Repetition by Peter Handke

darkness for the first glimmer of daylight from the Yugoslavian end. And quickly as the train leaves the tunnel, I always have time to glimpse the clay niche, usually strewn with leaves that have blown in, and in it the curled-up twenty-year-old with his cylindrical sea bag, an air sculpture. To me the place is then not so much the scene of war crime or the cave of speechlessness that it was that night, as my shelter. “Eoae!” Wherever I chance to be in the morning, when I first look out of any window, that has become a rousing cry—aloud or only in thought—whereby the vowels that pour from me are translated back into the things outside me, this tree, the neighbor’s house over there, the road between them, the airfield in the distance, the line of the horizon, thus opening up my senses to the new, literal, and describable day.
    E-O-A-E: I made my way in darkness over a strip of land between the railroad line and the river. Though I didn’t see a living soul, the country seemed alive and inhabited, because what spoke to my senses was all man-made and, as it were, ready for action. Near the station, work had actually begun in a few warehouses and workshops. A switchboard was lit up, while the rest of the room was still in darkness; the needles of gauges trembled and advanced; a regular thumping in every corner. A big steel wheel was set in motion and turned faster and faster, until the spokes disappeared and the whole wheel became a solid circle on the back wall. A lamp on a table in a dark office lit up a telephone, a slide rule, an alarm clock. The door of a loading ramp stood half open; the ramp opened out on a railroad yard with signals that changed colors. One nighttime image after another, it seemed to me, of unremitting
activity. There was no one to be seen, though I assumed the presence of workers. Only once was the “work” series broken—by a cloth lampshade, a yellow dome behind a single curtain, it, too, untended by any human being—but resumed at once with the clatter of a warehouse ventilator, a fast-moving belt sliding back and forth on its slippery bed, and the shadows cast by puffs of chimney smoke on the road—on which I was now walking, because there was no other way of getting ahead.
    I had seen similar things at home on the other side of the border, especially on the periphery of the few cities I knew, and I wondered why there I had always felt excluded, whereas here I had no difficulty in sensing the vibration from these enclosed shops; and the one room with the dome-shaped lampshade, very differently from anything I ever experienced at home, caught my imagination as an embodiment of ease and comfort, as the luminous center of the series, a temple of safety and warmth. I was reminded of a conversation heard the day before among a group of workers who had been sitting on a bench at the Austrian frontier station in Rosenbach, waiting for their bus. It went roughly as follows: “Another day.”—“Thursday already.”—“But then it’ll start all over.”—“It’ll soon be fall.”—“And then it won’t be long till winter.”—“At least it’s not Monday.” —“When I get up, it’s dark; when I come home, it’s dark again. I haven’t seen my house yet this year.”
    Why did this at first sight so inhospitable predawn industrial zone here in Yugoslavia, kept in motion by invisible hands as though for all time, give me an entirely different impression of workers, in fact of human beings in general, from anything I had ever known in my own
country? No, it was not, as we had been taught, the “fundamentally different economic and social system” (though I’d gladly have been faceless, with a number instead of a name, and even given up my supposed freedom); nor was it only that this was a foreign country (though, on my very first day there, many of the