by Peter Handke
Now a stooped figure is coming out, a boy with a book in his hand; he straightens up to become a man, and I am again immersed in the wood smell and summer warmth of my father’s shed; I’ve gone directly to the fields from school, and I’m sitting there at the table with my homework, barefoot; in one corner I see a napkin-covered basket with bacon and bread in it and a jug of cider; in the other the dead nettle plant from which, though there isn’t a breath of air in the room, cloud after cloud of pollen puffs trace on the floor the pattern of sunlight formed by the cracks and knotholes in the boards. I hear the voices of my parents as they work toward each other from the two ends of the field (monosyllabic greeting, followed by an exchange of words—Father cursing, Mother laughing at him—all leading up to their afternoon snack together in the field); I play solitaire, listen to the rumbling of the thunder, stretch out on the bench, dream, am awakened by the droning of a hornet as a whole squadron of bombers comes shooting out of the mist, eat an apple, the skin of which shows the bright image of the leaf that shaded it, and on the stem the shriveled blossom, go outside, straighten up in my turn into a grownup, a man, take a deep breath, and recognize the hut as the center of the world, where the storyteller sits in a cave no larger than a wayside shrine and tells his story.
So friendly was the room into which I now looked down, and such power rose up from it that even the Big Bang, so it seemed to me, would be powerless to harm this dolina; both blast and radiation would pass over it. And looking ahead, I saw the people at work in that fertile bowl at my feet as the remnant of mankind after the catastrophe, starting to farm again. Yes, this place tucked away in the dead desert struck me as a self-sufficient farm where the earth still fed its inhabitants. And no thing in the world had been lost; true, abundance was a thing of the past, but there was at least one viable exemplar of every basic substance and of every basic form. And since every necessity was both on hand and a rarity, it showed the beauty of the beginning. And precious was not only what was at hand but also everything that could be seen, the grain in the fields as well as the shadow on the stone—and in this imagining I was reinforced by the people of the Karst, for, living in want and menaced by the void since time immemorial, had they not a hundred names for a corncob, an ear of wheat, a bunch of grapes, and just as many for every one of their few birds, all sounding like nicknames (though neither “throttler” nor “mockingbird,” neither “wolf’s milk” nor “kitchen bell”4 was among them), as though the many names were intended to fence the thing in and preserve it. The image of this plantation sunk into the Karst earth, protected from any enemy incursion, secure from atom bombs, under the open sky, as a goal to strive for is still with me, nor have I forgotten the tootling of the transistor in the stone hut—its prize song. Image? Chimera? Fata morgana? No, image, because it is still in force.
Although my time in the Karst was entirely made up of walking, stopping, and going on, I never had my usual guilty conscience about being a good-for-nothing idler. My sense of freedom every time I arrived somewhere was not the consequence of a release. I had no feeling of detachment; on the contrary, I knew that I had at last become attached. Didn’t I secretly say to myself immediately after crossing the threshold of the plateau: “Now we are here!”; didn’t I see my solitary self in the plural? Just as my father’s daily chores, plugging a hole, unwinding a rope, chopping kindling, were for a time rituals designed to make my mother get well, so I imagined that by investigating the Karst I was serving a cause, and not only a good cause but a great and glorious one. Many motives were at work together: to prove myself in my own way worthy of my forebears and to save what they stood for; the desire to be the disciple—his only one, no doubt—my teacher so longed for; an irresistible feint in my duel—a strange obsession—with my enemy; to earn the love of the most lovable of women precisely by going into the desert and enduring all manner of hardships—but transcending all this there was something that I call the desire or appetite for an orgy. What sort of orgy? I have always believed in dreams, so I shall answer with the story of a dream. In a glass cage, intercity bus and funicular in one, the same passengers kept meeting time and time again for a group trip to the Empire of the Karst. Not a single word was spoken. The crossing was marked by a shimmering, towering Indian mountain, which any child could have climbed, under the bluest of skies. This was the last stopping place. Our group was now complete. From here on, nothing could be seen of the country; there was only the vehicle, moving as quietly as if it were standing still, and with it the passengers all at a distance from one another, no two together. True, this one and that one were known to me from the street; the man at the ticket window, “my shoemaker,” a shopgirl; ordinarily we greeted one another, but once we boarded this vehicle, none of us gave any sign of recognition. Instead of exchanging glances, we sat motionless, united in expectation. The more often we set out on this trip, always from a busy station accessible to all, the more festive became the light in the cage. Rapture awaited us at the end of our journey, in the heart of the Empire, the greatest joy a human being could know; the bliss of being gathered into nothingness. Of course it never happened, we never even came near it. On the last journey, however, one of my traveling companions smiled at me, so giving himself to be recognized and at the same time recognizing me. An orgy of recognition: instead of rapture and confluence, shock and oneness, with the verb corresponding to “orgy” translated as “to yearn steadfastly,” and the place name Orgas as “Land of Demeter” or “Meadow” or “Fruitland.”
