by Peter Handke
If he wanted to become a writer, then the kind of writer of whom, so he felt or daydreamed, at least sporadically—he liked to use this word, riffing on the name of the twenty-four Greek islands in the Aegean—he could find traces in himself, he had to steer clear of everything. “Steer clear!” he had admonished himself in the preceding years whenever, driven less by curiosity than by his own lack of affiliations, he had participated as a student in meetings of a political party or some other kind of party. Exhibitions, concerts, and readings to him also seemed like party gatherings from which he should keep his distance—which he did not do consistently, “to my shame.” (He did not consider going to the movies a party activity.) And even with someone “of the opposite sex” he saw himself as engaged in a party activity. And belonging to a party was not for him. He would either miss a scheduled meeting on purpose or he would keep hoping the other person would not show up, or he would find an excuse at the last or next-to-last moment to avoid being alone with the other person.
With the girl on the island it also turned out that he felt he had to swindle his way out of being a couple. As he saw it, being with her sometimes meant just going through the motions, on his part at least. His desire to fly the coop actually accorded with the way the two of them had met. One evening he was sitting in a, hm, sporadic gathering of island villagers on a bench constructed around the tree that marked the village center—that was how big around it was—when suddenly a hand thrust itself into his. And he? His hand, which, as he later thought, embodied the whole of him, jerked back, “not exactly as if it had been stung by one of the island’s tarantulas, but almost!” He knew immediately whose hand it was, although it was dark and the girl was facing away from him, seated on the other side of the tree trunk. Yes, he had jerked away, and almost at the same time, as if in response, something unfurled in him that was greater than him and transcended him, his attempt to free his hand was contradicted in the very way that movement occurred, a nameless, boundless, and enormous ecstasy, to describe which, during the night on the boat, he paraphrased a sentence by Gustave Flaubert—instead of “The moon rose; tranquillity crept into his heart,” “She chose me; ecstasy entered his heart.” Accordingly he revoked his jerking away; this once there was still time, but on future occasions, when it happened to him with this woman and later with others, no longer. His inconstancy was no longer forgiven, either by these lovers or by the one intended to be his one and only, whom he had not seldom cheated on, indeed betrayed.
In the meantime he was washed up as a writer, or almost—another word he used repeatedly, whether involuntarily or intentionally—almost to his relief. For some time now he had been feeling almost liberated. He no longer needed to swindle, to betray. He had been released from the law, that terrible sweet law. A good thing, too, that the village he had known no longer existed, not one house, not one tree. So had he been hoping for a memorial plaque? Whatever the case: as he paced back and forth and in a circle in that empty spot (he had soon forbidden himself to walk backward), his one thought was: lovely emptiness, my legacy. And then, in that nothingness-times-two, something suddenly overcame him, no, overwhelmed him, that was different from longing or desire, and this was, far from all living beings, a powerful hunger that was at once a physical hunger and a hunger for air. He was gripped by a kind of hiccupping that remained bottled up. Could he allow himself this kind of hunger now? On the spur of the moment he shed his clothes and swam out into the ocean, this time not as far as at the time of the shark, to live, for life. Whereupon the person in our group who, during that night on the Morava, interrupted our storytelling friend with factual questions whenever he began to portray his own interior world as a universally valid exterior world, did so again, asking this time, “Wasn’t the water too cold? I hope you didn’t step on a sea urchin? And what did you use to dry off? And how did you get back into town?” Whether he received an answer or not, these questions did not upset anyone. They fit the occasion.
