Repetition Read Online Free PDF Page A

I can still hear her voice of that morning—muffled, as one might expect of a voice from a post-office phone booth, monotonous and clear. She said my father and she had agreed to transfer me from the “boys’ seminary” to a secular school, and this without delay. I had already been registered at the Gymnasium in Klagenfurt and in two hours they would pick me up at the entrance in a neighbor’s car. “Starting tomorrow, you’ll attend your new class. You’ll be sitting beside a girl. You’ll take the train every day. You’ll have your own room at home, we don’t need the storeroom anymore; your father is
making you a chair and a table.” I started to protest, but I soon stopped. My mother spoke with the voice of a judge. She knew me inside and out; she had jurisdiction over me. The decision rested with her, and she decreed that I should be set free immediately. Just this once, her voice rose up from deep within her, from a silence she had stored up all her life, stored up perhaps for the very purpose of enabling her, in a single moment, on the right occasion, to make a powerful statement, after which she would fall back into the silence where her people had their throne and kingdom; a light, winged, dancing, chanting voice. I reported my mother’s decision to the rector, he accepted it without a word, and before I knew it, a happy little group was sailing across the open plain, the reprieved prisoner and his suitcase on the back seat, under a towering sky, in a world as bright as if the car top had been taken down. Whenever the road ahead of us was empty, our neighbor at the wheel would drive in wide zigzags, singing partisan songs at the top of his voice. My mother, who didn’t know the words, hummed the tune and from time to time, in a voice that grew more and more festive, shouted the names of the villages bordering my homeward road on the left and right. Seized with dizziness, I held fast to my suitcase. If I had had to give my feeling a name, it would not have been “relief” or “joy” or “bliss,” but “light,” almost too much of it.
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    Nevertheless, I never really returned home after that. During my years at the seminary, every trip home had been bathed in the atmosphere of a great festive journey, and not only because, apart from the summer vacation, we were allowed to go home only on the major feast
days. Before Christmas, we released prisoners stormed down the hill in the pitch darkness, left the winding road at the first opportunity, climbed over the fence with our bags, cut across the steep, deserted, frozen pasture, plodded on over the water meadows and the brooks steaming with frost to the railroad station. In the train I stood out on the platform, jostled my schoolmates, whose shouts of joy rang in my ears. It was still night, an invigorating darkness encompassed heaven and earth, the stars overhead and, down below, the sparks rising from the engine, and I am still able to think of the wind blowing through this black force field as something sacred. My whole body up to my nose was so filled with the air of that journey that I felt as if I had no need to breathe for myself. I heard the jubilation, which those around me shouted, but which I myself only had silent within me, expressed not by my own voice but by the things of the outside world: the pounding of the wheels, the rattling of the rails, the clicking of the switches; the signals that opened the way, the gates that guarded it; the crackling of the whole speeding, roaring train.
    Each of us left the group with the certainty that he still had the best part of his journey ahead of him, the adventurous footpath ending in a home unknown to his fellow convicts. And once, indeed, when on such a day I left the station and cut across the fields to the village, I was accompanied by something in which I saw the Child Saviour announced by the religious calendar. True,