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

he would stare blindly into space; and instead of stopping to look at a stool he had just finished, he would busy himself with wood for the next one. Still a young man, my father slaved for years, building, almost unaided, the first house the Kobal family had owned in more than two centuries. And yet I cannot conceive of his climbing to the edge of the forest and looking proudly down on the village of Rinkenberg with the house he had built for himself and his family in its midst; I cannot even conceive of a housewarming with Kobal, the proud owner, lifting a mug of cider.
    More than anything else, it was this incapacity of my father’s for living in his house that spoiled my homecomings in my last years at school. Even if my walk from the railroad station or bus stop had gone well, even if, still full of my journey in the midst of unknown, warmth-giving shadows, I had overcome the obstacle that was the village, I was seized with a malaise on entering our property: my scalp itched, my arms
stiffened, my feet felt bulbous—and there was nothing I could do about it. Not that I had conjured up some image on my way, not that I had been daydreaming, drunk as it were with self-absorption; well, to tell the truth, I had been daydreaming, but only about the things around me, the night, the falling snow, the rustling in the corn, the wind in my eye hollows, and all this, because my journey was still going on in my mind, more clearly than usual, paradigmatically, symbolically. The milk can on the stand became a sign; the successive puddles gleaming in the darkness joined to form a line. But near the house the signs lost their force, objects their singularity. Often I stood for a long while at the door, trying in vain to catch my breath. What had been so clear became confused. No longer able to dream, I could no longer see. The elder bush, which on the path rose from limb to limb like a Jacob’s ladder, disappeared in the garden, becoming a mere part of a hedge; the constellations overhead, each decipherable only a moment before, were now a meaningless glow. With the help of my sister, who had come to meet me, I might possibly cross the threshold safely; she distracted me like a dog or cat; like a dog or cat, she fitted into my dreamlike sequence of signs. But, in the hall at the very latest, I seemed to hear my father’s morose pottering in every room, a mood which instantly spread to me, not so much sobering me as infecting me with such gloom that my only desire was to go to bed then and there.
    It was only when my mother fell sick that my father learned to live in the house. In the course of those months, the house became a home for the rest of us as well. They kept her in the hospital after her operation,
and it was then that he moved, as it were, from his workshop to the house. He no longer worked in wordless fury for himself alone—every gesture an expression of despair that no one understood him and no one could help him anyway. Now he would pause for a time, say what was on his mind, and even ask for help in his distress. Throwing off the clumsiness which, because of his impatience, had always overcome me when asked to help him, I worked beside him with as sure a hand as if I had been alone. And my sister, overlooked and shrugged off until then, but now suddenly treated as an equal by her father, proved to be the soul of reason; all she had needed was to be spoken to and taken seriously. Just as a word can suffice to make a person stricken with paralysis for some unfathomable reason jump up and run, our father’s “Do this, do that” transformed my confused sister from one minute to the next into a young woman who was far from stupid. She understood him without his having to explain, she was transformed from a bothersome bystander into an active human being who didn’t see through me and look on the dark side of everything but rather foresaw what would be needed and did what had to be done. She