Slow Homecoming

by Peter Handke

  “I would like to be dangerous like you,” he said, while sitting in the house with Sorger, at an evening meal which as usual had come about by chance.

  The table stood by the screenless window, at the center of which, traversed by river and the evening sky, was a rectangle with long, dark stripes; above and below, a deepening black (cloud bank and dry land). Now and then, a mosquito would come in, reeling rather than flying. But the mosquitoes had stopped biting; they would just settle on the back of your hand and stay there.

  The meal consisted of light-brown mushrooms gathered “in the field” (they had absorbed some of the dampness of the soil, and tasted rather like Chinese mushrooms); whitish chunks of salmon bought from the Indians; and the last oversized potatoes from the somewhat disorderly garden on the east, lee side of the house. They drank a wine bought at the Trading Post, as the settlement market called itself, so cold that its sweetness, in conjunction with the bitter mushrooms and the fish, was pleasant for a time.

  This was one of the first days of autumn in a house whose absence of mystery, the practical anonymity of its furnishings and utensils, made for an easy, homelike feeling. It was only when looking out, even absently, into the open that one was likely to know the exalting yet terrifying sensation of flight into the Great North; and even without looking out, as you sat eating and drinking, a strange light might fall on the corners of one’s eyes and play unceasingly on the objects roundabout, yet their intrinsic glow was manifested only by the incredible inner jolt you felt when it came to you that you were “far, far away,” on another continent.

  The black-and-white spotted cat that came with the house settled on the table after eating the leftover fish—the wooden walls were too thin to allow of a window seat—and looked out at the bushes on the riverbank, which were blowing furiously in the evening wind; now and then, its otherwise motionless head or paw would follow a contrary movement in the bushes.

  The surface of the water was still yellow. The wind was blowing upstream, stirring up ripples that moved eastward as if the river were flowing in that direction; only at the edges of the picture was the real current visible in great, compact, night-black swirls, which looked as if someone had thrown a mess of tripe into the water. Far below in the west, now half in the shadow of the bank, a dark shape rose up from the surface of the water, rose and fell with a rhythmic, creaking sound that invaded the house and filled the entire countryside. The water level was falling, and this was one of the last days on which the Indians could operate their big wooden fish wheels, which, driven by the current, filled with salmon overnight.

  Beyond the wheel, where the river pursued its northward meander, a jagged line of stunted virgin pines seemed to form the arc of a lagoon. Since the tops of the few taller trees towered above the long, flat horizon, one had the impression, when looking into the distance beyond the lagoon formed by the river islands, of seeing the spires of Venice against a cloudless sky. In this fully darkened city, the details of which could be seen only in the reflection of the light-colored river water, rifle shots would sometimes ring out, or a lost dog might bark. But perhaps these were mere echoes, carrying village sounds back to the village, where the dogs, for the most part kept in packs, barked until late into the night.

  A boat, in which no one could be seen because the occupants were kneeling or crouching, glided from the darkness of the lagoon into what remained of the light, trailing an inky-blue wake. A rifle shot fired across the water, as though from ambush, grazed but barely ruffled the smooth surface, then ricocheted into an island thicket, flushing a few crows.

  Early in the night, Sorger drove Lauffer’s jeep along the rocky shore on his way to see the Indian woman, who never expected him but ministered to him, sometimes with good-natured irony, and sometimes even with a certain dignified satisfaction. Ahead of him in the potholes lay a row of no longer sparkling but still pale-bright puddles, which seemed to merge with the likewise pale-bright surface of the river. And this surface itself, broken here and there by sandbanks, was not self-contained but melted without perceptible dividing line into the luminous strip of sky which covered the whole distant horizon as though to symbolize the Arctic Circle. The thin black ribbon of cloud in it might equally well have been the farthermost islands in the fluvial plain, and the last stretches of bright sky framing the clouds might have been the westward-flowing river.

