The Moravian Night

by Peter Handke

  For a long time, human closeness, the proximity of human beings, other than his mother, had meant not horizons to him but rather a sense of being surrounded. This was the case with individuals, and he felt still more surrounded when a number of people approached him at once. Even at a certain distance he had the sensation of being confined, trapped, and one (he kept slipping into this “one” perspective) became completely encircled, fenced in, hogtied, in a crowd. The first human horizon he had encountered, before all eye, ear, and lip horizons, was a girl’s genital area, still hairless: the act of looking, admiring, being drawn in (without touching), feeling a sense of belonging, continuing to look. Didn’t all that deserve to be called a horizon, whether close or distant?

  Later, in the course of time, such horizons turned up now and then, including in a crowd, amid pushing and shoving, indeed often under precisely such conditions, and a couple of times even when he was hemmed in. It did not have to be at a soccer game or among tens of thousands leaving a rock, or some other, concert. In a crowded train human horizons could take on more monumental proportions than any Monument Valley; there were other situations, too, in which one horizon after another would become visible, or sometimes one horizon would give way to another. Such a situation might arise if one were caught up in the close quarters of a funeral procession for some unknown person, caught up unintentionally the first time but more intentionally with each succeeding time; or it might be in a subway car into which the passengers were packed so tightly that only the most shallow breathing was possible, like that of fish taking their last gasps while being transported in crates. Such a horizon might consist of the line of a person’s neck a hand’s breadth from one’s eyes, or hair literally standing on end in the crush. At such moments the gill-breathing could be supplanted by deeper and deeper breaths, a breathing for which one did not need to inhale; a breathing so deep inside one’s body that it seemed to create its own air in there; a breathing that did not originate with oneself.

  A mistake, as he now realized: that was what his search for wide horizons had been. A mistake? An erroneous pursuit. A sickness, because more and more, day after day, hour after hour, he had focused exclusively on finding such horizons, and not only since he had moved onto the boat in this land so foreign to him. It was no longer an avocation but an addiction. How could he have forgotten that the Great Horizon never let itself be seen from the outside, from way out there, even at the most distant distance? And above all never when he intentionally looked for it? That it emerged at most in a particular proximity and then took shape internally, and often could remain there long after the moments of proximity, as Goethe had reputedly continued to see certain afterimages on the inside of his closed eyelids months later.

  Didn’t horizons in the midst of the crowd around him dart through him now, in the form of guidelines, and wasn’t that therefore the first quivering second, before he properly got under way? No, these lines communicated themselves to him only gradually, first one, then another, and so forth, all in, oh, such a gentle symmetry, as the waves of a strangely still ocean there in the Balkan interior, a classic interior. It was less the weeping, or the earsplitting bawling, in the crowd that allowed him to rediscover the “decisive” horizons (his term) than the silent waves emanating from an unfamiliar brow line close to his shoulder, a cheek line, a neck line. “It fled, and the heart bled.” (We let him get away with that sentence, not his usual style.)

  He was the first, then, to board the bus. Yet he was in no more of a hurry than the others. Delaying, postponing, retarding had become almost second nature to him (perhaps starting during his time as a writer, when he felt increasing urgency to turn everything into a narrative—following what model?). Three times he had hugged me, quite spontaneously, something new for him, and so warmly that it was as if he were hugging not only me. And then I could see him sitting in one of the windows, one of the cracked ones, as I would have expected, in the back, also as expected, and in the only row of seats that faced backward. He was staring intently, also as was to be expected, yet neither at me nor at the crowd below, which was gradually calming down and here and there risking a laugh and even snatches of song, but rather at part of the garbage-strewn courtyard that quite obviously offered nothing to see. How predictable my friend was. And in the end, shortly before the bus departed—which happened without warning, like so many other events in our Balkans—I caught sight of him again, jumping up from his seat and, as I could guess, mechanically digging through all his pockets, according to a deep-seated habit, in search of a pencil and paper, apparently without success. So did he want to write something down again after all? Had he forgotten that his skin broke out in a rash if he touched a piece of paper, especially a blank one, and sometimes even if he merely heard paper rustling? That he had broken all the pencils on board and had thrown them into the river?

