by Peter Handke
During the time when the two of them were traveling together—traveling also while staying in place—trains and buses all over the continent plied their routes without accidents for a change, no new war broke out, none of their relatives died, and those who were ill felt better for a while. It could not be otherwise; this was how it had been conceived, this was what had been determined, this was how it had to happen and be within the realm of possibility, for this period, all too finite in any case. When they set out together—set out also while at rest—the cooks’ white aprons became whiter than white, whiter than in any laundry detergent advertisement; the sun allowed itself to be looked at without any risk of blindness; the steppe bordered on the Olympic stadium, the Alpine peaks rubbed shoulders with a stand of date palms; the millionaire’s estate, without walls or fences, nestled against a tent city for refugees, the monastery garden hugged the international airport, the zoo bordered on the Tibetan smile center, the golf course lay adjacent to the Badlands, the noise canal bumped up against the silence labyrinth, the mine shaft plunged next to the kite-flyers’ cliff, there was no distance between Atlas and Lebanon, and it was only a hop, skip, and jump from St. Jakob in the Rosental to Santiago de Chile, and hardly a leap of thought from the earth to Venus, which one evening sparkled red like Mars. And then one fine day William Faulkner’s feebleminded hero panted along behind his beloved cow. And then Madame Bovary dropped her handkerchief. And Josef K. stopped in confusion on his way to the railroad station. And there stood the man who watched trains pulling out. And Baur and Bindschädler were out walking in the evening light, which was reflected by the white cliffs of Dover. And on another fine day the cherry orchard bloomed. And then the bridge arched over the Drina, even if the river was not the Drina at all. And then one time a dog barked. And then two people kissed in their stead. And then, or before that? No, at the same time a bicycle slowly tipped over, while at the same time a ball rolled out of the bushes, a spring cloud became a summer cloud, an earring rang, a runner waved, a shoelace was tied, a clothes iron crackled, a newspaper sank to the bottom of the pond, a dance floor filled up, and nowhere, “no where,” was Faust to be found in the Pentecostal procession, let alone a Mephistopheles, a Nero, a Medea, a Lady Macbeth or any other witch, and certainly no trace of the Ku Klux Klan, Genghis Khan, Karla vom Bruck, Gringo Busch, Papa Benedetto, Josip Fisherman, Magdalena Ganzhell, Bernhard-Hinrich Glückskraut, Ossim Weichsohn, and all the others; even A. Hüttler was as if he had never existed. God protected the lovers, and for their part the lovers, or the two captivated by each other—or simply captivated—protected: whom? Yes, whom?
Thus, in this different dimension of time, their first time passed, the time that also encompassed their parting, without, however, the time dimension’s becoming inoperative, at least initially. Parting: that was supposed to occur. That they would go their separate ways for a while, as far as possible in opposite directions, that was obvious. During that period neither of them would be heard from or would send the other a sign of life. And then one morning it was clear that this would be the day for their temporary parting; no need to put it into words. To be out of each other’s sight, to know nothing about each other, that was one of the rules of the game. Game? Yes, a great game. Strange, or perhaps not: as they were leaving, putting distance between them, for the first time the word “we” occurred, and likewise later during the Moravian night, as they were telling the story or providing an accounting. “We would never have let ourselves dream, back then”—(so those events had occurred so long ago?)—“when the parting that made us both so happy took place, that war could break out between us, a war so bloody that it matched any classic wars between couples.” And at this point in their mutual story the first dissent occurred. It came from her, the stranger, and as she stood there in the swinging door, she also turned away from the rest of us in the salon for the first time and faced him. And that was at the place where she, as the first one to leave—they did not need external simultaneity—looked back at him one last time, and he allegedly thought that so much purity was too much for him, and he did not deserve her, this woman: “No,” the woman now said, “that is not what you thought, not in the slightest, or if you did, only for a second, and you forgot it immediately in favor of your eternal belief that on the contrary, no woman, none at all, deserved you, was worthy of a man like you, and that helped bring about what happened next, you dud, you big fish in a little pond, you mama’s boy.” And she laughed as she said it, but this time he did not join in.
She retreated into the galley, where we saw her through the porthole seated in the light of a neon fixture above the sink, motionless yet ready to spring into action, as otherwise only Balkan cooks can be observed. In the meantime the boatmaster continued the story alone. Where in Europe had the parting taken place? The city did not matter, now that all the cities on the continent had long since become interchangeable. The place from which he had set out, however, deserved to be mentioned: the tunnel on an abandoned stretch of railway that in earlier times had formed a beltway around the city. This location presented itself because the two of them had spent their last time together, still their “first,” nearby. And on the other hand, it had been his decision to head out through this very tunnel to seek, hm, the adventure with which he would win her, the woman. And in their parting, in their separation, reality appeared, blossomed.