  Sorger stopped; he wanted to capture this event in space and hold it fast. But already there was no more space before him, only a gently rising openness without foreground or background, not empty but ardently material. Alive to the pitch-black night sky above and behind him and to the deep-black earth beside and below him, thoroughly aroused, Sorger tried to prevent this natural phenomenon and the self-forgetfulness it engendered from passing, by frantically thinking the contradictory details out of the picture—until perspective, vanishing points, and a pitiful loneliness set in. For a moment he had felt the strength to propel his whole self into the bright horizon and there dissolve forever into the undifferentiated unity of sky and earth. Driving on, he sat stiff, dissociating his body from the mechanism of the car, and barely touched the top of the wheel, as if it had nothing to do with him.

  Roads without names led past huts without numbers. Some of the windows were already covered with sheepskins for the winter. The elk antlers over the front steps looked enormous and very white in the beam of the headlights. In the dark space under the huts, which were raised on wooden blocks, moved the shadows of the miscellaneous objects stored there. The airstrip along the edge of the forest, a rocky field that narrowed in the headlight beam, lay deserted, edged on both sides by short-stemmed red marker lights. A stray dog raised gleaming eyes from a hole in the ground. In this lost outpost, which could not be reached by road—or by ship for that matter, but only by plane——there were nevertheless any number of roads that went a little way into the forest and broke off when they came to the swamps. At least one car went with every house, even for the shortest distances the inhabitants used their cars, zigzagging in and out of the bushes at top speed, hurling great blobs of mud from the roads, which never dried out, against the trees and the walls of the huts. In this country, which though flat derived each day a rough, bony, cutting quality from all its objects, plants, animals, and people, the Indian woman (as Sorger always called her in his thoughts, even when he was with her) took on for him an inviting, coolly-bright smoothness. “Smoothness” might have been his pet name for her.

  In the season when there was virtually no dark night, they had met in the bar attached to the market and she had asked him to dance. At first, as she showed him the movements, her wide, unexpectedly delicate body (he didn’t know where to put his hands) had troubled him and aroused him in a way he himself had not wanted; she, on the other hand, found everything about him normal. In any case she accepted him; her smoothness was alluring, her indulgence contagious.

  She was determined to keep her relations with the outsider secret from the members of her tribe—actually, there were hardly any tribes left, only relics drinking beer and listening to cassette music in the huts, and in the woods behind them the great grave mounds of the old cemeteries. As a Health Department nurse, in sole charge of the settlement’s supplies of medicine, she would otherwise have lost the confidence of her people; she would “get body odor,” “frogs would jump out of her cheeks” and infect the village with mysterious diseases, and if that happened, they’d have to kill her “with stone scissors.” Her husband, a nonswimmer like so many inhabitants of these latitudes, had been drowned while fishing in the river; time and again she dreamed of pulling a feathered mask out of the water.

  Outside her house stood a totem pole, bright with color in the beam of the headlights: her two children’s bicycle was leaning against it. Through the curtainless window he first saw her round forehead, which he interpreted as so intimate a greeting and welcome that without waiting for her signal he went right in, sure that the children were already asleep.


  The one child, sexless in its deep slumber, had gently closed its mouth on the crook of the other sleeping child’s elbow, and the large, half-darkened but not somber room seemed separate from the rest of the house, a place accessible only to them. The shadows of the waving bushes outside moved over the walls. And nevertheless—watching her, giving in, resolutely transforming himself into her fantastic machine (as she did into his), and, more than “making her happy,” sharing in her durable pride—he did not regard himself as a deceiver, but saw the deception as an ineluctable phenomenon for which he was in no way responsible.

