The Moravian Night

by Peter Handke

  He, the observer, found it notable that the group discussed all these things in an almost cheerful tone, not loudly but also not too softly. The voices remained low-key. During the presentations none of the noise-sickness was perceptible—except at those moments when the conference center’s own facilitator intervened: at the sound of his voice, obviously trained, sonorous, mellifluous, and deliberately calming, all the participants noticeably cringed, and one face after another lost its composure. Not that they covered their ears. But you could see their knuckles turn white as they struggled to maintain control. Beads of sweat appeared on not a few brows. No, they were not laughing to themselves. The facilitator’s voice was torture to them. It was pain that brought on that sweat—during that night on the Morava he almost caught himself saying “literal” pain-sweat.

  Worth noting was something else that became clear to him as the days passed: that group at the foot of the mound of Numancia suffered less from noise and racket than from sounds that at one time had been associated with peacefulness, with reassurance, with healing, with exaltation. Things they had made a point of going to hear when they were children, and long after that, things that, no matter how remote their location, made them feel connected to what went on in the world: these things they could no longer tolerate: the trickling of water, the roaring of wind and rain, the rustling of snow falling on the branches of wintry bushes. Even crickets breaking the silence by chirping from their holes in the ground now struck them as an attack by the omnipresent hostile harshness (or they experienced the chirping, more innocuously, as the creaking of their own knees), as did the flapping of a butterfly’s wing, now at one’s right ear, now at one’s left, a sound normally inaudible. All it took was words like “trickling,” “rustling,” “rushing,” “rattling,” and the like, and each of them experienced “spiritual anguish” in his own language, not to mention that “murmuring,” from which in earlier times, after neither thunder nor a storm’s roaring had yielded any such thing, had allegedly issued the voice of God. It was not merely that all the sounds that had once been so delicate affected people as soulless; now, instead of having a healing effect, they were actually soul destroying. The murmuring, of one kind or another, constricted one’s chest and intensified one’s anguish, and instead of the warm feeling caused by a bird’s fluttering or the humming of a lone bicycle’s tires on a country road at night: uncannyness. “Ah, all the reassuring sounds, where have they gone?”

  The former monk vowed to silence posed the question, and he was the one who seemed to speak most among those in the circle. He had left his Carthusian monastery because he could no longer bear the silence, his own and the others’, the communal silence. “Once we had a factory of stillness there, and buildings of silence stood there. But as the years passed, it became a false silence, false stillness. Probably we should not have constantly looked into each other’s eyes. But after a while I no longer noticed the others in the cells next to mine or out in the fields. If I did, it was as coughers, pew-rockers, sandal-scuffers. Our Great Silence was a hoax. Instead of unifying us, it divided us, at least to my ears. Instead of helping me meditate, in the end all it led to was a heartless cocking of the ears. We were setting no good example for the rest of the world. More and more I would have preferred any clattering of machines or cars roaring by with radios blaring infernally loud music to our pretentious silence toward one another, pleasing neither to God nor to anyone else. And do you know where, in my anguish, I sometimes managed to find that other silence, the kind for which I still pined? No, less in the kitchen, while I was baking bread, or in the monastery’s vegetable garden, than—how should I put it?—in that quiet spot: the monastery toilets. There, after the worship service with its interminable Gregorian chants that spilled out of both my ears, I could finally take a deep breath and sense a bit of the veni, creator spiritus! I looked forward to the weeks when I was on bathroom duty, and would not have minded being the bathroom monk, so to speak, till the end of my days. The rushing there was the old rushing, just as the trickling was the old trickling and the stillness truly a Great Stillness. Has my hearing turned me into a misanthrope? Or into a lover of the world?”

  On the last evening, the sound and noise discussants invited the two or three auditors to join them for dinner, though not to participate in the conversation. At the end of the final day, dining was the only thing on the agenda. The dishes and drinks had been provided by the members of the group, by now used to working collaboratively; the facilitator had made himself superfluous and sat there silent, relieved of his role and not at all unhappy about that. And another phenomenon that the invited guest and future storyteller found worth remarking upon: the way in which these racket-sufferers seemed not only to tolerate but actually to enjoy the racket they themselves made as they cooked and served the meal. The louder the proceedings, the more cheerful they became. The screeching of a knife as it slit open a box of wine bottles: let it screech. The more a food processor’s whine filled the room, the more their eyes shone. The earsplitting sound of an electric knife slicing the lamb roast through to the bone: no problem. Merry though their noisemaking might be, nothing resembling music emerged from the sounds. Each participant was making a racket just for himself, not responding to someone else’s racket. For music, even the harshest kind, there would have had to be some common rhythm. Besides, no matter how one tried, one could not coax any beat or drive or pounding, or whatever one might call it, out of the sounds made by the modern machines they were using, whether small or large, in this respect perhaps different from the machines of a century ago, the locomotives, jackhammers, etc. Nonetheless they all seemed to come together for a while in a sort of homey noise, a sort of life noise. The noise of life, as opposed to the silence of the grave? Brotherly noise? Yes, brotherly noise did exist.

