by Peter Handke
The next monster in the story turned out to be the storyteller himself. Before he got to that subject, he asked us, his audience on the boat that night, whether we had noticed that as he continued narrating his experiences from the journey he had been addressing the woman less and less often as he continued. That his “Listen, I saw…” or “Just imagine, two lizards were mating in the spring sun…” had recently ceased altogether. Just as he was asking us these questions, we could see, through the bull’s-eye window in the galley door, the woman, the stranger, jump off her kitchen stool and throw open the door. She hurtled into the salon and out the other door onto the deck, where her silhouette could barely be made out way back in the stern. It was unmistakable, however, that as the boatmaster resumed his story her back did not stop shaking. Was she crying? Was she laughing? Or was she just shivering out there in the night on the river? And before her man—if that was what he was—continued, he hemmed and hawed for a long time, shaking his head, as if at himself, biting not only his lips but also the back of his hand (one of us cried out in pain for him), and striking his skull with his fist, so hard that he swayed to one side.
During their period of separation it had become clear to him that he had been mistaken about himself. His notion that all his previous failures with women could be ascribed to his profession, which demanded exclusive attention, had been wrong. He had fooled himself into believing that if he gave up his life as a writer he would perhaps be free at long last to commit himself wholly and lastingly to the being who his dreams had always promised would be the one who … He still considered these dreams truthful. But they applied to everyone else, not to him. With or without his profession, he was meant to be alone. This was not his calling; it was almost a sickness: he had fallen victim to being alone. When had that happened? He could not say, at some point, certainly long before he became a writer, perhaps in his childhood already, when he ran away from his grandfather’s house, from the family, from the village, crossing the steep meadow to the edge of the pine forest, to sit there alone, to listen to the trees’ rustling, alone. And how had he come to recognize during his journey that he belonged to the species of those who are by nature unalterably, incorrigibly, hopelessly alone, the aloneness-idiots, aloneness-lunatics, independently of his writing, which, he had thought, had prevented him from realizing his dreams—from “living,” others would have said—by demanding all of him? He had recognized how things stood when in her absence the woman, who unlike any woman before her corresponded to his dreams and the intimacy they portrayed, man-woman intimacy, had come more and more to seem a threat. A threat to what? A threat to his being alone, to his experiencing things alone, altogether to a way of experiencing things that with her at his side would become impossible. Increasingly from station to station, merely imagining that she was there with him, or he with her, would cause all perceiving or experiencing to break off, and so long as he could imagine her gaze resting on him, he would merely go through the motions, perceiving and experiencing himself as his own marionette. He almost saw the distant woman as his antagonist, as, to quote him, his “interferer,” almost. And so he turned, in the moments of experiencing something, away from her, abruptly, instead of toward her as he had done at first, constantly.
He saw the woman as his enemy in the very second when they met again after the long separation. This occurred at the end of the Old Road, at the entrance to the town there beyond the rise. The plan had been for them to travel the last stretch to his birth village together. That the danger he constantly sniffed out could equally well originate with him would prove to be true there. For quite some time he had thought of the woman with mistrust. His suspicion had been reinforced by the encounter with the person he was calling Melchior, who had appeared at first sight to be the soul of likability and human kindness, but then—see above. However that might be, when he then saw the woman for whom he had been longing all this time waiting for him, still at a distance, at the intersection they had agreed upon, a bolt of lightning flashed through the wanderer, blinding and at the same time clear: she, who presented herself as his beloved, was in reality the woman who had been persecuting him for years, the one who fought him, the writer, even now that he was a former writer, beyond all reason, eventually not even refraining from dishonoring his deceased mother, imputing things to her that would not have occurred to one of Shakespeare’s witches, the woman he had sworn to see killed for that, if not by his own hands then by a—what was the expression?—hit man, anything not to touch her himself! And now he had touched her, in a way so different from what he had imagined. She had ambushed him, there by the clearing under the eucalyptus trees, and he had fallen into her trap, the trap of that most evil of witches—there were also good witches, angelic ones!
