by Peter Handke
And thus the wanderer, when, after much crisscrossing, he had finally by the end of the day reached the bottom of the hill, promptly turned into a customer, purchasing a small carpet that he wanted to give, as quickly as possible, as a present to someone, anyone, in the spirit of the day, and sticking it under his arm, he then wandered around the base of the hill toward town, remembering a drawing class in boarding school in which he had drawn a house with only windows, no door. And when the teacher asked him where the door was, he replied, “In the back”—whereupon the teacher turned the paper around and, holding it up to the entire class and shouting, “Where in the back?” poked a very sharp pencil through it.
Later, when? later, as he was marching day and night along the Old Road to get to his birthplace, and confided to one of the people he met along the way his experience on the back side of the hill, this other person unexpectedly turned out to be a journalist and explained to him that this was not appropriate material for an article, and that it was especially not considered proper nowadays to describe such a thing or such an absurd thing the way he, the wanderer, had just done. But this will be discussed later, and in more detail. For now and henceforth, one thing at a time.
That Old Road had long since been off-limits to vehicles. It had been used for vehicular traffic before the war, before the wars, a light ribbon of gravel snaking its way across the countryside. Later it ran parallel at varying distances to the more or less straight paved road. The latter served as a highway, while what was now called the Old Road, whose many twists and turns made it somewhat longer, had always had the appearance of a local road, composed of a hundred and one smaller segments. In the meantime it had become usable only as a hiking trail, and even that only in some stretches, for not all of them were still passable, although those that were were generous. When one reached the gaps, one had to keep one’s bearings as best one could, and even the remaining passable sections of the gravel road were often overgrown with brush—the Old Road did not attract many walkers (especially since it was not marked as a hiking trail anywhere), and for this very reason some found it even more attractive.
Beforehand, he again took a plane to get him to the place from which he had always set out for home. It was a domestic flight, the route between G. and K. just being inaugurated that day, and the flight plan indicated that they would be flying almost directly over his village. He sat in a small aircraft that flew at low altitude, not much higher than a helicopter, perhaps also because it was the maiden flight and the passengers were supposed to be offered something to see. As if in answer to his wishes, it was clear, calm weather, and he sat, again as he would have wished, by the window that afforded a perfect view and then saw below, very close, every detail sharply defined, the region he knew from childhood, which he had never seen from a bird’s-eye perspective, and especially not in such proximity to the adjacent areas: now, from the plane, or the flying carpet, he saw the village in relation to them, and beyond that in relation to the whole country—even if what could be seen this way did not all belong to that countryside. And at the same time he recognized the tree in the center of the village, the cherry tree that was probably dead by now, along with the spring house of rough concrete at its foot, and next to it the abandoned village tavern, which still glowed in rich yellow, and across from it the wall around someone’s orchard, which he and others had scaled more than once to steal apples and pears. And there, the wall of the barn belonging to his grandfather’s place, his birth house, with the vent cut into the boards in the form of a cloverleaf—four-leafed, of course. Or was that another fata morgana, a hallucination from a long-ago time? And over there another barn wall, with movie posters advertising coming attractions, one poster for every month, small white sheets with nothing but the films’ titles, nothing but writing, pasted on top of each other as thick as a book after all the months, years, and decades, and then the end, the last sheet, the last of the screenings. And now the cemetery with the wall as high as a house to protect “against the Turks,” where a cat was just darting along the shingled roof. And now the lake, silted up? no, not that bad, not entirely, one watery eye still open amid the jungle of reeds, the stalks rising from black mud, which oozed refreshingly between one’s toes, and the leeches in the black mud, and, and …
From the airfield directly to the Old Road. It was also high time; time to go; time to “drop by at home,” perhaps for one last time. And soon the first encounter. A man was standing there by the road, close to the stinging nettles, in front of an easel. He was outfitted with an enormous paint box, an equally enormous palette, a white painter’s smock, from whose numerous pockets poked brushes in every size, and so forth, like a so-called princely painter, also wearing a fur cap, adorned in back with a foxtail. But when the wanderer answered his wave and came closer, the canvas turned out to be bare, with not a single dab of color, also without any preparatory sketch. The man, who had apparently been here on the Old Road for quite a while, had not yet begun. It looked, however, as though he was close to starting, so energetically did he gesture with first one of his brushes, then another, next with the palette knife, using it repeatedly to measure something, something different each time, something near, something far, at his head, by his feet; what could it be? He closed his left eye, then the right one, suddenly exclaimed, “Ha!” then “Yes!” then again “So!” (with a short o), yet nothing happened, and besides, the paint squeezed in huge blobs onto the palette had dried up and was hard as rock. He seemed to be a wannabe painter, not a proper one, or at least not yet, not for the moment. In reality he came from an almost opposite world, or this world had once been his, as the gesture with which he urged the approaching stranger to come closer betrayed, more an imperious gesture than a wave, just one brief, lordly, no, constablelike beckoning with his index finger, his body otherwise motionless, the eyes and the entire face rigid, the legs splayed.