Back in the town of Cordura, never mind how. Evening. Time now, as long ago, for going to the movies. Except that the movie theater no longer existed; it had been turned into an auto repair shop. The ticket booth fronting the street was still standing, complete with its window and the revolving drawer for money and tickets, next to the open garage door; the booth served as a storage area for lubricants, paint cans, and so forth. He tried to swivel the drawer, and it worked. He placed a coin in it and gave it a push. From the old church tower came the call to evening Mass, the bell sounding tinny and toneless, just as before. The Mass refreshing—very different from earlier—and that matched all the experiences he had gathered in the meantime with Masses celebrated on islands. It seemed to him as if there, in contrast to the mainland, something additional floated in among the words of the liturgy, and besides—this, too, a difference—a service on an island had nothing to prove. No particular faith had to be defended against evil foes or hostile brethren. No drawing of distinctions was grimly celebrated. Like other island churches, this one was no bulwark against such forces. These churches were not outposts of the one true Christian faith. Although the church door remained closed during the Mass, one increasingly felt as if one were out in the open, and despite its still being winter, the ceremony could almost have been accompanied by a chorus of swallows, as its tuneful tangent. It seemed fitting that he, a stranger to the place and to the country, should be urged, just before the “introibo ad altare Dei,” to join in and read the lesson, taken that evening from the Psalms, and that he, who for a long while now had avoided any sort of public appearance, should agree without hesitation, even though his pronunciation revealed that he came from beyond the border. “Why the tumult among nations?” So was this still Dalmatia after all?
Night. The island corso, which in the absence of a proper main street involved circling around the square down by the harbor. A walking, walking, walking that seemed to involve everyone. Without the succession of words, images, and actions from earlier in the church, without the sentences from the Gospel, the kneeling for the transubstantiation, the procession to the altar for Communion: Would this movement have seemed as harmonious, flexible, inviting, inclusive? Would a similar impression of inclusivity, for once entirely unintentional, for once nothing but peaceable, have arisen? Obviously the whole thing was an illusion—the Mass just another movie. But for a while this kind of movie gave pleasure: “Count me in.” With one churchgoer or another in the tavern, all drinking whatever one drinks there, yet remaining churchgoers for a while, and he with them.
So it came as no surprise, and certainly not as a disappointment, when the harmony ended abruptly. And with this “abruptly” some features of the Balkans broke over the jetty, features from which this island world had purposefully distanced itself long ago, if indeed it had ever been party to them. Suddenly a concentrated form of Balkanness manifested itself in shouts, blows, curses, spitting, baring of gaps between teeth. But that the person being shouted at, etc., turned out to be him, who had been taking part unobtrusively in the corso, that came as a surprise. It caught him off guard, struck him, at least, as an assault, while the others walking in a circle probably saw it differently, as more harmless.
Only in retrospect did he realize that the shouting was not merely an exclamation but actually contained his name, or one syllable of it. And he at first interpreted the poke in the back, forceful though it was, as accidental, and when it came again, even more forcefully, as a friend’s greeting that had simply taken this form out of enthusiasm, a greeting from one of us who happened to be on the island and had recognized him in the crowd. But when he turned around to look at the presumed friend, he saw a woman in rags baring her teeth at him—see above, gaps between teeth—and she spat at him and began to intone a litany of curses thoroughly worthy of the Balkans: “You dog without a tail! You seadog without fins. You sun-worshipper in the dark. You flat-footed praying mantis. You bead of sweat in the empty grave. May the brimstone butterfly fuck you. May the firebug f
uck you. May the sultan’s cook fuck you. May your mother fall out of the pear tree, so even if you fuck her you won’t be able to bring her back to life…”
Now he recognized her as the beggar he had seen earlier huddled by the entrance to the church. She had looked up when he dropped money in her cup, but not to thank him; she wanted more. And when he gave her more, she insisted on even more, with an imperious gesture, as if demanding tribute. The spot by the church seemed to be her regular post; it was as if she had not moved from there, under the porch roof, since time immemorial. Like the homeless in large cities, she was surrounded by piles of bulging plastic bags, and clearly the stench that spread in all directions for a considerable distance came less from the bags than from the woman herself, half sitting, half lying there, with trickles of piss, some already dry, others still damp, forming an unusual kind of sidewalk art around her. Her colorless hair, pasted to her skull as if baked on in a layer of fat, short on one side, barely reaching down to her ear, hip-length on the other side, and heavy, as if it were hanging in a net. Amid this colorlessness, her face deep red, chilblain red, and the cheeks free of wrinkles, smooth, stretched, shining, in fact, just like a chilblain; one wrinkle and one only on her forehead, but almost delicate, as if she had been born with it, with hardly any depth, hardly furrowed, only lightly incised, also not continuous, not extending all the way across, looking as it must have when she was a child.
