The Moravian Night

by Peter Handke

  Then all at once the Balkans were behind him. Relief. What a relief. But what revealed that one had left the Balkans? Was it the sea air, the first clumps of wild thyme or rosemary, a laurel bush, a palm tree, the only one initially, as Ivo Andrić described it in recounting his youthful journeys from the inland valleys, away from the mountain-cold Drina, to the Adriatic, or the Jadran, as it was called in his language? Yes, that, too. But it became even more evident from things that after a while no longer turned up everywhere, and then not at all—were absent as a result of one’s no longer being conscious of them. No longer in the Balkans, on the Balkan peninsula: that came from inside one. From behind this limestone outcropping no one would suddenly jump out, gun at the ready. No decapitated ram would be found rotting by the roadside, its head stuck on a fence post nearby after having been ripped off the living animal with bare hands, the horns, however, carefully sawn off. No more Muslim grave steles standing in the bleak karst, as if abandoned forever, the half-moon emblem on them long since undetectable (or was it, after all?). None of the dried-up well shafts, rock fissures, or other abysses along the way still served as reminders of one Balkan people or another who long ago, during one of many wars, had installed their transmitters deep inside, or into which they had been hurled by members of the enemy people. Or it was simply that all the sidelong looks were absent, the stepping aside that preceded aggressive shoving, the frequent spitting, the refusal to return greetings, the mocking laughter at an old woman when her umbrella broke in a storm, someone’s turning away however often one tried to catch his eye. Away from the accursed Balkans: one’s eyes free, one’s ears free, one’s nose simply nostrils now, a great sigh of relief, as if even one’s pores and even one’s oral cavity were nostrils.

  Although he was headed toward the Adriatic or Jadran, it was less in a westerly than in a northerly direction. The destination: that island where, long, long ago, he had tried to write a—he hesitated at the word—book, his first. And why did he hesitate? Because, he answered the rest of us, in the meantime it had become customary, among writers themselves, to use the term “book” for something that was only on its way to being one; every manu- or typescript, every computer printout was immediately, often after only a few pages, referred to as “my book,” supplied with covers that made it look from the outside like a finished work. No, he said, a book was a book was a book, and to him it was something unique, or at least something very rare, powerful, wondrous, something fallen from heaven, so to speak, no, without “so to speak.”

  The island he described to us during that night on the Morava boat went by the name of Cordura in his story, though in reality it had another name. Cordura had been his name for the island even long ago, inspired by a Western whose title had been They Came to Cordura. Incidentally, for the other stations of his journey he also used place names different from the ones by which they were customarily known, or he left places nameless. Either he borrowed a name from elsewhere, somewhere else entirely, or he distorted the actual names, either out of obstinacy or, more often (so it seemed to us), out of fondness for the place. The people he encountered, on the other hand, almost all went unnamed, with the exception of those already mentioned and introduced to us, Filip Kobal and Gregor Keuschnig. And with those exceptions, no first names either. Even his brother appeared consistently as “my brother.” Names had no relevance was his oft-repeated refrain, and not only during the night in question. Toward the end of that night, one name was mentioned after all, or let slip, a name that had relevance aplenty.

  A ferry transported the abdicated writer to Cordura. In the decades after his book-writing attempt, the island, located just offshore, had been connected to the mainland by a very long causeway. But on the day he reached the coast, the causeway was shut down for some reason (“take a guess!”), and so the ferry was back in operation, the same ferry, or at least so it seemed to him, as long ago. And the same dog as long ago sniffed at his leg during the crossing, and it was also the dog that during the departure from Porodin had been the last living creature to run behind and alongside the bus, refusing for a long, long time to give up the chase. And the same bread baskets as years before were stacked up, still warm. And the same wind was blowing, the very one, not merely one just like it, and in this wind his hair, which over the years had thinned somewhat, felt exactly as it had back then.

