by Peter Handke
But that must have been a dream, no? dreamed by the wanderer as he dozed off while drying his clothes by the inn’s fireplace, the smith’s hearth. Yes, it was a dream. One of us in the boat’s salon who had participated in the international convention of jew’s-harp players—the second convention in this story—took over for the faltering boatmaster and narrated the actual course of events. Unthinkable that the jew’s-harp players on the platform should have struck up any national anthems—that would have been a nightmare. Even anything resembling a jam session was out of the question for that humble instrument: for heaven’s sake, no jew’s-harp jazz! Each performer played alone before parting. And more and more guests joined in, on and in front of the stage. Soon there was no audience left, only players, each awaiting his turn on his pathetic breath-vibrator, then harping, or drumming, or droning, or sending out into the air what he had inside him or around him. And he did as well, the man the rain had driven inside, whom rage had startled out of his dreams.
The sounds he produced, as the other narrator described it, were unusual. “Unusual in what respect?” the wanderer asked, seemingly eager to learn how he had played that evening. “Less self-confident than the tunes the rest of us played, in which each took full responsibility for his tone.” “So I didn’t perform with full concentration?” “No, you did. But as if you were somewhere else. With a different sound space surrounding you.” “A smaller one?” “No, and also not a larger one, more an unfamiliar one. Perhaps that had to do with your having been fast asleep. It was a dream-sound, one from the boundary between sleeping and waking, a threshold sound. Earlier, when you entered the room, all of us except the innkeeper had simply not noticed you; that was how nondescript you looked, like someone from the cleaning staff, perhaps, arriving by bicycle in the rain. At any rate, no one was surprised to see you come in or thought it was worth asking about. Aiylgy—that was the motto of our annual gathering, from the Yakut, supposedly meaning ‘middle world.’ And God knows, we had conjured it up all these days with our harping, drumming, and plucking. But you, with your sound from a different realm, gave our middle world, Aiylgy, a different form.”
Here the interim narrator turned away from the host of the Moravian night, who apparently could not get enough of this account of himself, and addressed the rest of us on the boat, describing the ending of the jew’s-harp episode. The meeting ended in general astonishment, “between heaven and water,” as one of the wrap-up speakers expressed it. The instruments were pocketed, in cases that looked positively precious, in contrast to the little harps, which at rest resembled frozen, shrunken praying mantises. Just before this they had been passed from mouth to mouth, to allow them all to be touched by everyone’s lips, being dunked each time in a glass of brandy. Just as people had previously shown considerable amazement, now they ate and drank until far into the night on the banks of the Danube, with considerable gusto, the wanderer included, without anyone’s getting drunk. But intoxicated some of them certainly were. The rain pounding on the roof tiles, the fire hissing in the forge, and the imminent departure were all they needed. One person held up his jew’s harp and snapped it in two, bending the steel tongue until it broke off. But that was no misfortune, because the inn, as it now turned out, was also a workshop for making jew’s harps, and the innkeeper was also the blacksmith, and close to the forge stood his work bench, where he fabricated a replacement, using his metal file and a soldering iron—the intoxicated player stopped just short of putting the new instrument to his lips while it was still red-hot.
When the playing had finally ceased, storytelling took over in full force. There was a connection between the jew’s-harp playing and the storytelling—“jewish harp and storytelling!” (as the American from Bay City, Oregon, exclaimed)—and not only in the speaking voices, modulated from days of playing, using the breath and the instrument. Playing had filled people with a desire to tell stories. How could that be, after performing on such a small, humble instrument, after such monotonous buzzing, barely capable of variation? Yes, desire, more pure than after any playing of the flute or the saxophone, not to mention the piano or the organ. Pure in what sense? In the sense that the most incidental detail appeared worth telling about, in fact precisely such details. During that night in the inn it then seemed as if their days of playing the jew’s harp had been only a prelude to the final night of storytelling. Did the beautiful Mongolian woman also tell stories? Yes, with her eyes and with her neck.
