Read Online Repetition by Peter Handke - Free Book Online Page A

spasmodic. At such times, even my seated sister could not assert her power; peace of mind gave way to a breathless rigidity. And his uneasiness was contagious: a small man walking in circles in the big room; around him, more and more eyes, heads, limbs began to twitch. Often this twitching would infect us if he merely opened the door, let his look of injured hopelessness rest on the members of his family, and disappeared, or if we sensed that he was standing motionless in the hall, as though waiting at once for his savior and for the landslide that would bury him along with his house and garden. Once he was back in his workshop, we breathed easy, but even then we could hear his cries of rage, and though we had got used to them over the years, they still gave us a start; not even in his place of work, where he might have felt independent and free, did my father feel at home.
    Even on Sunday, apart from the afternoon card game, the peace associated with the day visited our house only on our return from Mass, when he put on his glasses and opened the weekly Slovenian church gazette, the only newspaper he read. He moved his lips soundlessly at every word, as though not only reading but studying the lines, and in the course of time his slowness engendered a calm that surrounded him and filled the house. During this reading period, my father at last found his place—in sunny weather on the bench in the yard; otherwise, on the backless stool by the east
window, where with a childlike, scholarly look he studied letter after letter. As often as I evoke that image, I feel that I’m still sitting there with him.
    To tell the truth, we didn’t even eat together at that time. As though my father were still working outside, his food was brought to him in a tightly closed mess kit, either at the house of the mountain peasants or at his place beside one of the mountain torrents; my mother ate at the stove while cooking; my sister, as befitted a confused person, spooned her food out of a bowl on the doorstep; and I ate wherever I happened to be. We all longed for the arrival of the card players, and not only because my father regularly won: his calm as he sat there, carrying off one daring coup after another, gave rise to a merriment which encompassed the losers as well as the winner. Whenever the so uncommon, neither malicious nor commiserating but simply triumphal laughter of the player whose daring had brought him success erupted, all were glad to join in. And the others were my father’s friends, underlings like himself, village notables, natives, who all became equal at the card table, talkers, storytellers, with no one over them. But friendship lasted only as long as the game; when the game was over, they broke up without delay, and all went home, as isolated as ever, mere neighbors, acquaintances, villagers known to one another chiefly by their weaknesses and oddities—the skirtchaser, the skinflint, the sleepwalker. And my father, though he stayed at the table holding a deck of cards in one hand and counting his winnings with the other, had again lost his place. When the lamp over the card table was turned off, the light in the house seemed to flicker and threaten to go out at any moment, for in
those days before the whole country was electrified, our region was supplied with a feeble, uneven current by a small power plant on the Drava that wasn’t even as big as a water mill.
    Though my father—mason, carpenter, and cabinetmaker in one—had built the house with his own hands, he was not its master. Because this self-driven laborer was incapable of stepping back from his work and contemplating it for so much as a moment, he could not regard himself as its creator. Though he took a certain pride in other construction he’d had a hand in—the roof of the church tower, for instance—he never so much as glanced at anything he had made in his own home; while putting up a wall with the utmost care,