In reality, the Karst is a land of want and the crossing is not marked by a strange Indian mountain. It’s long after the border before you notice, to your surprise, that you are climbing and that something has changed. First the wind, then the flowing brooks are gone, there’s not even a trickle of water; dark pines have replaced light-colored deciduous trees; conversely, the brown clay and gray-black stone, so long the companions of your journey, have abruptly given way to a massive chalk-white, covered by only the scantest of sod; stubbly pasture has taken the place of succulent meadows. Though the plain down below is still near, the towns and rivers still clearly visible—you can even see an airfield with a steeply rising jet plane and a drill ground with hopping soldiers—the plateau is as quiet as if you were far out on the open sea. At first you had sparrows flying ahead of you; now it’s butterflies. It’s so still that you hear the sound when a butterfly chasing a falling leaf grazes the ground with its wings. You hear last year’s dry pinecones crackling, one high overhead, the next at eye level, and so on, a graduated sequence, a constant chirping until sunset, while from this year’s fresh pinecones the resin drips steadily—dark spots in the dust of the path, getting larger and larger.
Stick to the path; even so, you won’t meet anyone; the dark men escorting you to the left and right, fanning out now and then into the pale savanna, are juniper bushes. Hours, days, years later, you will be standing at the foot of a white-flowering wild cherry tree, with a honeybee in one blossom, a bumblebee in another, in the third a fly, in the fourth a beetle, in the sixth a butterfly. What glitters like a water hole on the path up ahead is a silvery snakeskin. You pass long rows of woodpiles, which on closer scrutiny prove to be camouflaged ammunition dumps; you pass round heaps of stones, which turn out to be the entrances to underground storehouses; if you touch them with your foot, the rock is cardboard. At every step, grasshoppers will squirt up at you from the middle strip of grass. A dead black-and-yellow salamander moves almost imperceptibly along the wagon rut. When you bend over, you discover that it’s being carried by a procession of dung beetles. After all these tiny creatures, the first animal of any size, a white-faced fox, a dormouse wrapped around a branch, will look to you like a brother. That breeze in the solitary tree over there—a moment later you feel it on your face. Your resting place is a cave; to explore it you won’t need a lamp, because daylight shines in from the far end and through a few holes in the roof. Water will drip on your overheated forehead, and in a nich
e there are quail’s eggs, not bullets but stone balls, rounder and lighter in color than in any mountain stream. As you go your way, you shake them in your hand, and their smell, quite unlike the stinking heaps of bat’s dung, will bring the widely ramified clay chambers of the Karst caves into your room as long as you live.
Now you can go naked; the wild sow, one enormous black-brown hump, which bursts grunting and panting out of the underbrush on your right, followed by two piglets no bigger than hares, and crashes on into the underbrush on your left, has no eyes for you. Your feet stamp the ground, your shoulders soar, and your eyeballs touch the sky.
At your next resting place, you hear a long-drawn-out croaking of frogs in the stillness; a delicate monotone in the desert. You will go toward it and come to a puddle that takes up a long stretch of the path. The water is clear, a single feather is floating on it. The deep-red bottom shows a hexagonal crack, the hoof prints of two deer, any number of arrow-shaped bird tracks pointing in all directions, a cuneiform inscription that asks to be deciphered. You find its counterpart in the sky where a patch of azure blue the size of your big toe appears in the middle of honeycomb clouds—speaking of cirrus clouds, the Karst people say: “The sky is blossoming,” just as they say: “The ocean is cascading,” where we would speak of a rough sea. The feather will blow away, the wind will raise a swell in the long puddle. Stretch out on the bank, using your bundle of clothes as a pillow. You’ll fall asleep. One of your hands will pass between your knees and take root in the earth, you will hold the other to one ear (the torn corners of our eyes, brother, come from listening). In your dream you will hear the pond spoken of as a lake, and see a boat with your hazel stick as a rudder in the rushes by the shore; a dolphin will spring up from nowhere, its back bent into a dolina by the weight of the fruit it is carrying. Your sleep will be short but refreshing, and you will be roused by raindrops on your ear—there can be no gentler awakener. You will get up and dress. You will not have been out of the world, but for once wholly in it. And sure enough, a duck from the savanna will come flying low, land gently on the puddle, and swim back and forth in front of you; and a cow that has lost its way will stop and drink. You will let the rain fall on you. It will make you so calm that butterflies will alight on you, one on your knee, another on the back on your hand, while a third will shade your brow.
As you continue on your way through the Karst, the sky will turn blue again (only the usual black pileup to the north, beyond Mount Nanos, will give you a feeling of “weather”); the trees will sough clockwise, each with its own music, and you will understand why, when the rustling of the oak trees was especially loud and penetrating, the ancients heard it as the voice of the oracle. You will take notes, and the scraping of your pen will be one of the most peaceful sounds under the sun. It will lead you back to the hundred villages and city quarters (the Karst movie house, the Karst dance hall, the Karst Wurlitzer), which, when night falls and the sky is again overcast, will be recognizable in the soundless wilderness by the circular glow here and there on the cloud cover. There you will be regaled with white bread, Karst wine, and that special ham that will give you an aftertaste of your walk with all its smells, from the rosemary of the middle strip to the thyme at the foot of boundary walls and the juniper berries of the savanna. You will need no more for the present. And one day in the course of your years, you will come to the place where the sunlit patch of fog on the horizon far below you will be the Adriatic; and knowing the region as you do, you will be able to distinguish the freighters and sailboats in the Gulf of Trieste from the cranes in the shipyards of Monfalcone, the castles of Miramar and Duino, and the domes of the basilica of San Giovanni di Timavo. And then, at the bottom of the dolina at your feet, between two boulders, you will discover the ultra-real, many-seated, half-rotted boat, rudder and all, and involuntarily, taking the part for the whole (you will then be free enough), name it ARK OF THE COVENANT.