The shrill cry of falcons above the former railway cut with its rusted, partially dislodged rails: “It was a falcons’ cryday.” The cries outside accompanied him partway into the darkness. Similarly the low-angled rays of the sun, whether of morning or late afternoon, lit up the tunnel ahead for a short distance. Their yellow reflection off the concrete walls, off the rails, off the rotting wooden sleepers, off the sandy ground, had something inviting about it, making the tunnel, not only its entrance, appear inviting. Walking along was a pleasure, albeit a somewhat uncertain one. The tunnel occupied a longer segment of the former beltway than could have been anticipated. Ahead of him only blackness, no light from the end, not even a small bright dot. He had neither a flashlight nor matches on him. (“That was how it had been conceived.”) Soon he found himself walking in a complete absence of sound, the din of the city having died away, leaving not so much as a faint roar, and inside the tunnel he heard not even the occasional drops of water from the ceiling landing in a puddle on the ground or the scuttling of rats, such as would have accompanied a corresponding scene in a film. Was the rest of the tunnel even passable? He had not inquired—that, too, as it had been conceived, just as it was out of the question to turn back to the stretch where at first, when he looked over his shoulder, he could see the sun shining through leaves stirring in a semicircle that moved farther and farther back, and where then, from a certain point in the underground curve that traced the periphery of the city above, the entry behind him appeared only as a dim shimmer of gray, very far back in the tunnel, and then no longer visible at all.
At least the tunnel’s ceiling had, at intervals, something like air or light shafts, or what remained of them and had not been blocked by falling debris or whatever or completely covered aboveground by high-rise apartment buildings on the outskirts of the city. But even where a little light still penetrated, it must have come from far away, that was how weak it was. And no air to speak of. The ground with the rails seemed even more bottomless, if possible, in the few places where light entered from high above. A blackness seemed to rise in front of him from the ground such that one raised one’s knees with every step as if one were walking on quicksand and had to expect that at any moment one would sink in, or even fall into a pit.
Still: light now and then? Yes, except that these extremely rare spots seemed dimmer each time—which reminded him, as he told the story, that the time of day at which he had set out to traverse the tunnel contributed to the effect, and how. It was the late-afternoon sun that had lit the way for him at the beginning, and in the meantime the sun must have been going down outside, up
above. Soon night would be falling, and he would have to grope his way forward in total darkness. Along some stretches with blocked or covered-over light shafts he had already seen himself in such a situation, or rather not seen himself, and with arms outstretched had navigated through the pitch blackness, placing one foot right behind the other, expecting at any moment to be dealt a literal deathblow or devoured by the man-eating giant into which the darkness would coalesce.
Then night arrived: even from the light shafts—if there were still any open ones up there—came not another drop of light (he thought and said “drop”). “At least” he had his mobile telephone on him, and its keys lit up and let him see his own hand, or sense it. Obviously he had no reception down there. And that was all right by him, whether that is obvious or not. He no longer cared to find his way to safety, as had earlier been the case. And he most certainly did not want to be someone who had been rescued. Upon entering the tunnel and plunging into the first dark curve, he had still been on guard against human beings who might be squatting there, the homeless, fugitives, drug addicts, lying between the rails, leaning against the walls, cowering in niches, silent and ready to pounce, along with just such dogs or the devil knows what other creatures that might jump him out of the black-on-blackness. Then later, with the disappearance of the bit of light in the accursed tunnel that refused to end, he had longed for people, any people. And in the third phase he simply groped along, without thinking how far he might have to go or whether he had at least reached the midpoint, teetering onward, ever onward. Before he summoned us to the boat for the Moravian night, he had considered whether he could introduce into his story phosphorescence, for instance from the rotting railway sleepers, as something that had helped him keep going from time to time. But there was no phosphorescence that would have allowed the entire episode to appear less monotonous, so he had dropped that idea.
Instead he had: the sound of his own footsteps and the rhythm, determined by the invisible cross-ties themselves, even where they were dislodged or missing altogether. He began to count, and in the process of doing nothing but counting he moved ahead, now beyond any earlier hopes and fears. He counted and counted, and counted. And imperceptibly he began in the silence to describe, no, merged into telling the story of what he was experiencing just then in the present, but using the past tense. No, it was not he who merged into storytelling, but rather it. It told the story in him. It began to narrate inside him. And the storytelling was not addressed to some undefined listener, and certainly not to the rest of us—the desire to gather us around him did not arise until much later on his tour—but to her, the woman from whom he had just parted. To her alone the story was told silently, continuing after the darkness in the tunnel into the time that followed, from time to time, no, not merely from time to time but from step to step. And clear as daylight, and without need to invoke a fairy tale and fairy-tale powers: in this way he finally made his way into freedom, now no longer a traveler and not even a former writer anymore, and especially no boatmaster, only a simple creature. When he reached the end of the eight-mile tunnel, night had fallen long since. But having scrambled up the embankment, he found, right there on the edge of the city, a bakery that was still open, brightly lit amid the darkness of the outskirts, and without needing any prodding from us during that night on the Morava, he repeated what he had already told her, the stranger, in the bakery, simultaneously with becoming a customer—“the last customer of the day”: he bought a small loaf of bread with olives baked into it, heavy ones, and also an almond roll with raisins, as well as a cruller with plum-jam filling, and consumed all of them outside on a bench by an arterial road leading out of the city.
