by Peter Handke
But hadn’t he wanted to cross the border into Portugal and reach the Atlantic from there? interjected our interrupter, playing along with the delaying game. Appropriate, too, the response he received for once: he, the one setting out, had needed obstacles, particularly for this one day, more and more obstacles, before reaching his destination, and the Portuguese borders had long since ceased to be real ones, at least not the kind of obstacles he had in mind. And one could also come upon the Atlantic Ocean, together with its coastline, though in a stranger form, deep in the northern Iberian interior: the tides there—“Don’t you know this, you fool?”—manifested themselves in the high tide’s flowing upstream in the rivers, usually for many a mile, also spilling into the smaller tributaries, and there, during periods of especially powerful tides, even into springs, whereupon smack in the middle of the countryside the granite boulders from which the fresh water bubbled came to resemble a seacoast. “Get it?” Ríos, these rivers and brooks were called, which at high tide became part of the Atlantic. “Get it?”
On one such miniature fjord, a fjord in the plain, lay the ruin, his destination. And the obstacles? Of course the tracklessness, sought out where it had to be; also the willow hedges, the bulls, or perhaps just cows, that sauntered up as he slipped through. And the largest obstacle the brook itself, whose course one had to follow as closely as possible in order to keep pace with the tide surging inland. Did that work? Yes, though less along the brush-choked bank than in the actual bed of the brook. So the tide was not all that high? Yes, and besides it did not come along in waves but rather moved along more like a quiet, almost casual current upstream. And his suitcase? On his back, bulging from inside. That was how long one had been on the road.
He gladly accepted getting lost while traversing a stretch far from the tidal brook. He threw away the map he had brought. What would enable him to find his way would be pure instinct, no, intuition, which on this particular day, he felt certain, was infallible. Wasn’t this an unusual attitude toward getting lost? He gave himself plenty of time, and although he constantly scanned his surroundings, he was not searching for a path, merely observing nothing, nothing at all. And sure enough, a brimstone butterfly appeared, veritably dove out of the blue sky, landed on the wanderer, squirted out its poop by arching the rear of its abdomen upward and letting the poop spray over its head and into the air—the wanderer had never seen a butterfly shit, and in that moment felt like a scientist—then swooped up again and fluttered and, yes, reeled in a zigzag course over the prevernal scrub growth, whose gray-on-gray now acquired color, and what color, from the effect of the yellow darting through it, flashed into view once more in the depths of the forest, and—or was this already the afterimage? his imagination?—appeared again, and now and then probably flashed into view again later.
He approached his destination from the back. How did he know he was doing that, lost as he was? This, too, his intuition told him. And how did it happen that on this particular day he knew his intuition to be infallible? That came from a dream he had had the night before. In the dream he had encountered the woman, and in such a way that he felt certain that what he had dreamed would occur the following day. What the dream promised would be fulfilled. He had also realized long ago, however, that it would be up to him to fulfill these promises, like the ones he had received from nature in his childhood, all of which had come true. He had to make them a reality, to put them into practice, to breathe life into them—set out to find them, fight his way through to them, through thick and thin.
And just as nature’s promises had awakened his spirit of discovery, so, too, had the promising dream, the dreamed promise, awakened his boldness. Nothing could awaken one like a dream, “one like that.” Even if it were a deception: the next day he felt invincible. The dream surrounded him like armor, armor without a single chink that would allow infiltration, penetration, stabbing. And it was stronger than an illusion; how else would that one feral dog, in which he recognized the one he had seen while departing from Porodin, now grown as big as a lion, after some initial growling have accompanied him peaceably, then even running on ahead through the underbrush like a scout, constantly turning to see whether he was still following? How else would the one highwayman, on the trail through the underbrush, with the ruins already perceptible, have turned upon his approach into a basket-weaver, using his knife—how could it be otherwise—only for cutting willow shoots; where willows were, there must be water?
