Repetition Read Online Free Page A

altar, celebrating the daily Mass, far from being transformed into the priests they had once been consecrated as, they executed every detail of the ceremony in the role of policemen: when they stood silently with their backs turned and their arms raised heavenward, they seemed to be listening to what was going on behind their backs, and when they turned around, supposedly to bless us all, their true purpose was to catch me red-handed. How different it had been with the village priest: before my eyes he had just carried crates full of apples down to the cellar, listened to the news on the radio, cut hairs out of his ears; and now in the house of God he stood in his vestments, never mind his creaking joints, before the Holy of Holies—removed from the rest of us, who thus became a congregation.
    The only good company I had at the seminary I enjoyed alone, when studying. In my solitary study, every word I remembered, every formula I applied correctly, every watercourse I learned to draw from memory, anticipated my one overriding desire: to be out in the open. If asked what the word “kingdom” meant to me, I would not have named any particular country but only the “kingdom of freedom.”
    And to my mind the man who in my last year at the seminary became my great friend was the embodiment of this “kingdom” which thus far I had glimpsed only in study. He was not a contemporary but an adult,
and he was not a priest but a man from outside, from the world, a lay teacher. He was still very young; having just completed his studies, he lived in the so-called teachers’ house, which, apart from the seminary building and the bishops’ tomb embedded in the hillside, was the only structure on the secluded, treeless knoll. Inconspicuous as I was to everyone else (years later, when I ran into former classmates, I always heard the same description: “quiet, aloof, self-absorbed,” in which I did not recognize myself), he noticed me at once. Everything he said in class was addressed to me, as though he were giving me a private lesson; and his tone was not that of a teacher; rather, he seemed in every sentence to be asking me if I agreed with his way of organizing his subject matter. He spoke as if I had long been familiar with the material and he was only waiting for me to assure him with a nod that he was not misleading the others. Once, when I went so far as to correct him, he did not look the other way but expressed his delight that a pupil should know better than his teacher; that, he said, was what he had always wished for. Not for one moment did I feel flattered. This was something very different: I felt recognized. I had been overlooked for years, and now at last someone had taken notice of me. In so doing, he had awakened me, and I awoke with exuberance. For a time all went well with me, my classmates, and above all the young teacher. Every day in my thoughts I went over to the teachers’ house after class; I passed from the stuffy religious dungeon into the airy realm of study, research, and contemplation of the world, into a solitude which struck me as glorious at the time. When he went away on weekends, my thoughts were with him in the city, where
he did nothing but compose himself for his schooldays; and when he stayed at the seminary, the one lighted window in the teachers’ house was for me an eternal light very different from the trembling little flame beside the altar of the dark seminary chapel.
    In those days I never thought of becoming a teacher myself—I wanted to remain a pupil forever, the pupil, for instance, of such a teacher, who was at the same time his pupil’s pupil. Of course this was possible only while distance was kept, and we forfeited this necessary distance, I perhaps in the exuberance of waking, he perhaps in the exuberance of a discovery which up until then he had only let himself dream of. Or perhaps the trouble was that I couldn’t bear for