  Now the former writer resumed the storytelling, and would carry it on during the next nighttime hour without a second voice, for on the bus and also for a considerable time after the bus ride he had traveled unaccompanied. It was true: he had involuntarily groped around for writing materials, but not to write something down. It was a sudden urge to draw. To draw? To trace contours, merely to sketch them, or to reinforce them wherever an opportunity to do so presented itself. Presented itself? Yes, presented itself. Or no, to discover the contours in the process of drawing them—for that reason any kind of photographing would have been completely out of the question. Did he feel an urge to draw the people outside the bus? (He asked himself that very question.) The line of a cheekbone here, of a chin there, of a thumbnail over there? And again no: it was the contours of things that interested him, as they had when he was a child. But that rear courtyard: Wasn’t it empty, except for the bus? What was out there to draw? The backs of the seats in front of him, every one of them torn or slit open? The brackets for ashtrays, the ashtrays themselves all missing?

  And again, no: the debris-strewn space suddenly appeared not as empty as it had seemed at first. The huge block of stone in the farthest corner of the former farm was in reality the last intact structure of those that had once rimmed the courtyard—the sheds, the stables, the barns, the wine cellar. It was the hut where at one time the local brandy had been distilled. The stone block formed a dome that rose out of the debris, leaving an opening into a hollow space with just room enough for a still and—how could there not be one here in your Balkans—a bench, short and narrow, but nonetheless.

  The bunker, which was how he viewed the hollowed-out block, stood there without the large glass bulb filled with clear brandy. But the bench was still in place, at worst a little askew. This bench, and above it the stone dome, demanded to be drawn or sketched, if only with a last pencil stub, which was actually better, and if only on the back of a sales receipt, also better. And since neither one nor the other turned up, he traced the contours not on the bus’s windshield but in the air. He felt carried away, knew he was carried away at the sight of that bench in the former brandy-distilling cave, shimmering in the early morning light. Carried away? Did such raptures still happen nowadays?

  Being carried away was certainly not the same as losing touch with reality. To be carried away in this fashion did not mean being torn away from the world, or, as far as I am concerned, from the present. How real everything (everything?) appeared in this rapture, not only the bench, not only the structure. That was it. That is it. That will have been it. This form of being carried away whisked things into their proper place. People, too? That was an entirely different question, not to be answered, or at most to be answered during a general rapture, in another time. One way or the other he would have liked to revise or correct a sentence from his days of writing things down: “Only when engrossed do I see what the world is”?—“Only when carried away do I see what the world is.” Might that now become his new profession?

  That lasted all of one moment, though an immeasurable one. But it was enough time for the stone cave with the bench t
o become populated. Not that flesh-and-blood people took their seats there, or at least not those who had disappeared into the long-ago past. Rather it was conceivable human beings whose presence filled the empty dome, a virtual gathering place, so to speak (no, not “so to speak”), yet such a tiny one that it could hardly hold two or three people, a conceivable togetherness that had nothing to do with the structure’s earlier purpose, namely settling down and sampling the rakija—though perhaps that could happen, along with one thing or another; who among you would object to that? At the moment, however, there was no aroma of brandy. No songs rang out from the cave as if from the depth of the years, and no crisp, colorful peasant figures celebrated the Ascension before icons, as in a film flashback. This was no flashback, and these were no hallucinations; the rapture offered nothing of the sort, but rather? See above. Furthermore there was nothing rustic in this, hm, glimpse of a tableau—which otherwise inspired the thought: “Land ho!” Land? What kind of land?

