The Moravian Night

by Peter Handke

  That these passengers paid no attention whatsoever to him, who rather affectedly turned his head now and then to observe them: that he did not exist for them was fine with him. What was not fine with him, however, was that their comportment clashed with his conception, or his will? his ideal? his idea?—his sense of a narrative based on all he had just witnessed. Ah, you and your damned neo-Balkan inadequacy, obtuseness, mediocrity. Things had not always been this way, had they? At one time no voices more animated, no eyes more wide open, no gestures more inclusive than could be found among you. What had happened to your eloquent gaze, your eloquent shaking and rocking of heads, your eloquent sighs? It was not even necessary for someone to turn up with a gusla, fiddling a tune on its one string that pierced one to the bone, and singing to that accompaniment a centuries-old tragic heroic ballad.

  No sign indicating where the village of Porodin ended, one of the last enclaves in Europe, barely tolerated, and one that stretched mile after mile, “werst after werst” along the road. Did it end at the point where not even a dog still panted along beside the bus? Or where the first of the barns out in the fields lay in ruins, where the first vineyard huts had been burned to the ground, or at least charred? Where, despite the fertile pastures, neither sheep nor cows were grazing, and certainly no pigs skidded through the muck from one fenced orchard to the next? (Orchards still there, but abandoned, and the fruit, whether in early winter or early spring, still clinging to the trees everywhere, unharvested.) Where no road sign was not pockmarked with bullet holes, painted over with death’s heads, smeared with threatening slogans, in Roman, not Cyrillic, script?

  Perhaps the most obvious indication of the crossing from the enclave into the other realm: way out on the Magistrale a second police or military-police vehicle joining the one that had been serving the bus as an advance guard from the time it left the village center, this new vehicle bringing up the rear, so that the bus was now traveling in a convoy. (It was from that moment on that he, the solitary traveler, began to see the passengers and himself at certain moments as “we,” and thus also referred during that night to “us.”) We had unmistakably left the orbit of Porodin when the exits from the Magistrale, leading to side roads, even to (former) wagon tracks across the fields, were now blocked by tanks. And where there were no tanks, the barriers consisted of coils of a particularly tough barbed wire, apparently hard as steel, alternating with tank traps. The tanks’ muzzles were all extended, aimed not at the highway, still almost deserted, but at the chain of hills on one side, the river valley on the other, where the absence of human beings and anything else was total. Constant waving of hands from the tanks’ hatches, not so much friendly as impatient: “Move it! Keep going! Step on it!” And in fact the convoy sped up, or perhaps it merely seemed so to us.

  The former writer now experienced something that would recur now and then in the course of the tour: looking back in the direction from which they were coming, he saw the bus from the outside, from a furrow in a field, with the driver, the emigrants, and himself silhouetted in the windows. They all appeared in profile, thus hardly differentiated from one another. Through the window, its cracks resembling a star or a spider’s web, he saw his own profile, facing backward. And all of a sudden, still in the view from outside, the windows of the bus steamed up, the vapor on the inside, from them, from all the passengers, so dense that all at once, while the profiles did not disappear altogether, they became shapeless blobs. Involuntarily he used his sleeve to wipe away the steam, which was no illusion, none at all. From one moment to the next the panes had steamed up. And he was the only one who wiped and wiped—after each wipe a fresh coating formed. And his glance, then, again over his shoulder, at his fellow passengers: how rigidly they sat there, the impression of rigidity reinforced by those jackets, once worn throughout the country, now only in the enclave, of coarse, stiff leather, that reduced men as well as women to boxy shapes. The prints of a cat’s paws on the back of one of the jackets: was that something he was imagining, or a pattern, or did they really come from a cat that had stepped on the jacket? And on another jacket’s back, a dog’s paw prints? And on a third traces of a wolf’s paws! He jumped up and slid open the vent in the roof of the bus, a gesture familiar to him from rides in that same postal bus when he was an adolescent: how the sky shone blue once the vapor had dissipated, what a mild blue (which he transformed in his narrative to “wild”). And again he could see the bus from that distant external perspective, with the profiles of all those inside once more distinct, and curiously enough a thought now came to him unbidden, in these very words: “Have mercy on us.”