But something was not quite right. Even earlier, during the farewell performances, something had been wrong with the picture. The jew’s-harp player who was standing on one leg? The woman performing virtuoso-style on two or three harps at once, alternating between the left and right side of her mouth? She was the more likely source of the problem, but her performance was probably less showing off than high spirits and self-mockery. And then it became clear what was so jarring. It was the watches on the players’ wrists. No objections to the clock on the wall: it told the wrong time as if on purpose, or had stopped altogether. But all these watches offended the eye, even if one was set to the local time in Cancún, another to the time in Palermo, and yet another to the time in Kuala Lumpur. In addition, they created a melancholy mood. Catching sight of them made one feel as though the storytelling time and the performing time could not hold their own against real time, as though both, one as much as the other, were a futile illusion, smoke and mirrors, and also the wrong form of measurement. It did little good that all those present, as if by previous agreement, removed their time-measuring devices from their wrists, one after another, or hid them under their sleeves. Even without visible clocks, normed time was taking over, and more menacingly the closer the festivities came to their conclusion. And what threatened those celebrating? Isolation, an absence of future. Ah, time as prison. Come back, stuff of dreams, stuff of play.
All that was left was defiance. That was what the inhabitants of the Balkans had once been criticized for, as the worst of all our bad characteristics. And we are still criticized for our defiance, and today as in the past by foreign powers, part of the problem being that the most common word for defiance is not our own but a loan word from the vocabulary of the power that occupied us the longest, a loan word and a curse word. But such defiance was perhaps the only meaningful attitude and not something bad at all, but rather the last means we had to assert ourselves and radiate something beautiful, and that meant something moving and unifying, and such defiance could thus be transmitted from the Balkans to all those on earth living under the dictatorship of normal, real time and threatened with isolation? This much maligned defiance: could it become a source of strength? Give rise to action, all in good time?
Our host had forgotten to mention that children were also present in the inn’s dining room. Only now did they occur to him, during the night on the Morava, and the fact that the last episode of that other night, the one with jew’s-harp players from the five continents, involved them. He could not say whose idea it had been to bring the children up on the stage and have them try plucking the instruments. At all events, one child after another mounted the platform. They all held the steel instrument, or whatever it was made of, to their mouths and clenched the frame between their teeth as they had seen the grown-ups do; plucked with their thumbs or index fingers the narrower trigger or loop, standing out from the flexible tongue at approximately a right angle, set the tongue to vibrating, then breathed as hard as they could. They were one and all dying to have their turn and be allowed to play. But most of them, no matter how hard they plucked and blew, could not coax a single note out of the instrument; their attempts at playing produced nothing but a tinny rattling and a snuffling, puffing, and groaning, reminiscent of the sounds children make when a doctor instructs them to breathe slowly in and out. Some of them managed to produce at least the beginning or a suggestion of a sound, if so soft and with so little range that even in the room, which was quiet as a mouse, it could be heard only by the person closest
to them, or remained purely imaginary. All kinds of instructions and suggestions were offered to the children by the “world champions” present, as if they had not realized that playing the jew’s harp was not something that could be taught. There was no such thing as technique.
One child, a single one, finally managed to send a droning sound into the room, which—have you ever heard anything of the sort?—provided redemption and made all further attempts unnecessary. For a long time this child had resisted mounting the stage. He was chubby, freckled, and snub-nosed, wore glasses, and had a side part in his hair and a clip holding the hair out of his face. Truculently, his face screwed up as if he were blind, the boy stood there, holding at arm’s length the instrument that had been almost forced on him. Only with someone else’s help did he put it up to his lips, and the harp was more pushed between his teeth than placed there by him. He barely had it positioned before it boomed forth, through the whole room, louder than an electric guitar. Altogether involuntarily, without intention, without any preparation, the chubby child had made it produce sound; he had not even taken a deep breath on purpose, or if he had, not for the purpose of playing the instrument. For a moment he was startled by what had happened, and went rigid with fright, and from this very rigidity another note issued forth, powerful in a different way, transcending his fright or any other feeling. And now the chubby boy beamed at last, somewhat embarrassed, somewhat shamefaced, and then continued playing on his own. He refused to stop until a different redemption was demanded of him who had previously redeemed the gathering. And who managed to interrupt him? It was our wanderer, imagine that, who raised his voice and invited the jew’s-harp players to attend the following year’s convention in the Balkans, along with “you, my child!”
