Another thing that may have put me off was that she was so much older than I. Between her and my brother there was only a year’s difference; but between her and me it was two decades. When I was very little, I actually took her for a stranger in the house, a mysterious intruder, who would someday pull a pin out of her hair and stick it into me. And then, when I got back from the seminary, she did indeed take the pins out of her hair, by which I mean that she let her hair down and opened up to me. She developed a feeling for me, a kind of enthusiasm. With enthusiasm she crossed the fields to meet me when I came from the train; with enthusiasm she carried my bag; with enthusiasm she handed me a bird’s feather, brought me an apple, served me a glass of cider. I had denied it all the while, and now at last I was what I was: at last she wasn’t the only confused one who didn’t belong anywhere; now I, too, was just that. At last she had an accomplice, an ally, and it was possible for her to be with me. Instead of blasting me, her eyes rested on me, and while hitherto they had foreseen nothing but calamity for me, they now proclaimed pure joy in my, her, our presence; but they were never obtrusive; when I needed it, they merely gave me a look that escaped everyone else, a mere hint, a sign.
To my mind, the right posture for my sister is sitting, a tranquil, erect sitting, with her hands beside her on the bench. Though every house had a bench in front of it, it was usually the men, especially the old ones, who sat there. I remember my father only as old, but I have no recollection of him seated. As for the women of the village, I saw them “always on their feet,” as housekeepers were said to be: walking in the street, bending over in the garden, and indoors actually running. It may have been my imagination, but it seemed to me that no Slovene woman could move from one place to another without running. Short as the distance might be, a Slovene woman ran from table to stove, from stove to sideboard, from sideboard to table. This running in small spaces was a quick sequence of skipping, flitting on tiptoes, running in place, changing feet, turning, and skipping some more; seen as a whole, it was a kind of clumsy dancing, the dancing of women who had been servants for many years. The young girls as well, no sooner back home from school, took to running; vying with their elders, they galloped like servants around their kitchen-living rooms. Even my mother, who was not a Slovene, had acquired the native custom; just to bring me a cup of tea, she would hop with downcast eyes and bated breath, as though I were an unexpected noble guest. Yet I can’t remember any such guest ever coming to our house, not even the parish priest. But my sister, alone among the village women, appears to me seated. She sat on the bench in front of the house; there she sat for all to see, and all she did was sit. I regarded her, just as I did the roadmender, as a model. Sitting there, playing with her fingers, without the usual rosary, she transformed herself into a phantom, seen only by him whom she herself chose to see; that is, by me. Excluded like the sign painter from the dance, she, too, in her fool’s freedom, embodied the center of the village. And it seemed to me that the age-old little stone statue, which dwelt, ignored by all, in a dark niche in the church wall, might have sat there as she did. Now it was reduced to a torso, a hand, and a head, and the only protuberances on the weather-beaten face were the eyes and the broadly smiling mouth, both closed. Here in the open, eyelids, lips, and the hand with the stone ball reflected the sunlight, and the whole image receded into the shimmering wall, its pedestal.
Yes, there was the moment with the children in the dusk, the moment of the painter working without witnesses, the moments when my sister and fellow conspirator was sitting in the sun. Yet all these moments could not in the long run take the place of the village I had lost.
The dream was over. Other dreams had to help out, big ones and little ones, by day and by night. But in those years I failed to make a place for myself in the city. Though I no longer felt at home in the village and instead of coming straight home after school I often took the last train, I remained in every respect an outsider in the city. I went neither to cafes nor to the movies and killed time drifting or sitting on park benches. It may have been partly due to the geography of Klagenfurt that I had nowhere to go. The lake was too far for walking, and this city, which seemed enormous to me, the capital of a whole province, had no river running through it, with banks to stroll along or bridges to stand on. Apart from the railroad station, the only building that offered me any kind of shelter was the school. I spent whole afternoons alone in my classroom or, when it was being cleaned, in a side room off the lobby, where unused tables and benches were stored. Sometimes there were other out-of-town students, and there, as the enormous deserted building grew steadily darker and quieter, we formed a little class of our own, sitting on the windowsills and standing in the corners. It was there that I met the girl with whom I once went to the movies, after all; she lived as far away as I did, in the opposite direction, in a village which, quite otherwise than in my days at the seminary, I conceived to be infinitely more alluring than my own. Her face glowed in the failing light of the corridor, and I fancied that she could only be the daughter of a noble house, living on a magnificent street.
With my classmates, on the other hand, it was only during our lessons together that I felt an affinity. In the schoolroom I spoke up (sometimes I was actually the spokesman for the class or the one who was consulted in doubtful cases). But after school I was left alone. The others all lived in town, with their parents or with local families. And they were all the children of lawyers, doctors, manufacturers, or businessmen. I was the only one who could not have said what his father did for a living. Was I the son of a “carpenter,” a “farmer,” a “flood-control worker” (over the years, my father had been all of these); or would it suffice for me to answer evasively that my father was “retired”? Regardless of how I concealed my origins, of how I might ennoble or debase them or pass them over, as though — and that is what I should have preferred — I had no origins at all, I nevertheless recognized what I had long dimly felt in my dealings with the children of the teacher, the policeman, the postmaster, the bank clerk in Bleiburg; namely, that I was not one of them, that we really had nothing in common, that we were not of the same world. They had social grace, I had none. I found their parties, to which they politely invited me at first, not only odd but positively repellent. Standing at the door of the dancing school, listening to the teacher counting out the time in a voice of command, I’d have said that the people in there were convicts who had actually chosen a life term in this place, and when I touched the door handle, it had the feel of a handcuff. Once at a garden party someone threw a hammock over my head, and there I sat with my knees drawn up, as in a net from which there was no escaping, surrounded by Chinese and storm lanterns, under the spell of soft music and splashing fountains, encircled by dancing or chatting couples.