Read Online Repetition by Peter Handke - Free Book Online

being stormed, lost, retaken, and so on, over the years. According to him, the World War
had taken place on just such a bare, chalk-white mountain ridge, with a front line that moved a stone’s throw forward or backward from battle to battle, and if other veterans in the village were to be believed, that was how they had all seen it. My father was always shivering, but he seemed to shiver still more when he spoke of the deep clefts in the mountain, which even in the summer were full of snow. He had known many kinds of fear, but his overriding fear had been and still was that he might have killed a man. He showed his numerous wounds, in the shin, the thigh, the shoulder, with indifference; it was only when the conversation turned to the Italian at whom he had leveled his gun when ordered to do so that he lost his composure. “I aimed over his head,” my father said. “But after my shot went off he jumped up in the air like this, with his arms outstretched. And then I didn’t see him anymore.” Wide-eyed, he came back time and again to this one moment; for even after thirty, forty, fifty years, the man kept jumping up in the air, and it would never be known for sure whether he had let himself drop back into the trench or had toppled into it. “Stinking mess,” my father cried and repeated the sentiment in Slovene— “Svinjerija” —as though that language were better able to express his hatred of history, the world, and all earthly existence. Be that as it may, he had seldom seen a town or village during the war; at the most he had been “near” or “on the road to” one. Only Gorica meant something more to my father than a battlefield. “Now that’s a city,” he said. “Compared with it, our Klagenfurt is nothing.” But if questions were asked, his only answer would be: “There are palm trees in the parks and there’s a king buried in the monastery crypt.”
    What in my father’s stories was no more than the heartbreaking and infuriating names of battlefields stimulated my mother’s inventiveness. What with him was a curse—“damned Ternovan Forest!”—she transformed into a place of promise. From mere place names she created, for my benefit (my sister wouldn’t do), a country that had nothing in common with the reality of Slovenia; it was built up exclusively from the names of the battles or scenes of misery mentioned casually or with horror by my father. This country, which consisted entirely of towns with magical names such as Lipica, Temnica, Vipava, Doberdob, Tomaj, Tabor, Kopriva, became in her mouth a land of peace where we, the Kobal family, would at last recapture our true selves. Yet this transfiguration may have resulted not so much from the sound of words or the family legend as from the few letters received from my brother when he was in Yugoslavia during the years between the wars. Often he would prefix with a word of praise the very place names through which his father had cursed the world as a whole: “The holy [Mount] Nanos,” “the holy [River] Timavo.” From the start my mother’s fantasies, remote as they may have been from experience, made a stronger impression on me, the second, late-born son, than did my father’s war stories. When I think back on the two of them, I see one weeping and one laughing storyteller, one standing aside, the other center stage, asserting our rights.
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    The household’s present, however, its daily life, was dominated by my father’s prisoner mentality. His being a stranger in the village made him a domestic tyrant. Because he was nowhere at home, he bullied the rest
of us; he drove us from our places or at least poisoned them for us. When my father entered the living room, the atmosphere became unpleasant. He had only to stand at the window for the rest of us to be seized with a nervousness that made our movements