A time will come of course when walking, even walking in the heartland, will no longer be possible, or no longer effective. But then the story will be here and reenact the walking.
On that first trip, I was in the Karst for barely two weeks, on just about every day of which I was someone else. I was not only a seeker after traces but also a day laborer, a bridegroom, a drunk, a village scribe, a member of a wake. In Gabrovica I saw the bell that had fallen out of the church tower; it had dug deep into the ground and children were playing on top of it; in Skopo, emerging from the wilderness, I frightened the solitary old woman hoeing in the dolina; in Pliskovica I went into the only church that was unlocked on weekdays, and sketched the black-and-yellow hornet that was crawling over the altar cloth; in Hrusevica, brookless like every other village in the Karst, I marveled at the stone statue of St. John of Nepomuk, who as a rule is found only on bridges; in Komen I stepped out of the movies into a moonlit night, brighter and more silent than the Mojave Desert, through which Richard Widmark had just fought his way; got lost in the chestnut forests of Kostanjevica, home of the only tall trees in the Karst, where the ankle-deep rustling of past years’ leaves and the crunching of nutshells underfoot can be compared to no other sound in the world; strode through the freestanding portal of Temnica, which from the edge of the footpath leads out into the steppe and wilderness; bowed my head in Tomaj before the house where died the Slovene poet Sreko Kosovel, who when hardly more than a child celebrated the curative properties of his region’s pine trees, stones, and quiet paths, and—at the end of the war, when the alien monarchy ended and Yugoslavia began—entered (“clanked into”) his capital city of Ljubljana, where he, the brother of my waiter and my soldier, made himself the herald of the new era and, perhaps in the long run not brazen enough for that sort of thing, too much affected by the “stillness” (tišina, his favorite word) of the Karst—see his conspicuous jug-ear—was not long for this world.
An Indian squaw took me in, mistaking me for the son of the dead blacksmith in the next village. I never disabused her. She spoke with such certainty that I was glad to be taken for someone else, and in the end I was playing with conviction the role of a man who had returned to his home country after a long absence. When I spoke of incidents in my Karst childhood, the old woman shook her head and nodded by turns, a reaction that could only signify amazement at a story both incredible and credible. As I soon noticed, I took pleasure in my fabrications, all of which, to be sure, had some basis in fact and had to be both consistent and imaginative. Such invention was a part of my joy at being for once free; invention and freedom were one.
Yet this woman was the first person by whom I felt appreciated as well as recognized. In the eyes of my parents, I was always “too serious” (my mother) or “too dreamy” (my father); my sister, it is true, regarded me as the secret ally of her craziness; my girlfriend’s gaze when we met was often rigid with an embarrassment that melted only when at last—and I didn’t always succeed—I smiled at her from deep inside me; and even my teacher, who understood everything, once said—when in the course of a class excursion I had suddenly run off across the fields and into a thicket, just to get away! to be alone!—well, when I came back, he said with an undertone of irrevocable judgment: “Filip, you’re not right in the head.” The squaw of the Karst, on the other hand, gave me, heartwarmingly, the trust at first sight which, after a few days in her house, became an expectation, a wordless refutation of my constant self-disparagement (“I’ll never amount to anything”); an acquittal as surprising as it was reasonable; encouraging and protective; and so it has remained. And it was she who, before I had even opened my mouth, gave me credit for a sense of humor. At home I had often forbidden my mother to laugh, because her laugh reminded me of the way women guffawed when men were telling dirty jokes, and my school friends thought I was a killjoy, because when someone was telling a joke I’d point out a scratch in the tabletop or a loose button on his jacket just as he was coming to the punch line. Only my girlfriend, when we had been alone for a while, would sometimes manage—a
ddressing me in the third person as in eighteenth-century dialogues—to cry out in astonishment: “Why, he is an amusing fellow!” But whereas she had reacted to some little random remark of mine, my way of looking and listening was enough for my present hostess, and whatever she showed me or told me, she did it with the joyful gusto that an actor absorbs from an alert audience—so perhaps the so-called sense of humor is nothing other than a happy alertness. Though once, toward the end of my stay—the two of us were sitting at the kitchen table and I was just looking silently out into the yard—she said something different. Something contradictory? Or complementary? She said that I had inside me a great, silent, passionate tearfulness; it wasn’t just there, it was raging to get out, and that was my strength. She went on to tell me that once in Lipa, when it was almost dark in the church, a man had stood there alone and erect, and sung the Psalms in a firm yet delicate voice. What had struck her most was that he had held his eyes shut with the fingers of one hand. She stood up to act out the scene for me, and we both burst into tears over that absent man.