And just as the dream provided his armor all that day, it also sent him the guardian angel, the one assigned to him personally. Time and again, as he scrambled over granite barriers, often smooth as glass, he stepped into midair and was saved from falling by the angel, who knows how? Under normal circumstances, of course, he would not have fallen far, but how would he have got out of this wilderness with a broken leg? And the word “intuition” no longer sufficed in these situations, only “guardian angel.” It was his angel who restored his equilibrium at the last moment, as he began to slip, almost falling. No armor would have protected him then. And his angel had no easy time of it with him, for his boldness made this stormer of coastlines and springs impetuous. Every intervention by the angel was supposed to serve as a warning. And in the course of the day the warnings became ever more urgent. After a last warning came a very last warning. The warnings were certainly heard and also taken to heart for a while, but then forgotten every time in the constant bluing of the sky and in the brimstone-butterfly wind.
And thus at the very end, in spite of all the warnings, he was supposed to fall at the feet of the woman. Before that, however, his arrival at the ruins, alone. In their vicinity he would meet her, not immediately, but later that day. He felt torn: on the one hand he knew it, the way one knows upon shooting an arrow that it will hit the target; on the other hand, he felt the way one feels before the onset of an illness that has not recurred in a long time and has almost been forgotten: it was enough that it came to mind, without symptoms or any malaise, not even as a memory; simply hearing the name was almost a sure sign, at least for him, that the illness was just around the corner, and with it a bad time.
But first he entered the little church, actually just a chapel (its roof and doors missing), to which a network of trodden paths led through the semiwilderness. Before him in the apse, the fresco, undamaged, in the shape of an almond, from which the Judge of Mankind, his dark eyes fixed on the new arrival, blessed him, or damned him, or merely interrogated him; above him the blue Atlantic sky, and instead of circling seagulls a single red kite, flying in spirals; on the debris-littered earth—not a single flagstone left—stalagmite-like dog and bat droppings; behind him, just beyond the granite threshold, still untouched, the spring from which the brook flowed, a miniature bay far from the open sea, also both spring and bay, simultaneously, at this very moment, because the tide, having reached its end here in the interior, before retreating was holding out with its last strength against the water streaming from the spring, backing it up in a strange rocking motion, and under overhanging hazels and willows, the sand glittered with mica, out of which the spring gushed, forming a sort of beach, with fragments of shells and crabs’ legs that the tide had washed up, the chapel’s threshold functioning as a boat landing, without any boat, but with the smell of the sea. “Between the Waters”: wasn’t that also the meaning of the name of the place from which the Moravian-night narrator came? And indeed he, the man of fire, had always been drawn to water, to flowing water.
And where did it begin, at long last, the story involving the woman? Enough delays! And he would probably have dragged it out even more and missed the moment again if, during that night on the Morava, the woman herself, the stranger, had not unexpectedly emerged from the galley through the swinging door and come to his aid. It was she who began telling their story, and at first he seemed relieved, as if he had been at a loss as to how to get started. Soon he picked up the thread, however, something she was not entirely willing to let happen. She rep
eatedly took the words out of his mouth, not so much to correct him—though that, too, happened once, just one time, toward the end—as to participate in the events, to repeat them for herself and recapture them, or for god only knows what reason. But at no point did a dialogue result. No mention was made of an “I” or a “you,” and even a “we” was a long time coming, first occurring in the description of their parting. Up to that point, if any personal pronouns were used, they were almost exclusively either “he” or “she,” with the “she” usually coming from him, and the “he” from the stranger (a stranger to us listeners in the salon), and, as an exception, the impersonal or unpersonal “one.”
One of the footpaths leading away from the spring, at the same time a seashore, led to a guest lodge, located in the middle of a grove. The variety of tree is irrelevant. Or maybe not: eucalyptus—that was how far north this species had meanwhile penetrated into Galicia, which at one time had had such a raw climate. This grove appeared full of light because of the pale eucalyptus bark, and also because between the trees were fairly large gaps, in which, if anything could take root, only sparse, low-growing grasses. And thus the lodge stood in what seemed to be a clearing, without such a thing’s having been created on purpose. The ground floor served as a tavern, with an outdoor terrace, which, with its tables and chairs, occupied almost the entire grove. Bordering it was the thicket surrounding the spring, crisscrossed by footpaths, on one of which he stumbled into the eucalyptus brightness, blinded by it, shading his eyes with his hand, but without showing any surprise at finding a lodge so far from anywhere: that was how it had been dreamed, conceived, planned.
