by Peter Handke
Seeing his dead walking sprightly in the crowd, the survivor involuntarily rubbed his hands against the grooves in the granite, for joy at his new understanding of time, which until then he had thought of as purely and simply hostile. Here time no longer meant loneliness and death, but reunion and shelter; and, for the length of one lucid moment (when would it slip away?), he conceived of time as a “God” who was “good.”
Yes, he had the word, and time became a light in the middle of the city, shining in the glass globe of a park lamp lit up by the morning sun. The thick, cloudy, dusty glass, containing the shadow of an electric light bulb enlarged by the sun, flared up in the city mist and led his gaze onward to running dogs, from these to a bright-colored pile of clothes in the fork of a tree, and from these to the children playing ball down below and the still shadowy-dark ball at their feet.
Like primeval man, he moved on to partake elsewhere of the daylight that was beginning anew on every object. The eyeball of a man coming toward him, a shimmering metal box, and the pale moon seemed joined into a triangle. Too much light. Alone and released from his ties with the disciplined gravity of natural forms, how was he to avoid the folly and incoherence of ecstasy?
He went into a coffee shop and read the paper. It had a weather map on which the various regions were indicated only by “Bitter cold,” “Snow showers,” “Mild,” “Foggy, then sunny.” As he immersed himself in the map, amid the clatter of china and the soft radio music, these coalesced to form a cozy late-autumn continent in whose biggest city he was “drinking coffee” and “reading the paper” like a citizen of long standing. And here, as he glanced at the sunlit buses outside (the passengers sitting on benches placed lengthwise were visible only from behind as glossy hairdos in different colors), Sorger, more confident of the future, experienced his second return to the Western world. And with that the place in which he then happened to be began to take on importance.
The coffee shop was very narrow, with a single row of seats, which led deep into a kind of tunnel. (At the end of the tunnel a luminous sign read: “Women/Water.”) The subway entrance was directly outside the front window, and some of the people passing horizontally on the street would suddenly vanish down the stairs, moving obliquely out of the picture, while others rose head first into the rectangle of the window.
Behind Sorger were Big City voices, not always free from accent, but even when there was an accent, so very self-assured. He was struck by the number of children, which here, of all places, seemed surprising. A child came in and wanted to buy something they didn’t have. Sorger heard the child sigh. At that moment someone at the cash desk behind Sorger was making out a check in a loud voice. As he said the date (all sounds died away, only the radio music went softly on and the steam from the coffee machine seemed to move through the date), a general breathlessness set in and time became increasingly active (for a brief instant Sorger saw an enormous silhouette over a river landscape) and irradiated the room with a warming wave of light.
For all this the eyewitness had only the words “century” and “peacetime”; he saw calendar leaves falling as in a silent film. The goddess Time did not remove the coffee shop, which suddenly began to glitter along with the tin ashtrays and sugar bowls (which became gold and silver), from that day’s date, but connected it with the dates of past days, until the room (becoming not strange but more and more homelike) encompassed all those inventions, discoveries, sounds, images, and forms down through the centuries which make for a possibility of humanity.
All those present breathed as one. Light became matter, and the present became history; at first painfully convulsed (for this moment there was no language), then calm and matter-of-fact, Sorger wrote, to give the force of law to what he had seen, before it vanished: “What I am here experiencing must not pass away. This is a law-giving moment; absolving me of my transgression, for which I alone was responsible and which has weighed on me ever since, it puts me, as an individual capable of participating only by chance, under obligation to intervene as consistently as possible. At the same time, it is my historic moment: I have learned (yes, I am still capable of learning) that history is not a mere sequence of evils, which someone like me can do nothing but despise—but has also, from time immemorial, been a peace-fostering form that can be perpetuated by anyone (including me). I have just found out that I, hitherto a mere witness (though sometimes thinking myself completely into others), belonged to this history of forms, and that, along with the people in this coffee shop and those passing by outside, I, inspired with new life, am actually playing a part in it. Thus the night of this century, during which I searched my face obsessively for the features of a despot or a conqueror, has ended for me. My history (our history, friends) shall become bright, just as this moment has been bright—up until now, it could not even begin; conscious of our guilt, yet giving allegiance to no one, not even to others conscious of their guilt, we were unable to vibrate in harmony with the peaceful history of mankind; our formlessness only engendered new guilt. For the first time I have just seen my century in the light of day, open to other centuries, and I had no objection to living at the present time. I was even glad to be the contemporary of you contemporaries, and to be a citizen of the earth among others; and I was sustained (beyond all hope) by an exultant feeling not of my immortality but of man’s. I believe in this moment; in writing it down; I make it my law. I declare myself responsible for my future, I long for eternal reason and will never again be alone. So be it.”
Sorger stared at himself in the coffee-shop mirror, empty, exhausted, petrified, as though emerging from the depth of the centuries; on that day he was moved by his own face.
Looking up, he was not at all surprised to see, in the throng of people outside, the two women he had met in Earthquake Park on the West Coast. He smiled, and after gracefully giving him their sign, the two women vanished into the subway: they would often meet again.