  It was not only that with her he had to speak a foreign language (foreign also to her), in which he had another voice than his own. More fundamental than this particularity, which perhaps concerned them alone, was the discrepancy between inactive desire—here he knew himself and his partner to be in a state of perfection—and its physical accomplishment, which had to end one way or another, with the anticipation of a triumph that always failed to materialize. Each time it seemed to be the one thing that counted, and then it counted for so little. The anticipated union did not prevent desire, but reduced it to an abrupt, unstable instantaneity, and through its very weakness made for a guilty conscience, followed by a total lapse of conscience. In other words, he did not love her; he knew that he shouldn’t have come to see her, and when he was with her his indecision made him act brusquely. How was it that he could not see himself embracing anyone, but always alone?

  He would have liked to love her in his language and through his language, but instead he merely stared at her menacingly, until after the first surprise—and not just to please him—she felt afraid. He toyed with the thought of killing her; or at least of stealing or breaking something; after all, no one knew he was there. “I hate this century,” he said finally, and she answered slowly, as though reading his future: “Yes, you are healthy and perhaps you are doomed.”

  She didn’t know where he came from and laughed at the inconceivable notion that there might be another continent. Had the stripe in the sky at last disappeared? The generator hummed in its tin shelter behind the house, and in a placeless darkness, beyond all degrees of latitude and longitude, puddles of water trembled and whirled around in a circle. White yarrow blossoms curled in the frost; clumps of yellow camellias became aerial photographs of burning forests. From deep within Sorger, an alarm bell signaling disorientation passed through the dark silent lowlands, farther and farther northward—which way was north just then?—as far as the alluvial tundra, where it shattered a cone of ice that had formed a thousand years before but could not be recognized as ice under its sheathing of sand and gravel; and now a crater would form with a lake in it, as if there had been a small volcano up there, so close to the pole. The river behind the house flowed only on the surface; just below, seizing and quickly encapsulating the flowing branches and leaves, a smooth sheet of ice filled the riverbed from source to mouth, giving the water the appearance of glass. The foreheads of many people lay on the cool enamel edge of a washbasin, and that night these children in bed would not turn over again. Lauffer, standing, reading a letter—hadn’t this been mail day?—holding the paper more with the pads of his palms than with his fingers, a slightly tilted basket of fruit on the sofa beside him, glanced now and then at the cat, which didn’t let him out of its sight but finally dozed off. The wind roared over the empty beer cans in the bushes outside, and at the same time the primeval wind, which had gathered the soil on which the hut was now standing, set up an Aeolian roaring in his head. Sorger could literally taste the unreality compounded of so many simultaneous irreconcilables, which condensed around him and would soon blow him away; and again it would be his own fault. “I have to go home. I have to sleep.” He struck his head with his fist: a prayer, of sorts, which actually worked. The hallucination passed; his spatial sense came back. “What do you see?” the Indian woman asked. He felt a liking for her in the corners of his eyes. He hugged her and meant it. She held him close, and when he looked up he noticed for the first time that the expressionlessness of her face, in which he foresaw a beautiful old age, was perfect sympathy.

  While she was ministering to him, Sorger listened to a long story about someone who seduced a sleeping woman by giving her copper to smell. She saw him to the door and then, in a good humor, he drove home through the friendly Arctic night. His premature fatigue, which had burst upon him “like a deviation from the vertical,” brought on in part by the effort of speaking a foreign language, had never been. The gabled wooden house glowed in the darkness. From a distance he transferred its color, shape, and material to himself in the form of energy (the river behind the embankment had become a soft plashing). Entering, he felt enterprising, filled with a passionate urge to investigate nature, though all he actually did in the deserted laboratory—Lauffer was already asleep in the other room—was to settle down with a glass of wine and, holding the cat in his lap, project a vision of order and clarity into the near-darkness without and within.

  At length, letting himself go in his own language, he said to the cat: “Revered demonic animal, giant eye, eater of raw meat. Fear not. No one is stronger than we are, no one can harm us. On the other side of the window, hostile water is flowing, but we sit here in our element. We have been lucky up until now. I am not entirely weak, not entirely powerless. I am capable of freedom. I want success and I want adventure. I would like to teach the landscape to be rational and the heavens to mourn. Do you understand that? And I am restless.”

