by Peter Handke
Clouds, which Sorger did not look up at, drifted along with the prospective traveler as he sat at the table reading a book; the crowns of the pine trees swayed as if they were already somewhere else. Meanwhile, behind his back, people who had been sent by an agency strolled about inspecting the house that was up for sale. Not once did he look around at them.
Next door, only the neighbor woman was moving about. Some white cloths draped over her arm shone bright when she passed the spots that were in sunlight. Once she saw him and waved with a carefree, untroubled movement, as though he were already far away; and then she seemed to forget him and herself in a game that she played from room to room.
He was reading a Roman naturalist’s two-thousand-year-old attempt to explain the world, the language of which retained the “mild, transitional” quality of a poem. “Therefore solid matter can be eternal, whereas other forms of matter disintegrate.”
Three /
The Law
In the plane a deeper roar, remote from death. This was also a flight inside himself. How easy it was to speak; how easy life was altogether. An instantaneous idea: “Something new is beginning in me.” The West Coast city on its peninsula receded quickly.
Sorger was flying with the time, and with it, little by little, came daydreams “as changing as the faces of the moon.” It was snowing when the plane put down at Mile-High City on the eastern slope of the Rockies. Though booked through, Sorger took his suitcase, left the plane, and boarded an already overcrowded bus which carried him over a snowy highway, through a deserted countryside where he had never been before.
The flakes touched the windshield lightly and flew away. Sorger’s radiant daydreams went deeper and deeper. To drive beyond his inner limits: that was his way of thinking of others. He didn’t conjure them up explicitly, they came to mind as he gave his imagination free rein.
In the distance, a snow-covered horse stood motionless beside a dead willow tree, the slanting trunk of which had sunk deep into the ground. Schoolchildren pulled up the zippers of their parkas as they got out of the bus; snow blew in through the open door and even on warm hands took a moment to melt. After that, the bus was full of adult silence.
Sorger’s daydream produced a face with round, wide-set eyes, from which wrinkles emanated like rays. Now he was sure; he would stop for the night in the mountain village where the bus was going, and surprise his old schoolmate, who was a skiing instructor there.
He remembered him as he had seen him most recently, one summer on the West Coast: the nakedness of his face, with its open mouth as in his schooldays, and its lower lip, which he kept thrusting forward even when he was not talking (but which, when he was talking, spewed words like a milling machine).
Even when at rest, the skiing instructor looked strained, as though trying to get a better grasp of something. He spoke too loudly, but never quite distinctly. Often his speech consisted entirely of exclamations, and then there was a note of fear in his voice. If he trusted you, he would assail you with “ultimate questions” and expect categorical answers. If someone tried seriously to give him such answers, the proud skiing instructor would become that person’s servant; and in the summer months, when he was without work, he visited not his “friends” but his “masters” and was only too glad to help them with their household chores. He had no children and had been waiting for years for the woman of his life (whom he could describe with precision); but even the women who at first liked him were soon put off by his weirdness.
In his daydream, Sorger saw the skiing instructor as a man despised for his innocence, and imagined how he would embrace him at their meeting; he saw the man’s thick neck, his wide silver belt, and his thin legs between which he always hid his hands when he sat down. Dusk fell on the moving bus, the skiing instructor’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, bunches of dry grass rolled over the snow, and parched corn leaves stood horizontal in the wind.
The bus drove through an area where no snow had yet fallen, nor did anything else seem to be happening there. Later it began to snow, more quietly and with larger flakes. The mountains with their drainage ditches disappeared. Now nothing could be seen but the fallow fields nearby and a solitary herd of buffalo, breathing steam from their nostrils and nibbling at yellowish blades of grass; white fountains rose from the cars, which passed slowly as though engaged in some solemn journey, and clods of muddy snow rolled after their rear wheels. The only human forms on the road were occasional joggers; after a while it seemed to Sorger that they must be in training for a world war.
There were chunks of snow on the floor of the hotel elevator. The hotel was built in the style of an Alpine inn, with a wooden balcony, painted window frames, and a sundial. In his paneled room, with the lights of the great plain far below him, Sorger picked up the newspaper, the name of which was framed in a sketch of the region’s mountain peaks. He leafed through it, and almost immediately his eye fell on the skiing instructor’s name. He read the item through; it was an obituary. Without thinking, he read the names that followed, and heard a roaring from the shower.
The obituary had been put in by the skiing school. It described him as a “staff member of long standing”; apart from that, it supplied only the address and the hours of the undertaking establishment, here referred to as a “chapel.”
Sorger went at once to the chapel, which had long since closed for the night. Sorger looked through the lace curtains of the gableless row house into the lighted empty rooms: lamps with fabric shades on dark little tables; on the one larger table, a glass ashtray; beside it, an ivory-white telephone. The building was three stories high and had an elevator; the elevator, also lit, was on the ground floor, empty. The wide double door of the building had no handle on the outside. It was a cold, windy evening. The windshield wipers on the passing cars scraped like shovels. Sorger’s steps in the snow brought back the sound of meadow grass being mowed. Then he heard nasal Western voices and knew where he was.