Then a strange transformation occurred: the crowd outside the window began to move faster and faster, became more dense, face pressed against face, and at length—each individual in hurrying past almost frighteningly showing all his characteristics—filled the whole street. Thousands of eyes came glowing toward him. The image reeled and he knew that he had once again slept for a few moments. He felt the warm blood in his arms as a bond with his forebears, and looked forward to seeing the man from the plane: “Shall I recognize you? And what will you tell me?”
Still in the coffee shop, Sorger, in observing the scratched tabletop, found his way back to “his” earth forms. As he sat there in the low, dark, ground-floor room as though walled off from the towering Big City on all sides of him, a shimmer of the frozen river emerged from the wintry night; the shuttle buses crossed the newly regenerated West Coast pass and drove into the eastern morning light as over a continental divide, and behind them, clearly visible in the rising mist, the ocean waves rose and fell. Not only the bruised tabletop but also the floor of the coffee shop imitated the surface of the earth. Near the cash desk it formed a slight hollow, and for a terrifying moment Sorger felt that the ground was gone from under his feet, as though the floorboards had been laid on the bare, unleveled earth; and through this irregularity of the room the city became, in its very depths, a living and powerful natural organism. Going out into the street, where the humped sidewalk extended the coffee-shop floor, Sorger seemed to inhale the whole rocky island in one breath. Moving on the concrete slabs of the sidewalk intensified his conquest of space and gave it permanence. He experienced the subsoil of the city, which only a short while before had risen into the air from lifeless pavement. Now the buildings no longer seemed to have been plunked down in the landscape, they had become an integral part of it, as though the skyscrapers were really at home on this rocky island. Indeed, the city gradually became a village-like settlement in which small houses with bay windows stood side by side with high-rise buildings. A woman with a polka-dot scarf on her head, carrying a loaf of bread in a strin
g bag, was waiting for the bus, holding by the hand a child with a school bag. The summer lived on in a brick sunk deep into the tar, and the rain-filled holes in the asphalt foreshadowed the rural winter with its vast expanses of ice.
At one point Sorger stopped among towering buildings in the awareness of being at the geographical summit of New York. There he saw a locust tree, losing not only its leaves but whole branches as well in the mountain wind.
In the city on the West Coast, Sorger had never been on his way to see anyone; now he had this man from the plane, and he was going to see him. The stranger’s name was Esch, and again he looked at Sorger as unswervingly as that morning in the cab, as if he had had Sorger’s face before him throughout his absence.
They sat in a spacious restaurant, at first almost alone, with many empty tables around them, but these were soon occupied by the swarm of diners who swept into the restaurant with the coming of night. All evening the subway shook the ground under them. They were sitting in a corner booth, and when they raised their heads, they came into contact with the leaves of a potted rubber tree. The far end of the room was white with steam from the kitchen; sometimes the dishes moved like paddle wheels.
At first sight, the stranger’s lips were very pale, but after a while Sorger stopped noticing them. Much of the time, even in speaking, eating, and drinking, the stranger held his head propped on one hand. He said (repeatedly sticking his tongue out): “You mustn’t imagine that I want to ask you questions. I don’t want to get acquainted with you. When I thought about our appointment during the day, I regretted my impulse. I toyed with the thought of not showing up—and I’m certain it was the same with you.”
Involuntarily, Sorger hung his head. When he looked up, it seemed to him for an eerie moment that he was looking into his own wide-open eyes; only then did he realize that the stranger was crying. At the same time, the color of those eyes became a thing apart (as did his bare forehead). The two men moved deeper into the booth, until no one else could see them. The stranger asked Sorger for a handkerchief, blew his nose, and said: “Listen to me for a while.” He spoke of “business failure,” “inability to compete,” “wife and children,” “money,” and the “impossibility of returning to Europe.” He summed up his story in three outcries: “I know nothing!” “All I can do is clench my fist.” And in the end, simply: “Poor me!”
Sorger summoned up his power, transformed himself (with difficulty) into the booth where they were sitting, and surrounded his chance acquaintance, who shook his head in surprise at the state he had got into and from time to time politely asked for (and obtained) Sorger’s handkerchief. Sorger (as booth) enfolded the stranger until little by little the man’s rigid torso came to life, put on the at first grotesque but then winning face of a child, and finally rubbed his arms, out of which, as he said, his “fear flew away.” And then in the deep space of night Sorger felt a shudder of creation pass over him and, surprised at himself, wished to be physically united with this man, as though there were no other way of keeping him alive. But then one of those glances that want everything to be different proved sufficient, and in it the stranger was able to lean back, as it were. Later Sorger deliberately looked the other way, as though one could cure the sick world just by disregarding it for a while.
From the start he had the impression of listening to his own story—not because of any resemblance in the stories, but because in this man’s words of self-accusation he recognized the voice that had often denied him, too, the right to live. But speaking from another man’s mouth (and no longer a silent litany within himself), this voice did not condemn him, Sorger; it was identifiable as the absurdity which sometimes stifled others as well as himself. And so Sorger, opening the “gates of his senses” and stepping back from himself and his companion, was able to become the “laughing witness,” who fitted them both into a serene order; though moved by the stranger’s misfortune, he felt, as he listened and watched him, the carefree pleasure of a sympathetic audience. From time to time, he even smiled, and noticing his smile, the still hesitant Esch took heart and spoke freely.
