by Peter Handke
Again she raised her eyes from the book. But instead of looking over her shoulder as usual, she gazed at him, through the legs of her fellow passengers. That happened after they had already reached the summit of the Semmering Pass, and through the train’s rear door the tracks no longer ran valleyward but rather, in the fading light of day, up the mountainside, quite steeply, appearing at certain moments like a ladder leaning against the mountain. What about him disturbed her so? Perhaps that he was so battered from his solitary journey to Gutenstein and up the Schneeberg? He stepped to one side so as to remain unseen, his heart pounding at the same time like that of someone caught in the act. And at that she had already jumped to her feet and stood before him, her large eyes ringed with dark makeup. So she must have recognized him after all? She, the tenderest and loveliest of beings, not only in the train here, and he, long since rejected, even by himself, cast off into an almost longed-for state of oblivion, and for the most part also feeling at home in that state? Yes, she had recognized him, and his first thought was: Oh, no! And what happened next was described during that night on the Morava not by him but by the stranger, the woman, who as if on cue emerged from the galley to join the rest of us again. He seemed to have told her the rest of the episode so often that she knew it by heart. (Or had she been present? In secret?) Did the boatmaster wish to avoid the appearance of vanity? But in listening to an account of his own adventure, didn’t he increase the likelihood of seeming vain? On the other hand, what came next had hardly anything to do with him.
The stranger told us the following story: The beautiful young thing had not only recognized the man (she did not say how, whether from some old photo, or perhaps from a caricature?—probably the most likely to remain recognizable over time). She was his reader. “I know your books,” was her second statement. Almost involuntarily his eyes came to rest on the book she held in her hand. No, it was not by him; it belonged to a long-ago century. But for moments it could have been by him. She stared at him in amazement. That he was alive. That he existed in flesh and blood. That he was on a train. That he was there, not somewhere inaccessibly distant. She plucked at him, at his coat, his pack, and pulled him to the rear door of the train. They stood there together and looked out at the tracks curving away from them. She knew nothing about him, nothing personal, and also did not want to know anything, either where he was coming from or where he was going; she also had no idea that he had long since and consciously given up writing books—he was and remained the writer, here and now. Likewise she did not tell him what she thought of his books, did not judge them, did not even mention specific ones, and at first he wondered whether she hadn’t mistaken him for someone else. But no: he was the one, that was clear from what she said, which, or so he imagined, would never, never, never have been expressed so frankly and straightforwardly to another member of his guild (or what should he call it?)—downright trustingly, an impression reinforced by the way she continued to touch him, without any inhibitions, putting her hand on his shoulder, punching him on the upper arm and chest in her excitement at being able to speak her mind, picking a hair off his coat, twirling one of its buttons, and one time, completely caught up in the subject or her views on the subject, unconsciously bumping him with her hip, like a stray animal that had adopted him, like his pet. True, he had to keep asking questions to make her go on speaking. But he sensed that she wanted him to ask. Could he have asked her anything, so to speak? Asked until she had told him everything? No, only harmless matters were permissible, or what passed for such. And this very asking and refraining from asking helped light a fire under him, in the past always deeply resistant to asking questions. An animated give-and-take developed between the two of them as they stood by the glass door, and viewed from the outside it looked as if all the people here and there, sometimes even in large numbers, lining both sides of the tracks, who in reality had come for the train’s last crossing of the Semmering, were their spectators, forming an aisle of honor.