And this wrinkle enabled him to recognize her as someone else, while she continued to curse him. Yes, it was she, the very one, the island girl from the summer when he was writing his first book. Even before he was sure, her name popped out of his mouth—a name that, as previously agreed, has no relevance here—not as a question but as an exclamation. Before he knew it himself, the word knew it for her. And she at once stopped her cursing, and her redness became redder. Yes, it was she. And for the duration of this second—yes, it was a long second—her whole face, not only the broken wrinkle on her brow—became recognizable as that of the young woman from his long-ago experience, her long-ago experience, their shared long-ago experience, gentle and full of grace. Then, as abruptly as she had started shouting at him before, she wheeled and disappeared into the corso.
Later that night he came upon her again. He had searched for her. She was not by the church door. Only the plastic bags were still there, but looking more like props for a scene in a film, used some time before and left behind. One of the bags was empty and was blowing back and forth over the cobblestones in the faint night breeze. In the stillness all around the sound seemed particularly gentle to him, and he resolved to take note of it for the upcoming symposium on noise to be held in the Spanish Meseta: as he listened, he even believed he could make out a kind of instrument, tones rising and falling, cadenzas. And he noted: “Hearing as seeing.”
Where he eventually found her? In one of the taverns down by the harbor, and at first he was not at all sure that she was the same homeless person. Not that she seemed transformed. But she had “dolled herself up,” to use an expression current at one time in the region where he had grown up. She had put on a long dress with a colorful pattern that made one think of a local island costume, even though such a thing probably did not exist, and her hair seemed more or less restored to its original shade, the uneven sides pinned up in the back to form an almost classic coiffure. Her red face: was it powdered white? or was this her natural pallor, reminiscent of those Egyptian statues of couples, which always showed the man’s face bronzed while the woman’s was swan-feather white?
Yet this was still the local vagrant, wasn’t it? At any rate she circulated as such among the tavern’s tables, and when she paused, which she seldom did, and spoke to the seated guests—he was standing too far away to make out what was said—she had the air of someone voicing demands, even though no outstretched hand could be seen. In the course of her continued circling, she repeatedly passed him at the bar, in a cloud of salty perfume, but paid him no mind. She had already said to him all there was to say? He no longer existed for her? And perhaps she had not recognized him as her first man but as the person on his way to evening Mass who had refused to give her what she was owed?
For his part, he resolved not to let her out of his sight during this hour of the night. That was his duty now. That much he owed her. Now and then she went to one of the windows and stood there, her hands clasped behind her, gazing out at the dock and perhaps beyond. The light flashing at intervals into the taproom did not come from a lighthouse. It was heat lightning far out over the ocean. As time wore on, whenever the woman exchanged words with people at one of the tables, she came to resemble, from a distance, the proprietor, keeping an eye on things all evening and checking on her guests’ well-being. The only person she avoided was him. At most a glance came to rest on him now and then, as if from far away, a fairly somber look that brushed him or swept over him, and each time that happened, he recalled in that second the first time they had been together, and how she had lowered her eyes, which had been looking into his, to rest on his body, and how a wave of heat had surged through him, the boy he was then, and now? And he remembered, as she made her rounds, the way she had seemed always to be waiting for something, watching for something. The way she bustled around, straightened and tidied things, gathered up decks of cards, set up chess pieces for a new game, smoothed out crumpled lottery tickets, then smoothed them again. And no one except him was paying the slightest attention to her, although in that small space she was by far the most active. Actually none of those she addressed answered; if someone seemed to be doing so, in fact he was talking to someone else at the table or someone behind her, at the next table. And then, as he stood by the bar, at one point he found himself pulling out his notebook, hardly used anymore, as if to record all these small details, a habit he had long since given up. Secretly, secretly, as he had done in the past, he opened it under the lip of the bar and then hastily put it away again, without first needing to feel his former lover’s eyes on him.
