Repetition Read Online Free PDF Page B

age, with whom I had attended grade school in my village days, started telling me bits of local news, but broke off in the middle, saying: “You look like you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
    I was unable to get back in with my age group. For one thing, none of the others was still going to school; some had taken over their fathers’ farms, others were plying a trade, but all were working. Though legally minors, they struck me as adults. Whenever I saw them, they were either at work or on their way to work. In their farm clothes or aprons, with their faces set straight ahead, their always alert eyes, their ready fingers, they had acquired a military quality, and similarly the babbling voices of the schoolroom had given way to monosyllabic utterances, to curt nods or vacant stares as they passed on their mopeds (with, at the most, a laconic wave of the hand). Their pleasures as well were those of adults; and I as a matter of course was left out of them. With a shudder of wonderment, almost of awe, as though worshipping a mystery, I contemplated the so serious, attentive, sure-footed couples on the dance floor. This young woman with the dignified movements was the little girl who had once hopped over the chalk lines of hopscotch squares. And not so long ago the young lady who now picks up her skirt as she steps daintily onto the dance floor was showing us her hairless pubis in the cow pasture. How quickly they had all outgrown such childish pursuits! And now they were literally looking down on me. Every one of the boys had already suffered a serious accident; one had lost a
finger, another an arm or an ear; one at least had been killed. Some were fathers; several of the girls were mothers. One of the boys had been in jail. And what about me? It came to me that during my years at the seminary my youth had passed but I had never for one moment known the experience of youth. I saw youth as a river, a free confluence and flow from which I was excluded when I entered the seminary. My years at the seminary were lost time that could never be retrieved. In me something was missing, and would always be missing. Like many young men in the village, I had lost a part of my body; it had not been cut off like a hand or a foot; no, it had never had a chance to grow; and it was no mere extremity, so to speak, but an irreplaceable organ. My trouble was that I couldn’t go along with the others; I couldn’t join in their activities or talk with them. I was a stranded cripple, and the current, which alone could have sustained me, had passed me by forever. I knew that without youth I could do nothing. I had missed it once and for all, and that made me incapable of movement; especially in the only company that would have been right for me, that of my contemporaries, it gave me a feeling of painful inner paralysis, and I swore that I would never forgive the people I held responsible for this paralysis—and those people existed.
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    Though I was often glad to stand apart, in the long run I couldn’t reconcile myself to being alone. At first I associated with my juniors, with children. They were glad to have me, as a referee in their games, as a helper, as a storyteller. In the hour between the onset of dusk and nightfall, the open space in front of the church
became a kind of children’s forum. They would sit on window ledges or on their bicycles, and as often as not they had to be called several times before they would go home to bed. They didn’t talk much, they just sat there together while the bats circled around them, growing almost invisible to one another as the time passed. With the help of certain paraphernalia, I would try my hand as a storyteller. From time to time, I would strike a match, tap two stones together, blow into my cupped hands. Actually, I never did more than evoke sounds and sights: clubfeet walking, a stream swelling, a will-o’-the-wisp coming closer. And my listeners