5
HE HAD NEVER known his father, and during the man’s lifetime he had never felt the urge to make his acquaintance. Nor was it to see the grave that he set out now. His intention, rather, was to get to know the area where his progenitor had been born and died, and if possible also the areas adjacent to and beyond it. The plan had come to him a while back: if he was to undertake the tour he had in mind, this area would be one of his destinations. But after his time with the woman, this somewhat vague plan had become a powerful drive—an idea that pulsed within him. If earlier he had perhaps needed an excuse, once the two of them had been together that necessity vanished. He would go to his father’s and forefathers’ region just for himself, and for her, the woman, as indeed everything he experienced and took in during her absence was also for her. And what was the idea? What was he burning to experience? (In actual fact: he was burning.) To roam hither and yon and, especially, to snoop around. Yes, snooping around would be his principal activity there, and he felt certain there was something to ferret out in the paternal landscape, whether involving the deceased or someone or something else, though not a crime? One could never know.
He could not bring himself to utter his father’s name, just as he concealed from the rest of us the name of the town. It was located in “Germany,” in the southern foothills of the “Harz Mountains”—to pronounce those place names he had just enough of the energy that he lacked for saying the town’s name, and also, unlike with the Dalmatian “Cordura” that came up earlier in the Moravian night, for inventing a place name. In the case of places in Germany—towns as well as villages—he lacked the capacity. But “Harz” and “Germany” he mentioned, even repeatedly, with a storyteller’s gusto.
The only somewhat more precise indications of the topography: the landscape forming an arc around the town was karst, of the sort otherwise encountered primarily in our Balkans, with subterranean limestone and dripstone caves, fields covered with knife-sharp white scree. Dolines, visible as darker green hollows in the grasslands, and watercourses that suddenly disappeared into the ground. And the former border between West and East Germany was nearby; the town was located in the area where the two zones touched. One mile farther east in the Mittelgebirge his mother had escaped without being shot at, crossing the border, which at that spot ran through a hilly evergreen forest that provided cover. She had begun her escape just as the sky began to lighten on a morning in early summer, the huckleberry bushes wet with dew, the berries still small and green, here and there with a hint of blue, and the bottoms of the two cardboard suitcases the very young woman was dragging became soggy, that was how dense the dew was by the end of that night.
At that time he had not yet come into the world; he was conceived only later in the town in the Harz region, or wherever. But when his mother talked about her escape, he felt as if he had been present. He saw the dew-drenched cardboard suitcases with his own eyes, smelled the air, fragrant not of pine pitch but simply of the cold in the mountains before sunrise, felt the chill brush cheeks and temples, his own as well as the fleeing woman’s, heard a plane’s engines, not far off—the military?—heard a stifled cry—what was that?—and then another, ah, a pheasant, its rustling high up in the crowns of the pines creating the illusion that one was not merely safe and out of danger but already somewhere else entirely, beyond all sorts of borders, at home, near a village; and heard the heart pounding, no, “pumping,” not only in his ear but in his entire head. Did his mother tell him this story? No, she did not take on the role of storyteller herself or attempt to become one; she simply let herself be heard, with the words welling up involuntarily; they had been gathering inside her for a long time, and now the moment had come, probably also because her son was a listener who could not get his fill, and not only of happenings and situations but also of pine-crown-rustling, rain-drumming, snowflake-crackling, cricket-chirping, swallow-screeching, train-thundering. And it was not only the young woman’s border-crossing that remained intensely vivid to him but also everything she described to him from her life and also that of her ancestors, and with all kinds of details that she had not experienced herself.
He reached his father’s town in early or late afternoon—in this case the time of day certainly had no relevance. Or did it? Hadn’t he preferred, and described it this w
ay during his writing period, to reach an unfamiliar place toward evening, when, as film terminology had it, the light was already breaking, or, better still, here and there in the dusk a lamp was already lit? Accordingly he got off the local train as dusk was falling, and, after inspecting the station, this one, too, located far from the town, a mere whistle stop, with the toilets bricked up and graffiti on the passenger shelter, headed north with his suitcase/backpack, made of fabric, not cardboard, toward the town, hidden in the hollows of the Harz foothills. And where was the dog from Porodin? There it was, running alongside him for a bit in the roadside ditch in the form of a pied wagtail that had a white bib, like the dog “back home,” he thought involuntarily.