Repetition by Peter Handke Page A

usual sights had struck me as stimulating novelties): it was something more than a mere thought or feeling—it was the certainty that at last, after almost twenty years in a non-place, in a frosty, unfriendly, cannibalistic village, I was standing on the threshold of a country which, unlike my so-called native land, did not lay claim to me in the name of compulsory education or compulsory military service, but to which, on the contrary, I could lay claim as the land of my forefathers, which thus, however strange, was at least my own country! At last I was stateless; at last, instead of being always present, I could be lightheartedly absent; at last, though there wasn’t a soul in sight, I felt that I was among my people. Hadn’t a child pointed at me on the platform in Rosenbach and shouted at the top of his lungs: “Look, somebody from down there!” (“Down there” meant Yugoslavia, while Germany or Vienna was “out there.”) The free world, it was generally agreed, was the world from which I had come—for me at the moment, it was the world that I had so literally before me.
    That this was a delusion I knew even then. But I didn’t want that kind of knowledge, or rather: I wanted to get rid of it; I recognized this wanting-to-get-rid-of it as my life-feeling; and the inspiration I gained from that delusion is still with me.
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    When I think back on that hour, it was not the machines, whether operating or standing in readiness, which deluded
me into thinking that there, unseen, my people were indefatigably at work, but, most of all, the lights, that of the shaded lamp in the one dwelling, that of the office lamp on the desk, and especially the white, dusty, floury, fluorescent light, reproduced from workshop to workshop as from room to room in a flour mill. Into harness! Shoulder a wheel! Join in! Most surprising was this urge to be active in someone who otherwise, according to my father, was “just about useless for any kind of work.” And it wasn’t because there was no one around who might have watched me (for as a rule, again according to my father, being watched “made me all thumbs”); no, here, I was sure, it wasn’t at all like at home; anyone who wanted to could watch me and I wouldn’t feel observed. Every one of my movements would be “right.”
    But was it this empty vision of light that attracted me to those workshops, to those invisibly at work there? Was I not in reality drawn to a very different kind of working together which expressed itself most clearly in my silhouette entering the picture from outside, from the edge, from the road, and being fleetingly sketched into it as I passed? No, my father’s leather strap, his travel amulet, was not tied around my wrist to give me a better grip but, if for any purpose, for warmth; my sense of oneness with the workers came less from any desire to work with them than from pleasurable, unburdened passing-by.
    Thus I learned the differences between conformity, consonance, and congruence. Conformity: I have always found it intolerable to keep in step with others, even with one person; if I found myself in step with someone, I had to stop instantly or quicken my pace, or move to one side; even when my girlfriend and I chanced to fall
into step, I saw us as two soulless marchers-against-the-world. And consonance, too, was impossible for me: if anyone else, and not only in singing, gave me the keynote, I was incapable of taking it up and sustaining it; or conversely, if someone else took up my intonation, I was immediately thrown off; only the dissonance of the quarrel to which this prompted me saved me from falling silent (such quarrels were often brought on by my girlfriend speaking of us as “we,” a word I could never bring myself to utter).
    Congruence was a different matter, a powerful experience; I felt this, for instance, one morning when I turned the window handle and