Repetition Read Free

like that, but that she had done so ever since I was born. She lifted me, held me up to the light, laughed inwardly, and condemned me. And later on, when I was a baby thrashing about in the grass, screaming with the love of life, she would hold me up to the sun to make sure, laugh at me, and again condemn me. I tried to think it had been the same with my brother and sister before me, but I couldn’t. I was the only one who elicited the exclamation which commonly followed that merciless look: “Aren’t we a pair!” which she sometimes addressed to a farmyard animal about to be slaughtered. True, at an early age I felt the need to be seen, perceived, described, known, but not like that. For instance, I had felt known on one occasion when, not my mother, but my girlfriend, had said: “Aren’t we a pair!” And when for the first time, after all the years at the seminary, where no one called us by anything but our family names, I heard the girl next to me at the state school address me quite casually by my first name, I took it as a characterization that exonerated me, almost as a caress. I had a feeling of relief and I can still see the sparkle of the girl’s hair. And so, once I learned to decipher my mother’s looks, I knew: This is no place for me.
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    Yet twice in those twenty years she literally saved me. When I was transferred to the seminary from the
Gymnasium in Bleiburg, it wasn’t because my parents wanted to make something better of me. (I believe my father as well as my mother were convinced that I would either amount to nothing at all or become “something out of the ordinary,” by which they understood something ghoulish.) The reason for the change of schools was that at the age of twelve I acquired my first, and from the start deadly, enemy.
    There had always been enmities among the village children. We were all neighbors, and proximity often made a neighbor’s idiosyncrasies unbearable. It was the same among grownups, even old people. For a while two neighbors would pass each other without a greeting; one would pretend to be busy in his house or yard, and the other, within plain sight, would also be busy in his own way. All at once, even without fences, there would be an inviolable boundary between properties. Even in his own home a child who felt he had been unjustly treated by a member of the family would stand silent in a remote corner of the living room with his face to the wall, as though in observance of an old custom. In my imagination, all the living rooms of the village are joined into a single room of many corners, all of which are occupied by quarrelsome, sulking village children, until at length one of them, or all at once (as always happened in reality), breaks the spell with a word or a laugh. It’s true that no one in the village referred to anyone as a friend—they spoke instead of “good neighbors”; but it is equally true that at least among the children there were no quarrels leading to lasting hostility.
    Even before I came up against my first enemy, I had suffered persecution, an experience that had its
effect on my later life. But there was nothing personal about this persecution; it was simply a child from Rinkenberg being persecuted by children from another village. The children from that other village had a longer, harder way to school than we did; they had to cross a deep ditch and, if only for that reason, were thought to be stronger than we were. On the way home, which as far as the fork was the same for both groups, we Rinkenbergers were regularly chased by the Humt-schachers. (Though they were no older than ourselves, I couldn’t see them as children. Now for the first time, as I look at pictures on the tombstones of those killed in early accidents, I am struck by how youthful, not to say childlike, they all were even as young men.) For an eternity we ran along a road (there were never any cars at that time of