The Moravian Night

by Peter Handke

  I myself recall walking with the future writer, to the distant monastery church, I think it was. The road was actually just a footpath, one stretch of which led through dense shrubbery. It was probably not summertime; I have no memory of heat. But from one moment to the next my friend stopped dead in his tracks and began to talk about snakes. No sooner had the word occurred to him than he already saw them: “There! And there! And there!” He pointed and pointed, shouted and shouted, and sure enough, I saw snakes, too. Snakes everywhere: there were not only loads of them crawling in the undergrowth; some were also darting their tongues up in the branches that arched across the path, and the boughs were bending under their weight. He started to run, with me close behind him, and as we ran I saw with him, who continued to point and shout, snake after snake, springing from bush to bush at eye level with us. (So there was such a thing as leaping snakes, not only in dreams.) Although after the tunnel we were safe, it took only a gray piece of bark in the grass and an exclamation of “Look!” for us to see it start moving and swerve to avoid it. And even now I can see the gray snake there, and also the snakes from before flitting through the air: I saw them, I see them.

  During that night on the Morava, many years later: so many dangers were thinkable here and now, and all of them bona fide and at the same time unspecified, and none of us wanted them to be specified, or if at all, only the way the boatmaster did it before he continued his story: he said he had let the boat drift into the reeds to escape from the tax-evasion investigation, the pan-European one. Just as during the previous week the date had been announced for the forest-debris collection, for this week the night for pursuing tax evaders had been set, corresponding to the film The Night of the Hunter, where Robert Mitchum lurks under a starry sky on a riverbank, waiting for the boat carrying the children whom he plans to overpower; so the bank of the Morava was swarming with thousands of nocturnal pan-European tax investigators.

  3

  THE SYMPOSIUM ON noise and sounds was supposed to take place in a conference center located out on the Spanish steppe, at the foot of the round hill where Numancia had stood in pre-Roman times. No settlement in the immediate vicinity, only a few farmsteads, long since abandoned. The road leading to the center was passable only in a Jeep. And then no trace of a “center.” The building looked more like a small round hill at the foot of the large round hill, its baby, so to speak, also matching its coloration, a mixture of rock, lichen, and sand. The construction seemed to be intended primarily as a kind of camouflage, perhaps similar to that of military installations, which, especially from above, in a bird’s-eye view or such, were meant to look like features of the landscape—yet on closer inspection turned out to be very different: the building material, each component the opposite of stage scenery, the stones not painted tar paper but granite, as solid as any on the Meseta; the chimneys no mere slits as in a simulated charcoal-burner’s pile, and the numerous irregular gaps in the mound all thickly glazed—the architecture obviously aimed for durability, and if meant to withstand a worst-case scenario, then not the kind associated with war. What a surprise upon entering: the dome of stone and glass, its foundations anchored in the ground of the steppe, enclosed one of the old farmsteads, the largest in the area, all of whose components, with their different functions, had been largely preserved in their original order and even their original forms: the main house, the hired hands’ quarters, the barns, the stables, the corral.

  When the former writer arrived there, it was a dark, clear day, of the sort he wished all the remaining days during his tour would resemble. How had he reached the place? In a rented Jeep. And did he still have his small suitcase with him? Yes, and it had straps attached to one side, so it could be used as a backpack. And had he taken an airplane before this? This question from the chronic interrupter among us he did not answer. The light around the two round hills of Numancia was wintry, so did he wish it would also snow? No. Snow had provided for and guided him often enough in his life, thank goodness, and this time, he promised the interrupter in that night of storytelling on the Morava, it would not snow during the rest of his story; not a single flake would fall.

  “Symposium?” The prospect of hearing about one, whether it had anything to do with Plato’s or not, made us rather grumpy. We pictured a symposium as a sort of—what was the word?—“roundtable,” with movers and shakers, dignitaries, experts, or assorted role-players from all over the world, dressed in suits and ties and each of them with a lapel pin representing some distinction, the tinier the pin the more distinguished, all these gentlemen with earpieces for the simultaneous translation, the event taking place in a bunker located between somewhere and nowhere, protected by special security details, likewise from all over the world, and the participants seated at a more-or-less round table, and for three days giving the world, urbi et orbi, an example, but of what no one knew, and showing people like us the way, to where no one knew, and besides, each of us, or at least those of us on the nocturnal boat, wanted to strike out in his own direction—see the small tables standing at the oddest angles to each other in the salon, each with only one occupant, and each turned away from the other, at least slightly.

