by Peter Handke
The other man, “I,” walked on all through the night. The former politician had given him a handful of nuts “from my own garden,” and the former professor had given him a piece of chocolate “from my homeland,” and those were his provisions. The night on the Old Road was bright, thanks in part to the gravel, still white, possibly bleached by the weather. Even where the material had sunk into the ground along some stretches and had been covered by layers of postwar fill, even when it was out of sight, the road retained a certain incomparable firmness due entirely to this gravel that did not let one wander off course, even along the stretches that were almost pitch-black, where the road led through woods, usually a dense spruce forest. During the night he still had quite a few encounters, each of them only in passing, for a couple of minutes, merely sensed yet leaving no less of an impression, encounters moreover affecting only him, the walker, whereas some of those encountered by him that night on the road did not so much as notice him, perhaps on purpose. As our host for the Moravian night described this to the rest of us, it seemed as though the night of storytelling—already far advanced—was reinforced by the night he was telling us about.
For a long time all he registered of the nocturnal figures on the Old Road was their gait. Depending on how they came toward him, despite the darkness distinct gaits could be recognized. Those who bustled along wanted to call attention to themselves, but were harmless; there was nothing to fear from them; as was always the case with vain people, one was perfectly safe in their presence. On the other hand, some of the walkers were dangerous; their very gait spelled danger, just as the running posture of certain dogs signals danger even at a distance: one had to reckon with the possibility of being attacked. The peaceable walkers were something else again; one could count on being greeted as they passed and receiving good wishes for the rest of one’s journey. And it was something else, yet again, with the peacemakers among the walkers, not that they meant anything by it: completely preoccupied, taking no notice of the world around them, let alone of the person observing them, they infected that person through their casual art of walking, which forestalled any warlike thoughts, and involuntarily, like any art—or perhaps not?—offered a liberating example, lighting up the road in the darkness. On the other hand, there were the warlike walkers, tromping loudly but not really dangerous, at least for the moment, dangerous only by virtue of their numbers, albeit during that night on the Old Road dangerous also as individuals. And then the desperate or despairing walkers, their heads and shoulders drooping, their steps ever so small, hardly raising their feet off the ground (but walking nonetheless, whether alone or in clusters, or at least still walking). And the ugly walkers, each of whom, instead of moving in one piece, with legs and brow in sync, as they were supposed to be, or perhaps not, after all, had his limbs all in a jumble, dangling, bobbing, not head over heels but heels over head, and altogether full of ill will—otherwise it would not have looked so ugly—not a walking but a seemingly vengeful, intentionally offensive letting himself go, which created the impression that the person in question wanted to show the world that the only real thing, the only thing that would remain in the end, was this kind of scornful refusal, absolute refusal, to budge. And even more insulting were the self-consciously attractive walkers who mistook the Old Road for a running track and while passing an imaginary reviewing stand gazed into the distance, a distance they merely feigned to see, and with their rolling shoulders and vigorous gait conjured up an élan that stemmed from the devil only knows what but definitely not from their style of locomotion, which seemed utterly fake and at most made one want to crawl on all fours in front of this type of walker or creep forward on one’s stomach. But then the opposite occurred with the walkers whom our host placed even higher than the peaceable and peacemaking walkers: he called them “the imagination-sparking walkers” and varied or corrected that moniker to “the inspiring” ones. Their characteristics? (the interrupter)—he did not want to mention any except perhaps that the inspiring walkers, Old Road be damned, moved along beneath the heavens, Kant’s starry ones as well as the starless ones; and he added that during that other night there, in some cases, the walker types had switched identities in midstep, like chimeras, so a peaceable walker might turn in an instant into a desperate one, a pseudoattractive one into a truly attractive one, an order-loving one into a dangerous one, and so forth.
