This article was written by Scott Abbott

Hay harps Photos by Scott Abbott & Zarko Radakovic

14 May 1989

In Peter Handke's novel Repetitions Filip Kobal rides a train through a Karawanken Mountain tunnel to get from Villach, Austria to Jesenica in Yugoslavia.  Out of the cultural terrorism of Europe into the fabled "Ninth Land" of Slovenia.  We can't exactly duplicate Filip's trip with our Opel Kadett; but Zarko Radakovic and I decide to drive through a parallel tunnel.

Somewhere near the tunnel we make a wrong turn and find ourselves driving along a long lake parallel to the mountains.  Only fifteen minutes away, through the tunnel, is the promised land.  Back and forth we drive, sometimes sure of where we are because of correspondences between countryside and map, then suddenly, inexplicably, repeatedly lost.  The tunnel is carefully marked on the map, as is the Autobahn leading to it, and the name "Karawanken Tunnel" stands in tiny red letters next to the marks that mean "mountains."  We can see the mountains.  We can see the lake.  We can drive through the streets of St. Jakob.  But the map's promised 7.6-kilometer tunnel ("toll required") is simply not there. 

Finally we throw away the text and ask an Austrian policeman how to get to the Karawanken Tunnel.  When he understands that we want to drive through a tunnel to get to Jesenice he smiles so broadly that his thin moustache quivers.  No such place, he says, not until the Yugoslavs finish their half. 

We'll have to drive over the Wurzenpass.

At the border in an alpine meadow at the top of the pass, Zarko speaks with the guard and pulls the car into a parking lot.  You need a visa, he tells me, and leads me into a low, dark, dirty monument to bureaucracy.  Zarko answers questions put to him by a uniformed official.  I watch several men pay what looked like huge amounts of money at another counter.  How much will a visa cost?  There are long silences while the official flips through several old notebooks.  Habsburg vintage?  Josef K. and the Castle?  The official reads my passport page by page.  My ears register the tiny sounds of a burocrat's radio playing somewhere in the building, broadcasting the immortal voice of Engelbert Humperdink: "Please release me, let me go, I don't love you any mo." With a flourish the official stamps my passport.

Now the border is crossed, Jesenice just ahead, and Filip Kobal's first experience awaits our retracing.  Zarko is home.  And yet not home, he explains.  This is Slovenia, and the people here speak Slovenian.  They learn Zarko's native language, Serbo-Croatian, in school.

An eerily clear, colorless mountain river runs into the alpine city.  Downstream, leaving town, the now opaque river percolates and fumes.  A dark cloud, tinted chemical yellow, hangs above the city.  Zarko drives straight through the steel-milling town.  We will stay overnight in Bohinj, a mountain resort better adapted to the human breathing apparatus. 

On the strength of the Italian cars parked outside its restaurant (Zarko says that is a sure sign of good food) we choose a pension.  Later that night we stand on the gravel shore of an enormously still mountain lake.  The silky water mirrors the bright half-moon and the surrounding mountains.  Standing there in silence, Yugoslavia's highest mountain towering three-headed (Triglav) over us in the moonlit night, Zarko and I begin to talk about standing and being.  (The subject could just as well have been basketball, but we had covered Yugoslavs in the NBA while driving and now the bright darkness puts us in a philosophical mood.)  The entire day we had raced along the Autobahn into Austria, up through the mountains into Yugoslavia.  And now, on a lake shore where the slightest wave was a remarkable motion, we stand and talk about standing:  about Handke's evocation of the nunc stans in The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire -- that standing gesture created by the most concentrated artistic effort, that brief moment of achieved stillness between one motion and the next, that ephemeral moment of duration, of "true feeling."

14 May

Pentacost.  We leave the lake and its peaceful morning fog and drive down to the town of Bohinska Bistrica, the town where Filip Kobal reads his brother's notebook on fruit-growing and discovers the Slovenian language.

In grassy meadows we see the hay racks Handke's character admires:

those long, narrow wooden frames known as 'hay harps': two wooden posts (perhaps made of concrete today) rammed into the ground, and embedded in them a number of parallel bars, on which, under a shingled roof, the first hay of the year was drying.  This first crop was full of spring flowers, and the gray mass of hay was shot through with color.

I am thrilled by the sight of these objects I had seen only in Handke's verbal descriptions. Why thrilled? Doesn't seeing the actual "hay harps" distract me from the language with which Handke describes them?  Won't the descriptive passage now revert to a cipher for something I have seen, rather than serving as a thing itself?