  But as the boatmaster continued his tale, he soon changed our minds. Those who came together at the foot of the round mound of Numancia, under the banner of noise, might be experts, but above all they were victims. And whenever these victims spoke up, they did not speak of something they had survived, something they had put behind them. They were permanently damaged by the noise, the tumult, the racket, which by no means had to be exclusively the din of war; these were people with incurable wounds. A quieter place for the symposium could hardly be imagined. Their persisting symptoms and especially disorders were, as the discussion leader, apparently the only uninjured one, the only healthy one among them, kept repeating, “phantomatic,” but that, as the victims likewise kept repeating, made it “no less real.” And he, the former writer, what did he say? What was his contribution? He said nothing, said not a single word during the entire symposium, at least not at the table, had come only to listen. How could that be: hadn’t he indicated at the beginning that he had been invited as a participant? Wasn’t he contradicting himself now? Well, if he was, he replied, in the course of the night he would take the liberty of contradicting himself, perhaps rather often.

  He was one of the observers, one of very few, and the only one from farther away. The two or three others—of whom only one remained by the end—all came just for the day from the provincial capital far below in the river valley carved into the steppe, given lasting fame by the poplars and nightingales invoked in the poems of Antonio Machado, and from time to time also by the soccer team known as FC Numancia. And if he had not been invited as a participant, who had made him aware of the conference? In fact it was one of the two or three from that city, “let’s call it Numancia as well,” a poet, “another one,” whom the former writer knew from much earlier when he was working on his prose there. That had been long, long ago.

  Symposium? A strange roundtable, perduring three days and three nights. (“Perdure” was the kind of word that sometimes slipped out, cut off as he had been for a long time from contemporary usage.) He had been drawn to major cities, away from his rural Balkans. And now an even more remote location if possible, somewhere, to borrow freely from a pair of place names familiar from the old days back home, between the “Inner Wasteland” and “Outer Wasteland.” No: as he listened to the participants, he became part of a metropolis, more so each day, in the fullest sense. That had less to do with the fact that the speakers had journeyed there from all corners of Europe. They formed a center for him, even without the conference, for another reason. And besides, by no means all of them came from capital or major cities. One of them was a “shepherd,” or at least introduced himself as such. Another described himself as a troubadour, a third as a former Carthusian monk. The one who had come from America—the only one from a different continent—presented himself as
an Indian from a reservation; whether a Navajo or an Apache our host did not want to say.

  The impression of a metropolis there at the foot of the godforsaken round mound of Numancia emanated more from the shared, sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory, problems, misfortunes, as well as fortunate encounters and adventures, with noise, sounds, tones, or silence, of which the roundtable participants spoke one after the other and more and more all at once. Probably the most strikingly adventurous case from an outsider’s point of view was that of a man from the suburbs who had attacked his “noise neighbor,” as he called him, with an iron pipe (“I could easily have gone after seven to seventeen others; the authorities should issue noise licenses like gun licenses”) and who had been punished by being locked up in a soundproof isolation cell for a year. But the former writer, and, as he thought, the rest of us along with him, did not want to hear at length about such an adventure, let alone stories about neighbors, since people hardly had neighbors anymore, and even the word had gone out of use in its primary meaning.

  What the reports had in common: noise, racket, the din at home and the noise abroad—by now there was no longer any difference. And that was true both of the decibel level and of something the group found equally worth reporting, and that was the fact that all of them had become just as sensitive to noise abroad as at home, just as noise-sick, noise-crazed, homicidal. They had found much the same explanation for the noise volume, generated equally by natives and foreigners: because there were hardly any foreign countries left and accordingly no borders, the majority of, no, pretty much all the former foreigners, wherever they turned up, which was usually in groups nowadays, behaved beyond their former borders much the way, no, just the way they did at home at all unhallowed times; so that business about the noise made equally by natives and foreigners was not quite accurate. Ah, the days when Italians, even in groups, had moved so quietly and sensitively through foreign cities, and when you heard them speaking: what a delicate melody. Ah, the times when the Spaniards … had tried so tentatively and conscientiously to express themselves in one foreign language or another. Ah, the times when the Asians … had not laughed so uproariously in foreign subways or had at least held their hands over their mouths when they laughed.

  No common explanation was found, however, for the fact that the noise affected one just as harshly outside one’s familiar surroundings, in unfamiliar places, where one was visiting, was allowed to be visiting, as at home. That one wanted to scream and demand that it stop, whether in a Portuguese bar or a Scottish pub or a Czech beer hall. That beyond the former borders, where one was merely a guest, one imagined shoving the first helmeted champion engine-roarer one encountered off his motorcycle just as one would at home. One participant explained this inner resistance to noise, in any setting whatsoever, by pointing to the noise level, the same in any setting whatsoever: for those one might call the noise-sufferers there also no longer existed any distinctions, any borders or thresholds. Another person said, no, the domestic or local noise had made him so sick after a while that even in the most faraway corners of the world his ears reacted not like those of a traveler, a guest, an invitee, but incurably as those of someone ill. And yet another commented, no, he had been ill, all of them here had been ill much earlier, spiritually ill, maybe even born with a spiritual deficiency, a mysterious one, as yet unstudied—and it was as a result of this illness that noise had become such torment to him, to the others, or sounds previously entirely harmless were experienced as noise attacks, as witness the way newborns in all countries now winced and went into convulsions when their pacifiers fell on the floor—how long had this been going on?

