by Peter Handke
I saw myself at a goal. My purpose had been not to find my brother but to tell a story about him. And another memory took hold of me: in one of his letters from the front, Gregor speaks of the legendary country, which in the language of our Slovene forebears is called the “Ninth Country,” as the goal of our collective longings. “May we all meet again someday,” he wrote, “in the festive Easter vigil carriage on its way to the wedding of the Ninth King in the Ninth Country. Hear, O Lord, my prayer!” I now saw a possible fulfillment of his pious wish: in writing. Just as I would transpose the empty bed from the basement of the station, so also would I move the thermometer on the outer wall of the station, fashioned by a Vienna instrument maker at the turn of the century, the three-legged stool next to it, the vine pattern of the waiting room, and the chirping of the crickets to our family home. Thus, my train approached, meandering through the wasteland, roaring, fading, welling up, headlights shining from the gullies and ranging far ahead, then itself coming into sight, the locomotive halting at last, chinks and joints traced by all the lights inside it, a crackling, fabulous monster, bursting with power, and the cars full of people returning home from the cities, from the sea, from abroad, snoring, working crossword puzzles, knitting.
As bright as were my waking moments, by night as by day, so dark were my dreams. They banished me from my supposed paradise and flung me into a hell where, without other company, I was the damned and the tormentor in one. I was afraid of falling asleep, because my guilt at not being at home with my people figured in every dream. I kept seeing our home but never a human being in it. And the house was a ruin, the roof had caved in, the garden was all weeds and jumping snakes; not a sign of my family, only their plaintive, receding voices, or a few spots in the dust, as of melted ice cubes. From time to time I woke up, an outcast. In time even the sun, the baptismal wind, my walking, the piles of onions drying under my window (they reminded me of fishermen’s nets) lost their power, and I decided from one minute to the next to escape homeward.
Not until I was on my way did I regain the calm needed for the last station on my Yugoslavian journey. I went to Maribor (or Marburg) to look for my brother’s school. But there was no need to look for it; from the train window I saw the hill with the chapel on it, familiar to me from the prewar photo. Even when I came closer, nothing seemed to have changed in the last quarter of a century; nothing had been destroyed, and nothing new had been built. Only the big painted apiary had fallen into disrepair; in its place there were bright-colored little boxes on the grass among the fruit trees. I walked around the spacious, airy grounds, looked at the palm tree outside the main building, the Virginia creeper twining in and out of the clefts in a poplar, the initials that had grown immoderately with the smooth bark of a hornbeam, the many steps leading up to the door of one of the smaller buildings (“there he sat in the evening with the others”), and wished when I was done that this activity, this plantation, this admirable country had been my seminary. Time and again, as I climbed to the top of the vineyard—the clay under my feet became thicker and thicker—I felt the need to bend down, to reach into the earth, to collect, to take something with me. Keep it, keep it, keep it! Bits of coal were encrusted in the slate. I dug them out and today, a quarter of a century later, I am drawing quavering black lines on my white paper with them: You have earned your keep.
The chapel was on the top of a rocky hill. It was as devastated as the agricultural school down below—the treetops, the shimmering leaves of an olive grove, the brown tile roofs, each patterned like a secret script—was unscathed. It was like entering the roofless, deserted house of my nightmares. The altar stone was shattered, the frescoes smeared with the names of peak stormers (the barest vestige of the celestial wayside-shrine blue); on the floor, buried under rubble and boards, the statue of a Christ fallen from the cross, lying headless, his crown of thorns replaced by barbed wire; the threshold cracked by tree roots. I wasn’t alone for long; a young man came and stood beside me; he folded his hands, and after that I heard only his breathing; later, a group passed by, part of a factory excursion, I thought. Rather randomly they turned aside to the chapel, stood with legs spread in front of it, considered the ruin and the young man at prayer with an utterly uncomprehending, unbelieving look, which as they went on became a frozen collective grin, not so much of mockery as of surprise and embarrassment. Only then was I jolted out of my timeless dream and given a clear picture of history, the history at least of this country, and what I wanted was not “no history” but a different history, and the one worshipper struck me as its embodiment, its nation, erect, alert, radiant, composed, undaunted, unconquerable, childlike, vindicated.