During the Moravian night, the former writer picked up the narrative thread at this point. Yes, the girl, the reader, the “creature,” as he thought of her, was still in school. Yes, she got along well with her parents. With her father, at the moment out of work and getting trained for a new job, she often went mountain-climbing. She had a more than fifty-kilometer bus ride to school. In the wintertime she walked the last three kilometers home in the dark, without being afraid. Yes, she had a brother, with whom she sometimes had fun. Her mother was a teacher, for special-needs children, also far from home, but in the other direction, so the evening meal was often prepared by her grandfather, who still lived with them. But she did not care for his cooking. During the holidays she earned money as a swimming instructor at the community pool on the river, and by offering tutoring in math, Latin, and even Russian, becoming increasingly important in her area, and on weekends she played the piano in the town where she went to school, in a blues club, really? Yes. She sometimes felt sad, though not often. What did she plan to be when she grew up? She did not know. Go abroad? She did not know. To her, reading was simply essential. It was the drive train, the engine, and the fuel all in one. The blues on the piano came later, inspired by her reading. Some guests at the club thought her playing resembled a lament. “Such a tender lament,” one of them had remarked, “impervious to any comfort, and also not needing any.” Someday she would sing to her own accompaniment, but that day had not yet come. She would probably never write, at most a song now and then—again, when the time came. Her parents did not read, at least nothing worthwhile. The daughter had reproached her father and mother for that, and not only once. Her brother did not read either, but for him there was still hope. Her parents, on the other hand: what a disgrace. She had never seen either one of them with a book. In their spare time they rattled around the house doing the most inane things, and very noisy things. Only if it made a racket did it count for them. But yes, she was fond of them in spite of everything, and it was not her father’s and mother’s fault that she, the sixteen-year-old, despised the current era, the time in which she lived. Her reasons? None. All she could say was that some of her male and female friends—so she had some? yes, of course—felt the same way: isolated, filled with an enthusiasm that could never find expression through a larger movement undertaken with others; they disliked the present, they rejected it, excluded as they were, and were prepared to fight it, each in his or her own way. Not even rap offered any hope these days. And if she, the creature, wished she were living in a different era, it was not one in the future—she could not imagine one she would like—but in the past, and in a different place. She would have liked to live, for instance, in America in the forties and fifties of the last century, or in Russia during Dostoevsky’s time—despite the nihilists? precisely because of them—or in pre-Christian Greece, in the days of Pythagoras, whom she, the only girl among the students at her school to do so, pictured as a teacher, one whose mathematical principles not only taught one to calculate and measure but also guided and disciplined one to understand the logic of language, of speaking and writing.
What a creature. And to think that such a creature was growing up in the country that had epitomized for him, at least during one period in his life, the hub around which his prejudices revolved. The disappearance of prejudices: worth narrating as hardly anything else could be. What would be more fruitful as a narrative subject? And that such a creature was confiding in him, of all people. What a gift. One he did not deserve? His heart, he said, using this exact word, was ready to “burst” in the presence of such “innocence,” again his exact word. And receiving once again, certainly not by any means for the first time in his life, receiving such a gift, which he thought he did not deserve, became too much for him, and at the station where some of the cars were uncoupled to continue on to Styria, he abruptly said goodbye to the young reader, the “tenderest among thousands,” as she appeared to him, and got off the train. To be alone, with the afterimage of the creature.
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br /> If he could still imagine a painter for his times, it would be a painter of afterimages. That was the role he assumed during our night on the boat, though merely with one finger in the air and a few evocative sentences. With the afterimage of his fellow passenger before his eyes, he sketched out for us how he pictured her at the moment. Although it was night, he saw her in daylight. As we sat in the boat’s salon here on the Morava, each of us at his table, she was climbing with her grandfather to a mountain pasture, far off beyond the Karavanka range. They had slept in the hay loft of a barn belonging to the last active farm on the southern slope of the Sau Alp. She had scratches on her legs from the hay, cut years earlier, and dust in her nostrils—but those features were not significant in this afterimage. What was significant? What was going on inside her; the interior of her exterior. And the girl seen against the glow of mica flakes along the trail, which now narrowed to a cow path in the first light of day. He saw her beneath the last flickering stars, which she pointed out to her grandfather, but he was too bleary-eyed and also too preoccupied to look up. He saw her between two boulders at the entrance to a hiding place once used by the partisans, with nothing there to serve as a reminder, no grenade fragment, no shell casing, no ring of ashes, no pieces of a cot, no scraps of a pamphlet, not one piece of type from the printing machine the Allies had dropped by parachute—perhaps the most important of all: with only the grandfather remembering, reminding himself as well as his granddaughter, and suddenly no longer feeling tired. He saw her with glowing black eyes, holding in her hollow fist, no, not bullets but rock-hard blue juniper berries. He saw her darting up the mountainside, far ahead of her grandfather, letting out a piercing shout, then another, until finally she heard the echo. He saw her waiting for the old man, squatting on her heels, then going back downhill toward him, and forever going toward him, or also no one, at least no one specific, simply all her life going toward, not allowing anything or anyone to get her down, filled with sadness from time to time, but externally invulnerable, protected by herself, by her nature, by her being, forever free, forever young. And in the end that was what he wished her from afar.
