by Peter Handke
Wherever he looked, Ferdinand Raimund spoke to him in his Gutenstein, and then spoke not merely through objects in that place but also through the occasional cat lying quietly on a shed roof—not, however, through any dog, no matter how sound asleep: “Caution, risk of rabies”—and likewise through the inhabitants’ eyes, cheek-lines, shoulders (often slightly stooped like those of mountain folk), primarily the older ones—odd in light of Raimund’s rather early death—and especially the dangling arms and, if possible even more distinctly, through the cowlicks of children, more straggling or dawdling home after school than hustling, and often going out of their way to accompany one another rather than heading straight home.
And how did the dialogue go between these two, yes, old comrades? More or less as follows. Ferdinand Raimund: “Greetings to ye, friend. High time you showed your face in Gutenstein. What brings you to me? What would you like to know? Ask me everything—except how one can become happy and contented.” The man seeking insight from the oracle: “Are there still fairy tales like yours to tell?” “No. Or at most in fragments. Fairy tales that last only a second.” “Should I have continued writing instead of giving up?” “No. For you are incapable, as I was, of speaking of evil and describing an evil person, someone rotten to the core. And devils exist, as they did in my day, and worse now than ever. In my time, I could banish evil by invoking fairy-tale magic. But you, nowadays—and besides, I also practiced magic as an actor. When I played on the stage, the audience erupted with enthusiasm. But you—you may be a player, but not a winner. And as a writer, too, you would in the meantime be a loser also. For in your case, as in mine, the good would win out. And unlike in my case, no one would be willing to believe you anymore. For what wins out everywhere can only be evil, the devil, I mean, with his saccharine grin and his malice—who wants to sow dissension, between individual human beings as well as between peoples.” “Can’t you be less unambiguous, Ferdinand?” “Then don’t ask me so specifically, brother.” “Why am I so reluctant, since my arrival in this country we share, to strike out directly for home, for the village I come from, or what’s left of it? Why do I take detour after detour, go off on tangent after tangent, to postpone stepping into the house where I was born? Why do I have the sense I would be approaching a forbidden zone there? A death zone? Warning! Death zone!” “Ask me something else. In a house where someone committed suicide, there is no room for an expression containing ‘death.’ And besides: yes, dear friend, don’t you know that it is characteristic of rational people not to think about death but only about life?” “And likewise about love? For a time, while I was on the road, that was my only thought. One thought led to another, and accordingly one sentence, addressed silently to the beloved, gave rise to the next. But how does it happen, magician, that since I have been back in our shared country I have had to make more and more of an effort to summon these thoughts, that the corresponding words and sentences become more and more theoretical—not innately theatrical as in your case—and they are hardly directed to a distant reality, the distant proximity, but no longer have any direction, are incapable of flying, if indeed words of love don’t fail to materialize altogether? How can this be: homecoming and threatened with lovelessness? Or worse still: heading home and having ulterior motives? Homeland and distrust?” “Ah, speak not to me of love, little brother, not to me. Love, especially love for a woman, does not belong to my vocabulary, any more than homecoming and homeland. True, I am an illusionist. But I know my limitations. And they are called distrust and suspicion. Or you might call it mistrust, healthy mistrust? Unhealthy, fundamentally unhealthy. For all my days I lived with the thought that a woman would save me, who else but a woman? And I needed so badly to be saved, my friend, time and again. And then, time and again, Beware: woman, beware: betrayal, beware: death zone. And then time and again a period in which I was not close to Antonie even in writing. And then I was with her. And then we quarreled. And then again. And then we were on good terms once more. And then we swore eternal faithfulness to each other under the column with a statue of the Virgin Mary in Neustift am Walde. And then we quarreled again, and for a long time she did not come up to see me. I had terrible headaches. That time was not good. Evil absence. And then we traveled to Gutenstein, where I was very sad. And on the way back I put the pistol in my mouth and fired, not out of fear of rabies but because of the woman. Nothing is free in life. A great deal is free in life.” “What to do, Ferdinand?” “No danger is ever past. Even hunger cannot be relied upon anymore. Why do human beings turn up only in the newspapers nowadays? Nonetheless you should write, write it all down. There is much to be seen in a village. You are in foreign parts here; be peaceable! Is all this surviving worthwhile? No one will save you. In the end it all comes down to grace. Much still takes place. No cause for rejoicing. Do not call me an inspired writer; call me a collector of material from the air. An ashman. Ashes to ashes, air to air. I am puzzled by everyone who is merry. Keep to the truth, and seek it. Actually one should do nothing all day but sharpen pencils. All have found a safe haven, only we two have not. Nothing, yet again—and everything splinters. Run to the lilac bush. Today is Monday, and Monday is a good day to go up to the mountain. Parting should be tender. The sun is friendly. Continue not calling attention to yourself, you hear? Once a day you will experience something new. Or perhaps not. There are no heavenly days. And in the end no one knows anything. Parting must take place without answers.”
