Nevertheless, I never really returned home after that. During my years at the seminary, every trip home had been bathed in the atmosphere of a great festive journey, and not only because, apart from the summer vacation, we were allowed to go home only on the major feast days. Before Christmas, we released prisoners stormed down the hill in the pitch darkness, left the winding road at the first opportunity, climbed over the fence with our bags, cut across the steep, deserted, frozen pasture, plodded on over the water meadows and the brooks steaming with frost to the railroad station. In the train I stood out on the platform, jostled my schoolmates, whose shouts of joy rang in my ears. It was still night, an invigorating darkness encompassed heaven and earth, the stars overhead and, down below, the sparks rising from the engine, and I am still able to think of the wind blowing through this black force field as something sacred. My whole body up to my nose was so filled with the air of that journey that I felt as if I had no need to breathe for myself. I heard the jubilation, which those around me shouted, but which I myself only had silent within me, expressed not by my own voice but by the things of the outside world: the pounding of the wheels, the rattling of the rails, the clicking of the switches; the signals that opened the way, the gates that guarded it; the crackling of the whole speeding, roaring train.
Each of us left the group with the certainty that he still had the best part of his journey ahead of him, the adventurous footpath ending in a home unknown to his fellow convicts. And once, indeed, when on such a day I left the station and cut across the fields to the village, I was accompanied by something in which I saw the Child Saviour announced by the religious calendar. True, nothing more happened than that the spaces between the shriveled cornstalks by the wayside flared up as I passed. These spaces appeared to move, step by step, identical from row to row, empty, white and windy, and I had the impression that it was always the same small space that not only accompanied me but flew fitfully ahead, a puff of wind that flushed like a bird in the corner of my eye, waited for me, and then flew on ahead. A handful of corn chaff rose from a furrow in a fallow field; pale yellow leaves hovered motionless for a time, then in the form of a column moved slowly over the fields, while in the background a train, almost hidden by the fog, seemed now to stop, now to shoot ahead, as fitfully as the airy something beside me. I ran homeward, burning to tell them something which, as I already knew in the doorway, could not be told just then, and not in words. Once the door opened, nothing existed but the house, warm, smelling of scrubbed wood, inhabited by people who, unlike those at the seminary, belonged to me. My face, covered with soot from the early-morning train trip, told them all they needed to know.
The seminary had been so foreign a place that from there, regardless of whether to the south, west, north, or east, the only direction was homeward. At night, as I lay in the dormitory listening to the trains rolling across the plain below, I could conceive only of passengers on their way home. An airplane on its transcontinental route passed directly over the village. And that, too, was where the clouds were heading. The path leading to the steep descending cattle track showed the way; on the deserted, grass-overgrown paths, I was so near the goal that I seemed to hear someone say: “Warm,” as in a game of hide-the-thimble. The bread truck that came once a week drove on to a place about which I knew nothing but its name, but where the light was the same as at home. Objects in the distance — a mountain, the moon, a navigational light — seemed to be bridges through the air to the place where, as it says in my birth certificate, my parents “resided.” My daily thoughts of flight were never directed toward the city, let alone toward any foreign country, but always toward my native place: a barn, a certain hut, the chapel in the forest, the reed shelter by the lake. Nearly all the boys at the seminary came from villages, and if one of them actually ran away, he was soon found somewhere near his village or making a beeline in that direction.
But now that I was free and traveled back and forth day after day between my remote village and the city school, I discovered that I no longer had a fixed place. In my eyes the village of Rinkenberg — which had hardly changed during my years at the seminary, not the church, not the low Slovenian farmhouses, not the unfenced orchards — had ceased to be a coherent unit and was only a sprinkling of houses in the countryside. The village square, the roads leading up to the barns, the bowling alley, the beehives, the meadows, the bomb craters, the wayside shrine, the clearing in the woods were still there, but they did not form the fabric in which I had previously moved as a native among natives, a Rinkenberger. It was as though a protective roof had flown away and the harsh, cold light no longer revealed meeting places, festive scenes, nooks and crannies, points of view, benches to rest on — in short, the landmarks that coalesce to form a whole village. At first I put the blame on the village, where in many instances hand tools had been replaced by machines, but I soon realized that I was the disrupter, I was out of tune. Wherever I went, I stumbled, collided, missed my aim. If someone was headed my way, I evaded his eyes, though we may have known each other since childhood. Because I had been away for so long, because I had not stayed home, because I had left my proper place, I felt guilty; I had forfeited the right to be here. Once a boy of my own age, with whom I had attended grade school in my village days, started telling me bits of local news, but broke off in the middle, saying: “You look like you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
I was unable to get back in with my age group. For one thing, none of the others was still going to school; some had taken over their fathers’ farms, others were plying a trade, but all were working. Though legally minors, they struck me as adults. Whenever I saw them, they were either at work or on their way to work. In their farm clothes or aprons, with their faces set straight ahead, their always alert eyes, their ready fingers, they had acquired a military quality, and similarly the babbling voices of the schoolroom had given way to monosyllabic utterances, to curt nods or vacant stares as they passed on their mopeds (with, at the most, a laconic wave of the hand). Their pleasures as well were those of adults; and I as a matter of course was left out of them. With a shudder of wonderment, almost of awe, as though worshipping a mystery, I contemplated the so serious, attentive, sure-footed couples on the dance floor. This young woman with the dignified movements was the little girl who had once hopped over the chalk lines of hopscotch squares. And not so long ago the young lady who now picks up her skirt as she steps daintily onto the dance floor was showing us her hairless pubis in the cow pasture. How quickly they had all outgrown such childish pursuits! And now they were literally looking down on me. Every one of the boys had already suffered a serious accident; one had lost a finger, another an arm or an ear; one at least had been killed. Some were fathers; several of the girls were mothers. One of the boys had been in jail. And what about me? It came to me that during my years at the seminary my youth had passed but I had never for one moment known the experience of youth. I saw youth as a river, a free confluence and flow from which I was excluded when I entered the seminary. My years at the seminary were lost time that could never be retrieved. In me something was missing, and would always be missing. Like many young men in the village, I had lost a part of my body; it had not been cut off like a hand or a foot; no, it had never had a chance to grow; and it was no mere extremity, so to speak, but an irreplaceable organ. My trouble was that I couldn’t go along with the others; I couldn’t join in their activities or talk with them. I was a stranded cripple, and the current, which alone could have sustained me, had passed me by forever. I knew that without youth I could do nothing. I had missed it once and for all, and that made me incapable of movement; especially in the only company that would have been right for me, that of my contemporaries, it gave me a feeling of painful inner paralysis, and I swore that I would never forgive the people I held responsible for this paralysis — and those people existed.