  They also agreed that for some reason even the most delicate sound could suddenly assault one raucously and that silence itself could swell at times to a roar, from which one wanted to take refuge in an actual racket. Just as certain images refused to let one go, even when one was far removed from them in time and space, a noise one had experienced as evil and hostile could persist inside one long after it had fallen silent in the outside world. People no longer experienced silence. The buzzing one had heard all day long continued buzzing during the night in one’s dreams. The clang of metal on metal pursued one into the desert. “The rumbling, screeching, crashing, ringing, banging will never cease,” sang the itinerant musician—whose hearing, in his own words, was “completely wrecked”—at the farewell party on the third day, “the noise gobbles up my love.”

  Those attending the roundtable were not noise-sick from time to time, but once and for all, permanently. And in what other ways did this sickness express itself? One of them, for instance, experienced even the most tender music as malevolent noise and covered his ears at the first measures of a piece by Mozart or Schubert, explaining that not long ago these very notes had been employed strategically as part of an attack on his country of origin: all the soul-stirring sonatas and lieder had been deployed not for the sake of the silence that would follow—what more could music accomplish?—but to unmask the music of his country as culturally worthless, and also to unmask his country altogether; since then, anything soul-stirring of which he had previously been fond pierced him to the quick before the first suggestion of the first notes could be heard, and sent him fleeing. Another man flinched at the slightest breeze. Another took cover if a button on his coat brushed against a door handle. And another whipped his head around at the creaking of his own shoe. Far off a pheasant rattled, a coot hooted, and a bicyclist sounded his bell to force one to get out of the way, or a stranger clipped his nails menacingly as he sat nearby. As a fisherman tossed his line into the water, it sounded like a ferocious dog barking. In the rushing of a mountain brook one heard not the fairy-tale voice of long ago but the blabbing and nattering of talking heads on television the world over. A small pencil dropped—such a charming sound once upon a time—and one started, likewise at the drop, no, the crash, of the softest grape hitting the ground. The former Carthusian monk reported that the shuffling of the other monks, obeying the rule of silence, had given him suicidal thoughts. A jay cawed, and a “jogger” sniffed back his snot. The kinds of things that had once simply made one prick up one’s ears, like a leaf landing in a puddle, the rustling of heads of wheat, the popping of jewel weed, now caused one to flinch.

  Taken all together, the fundamental characteristic of this noise sickness was a loss of space. People’s sense of space became muddled. Things heard from a distance attacked one physically. Noises inside the body threatened one from outside. A rumbling deep below the street resounded from high above. A helicopter buzzed on the horizon, and one batted at a wasp. It could get so bad that one backed away from the rumbling in one’s own stomach. One might think that in the course of those three days the Indian would have got used to the sounds of this continent—yet on every walk he took out into the local European steppe, the bubbling of a spring or a trickle in the grass promptly transported him back to the glug-glug-glug of booze going down the throats of his fellow tribesmen, and whenever he made the rounds of the barns and stables, the former corral, the chains hanging everywhere—almost impossible to avoid—brought back the rattling of the chain that his own brother back home had swung menacingly as he staggered toward him.

  Who was to blame for their illness? They themselves—on this, too, they reached consensus—were not to blame. At one time or another, for all of them perception of what was going on in the world had primarily taken an auditory form: “Listening—hearing—tuning in”: this formulation offered by the former itinerant musician. Even as a child, the noise-deranged shepherd, pastor, had dropped everything to run to the edge of the woods and sit there quietly, listening to the trees rustle, hour after hour, and he would have given up every game and every book for that, and would still do so—if in the meantime everything, including the leaves’ rustling, had not become evil in his ears. “I was intent from head to toe on listening,” the itinerant musician sang. And the defrocked Carthusian monk responded, “The fact
that from a young age and from the bottom of my heart I was intent on listening means that my soul was healthy. Ah, give me a lovely sound, and my soul will be cured.”

  No one and nothing else was to blame for their condition either: on that point, too, they achieved consensus (although one or the other at first continued looking for people to blame—for instance, or so it seemed, the great mass of people impervious to noise, of those deaf to any racket, “the ones who are really sick,” “the ones who were sick from the beginning, who, oblivious to their own sickness, made the rest of us sick”). If not to blame, at least they were responsible. One member of the group commented that noise and racket had always been there, but increasingly, ever increasingly, the suddenness, the assaultive quality of the world’s noise had manifested itself as evil, as destructive. So many contemporary phenomena were veritable noise mines that could explode from one moment to the next. What in earlier times the sound of chalk scratching on a blackboard or a fingernail scraping a windowpane could do to one’s hearing by now could be done by almost anything. “Noise lurks in all things,” sang the itinerant musician. “The asphalt whispers, the carpet rattles. The lovers whisper, the headphones pound. There’s lisping at the Busento, crashing in the Himalayas.”