It took him a long time to discover it. For such a remote location, the tavern’s terrace was full, almost to the last spot, all the way back to a eucalyptus growing just before the underbrush began; at the same time, there was no noise, only a muffled, steady buzz consisting of voices and footsteps, and woven into it the rattling of dishes, pinging of glassware, even the shouts of children and the braying of a donkey, hitched to a tree, a monotone derived perhaps also from the prevernal air. A state of exception, a different one this time, for a change. And she, the woman, was seated outdoors at the farthest table. Alone? That was the idea. And he, alone as well, without relatives looking over his shoulder—two orphans—two free agents! (That being the first, all-encompassing thought.) And she recognized the new arrival, the man, from a distance. But not actually him, the pan-European writer, or former writer? Nonsense: she recognized the man in that place, about which nothing more needed to be said. And to him she immediately looked familiar. Yes, hadn’t she been the third invited observer, along with him and the poet Juan Lagunas, during the—now long-ago—symposium on noise in Numancia? If so, she had disguised herself for the conference. With the exception of the black horn-rimmed glasses, she had been shrouded during the entire event, with a scarf covering her entire head and forehead, and not only during the presentations but even at the farewell party, almost like a delegate from some Arabia, inaccessible, not exchanging a word with anyone, also so unobtrusive that people looked right past her. And now: her hair loose, blowing in the wind even though there was none—“or were those snakes?”—as his chronic suspicion of women interjected for an evil moment, but that question did not come from his conscious mind; her shoulders bare, the sun on her smooth, arched eyelids—about that, too, there was nothing more to say. But why had she been disguised earlier? What had she been spying on? Or on whom?
Actually these questions, born of suspicion, came to him only much later, during her second absence. Right now the only thing that counted was to go to her and without a word—without so much as a “Don’t we know each other? Where in the world did we meet before?”—sit down at her table. And what then? Consistent with the principle he had tried to follow earlier, when he was writing a book or a long story: let things take their course. With bold steps, he—who otherwise in life so often fell into the grip, if not of social phobia at least of a fear of the unknown that caused him to hesitate unduly on the threshold of a new experience—strode toward her through the trees, worried that he might miss her and find the table abandoned when he got there: a different dream that had flashed through the middle of the one that made him approach so cockily and carelessly. And later, when his suspiciousness drove him to even worse deeds, a third dream joined the others: his guardian angel, which earlier had often saved him from collapsing and falling, now saved him from meeting the woman by making him collide on the way to her table with a tree, hitting his head and falling down flat, unable to get up.
What happened next between the two of them? Had anything at all happened—that was the question posed by the rest of us during that Moravian night, though only to ourselves, with even the brash member of our group holding his tongue. The two of them, our host and the woman, offered no hints. Either they had no words to describe it, or it was not a topic they cared to discuss, cared to include in the story. At most they gave us a hint. The only specific detail they provided about each other: that later, during the night, they both fell to the ground—from tiredness, from sheer exhaustion. And because both of them, while they were speaking, kept to themselves and did not look at each other, any allusions were out of the question. But something had happened with them in that eucalyptus grove, and that they did address, speaking in turn. For the two of them, a different time calculus came into play. And when did the different calculus set in? Where? In what connection?
The new time calculus went into effect the moment their eyes locked onto each other’s, simultaneously. And this simultaneity gave them both the opening for what would follow. There was no way to avoid this new calculus, nor did they want to, although he, the man, initially displayed his inveterate avoidance reflex: the moment the woman had caught sight of him he was tempted to look behind him, as if she were looking at someone else, or to look away, as if nothing were happening, whereupon the calculus might have been blocked and nothing would have happened.
