Repetition by Peter Handke Page B

simultaneously heard in the distance the closing of a car door, the scraping of a snow shovel, and a train whistle screeching at the horizon; or another time, when a bowl was put down on the stove just as I was opening a letter; or when I now look up from my writing and, as often happens at this time of day, a sunbeam strikes the darkened painting on the opposite wall and moves from left to right like a spotlight, making every tree, every sparkle on the water, every fork in the road, every fringe of cloud stand out from the somber surface. And I had the same experience that day, when before daybreak, carrying my sea bag with my brother’s two books, a welcome burden, I passed the pounding, whistling, or just silently bright industrial installations of Jesenice. I even strode more firmly in order to set this congruence in motion—no, I wasn’t going to let any big or little enemy kick me in the legs from behind—and then, just as I had caught sight of the empty workshops, I glimpsed the first human being of the day, the outline of a bus driver in a dark, otherwise empty bus, moving at high speed, as
though it were already expected at every bus stop in the valley, and then the first couple, a man and a woman at the window of a tall building, she standing in a housecoat, he sitting in his undershirt. What has remained most clearly in my memory over the years is the mist on the windowpane, which made me guess that the man up there was not about to set out for work but had just come home from his job, sweating, breathing heavily after a night of labor, which transferred itself to me as though it were my own.
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    A single unset table and an oilcloth-covered kitchen chair were standing in front of a restaurant, diagonally across from the station. I sat down in the chair and let the day break. My seat was slightly below the level of the tracks and of the street and sidewalk, from which a few steps led down to a small, polygonal concrete surface which was bordered on the other side by a semicircle of houses, each wall of which formed a different angle with the next, thus giving the impression of a bay sheltered on all sides and offering a protected vantage point from which one looked not down as usual but upward from below and instead of a panorama saw a proximate but all the more impressive view, as though from the bottom of a hollow. The houses were low and old, but each dated from a different period. Just behind them began the sloping valley with its mass of dark foliage, above which the tips of the spruces were gradually coming into sight.
    In my hollow, it would long be night. Was I dreaming that tiny bird, a motionless silhouette up on the edge of the sidewalk? I had never seen a day bird at night. The street looked like a wall with this wren
sitting on it. The restaurant opened early; the first customers were railroad workers; they drank their coffee or schnapps—I could see them over my shoulder—in one gulp and were gone. The sky, which had looked rainy in the first light, was cloudless and radiant. An aged waitress with the furrowed face of a man brought me a pot of coffee with milk and a plate piled with thick slices of white bread. The skin on the coffee reminded me of my brother, who, so I was told, had always detested those rubbery blobs. When, on his first leave from the front, my mother, supposing the war had cured him of his fussiness, served him the usual coffee, he had pushed the cup away, saying: “Don’t bother me.” I saw the milk welling up and forming a skin that broke into islets on the dark surface, which then grew lighter. The mound of white bread beside it didn’t last long. Fresh as it was, it took in air after being compressed in cutting, and swelled up under my hungry eyes. I ate it, razed and demolished it in one go. That white bread has meant “Yugoslavia” to me ever since.
    When I looked up after eating, droves of people were passing on the sidewalk