by Peter Handke
Yet, at the same time, they were fairy tales; for in answer to every word that questioned me, even if I had never seen the thing it stood for and even if it had long departed this world, the thing invariably gave rise to an image, or more precisely, a radiance.
One afternoon on the plateau I came across the last word my brother had ticked. As in many other cases, the date and place were supplied: “At the front.” In the early stages of the war he always carried the book with him; it was only at the end that he left it home, along with his jacket, “as a baptismal present.” The rest of the dictionary, more than half of it, showed no further pencil marks and seemed never to have been opened; there were no prewar blades of grass or wartime flies pressed between the pages.
There I sat, contemplating the one word, leafing back to the others: was this a map of the areas of the earth or only of their memory—or perhaps even their obituary? Was it only the fault of the wars that human language in the time I was living in, in my time, was so inexpressive that we speakers always had to emphasize something? Why, at the age of twenty, did I feel tired at the mere thought that some interlocutor might open his mouth? Why did speech—even my own—often banish me to a muffled middle-class living room (where the windows might be “deaf” rather than “blind”)? Why had words lost all meaning? Why was it only the rare mot juste that made me feel that I had a soul?
In the village, on my way to this spot, I always passed a house, one wall of which merged seamlessly with a boulder. Similarly, when I now looked up from the old words, I saw the upper edge of the book merging directly with the air. The book formed a ramp guiding my gaze to the foot of the southern chain of mountains (one Slovene name for which, in literal translation, was “underwing”). There I saw a bare declivity, somewhat veiled by distance, which, however, because of the spruce at the edge of my little plateau, seemed only a stone’s throw away. The slope, overgrown with grass, was hatched to the very top with a dense pattern of disused cow paths. These looked something like stairways, which occupied the whole breadth of the slope and crisscrossed to form nets. The large horizontal pattern was broken by a smaller one of vertical grooves, in which the clay-yellow water of the afternoon rain was now flowing. Seen from a distance, the water moved so slowly that I thought of oozing stalactites. The dead sloping pasture made me think of the cows which had climbed up and down it in the past, an image of slowness, of hulking bodies, stopping now and then to pull up grass, not jumping over any of the steps as sheep or dogs might have done, their udders grazing the tips of the grass, their hooves often getting stuck in the mud. Sometimes they slipped from level to level, thus gouging out channels for the rainwater. One beast jumped up on the one ahead and was dragged a bit of the way on its back. One raised its tail and urinated so violently that I almost thought I heard it, followed by a plopping of dung. And then I actually saw the steaming of urine on the paths. So slow was the procession that it called to mind the crossing of a great mountain range, the baggage train of a migration that had been going on since the beginning of time. And precisely the emptiness—the empty network, the deserted crisscrossing paths, the empty, slightly irregular serpentines—reinforced my impression of animal clumsiness. Here, in contrast to the terraces of a mine or gravel pit, there were no helmeted men with machines moving busily up and down the slope, but an aimless mass almost marking time, with lowered heads, on all fours or slithering on their hind parts, a caravan of carriers and slaves, coming from nowhere and heading nowhere, for which the slope was not even a stopping place, except in the event of a broken leg or an emergency slaughtering.
I thought again of my teacher. As a historian, he took a special interest in peoples who had vanished from the face of the earth. He began his course almost ritually with an example taken from his study of the Maya (because of which the students had given him a related nickname). As a student he had explored the Yucatan for years: “As a geographer,” he said, “I grew tan, and as a historian, pale—as pale as I am now.” The Maya, he said, had never succeeded in building a state, because their peninsula “lacks a great river. Think of the Euphrates and the Tigris, or of the Nile.” Nor had they known the wheel or the pulley or the windlass; the only form of Mayan wheel ever found had been part of a small toy. But what most impeded their political development was their inability to construct a supporting arch; they knew only “pseudo-arches,” incapable of sustaining the roof of a room, let alone a hall. Their one element of cohesion had been religion. Instead of the wheel, they had had the roller, and with it they built roads, used only for processions to their sanctuaries in the jungle. But every peasant’s hut was also regarded as a temple. All life was governed by the heavenly bodies, which were looked upon as sacred, because instructions for daily life could be read from them. The steles dedicated to the sun indicated the time to sow; the hieroglyphics engraved in the stone served as a clock. In these ancient inscriptions, ancestors were also honored; the popular religion demanded that every family should know its origin; the first man, the ancestor common to all, had been made of corn.