Even once he had long since left Gutenstein behind on his way to the Schneeberg, the wanderer remained under Ferdinand Raimund’s influence. He thought of himself as not merely invisible in it but also invulnerable. “Nothing can happen to me!” Furthermore he felt as if it lent him wings, so that he veritably flew up the mountainside, although the path grew increasingly steep. Beyond every bend and boulder their dialogue, or rather their chaotic, stammered exchange, resumed. It was the kind of ecstasy of which lifelong experience really should have taught him to be wary. But right now that did not concern him, and it also did not count that after a while he had no path to follow; as he progressed up the mountain, sometimes walking, sometimes scrambling, feeling his way across scree or pulling himself up a fissure in the rock, in his imagination he created his own path. And in no time—or so it seemed to him—he found himself in the snow, still far from the snow-covered peak, the various peaks that gave the mountain its name, but in the brilliant blue it appeared to be only a stone’s or a snowball’s throw away. Setting one foot directly in front of the other like a fox, he was proceeding without pausing across the high plateau near the tree line, seemingly covered evenly with crystallized snow, when all of a sudden he tumbled into a crater, a sinkhole in the karst that had been almost impossible to see because of the lack of shadows and because of the snow that had blown into it to a considerable depth. And there the wanderer lay. Struggling to his feet, he stood there down in the crater, up to his hips in snow, and—he saw himself from the outside—looked around, at a loss. “Damned snow!” At that a chamois, a real one this time, came to the edge of the depression and, with its head turned to one side, stared at him out of one black eye. And after it had gazed at him from above for a good while, using its rump as a sled, it slid down to him in the sinkhole, stood up on all fours, and conveyed without beating around the bush, without stammering, unlike in that earlier dialogue down in the valley: “Enough of avoiding the beaten path! Enough of going it alone! Leaving others in the lurch! You’re the traitor; you’re all traitors. You’re a wild creature, I say. But an aging, decrepit one. All your phony ecstasies. Now you see where they get you: into a snow pit, into snow-blindness. Back to the realm of the living, of the modern world, of pairs of eyes. I’m not going to rescue you, not I. But I also have no desire to see you perish poetically up here in white and blue, over the course of days. Up with you, you stupid flatlander.” And did that help him get out? How else would he have been able to tell us the story during the Moravian night?
After tha
t, for a while he was no longer a wanderer. He allowed himself to be transported, by train, if you really want to know specifically, and if you want to know even more “precisely”: once he had made his way with bag and baggage to Puchberg on the Schneeberg, he took the late-afternoon local east to Wiener Neustadt and there changed to the express heading south to Carinthia and Styria; he was not yet sure in which province he would get off that night. But only briefly did he enjoy the sense of security that came with being transported. Soon he found himself missing the awareness of danger. What comforted him somewhat was the thought that it was probably enough that his life had hung in the balance for a day. Besides, he told himself, if the danger did not come from outside him, it could be counted on to come from inside. He personified the danger, was his own threat to himself, especially since he had let his profession go—and was no longer working. So during his time on the road he had survived a danger each and every day? Yes. And why had he not mentioned this to us? “Nonsense: I haven’t concealed a single danger from you—you haven’t been listening properly. If my tour had been a boat trip, I would have been telling you about the hundreds of ways I came close to capsizing every day.”