Things were really hopping, or hopping in a different sense, on the Old Road in the hour after midnight—how should it be otherwise? Action! And what, specifically? Flight and pursuit. The country’s past returned, in scenes of war, in life-and-death situations. Some time ago the silence had become sinister. Soon blows would fall. And then, without warning, a little squad of partisans emerged from the underbrush along the road, soundlessly, and one felt no surprise, either at what had occurred or at what happened next. The partisans had several children with them, were leading them, hand on shoulder, and the children walked with their eyes closed, in their sleep. No one spoke. Get off the road—you’ve been betrayed! one wanted to shout, but could not get a word out. And in fact a moment later, at the next bend in the road, people jumped out of the ditch, with only swastikas and gun barrels visible, and, and? and? See above. And suddenly a church bell pealed, and after midnight at that. But just as suddenly a third group came into view, on a sort of reviewing stand, made of steel, new, and plainly not belonging to the Old Road: a camera could be seen there, the kind that can also film in the dark—the whole thing was a scene in a film, the action belonged to a film, bodies hurtling to the ground, blood spurting, eyes breaking, one child diving back into the underbrush, the sole survivor—who later, when he was grown old, would say, “We always walked at night. I gazed at the stars until I fell asleep. When a partisan’s child survives—the fear stays with him all his life. A child fears for his life much more than a grown-up. Only now do I know that. All I knew was fear. A life in fear, and in my fear I felt like a stone. I did everything possible not to be a stone anymore, to feel myself. But I was a stone—that was all there was to it. And something else stayed with me: that I never again trusted anyone enough to talk about my feelings, and not only those about the war. That stays with me.”
And look at that! Who was the director, who was making the film? Wasn’t it Filip Kobal, the writer from the neighboring village? Yes, it was, and he had also written the script, which he let the wanderer glance at, with a flashlight. Did he even recognize his old friend and onetime rival? Did Filip—who had gained weight and spread horizontally, he who had once been so gaunt—realize with whom he was speaking? Pointless questions—such things did not count during that night there on the Old Road, where everyone could speak with anyone, spontaneously, without needing to be introduced. And thus Kobal opened up to the other man, friend or not, without any preliminaries, during the brief interval before the next scene had to be set up, perhaps also out of tiredness. For a long time now he had been writing only film scripts, and because they were “hopelessly personal,” he filmed them as well, not without passion, and above all free from fear, in contrast to the days of his novel writing. He was also always elated to be working with others. In his eyes, literature had lost its luster, only for this era? forever? It no longer had anything to offer, not even the stars, for it had no glow for the glow of distant parts? And yet, and yet. Franz Kafka was not dead. Franz Grillparzer and Adalbert Stifter still lived, in our midst in the next room. Samarkand was no less legendary and real than before, had even moved closer, to this side of the border, if now it had shrunk to the size of a village, to the neighboring village beyond the neighboring village, and was located no longer on the Silk, Salt, Pepper, or some other road but not even half a day’s walk away on the Old Road here. And there was so much pleading in the world, silent pleading, in so many eyes, perhaps more than ever before. And so much sighing, to be heard by anyone who had ears to hear, embarrassed, wordless sighing, as never before. Only the bold ones, the inwardly cold ones, the shameless ones
survived? No, the shame had also survived, though in a form different from the one described of old. And the silently pleading ones and the wordlessly sighing ones demanded, yes, panted to be asked and likewise to receive an answer. They wanted to be preserved and written down, but not necessarily in images, and certainly not for television. And look, the child here, the children: in them is concentrated, far more purely than in us big folk, us grown-ups, the secret of the times, and this secret cannot be filmed. The secret of the times in the children? What did he mean by that? Without any external happening or action, and also without any outward sign on the little one there, on his little body, a single moment determined in him the entire future course of his life. A single moment, not anything lasting, decided what time would be for the child from then on, and also how this time would be for him. The one decisive moment struck the defenseless little body like a bolt of lightning, going straight to its core—unlike with me, the adult, who, on the contrary, has become more or less immune and would have to search for a long time to find anything resembling a core in myself—and the secret of it was that this lightning moment passes the child by seemingly without a trace. The one who caused the lightning, who lit and tossed the bolt, I, the adult, the father, the mother, saw the child continuing to play as he had been playing the moment before—if only he had at least paused or looked up at me—and did not notice, or noticed only long afterward, when it was already too late, that that one moment would remain branded onto him, irrevocably, hopelessly, for eighty, ninety, even a hundred years of time-sickness. But someone else was to write that story, or perhaps it had already been written, and not only one story?