The decline of the Maya began when public religion gave way to private worship. “You see,” the teacher went on, “the families were rather unsociable, each kept to itself; the only bond between them had been public worship. But then they began to build chapels of their own, each for itself, at a distance from the others; forgotten was the idea that the house as such was hallowed. The bond was broken. It was then that the hieroglyphics on the steles came to an abrupt end. In the year 900 of our era,” said the teacher, “the last inscription was chiseled into a pillar not far from the grassy area which the Spaniards were to call the ‘Savanna of Freedom.’ Imagine the sparks in the flint, which was what most of the steles were made of.” The end of this people is most strikingly symbolized by the stairs on one of the pyramids: step after step richly decorated with sacred reliefs and glyphs, the sign for the morning star, the sign for the tree that gives the villagers shade, the signs for sun and day, which taken together signify “time”—but on the topmost step only “a few muddled, scratchy chisel marks.”
That stairway appeared to me in the empty sloping pasture. Much larger than the mound in our orchard at home, it actually had the shape of a pyramid and seemed with its hundred-odd steps, tapering toward the top, to reach the sky. I saw the words my brother had ticked climb the slope and then break off. Every line on the slope was an overturned hieroglyphic pillar, lying face down in the mud. The clayey brooks, welling up from scars in the earth, washed syllable after syllable away, until the whole place smoked like a field of ruins where not even the usual cherry trees had been spared. Seized with a need to mourn, I stood up, still holding my brother’s book. Nothing more was moving on the empty steps, not even a blade of grass; even the water stood still; and hadn’t being alive always meant simply being able to breathe with the flowing water, the waving grass, a rising branch? But what I wanted to mourn was not just a solitary death, it was something more: an annihilation. To annihilate means to do away not only with a particular human being but also with what gives the world its cohesion. To eliminate someone like my brother—who, unlike the great mass of those who speak and write, had the gift of bringing words and through them things to life, who never ceased to exercise that gift and to point out examples as he was doing now to me—was to kill language itself, the living tradition, the tradition of peace; it was the most unforgivable of crimes, the most barbarous of world wars.
But I was unable to mourn as I had wished. Instead, the phrase that had been the peasants’ watchword in their earliest uprising—“Our old right!”—kept spinning around in my head. Yes, from time immemorial we had raised a claim that should not have been allowed to lapse. And it had lapsed, because we ceased to raise it. And why did we always demand our right of someone else, some of an emperor, others of a God? Why didn’t we take it for ourselves, essential as it was for our self preservation, letting no one else intervene? There at last was a game in which we wouldn’t have had to
measure ourselves against anyone, a lonely game, a wild game—Father, the great game!
