by Peter Handke
So all that was left of the once great empire was the labyrinth in its center? No, with the newly realigned Europe—was that the right term?—some of the old grandeur seemed to have returned, at least for certain of its citizens, especially the younger ones. Gone was the imperial mentality, if it had ever existed (he as a villager had hardly come in contact with such a thing), replaced by an openness to the world of the sort that he as a young person, having left the cherished village behind, had found sorely lacking in most adults. Although nothing about the borders had changed, the country no longer appeared so small. Strange, or not really all that strange, that the empire seemed to have returned, if only in certain hints and trace elements, presenting itself not boastfully in its—somewhat ethereal—representatives, but, on the contrary, quite modestly. No actual features of an empire could be seen. And the country would never again degenerate into an empire. Or maybe not? How about the unspoken aspirations of some older folk? Be that as it might: the younger folk from this country whom he saw as reviving some aspects of the former empire appeared to have no unspoken aspirations, to be immune to anything imperial. The reinvigorated trace elements of the old empire would remain just that, or was he mistaken? “Or I’ll eat my hat.”
And how did he know all this? He knew it first of all from the flight, during which the natives among the passengers had behaved in a manner fundamentally different from that of, let’s say, two decades earlier. Even when one of them spoke dialect, it was just a coloration. Their eyes no longer “gawked,” but simply “looked” or “gazed.” And above all it was their voices, if any at all were raised—but was he hearing properly?—that projected matter-of-factness, together with a calm, sovereign confidence previously unfamiliar to him among his own people (“which would take us back to the empire after all,” he said during the night on the river). And he also knew it from all his time in our Balkan enclave, where his younger fellow countrymen stood with the encircled residents of the enclave, unostentatiously, quietly, attentively, egalitarian in spirit, eager to learn. These young and not so young people—even if some of them slipped back into the old familiar braggadocio—reminded him of a Europe, a unitary one such as had probably never existed except in propaganda (and never would?), and which he called “the third Europe,” without being able to tell us anything more specific about it that night—it remained as hard to pin down as the memory itself. “But,” he said, “all hail to this memory!” Did he simply want to see everything—the airplane, the enclave—in this light? “No, this memory meant: I saw it that way. I see it that way.” And if—and if he wanted to see it that way? Wasn’t this how he had also written his books? “Never heard of Utopia?”
It turned out, you know, easier than he had thought to get away from the Vienna airport on foot and reach the open, more open countryside. For a while he continued walking along the shoulder of the access and exit road, being honked at now and then by one of the cars in the bumper-to-bumper traffic. In most of the vehicles, the occupants did not even notice him. A child had once urged him to look closely at people in cars, saying it was “so interesting to peer in.” He had tried it many times as he walked on the shoulder of highways and byways all across Europe—one of his specialties—but his head always began to spin and it left him disoriented.
On this particular day he finally succeeded. It happened because he paid no attention to the faces, which in any case could hardly be decoded, and concentrated on the hands on the steering wheels. How differently each of the drivers held the wheel, or did not hold it. The classic model, with one hand on the right and one on the left side of the wheel, marking its diameter, so to speak, was more the exception than the rule. It was more common to see both hands resting at only a slight distance from one another close to the peak or divide of the wheel’s circumference. If the first-mentioned placement of the hands suggested an image posed for a movie close-up being filmed in a studio, with the driving merely simulated, as became most pronounced when the driver kept turning the wheel slightly back and forth without having to negotiate a curve, the second placement suggested a film being shot on location, as did all the other hands glimpsed on steering wheels.