  Then a side road, actually just for tractors, which was not blocked by either a tank or coils of barbed wire. Why did the bus turn off here instead of continuing on the Magistrale? No one posed that question, however, including him, as if during his years in the Balkans he had lost the habit of asking questions, or at any rate mostly; in these parts hardly any question did not sound like prying. The bus was moving very slowly now, rumbling along no faster than a walk, although no obstacle was in sight. The increasingly rocky landscape, untilled and treeless, was bare far and wide. They were leaving behind the river valley and the highway that cut through it and heading up into the southern hills, still in convoy with the police cars, one leading the way at a distance, as a pilot, so to speak, the other close behind the bus, the three vehicles, seen from the outside, wrapped in a single cloud of murky yellow dust, which, despite the slow speed at which they were traveling, billowed massively skyward in that uninhabited waste, at the same time confined to the convoy, wrapped around it, while on all sides the atmosphere remained that much clearer. No, there was no longer any reason to fear mines; all that belonged to the distant past. What slowed our bus were the many curves in the road, rather puzzling in this uncultivated terrain, as well as the narrowness of the tractor tracks, left over from the time when the fields had grown crops and were lined on both sides with old irrigation ditches, now without water, but clogged here and there with rusting machine and car parts, tangles of rags and plastic bags, animal cadavers either rotting or reduced to skeletons, and in between, not infrequently, jumbled crosses from graves, wreaths that could be mistaken for automobile tires decorated as if for a wedding, sections of car antennas with bows on them (which actually did come from weddings), rubber boots buried upside down, and, above all, the rubble of houses and cottages. Unexpectedly—“well, not so unexpectedly”—he interrupted himself during the Moravian night, something resembling a settlement. If this was a village down in the hollow, it was one fundamentally different from Porodin. Not just that it was built in a huddle rather than strung along a road: the styles of the houses were different, so different that it was like being transported suddenly not merely to a new country but to a far-off unfamiliar continent. Were these farmsteads, or more likely forts? If forts, then not surrounded by classic palisades but rather by stone walls higher than any imaginable palisade. The forts’ interiors, almost entirely roofed over, were hidden from view, even from the crown of the hill, which was where the settlement in the hollow first became visible.

  An unknown continent, toward which the bus convoy was rolling, even more hesitantly, if possible? Yes, and furthermore, or at least so it seemed to him, the stranger to these parts, a forbidden one. And that was as it should be. Above all, no questions. But the fellow passengers, too, natives of this entire country, expressed through their heads, retracted at the sight of the hollow, the sense of something like an illegal border crossing. Even without changing seats—which they did do, after all, as the bus entered the village down there—they seemed to edge closer together. The nibbling of pumpkin seeds, the gum-chewing, stopped. Or, in the case of one or two of them, it intensified, just as the puzzle-solver suddenly worked more furiously and the book-reader followed the lines in his book more intently. The majority, however, fell into a shared state of bated breath. And now he got up from his seat in the back, moved forward to join them, and like
wise held his breath.

  Bated breath, which at the same time involved looking out. Yet no one looked out when the bus, still groping its way along the narrow tractor track, reached the farms or forts with their windowless walls and probably padlocked gates, in which, one after another, peepholes opened, then closed, if possible even more quickly. Those in the bus were looking, not at what was right before their eyes—at times the bus almost scraped the walls—but at the gaps between the buildings, and then at the ruins there, which, overgrown with brambles and weeds (not the useful kind), were so difficult to distinguish from the uneven ground that to the unaccustomed eye they became identifiable as ruins only as the bus passed gap after gap. (And the gaps distinctly took up more and more space, until the end of the village turned out to be one big gap, one expanse of ruins, hardly recognizable anymore.)