Outside, on the façade, I found my brother’s name. In capital letters, in his finest handwriting, he had scratched it into the plaster, so high that he must have been standing on the ledge: GREGOR KOBAL. That had been the day before he left the school to go back to his hostile country, where he was awaited not by a loved one but by a foreign language and a war, in which he would be fighting against the boys who had become his friends over the years. I was surrounded by silence; in the grass a crackling of rain, produced by the wings of a pair of dragonflies.
Late in the afternoon, I was in the town below, standing on the big bridge across the Drava. Less than a hundred kilometers east of my native village, it had become a different river. At home, sunk in its trough-like valley, hidden by rank growth, its banks almost inaccessible, its flow almost soundless, it emerged here in Maribor as the glittering artery of the plain, visible from far off, flowing swiftly, with a wind of its own and sandy coves here and there, which offered a foretaste of the Black Sea. Looking at it through my brother’s eyes, I thought it regal, as though adorned with innumerable pennants, and its ruffled waters seemed to repeat the empty cow paths, just as the shadows of the railroad cars on the parallel railroad bridge seemed to repeat the blind windows of the hidden kingdom. The rafts of prewar times drifted downstream, one after another. Close-of-business bustle on the bridge, more and more people, all in a hurry, their eyes widened by the wind. The globes of the lamps glowed white. The bridge had those lateral salients which at that time I looked for in all bridges. The endless flow behind me shook the ground under my feet; I clutched the railing in both hands, until I had transposed the bridge, the wind, the night, the lamps, and the passersby to myself. And I thought: “No, we are not homeless.”
The next day, in the homeward-bound train, a sudden storming of the compartments as though this were the last possibility of flight. (And yet only the pilot trains had been canceled.) Wedged between strange bodies, as though armless and legless, even my chin dislocated for fear of contact with other chins, I felt more and more cheerful as time went on. In this crowd I was at home. Even my cramped position gave me a certain sense of well-being. And I wasn’t the only one. One man, for instance, though no better off than I, found room to read a book; one woman was knitting; and a child was eating an apple. Then, as we neared the border, I had the whole car almost to myself. A dreary luxury.
It made me happy to see Austria again. I realized that even in the Karst I had missed the Central European green; it was in my blood. It did me good to see Mount Petzen, “our mountain,” again from the familiar side. And the mere thought that, after struggling for weeks to get my tongue around a foreign language (especially when tired), I was again in the midst of my familiar German made me feel sheltered. In the sunset sky on the way from the border station to the town of Bleiburg, I saw a second, deeper sky, wreathed in many-colored clouds and as resplendent as a glory. And as I walked, I vowed to be friendly while demanding nothing and expecting nothing, as befitted someone who was a stranger even in the land of his birth. The crowns of the trees broadened my shoulders. No sooner in the small town than I found myself in the hustle and bustle of local society, which, so it seemed to me, had been going the rounds during my absence, on the lookout for a victim. And now the unconscionable enemy was back again. Even on my way into town,
they overtook me in their cars and informed others of my arrival. The commando was waiting for me, disguised as evening strollers. The leashes dangling from their necks were really rifle slings, their whistling and shouting at every street corner were only a stratagem to surround me. But that day they were powerless against their adversary. I looked them in the eye as though telling them about a country so remote that they either greeted me in spite of themselves or looked the other way, at the Plague Column, for instance, and when they turned around to see what their dogs were up to, it was mainly out of fear, as much for themselves as for their four-footed friends. And indeed, with every step through the town, my hatred and disgust redoubled, until, instead of a heart in my breast, I felt only a boiling and bubbling. I wanted to spew fire at them as they marched, swaggered, minced, crept, shuffled, as they grinned at one another from the protection of their cars, as their voices (beside which the creaking of a branch, the scraping of a woodworm was delightful), malicious, whining, sanctimonious, wiped the blue from the sky and the green from the