To describe his despair, Esch displayed it; not that he acted it out; he merely commanded the only fitting gestures and words for it and had the presence of mind to use them at the right moment. Portraying himself, fervent and at the same time laconic, he pictured his misfortune and became the prophet of truth; in this way (with Sorger as the indispensable opposite), he averted panic and even, though without overdoing it, showed himself attentive to his audience, anticipating—while going on imperturbably with his lament—his every move, pouring wine, reaching for the check, etc. In the end, he mastered his condition so fully that he was able to frame it in a sequence of burlesque signs. He said: “I could cry the whole time—just watch me!” And true enough, he actually produced a tear or two. In the next moment he displayed his trembling hands—whereupon beads of sweat appeared on his forehead and immediately disappeared. There followed a calm interval, which the narrator (again at the proper moment) broke off by whispering in his listener’s ear: “I’ve nearly finished”—then picked up the plate with the check and a pencil on it and, looking down at it, calmly told the end of his story: “In the afternoon, the cliffs of death were still rising from the park and in the zoo the animals’ cages were empty. But now in the evening, what a pleasure to hold a plate with a pencil rolling on it. I wish us all a long life.”
He concluded his performance with a parody of himself. He pointed to an aquarium, where small chunks of granite served as decor for the ornamental fishes; and then, earnestly, with nothing offensive in mind, called Sorger’s attention to the neighboring booth, where—there was little else to be seen—a woman’s shapely leg was swinging up and down, and swore, without batting an eyelash, “to die a natural death.” (Previously, when he was asked if he wished to die, only his pupils had darted to one side.)
Then the stranger got hungry. He ate, not greedily, but with almost ceremonious movements, drinking his wine in small sips, contemplating every morsel at length and putting it into his mouth with a look of affection. He said that he felt food and drink literally “sparkling” in his mouth. Then he smiled, and sustained the smile for several minutes, as though storing up energy.
Sorger watched him eat and, learning from him, felt warmth on his forehead. His face was covered over by the stranger’s face, and in the end there was no other.
They sat in the booth as on a bridge; it sufficed to exchange a grin of complicity now and then. Each sank into his private thoughts, but they enjoyed them in common. “A god had his sport with them.” Once Sorger fell asleep with his eyes open and was awakened by his companion’s voice, but heard only the final sentence: “I’ve never told anyone that before.” What had the man said?
Once more, to be sure, the stranger’s misery resumed its hold on him. On his way back from the toilet he got lost and without noticing sat down at another table, with other people. There he sat motionless, staring into space, until Sorger went and got him.
But before that, hadn’t Esch missed several times when reaching for his wineglass? Hadn’t he put on his jacket inside out? “Power, come back to me.” Sorger became his advocate, commanding, forbidding (and in his retrospective fear the other was glad to obey), releasing him from pain, predicting good things—and in the end gave him his blessing, whereupon the last vestige of blackness poured out of the man’s mouth and, as the hatcheck girl later remarked, the “gentleman’s” face revealed only a “sad contentment.”
They did not go out “into the night”; rather, they passed from the restaurant to the street as from one city room to another. In the doorway leading into the open, Esch, as though he were the owner of these rooms, made a gesture of invitation to Sorger.
Sorger had once heard of a strange sacred mountain in China which was forbidden to foreigners. From its summit, the natives (when the weather was right) could see their shadows on the clouds below and read their future in the shape of the shadows.
A special shadow appeared that night on the yellowish-lit street along which the two of them took each other home, from south to north, from downtown to uptown, traversing half the length of the city. This shadow showed itself on one of the many clouds of dense white steam which, smelling of hot rolls and often hissing softly, rose through the asphalt and, in the corners of Sorger’s eyes taking on the form of fleeing dogs, were driven swiftly into the darkness by the night wind. Near an underground work site from which an uncommonly large sheet-metal ventilator protruded far above the surface of the street, the white steam was much thicker; and it did not seep off to one side, but high in the air formed a persistent but constantly renewed mass, upon which one of New York’s intensely bright streetlamps cast the shadow of a small tree. When, ceding to the wind and the rhythmic bursts from below, this mass of steam broadened or lengthened and narrowed, the tree shadow on it expanded or shrank with it—for a moment it was bloated and blurred and in the next it was small, shrunken, deep black, and clearly delineated. Though neither a word nor a sign was exchanged, the two men stopped in unison to contemplate the shadow branches (on which a few individual leaves were discernible) on the clouds of steam. True, the playful silhouette answered no questions about the future, but thanks to their perception of this commonplace sight (a sight not “forbidden,” not “sacred,” but accessible to all) the rest of their walk was dominated by a present which encompassed them both without distinction, and with every step on the pavement they sensed the beneficent hardness of the earth.
Was this beauty on the humpbacked avenue ephemeral (did the two foreign nightwalkers encounter it by mere chance)? Would the unique scene—the yellow light, the glaring white steam, the tree shadow that moved back and forth on it—soon vanish for all time in Eternal Formlessness?