  Unaccustomed eyes? No, not theirs, not those of his fellow passengers. They knew what they were seeing. And they were seeing something entirely different from what was there, in many places almost swallowed up by the earth, perhaps more to be intuited than still to be seen. And their eyes focused, more often than on the ground, out through the gaps into the empty countryside, to the slopes of the hollow and up to the top, where there was nothing, nothing at all. Down in the village not a single being out in the open, not even animals, whether dogs or chickens. Or only the sparrows that whizzed back and forth in front of the bus—always a calming sound—or, untroubled by the heavy vehicle rumbling past, bathed in the dust, also in patches of snow.

  It was no longer a track on which the bus traveled uphill after the settlement ended, it was a steppe, trackless and increasingly steep. When would the bus finally stop? No, no questions. And then it was standing still, aslant on the ruin-strewn slope, yellow against grayish brown. All out!? No need to make that explicit. Were they, and he with them, asking no questions, now headed uphill on what must have been a path at one time? Hardly any traces of it, but the matter-of-factness with which each of them in the little band of pedestrians set out across and up the steppe allowed one to sense where it had been. Apparently the old path had taken a serpentine course, a wide-looping one. Possibly it had been intended for the transport of heavy loads; walkers without packs would have taken a more direct route to the top, snaking in less leisurely fashion or heading straight uphill, as did the military policemen providing security up ahead for the procession.

  Providing security? Yes, indeed; for upon arriving at the top, we found ourselves surrounded by them as if by sentinels, posted at the four corners of an empty field that formed a plateau high above the village in the hollow. Submachine guns at the ready, aimed not at us but away from us in all directions; and the plateau ringing and crackling with two-way radios. Was there a connection with the figures far below, who, little by little, in ever more rapid succession, emerged or actually swarmed out of the fort-like farmyards, which had previously seemed uninhabited, and closed ranks as they headed uphill, the vanguard halfway up already?

  Except for him, the bus passengers seemed to notice none of what was taking place around them. Or if they did, they had no eyes for it. The only thing for which they had eyes was their destination, located on the farthest edge of the empty field. They stayed on course toward it, undeterred by the uneven ground, and it was clear that he had to follow. The sun shone warm in the southerly blue sky, almost hot. Underfoot the withered herbs, wild thyme and rosemary, gave off a summery smell. Eyes only for their destination? And how. Even down below, while they were still on the bus, their demeanor had changed at the sight of the hilltop. After all their earlier corpse-like staring, their eyes suddenly came alive, even if only for a hasty, almost surreptitious glance. And now, as they hobbled and stumbled toward their destination, with one or another of them tripping and falling now and then, their gaze became completely open and unabashed; no fall could deflect it from its goal.

  But what was the destination? No, he still did not ask, not even himself. Clearly the edge of the square field, now turned to steppe, the verge of the wilderness, was as empty as the rest of the field, at most somewhat rockier, as such edges usually are. Whatever the case, this strip at the end of the field was the destination. The entire group, except for him and the bus driver, who had come along, squatted in a circle around a spot where, other than grass, rocks, and brush, there was nothing to be seen. One after another they pulled out of briefcases, handbags, and plastic bags various items to eat and drink and placed them in the circle, all this taking place smoothly and with gestures as practiced as those in a Balkan shell game. Then the various items were unwrapped, if necessary, and organized: cookies and waffles removed from their packages, chocolate bars slid out of their foil, cheese taken out of its wrapping; apples were added, also oranges, one or two bananas, even a couple of homegrown kiwis (the enclave was not that distant from the rest of the world); and the caps of the beverages were loosened slightly.

  An odd picnic, for which all of them remained in a squat, no one sat down, let alone ate or drank; and at which in broad daylight a candle was lit; and at which, after no word had been spoken for a long time, in fact since they got off the bus, no, even longer, since they turned off the Magistrale to the village, now weeping broke out among these emigrants, entirely unlike that of the crowd that had accompanied them in the morning: a weeping from which one wanted to turn away at once, whether to the sky, or to the earth, or to nowhere at all, just turn away; for which one felt responsible without being to blame or having any urge to blame someone else; a weeping that challenged one to take responsibility.