In town we hear bells and find people streaming out of a large church. Zarko gives me a lecture about Slovenes.  There are about 2 million of them, mostly strong Catholics, their religion closely allied with their nationalism.  Politically dominated by Habsburgs and then Serbs, they have fought a heroic battle over the centuries to keep their language and culture intact.  In Repetition, Handke claims there are no Slovenian words for military commands.  German and Serbo-Croatian words suffice.

On the road back down to Jesenice we get a sense for the new Slovenia: "Tennis," "Mini-Golf," and "Ski-Area."  Back in the steel-milling city we slosh through chemically fortified rain to the train station restaurant where Filip Kobal sits one whole night drinking sweet, flat, east-block Cola.  A photo of Tito figures prominently in the story, but we can't find it. Zarko checks the WC to see if Handke got it right.  He did.

We look for the mouth of the train tunnel where Filip Kobal spends his first night, unwilling to leave the border, the threshhold: "The tunnel did not strike me as an insane idea.  I would go in where my train had just carried me out." We drive and walk up a dozen blind alleys before a wet garden path almost accidentally brings us face to face with the tunnel.  Standing in the streaming rain Zarko photographs the heavy stone arch and the black half circle it creates.

Later we eat the Slovenian meal Zarko has been promising me.  Dark bread, tomato-and-onion salad, soup (with a raw egg yolk staring up at me), a tender, well seasoned Schnitzel.  Prosperous, dour Slovenian families eat their quiet Sunday dinners at tables around us.  Four soldiers drink at one table.  A huge boar's head and several sets of antlers hang heavy over the diners.  Zarko glows as I praise the food and glows again as he drinks a glass of Slivovitz. 

An uneventful trip across the border.  "Where was the transition?" asks the narrator of Repetition.  Just before crossing we spend the last of our money on Yugoslavian tomatoes and pears.   From an official poster still tacked obediently to the back wall, Marshal Tito keeps watch over the transaction.

In the late afternoon we drive through south-central Austria to Klagenfurt, the city where Handke finished high school.  Exhausted from a hectic week of travel, I sleep in the car while Zarko seeks directions to Tanzenberg (the Catholic boarding school where Handke was a pupil for several years before moving to the school in Klagenfurt) and interviews several passersby about whether they know who Handke is (most of them don't, one defends him as a national hero).

Almost 12 p.m.  We have found a room in St. Veit an der Glan, a town not far from the Tanzenberg boarding school.  Handke's ex-wife, Libgard Schwarz, is from here.  Four leather-clad motorcyclists share the next room.  I can't imagine them without their helmets and leathers.  Do they wear pyjamas?

On the way from St. Veit to Tanzenberg we stop by a country soccer tournament.  At least four teams have gathered, if I read the shirt colors correctly.  Healthy young girls sell sausages and sodas from a little stand.  Two teams race up and down the wet field.  One goalie can punt the ball the entire length of the field.  Heads crack together as players strain for the ball.  Muscular legs drip blood.  Feet control the ball delicately, with amazing precision, and suddenly punish it with terrifying force.  A tall, thin player has his glasses ripped from his face.  He picks them up and reenters the fray.  Zarko photographs the goalies.  We'll analyze their faces later for the anxiety Handke describes in his early novel.

Tanzenberg, in Karnten.  More shades of green than I have names for.  Bright white and subtle grey clouds.  Dark, brown, rain-soaked earth.  Broad fertile valleys bordered by hills.  A wisp of smoke rises from a thick stand of trees.  Overlooking a wide sweep of this exorbitant landscape stands the boarding school, a long, high, heavy, stone building.  An architectural witness to institutional power.  The natural beauty seems to exist for the greater glory of this institution set on a hill.  The school is locked up for the Pentacost holiday, but we find three nuns to speak with.  The first is feeding a cat on the kitchen doorstep, the second two wander up a lane carrying wild flowers, pine boughs, and an unwashed head of lettuce.

The woman on the porch is very shy.  Her face is radiant.  We ask her about the former student, Peter Handke.  She wasn't at Tanzenberg then, she says, but she knows who we are asking about.  Beyond that she tells us only that she is a simple woman, that she doesn't read much, that she works in housekeeping and not in the school.

"Are you with the Boy Scouts?" asks one of the other two nuns, brash and fat and secure in her long black-and-white habit.  She does most of the talking while her companion nun, much leaner, does most of the smiling.