And he? After the meeting with the young reader, he remained alone again for a long time. He wanted that, too, avoided any encounter, decisively, with conviction. Yet upon getting off the train he had ended up in the town where he had perhaps the most acquaintances of anywhere in the country, not from his profession but from his time at the university. How to avoid running into them? Simple: by staying well away from the center of town, which also, in contrast to Vienna, soon and without clear markers merged into nondescript areas. But why not head straight for home, his birthplace, as he wished to, or as the chamois by the snow pit had ordered? What took you instead to G., of all places? It was a dream, another dream.—A dream?—Yes, hasn’t a dream ever made you go somewhere?—Not me. Me, never.—What kind of a person are you? You should be ashamed of yourself, forgetting your dreams. Or even worse, being embarrassed by them. Listen to my dream—all of you have already dreamed it, each of you, again and again; otherwise I wouldn’t tell it to you. It has to do with the back side, a back side. What kind? The back side of a house, for instance where one spent one’s childhood. The back side of a mountain that one has seen or hiked only from the front. A dream, as you recall, never has a subject. It has no action, ever. All it enables us to see, as we cannot when awake, is the back side, an empty, seemingly lifeless sphere that can nonetheless make itself felt in our innermost vein and heel bone. The back side of the mountain lies there in a clear haze. One step inside and down into the sphere takes me to a different planet. In a moment I have landed in an invisible, immaterial spaceship on a foreign, distant star, where everything, except for the light from the sky, is exactly as on earth: the varieties of trees, the topography, the air currents, the bodies of water (except that those on the brother or sister planet are omnipresent—water wherever one looks). Once a small bird there perched on my hand. A hummingbird? I asked. Yes, a hummingbird—it had the same name as on our planet. Everything, almost, looks the same and has the same name as here, and yet my innermost vein, or someone, or something, knows that it is different, starting with the first step into the realm of the back side. Different how? Simply different. Fundamentally different. Overwhelmingly different. Persistently different. Wonderfully different. Worrisomely different. Investigation-worthily different. Systematically different. Systematically? Yes.
8
DURING THE YEARS when he was at the university in G., he had lived on a hill, on a slope that faced the city and the buildings where he had classes. The path he took had run along the ridge of the hill. But either the side of the hill facing away from the town had been obscured by houses or he had never consciously looked down in that direction, let alone been tempted to step off the path on that side or venture downhill; during all his years as a student the back of the hill was not even terra incognita to him, it did not exist. In a dream, in his dreams, however, much, much later, that side of the hill, as well as the landscape down below—dizzyingly far down—appeared to him as the Different Planet, also under a Different Sun. And to this dream he gave credence—a rare enough occurrence. And so he set out for this overlooked area, full of curiosity, positively driven by the spirit of discovery.