Just as with all the subsequent individual encounters on the Old Road, appearances proved deceptive and everyone was sooner or later revealed to be someone else, so, too, here: Oh, dear, wasn’t this the politician who had once been in power in the country and on whom a person described as mentally disturbed had made an assassination attempt? Yes, it was. “Yes, I’m the one.” He said it softly, in a completely unrecognizable voice. It was a gentle voice, yet it carried, as it once had on the radio or elsewhere, perhaps carrying even farther now. His beckoning had been an illusion, he had probably made the gesture by mistake, or he had been playacting. His eyes were also gentle, eyes such as one seldom saw in his day, and large, as if opened wide, pleading, almost dry, the pupils intensely enlarged like a child’s, as if he were gazing into darkness. And he talked incessantly, without asking the other person where he was coming from and where he was going. He had waited so long on the Old Road for another human being; no one had been attracted by his getup, or had no one else happened by? At intervals he showed off the scar on his abdomen from the gunshot and gave himself an insulin injection: in the shock of being shot at point-blank range he had become diabetic from one second to the next. He had turned his back on politics. He was nothing but a disabled pensioner. A widower, without friends. He had not had any friends earlier, either, but that had not mattered to him at the time. How pale he looked, although he was out in the fresh air all day. For a while he had still gone to the marketplace, making his way from booth to booth, also to the soccer field or ice-hockey rink, had mingled with the crowd when one of his successors presided over the opening of a bridge somewhere, laid a cornerstone, put the first shovel in the ground. In the meantime, however, he spent most of his time on the Old Road. Not that he wanted to get away from people. On the contrary. He could cry every time someone so much as noticed his presence, let alone recognized him. It was the masses he could not bear anymore. Even just a few, more than two or three, scared him off.
First of all, only one person at a time came along the Old Road. And besides, in his painter’s disguise he could think so wonderfully,
so wonderfully painfully there. More and more ideas, not for himself but for his country and its citizens, were spawned there. If he had the chance to do it over again, he would still become a politician, but a politician such as there had never been in these parts since the kaiser’s time. One who was not indistinguishable from the others, one whose person, his very person, was sorely needed. And first and foremost he would speak a different language. Everything else would flow from this different language. And on the Old Road a new language came to him, but only individual words that did not fit together to form sentences. It had not reached that point yet; he had not reached that point yet. But just you wait. And he stretched out his arm toward the distant city. How his hands shook. He could hardly hold the brush, which in fact dropped into the stinging nettles without the former politician’s seeming to notice. He did not take his eyes off the other man. He did not want to let him leave, blocked his way, stopped just short of lying down in his path to keep him from moving on. And then he suddenly let him go after all, wished him “safe travels,” wanted only to be looked at once more, which actually brought tears to his eyes?
Some time later a voice called out to the wanderer on the Old Road from behind, the voice this time not gentle but grating, a scratchy voice that drawled out the sounds and swallowed syllables like a drunk. He turned to look, and what he saw seemed to confirm that impression: a man he did not recognize staggering along and babbling at him, so unceremoniously that one wondered where one had met him before and whether one hadn’t known him for a long time, or whether one had been on the road so long that one had lost one’s memory, and even old friends had become strangers? And he let the stranger catch up to him, thinking that might help him remember. Apparently he was not a drunk after all but a vagrant. Did that mean someone he had known in his youth had gone downhill or, as the expression went, taken a wrong turn, like his first love or also that schoolmate, the brightest boy in the boarding school, whom he had run into again in Athens, busking on the slope of the Acropolis, his flute so shrill it made one want to cover one’s ears, and the performer not wanting to be recognized? (His dialect alone would have given him away there, below the Parthenon.) No, this man who then walked beside him, moving and breathing with difficulty—or actually forcing him to adjust his pace to the stranger’s scuffing along—was no old acquaintance who had degenerated into a vagrant. He was not a vagrant at all. The first impression of wild hair down to his shoulders had been deceptive. It was a headful of tightly curled hair, and it belonged to—what was the term—a black person? And likewise his outfit revealed itself upon closer inspection to have nothing clochard-like about it. No trace of its being matted. All the materials were choice, without exception: worsted, cashmere, silk, “pure cotton.” From close up the garments did not appear sloppy or tattered in the slightest, but rather capacious and flowing, the thick-soled shoes suitable for hill and dale without being actual hiking boots. They gleamed on the ribbon of gravel as if this were