earth, and every word they said was a cliche, one more hateful than the next, from “remove from circulation” to “a poem or something.” These people were neat and clean, well barbered, fashionably dressed, they had gleaming badges on their lapels, they were scented with this and that, excellently manicured, shoes shined to a high polish (the first thing I noticed was that their welcoming glances were aimed at my dusty shoes), and yet the whole procession had a guilty, hangdog ugliness and formlessness. That, it seemed to me, was because of their colorless eyes; the colors had been washed away by their stubborn malignance. I asked myself if that couldn’t be my imagination and in that same moment I was struck by a sidelong glance which, helpless with rage at being unable to kill the first comer, shifted to the next. And then it occurred to me that not a few members of this crowd were descended from people who had tortured and murdered, or at least laughed approvingly, and whose descendants would carry on the tradition faithfully and without a qualm. Now the revanchist losers were marching along, sulking because peace had been going on too long. They had probably been busy all day, but their work had given them no joy—at best, they had enjoyed sending someone to jail or giving someone something to remember them by; so they hated themselves and were at war with the times. I thirsted for a Christian glance to which I could have responded. Idiots, cripples, madmen: breathe life into this procession of ghosts, you alone are the bards of the homeland. But it took an animal, appearing to me as the symbol of all the small-town persecuted, to comfort me and show me, the villager, a vast country with steppe, seacoast, and sea beyond this petty state. Suddenly, in the dusk, a hare appeared at the edge of the town, ran straight across the main square, zigzagging between cars and pedestrians, and vanished, unnoticed by anyone. Hare, heraldic animal of the harried and persecuted.
I followed the hare and came to a bar. Up until then I’d known it only from hearsay as a meeting place for drunks. At that bar I came across members of the philistine procession. Sitting among the derelicts and misfits, they were transformed. As if they had finally changed to civvies, they radiated friendliness and trust. They were burning to tell stories, and not only about war. In my memory I hear them give vent to a strangely gentle lament and song of thanksgiving about the sweetness of childhood and their stolen youth, and I see them as isolated fugitives and exiles. They had suffered at being involved with the philistines; they dreamed of being accepted, not by some high-class club, but by this noisy gathering. Noisy? Maybe they all talked at once, but it seemed to me that I understood every word. My dominant impression of this smoky cavern was one of transparent order, regulated by the interaction between individual exuberance and an urgent collective seriousness. When the waitress appeared, a path was made for her, and the cook’s hand with a plate in it would pop out of the mist as from a cloud. The sound of cards being shuffled suggested the flapping of dogs’ ears and the whirring of birds’ wings, and rolling dice supplied the music. Whenever the telephone rang, everyone looked up, hoping it was for him. The proprietress behind the bar had eyes that nothing could surprise. A peasant woman came in, incongruous in those surroundings, put a bundle down beside her son, who had slumped over the table—his washing that she had just done—ordered a glass of schnapps for herself, and proceeded to drink it very slowly. The man beside me asked me who I was and I told him. We were standing shoulder to shoulder. At the back, one looked out on a vegetable garden, and in front on the street. Cars sped by and a dark bus overtook a lighted one as in a free and nameless metropolis.
Homeward across the deserted plain, under a starry, moonless sky. As always when I approached my village after being absent for any length of time, I was excited. My mood was positively festive. I was drawn to my village as by a magnet, but I commanded my heart to beat slowly. The night was unusually mild for that part of the country, and the only sound was the barking of dogs here and there, which put me in mind of a big estate, though big estates were a thing of the past. There were so many stars (even the spiral galaxies were clearly visible) that the constellations merged, suggesting a cosmic city girdling the earth. The Milky Way was its main thoroughfare, and the stars on the edge of the city bordered the runway of its airport; the whole city was getting ready for a reception. I thought of the mountain on Mars, almost twice as high as Mount Everest, with the suburbs of the heavenly city on its slopes.
