As for me, I often changed my handwriting; in the middle of a word my letters would get bigger, I’d push them back, then forward again. I’d begin every paragraph with the utmost care and then — as one can tell now by looking at the writing — start racing in my impatience to finish it. The worst of it was that I didn’t really regard my handwriting as my own; today it has become regular, but it still strikes me as artificial, as an imitation; unlike my brother, I have never had a handwriting of my own, my present style was copied from him; the moment I stop concentrating, it loses its affected regularity and degenerates into a formless scribble that I myself am unable to read, a picture of harassed helplessness in place of the grandiose family gesture. It took the typewriter to teach me to write properly. Before that, the only writing that suited me was in the air, without any instrument, using my forefinger for a pencil. I couldn’t see what I was writing, the movement of my finger sufficed and that was what gave me the feeling that I had a personal handwriting with a rhythm of its own. And besides, when I wrote in the air, I could be slow, pause, break off. But otherwise, convulsively clutching the foreign instrument, the mere sound of which threw me off, bent over the paper instead of sitting erect, I rushed from line to line, not knowing what I was doing, giving off sour, unproductive sweat, incapable of raising my head, with no eyes for my surroundings. It was only when I concentrated on my subject that my writing looked at all natural to me; then script and content seemed to take shape side by side.
And where, when writing, could I concentrate on my subject? In the dark, for one thing. There, stroke by stroke, pencil and fingers grew together and a writer’s hand developed, beautifully heavy and deliberate, no idle scribble but a recording. Then, when I looked in the light at what I had written, I saw my thought framed in a script that seemed to combine my brother’s fine inventive hand and my father’s halting, self-educated one.
My brother’s copybook dealt mostly with fruit growing. With the help of the dictionary, I managed to get the gist of it. Though the work of a man who was not yet twenty, it did not consist of lecture notes but was, rather, the record of a young scientist’s independent research. A second section was a kind of treatise, made up of reflections on the subject, and the end a catalogue of rules and suggestions. The whole was a student’s notes and a textbook in one.
Essentially, the book revolved around my brother’s experience of planting and improving apple trees in his own orchard at home. He spoke of suitable soil (“loose and rich,” “flat, slightly vaulted ground”), orientation (“east to west, but sheltered from the wind”), the best times for the various operations (often determined by the equinoxes or the rising of certain constellations, or by rural holidays).
I couldn’t help reading my brother’s observations on grafting and on transplanting young trees as in part a Bildungsroman. He had carried the young plants from the nursery to his garden “along with their earth” and arranged them in the same order as in the nursery, though much farther apart, because the branches of one tree should never touch those of another. He had woven the root branches into protective baskets before inserting them in their holes. The trees grown from seed on the spot had proved more resistant but also less fruitful than the transplants. Leafy crowns were advantageous, as they provided a roof under which more fruit would form. Branches that inclined toward the ground bore more fruit than those that soared skyward (though the fruit hanging higher up was less likely to rot). As for grafting, he used only branches pointing eastward. They were pencil-shaped and the cuts chamfered to let the rainwater run off. The cutting itself was done not with a blow but by pulling the knife through so the bark would remain intact. He had always chosen scions that had once borne fruit, “because otherwise we shall have worked not for a yield but for shade,” and he had never inserted a scion in a fork between two other scions, for, if he did, it would draw nourishment away from them. Of pruning, he wrote that the earlier he did it, the more “wood” he obtained; the later, the more “fruit”; the wood just “shot up,” while the fruit would “bow down.”
At the beginning of the copybook he explained that originally there had been only one tree in his orchard; it had run wild and bore no fruit. He had driven a spike into the bark at the spot that was freest from lichen; from the festering wound had sprung a shoot with one promising eye after another. The spike, his own invention, had been more like an auger — instead of hole-plugging dust, it produced shavings that could be blown out. (Beside the description was a drawing of a “Kobal auger.”)
But what made a deeper impression on me than such incidental pedagogic metaphors, such allusive meanings, were the concrete details, the mere mention of things which up until then had been only a jumble to me. The bast my brother used to tie his scion to the branch, the wood splint (not round but square) that held it straight, the pebbles that moderated the temperature of the soil at the roots and protected them from the groundwater, took on a radiance that held my attention. Thus a light fell on the orchard, which has been neglected since then and run wild like the tree with which it began, and in the manuscript I caught sight of a blue-bordered enclosure, where, confronted with the rich diversity of “my thing” (as my brother called his orchard), I gazed around and around as though I stood in my brother’s place at the center of it. “We shall not have worked for shade”—that was the battle cry which now, at the table beside the window, I shouted into the roaring of the torrent, as the black grouse in the corner of one eye and the white washbasin in the other swung across my field of vision like two intersecting pendulums.
Undoubtedly, the words owed some of their power to the fact that I did not immediately understand them but had to translate them, not from a foreign language into my own, but directly from an intimation — incomprehensible as much of the Slovene was to me, it seemed somehow familiar — into an image: into the orchard, a branch prop, a piece of wire. My brother referred to certain of his activities, such as removing sterile shoots, as “blind work.” Possibly such translation transformed blind reading into sighted reading, an unseeing activity into intelligent work. It seemed to me that even my father, if he had come into the room, would have left his grumbling on the threshold and, at the sight of my sparkling translator’s eyes, expressed his satisfaction with his son: “Yes, that is his game!”
Even where in the second part of his copybook my brother passed from his particular orchard to a general discussion of different varieties of apple, it was his own trees that appeared to me; where he was merely describing a method, I continued to read a story about a place and its hero; and it was also to them that the concluding remarks addressed to every fruit grower referred, to the effect that in a “thing” so closely akin to wisdom there could be neither professors nor students, and that what mattered most in fruit growing was “the master’s presence.”