Back from the empty cow paths to put my thoughts in order, back to the book. I had been sitting and standing barefoot, and barefoot I strode back and forth outside the barn. The last word my brother had ticked had a double meaning. Translated, it meant both “to fortify oneself” and “to sing psalms.” (Immersing myself in these words was the exact opposite of my usual immersion in so-called breathtaking stories; time and again the words made me raise my head and my eyes.) I stopped and raised my head. By way of a ford marked by a tree, I was carried back to the bluish cavern of my seminary desk. Its back wall was the grooved mountain slope. A sun shone on it, low in the sky as shortly before setting and made brighter by the unlit spruce in front of it. The steps were thick bars of shadow leading to the summit, on which lay a thoroughly earthly glow. The light pinpointed the smallest shapes on the slope—a clump of grass, a half-overgrown hoof print, a molehill, a line of birds along a rivulet, a wild hare nearby—and connected them with one another by distinct interstices. I went on reading, my eyes at once in the book and on the mountain. My staring became a watching, as when in a strange crowd one knows that a familiar face or two must be present. Here in the sun, the resounding litany of the faithful which had begun in the dark church was resumed in a silent litany of words, with their many meanings. To breathe deeply was to yearn was to tense the strongest muscle. Violent anger was sobbing. Fireflies were June was a variety of cherry. The mower was a sandpiper was the belt of Orion. The grasshopper was the bridge of a violin was the inner partition of a nut was the upper part of a whip … A change of one letter transformed the word for a slight breeze into the word for a powerful flow, and another into a tempest, which was also the name for flying sand … At last, silent invocations took on human form, and I saw the absent ones appear on the steps, silhouetted by the word-light: my mother as “the woman who had ceased to be a handmaiden”; my father as “the man who never ceased to be a servant”; my sister as “the madwoman,” which, with a slight sound shift, became “the blessed”; my girlfriend as “the quiet one”; my teacher as “bitter sweetheart”; the village idiot as “he who stirs up wind while walking”; my enemy in the form of “a bruised heel”; and ahead of them all my brother “the pious,” a word which also designated “the serene.” And I?—I recognized myself, reader and onlooker in one, as the third party on whom everything hinged, without whom there could be no game, and who thus found in himself the salient features of the other players: my father’s white, servant’s feet and the torn corners of my brother’s eyes.
Of course it was only for a moment that this picture writing shimmered on the mountain slope; then all was reliefless emptiness and the sun had set. But I knew I could bring the picture writing back, that unlike grief it could be willed; the empty forms both of the cow paths and of the blind windows could be relied on; they were the seal of our right. “Brother, you must have walked there in the gray blueness.”
I shut my eyes. Only then did I notice that they were wet. But I was not weeping for myself or my family; no, the source of those tears was things and their words.
Behind my closed eyelids, the after-image of the cow paths: a stone-gray pattern. Now, a quarter of a century later, I see, there on the plateau, a man of indeterminate age. Barefoot, wearing an overcoat that’s too big for him, he begins to wave his arms. His arm waving becomes a continuous movement which, if it were not done with the whole hand, including the fist, would be something like writing. Was this “he” or “I”? It is still I. I no longer write in the air as I did as a child; instead, like a scientist who is at the same time a manual laborer, I make hatch marks on a sheet of paper lying on the stone-gray steps. That is the movement I have chosen for my story. Letter for letter, word for word, as chiseled in stone long years ago, I want the inscription to appear on my paper; I want it to be handed down recognizably thanks to my light hatch marks. Yes, I want my soft pencil strokes to join with the hardness of the stone as did the language of my forebears, in which the term for “the monotonous note of the finch” is derived from the word for “a single letter.” For, without the refuge of words, the earth, the black, red, greening earth, would be just one great desert, and I will no longer acknowledge any drama, any history other than the drama of the things and words of this beloved world—and I pray that the bomb which is threatening the cow-path pyramid will strike softly in the form of the word for “an elongated pear.” I shall find a word for the dark interior of a white chestnut blossom, the yellow of clay under the wet snow, the bit of blossom that clings to the apple, and the sound of a river fish leaping out of the water.
I opened my eyes again, and again walked back and forth outside the barn, faster and faster as though taking a running leap. Again I stopped. Sensing that my chest had become an instrument, I shouted. Filip Kobal—whose voice was so soft that he could never make himself heard, whom the prefects at the seminary had scolded because his prayers didn’t “carry”—shouted so loud that all who knew him would have looked at him with new eyes.
Something comparable had happened only once, at that same seminary. I had convinced myself that I was unable to sing, and then one day the teacher called on me to sing. With my heart in my mouth I had stood up and taken a deep breath. Then, in the midst of the sullenly brooding class, I had drawn from my innermost soul a strange and tender song, which had provoked first laughter, then awed embarrassment in my listeners, and which, it seemed to me, must always have been inside me. Now on the plateau, where I was alone, what came out of me was not singing, nor was it a bellowing or calling; it was a clear shout, imperiously demanding my right. With all my might I shouted the laconic or lyrical, monosyllabic or polysyllabic words of my brother’s book. The words went out over the countryside, calling forth on the empty cow paths an echo whose other name was “world sound.” And at every shout I saw the open ears of my forebears, the amused arching of their eyebrows, their joyful faces.
