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 day), pursued by the menacing roar of the faceless, heavy-legged, clumsy-footed horde, brandishing gorilla-length arms like cudgels, wearing their schoolbags on their backs like combat gear. There were days when, hungry as I was, I would dawdle in the safety of Bleiburg until the jungle menace had passed; at such times the town was dear to me, though as a rule I longed to go home. But then came a sudden change. Once again, starting at the edge of the town, I was pursued by the howling, so terrifying precisely because it was incomprehensible. But this time I let my fellow villagers run and sat down in the grass triangle enclosed by the road and the forked path running into it. In this moment, with the enemy bearing down on me, I was confident that nothing would happen. I stretched out my legs in the grass, looked southward at Mount Petzen, which forms the Yugoslavian border, and knew that I was safe. I felt shielded by the fact that I thought and saw the same thing at the same time. True enough, nothing happened to me. As they came closer, my persecutors slowed down, and one or two of them followed my eyes. “It’s beautiful up there,” I heard. “I went up there with my father one time.” I looked at them and saw that the horde had broken down into a few individuals. They smiled at me as they sauntered by, as though relieved that I had seen through their game. No words were exchanged, yet it was clear that from then on there would be no more persecution. Looking after them, I noticed their sagging knees and dragging steps. How far they still had to go in comparison with me! And I began to feel a bond with them — at a distance — as I had never done with the children next door in my own village. And with the passage of time, the chaotic, dust-raising plunging and lunging, the terrifying guttural shouts of the Humtschach horde became a dancing, skipping procession, which to this day is gamboling down that childhood road like a festive tribe, for no other purpose than to live on in this image. (It’s true that when they were gone I was trembling all over and was unable to leave my grass triangle for quite some time. I leaned against a wooden milkstand and silently counted out numbers.)
But with my first enemy, nothing helped. He was the son of our next-door neighbor; his mother beat him all day long, and his father all evening. (I was never beaten at home; when my father was angry with me, he slapped his own chest or face before my eyes; most of all, he pounded his forehead with his fist, so violently that he staggered backward or fell to his knees. On the other hand, my brother, though blind in one eye, was not only beaten but locked up in the potato cellar dug into the slope behind the house, where he could certainly see more when he closed his one eye than when he kept it open.) My “little enemy”—as I call him now, in contrast to the “big enemy” I had later — never assaulted me. Yet he was instantly my enemy, at first glance, which for a long time nothing followed, not even another glance. None of the usual sticking out of tongues, spitting, tripping up. My childhood enemy did not declare himself; he was simply there with his enmity. And then his enmity erupted in aggression.
One day in church, when the Gospel was being read and we were all standing, I felt a light blow in the hollow of my knee, little more than a poke, but enough to make my knee buckle. I turned around and saw him gazing into space. From that moment on, he left me no peace. He didn’t hit me, he didn’t throw stones, he didn’t insult me — he only blocked my way at every turn. Whenever I stepped out of the house, there he was beside me. He even came into my house — in the villages it was usual for children to go in and out of their neighbors’ houses — and attacked me, so inconspicuously that no one else noticed. He never used his hands; all he ever did was push me lightly with his shoulder (you couldn’t even have called it shoving as in soccer); it looked as if he was trying in a friendly way to call my attention to something, but in reality he was forcing me into a corner.
Yet as a rule he didn’t even touch me, he mimicked me. I’d be walking along. He’d jump out of a bush and walk behind me, imitating my way of walking, putting his feet down at the same time as I did and swinging his arms in the same rhythm. If I broke into a run, so would he; if I stopped, so would he; if I blinked, so would he. And he never looked me in the eye; he merely studied my eyes, as he did every other part of my body, so as to detect every movement when it had hardly begun and to copy it. I often tried to mislead him about my next move, I’d feint in a wrong direction, then suddenly run away. But he never let himself be outwitted. His imitating was more like shadowing; I became a prisoner of my shadow.