  The bus jerking backward. Slowly, slowly, to make sure the trailer did not jackknife. The sound of the engine in reverse: on the one hand threatening, on the other as if threatened. (If he had a consistent goal in mind for his tour, it was to pay attention to sounds, to reflect on them, to compare them, to translate them.) The trip began with jerking, which was to persist for a while longer, especially for the stages taking place in the Balkans. Balkans and jerkiness: for him those two went together, and he almost felt something was missing when, on days spent only on the boat on the Morava, the jerks did not come—not the case, however, now, during the night in question.

  Much waving outside in the debris-strewn area, with little response from inside the bus. How few passengers there were in comparison to the crowd seeing them off. And not a glance outside; if one of them did look, it was a blank stare. But most of the passengers, as soon as they had taken their seats, were preoccupied exclusively with themselves, including members of couples or families, each individually unwrapping a packet of food, biting into an apple, taking a swig from a bottle, chewing on fingernails, starting to work on a crossword puzzle, a Sudoku (even in the Balkans, even in Porodin, the days now began with Japanese number puzzles), and one—yes, are my eyes not playing tricks on me?—even opening a book; no, not the former writer himself.

  No residual effects from the recent crying and sobbing, not even a sniffle; and the eyes so dry, positively hyperdry. Because no one blinked? No eyelid movement could be detected? Or perhaps after all: in the one person who was reading a book, very rapid eyelid movements that caused the observer to doubt whether that person was reading at all, or whether it was real reading, the kind of reading that he at least would define as such. He, he would not read, not yet. For the time being he would read no book, and, listen to this, during the entire tour no newspapers: another firm principle, this one, however, relating to refraining from doing something. A single principle involving doing, not a few for refraining from doing something. Would he be able to follow through?

  The backward jerking happened so slowly that the crowd outside, all together, could keep up with the bus, providing an escort. The crowd still ran alongside after the rear courtyard had finally been left behind, on the narrow side street that led past the Porodin church to the major highway and thoroughfare, still called “Magistrale” on the old maps, as even the most wretched arteries in the Balkans used to be called (the term now long since out of use). It was not only because the access road was so narrow that the bus continued to crawl, jolting along, though no longer backward. It was important to be on the alert, especially as they neared the church, for things other than the sides of buildings, trees, or parked vehicles. In truth this stretch had neither houses nor trees nor vehicles, and it was not even an alley but a mere passageway, a passageway that took shape only as it was traversed in that particular jerky fashion through an apparent no-man’s-land surrounding the church (which bore no resemblance to a village church, a common phenomenon in the post-Pannonian lowlands). Apparent: this no-man’s-land was actually a cemetery, its grave mounds so small that they hardly protruded above the grass, their plaques, if they had any, just a hand’s breadth above the ground. That might still correspond to the old burial custom in the Morava region, but it was certainly not the old custom to bury the dead in the middle of the village, next to the church. In this region the cemeteries had always been located outside the village, often very far outside, surrounded by semiwilderness, beyond the last cultivated fields and meadows, not seldom on the crest of a hill, the graves easy to mistake from below for weathered chunks of limestone. So was this a new custom, introduced or simply evolved in the course of the general homogenization? No. It was out of necessity that the deceased of Porodin were buried in the middle of the village, around the basilica, rather than outside in a former vineyard. It was simply not possible to do otherwise. The old cemetery was completely destroyed, and any gravestone installed up there would have been smashed to bits the very first night, any fresh grave mound, no matter how shallow, leveled. And this dire situation had not existed only since yesterday. The sole burial place still possible, the churchyard, had become packed with graves during the enclave years; if Porodin was a village, it was a large one, densely populated, indeed overpopulated, as a result of all the refugees from the surrounding area, whose—what is it called—“death rate” was considerable. The apparent grassy no-man’s-land at the center of the village was a graveyard, with the burial mounds cheek by jowl, so the crowd escorting the bus tiptoed through it, twisting and turning, more meandering than walking, their arms raised to help them keep their balance and not make a false step, which created the image of a mass prancing, much like traditional round-dancing. And the bus likewise twisted and turned, making its way across the remaining free space at the speed of a walk. Maybe as soon as tomorrow this terrain would be impassable. But then the bus would in any case be departing from a different rear courtyard.