7
WHEN HE HAD brought the story up to this point, the sound of a jew’s harp made itself heard on the nocturnal boat, as if he had planned it as the finishing touch, the same note several times, at the same pitch, and only gradually did we realize that no one was plucking away in the semidarkness; no, it was his mobile phone’s ringtone. He did not answer it. Instead the frogs answered, in a sort of chorus, from the belt of reeds along the Morava. And how did they answer? Their monotonous croaking modulated into an unmistakable droning, an angry drumming, half underwater. Was the enclave threatened again? Did the spot where the boat was moored have to change again? Or did the storyteller, as suggested by the index finger he put to his lips, want to create the kind of tension of which we, the audience, had no need? Only after some time had elapsed and the ringtone had finally fallen silent did he resume the story, his detour to the playwright Ferdinand Raimund in Gutenstein at the foot of the Schneeberg—Austria’s Mount Snow—but he was immediately interrupted by our fact hound, who wanted to know where the jew’s-harp players from all over the world had gone when they scattered in all directions.
But that episode was rather mournful, and sad things, even if they had appealed to him all his life, were not exactly what the storyteller wanted just now. If the parting took the form of an episode at all, it was a minor one, not enough to fill a chapter, at most a gloss, a paragraph—an intermezzo. So they set out just as dawn was breaking. The rain had stopped. They stood outside, under the trees, in a triangle between the inn that had hosted the convention, the Danube, and the cemetery from which the inn had received its former name, the Cemetery of the Unknown. This cemetery had much earlier provided a final resting place primarily for unidentified corpses washed up by the river and for suicides, and old headstones from a period between wars were still tended, headstones with inscriptions such as “Unknown—Unforgotten!” As they stood there in the grayish light of early dawn, the mournfulness assailing each had less to do with the cemetery or with lack of sleep, also less with the necessity of parting—they all felt lastingly enriched by each other and were looking forward to the next year—than with the fact that after spending this time together with the jew’s harp, the khomus, the thoughtcrusher, they now had to return—“to their countries of origin?” broke in the interrupter, getting ahead of the story again—no, to their respective jobs there. Each participant in the international jew’s-harp convention had a proper job back home, you see. And they all came from different lines of work. One was employed near Paris as an “experimental physicist,” another as a “linguist” in Kyoto, and yet another as a “roofer” (“That’s where my loud voice comes from, from constantly shouting down to the street or to the opposite side of the roof”) in Lima. A “home economics teacher” was among them, a “master tailor” (“a soccer referee on the side”), a “laundromat attendant” (“ah, all that steam”), a “professor of church jurisprudence,” a “shepherd” (another one), a “bus driver” (another one), a “professional fisherman” (on a lake in Austria), a “pharmacist” (one of those wearing a peasant costume), an “opera singer,” a “beekeeper,” a “tax auditor,” a “hunter (and game warden),” a “sanitation worker,” a “dentist,” a “hairdresser,” a “model” (male), a “disc jockey” (female). And on this particular morning they all felt disgruntled, almost disgusted, at having to return home—wherever that might be—to their jobs. And there was nothing more to be said on that subject: end of paragraph, end of explanation. “Which was not really all that mournful”: thus our interrupter, who could not contain himself.
So the former writer, glad to be rid of his profession, subsequently found himself outside the country estate that had belonged to Ferdinand Raimund. Did that literary figure actually exist? Had he ever existed, and hadn’t the writer and actor occupied only a rented room in the tiny village of Gutenstein, near the Schneeberg, and only during the summer weeks dedicated in the nineteenth century to seeking “fresh air”? And even if that were perhaps true: from the village in the shadow of the mountain, filled with the sound of rushing brooks, yet quite close to the capital, a city of theater, Raimund’s spirit wafted toward the new arrival. He had expected no less, and that was why he had made his way to Gutenstein in Lower Austria, and his expectation was fulfilled the moment he took his first step past the sign marking the entrance to the village. The same thing had happened every time he had sought out the haunts of his predecessors, or rather path breakers, as whose successor, or more like a slowpoke follower, he had seen himself during his earlier life as a writer. The spirit of those who had put him on this track could be counted on to waft toward him, surround him, dance around him, speak to him, whenever he sought out their favorite haunts, even if those places existed by now in name only, with nothing left but overgrown fields, stagnant creeks, tree stumps—Vergil’s “Andes” near the banks of the Mincio River, or a cul-de-sac ending in a tangle of brush on a mound of rubble from which Sophocles’ “Kolonos,” let’s say, had received its name: right there, in the middle of nowhere and nothing, without any memorials, the spirit probably spoke to one most powerfully, and in smaller places, like Oxford, Mississippi; Višegrad, Bosnia; Cleversulzbach, Württemberg; and yes, Gutenstein, Lower Austria; more clearly than in large cities—where, whether in St. Paul, Minnesota, in Taganrog, in Oslo, in Lüttich, it spoke to one, if at all, at most in a seemingly deserted side street.