He had little to report from this part of his expedition. (On the other hand, during that night he really had little interest in giving a report.) If he made discoveries, they were fairly ordinary ones. The sense of the uncanny that had underlain the dream—that the Different Planet could lose its atmosphere, its airspace, at any minute—dissolved. The day on which the wanderer turned off the road along the ridge and ventured onto the back side of the hill was a bright, sunny day like any other. On the winding streets and alleys leading downhill, he felt he had particularly firm ground underfoot. A draft wafted up toward him, strengthened further by the breeze his own movement generated. Spring sunshine lit the way ahead, mild in a way that one could imagine only for one’s home planet. What remained in effect from the dream: the sense of having plunged into another realm. From the moment he stepped off the ridgeline, even his own circulatory system seemed to take a different path. The back of the hill, in contrast to the side facing the center of town, the north side, turned out to be thickly settled, this, too, contradicting the dream, in which it had been unpopulated. The houses were rather small, often having only one story, more frequently older rather than newly constructed, and all of them of different heights, at varying distances from one another, also with a variety of roof styles, in a nice jumble, and set in equally small yards. And this for as far as his eyes could see, and they could see far, all the way to the opposite slope, the antipodes, so to speak, not merely thanks to the landscape but also just because they could. With every step he saw new territory, and, alien and familiar at the same time, it showed no trace of dream-gloom—this was not his city, to be sure, but his country. You heard right: he caught himself, no doubt about it, saying to himself in quiet amazement: “That’s my country. That would be my country. That would have been my country.” And in that respect perhaps he could speak of a discovery after all. It fit the circumstances that, although the houses were almost exclusively private dwellings, they appeared to him as small businesses, here a mill, over there a carpentry shop, in between a distillery, a cobbler’s, a sawmill, a stonecutter’s, a master mason’s, a laundry, not to forget one or two farmhouses and inns, and also one or two small factories for all sorts of things (no weaponry, however), and in particular a research center, and next to it the house of the town clerk. That business about “my country,” however, he forgot almost immediately. In silent amazement, yes, without words. If, as he had done earlier, he had been writing down everything that went through his head and opened his eyes, or the opposite, he would have written that as one word: silentamazement. The sounds, the noise, the racket were the same as everywhere in the world, that, too, in contrast to the completely soundless dream; let everyone come up wi
th his own soundtrack. But during his descent, this time at least, he listened in silent amazement to the whistling and whirring, the pounding and banging, the barking and meowing; or: the types of noise were pretty much all going at once, but with him they went in one ear and out the other. The amazement occasioned a type of concentration more involuntary yet also more complete than one could wish for. It involved admiring, concentrating exclusively on one object, one happening, one moment. And it involved learning, enjoyably, in a way that made him wish he could continue learning forever—but only in this way, and never again in the way he had learned in the old days, during his, oh well, his student days on the other side of the hill, in his narrow, dim garret there without a glimmer of larger understanding and without a breath or whisper of the present, of relevance, of the significance for the world of what he was studying. Amazement and learning, now, and now, and now. But what specifically did he learn on the back side of the hill? “Concretely?” What earthshaking things? What, for instance? For instance, a sparrow, no bigger than a hummingbird, was bathing there in a dust-filled depression. Two men were standing at a garden gate, one of them inside, the other outside. On a windowsill stood a saucepan. A bicycle tipped over. A woman had gray-green eyes. A man had a scar on his cheek that was not from dueling. A branch bounced from a bird that had just taken off. A scrap of newspaper poked out of a catch-basin grating. The sun shone. A jackhammer pounded. A black man was sticking advertising leaflets in mailboxes. A Turk and an Asian were talking, in Austrian dialect. The engines of an airplane that had landed screamed far off on the plain. The sky was the way it was. But below him different people were moving around, and he, too, as he made his way along, was a different person. If all this was learning, at the same time it was unlearning, a no less enjoyable process. And the danger again of taking leave of one’s senses and not finding one’s way back to the old earth, to life, from the New Planet? This danger did not exist when one was silently amazed, or hardly. And what, and where, was life in this case? And if so, what preserved the sense of equilibrium was, for instance, entering a shop somewhere and buying something, almost anything, naming numbers, supply and demand.