I propped up the book, touched it with my lips, and bowed down to the place. I cut a branch from the hazel bush near one corner of the barn, scratched the name of the place and the date into it: “Dobrava, Slovenija, Jugoslavija 1960,” and declared it to be our stele, the record of a new and different family history. How little hope I had of a future at the age of twenty (never would my king appear), how firm were my expectations concerning the present; and how weak or cautious is my voice now as I repeat the young man’s experience. Wasn’t it drowned out long ago by shouts converging on the plateau from all directions, by shouts of command on drill grounds, by field-gray soldiers on firing ranges, by the scraping of shovels in the village graveyard? No, wherever I may be, the blind windows and empty cow paths strike me as the hallmarks of a kingdom of recurrence, where a locomotive whistle can become equally well the cry of a pigeon or the shriek of an Indian. I can still feel on my shoulder the cord of my sea bag with the book of words in it. Mother, your son is still walking under the open sky.
Then, flinging myself upon the ground, I discovered once and for all what the spirit is.
Three
THE SAVANNA OF FREEDOM AND THE NINTH COUNTRY
THAT DAY I stayed on the plateau until the after-image of the sun left my retina. An axle seemed to be turning inside me, more and more slowly, bringing the things behind me into my field of vision. Beyond the northern mountains I saw a fiery cloud, which I situated exactly over the house of my parents. Heart, diamond, spade, and club shapes had been cut out of the west wall of the barn to let air in, and my father’s centuries-old desolation came blowing out of the black holes.
I left the place, backing away; and later, while walking, I kept turning back toward it. A little bird rose high over the edge of the plateau—as though it had just slipped from the hand of the dwarf who had hoped with its help to win the stone-throwing contest with the giant—and plummeted to the ground as though shot. The lake at the end of the valley looked like jelly in the dying light, and
I fancied it full of drowning bees, circling around with transparent wings.
Each time, I went there with head bowed and came back with head erect. A tablet was affixed to one of the houses at the entrance to this village. On such and such a day in the year 1941, it said, a meeting held here passed the first resolution on resistance to Fascism. (In every Slovene town or village I was to pass through, I found a house bearing the same inscription.) I, too, wanted to put up resistance. I made my decision not in a cellar but out on the street, without a meeting, all by myself. “Form a sentence with ‘fight’ in it,” I said to myself. Only then did I realize that there already was such a sentence and that it had as many meanings as an oracle. Once, in such a mood, I went into a wooden hut and brought the ax down on the chopping block with all my might. An elderly woman came in and asked me to split a pile of sawed logs. I struck so hard that the pieces flew in all directions—I can still feel one grazing my forehead. In one hour I earned an evening meal and a few locutions such as “to split light” for “to chop kindling.” Another time, a soccer ball bounced across my path and I kicked it so well that I was asked to join the game (to this day, I sometimes dream that I’m a forward on the national team). My shoes supported my ankles, and my father’s leather strap, no longer a mere wristlet, strengthened my hand.
In the evenings, Filip Kobal had his corner place in the Black Earth Hotel. No one, not even the militia on its constant rounds, asked me my name; everyone called me “the guest”; even the picture of Tito had been turned away from me and was looking up at a squadron of bombers. On the tables, instead of baskets piled high with variously shaped Austrian rolls, which at times could remind one of corpses thrown headlong into a mass grave, there were simple stacks of sliced white bread on the napkins that used to be called “bread cloths.” It was midsummer and sometimes warm enough for serving meals outside. I was usually so overheated when I got back that the breeze from the torrent made me feel pleasantly fanned. There was a stool by the open window of the dining room, and the waiter stood on it to take the dishes that the cook handed him. Next to the stool there was a concrete surface with deep grooves that looked something like piano keys: a bicycle stand, usually empty. This was where the lightning rod ended; the fact is that a day seldom passed without a storm, and the evenings in the open were brightened by the summer lightning, for which, as a secondary-school graduate, I knew the ancient Greek term “space eye.” July came, and the fireflies which had just been flitting through the bushes crept into the grass and vanished.