Kobal was called for the next scene—the child lying among corpses as the sole survivor—and the nocturnal wanderer continued on his way, having been given a salami sandwich from the film crew’s field kitchen. He could now cancel his plan of visiting Filip Kobal in his Rinkendorf, close to the Old Road. And that was fine with him. It still did him good to be among his own kind—that was how he felt, strange, even now, when he was out of the game—but for as short a time as possible, just in passing. Once there had been three of them in this area he was passing through, who had—what was the expression?—made a name for themselves as writers. Ah, names. Oh dear, names. How comforting it was now to go through the night as a nobody, in a darkness that in this hour along some stretches on the Old Road veritably solidified into something material, a material so soft and cloudlike that one had the sensation of being lifted off the ground and becoming disembodied, without worrying about losing one’s way—hoisted under the armpits by the darkness and made to hover, at least without the earlier strain of walking and without the slightest resistance from the air. Names, oh, names. He had hardly been able to invent names and write them down—as if for him and his writing they were taboo. And yet there were certain names that had kickstarted him. Nebuchadnezzar. Maracaibo. Tatabánya. Kristiania. Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. Joseph Conrad. Joseph Cotten. Elio Vittorini. Galicia. Dolina. Gariusch. Fontamara. Providence. Lind. Dob. Himberg. Matthias Sindelar. The impetus for one of his first stories had come solely from such a name, the name of a murderer: Geronimo Benavente. Praised be names, in spite of everything!
He thought of Gregor Keuschnig, the third person from that region, together with Filip Kobal and himself. And then, not for the first time, someone whose name had just come to mind showed up in person within the hour. At any rate he saw the figure he encountered next during that night on the Old Road as that very Gregor Keuschnig from yet another neighboring village—their villages formed a crook-angled, very sharp triangle—who, rumor had it, had turned his back on his French host country and his no-man’s-bay to return to his native Rinkolach, whose only resident was now him. But the man standing at a bend in the road shining a flashlight (another one) into the woods, which, at the spot in question, was a pine forest, was not Gregor Keuschnig, although he resembled him so closely, especially in his posture, that the wanderer, who had stopped behind him, could not help seeing in the stranger his erstwhile friend and almost-relative. He contemplated, measured, and studied in a stranger one of those to whom he felt closest; recognized perhaps more clearly who that person was than if he had had him actually there, with all his idiosyncrasies and identifying features. And this was not the first time he had had such an experience.
The night was no longer so pitch-black, and the contours of “Gregor Keuschnig,” the stooped shoulders and the rather angular head, seen from the back, along with the “lost profile,” became increasingly distinct. The night wind already felt somewhat like a morning wind, wafting up from below, from the ground, changing directions. The man by the side of the Old Road seemed not to feel the gaze on his back. He had eyes only for the cone of his flashlight, which he moved pouce by pouce—so this old measurement unit still existed—over the litter of pine needles. At the same time he offered himself for viewing, as if intentionally, showing himself not to one person in particular but to his surroundings, the gaps between the tree trunks, between the leaves on the occasional bushes as the wind blew them apart, between the stinging nettles and the blackberry brambles. At his feet a basket, filled with what he had gathered during the night: dandelion greens, feathers, snakeskins, a mummified fire salamander, pieces of birch bark, white, with lines that made it look like natural writing paper, and—how could it be otherwise?—among the other odds and ends a goodly number, and numerous types, of mushrooms, spring morels, wood ears, dottles, arranged and exhibited as if to prove to the world that it was possible to gather fresh mushrooms all year round, and it was these he was after above all, these he was hunting for—which showed that the rumors about him were true—these days even at night.
So who, as what kind of a person, did this “Keuschnig” reveal himself to be? Engrossed in studying his contours, the nocturnal wanderer gradually formed an image, no, not just one, but rather one image after another, more and more visual atoms in succession, which yielded a story, though not the kind focused on “what happened up to now” from the past of this “Gregor”—but one that began effortlessly in the present, now, in the course of his being observed, and flowed equally unobtrusively into the future, into “what would come later.” It was a pessimistic story, without malice aforethought: it took shape all by itself behind the observer’s forehead. A poignant story. And here are a few atoms or elements from that story: gathering mushrooms was not the escape Gregor Keuschnig hoped for. Neither was returning to the area around his native village. Driven out of the no-man’s-bay by the noise, sooner or later he inevitably found it catching up with him on his home turf. After half a day, the silence under his grandfather’s linden tree was already gone. He needed earplugs to block out the night wind, even here along the Old Road, as well as the music of the wind in the trees, the flute, cello, viola, and saxophone notes that sounded when the trunks, thick ones, thin ones, rubbed against each other, now below, now up above. The noise was there, all over the world, unceasing. That which seemed ugly, those who seemed ugly, could be thought of as beautiful, or reconceptualized, if one animated them by writing about them, but not in the presence of noise. The noise he had in mind could not be thought of as beautiful. (This Gregor Keuschnig could have delivered the keynote speech at the world symposium on noise…) And his escape, his return to a gatherer’s existence, would not turn things around. On the contrary: as a gatherer he would lose the rest of his soul. More and more the world around him would narrow, and, with his greed to gather, eventually disappear, and he would be so caught up in gathering that he would become incapable of thought, let alone more elevated thought. What would not disappear would be the noise, until one day the final metamorphosis of Gregor Keuschnig would take place: he would run amok from sheer defenselessness. Armed hunters, defenseless gatherers.
