The Moravian Night

by Peter Handke

  Then, as if nothing had happened, back down to the bus, in silence. In the meantime a crowd had gathered around it, so large that these people could not possibly all come from the village? Yes, they could, this many and even more, thousands lived there, though on ordinary days most of them could be neither seen nor heard. But this day was no ordinary one, for anyone, on one side or the other. Yes, in contrast to the crowd that had gathered for the departure from the enclave, there were two sides here, and the crowd belonged to the other one. The crowd seemed neither angry nor hostile. The military policemen did not need to hold it in check. The gathering kept its distance without even one weapon’s being drawn. All the members of the crowd completely expressionless as they took in the little band from the bus. They in turn, without making any move to board the bus, gathered in front of it, appearing rather relaxed, and returned the others’ gaze, but as if among the thousands of faces they were searching for a familiar one here and there. And a number of them succeeded. That was clear from a glow in their eyes, a strange glow, certainly not a happy one, and the glow was not returned in any way by the other side. General wordlessness, as the one group strolled back and forth in front of the yellow bus with its Cyrillic lettering while the other, the children included, remained almost motionless, if possible not even blinking. This crowd looked almost beautiful in its silent, wide-eyed symmetry, also in contrast to the jerking and jumping, the flailing and floundering of us visitors, caught in the trap of their gaze. And then, with us back on the bus, as it started up and pulled out, a single motion in the crowd, which greatly outnumbered us, the motion of one individual. One of us on the bus, seated by a window, had suddenly waved, as if it were nothing, as if nothing had happened, as if nothing had ever happened. Unquestionably the wave was not meant for the crowd, for the horde, which is what it was now after all in the moments of departure, pantomiming in unison taking aim with guns and firing, alternated with an orchestrated blowing of kisses, accompanied by a sardonic grinning, as if on command—but meant for a single person in their midst. The former writer, following the direction in which the waver, male or female, was looking, managed to make out who it was. Was it obvious that the wave was intended for a child? No, he would have been no more surprised to discover it was for an older person or an adult. The waving was aimed, yes, aimed, at a child, whether coincidentally or not. And the child, almost hidden in the throng, waved back. He had realized that he was meant, he alone. And what a waving it had been!

  During that night on the Morava boat, our host interrupted his story. The event he had been describing seemed to have happened long ago, and at the same time it was taking place again. And thus he shifted from the paster-than-past and the past, after a pause to catch his breath, into the present. What kind of a waving is it, actually? The child from the other people, the “enemy,” does not react right away, and then only with his eyes. He does not know what to do. He feels ashamed. The whole thing is embarrassing. He blushes. He would like to look away. He would like to get out of the situation altogether. Yet he also does not want in the slightest to go away. He would like to blow a kiss like all the others, to the woman waving from the bus. He would like to stick out his tongue at her, stick out his tongue until his whole face is contorted. For a quivering second that is not merely possible but is about to occur, as the very opposite is also not merely possible—otherwise this second would not quiver, and with it this child on the other side of the dividing line, quivering all through his body, without the quivering’s making its way to the surface and becoming visible to any of the bystanders.

  This quivering remains confined to the inside but takes hold all the more powerfully, a quaking deep within that makes an eruption unavoidable. Any minute now it will happen. And now it is happening. And this eruption takes the form of the child’s waving back, a hardly noticeable gesture. The little stranger waves almost imperceptibly, also entirely unobtrusively, no, that is not the word, but rather? tenuously, yes, that is the word. Unlike the woman on the bus, he does not make any move to wave, does not raise his arm. Rather he lets his arm droop, alongside his body. His arm droops down to his knees, as a child’s usually does. And the answering wave appears as the mere jerking of a finger, a brief, one-time reflex like the reaction to a hammer tap on the knee, which bobs slightly.

  So teeny-tiny is the wave, no, that is not the expression, so—secretive. And it is “in fact,” “really” (see above) a wave, not a reflex. For a reflex the motion of the hand is too slow, even if the curling of the finger occurs only once and is so slight as to be almost imperceptible. And the little hand does not move automatically, but rather reflectingly, no, reflectively; as slowly as reflectively; hardly noticeable is this curling of the finger, but it emanates from the entire body. And the former writer apologizes to his listeners on the boat for this “close-up”—but only in this way could that second be conveyed, and he owed it to himself and to the others to convey it, especially to the child listening to him in his imagination, perhaps long since not a child anymore. Or actually still a child after all? And what did “actually” mean? “If things were as they ought to be.”