This run was one of the last times the train would traverse the more than hundred-year-old stretch over the mountains, the Semmering Pass. Very soon a new tunnel would be opened. Did that explain why the compartments were so full? Not another seat available, and even the corridors were crowded. That was fine by him, and not only because he had been hiking alone for so long. It felt to him as though it had been even longer since he had been seen by anyone, at least any living human being. He had no memory of a human eye observing him, even with a fleeting glance, and he was beginning to miss being perceived by others. Looking at himself in the mirror no longer sufficed, and besides he tended to avoid mirrors, or ignore them. There was another odd phenomenon: he, who during his period as a public figure had felt awkward at being recognized on the street or wherever, now wished that someone, even just one person, on the train would recognize him, specifically as the one who had published this or that work, no matter that it had been some time ago. If in the past he had been recognized by someone or other “in my own country”—these words came to him unbidden—at most it had been as someone vaguely suspect.
This wish, too, finally found fulfillment during his tour. He did have to wait a good while, and as usual contribute in some way to the fulfillment. He squeezed past those standing in the corridor and sitting on the floor, making his way from the end of the train to the locomotive up front and then back. Along the broad and then unexpectedly abrupt switchbacks on the Semmering route, he was constantly thrown against the bodies of the other passengers, and he allowed that to happen, almost luxuriating in the contact and thankful to feel himself integrated into the crowd, even enthusiastic when, from time to time, it was impossible to get by, and he stood there in the mass, compressed by another curve, his arms close to his sides, unable to move a finger, and forced, like the others, to “breathe lightly.” It goes without saying that in such close quarters, eye to eye, no one recognized him. But neither did he expect anyone to. Being seen, yes. Yet even in this situation, that did not happen. He looked expectantly at the faces of all those around him, no farther away than a hand’s breadth, a nose’s length, the distance of a toothpick, of an eyebrow, of an auricle, of a hasty glance, but far and wide there was no one who returned his gaze for even a second. Was that a function of excessive closeness? Was it impossible to register anything at such close range? No. Even once the people in the carriages had long since been distributed more evenly, his gaze at their faces was not reciprocated, and no one perceived him. And he was not the only one to go unseen, to not exist, as it were. Even among themselves, even in cases where their clothing, age, or other features suggested that they belonged together, formed a group, they did not relate to one another. No one had eyes for anyone else. Yet almost all of them, from one end of the train to the other, were very young, and without exception—what was the expression?—good-looking. Entire classes from Carinthia or Styria returning home from a school trip to the nation’s capital?
And he in their midst, so needy of faces, having needed faces for so long. Nothing meant more to him, when the time came, than a human face, nothing in nature, no sky, no book. And now was that time. Looking out the train’s windows, he saw snow again, that was how high the train had worked its way up the mountain, and, poking out of the drifts, the back of a bench meant for hikers: if only he did not have to see any more snow, any more objects. Faces! One face! Give me one human face, and my soul will heal. But these thousand faces crowded together now offered nothing to see. Or rather: they did not allow themselves to be seen, intentionally, and that had been the case for a good while—even if, according to normal time measurements, it had been only a week ago, only a month ago, only at the beginning of the school year, that that had happened or been decided on. All these young faces, most of them female, which had doubtless once been quite diverse, revealed an almost worrisome uniformity—to which the earbuds here and there and the pale complexion repeated in face after face contributed only slightly, certainly not the decisive aspect—a twin-like? a doll-like uniformity, certainly not a family resemblance anywhere. And it would not have taken much for him, as he squeezed between them, to pick one of the young women, for whom he and no one else existed, one standing in for all, and shout at her, berating her, calling them monsters, zombies, troublemakers, holy terrors of the last days, scouts from the Planet of Blind Souls, would-be masters of the universe. If he had berated her, it would have been less out of rage than—to be honest—out of fear. And his shouting, if like anything, would have been like the shouting in a bad dream, coming out wordlessly as pathetic croaking, or remaining stuck in his throat.
