Free Repetition by Peter Handke Page B

distraught, unfeeling leave-taking behind me, but after an hour alone at the Mittlern station I decided to go back and spend one more night at home. I left my sea bag with the men at the ticket office and turned back eastward, first along the railroad line, then through the sparse Dobrawa pine woods, the largest coppice in the country. It was an early-summer afternoon, and the sun was behind me. In the woods, where I knew the places to look, I found the first mushrooms of the year: small, firm chanterelles, almost white in the gravelly Dobrawa soil; then boletes, each a perceptible weight in my hand, more and more of which beckoned to me as, while walking, I, ordinarily none too sure of my sense of color, began to distinguish the colors more clearly; and finally, at the edge of the woods, jutting out from the grass, its tall, thin, hollow stalk swaying in the wind, a single parasol mushroom, visible from far off. I ran to it as though I had to be first to reach this king. Its cap, as large as a shield and domed in the middle, extended beyond the palms of both my hands but weighed less than the thinnest wafer.
    After wrapping my mushrooms in my brother’s enormous handkerchief, which like various articles of his clothing had been forced upon me for my journey,
I approached Rinkenberg and the house, where I was sure of finding my mother lying with her face to the wall, my sister on all fours about to relapse into her confusion, and my father sitting down among the ashes like Job.
    Not at all. The house stood open and empty, my mother’s bedclothes hung out of the window, airing. I found the three of them on the grassplot behind the house, with a fourth person, a neighbor, who had helped my father carry my mother out of the house in an armchair. She was sitting there barefoot, in a long white nightgown, an old horse blanket over her knees, and the others were sitting around her on the grassy bench provided by a slight hollow in the plot. At first it seemed to me that I had surprised my family in some secret, as if they were glad at last to be among themselves without me, able at last to let themselves go. For, though quiet, they seemed exuberant; my sister was amusing herself making faces in all directions, imitating the expressions of various people, challenging the others to guess who; one of these various people, the most laughed at—by my father as well, whose hat was on crooked—I recognized as myself. (I had many times felt myself to be unwanted, an intruder, a spoilsport, and often enough I really was.) But when they noticed me, the grassplot was suffused with a radiance which now, a quarter of a century later, brightens this deserted place for me. My ailing mother gave me a smile of infinite kindness, a smile such as I had never known, and it lifted me off the ground.
    I sat down with them, the family was complete. My sister quickly prepared the mushrooms, and even I enjoyed them, though as a rule I was keener on gathering
than on eating them. Though no table was set up, no cloth laid, it was a banquet, and our neighbor, who had just been leaving to answer the call of work, took time out for it. From then on, all I remember is sitting there for hours without anyone saying a word. Long, narrow eyes, bent at the corners like boat keels. From that unaccustomed vantage point—we seldom sat on this grassplot, ordinarily our washing was spread out there to bleach—my father’s house seemed to stand alone, not in the village named Rinkenberg, but in an unknown and nameless part of the earth, under a strange sky. In the rooms, a breeze that could be felt out here in the soft meadow grass. A pear on the espalier wobbled and fell. The boards of the long-abandoned apiary showed their colors, which taken together disclosed a face, and that face was repeated in the white of the cat half hidden under the dark green box tree. The barouche in the shed, superannuated like the farm implements, stood out from the