The other time, it was an empty bed that spoke to me of Gregor. I often took the train in the Karst, and sometimes I just hung around one of the extraordinary stations. Most of these were in the wilds, far from the villages, and could be reached only by paths without signposts. Some of them, at night, were plunged in total darkness; the only way to find them was to feel your way slowly, if possible under the guidance of a native. But then, just before the train pulled in (even if I, as happened often enough, was the only prospective passenger), the whole area lit up, revealing a large, diversified building, as big as a factory and as majestic as a manor house: light-colored gravel, fountains under a cedar tree, resplendent façades covered by clusters of fragrant, light-blue wisteria, heraldic blind windows. Here again, the upper floor was inhabited, and while the stationmaster sat in his office downstairs at the brightly lighted switchboard as in a space capsule, his wife upstairs passed window after window on her way from room to room. Time and again, the telephone bell jangled in the desert stillness. And then at last came the imperious signal that a train was coming. Since the tracks were encased in the Karst rock as in a canyon, the rattling and rumbling of approaching trains reverberated as in a subway tunnel. As often as not, the station bell began to ring immediately after the great clatter in the wilderness, as though the train would instantly shoot out of its grotto; but then it would lose itself in one of the countless looping ravines and much later, when I was beginning to think my ears had deceived me, I’d hear it again from an unexpected direction, accompanied by the repeated melodious tooting of a departing overseas steamer, and then at last the thundering organ of the Karst would come bursting out of the pitch darkness, whistling, roaring, trilling, booming in every register, recognizable by the triangle of eyes at the front of the locomotive, the one in the forehead going out as it came closer. Almost more fantastic were the freight trains passing through, with their massive, unlit cars, sometimes of varying length, among them a string of empty undercarriages with jutting rods, an apparently endless procession, with a powerful pounding, hammering, knocking, and drumming, leaving behind it in the void a wake compounded of metallic smell, buzzing and singing, as though the world of men were unconquerable.
On such a night I was waiting in one of the Karst stations for the last passenger train. As I still had a long time to wait, I sat in the grass by the cedar tree, walked up and down on the gravel, sketched the grain of the table in the waiting room with my stick lying on top of it, looked at the green-painted cast-iron stove, the pipe of which was missing. Outside, under the stars, the shadows of bats. A warm night as usual; the smell of the wisteria, more delicate than that of any lilac. I still remembered the plan drawn up under the Empire to build the Slovenian stretch of the Vienna — Trieste line underground, cutting through the caves of the Karst. As I was pacing back and forth, I passed a lighted basement window that I hadn’t noticed before. I bent over and looked down into a big room, comfortably furnished with bookshelves all along one wall, and a bed. The bed was made up and the coverlet turned down, as though ready for someone to get into it; the bedside lamp cast a circle of light on the pillow. So that was where my deserter brother was hiding. I stepped back and saw a woman’s silhouette in one of the tall windows of the upper story. She cared for him; he was happy in her house.
I saw myself at a goal. My purpose had been not to find my brother but to tell a story about him. And another memory took hold of me: in one of his letters from the front, Gregor speaks of the legendary country, which in the language of our Slovene forebears is called the “Ninth Country,” as the goal of our collective longings. “May we all meet again someday,” he wrote, “in the festive Easter vigil carriage on its way to the wedding of the Ninth King in the Ninth Country. Hear, O Lord, my prayer!” I now saw a possible fulfillment of his pious wish: in writing. Just as I would transpose the empty bed from the basement of the station, so also would I move the thermometer on the outer wall of the station, fashioned by a Vienna instrument maker at the turn of the century, the three-legged stool next to it, the vine pattern of the waiting room, and the chirping of the crickets to our family home. Thus, my train approached, meandering through the wasteland, roaring, fading, welling up, headlights shining from the gullies and ranging far ahead, then itself coming into sight, the locomotive halting at last, chinks and joints traced by all the lights inside it, a crackling, fabulous monster, bursting with power, and the cars full of people returning home from the cities, from the sea, from abroad, snoring, working crossword puzzles, knitting.
As bright as were my waking moments, by night as by day, so dark were my dreams. They banished me from my supposed paradise and flung me into a hell where, without other company, I was the damned and the tormentor in one. I was afraid of falling asleep, because my guilt at not being at home with my people figured in every dream. I kept seeing our home but never a human being in it. And the house was a ruin, the roof had caved in, the garden was all weeds and jumping snakes; not a sign of my family, only their plaintive, receding voices, or a few spots in the dust, as of melted ice cubes. From time to time I woke up, an outcast. In time even the sun, the baptismal wind, my walking, the piles of onions drying under my window (they reminded me of fishermen’s nets) lost their power, and I decided from one minute to the next to escape homeward.
Not until I was on my way did I regain the calm needed for the last station on my Yugoslavian journey. I went to Maribor (or Marburg) to look for my brother’s school. But there was no need to look for it; from the train window I saw the hill with the chapel on it, familiar to me from the prewar photo. Even when I came closer, nothing seemed to have changed in the last quarter of a century; nothing had been destroyed, and nothing new had been built. Only the big painted apiary had fallen into disrepair; in its place there were bright-colored little boxes on the grass among the fruit trees. I walked around the spacious, airy grounds, looked at the palm tree outside the main building, the Virginia creeper twining in and out of the clefts in a poplar, the initials that had grown immoderately with the smooth bark of a hornbeam, the many steps leading up to the door of one of the smaller buildings (“there he sat in the evening with the others”), and wished when I was done that this activity, this plantation, this admirable country had been my seminary. Time and again, as I climbed to the top of the vineyard — the clay under my feet became thicker and thicker — I felt the need to bend down, to reach into the earth, to collect, to take something with me. Keep it, keep it, keep it! Bits of coal were encrusted in the slate. I dug them out and today, a quarter of a century later, I am drawing quavering black lines on my white paper with them: You have earned your keep.