One day my hostess took me through the wilderness outside the village to a field that was not in a dolina, a rarity in the Karst. Enclosed by a low wall, it was overgrown with weeds, but the light-red earth shone through and furrows were still discernible. Access was barred by a wooden stile, beside which there were stone steps leading over the wall. At the bottom of the wall there was a square opening, through which rainwater could drain from the path into the field. Here the woman stretched out her arm and said: “To je vaša njiva” (“This is your field”).
I climbed over the wall and bent down to the earth, which was loose, as if it had been plowed not too long before. The field was narrow and slightly vaulted in the middle, ending in a row of fruit trees, each of a different sort. Had the old woman simply made a mistake, or was she pulling my leg? Or, as I had asked myself when I first laid eyes on her, was she mad? When I turned around to her, she was laughing all over her broad face, with the little delighted sounds of a very young girl — a laugh deserving of the name.
Not only the squaw, everyone in the hundred villages treated me like an old friend or the son of an old friend; I had to be something of the kind, because strangers never came to the Karst. And just as Odysseus was often full of wine, so I, his son, in the course of my search for him, once lay on the ground dead-drunk. At home, we never drank anything stronger than cider, and that only when thirsty; and I had always steered clear of my roistering classmates, especially after one of them, on our class trip to Vienna, after groaning and retching for hours in his upper bunk, had spewed a great flood of sour vomit down on me. The mere smell of liquor, the peculiar glug-glug, and worst of all its devastating effect on the drinker’s behavior, repelled me. Up until then, I had barely tasted wine; but here in the Karst, in the open air, in the sun, in the spicy wind, I began to — what was the word again? — to savor it. I drank swallow after swallow, putting down my glass after each one. Often after the very first swallow I felt at one with the world and at the same time, as though the two pans of the scales were at last evenly balanced, experienced a sense of justice. Afterward, I saw more clearly, dreamed astutely, perceived connections, took pleasure in precisely staggered intervals, which composed a well-ordered globe, rotating clockwise; I had no need to rotate with it. Incredible that anyone should slander wine as “liquor.”
That’s the way it was when I drank by myself. But in company — remember that companions flocked to Telemachus — I usually lost all sense of proportion. I didn’t guzzle, I didn’t drain my glass at one gulp as the others often did, but I did down my wine without tasting it, and I especially liked to stay on until everyone else had gone home. One night — a cock was already crowing, my companions had all drifted away — I got up from the table and noticed that for the first time in my life I was drunk. I took a few steps and collapsed. I lay face down in the grass, unable to stir a finger. I had never felt so close to the earth; I smelled it, felt it on my cheek, I heard the roar of the underground river, the Timavo, and laughed to myself as though I had accomplished something. Later, when they lifted me up by my arms and legs and carried me home, I was able to give my accomplishment a name: at last I, who had all my life set so much store by independence, was making a display of my helplessness; at last I, who had always made a secret of my indignation that no one came to my assistance, had allowed myself, unresisting, to be helped — a deliverance, in a way.
The next day I was told that my drunkenness hadn’t even been noticed; I had only been “very stiff and proud”; my eyes had “sparkled”; I had “told them all off”; and in the end I had made a speech about grammar, especially the “suffering form” (the passive voice), which did not exist in the Slovene language, for which reason the Slovenes should stop feeling sorry for themselves and calling themselves “the people of suffering.”
In the course of those weeks, I saw someone die for the first time in my life. On my way through a village, I was almost knocked down by a woman who came running out of a house. She threw herself down in the street, writhing, screaming, and hugging her knees as though in labor. They laid her on a bench, where she stretched out, letting her head dangle. I have never heard such deep, agonizing sounds as her last breaths. For a time, her lower lip moved as though to suck in air; it slowed and stopped; it seemed to me in the deafening silence that her lip had written something, and that her writing had now run its course. I felt as if I had known her, and her family took it for granted that I should watch through the night with them, though with all their mumbling of rosaries I could hardly keep awake. The corpse’s face was smooth; but all her suffering was still written in her distorted, shriveled eyelids. Strange what veneration I felt for this unknown dead woman; strange my vow to be worthy of her.
