would be either damaged or broken; if I’d been a burglar, I’d have left dozens of fingerprints on the smallest object. I realize now that the moment I was expected to make myself useful I would go into a daze and have eyes for nothing more, least of all for my work. I would blindly shake, tug, kick, rummage, until, often enough, both work and tool were in pieces.
I was deafened by what I took to be other people at work, the gentle swishing of the scythe or the soft sound of potatoes tumbling from a crate into a cart; I ceased to be receptive — though I must have heard it — to the sound I loved best, the rustling of the trees, different from one variety to another. A chore could be ever so easy—“Take the milk cans down to the stand,” “Help me fold the sheets”—and before I knew it, I’d be out of breath and red in the face, my tongue would be hanging out. Suddenly, regardless of whether I was walking, reading, studying, or just sitting there, my body ceased to be all of a piece, my torso lost its connection with my abdomen; bending over to gather mushrooms or to pick up an apple, for instance, became a marionette-like jerking instead of a smooth movement.
Most of all, I came to understand while working with the Karst squaw that my problem began the moment I was asked to help, even if I had plenty of time to prepare myself. Instead of getting ready, I would brace my fingers and arms against my body as though in self-defense, and even arch my toes in my shoes. Perhaps, I thought, my horror of physical labor came from the look of my parents’ bodies. Even as a child, I had been ashamed of my father’s flat chest and sagging knees, and of my mother’s heavy buttocks, and during my last two school years the poise and elegance shown by lawyers, doctors, architects, and their wives, even when asking one another how their children were getting along, made me still more ashamed of my parents.
And now my recognition of what was wrong with my way of working helped me to control my body, so that with each passing day I enjoyed my daily labor more. Watching the old woman, I learned to pause in my movements; the transitions, at first forced and spasmodic, became easy and natural, and my working place, the red earth or the white wall, appeared to me in full color. Once when I started home with a handful of terra rossa, I even found a fragrance in it. Command to myself: Get away from your father.