What all the hand positions had in common was that despite the distance from which he was viewing them in the steady stream of heavy traffic heading toward the airport, each and every one appeared as a close-up. The most frequent hand position, as he recognized after a while, was probably the one in which both hands rested close together near the bottom of the wheel, and the champion was the woman who grasped the wheel at the bottom from behind, in such a way that her fingers, except of course for her thumbs (how else?) pointed toward her, while the second-place winner was the woman whose two hands held the wheel at its lowest point from above, so to speak, which looked like fists clenched around the wheel, with the knuckles—in a close-up within the close-up—appearing most prominently, paler than the rest of the hands. Not infrequently he also saw a single hand on the wheel, sometimes a right hand, sometimes a left, preferably when the wheel had a spoke to hold on to. This one-handed steering occurred more often with men than with women, and then exclusively young ones. Only once did he see an old man driving along casually with one hand, and when he looked closer, the man turned out to have only one arm.
The drivers more advanced in age either kept both hands in the classic position at the wheel’s midpoint or, and these constituted a slight majority (he counted them), higher up on the wheel, and almost one hundred percent of them held their arms out straight, with the seat pushed back, looking as if they had sunk into it in such a way that only their arms and hands were visible, seemingly stretching toward the distant wheel from somewhere underground or from a different horizon. Some truck drivers also did out-of-the-ordinary things with their hands, sitting either with their torsos leaning toward the wheel, no matter where their hand, fist, or just the fingertips rested, or with their elbows braced against the wheel. No matter what their position, most of the drivers were alone in their vehicles—except for one time when the car was “packed” with passengers, “as in our Balkans.”
As he strode along the shoulder, away from the international airport and into the countryside, a film unreeled rapidly before him, which, hear this, almost appeared to be in slow motion. This film did not tell a story. It amounted to nothing, yet as he deciphered one image after another and placed the images in relation to one another, he felt himself to be temporarily, yes, temporarily, a researcher. It was as if simply from observing he were discovering a secret writing that was revealing itself to him, or a tiny fragment of one. And what did this writing signify? Nothing, nothing at all. But researching, studying, learning, even if it was only imagined: it soothed him (again our storyteller invoked Flaubert for us), and initially, even without soothing, it had a cushioning effect, cushioned the roar there on the highway, made walking along pleasurable, in short, made him fleet of foot. Someone in one of the cars finally noticed him as he walked along the shoulder in the opposite direction, and, instead of honking at him or honking him out of the way, waved to him out there, raising his hand from the steering wheel, raising both hands. Did he envy him for walking along the road, just as he, the one now walking, had at one time, very long ago, envied a pedestrian while he himself had to drive? No. Not yet. But once again he, the walker, resolved that since he was already walking, he would walk in such a way that someday he, too, would awaken envy, if only in one person, preferably a young fellow such as he had been. Envy? Longing. Čežnja.
It was afternoon when he turned off the highway heading toward the city to take a road that he imagined led north through the meadows to the Danube, the Danube in the area where it has left Vienna behind and flows freely through what is already the Pannonian plain. He was familiar with that flat countryside from way back. Whenever he had been in the capital, he had felt drawn to the region, and accordingly had stopped by to see Joseph Haydn’s birthplace, had undertaken a pilgrimage from Petronell across the fields to the P
agans’ Gate in the late Roman town of Carnuntum, and had nonetheless cast to the unceasing wind the admonitions about the beggar’s mentality formulated by the writer and emperor Marcus Aurelius, who had held the fort there in the wilderness; intrigued by its name, he had “checked out” Fischamend, where the small Fischa River flows into the Danube … He knew some things about the area, extending beyond Maria Ellend, Hainburg, and Mannswörth. But on the day he arrived in his country of origin he wanted to know none of that and to avoid anything he had yet to learn. He decided, as he took a shortcut through an uninhabited region of grasses, already more like the steppe, to turn a deaf ear to any knowledge, especially knowledge of names. Feeling crowded by names such as “Vienna,” “Austria,” even “Danube,” he thought this approach would give him some flexibility.