So he literally fought his way through to the very last car in the excessively long train, from where he had first set out, hoping to find a face—as if one human visage, even one bowed or turned away, would suffice to let him feel that he was being seen. There, with a view out the back, onto the tracks, would be his spot. Time and again someone jostled him, unintentionally. Did no one see him, then? Did he in fact perhaps not exist at all? In the end he almost jostled someone in return, simply to prove that he was really present among all those young people. And then, at the very end of the train, the girl sitting on the floor and reading, her back against the glazed, sealed rear door. The steeper the climb up the mountainside, the slower the train moved, taking the turns almost at the speed of a walk, with the result that the landscape behind the glass door receded in slow curves, offering each time a changed perspective, while also seeming to recur, like the backdrops in a play or in an old film.
At first glance, the girl looked hardly different from the other young folk on the train: leather jacket, jeans, ankle boots, a fake diamond stud in one nostril. But what immediately set her apart from the others was the way she sat there and the way she was reading. Initially he saw her only through the legs of those standing all around, and caught only a glimpse of the book on her knees, without its title. But the way she was reading: that was a reader for you! She was visibly living in the book, spelling it out, interrogating it, interrogating herself, connecting with it, becoming and being one with it. In reading this way and obviously having a book that lent itself to being read this way, this young person showed herself to be transported out of her surroundings—in another element altogether? No, in contrast to the others, she was actually in an element, her own, the only one appropriate to her, the one in which she could be herself. And yet she was not lost to the world; being transported did not signify being lost or sealed off: she could also take in whatever was happening in the corridor and outside the train that was worth taking in, vide the way she periodically raised her eyes from the book and looked over her shoulder through the glass door, both actions apparently motivated by her reading, nothing but her reading. And he could not get enough of watching this young woman, almost still a c
hild? no, no longer a child, read and read and read. Concentrated solemnity radiated from her brow, her lowered lids, her flattish nose, her full lips, which at times seemed to be humming along with what she was reading. A solemnity that radiated—really? yes, Mr. Know-It-All. And although he was gazing down at her as she sat there, legs crossed, it seemed to him, the more he immersed himself in this reader, that she was floating, weightless, above the ground, and he with her. Part of her solemnity was that now and then, even though she was clearly not reading anything comical, let alone humorous, she would smile or grin (quite a rarity, a grin on such a young face), or, most frequently, would shake her head after every paragraph—indicating her astonishment, her surprise, her inner eye-opening, venting itself in a barely audible sighing and/or giggling. Everything, everything about her, no matter how still she sat, harmonized with the book, and if the book facilitated such opening-up and becoming beautiful (but wasn’t openness already in itself beauty?), it indeed deserved a name, or maybe not? A reader like this, male or female, sensitive through and through, he had imagined in the past for his own books—a being like this; from that kind of reading he would have recognized her on the spot, “with hundred-percent certainty.” Even supposing the book being read had not been one of his: he could have been its author, judging solely by the reader’s eyelid movement, a movement free of all reflexes, an eyelid movement that marked a conscious pausing—dawning awareness as pausing. “His” reader instilled patience in him; and accordingly the conviction came to him that her reading was tantamount to protection; by reading as she did, she was helping someone in danger. Such reading provided protection, giving and maintaining safe conduct. This reader came across as motherly, though she was still partly a child, and would remain so all her life. “Yes,” to quote his exact words, “I esteem my readers more than myself.”