It was such a promise of fidelity that I then, as a twenty-year-old in the Karst, celebrated as my “wedding.” This happened on a Sunday after Mass, in the walled-in yard of an inn, under a broad-leafed mulberry tree. I was sitting there over a glass of wine when a small mixed group in holiday dress came through the gate — in a festive mood, as though still enfolded by the blessing of the “Go in peace.” The children ran or hopped about in a ring, the grownups kept turning to one another, a one-legged man and a dwarf woman completed the round. After greeting me, the stranger, with a natural grace, the men by lifting their hats, the women with a smile, they sat down at a long table requiring several tablecloths, which billowed in the Karst wind and reddened with the hours, not only from spilled wine but also from the soft fallen mulberries. In this company — they talked a good deal, though none raised his voice or held forth — I noticed a young woman who remained silent the whole time, a mere listener, her eyes almost unblinking in their attentiveness. At last, she turned her head slightly and looked at me. Her face revealed a gravity as the listener became a speaker, and it was I she spoke to. No smile, no crinkling of the lips, only two eyes, looking at me and saying: “It’s you.” I was so startled that I almost turned aside, but I stood up to her gaze, recovered my composure, and fought through to a seriousness that came as a kind of shock, as though I had for two decades been leading an unworthy life, without soul or consciousness, and had just now, thanks to my meeting with these eyes, come to myself and the world. Yes, that was a world-shattering event; this was the face of my wife! And to this woman I was now wedded, in a meticulous, gradual, solemn, exalting—Sursum corda! — ceremony, presided over by the Karst sun and the sea wind and perceptible only to the two of us. Without a word or gesture, keeping a diffident distance, joined in the look of our eyes, without a witness, with no other document than this story. Eye to eye, in intermittent jolts, we came closer, until you were I and I you, adorable woman under the mulberry tree. From no other woman has a secret voice come to me saying: I am yours.
Twice during that time, I glimpsed my brother. My night in the railroad tunnel had taught me that the essence of a place is often best perceived through another, neighboring place — that of the torture tunnel through the tunnel I pioneered. Thus, I deliberately avoided the Karst villages mentioned in my brother’s letters, in the belief that I would be able to get a clearer idea of them by studying the neighboring villages. Places whose names I heard day after day in my childhood, places which I approached but never got to, had much more of an aura than those that I actually knew. On the eastern edge of the Jaunfeld, for instance, there was the hamlet of Sankta Luzia, consisting of little more than a church; my parents often mentioned it because that was where they were married. I was never there, but I circled it on all sides, and because my perception of it amounted to no more than the edge of a field seen from the woods, church bells in the evening, or the crowing of a cock, I have a feeling to this day that there, hardly an hour’s walk from home, a new world began. And so it was that in a sunny hour, once again outside an inn, in just such a neighboring village, I saw my brother stepping through the door to the yard. He appeared to me in a crowd, because the parish was celebrating its saint’s day and people had come from the whole Karst plateau. Did he really come in? No, he just stood in the doorway, and despite the constant coming and going, an empty space formed around him which, as it seemed to me then, brought back his time, the years preceding the World War. My brother was younger than I, his twenty-year-old descendant, and this was the last holiday of his youth. He was wearing the jacket with the wide lapels, which since then had been handed down to me, and his deep-sunken eyes — both had their sight — projected an infinite dream. Though I remained seated with my companions, I also had the impression that I got up to make sure it was he. His eyes were the blackest black, the black of the elderberries that had ripened all about during those summer days, and shone with their living light. Neither of us moved; we stood facing each other for an eternity, at a distance, beyond reach, unapproachable, united in grief and serenity, merriment and forlornness. I felt the sun and wind on the bones of my forehead, saw the festive bustle on both sides of the dark passage with my brother’s image in it, and knew we were in midyear. Holy forebear, youthful martyr, dear child.