The different calculus meant a transition into a different system, a transition from one world into a second world, which, for their particular time, had every right to be called a world, a transition into a different history. And now, during the night on the boat, a memory image came to him, reminding him of the way he, upon seeing her lowered eyelids in the sun, before she finally looked at him, had been convinced that she was reading a book out there on the terrace, a book, as he concluded from her motionless eyelashes, that was the kind of book he had always dreamed of in the hands of an imagined reader—and also reminding him of the way the woman’s hands had been empty, placed on her knees, the palms cupped and facing upward like those of the migrants on the enclave bus. And at the same time the instant of terror. Sweet terror? One that pierced him through and through.
And the different calculus brought with it a different light, and it was not a brighter light but a markedly darker one, a dimmer one, a sort of dark light, with night breaking out in the middle of the day, the sunlight extinguished by a total eclipse, along with the accompanying gust of icy wind. The iris shot in a film, blacking out everything around the two of them and finally leaving only their two faces visible in the circle, as at the end of a movie? It was neither a movie nor an ending. And if a woman’s story, one that this time did not even begin with her expecting to be rescued by him, the man. What kind, then? The kind—thus his answer to his own question during that night on the Morava—that embodied a challenge; the kind that would confront him as one would confront a fugitive or a wild animal or a crook; that would summon him to battle. How could that be? That was how it had been conceived, and that was how he saw it. Or was it a question of a rescue after all? The woman, the stranger, did have an aura of suffering, no, of some terrible deprivation. And for a second time, even sweeter and more piercing, terror shot through him.
And what about her? How did she react, standing there in the swinging door, still apart from him, as he continued to turn only to us? She did what she had done
when their eyes first met in the Galician eucalyptus grove: she laughed, her laughter expressing the kind of gaiety such as we normally experienced only in certain children, but unfortunately too briefly for us to be infected by it. But we sensed that it would not be her last laugh that night.
The one word she spoke to the man outside the guest lodge, as she pushed toward him the remaining free chair, seemingly reserved for him, turned up in his version of the story: “Finally!” she said. “Finally someone suitable.” Or was she deluding herself? And what if she was. And she cupped her hand to her ear to catch his reply, as if it could come only from a great distance.
In the tale of their time together—where? wherever—the two of them and what they had said, done, or left undone no longer figured, a further contrast to that iris shot in a film, in which only the couple remains on the screen. As they took turns telling the story, they kept distance between them and looked only at us. But it happened more and more often that he took the words out of her mouth, and vice versa. Did that indicate that the unknown woman and the boatmaster were a couple? Whatever the case, during their time together momentous things must have occurred, and apparently almost every minute. Even in the hour after they met, raindrops suddenly fell from the cloudless, blue, prevernal sky, but only on them and their table, came pelting down on the two of them, then stopped, then sprayed down again, a shower, also a proper downpour, though both times in small drops, one after the other, until they simultaneously discovered (how else?) that high above their heads, in a hole in a limb where rainwater had collected, an invisible bird was taking a bath, splattering the surrounding air every time it shook its feathers. That same evening a child came to sit with them and then had to be torn away from them by its parents, one finger at a time, as from a toy that a child refuses to give up. In the night that followed, the donkey tethered to a tree hooted like an owl, and an owl responded with a donkey’s hee-haw. The next morning, what was in the newspaper? Nothing, nothing at all. During the next day someone climbed a ladder made of blades of straw, and it held, and on the evening of that same day someone pressed a latch and the door opened. A few days later someone played “Death and the Maiden” on a jew’s harp, and someone shook his head while weeping. And one night all the cats turned green, and then the following day—or had it been the previous day?—was declared International Green Day. One time a single elderberry blossom—you know how tiny that is, smaller than any button—a white, star-shaped one, floated through the air, all by itself, without an umbel, between the bush and the ground, simply hovered there in the air without moving, attached to a spun thread, you think? not at all! it was hanging by its own mucilage, its blossom mucilage, which—you should have seen it, visible only from very close up and only from a certain angle—connected it with its umbel up above, from which this single tiny blossom had become separated. How could that be, elderberry blossoms so early?—And didn’t the two of them grow impatient from being alone together? They had been impatient before encountering each other, he as well as she, and how! But in a curious arithmetic their impatience gave way to patience.