In the end he followed her out onto the square by the harbor, by this hour past midnight deserted. He had always felt the urge to follow someone or other unobserved, not in order to ferret out some secret—just because. When it looked as though a discovery or a revelation was about to occur, he would instead turn and head in the other direction. He had a horror of sneaking up on or shadowing a person. So, too, on this night he ducked into an alley the minute he saw her, in a flash of heat lightning, awkwardly kicking off her stiletto heels at the edge of the square and, almost falling in the process, putting on a pair of slippers, clearly scuffed, and having done that, bunching up her long dress and crouching down. What to do? He did want to do something, something for her. He knew from earlier, however, from his earlier life, so to speak, that every time he had done something for someone, it had only made things worse. At most his good deeds had held disaster at bay for a while. The best thing was not to get involved. To let whatever was going to happen happen. Let it be: that had become part of his law for himself. And yet. And yet.
A large dog followed him back to the Cordura Hotel, the same dog that had run alongside the bus, the last living being to accompany it as it departed from Porodin. But hadn’t the mutt back there been much smaller? one of us chimed in. No, it was the same one. And the dog and he stopped in front of a relief sculpted on a wall, from the period long before the Venetian winged lion. It was an intertwined spiral from the Carolingian, Langobardian, or possibly Illyrian period, or some other historical or prehistorical period. He urged the dog to translate the symbols for him, and the animal then spelled out something like this: “There is no such thing as a happy love, and heat lightning will not produce a thunderstorm, and the water in the harbor is all deep, and it is far to Numancia, and you will not die in peace, and you kissed each other amid the farting of the cattle, and one time she had the name of a cherry, and he who is enthroned in heaven laughs, and the dew will be salty the next morning.” And in the end the dog was speaking in
the voice of the woman, no, the delicate voice of the girl from long ago: “Did you not know—did you not wish to know it to this day? I was carrying your child under my heart, and you, you killed it, and me with it.”
At this point in the account of his tour of the continent, our host suddenly stopped speaking and jumped up from his seat. He turned his head this way and that, peering into the darkness around the boat and sniffing the air. Without a word, simply by means of gestures and then actions, he managed to transmit a sense of danger to the rest of us. Although the frogs had probably not fallen silent until he jumped up, he took pains to create the impression that it had happened moments earlier. He put his finger to his lips, tiptoed hastily onto the bank of the Morava, unfastened the hawsers from the trees with the help of the young woman, the stranger, and, dragging her behind him as if they were fleeing, dashed almost without a sound back onto the boat, already beginning to drift slowly downstream, and, without starting up the boat’s engine, grabbed the helm and steered, as if holding his breath—whereupon we hardly dared to breathe either—as close to the bank as possible, through dense reeds and shrubs growing in the water, and when the boat had traveled a few stone’s throws or spear-casts or rifle-lengths farther, he finally tossed overboard, at the spot where the reeds grew thickest, a proper anchor, as if close to the open sea.
There, with the boat hidden in the reeds and at the same time away from the bank, he continued his story. I, the only one of us who had known him from childhood, had admired even then his knack for conjuring up, for the rest of us village children, dangers and prickly situations that were perhaps not even real—or were they? At any rate he, becoming more and more seduced by his own imaginings, came to believe them himself, and was in turn infected by the fear of his listeners, who even before him anticipated, wavering between fascination and panic, the imminent bombing raid or the return of the Turks, now, now, or the flood about to sweep over us (“and now … and now … and now!”). I heard from his brother, who was considerably younger, that the bedtime stories he would tell, always in pitch darkness, with the kerosene lantern blown out and later the lamp turned off, usually merged into a kind of live reportage describing something scary that was taking shape outside in the darkness and coming ever closer—until the reporter perching on the edge of the bed, who had earlier playfully struck a match from time to time to scare the smaller boy, would break off his account and fall silent, both brothers now frozen with fear as they awaited the calamity about to strike. Bedtime stories? After that a good night was out of the question, yet the next evening the little brother would wait eagerly for the voice out of the darkness.