He went back to the hotel, his skin numb from the snow. The bones of his face ached. He drank and made merry. He held his wineglass in both hands like a bowl and bared his teeth.
That night he dreamed of the dead man. They were walking together in the country. But then the skiing instructor became shapeless and vanished, and Sorger was alone when he woke up. He saw the deceased in a blue apron; his eyes were sealed with shiny black lacquer. Then Sorger had wonderfully senseless thoughts and fell asleep again, filled with longing for an invented world that would permeate the real world and incorporate it in one vast invention.
In the morning, the sun shone on an empty wooden clock case standing in one corner of the room. Sorger visited the corpse in the mortuary. The skiing instructor lay like a doll in his coffin. The folds of his eyelids extended to his temples; one eye, which was not entirely closed, glistened. He was wearing the woolen cap in which he had almost always been seen, with the inscription: Heavenly Valley; a turquoise amulet hung from his neck.
Sorger stood on the sidewalk outside the building. The porter, in a uniform with brass buttons, was walking back and forth outside the gate; all over the street his discarded cigarette butts were smoking. Over his head hung an American flag; beside it the windblown shoots of a dark-green trailing plant flapped against the wall. A large drum of cable was rolled past. Clearly delineated clouds were piled on other, vaporous clouds, near and at the same time far.
Outside the village, Sorger took a funicular that went up into the mountains. The car swayed as people got in, their ski boots crackled underfoot like burning faggots. Still, there were good faces in this crowd. Out in the snow, children were running around; when they fell, they picked themselves up and ran on, moving like cheerful little wheels.
When he arrived at the top, Sorger attached himself to a group of strangers for no other reason than that they were all wearing light-colored fur coats; but after a while he went on alone. No one had been there since the snowfall. The air was warm but the snow was not melting. It was deep
but so powdery that the ground could be seen here and there.
Sorger climbed until there was nothing to be heard. After crossing a ridge, he saw the Rockies proper; they were a dull reddish-yellow, and beyond them a white cloud bank was drifting past. He ran up the slope until his face was plastered with pine needles, then stopped as though he had come to a forbidden precinct. No bird song; only the still-distant Indian shapes of the mountaintops. Ahead of him, at the edge of a deep gully, stood a solitary mountain pine; beside it scrub oak, with snowflakes whirling between the dry leaves. Though there was nothing whatever to be seen, the tree gave off a sound: a faint but distinct whirring, which went on for a while and started up again after a silence. And then the whirring was heard for the third time, not from the same tree, but from another solitary pine far down in the gully. In the next moment, plunging vertically, a flock of shrill, white-bellied birds landed on both trees.
Sorger stood in the deep snow as in an extra pair of boots and looked down into the great, yellow-misty plain, which from the foot of the mountains extended eastward for thousands of miles. In this landscape there would never be a war. He washed his face in the snow and began to whistle monotonously. He put snow in his mouth, but only whistled the louder. He coughed and he sobbed. Then he bowed his head and grieved for the dead man (and the other dead).
When he looked up, he had the impression that the dead were laughing uproariously at him. He laughed with them. The present blazed and the past glittered. The thought of not-being-around-anymore gave him profound pleasure. He had a vision of the thicket on the riverbank. “No ecstasy!” (Never again.) To conjure up ecstasy, he looked about for a landmark. In the snow-covered, sunlit gully he distinguished a shimmering furrow—the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Involuntarily he cried out, and a faint echo came back at him from a bush. He was overcome with melancholy and lust.
Again, on the way back to Mile-High City, bunches of hard grass rolling over the frozen snow. A single bush cast an enormous shadow on the bare plain. Fervid expectation. But even if nothing happened, that would be what he expected. That would enable him to play a game: everything is (perfectly) possible, and just as an earthquake gave rise to a human dance, meaningless being-alive engendered a meaningful game.
Was there no one else in the plane that carried you farther east that night? Your row of seats was empty, and the backrests in front of you were upright in the dim light reflected from the roof of the cabin.—The even hum in the deep, half-darkened cavern provided a background music that preserved the passenger’s connection with the past few hours. He thought of “his people” and made plans to see them soon; he was determined never to be late again. The dead skiing instructor brought the members of Sorger’s own family alive for him. Once upon a time he had felt responsible for his brother and sister. There had been a bond between them that linked them all in a circle. Of late they had had little opportunity for a language in common (they hadn’t lost it, but it had become a kind of memory exercise that they just reeled off). Brother and sister had embraced for the first time at the death of their parents. That, at least, was how it looked to the daydreamer, who saw the lights of the towns below him as paths in a cemetery and then as constellations. Then they had fallen silent for many years, at first in indifference, then in hostility. Each regarded the others as lost. When his brother and sister came to Sorger’s mind, it was in the form of a sudden death notice (and they too, he felt sure, expected nothing more of their brother than the news of his death). True, they often appeared in his dreams, sometimes talking to each other as they had never done in reality; but more often they were malignant corpses, lying around the house where they were born, impossible to get rid of. Because they had never become explicit enemies, there was no possibility of reconciliation.