  The racket-making lasted only a short while. In the course of the evening meal, although initially tongues had clicked and glasses had pinged, a stillness arose in which hardly a slurping or smacking could be heard, let alone a gurgling—for the Indian’s sake. To the auditor, and even more to the melancholic poet from Nueva Numancia seated next to him, it sounded like a melancholy stillness. Everyone around the table would have to return the next day, and each of them alone, to a life-killing world of noise, from which there would be no escape. They would go home to wither away or suddenly run amok. The noise had a system, and was a system, one that had long since girdled the globe, and the islands of stillness here and there, whether in Europe or elsewhere, were nothing but propaganda, or a commercial offering, a product, or a come-on for a packaged travel deal. And the noise system was indestructible, and the only defense one still had against its overwhelming power was simply to run amok, something that “for good reason” was “flourishing” all over the world, except that those running amok always attacked the wrong targets—the “right” ones kept out of sight or did not exist at all, or at least not in flesh and blood. Only so long as the sufferers were eating and drinking together were they in safety, albeit a tenuous one.

  At the end of the evening meal, there nonetheless arose from the shared silent, concentrated melancholy, far from any running amok, a kind of resistance, which spread through the assembled company, whereupon one indicator after another emerged for a party, albeit one marking a parting forever. It began when the minstrel, or someone, tapped his glass with his knife, perhaps unintentionally. No one was expecting any speeches. No need for anyone to fall silent in the circle, already silent. On the contrary, other tones and notes provided a kind of response, at first sporadically, then in a sequence, increasingly rapid and eventually syncopated. After a while someone, let’s say the former monk, who in any case had involuntarily risen from his seat, launched into a speech, which was then taken up and continued by the shepherd, let’s say, and so forth, until in the end every diner had spoken briefly, each time in harmony with the previous speaker, so that soon it did not matter who was speaking.

  And this communal speech b
y the noise-sufferers, in which one or another of the auditors also participated, went more or less this way: “I don’t believe in the Big Bang. If it had occurred, I would dream about it. But I do believe in the Original Sound. For I have dreamed about it. No, that’s a lie. I’ve dreamed about Original Sounds, plural, one and then another. I not only dreamed about them but heard them in broad daylight, and I was perhaps never more awake. And I have heard the Original Sounds as a voice. Yes, the flapping of a butterfly’s wing, even if by now it’s nothing more than that: at one time it tuned me in, once upon a time, at least. Or the splash of that one dewdrop long ago, a splash on the margin of audibility, and then, at an interval, once I was tuned in to it, another drop at the same great interval, landing, let’s say, on a piece of firewood, on pebbles in the gutter, on the sidewalk, always in the same spot, until I heard the dewdrops as the regular tick-tock of an unheard-of clock, which at the same time became audible in the inner ear. And similarly, at least in those days, the morning opening of window shutters in the neighborhood as one of those Original Sounds. Likewise the rattling and clattering of morning trains and buses passing in quick succession. Likewise distant shouts of ‘Goal! Goal!’ Likewise cries of ecstasy or other emotions from the next room. And of course actual voices as Original Sounds: the voice of my dying sister on the telephone. The voices of abandoned children in the night (and also during the day). The voice of the woman, awakened from a deep sleep, that rekindled my love. The voices of old men talking in their sleep, like those of little children. Original Sounds used to mean impressions that would remain in one’s ear forever—or so they promised. In one’s ear? No, in one’s heart, where they had first echoed, corresponding to the Original Sound before all Original Sounds—so similar after all to that voice in a dream that once woke me as I have not been wakened before or since. Was it you calling to me? No? Or you? Not you either. But it was a call. At times I even heard a murmuring, nowadays a word in disrepute, as such a voice, as one of the Original Sounds, and similarly a certain whispering. And a certain hammering? Yes, that, too. And one or another booming, roaring, rushing, shrilling, drumming? Well, why not, and so long as the sound accompanied an action—something was being fabricated, moved along, transported—and the sounds were not set in motion for their own sake, fruitlessly, without any product, set in motion and immediately allowed to idle by millions of completely innocent noise devils, every second backyard and garden patch filled with howling and roaring, against which even the sturdiest sound barriers could not prevail, in contrast to which the racket on the loudest factory floor sounded positively soothing, as an oasis of peace. You noise-devils, who instead of hooves have steel plates on your soles and no ears poking out of your leisure overalls, not a trace of ears. Ah, the one sound, the one tone that would silence all the evil ones, that would absorb them, transform them, causing them to fall in step like a marching band. Ah, the days when my hearing could transform the sound of a pinball machine into an oriole’s song. Ah, the time of transformative hearing. Except that by now almost the exact opposite is the case: a jay’s cry seems to be imitating aluminum foil being ripped. In the call of a magpie I hear my father’s drunken hiccupping, and in a blackbird’s trilling his embarrassed whistling the next day. When I hear a sparrow chirping, I reach for my telephone, or is the sparrow imitating the telephone? And is the screeching of a falcon imitating a referee’s whistle, or is it I who am…? Wing-flapping? A trapdoor being pushed open. And there are also some sounds, and perhaps there have always been, that no Original Sounds can transform, with which nothing can or ever will be accomplished. A tournament could accomplish something? Impossible. The Distant Sound? The Distant Rumble. If a tournament were possible, it would have to be noise against noise, combating their noise with another, a good noise. But what would that be? And how? And where? Holding a shell to one’s ear and hearing, instead of the alleged rushing of the sea, a shrill whistle inside one’s skull. Give us this day a different noise, and tomorrow as well. In the current noise I have come close to losing my soul. The most destructive thing about this noise is that against my better instincts I am forced to identify the noise-generators with their noise … A single lovable sound, and my soul will be healed. Secrecy: show me the place where you are hidden.”