To be sure, our host told us during the Moravian night, it was important to add that at the end of his fantasy generated by the contours of this “Gregor Keuschnig” during the night on the Old Road, t
he person in question turned toward him, his smile revealing that he had been aware all along, gathering or not, not merely of his surroundings but also of the gaze on his back. Viewed from the front, the stranger in no way resembled the Keuschnig the wanderer knew. What appeared in that hour between night and day was a human face, wide awake, calm, open. And at that sight, the thought, again, that nothing could be better. It went without saying that—for a price—some of the booty gathered during the night changed owners; he would not arrive at his brother’s empty-handed. Defenseless gaze of the gatherer? On the contrary: armed? Ah, the disappearance of prejudices.
In classic on-the-road stories, the account of yet another adventure would be followed immediately by the sentence, refrain-like, describing how they, the heroes or some others, rode on for a while, across La Mancha, the steppe, or the prairie, “without encountering anything worth mentioning.” As he now resumed walking along the Old Road, or what was left of it, heading into the morning, toward the sunrise, for a while nothing more happened, and perhaps for this very reason various things happened that did seem worth mentioning, at least to him. One after the other, his forebears came toward him in the early light, reached him, went by him. He encountered some he knew only by hearsay, mostly from stories told him by his mother. One member of the family who had emigrated to America, almost a century and a half ago, and had disappeared there, trundled past with his possessions, a few bundles knotted together, in a one-wheeled barrow called a carriola, and spat out a wad of brown chewing tobacco, his pale blue eyes open wide, unblinking. Then his grandfather, still young, came along, pulling a small ladder wagon behind him in which his mother’s older brother was sitting, as a child, one eye covered by a blood-soaked bandage, father and son on the way to the city to see a doctor, who would say they had come too late. Where the bridge over a brook was destroyed, with only one wooden girder left, on which one had to balance to get across, the young man, one-eyed yet able-bodied, as they classified him, was marching off to war, weeping with rage, and later his mother’s younger brother caught up with the wanderer, a duffel bag on his back, he having run away the previous evening from the municipal boarding school for future priests, and as day was breaking the boy approached the family farm with nothing in mind but never again to leave home (he, too, soon to be declared fit for service—may the soil of the tundra weigh lightly on you!). On this stretch of road all his absent relatives could be felt; where there was nothing, where nothing else was happening, they formed a procession, no matter in what direction they were going; they wafted toward him, wafted over the wanderer, wafted through him, not just one of them gone forever—all of them gone. Only his mother did not make an appearance. And that was fine with him. True, with the passage of time he had rid himself of his fundamental sense of guilt toward everything and everyone; he owed this reprieve in part to the fact that the primary source of his guilt, writing, or even the mere compulsion to write, no longer existed. But toward his mother he still felt guilty. He thought he had failed her, telling himself that he was already too caught up in a “life of his own,” or he had stayed away while she, clinging to her pride in her loneliness, died by slow degrees. Without his apparent assent to what was happening to her, he thought, the woman could still be alive today, even displaying her characteristic cheerfulness, not at all motherly, flicking the ash off her cigarette, taking his arm (which nowadays he would tolerate), tossing her head over nothing at all. And instead she lived only in his dreams, in which time and again death was imminent; in which she lay dying, over and over. If only he could have at last shaken off this final remnant of his fundamental guilty conscience, or could at least blame it on original sin or something.