It didn’t even occur to Sorger that his relations with them might become “as before.” He wanted only to be as clear as he was now that the outside world had become a living dynamic space behind his forehead—then perhaps different social forms would be self-evident. After that, he saw the other villagers, most of whom he had hitherto regarded as a group of people malevolently looking forward to his death; and now he knew that the opposite was true—they had always sided with him in spite of his going away; they had thought he was in the right.
He wrote mental letters to his brother and sister and added friendly insults. Question: “Aren’t these plans too contrived?” And the self-assured answer: “I’ll just have to make them come true.”
The sound of the plane changed. The traveler’s exhilaration left him; and he went on speaking in silence (putting down each word in his thoughts, as though writing it): “What of it? If there is no universal law for me, I shall gradually give myself a personal law that I shall have to observe. Before the day is out, I shall frame its first article.”
Clouds puffed past the window, and then at the edge of his field of vision the City of Cities emerged from the gray of dawn like a field burned over and still dimly glowing here and there, while the plane circled over the vacant stormy ocean and the sun rose above the sea mist. When the wheels touched down, the lights went on in the cabin and some of the passengers clapped their hands. In applause for the landing or for the city? And then it came to Sorger that he had not been traveling alone.
The man ahead of him on the way out looked familiar. The man turned around, both nodded, and only then did they realize that they were unknown to each other. At the exit the stranger stopped Sorger, made a slight bow, and invited him to share a cab with him. It turned out that they came from the same country. “Actually, I was intending to go straight on to Europe,” said Sorger. But then he followed the man as if that were a part of his law. In the cab, he looked up at the relaxed faces in the buses alongside, and thought: Actually, I’d rather have … The man looked him in the eye: “Forgive me. Have you a little time for me? I need your goodwill. You look so available.”
They parted company in midtown, surrounded on all sides by panting joggers, and arranged to meet again later. In attempting to visualize the man, Sorger, who had not had enough sleep, saw only a half-eaten apple in the man’s hand—seeds glistened on the core.
As a rule, Sorger had to “work” himself into a new place; it was some time before he felt at home there. But in the megalopolitan hotel he immediately felt sheltered. His corner room in the tapering tower-like edifice had two windows, one facing west, the other south. Westward, the eye flew to the reservoir in the great mid-city park and rested there—southward, it passed over an intricate pattern of rooftops, below which the network of streets remained invisible, and leapt straight to the horizon, which was barred from end to end by giant office buildings, and it was as though the true metropolis began only with this distant blue. The varicolored area of flat-roofed apartment houses between Sorger and the barrier seemed a region apart, from which the cars, honking their horns but hidden in the chasm-like streets, seemed much farther removed than the numerous planes roaring overhead. Turning away from the west window and the reservoir, Sorger, in an instantaneous dream, saw this self-contained system as a shut-down factory. Gulls skimmed the light-gray surface of the reservoir; in the other window appeared the two spires of a cathedral, not nearly as high as the surrounding high-rise buildings, and Sorger felt his fatigue, which only a moment before had bordered on exhaustion, metamorphosed into self-mastery and strength. He saw the stranger’s face distinctly: the cheeks looked as if all their muscles had been knotted together, a strand of hair cut across his forehead and seemed prolonged by the notch of his lower lip; he heard his voice abruptly rising and falling as though he were looking for the right pitch. The severe lines of the high-rise buildings, the glitter of the planes, the wailing of the police sirens—Sorger had the impression that a lasso had been thrown: the whole city was being hoisted into his room.
He was staying at a so-called residential hotel. Many of the guests lived there for a quite a while, often with their families. Forgetting his need for slee
p, he rode down to the lobby under the auspices of an elevator man in a braided uniform. At every floor, grownups got in, accompanied by children (with flexed knees), all talking at once in different languages. By the end of the protracted descent Sorger had become “one of the elevator crowd” and as such he bounced out into the street.
He had time for detours. As he made his way in the sunlight, his sleepy grogginess turned to erotic self-assurance. Was it his fatigue which, more intensely at each detour, made many places seem like repetitions, separated by wide, flashing expanses?
By way of getting ready for the stranger, he walked slowly into the park and stopped, facing one of the granite boulders which jut out of the grass like the wing tips of buried airplanes. Looking up, he saw people passing through a wide, still-shady hollow between two hills, like Indians in the Far North; here and there in this unbroken procession he saw reminders of his dead. Not because of similarities; it sufficed to immerse himself in the big-city crowds as they moved this way and that, to dwell on an insignificant gesture, the outline of a cheek, a rapid glance, a headband, and quite naturally, without dream or evocation, the departed would enter into the picture, but without obstructing the general movement (as often happens in dreams); on the contrary, giving it new life. Unlike any other landscape, the Big City swept “his people” along in its movement, not only the living, but the resurrected dead as well.