  The following morning, a general exodus from Numancia. But by no means all the roundtable participants set out for home. Some of them had apparently decided overnight to stay together and, usually as a couple, to strike out in a third, unfamiliar direction—if indeed there was such a thing. The former writer and the local poet also joined forces for the time being. Actually they did not budge from the spot, but instead kept their rooms at the wasteland conference center. (The interrupter on the boat: “Was the heating adequate? Was there anything left to eat and drink? How much did the room cost?”)

  Only now, alone with him, did the former writer really concentrate on his old friend, a process no doubt helped by the daylong hike they took together through the steppe, a kind of circling, in which the spirals grew smaller as evening drew near, with the last one consisting of winding their way up to the top of the mound, a relic from prehistoric Numancia, the sparse traces of which were preserved down in the museum of New Numancia. The poet—to avoid having to refer to him this way time and again during the night on the boat on the Morava, the storyteller called him “Juan Lagunas”—looked exactly the same as when they had met a quarter of a century earlier in the provincial capital. But his appearance was not, and had not been at that time either, the appearance of a living person, or at least not that of an ordinary living person or mortal. It was as if he had spent the entire time closed up in a glass coffin, and his youthfulness, even the rigidity of an apparent corpse, had been preserved, along with the pallor (no, not parchment-like quality) of his skin (of which more will be said shortly). His eyes likewise rigid, except for rare, tiny movements, almost imperceptible, this feature, too, unchanged since far back in the previous century, the eyes black, glass orbs almost without lashes and lids, a black without any gleam or sparkle, glass of a sort that would seemingly never mirror anything.

  Yet he still gave the impression of being uniquely present, and expectant in a way that none of the others whom the traveler encountered were. Expectant of a conversation partner. And when he found one, as in the current circumstance, he expected, yes, veritably demanded, that this partner focus his questions and answers exclusively on him, Juan Lagunas. And when he himself spoke, he played on words, almost to the point of being aphoristic, for example in the saying he offered one member of the roundtable to take with him on his journey: “This is a time for stillness, and a time for noise”—speaking with motionless lips beneath the rigid black eyes, in a voice that might issue from the belly of a mummy, no, not from any belly or any internal organ, but likewise not from air of any sort—the same voiceless voice as twenty-five and more years earlier.

  At the time, Juan Lagunas had been the only person with whom our host, still a writer in those days, had any regular contact during the weeks he spent in Nueva Numancia, working on another book. The poet, barely grown-up, with a packet of self-published and self-printed chapbooks under his arm—that business with the chapbooks had not changed—had stopped him on the street, and from that moment on there was no question of evading those eyes, at least not for the next hour, and for an additional hour here and there in the course of the month. They always met in one of the bars on the Plaza Mayor, and unlike during their present hike through the steppe, when the poet was the only one speaking all day long, at that earlier time the poet had still asked questions about various things; to the object of those interrogations it seemed like “everything.” What was the name of his native village, so far away? His mother: had she been beautiful? The name and home of his first girlfriend? How large a royalty did he receive when he sold a book? Had he really been pursued clear across America by a woman? Cypresses along the Missouri: did they exist? And his brother: had he actually worked in an Oregon sa
wmill? And seriously, had he met Johnny Cash in Atlanta?

  When questions were directed at Juan, however—such as what he lived on, what plans he had, whether he wanted to stay in Numancia—no answer was forthcoming. He was the one asking the questions, just as now on the savannah he was the only one allowed to speak. He embodied and represented a law before which the other person had to bow. During their previous infrequent encounters, the other person was not only the writer, the stranger to these parts. Once or perhaps twice a third person, likewise young, joined them, though he remained silent—not clear whether he was even listening. He merely had to be present, as a squire, an escort, for Juan, the local poetry authority. An authority, however, who made no impression on the crowd in the bars, filled to bursting every evening. Did people ignore him on purpose? No, they simply did not notice him. The girls especially, invoked so often in his poems, gazed right past his shoulders, broad though they were, and past his rather large head, without so much as registering him, their attention unmistakably focused elsewhere. And he seemed accustomed to this treatment and had a spot off in a corner, not as an observer—that role he left to the other man—but with his eyes fixed solely and steadily on his companion and on the wall. But, as he let slip in parting, he would show them! Someday, although he did not actually voice this thought, they would realize who he, Juan Lagunas, was. Someday their eyes would be opened and they would fall in love with him, passionately, boundlessly—no, only one of them, the one.