London’s Bond Street or such. This person was completely unknown to him, a man who despite his shortness of breath talked without pause to him, or rather to himself. But in the process he revealed himself to the other man. Had he lost his way in the area? Not in the slightest. He had settled here on purpose, near the Old Road. He had had pulmonary disease for a long time, was mortally ill, and once a day he struggled out to the Old Road to get fresh air. Walking there, slowly up and down, refreshed his lungs, or what was left of them. He had been a professor of “world literature” in the capital city, and every third or fourth sentence he spoke was a quotation from Homer, Shakespeare, Keats, or from his own father. Yes, his father was a world-renowned poet, “from the Caribbean, from Nigeria, from Madagascar—as you wish” (the storyteller put it this way during that night on the Morava). He quoted his father and hated him. So was this father still alive?—And how! He was in much better shape than the son, fighting death every day here on the Old Road, far, so far from home. Had his progenitor disowned him, then?—No answer. It became clear that the poet had never hesitated to sacrifice anyone for his goddess, poetry. It was not even so much sacrificing as ignoring. It cost him nothing; to drop the other person or to lose sight of him created no conflict in him, no reflection, no self-doubt, let alone inner conflict, that conflict that one world religion calls great. He viewed himself as consecrated to poetry from birth, poetry’s deputy on earth, and thought he had every right to walk over dead bodies for his goddess’s sake, or to banish from his poet’s life those who should have been his nearest and dearest—to let them die as he had his parents at one time, then his wives, and now his son, Isaac and Ishmael in one person. Goddess? She had long since shriveled to an idol, to a stuffed bugaboo, without air in her lungs, as had the poet, his father, her embodiment. It had been a long time since a poem had come to him on wings of inspiration and had gone flying from him into the world. For a long time now he had merely performed a public role wherever he appeared, had become a circus barker among thousands of barkers, including on those occasions when he recited his poems in a whisper, presented himself, spoke, sat there as a celebrity even in the most private moments—but what could still be private about that kind of professional poet? He did not merely have an opinion on anything and everything but also constantly broadcast it to the world, his eyes darting around, demanding attention, representing poetry, even when he was alone for a change, in the men’s room or wherever. And instead of his having run out of breath, that had happened to his son, as a sort of proxy. So had the father completely forgotten his son, now so ill?—For a long time that had seemed to be the case. But now that he knew the end was imminent, he called him almost every evening, across several continents, and asked for an update.—And what did that mean?—The father planned to write a poem about his son after he died, and was collecting from afar his penultimate, last, and perhaps this very evening his very last words. He had a plan, but it did not mean that on the telephone he had ulterior motives. The plan had been explicit from the beginning; it was consistent with his profession and did not prevent the father from caring; his voice, after he had listened to his son’s report on his condition, uttered with much wheezing and panting, sounded different from his usual proclamatory voice. It sounded stricken, as if he was choking back sobs, stricken by the other man’s pain and suffering, but by the same token inseparable from the thought that this fate cried out for a poem, yes, cried out for a long poem, an epic one, such as he, the poet-father, had dreamed of all his life, a Caribbean or a Nigerian epic, an epic about a new prodigal son. And a little while ago his father had actually burst into tears, in the middle of a long-distance telephone call, and had not stopped sobbing, had only sobbed louder, despite, as almost always, being not alone but surrounded by other public personages like himself who, as could be heard through the satellite transmission, were turning away, even lowering their eyes, each for himself, and removing themselves from the room with the telephone, softly, softly, let’s leave him alone, and in the end the two of them, the son on this end, the father on the other end of the line, had simply sobbed, bawled, and whimpered at each other—which one was the father, which the child?—without words, which on him, the one who was ill, had the effect of carrying oxygen to what was left of his lungs to a degree normally achieved only by his walking up and down the Old Road all day. And with that his story ended. He continued to walk beside the homeward-bound wanderer for a while, but without uttering another word. Toward evening he turned back, for a telephone call? It was he, the temporary companion, who received the small carpet as a gift. Gazing westward over his shoulder after the forgotten son, our host saw smoke eddying from his head: was he smoking? The sky above him seemed vaulted (not often did it appear that way). The sun, almost down to the fairly level horizon—the mountains lay in the opposite direction—cast lance-length shadows over the innumerable rock fragments on the road. The son’s wheezing could be heard almost all the way to that horizon. He was wheezing hard enough to melt a stone, as if he were bearin
g his father on his back.