Back to earth. In the distance, the few lighted windows of the village of Rinkenberg seemed embedded in Rinken Hill, as though the hill were a prehistoric formation converted into a modern housing complex. At the crossroads with the milk stand, which marked the village boundary, I was glad to be weighed down by my sea bag with the heavy books in it, for without it I might have flown away. The roofs of the houses, especially those made of weather-beaten shingles, had a silvery sheen that made them look like pagodas. The roadmender was a silhouette standing in the doorway of his porter’s lodge; his greeting to me, in a quavering voice that seemed to come from a great distance and didn’t wait for an answer, had the liturgical sound of a muezzin’s exhortations high up on his minaret. Outside a house at the end of an avenue of fruit trees far from the road, a whole family of villagers were sitting on a bench, knee to knee, plunged in a consensual silence, as though the essence of a summer night had been translated into human terms. I made a detour to the graveyard: no fresh graves (until my subsequent homecomings, but then more and more of them). On the way to our house, a neighbor woman passed me, mute, with arms half upraised; a poignant sign of helplessness. I couldn’t tell whether the buzzing in my ears came from the ventilator at the inn or from my blood.
There was light in our house, in every room. My sister was sitting by herself on the bench outside. Her eyes recognized me but gave me no greeting. In her face I saw a sorrow so pure that at first I mistook it for sublime happiness. But it came to me later on that she was sorrowing not so much for her dying mother as for her lost love, decades old, undying. “Grieving dancer.” Never had I seen a more beautiful woman. I wanted to kiss the sorrow away from my sister’s face, and—overwhelming event!—I was aroused by compassion; but she was untouchable.
Under the espaliered tree, the pears were lying in piles, unharvested, rotting. I went to the window and saw my parents lying on the bed. Side by side, holding each other tight; his leg on her hip. They rolled this way and that; I kept seeing first one face, then the other. For once, I saw my hard father softened by weakness, at last holding his wife in his arms. Over his shoulders he was wearing the purple robe beneath which he had stretched out on the church floor during those Easter vigils; my mother’s eyes were wide with the fear of death; she wanted her husband’s embrace to keep her alive.—Years later, where the bed had been, I found a thriving rubber plant in the warm sunlight; it was then that I remembered that scene of suffering most keenly and foresaw a time when the rubber plant would again give way to a human being in pain.
A hundred times I walked back and forth in the night outside the house
before I was able to go in to those two people whom, grateful to have been born, I loved. And to this day I have no image of what followed, but only something hot and huge—my empty hands in which to gather, now and forever, the looks of my parents’ eyes.
I have often mentioned numbers in this story, numbers of years, kilometers, people and things, and it has cost me a struggle every time, as though numbers were incompatible with the spirit of my story. For this reason I shall speak once again of my fairy-tale-writing teacher. He is now retired and I go to see him now and then. He has set up a garden outside the town with a hut in it, where he sometimes spends the night. The pale historian’s face has again become the sunburned face of the geographer. His mother is still living, but she is very old and, as often as I’ve been there, I’ve never once laid eyes on her; I hear her talking to her only son through some doors, no longer in words as before, but with tapped signals, which he interprets by counting them. He has given up writing fairy tales; their place has been taken by counting. Even in childhood, he was always counting to himself, often unconsciously. In those days he had thought it an ailment. But then, on his solitary expeditions in the jungle of the Yucatán, he had discovered that counting, now consciously, his steps and breaths could be a means of survival; it had often helped him in danger, a more powerful “medicine” than any fairy tale, and more effective than any prayer. Now in his old age he felt increasingly allergic to the public notices and posters that were taking over, and more at ease with numbers, even price tags and the luminous figures in gas stations. Hadn’t the archaic poet said that number was more powerful than any ruse. Counting, he said, moderated him, slowed him down, regulated him, and cared for him; in counting he recovered from the world of headlines. His sacred numbers were those of the Maya: 9 and 13. Nine times he scraped his shoes before coming into the house; he would not start work until thirteen birds had flown across the garden; now and then he needed a nine-minute breather; and he walked around in a circle nine times thirteen times before going to bed.