A hefty gust of wind from the east buffeted his side. Where was the dog from Porodin? For a moment the dog crossed his path in the form of a raven, large enough for two and almost silent, accompanied by nothing but a rushing sound from far away in the east, and whisking by so close to the ground that it looked as though it were running at greyhound speed through the faded grass, a deep black gleaming pelt storming through the fronds. The many hollows in the meadows along the Danube had to be avoided. These were branches cut off from the main river, dried-up streambeds or ponds, which did have life in them after all; how else to explain the omnipresent fishermen on their banks? Often, as he forced his way through a dense old-growth forest, he would find himself in what looked like a New England vacation spot, where, however, not a few of the white wooden cottages appeared to be inhabited year-round, with smoke billowing in a westerly direction from the chimneys, laundry fluttering on clotheslines strung under porch roofs, next to rocking chairs, clothing enough for entire families, even several generations, mixed in with dishrags and bedside mats, or whatever. Here and there gardens carved out of the overgrown floodplain were being raked in preparation for spring, with some of the rakes sounding as if they were striking ground that was still frozen solid. Some of the gardens were being not merely tilled but also expanded: the clearing continued. Trees were being felled, whether legally or not, less often with chainsaws than with axes, which was also more practical with such scrawny saplings. The roots—most of which spread horizontally—were dug out with shovels, picks, and mattocks (old terms came back to him) and heaped up for what he pictured as an Easter bonfire—the dried fungi on the trunks would serve as tinder. And every time, from garden colony to colony, all of which soon had nothing weekendish about them, hear this, he would encounter two or three people sawing up trees, splitting firewood—as if winter, Nordic-style, lay just around the corner—whitewashing the houses, or digging trenches for water lines, probably the most strenuous of these labors. Whole swaths were being cleared through the underbrush, and the gardens, unfenced here, were visibly making inroads into the wooded areas. No flowers or even decorative shrubs would be planted there. That meant these were not ornamental gardens but arable land. The inhabitants of the settlements, starting with what had been weekend cottages (in the Balkans we called them vikendice), were engaged in wresting land from the overgrown floodplain. But what did it mean that boats, not simple fishing skiffs but proper houseboats, were up on blocks in many of the yards, and like the houses they were being scraped, sanded, and painted, though not white? Were they intended for the next hundred-year flood, now to be feared every decade, or every five years? Heavy though the settlers’ heads might be from all their labors, when he greeted them as he passed by—and he felt compelled to greet them, an urgency that had overcome him since he entered the country—they looked up, hear this, including those wearing earbuds as they worked, and returned his greeting as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Likewise they struck up conversations with him about the wind and the weather, about the right times to sow and plant, without showing any surprise at seeing him out walking by himself (a rarity) with a suitcase that he carried as a pack, wending his way among their clearings. It happened more than once that he was invited to pitch in, for pay, of course, and when he could do so in passing, so to speak, he helped out with moving a sofa, pushing a truck that had got stuck, and one time he did accept payment, though only in the smallest of small change. On these occasions it occurred to him that he had expected these people to speak a different language, not German, and if German, then a strange, unfamiliar, perhaps archaic form, a kind of Volga, Amazon, Mississippi, Yukon, or, why not, Congo German. But all of them spoke Austrian, even Viennese, dialect, you know, whether it was the variant from Erdberg, Kaiserebersdorf, Simmering, Siebenhirten, Hietzing? no, not from there, from Liesing? no, not that either, from Hütteldorf? no, from Ottakring? no, from Grinzing? from Döbling? no, from the inner district? oh, no, heaven forbid, from Lower St. Veit, yes, from Upper St. Veit. Nonetheless he could guess that among them were some of the émigrés from the enclave of Porodin who had started out on the bus with him: they had put down roots here in the floodplain and in no time had picked up the local language, at least superficially, not that difficult with this dialect. Among all the new and resettled inhabitants, it felt odd to encounter weekenders, as one thought one knew them or who fit the stereotype to a T: they were mowing their lawns even when there was not one blade