  Back to the side road where, after the detour into that wasteland, a large crowd lined the road, motionless on both sides except for various obscene gestures, and back onto the Magistrale. Over-the-shoulder glances by the occupants of the bus, for one last time, then for one more last time, and yet another last time. In the meantime the solitary traveler had taken a seat among them and, instead of imitating them, looked around at all of them. Unlike in school buses, where, as he knew from earlier observation, the pupils, or at least the younger ones, always sat way in the back, as if in obedience to some law of physics, usually leaving the front seats empty, these emigrants were crouched—yes, it was as if they continued to crouch as they had in the vanished cemetery, and it seemed as if that had been long, long ago—in the front, near the driver, all in a heap, as it were. As expected, once the bus was back on the broad Magistrale, they reverted to their earlier preoccupations or attitudes. Puzzling over numbers in Sudoku. Spitting into a checkered Balkan handkerchief. Spooning food out of a tin canteen (which somewhat resembled a military helmet). Except that these actions (including someone’s snoring) produced no mere sounds of one kind or another; they created reverberations that, even when they came intermittently, yielded a kind of harmony, a fleeting one, for perhaps an hour. And another constant feature could be seen in their hands, those that were idle. (“Ah, here come the hands again!” the storyteller interrupted himself.) These hands were resting on people’s thighs or were thrust between the seats as if doing something indecent, something that had developed a life of its own, yet remained completely still, at most vibrating along with the bus. All of them had their palms facing up, forming bowls, empty ones, and it seemed to him—an effect probably created by the vibrations—that something was being weighed in the bowls, a bird, to be specific, a more-or-less small one. Live weight? Dead weight? An image and a question that would stay with him on his tour. Then a dog was running alongside the bus, in the middle of the Magistrale, spray-painted, or was that a coincidence, in the former national colors. It ran and ran, refusing to give up, and was eventually taken on board for a stretch, without further ado.

  Later the first larger settlement, located along the highway, which wound its way through it. And there the first rock was thrown at our bus, which had to slow down on the curves and thus offered an easy target. At first the storyteller did not know it was a rock that struck one of the windows sharply. It sounded and felt like a vigorous blow from a fist, hitting not only the window but the entire bus. Yet the passengers did not react, and neither did he. The glass, a special kind, did not shatter but was merely nicked, with delicate cracks radiating from the point of impact. One question, “Was that a rock?” and in reply a nod, just a brief one; the others seemed to find the incident not that unusual. On the next curve another rock, and a third as they were leaving the settlement (earlier called M
alishevo, but meanwhile, under the reorganization, Malisheva, all the short o endings having been replaced by a endings, fuller in appearance and in pronunciation).

  And so it went as the trip continued, through the reorganized country, from settlement to settlement, despite the escort vehicles in front of and behind the bus, yet without ever amounting to a hail of stones. Each time only a single rock crashed, clinked, or clattered against the glass of the “Steyr Diesel” or the whatever-it-was-called rust bucket from postwar Austria, and perhaps leaving, but also perhaps not, yet another dent. In any case, from a certain moment, or stone throw, on, the trip took place accompanied by a kind of constant expectation and premonition that were something other than fear, and nonetheless, to quote the storyteller verbatim, “not entirely without.” A couple of stone throws after the first one, and then a few stone throws later, they were no longer just stupid child’s play.

  Yet it also seemed as though the rocks were all on the small side, certainly no large chunks. Although all of them hit the bus squarely, the most pronounced effect remained the unexpected suddenness of the crash every time, impossible to anticipate no matter how one braced oneself for it. And for a long while there was no glimpse outside the bus of one stone thrower or another. No matter how intently one—or only he—scanned the surroundings: no one to be seen, either before or after the rock landed. Not once did a stone come flying when one expected it, thinking Now! and Now!, for instance when, from one settlement to the next more and more groups of youths gathered along the road, apparently informed in advance of the passage of the extraterritorial bus; no, not one of them bent down, or so much as moved, even grimaced; all that could be seen was their silent, dark, wide-eyed staring—veritably iconic (though they would have objected to such a characterization). In addition, the driver, who had cranked up the window on his side as if for no particular reason, now turned on music, loud, completely un-Balkan music, without rattling harmonicas or short-tube trumpet blasts, music that could not possibly provoke anyone; instead it was the long-distance echoing guitars from the “Apache” instrumental piece, the most universal sounds imaginable, while he, the lone passenger, felt as though he had already heard these same Apache guitar chords accompanying his ride to school years before on the same bus as now.

  Moments of absentness while the music was playing, accompanied by the dwindling and disappearance of expectation. And out of just such absentness he then saw the next stone-thrower, and after that, because he now knew how to look, the next one and the next. All of them were children, and for the most part so little that the stones they threw suddenly seemed disproportionately large, so little that—if there had still been anything that provoked astonishment—it was astonishing how sure-handedly they all, without exception, set about their work. They squatted in the dust along the Magistrale, seemed to be playing, and perhaps really were playing in earnest, each of them alone, engrossed in his play, and apparently unaware of the bus approaching. And nonetheless each of them hurled his rock without any windup, popping up from the dust without one’s being able to see the object coming, let alone follow its flight through the air, and almost at the same moment one saw the child squatting again, playing. Was it the noise of the engine? The bright yellow, caught out of the corner of their eye? Yes, one child after another snapped to attention upon glimpsing something out of the corner of his eye. But it was not really the yellow so much as the gray-blue lettering on the yellow surface. Each of the children was still too young to be able to read the script of his own country or nation, let alone the foreign Cyrillic script. But what they did know, or instinctively grasped: in the form of this script, no matter how bleached and blurred it was, the letters half blending with the yellow surface, it was the enemy approaching, and this enemy, they knew reflexively, before any thought or decision could register, had it coming—and pow!