  In the intervening years he had never been back to Cordura. Stepping off the ferry, and then standing stock-still, at most turning his head now and then, he recognized nothing at all. Yet in reality the harbormaster’s building, a centuries-old structure built of karst limestone on a marble foundation, appeared to be the same, just as the fishing boats were pretty much the same ones, and likewise the “let’s say” Venetian church tower atop a rocky mound, along with the obligatory stone lion.

  For an entire summer he had gone into town almost every morning and evening, first to purchase bread and fruit, then to sit around or go to the movies, and now, although hardly anything significant had changed, the place had become unfamiliar, as if he had never set foot there. Was this really Cordura? Was it actually near here that as a very young man he had wanted to refocus his life, on his own, single-mindedly, no, single-handedly, come hell or high water, or come whatever?

  It was midafternoon, in spite of which things were humming in the harbor, which bore the same name as the island. On the fishing cutters the catch was being dumped out of the nets and sorted into baskets. The spectators were primarily children on their way home from school. No tourists. Either it was not the right season, or in contrast to before, no tourists came anymore? The natives, not a few of whom were perusing the skimpy island newspaper as they walked along, or in one case reading a book, saw and recognized each other out of the corners of their eyes, and there was a constant exchange of greetings, sometimes out loud, sometimes with a mere wave. Outdoors, in front of a bar near the water, stood a jukebox, silent; impossible to tell whether it was glowing from inside or from the low-angled sun. It, too, seemed to be the same one as long ago, yet it remained strangely insubstantial, or at least was not the same object as before. Almost the only objects that seemed substantial were the dead or dying fish, and the sounds they made as they landed in the baskets, a slapping underlined by the thwacking of bodies rearing up one more time and a crackling in the container for shellfish and crusted creatures, for spider crabs and shrimp, and in between the scrabbling of those still alive, and, almost inaudible, in a third container the feeble movements of perhaps the one polyp still alive in the dense heap of lifeless ones. By comparison, even the fishy, seaweedy, oceany odor that he was breathing in, much more powerfully, it seemed to him, than the last time he had been there, struck him as insubstantial, no, completely devoid of substance, ethereal. Despite all the bustle, it was an empty world that wafted toward him from this island of his first book, and this emptiness, rather than welcoming him as it usually had in the past, repelled him; resisted him. An impulse to turn back, to the ferry, to the mainland? Yes, but turning back was out of the question. And then came something like a contrary impulse, emanating from the sight of a shark lying on a cutter’s deck, a not very large shark, its white belly turned up, its rows of teeth equally white, almost milk-tooth-like, the shark eyes closed, as if on purpose: long ago, when he had swum far out into the sea after writing, calls had reached him from the shore that sounded like “Seadog! Seadog!” He had paid them no mind and simply swum farther, and only later, when he looked in the dictionary, did he discover that “seadog” was the local term for shark.

  Then, having arrived in the writing village of long ago, far from the town of Cordura, he did not recognize anything either. Earlier, as he walked, a sense of familiarity had returned with some of his footsteps, familiarity with the landscape, the road, the island wind, and, in another way, with his own gait, with his own body, as if the longer he walked the more he fell into his previous footsteps, footsteps of air, as if he were filling with his current body the airy ou
tline of his long-ago body, and as if that were creating a single body, beyond past and present, a body as solid as any could be. His walking had become a striding, his striding a measuring, and added to that the great sky over Cordura and above him. “Cordura and me.”