out of place, grilling fish they had caught themselves, finger- or palm-sized, and when one of them was sitting indoors, his presence revealed itself in the billowing of a lace or not lace curtain, in a voice booming from a radio, and when such a person could be glimpsed through a window, one saw only two hands—again, only hands—holding up in one way or another a small newspaper, seemingly meant for dwarves. And likewise this person could be felt by virtue of his absence, as a silhouette in the gray east-wind air, guessed at from a flowered or not flowered enamel coffeepot on a windowsill, a porcelain or ceramic cat on a roof, also an ibex of the same material on a ridgepole, from a mousetrap left on a porch railing, from an oversize thermometer on the side of a house, its mercury column missing, and especially from a crawl space under the porch, from the junk accumulated there, including a weather-beaten broken paintbrush in the dust, its bristles stiff with dried residue, a chopping block without an ax, its surface scarred and worn as only a chopping block’s can be, the cover from a shoe-cream tin with the little lever that pings, and, weighted down, seemingly unintentionally, with a rock, a page ripped from a book, darkly yellowed but with some sentences still legible, if one went down on one’s knees: “… thyme and poppy. / Ah, from them the heart receives / a distant intimation…”
Out of the floodplain forests, and after another stretch of steppe, a broad one, where the east wind blew even more fiercely, sometimes blowing a leg out from under one as one walked and one sometimes had to stand still, legs braced to steady oneself: the Danube, or as we call it in the Balkans, the Dunav, a masculine noun, whereas the German name is feminine. Here, just east of Vienna, it appeared to him as a mighty stream, whereas he had previously seen it in this area at most as “a fairly wide river.” The river’s altered character could probably also be attributed to its flowing here through open countryside, with flat steppe on either side. True, here and there huts perched on the bank. But these resembled hunting blinds or guardhouses, with a single room high above the ground, to be reached by means of a ladderlike exterior staircase or sometimes only by a ladder. Fish traps hung outside, and the huts themselves looked like fish traps, larger ones. The stream was as deserted as its banks, except for a single freight barge as long as a train, which one imagined as being on its way to the Black Sea; the next evening it would already be passing the mouth of the Morava.
But no more jumping ahead! One step at a time! Now, despite his reservations, he headed west, toward that capital he had never been able to view as his own. Moving against the current, upstream, had a bracing effect; so he had observed. Besides, if he had to proceed alone, it did him good to do so in the vicinity of a metropolis, holding a steady course toward it, and then, time and again, fixing his eye on i
ts skyline, skirting around it, avoiding actually entering it. One of his earlier resolutions: to circle all of Europe’s metropolises on foot, wherever possible, for days at a time, for weeks, for a month—and a couple of times he had come close to pulling that off, around Paris, Madrid, Rome, or even just Dresden (“just”?). If he felt drawn to people at all, it was to people in multitudes, where they gathered in large numbers, anonymously, which meant he was drawn less to villages and towns, but usually it satisfied his need to sense that those were not far.
It also made him feel good, quirky walker that he was, to have the wind not at his back but blowing toward him, in his face. And thus he now wished that the wind would shift from east to west. And his wish was fulfilled, except that the west wind brought rain. He could have taken shelter under one of the cottages on stilts located on the towpath atop the dike, but he let himself be rained on as if that were fitting for the day of his arrival. And what if the things in his pack got wet, especially the book lying on top? Let them. Let it. For him the adventure of reading had always been enhanced, you know, if the book had suffered some external damage—was singed, mildewed, had pages stuck together, had a pungent, perhaps mushroomy, odor. When he had new books waiting to be read, he would sometimes leave them outside on purpose until they started to yellow from exposure to the air, the paper became wavy from the dew, or, why not, from light rain showers, and then, before he began to read, would bend the book till the covers almost sheared off, strike it against a wall, play football with it, hurl it at the ceiling, and in the middle of the most enjoyable reading, if it was snowing outside or, even better, hailing, it could happen that he went out and let the pages he was reading be covered by drifting snow or properly pounded by hailstones, after which the reading became more enjoyable by several degrees.