Repetition

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A QUARTER OF A CENTURY, or a day, has passed since I arrived in Jesenice on the trail of my missing brother. I was not yet twenty and I had just taken my final school examination. I ought to have felt free, for after weeks of study the summer months lay open before me. But I had set out with mixed feelings, what with my old father, my ailing mother, and my confused sister at home in Rinkenberg. Besides, after being released from the seminary, I had got used, during the past year, to my class in the state school in Klagenfurt, where girls were in the majority, and now I suddenly found myself alone. While my classmates piled into the bus together and set out for Greece, I played the loner who preferred to go to Yugoslavia by himself. (The truth was that I simply didn’t have the money for the group trip.) Another reason for my unease was that I had never been outside of Austria and knew very little Slovene, though it was hardly a foreign language for an inhabitant of a village in southern Carinthia.

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