It was not curiosity that drew him to the realms of those who had become most near and dear to him in the course of his life. Or rather: in such places he wanted to know not anything specific about the place itself but about the person whose spirit, he had no doubt, resided there. For that, however, he had to go to the actual place. Only there would he learn what he wished to know. But these were probably not conventional pilgrimage destinations? And for heaven’s sake, not oracles’ lairs. What could be more perverse? No. Those oracles, those emanations, were not something he, not something anyone, could possibly—no, not believe in—trust. They offered nothing that merited belief. And also nothing one could understand, whether unambiguous or ambiguous, leaving one simply and solely none the wiser. But how did he happen to feel that he was on intimate terms with these other spirits, and after his visits to them
constantly kept his ears cocked for what they would say to him? He had encountered each one back in the day when he still wrote everything down. In each case the connection occurred only once, for the duration of a sentence perhaps, or at most a paragraph, sometimes just for the instant of an exclamation that he jotted down; that was probably the most common form it took. For this one, more or less lengthy, moment, he felt at one with them. And he did not need anything more than that one moment. It allowed him to experience the presence of his predecessors, from the earliest times to now. Now! and now! he was with them, was the twin brother for the moment of John Cowper Powys, of Cervantes, of Patricia Highsmith, of Katherine Mansfield, of Eduard Mörike, of Georges Simenon, and this now, although it flitted by faster than a falling star, for instance, would never be gone for good. It could not be destroyed by calendar time. He would share a space forever with those writers, or would occupy a room next door to theirs, something like a chamber, a morada, a cell, in the “castle of the soul” described by Teresa of Avila.
Thus he had experienced an atom of time like this, a second in a writing expedition, with Ferdinand Raimund. Unexpectedly, engrossed in a dialogue, or rather a two-sided monologue, or, even more accurate, a dual, daydream-like, aside, he had been sure that he felt the presence at his side of the author of those magic plays, and had seen himself as the one chosen to carry on the tradition, as a second voice, a repeater?—a recapitulator. And thus he had come to Gutenstein to commune with his comrade and followed the brook upstream through the village, located in a valley that narrowed as it neared the Schneeberg. And lo, the spiritus loci—of its own accord the village would not have radiated any spirit—not only became eloquent and spoke continuously to the new arrival but also showed itself to be receptive, loosened his tongue, involved him in a dialogue. The spiritus loci spoke above all of Gutenstein—how matters stood and lay there—to be precise not so much of matters connected with nature, such as the brook or the trees, but of things made or produced or manufactured, fabricated by hand, crafted, but never of those mass-produced, such as cars (those drove around as they did everywhere), television sets (not even ancient models discarded behind houses), or the like. And on the other hand no spiritus loci spoke from obviously older manufactured goods, from handcrafted objects from past eras: the nineteenth-century wooden galleries remained mute, as did the garden bowers from the same period, the painted marksman’s plaques on the verandas, the old horse-drawn carriages parked in the remaining sheds or placed in front gardens as flower containers, or on terraces. Likewise silent were the Biedermeier wardrobes, chests of drawers, and armchairs glimpsed in the houses as one passed by, indeed every object from Raimund’s period, whether an oil painting or very early photograph (?), as were the writer’s personal possessions, let’s say the bed he had slept in during the summer holidays, his writing desk, his quill pen (?), his bed (probably child-sized), for which reason the wanderer making his way through the village avoided from the beginning any spot designated as a memorial. What spoke to him and sparked the dialogue, one more lively, more spirited than almost any he succeeded in having with a living person, were inanimate objects almost exclusively, along with the stones in the brook and the breeze from the brook that blew up at him from below: timeless objects along the road, such as a crudely knocked-together bench, a chair of indefinable style in a front courtyard, a beehive that was neither clearly old nor freshly painted, a wooden ladder, even a bicycle from some time in the past, a hazel stick leaning by a front door, a flower box filled with nothing but sand, a mailbox for complaints that would not be emptied until the following fall, if at all, a dusty cap on a windowsill, a row of gray, weathered clothespins on a line, a so-so gazebo, a so-so support for a fruit tree, a privy in a rear courtyard with a heart sawn out of the door, or maybe not.