  They both looked out into the night, the cat far more attentively than the man, the orifice under its upraised tail turned toward him like a burning eye. A wind unusual for the region thundered outside, and inside made the wood of the silent house creak. Sorger sat motionless until he felt he was weighing his brain with his skull—scales designed to make what they weighed weightless. A nervous flutter circled his head as though wings were beating under his skin; and then came a total calm, in which everything could be said with the words: “Night—Window—Cat.” The cold and the wind outside were a blessing to Sorger’s lungs.

  He lifted the cat by the forepaws, making it stand stretched on its hind legs, and put his ear to its mouth: “Now say something. Stop pretending, you sanctimonious quadruped, you parentless monster, you childless thief. Make an effort. Everyone knows you can talk.”

  He held the little round skull pressed to his ear and stroked the body more and more violently, until his hand was stroking the skeleton through the fur.

  The distressed cat didn’t move; it scarcely breathed; its eyes became round and glassy, and the man’s image appeared in the slits. After a long while, it began to pant and finally, along with a puff of warm air, poured a brief plaint into Sorger’s ear, expressive not of pain but of desperation followed by appeasement; that done, it patted him on the face with one paw, almost like a domestic pet.

  “Absurd beast,” said the tormentor, “satanic creature of the night, slavishly available metaphor.”

  The cat scratched him; then, when he let it go, used his knee as a jumping-off place and crawled under the carpet, forming a motionless bump.

  At first Sorger had a sensation of coolness on his cheek; a little later the scratch began to bleed. Behind the fugitive animal the furniture was still creaking. On the table in front of Sorger the brown tip of a compass needle trembled, and in the adjoining room, tossing and turning in his bed as though unable to find his place, the other man was talking in his sleep. Or could he be singing? But what was there to celebrate? How easy it was to give oneself away. How ready one was to speak. How beautiful by contrast was the cat’s reserve. Be silent, man. Dawn, age of silence.

  Beside the compass lay a letter for him from Europe, which he had not yet opened. (To see what smoke arising from what country?) And how much else had he missed in just this one day? A sense of inexpiable guilt more played with him than took hold of him, but since it was only a vague intimation he could not repent or make reparation. “
Never again,” he said. This was the hour of sleep-heavy night resolutions: “That was the day when for the last time he …” He what? A heat so stifling that it almost stank weighed briefly on the room and on the man still sitting obstinately awake; it was the consciousness of insatiable privation and infinite incapacity. He had no right to his scientific instruments; no right to look at the river; and it was dishonest of him to let himself be embraced. Now Lauffer was really singing in his sleep. “Comical fellow man, ridiculous self, laughing witness.” Something was wrong, always had been, with all of them; they were cheats without exception. The night became a solid body pressing against the windowpanes from outside; and now Sorger saw himself as someone really dangerous, because he wanted to lose everything and himself as well.

  Of course he had long been acquainted with these no-man’s-land states; they were dispelled by sleep or the next day’s fresh air; besides, the cat came out from under the carpet and, while Sorger was getting ready for bed, ran across his path several times in token of affection. “As you see,” he said to the cat, “I’m going to bed.” And he added: “Rejoice, dear animal, that you have a home.” In the storm the house flew through the darkness, and Sorger looked forward to the morning light. “If only I could live for a while with animals. They don’t sweat, and they don’t whine about their condition …”

  But, along with the need for silence, wasn’t there such a thing as joy in a spontaneous outcry, in the pure act of crying out? For not only did it demonstrate absence of guilt; it also restored the radiant innocence that one could live with forever and ever.

  Sorger had no outcry to make, not in any language. In his half sleep it became clear to him that another day had passed in which he had postponed something that it would soon be impossible to postpone any longer. A decision was due, and that decision was in his power, or perhaps not—in any case, it was up to him to bring it about.