  Having finally lumbered onto the Magistrale, the bus would not have been prevented from picking up speed; the road was deserted. At first, however, the bus slowed down even more, if possible. Some of those escorting it, and not only children, had climbed onto the running board and the trailer. One scrambled onto the hood in front. It was an old-style bus, from the middle of the previous century, which had once seen service as a postal bus in Austria, long before the advent of automatic doors, tinted windows, and adjustable seat backs; a donation from the neighboring country after the last war, the postal horn symbol from that other country still on the sides, not painted over, the only recent addition being the word “Porodin,” but unmistakably clear, and in Cyrillic to boot: ПОРОДИН.

  Then, from one moment to the next, without any warning, acceleration. The running-board riders and their comrades seemed to have been expecting it. They nimbly jumped and rolled off to the side of the road. And not a few among the crowd picked up their pace as well, running, sprinting, storming along beside the bus. It took the vehicle quite a distance before it could leave them behind. Billows of diesel fumes, some of which also seeped into the passenger compartment, obscured the view of the last few pursuers, though not so completely that one could fail to notice that as they ran and leaped they were also grieving, and with them the entire crowd, soon out of sight. Before he gave up the chase, one of them executed a somersault on the road’s cracked asphalt, and then another, before he, too, dropped back, the last one to do so, and performed a salto mortale (wasn’t that the soccer star—even villages, even enclaves, had their stars—of Porodin?). Yes, that was possible: high-jumping, somersaulting, performing a salto mortale out of grief, a sprinting, leaping procession of grief. It was a wild grief, expressing resistance where resistance was futile, and for that reason all the more unconstrained.

  In the bus he was the only one with eyes for all that. The people for whose sake all the others had run after the bus with such a fervor paid no attention. They remained intent on biting into their apples, causing a crunching, squeaking, and gnas
hing; they stuck their earbuds into their ears and turned up the volume on their music devices so high as to drown out any melody, singing, or instrument, also drown out any beat to which others might have tapped their feet. Nothing made itself felt but a rushing sound, permeating everything, inescapable all through the bus, despite the roar of the engine; having solved the first puzzle, they ostentatiously turned the page to the next; they combed their hair thoroughly; they picked their noses; one after another they stuck cigarettes in their mouths (though without lighting them); they incessantly tapped on their mobile telephones (just to pass the time); they munched sunflower and pumpkin seeds as well as their own fingernails (that, curiously enough, drowning out the engine); and one of them popped a toothpick in his mouth, in addition to the cigarette.

  How he wished they would feel grief, too. Would act inconsolable, hopelessly distraught. Why didn’t they hurl themselves to the floor, or onto their stomachs in their seats, why didn’t they slit open the backrests with their fingernails instead of biting them, or at least pound the seats with their fists? How he wished they might be a different sort of company, one worthy of his journey. He almost went so far as to order them, with a stern expression, to behave as he imagined they should: if only they, the couple of them who were leaving their village forever, would take each other in their arms, or even just put their hands on each other’s, exchange a few words, however inconsequential, cozy up to each other, the couple of them. But no, each sat there on the bus alone, silent and stiff, except for one up front, diagonally across from the driver. And what this one jabbered, incessantly and at the top of his lungs, also in no respect matched the solemnity of the moment, resembling instead the prattling of someone the former writer recalled from his bus rides as a child, in a bus almost exactly like this one, who always sat or stood next to the driver and for the entire trip would bombard not only the driver but also the entire bus, all the way back to his, the schoolboy’s, seat in the rear, with nonsensical chatter, with changing content but always at the same volume and equally unavoidable. In those days the role of the jabberer had usually been assumed by a woman, whereas today it was a man—though that was nothing new—and quite an elderly one, too. The tone of voice, the incessant chatter, even the laughter—when really there was nothing to laugh about?—filled and battered the auditory spaces now just as they had for an eternity.