Yes, of course ("ja freilich") they had known Handke.  He was a bit strange ("ein eigenartiger Mensch") -- like all the boys are these days, she adds quickly.  We housekeepers don't really have much to do with the Gymnasium; but when Handke's book about his poor mother appeared we were as outraged as anyone.  Yes, the professors at the Gymnasium were quite negative about it.  No, none of the professors are around, all gone for Pentacost. --  But Sister, Professor X. lives right over there. -- That's true, Sister, but he is not at home. -- Yes he is, look, his car is in the driveway. -- Well! 

Standing on the road between the boarding school and the stand of trees that evidently hides a Boy Scout camp, we strike up a conversation with a bearded bicyclist and his eight- or nine-year-old son.  The man was himself a student in the boarding school until 1970.  He knows Handke's work well.  His German teacher, he says, also Handke's teacher, told the class that Handke would be a great writer.  In my notebook he writes the teacher's name: "Reinhard Musar, Villach."

We ask what it was like as a boarding-school student.  I wouldn't send my son there, he says, although it is a superb Gymnasium.  Ten-year-old boys begin there in September and don't see their parents again until Christmas, unless the parents have enough money to come for visits.  The school exists to educate future priests.  Five times a day the boys take part in religious services. 

Handke's description of his stay on the Tanzenberg:  "A religiously damaged boarding-school pupil.  The five years in the school are not worth telling.  The words homesickness, oppression, coldness, group imprisonment are enough."  Handke on his homeland: "The lard that strangles me: Austria."

"Griffen:  3000 inhabitants.  Griffen is a beloved summer freshness between the valleys of the Drau and the Lavan, an inviting place for long walks.  It is also visited eagerly by fishermen"  (from the map that showed a tunnel into Slovenia).

"Griffen.  The writer Peter Handke's birthplace and childhood home."  So begins the entry on the town in Zarko's traveler's guide to Karnten.

By the time I slow the car we have passed clear through the village.  Before we reenter Griffen we drive up a country road into the surrounding low hills.  It will give us a context, I argue, an overlook.  A steep, winding, gravel road.  Old farm houses, well spread out.  Clouds sweep the hills.  Fine grey and rich green.  A castle ruin on a high hill dominates the town.  On a ridge we stand at the edge of a newly planted field and look back and forth into two valleys.  In the stillness I hear, for the first time in my life, the low call of a cuckoo.  I will be 40 this summer.

Placid cows.  Chickens.  Cats.  A heavy dog on a chain, too lazy to challenge us.  I photograph a beautiful pile of manure butting up against a rich brown reflecting pool and topped by a sturdy wheelbarrow.  An old tin arrow pointing to a farmhouse announces the presence of a telephone. 

In a pottery shop ("Terra Nigra! An Ancient Art Rediscovered") we ask about Peter Handke.  Both the potter and his teenage assistant stand up when we say Handke's name.  With no prompting they vie with one another to give us fragments of their versions of the Handke family story.  When the potter changes the subject to his own discovery of the ancient secret of black pottery, the young man breaks in to ask if he could have ten minutes off to show us Handke's grammar school and the family house where Handke's half-brother now lives.

The school, right on the town's main street, is now a pizzeria.  He directs us to a row of houses on a hill and then must return to the secrets of Terra Nigra!

Wedged in against a wooded ridge just outside of Griffen is Altenmarkt, Handke's actual birthplace.  (I sound like a tourist guide.)  Below the ridge lie a lumberyard and a cemetery.  The lumberyard must have been where the uncle had his carpenter's shop. 

On the road just above the cemetery a well dressed elderly woman responds to our query by pointing down the road to the last house on the last street in town.  It is the half-brother's birthday, she says and claims to have been the owner of the property. We ask about Handke's mother.  The mother's maiden name was Maria Siutz and she is buried, not in the cemetery below, but in the cemetery of the Stift, up the road and around a corner. Zarko photographs the woman as she walks away (a dark raincoat and thin legs), and then turns down the road and takes another photo, this time of the open garage door into which, from this angle, the road seems to lead.

Now we stalk the house at Altenmarkt 6, the half-brother's house standing right at the end of the paved road, the last house in town.  A black, sporty car -- "Sprint!" -- stands outside the garage.  We peek into the doorless garage.  The brother (we suppose) has painted cartoon figures on the walls.  A sexy young woman, a virile young man, a sensual cat, and the English phrase "Only you."  Walt Disney's Pluto adorns the wall of a garden house.  We want to go in and ask the brother about Peter, we itch to ring the doorbell.  Instead Zarko takes several photographs as we walk past. 

(In the opening scene of William Golding's The Paper Men, an aging, alcoholic writer nearly shoots a young would-be biographer who is rooting through his rubbish.  The novel ends as the would-be biographer, repeatedly frustrated by the uncooperative novelist, shoots the man he has been stalking.)