  The lack of recognition that followed turned out to be entirely different from what he had experienced in the harbor. In fact the village no longer existed. When telling us this part, he avoided the term “fishing village” altogether and spoke instead of a “village where a few fishermen lived,” and his room there “way back when” had been rented not in a “fisherman’s house” but in a building described in a detailed and roundabout fashion as a “stone cottage without electricity where one got tangled at night in nets,” and so forth, which, however, as one of his listeners interrupted, amounted to the same thing as a “fisherman’s house,” whereupon the storyteller merely corrected him briefly with “No, not the same thing!” Whatever: the house in which he had spent the nights that summer, with the Adriatic visible from the skylight in his room, was no longer standing, and likewise the couple of other houses in the village had disappeared. The emptiness there was real and physical, not “virtual” (although he spoke the latter word as if the whole thing were a game). The thing that had remained most present to him all this time, the tree standing among the stone cottages, in whose shade he had sat at a small kitchen table and typed day after day: in its place a bare patch. And even if he was mistaken about the exact spot: nowhere else in the vicinity could another tree be seen, or even a trace of one. No village, to say nothing of “fishermen.” Instead, built partway out into the ocean and onto the cliffs, a sort of marine center, glassed in, and closed at the moment, or altogether. And yet this was the village with the tree—whose botanical name he did not know, although he insisted it had been a plane tree—and thus he took up a position, and planned to stay awhile in the empty space in what had been the village center, where the waves, as close as before, were audible as a mere lapping, also just as before.

  On the way to his first book—it would be some time before it deserved that name—he had also had his first girlfriend there in the island village. This girl was the first person he, the would-be writer not much older than she was, had betrayed, and along with the young woman his future book, though in a different sense. As a traitor to what he had undertaken, what he was writing, what he intended to accomplish: this was how he already saw himself in those days every time they kissed or just walked hand in hand, and he looked into her eyes, and that is how he saw himself now, sitting there alone in the void, under a rather lowering sky. As a traitor to the dreamed-of book, daily to be dreamed anew—and also to the girl? More as a swindler. “Ah, so torn!” was what he exclaimed that night on the boat.

  Yet it was a grand summer, “possibly,” as he, who otherwise did his utmost to avoid superlatives, found himself bursting out right after that remark, “the grandest in my life.” He had recognized the conflict early on, yes, the incompatibility, even unsuitability. But in those days he enjoyed the back-and-forth. The sweetness and, yes, the exaltation of merging with the other person’s body, then spending hours alone at the table, where word after word demanded something of him that he merely intuited, but soon thereafter, and after that again and again, and soon daily, experienced against a backdrop of unmistakable, palpably merciless menace. Only both experiences, precisely because of their incompatibility, gave him for the first time something like a sense of completeness, a sense of life. In later years that would change. Eventually he could find no pleasure in the conflict between being obligated on the one hand to practice the profession of a writer, or recorder, and on the other being a lover or a loved one. It was a form of guilt. It was culpability. The two together were criminal. Either-or.

  The abdicated writer got up and paced back and forth, then in a circle, in the former village square or writing place, or whatever he had decided to call the empty space. (“Where did you leave your suitcase?” the pushiest member of our group interrupted him. “At the Hotel Cordura,” he replied.) He had never felt a calling to write, and certainly not before that summer. If there was to be a calling, it had to come from him, from him alone. He had to try to discover his calling, and—this at least seemed like a sign, the only sign he had received in his life, as he had already sensed when taking leave of childhood: perhaps this self-determination could be accomplished through writing.

  The former writer continued to pace back and forth and around in a circle, and eventually also backward. The lapping of the Adriatic. The ever-present island breeze. Oncoming dusk. Writing? What had that meant to him? Primarily an escape. An escape from what? From so-called reality? From the heavy hand of reality? From the world? The demands of the world? No. Or yes. If opening one’s mouth, having to speak, being told “Come on, out with it! Tell us!” constitutes such a demand of the world, he did feel impelled to escape from it, and not by falling silent but rather by writing things down. He, who during the Moravian night just talked and talked, had resorted to writing in order to get away from all the damned jabber. Damned? To him, yes, at least in his early years. Yet he, the villager, hailed from a region and from a clan in which orality was almost the only medium of communication, and if the written word played any role, it always evoked the suspicion associated with anything official, governmental, or it took the form chiefly of numbers, of calculations. But there was no need to look beyond him and his person: it was his very own orality from which he wanted to escape. It was his own voice. It was not only that others usually found his voice too soft—“Speak up, please!” He himself did not want to hear his voice, and not only because it was so soft, or thin, or tremulous: he had only to hear himself speak and promptly he did not want to go on speaking—he had a deep reluctance to hear himself speak, and in his early years, and not those alone, when he did speak, even to himself, his own voice constantly got in the way. But when he was writing, ah, how he could forget himself, at least for a while, and not such a short while. Oh, the damned echo of speaking. Oh, the echo of writing. (Yet during our Moravian night he seemed to have forgotten himself completely while speaking, and the rest of us forgot with him that it was him—even forgot from time to time that there was a voice to listen to.)