  Wanting to turn away from people weeping in this fashion did not signify closing one’s ears to them, did not signify failing to absorb these tones, each and every one, or failing to let them imprint themselves on one’s consciousness. It did not mean consigning these people to their fate, the earlier nose-pickers, nail-biters, belchers. Or did it? Or did it? Was being forgotten, being ignored perhaps the kindest thing that could happen to these people, whimpering here in this deserted place? And they themselves wanted it this way? No. They wanted nothing, and certainly not anything from someone like him. They were beyond wanting anything.

  As the weeping continued, on and on, the driver shared with him, quietly, the story behind it. Before the last war, the village in the hollow had been inhabited by two peoples, and those crouching in the circle here were some of those who had been driven away after the war, let’s call them the Wallachs. Now, for the first time since the end of the war, some members of this former second people had returned to their region, if only for a visit, and the first time would also be the last. And this spot was where their graveyard had been located. Not a trace of it left. Or perhaps there was: the couple of darker, marbled chunks of stone among those indigenous to this place and the Balkans, the lumps of white limestone jutting out of the reddish eroded soil. According to the driver, these were the only remnants of a grave, all that remained of the burial ground on the plateau high above the village, long since and probably forever inhabited by only one people. The, hm, driven-out and now actually resettled people were crouching at a distance from the ruins of the grave marker at a spot where nothing was left. In approximately this location, the driver continued, during the war one of them had witnessed several members of this people being surrounded by a group wearing masks that suddenly burst out of the underbrush and dragged them off, never to be seen again. (He, crouching behind a nearby grave, had gone unnoticed.) The ambush had occurred during a festival celebrated by his people that called for visiting the dead and bringing them food and drink, while the living sat down on a special bench at a special table—of those not a trace either—and joined in heartily; this cult of the dead or the ancestors constituted a main feature of their religion, still strenuously observed at the time; each tribe preserved the memory of its dead going far, far back, and thus one feast day, or at least one feast hour, by the graves led to the next. Yet traditionally this practice also signified danger, and more acutely in warti
me: feast day and crime, feast day and betrayal, feast day, decisive battle, and defeat all went together “for us.”

  And now the survivors were visiting what was left of the cemetery, bringing food and drink. But how could it be—without the ancestors’ graves, and also graves for those who had disappeared, who had not yet been declared dead and whose corpses, hm, if indeed they really were dead, were decomposing somewhere else, probably unburied? No questions. It was as it was: the survivors, those who had escaped and gone away, were crouching where, according to that one witness, a father, brothers, a sister, an uncle, aunts had sat shoulder to shoulder, and then, a few moments later, were gone, dragged away by the masked men into the underbrush.

  The candle placed in the middle of the victuals kept going out, extinguished by the wind on the plateau, or something. How about crouching down with them? Heaven forbid. They were weeping so loudly into that empty space, completely unabashed. Perhaps the weeping of the men was not quite so unrestrained, especially that of one man, broad-shouldered, with a, hm, low forehead, who in the bus earlier had glared in all directions as if on the verge of perpetrating murder and mayhem; the weeping emanating from him was more intense than a child’s, when, after screaming and screeching, bawling and whining for help, in the realization of being totally lost, nothing remained but this one long-drawn-out, high-pitched wail, much higher than the others’, and likewise much softer than that of the others, the women. There was no help to be had. And as if in confirmation, as one of those crouching moved some fallen branches aside to make room for a new candle, out shot a snake, awakened from its winter paralysis and set in motion by the burning sun, but it did not strike, merely slithered away, after whipping into view, into the grass of the onetime burial ground, with a rustling that came not from any rattles but from the snake’s skin rubbing against the brush. And for the group there in the grass the moment when the snake darted forth had not existed, or it did not count; not one of them reacted in any way. And for him, the bystander, the command to keep his ears open remained in effect. Listen: the creaking and squeaking of all those stiff black leather jackets, together with the continuing chorus of wails, together with the moan of grief passing from one to the other. The bleating of sheep down below in the village and the bleating of a hawk overhead in the sky.