The Stift, a former monastery, is in disrepair.  Crumbling bricks disfigure what was once a smooth plaster coat.  Beer and sausage booths from Griffen's Pentacost are being dismantled by workmen in the rain.  By some of the workmen.  The others lift glasses in the pub that now occupies the southeast corner of the huge building.

Surrounded by a high, crumbling, brick-and-wood wall, the graveyard lies on the west side of the building.  With little trouble we locate Maria Handke's well-tended grave.

"Maria Handke / 8.10.1920 - 20.11.1971" it says on the smooth front of the otherwise uncut stone.  A wooden cross fronts the stone: "Bruno Handke, died 21.3.88."  I photograph Zarko as he stands in front of the grave, umbrella at a slant, his hands busy with pen and notebook.  He photographs me in a similar stance.  Assiduous scholars.  Pious pilgrims.

Over the church's massive front door hangs a statue of Mary, her foot balanced delicately on the neck of a fine green dragon.  We swing open the heavy worm-eaten door and enter a working church housed in a partial ruin.  Rich altar rugs lie on platforms of unpainted pine.  Oak pews shine with woodwax and use.  The scent of mildew.  Pyramidal piles of drifted plaster gather at the base of disintegrating walls.

Inside the entrance, German and Slovenian signs give directions to the confessional.  German-language pamphlets are stacked in ragged piles on a table to the left and a table to the right displays similar pamphlets in Slovenian.  The naive paintings of fourteen naive stations of the cross circling the church have Slovenian captions: "1. Statio  Jesus je k'smerti obsojen."

Monastery Church Maria Ascension (Haslach): The church has its origins in the 13th century, but was much altered in the following centuries.  It received its west facade (Baroque) in the 18th century.  Inside romanesque style dominates . . . numerous gravestones and coats-of-arms from the 15th through the 18th century deserve attention. . . . notable stuccos . . . scholars, however, do not agree whether these stuccos can be attributed to the artist Kilian Pittner (1700).

Is this the kind of thing I will be doing to Handke? 

Peter Handke has his origins in the decade of the Third Reich, was, however, much altered in the following decades. . . .  Within, postmodern style dominates.  The book published in 1986, however, is postpostmodern. . . .  Also deserving attention . . . scholars, however, do not agree, whether. . . .

However, however, however.

We leave the church and step out again into the dripping rain.  It's time to return to Tubingen; but we are not yet satisfied.  We go into the pub to see if someone there wants to talk about Handke.

Only one drinker is still there, talking with the bartender.  We give them the spiel about our book and ask if they know Handke.  The young workman says he knows Peter well.  I sat next to him at the soccer field across the street while he wrote The Goalie's Anxiety.  He sat there and stared at the goalie the whole time, just the goalie.  The bartender wants to have his say as well: The story takes place in Frankfurt, but Handke got his ideas right here.

Does Handke ever come here? Zarko asks.

About once a year, the bartender answers.  He sits alone at a table outside in the courtyard.

What does he drink? I ask.

Always a cheap white wine.

Do people around here read Handke's books?

The bartender says he has read three of the books, but Handke is less read in Griffen than he ought to be.  A prophet in his own country, he says.

In the car, driving along the bumpy country road between the Stift and the town, we laugh at ourselves and the information we have gathered.  It all seems so trivial, yet we are fascinated by the details. 

We leave Griffen and head home.  I sleep while Zarko drives through Klagenfurt and Villach, and when I wake up we are in the mountains.  Through a long tunnel, we leave the mountains. Somewhere between Salzburg and Munich we watch the sun go down, a huge red ball.  It balances for a silent moment on the sharp points of pine trees lining a hill, then eases down to light my family's day in Utah.

Scott Abbott is the author of two books co-authored with Zarko Radakovic (Ponavljanje and Vampiri/Razumni recnik, published in Serbo-Croatian in Belgrade) and of Fictions of Freemasonry: Freemasonry and the German Novel. He was the jazz critic for the Salt Lake Observer and co-author, with Sam Rushforth, of the series "Wild Rides, Wild Flowers, Biking and Botanizing the Great Western Trail" which appeared for four years in Catalyst Magazine. He is also a translator, with Peter Handke's A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia and an exhibition catalogue The German Army and Genocide to his credit.

Readers of Serbo-Croation can buy our latest book at:

http://www.yu4you.com/trazi.php?terms=arko+Radakovic+%3B+Skot+Abot

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