  His landlord and landlady back there in the island village had probably never read a book. At least there was none to be seen in their house, not even one about fishing. Certainly they had never had any contact with an author, let alone one like him, who was writing a book before their very eyes, and outdoors, too, where they also did their work. At first they laughed at him amiably, then they were astonished at him, and by the end of the summer they actually expressed admiration for his activity, probably also because of his persistence, which matched theirs, and his refusal to let anything disturb him, whether noises—radios, tractors—or smells, beneath a sun from which at certain times of day no leafy shadows could offer protection. When an occasional bad smell wafted in his direction from the rotting fish heads and innards, he held his handkerchief over his nose and went on typing, using one finger of his free hand, and the same thing toward evening when the cows, having eaten their fill in their island pastures, passed through the village on the way to their stalls, not a few of them quite bloated and relieving themselves in an endless succession of farts, billow after billow of a stench that challenged him not to lose his sense for rhythm, images, indeed all feeling, as he chose his words. What an undertaking. A grand summer.

  A challenge, however, not only from the outside, but also from the inside, an inside that was entirely unlike him and his person. Challenge? Demand. Order. Law. A pretentious concept? No, the proper one. As he wrote, and in that which he was writing, the “book,” a law was at work. It had begun to manifest itself with the first sentence, and in the course of the writing it became all-encompassing. And what did it express? Affirmation, no, assurance, and on the other hand, no, on the contrary, a threat, no, a menace. And the law was absolute. It brooked neither om
issions nor exceptions. And with what did it threaten him? Punishment? What kind? The menace, absolute though it was, remained unclear. But what was clear: there would be, or again on the contrary, there would not be, a verdict, no, a conviction. And “on the contrary” meant: if he violated the law. And how would the violation become apparent? Heavens, it would be obvious the moment it happened. It would be branded on him, then and there. And it would burn inside him until the final judgment was pronounced.

  The menace sprang to life inside him in response to seemingly small, trivial factors: all it took was a fleeting irritation at the heat, at a wind gust that flipped over the paper in the typewriter, making him type the letter he was about to strike on the back instead of the front of the page, and the whole undertaking would be called into question, and with it he himself. Anything that began with un-, such as a touch of unhappiness over something, a vague uneasiness, an unfriendly response he caught himself making—that was enough to bring on the sense that an unnamed sanction was imminent, and how! Especially dangerous was unkindness, not merely in his actions but also in what led up to them and followed them, when he was standing in line to be waited on in a shop in Cordura, or waiting to buy a ticket at the cinema and chafing inwardly at those ahead of him. From the beginning he had lacked patience and could picture himself as an infant shrieking if his mother’s breast was offered a fraction of a second too late, or even if the sun, for which he was constantly on the lookout (or so his mother had told him), refused to emerge from behind clouds. This lack of patience, or, to use another term, lack of self-control, had been his worst character defect until those months on the island. Up to the Moravian night and probably long after, it formed part of his problematic relationship to time. How would he, who became downright mean in his lack of patience, ever manage to produce a book, the fruit of tranquillity combined with patience, the fruit of having time, which, as he began to learn there, was the most noble of feelings? A summer fraught with danger. A summer of adventure.