  The bus picked up speed. No more music. Dusk. It would not last long—they were still in the south—and it was clear that the driver was not the only one in a hurry to get to the other side of the border before dark. Yet the acceleration in no way resembled flight. The settlements, and with them the hurled rocks, lay behind us. We were driving through a no-man’s-land, apparently interminable, no lights anywhere, as if depopulated once and for all. The acceleration resulted rather from impatience and, even more, as the storyteller recognized when he moved to the front to sit next to the driver, from anger. And there it also occurred to him that when the first rock had hit the bus and later as well, until he caught sight of the little children, he had pictured the stone-thrower or the organizer as his unknown enemy, the woman; the idea haunted him that she was on his trail, hot on his heels.

  The noises made by the bus, by the engine, now increasingly sounded like expressions of this anger. Only the words were missing—otherwise every feature of an angry outburst was present. The driver let the engine rise to a howl, let it bellow, screech, drone, spit, grind its teeth, howl, sing off-key, growl (yes), threaten, and all this rhythmically, with a steady beat that harmonized with the angry quivering inside him and resembled an instrumental prelude, now really comparable to the first notes on the thick plaited string of the Balkan gusla, a merely apparent cacophony, in which, if one listened more closely, the sounds were kept distinctly apart, easily recognizable individually, and at the same time giving rise to each other, yielding a rhythm. An anger at once wild and controlled, even playful, issued from the engine and from the entire bus, too, both of them furnishing the driver with instruments for his overture, and the equally rhythmic flashing on and off of the headlights’ high beams, not necessary on the completely deserted Magistrale, formed part of the performance. Soon words and a voice would be added, and it did not have to be a singing voice.

  And that in fact happened. But no, this was not the voice of a gusla-player, breaking forth suddenly, from deep inside the breast cage, filling the space. The words came from the driver’s lips, half under his breath and not directed at any audience. If the storyteller had not intuitively moved close to the driver, they would have remained incomprehensible, indeed inaudible. There was also no rhythm to what he said, no coherence, and accordingly, as he opened his mouth, the noise of the engine went back to normal, becoming hardly noticeable, and at the same time the high beams stayed on. Nonetheless it was anger being articulated, a specific anger, even if the man beside him had never before heard such gentle, no, childlike expressions of anger. For one thing, the effect resulted from the curiously high-pitched tones, all of them head tones, in which the angry man spoke, half under his breath, the sound contrasting to the massiveness of his body. And then it was a type of anger in which the angry speaker, and in this case it was no contradiction, made noises with his lips the way small, very small children sometimes do, and the succession of lip sounds accompanied his imprecations, curses, expletives with something like a melody.

  The bus driver’s anger was vocalized as follows: “They have always hated us. They got everything they wanted, and still they hate us. More than ever. In more of a blind rage than ever. More blindly than ever. They have their own country now. They are a nation now, like the Lithuanians, like the Catalans, like the Transnistrians, like Cisnilians, like the Valley Kalmuks, like the Mountain Slovenians, like the Danube and Mekong Delta Autonomians. They are a national people and, now that their great dream has been realized, a one-people state, they still hate us, what remains of the second people, which has no state of its own, hate us as if we remnants were the national people instead of them. And they need not even teach this hatred to their children. It simply gets handed down, from generation to generation, from gene to gene, long past blood feuds and wars. Your hatred of us became baseless ages ago and has taken on a life of its own, if indeed there ever was a basis for it, but no, there never was a basis. It has become not your national consciousness but your life force. Ha, life. Your state merely provides a vehicle for living out your hatred, protected by your national boundaries, your flags that signal hostile inte
nt, your anthems that are anthems of hated. Your hatred for everyone who is not of your nationality, for everything that is not the nation. You derive no pride from your nation, only legitimation and perpetuation of your hatred. And in that respect you typify all nations nowadays, you are the quintessential modern nation, the new form of nation. Nation and hatred go together. Ha, these parents and grandparents—who not only did not energetically dissuade their children from hating others, hating us, but on the contrary passed the hatred on to them—should never have been allowed to become a nation, such a nation. Ha, such parents and grandparents, tribal chiefs and clan leaders, politicians and teachers, star athletes and poets—to whom it never occurs to whisper in angelic voices, yes, angelic voices to your little children, just learning to walk and hold on to things, and to drive out of them with utmost concentration of energy the rock-throwing gene, to smoke out the rock-throwing instinct, to whisper away the hate-pounding drum from their little ears, reaching into the deepest recesses of their brains—never do they, never do you have the right to a nation of your own. But nation or no nation: your hatred never ceases.”