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 wasnât the only confused one who didnât 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 âalways on their feet,â 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 canât 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 foolâs 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.
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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,