Repetition by Peter Handke

my girlfriend merely cut off my view when she turned toward me as her bus was pulling out on the other side of the street. I couldn’t respond to her wave until she was out of the picture and the square was empty again. Then, to be sure, the whole country was full of her; I accompanied her on her trip and she me on mine.
    Yes, trains and buses, railroad stations and bus stops were my home in my days as a commuting student. The homesickness of my years at the seminary was a thing of the past; on days when there was no school, something drew me to the road with its bus shelters, which, unlike the village, deserved to be called “places.” I longed to be always on the move, a vagrant, without fixed abode. My old homesickness, the most painful of all the sufferings I had thus far experienced, a torment which unlike other torments fell from a clear sky on me alone, while the whole world around me remained bright, and which, also unlike other torments, was irremediable, had given way to a carefreeness which, as long as it had no goal, I identified with boredom, but once it had a goal, with wanderlust: pleasure in place of torment.
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    During my commuting days, it came to me that my parents were also strangers in the village. They were so regarded not by other villagers but by themselves. Outside the house, they were respected. My father was given honorific positions (in Rinkenberg, these were almost always connected with the church). My mother was regarded as an expert in dealings with the authorities and with the outside world in general; she was a
kind of village scribe, who wrote letters and petitions for neighbors. But at home, once they were alone and especially when neither was working, they would grow restless, or sit and brood, as though they were there against their will, prisoners or exiles.
    The memory of my father pacing the floor, rushing over to the little radio, scowling as he turned the tuning knob, makes me think of a soldier given up for lost in an advance post, trying desperately to pick up a signal telling him to come in. At first I thought this was brought on by the silence of the stable, which had emptied over the years, and of the barn, where the old farm implements had ceased to be anything more than souvenirs or junk. But then I saw that what drove him to keep on making strictly rectilinear chairs and tables, without a trace of ornament, in his old workshop behind the house, though he had no orders, was incurable rage and indignation provoked by an injustice. I’d sometimes look in through the windows and see how he worked without a glance at what he was making. Either he’d be staring into space, or he’d raise his head abruptly, and for a moment there’d be defiance in his eyes, followed by a look of prolonged resignation. When he was working, his bursts of temper, which had become legendary in the region, gave way to a sustained rage that made him trace thick, heavy lines, hammer nails ferociously, and make his corners as sharp as possible. Later on, I thought it was because, twenty years after my brother’s disappearance, our house was still a house of mourning; because a disappearance, unlike an unquestionable death, leaves a family no peace; every day he died again for them, and there was nothing whatever they could do about it.
    But that wasn’t it, either; at any rate, not that alone.
Their feeling, deforming, as it were, every corner of the farm, that this was not their home, that this village had been inflicted on them as a punishment, was much older. It was a—our only—family tradition, handed down from father to son, perhaps most clearly exemplified in a saying that had been passed from generation to generation: “No, I won’t go in, because if I do, there won’t be anyone there.”
    Our family legend was rooted in a historical event. It seems that we really were descended from Gregor Kobal, the instigator of the Tolmin peasant