Should he turn on his heel? And already he was running toward her. At certain moments in his life he had seen himself from the outside, as if he were watching a film in which he was also acting. That was what happened now. With his pack on his back bouncing with every step and producing a rhythmic rustling, pounding, rattling music. Although he had eyes for nothing but the woman at the crossroads, he leaped over every puddle and skirted the boulders that marked the beginning and end of the Old Road and prevented the vehicles on the New Road from turning onto it. Thus his running—he saw himself from above—looked playful, high-spirited, and as he ran he was also picturing a film with the title “The Gentle Run,” and he was also silently humming along with the music of his pack and of his footsteps crunching on the gravel. But primarily he was intent on striking a blow, and, if it came to that, why not, a death blow, and what was going on inside him at the same time, the remembering, the silent singing, did not clash with that intention, it was in harmony with it, was even clarified from one step to the next by the mounting impulse to violence in the core of his body, his consciousness. And she? She understood his running, and above all the way he ran toward her as his way of greeting her. In a moment they would have each other back, and this time for good, and no words would be needed between them, not now, at least, and then not for a long time, perhaps never again. A word, whatever it might be, even the tenderest, would shatter the morning dream, which, as long as they both just gazed in silence, meant more than any other reality, would destroy it. But then the runner spoke, his voice becoming louder, shouting, in a way completely at odds with his running. And what did he shout? “I know who you are. I’ve seen through you. Get away, you she-devil. Go to hell.”
She responded with a smile, thinking he was speaking in jest and that his words actually meant the opposite. But already he had hurled himself at her and struck her, just once—just?—so hard that she fell to the ground, into the tall grass around a tumbledown milk stand at the intersection of the Old Road with the New Road, and did not move. Hadn’t anyone witnessed the act of violence? Wasn’t there a lot of traffic on the New Road? It had happened so abruptly, so fast, and the woman had disappeared into the grass so fast, all of it so unbelievable that no driver, including those who might have been startled for a moment, believed it had really happened. There were no eyewitnesses. Or rather there was one, and that was him, the perpetrator. And what did he see? (As he told us about it during the night on the boat, he held his hands over his face, no, had already done so when he mentioned the blow.) He saw himself at the moment of the blow, and this moment would continue to pop up in him at least once a day for the rest of his life, and no amount of sharing the story would heal or absolve him. He saw his own face as he struck, and it was not as dehumanized as it perhaps should have been, it was the face of an avenger, of one who had lived year after year in anticipation of the moment of revenge, calm and handsome, the face of a hero in a film, if not exactly that of Gary Cooper or Marlon Brando, but of one suitable for him, his true face, undistorted. And the woman? Out of sight. Vanished. And besides, after the blow he had continued on his way without stopping, away from the Old Road and the scene of the crime by the milk stand on the side of the highway, heading t
oward the town beyond the rise, briskly but without running, and without looking back. He had done the right thing. Victory!
9
IF HE HAD known the place at one time, he did not recognize it on this particular day. He did not recognize anything for a whole long hour, although this had to be his native region, very close to the village where he had been born and spent his childhood, over the next rise, or perhaps not after all? The sky-high mountain chain on the southern horizon, craggy limestone, should have been the Karavanka range, behind which his Balkans began—but it was a different range, an unfamiliar one that seemed to have been moved there from somewhere else entirely, and he had the same impression of the rounded ridge to the north, it, too, almost sky-high: it was not the Sau Alp familiar to him from childhood, with veins of iron, a great crouching animal of granite and mica that attracted lightning. And the river below, hardly visible as it flowed along in its trough, was not the Drau, but also not the Ebro in Spain or the Silver Bow Creek in Montana. This river was as unrecognizable as the mountains, coming from an unknown direction and flowing in an unknown direction; impossible to locate it and this entire landscape, and foreign, so foreign, the village when he reached it. Where am I? Good heavens, where am I? The only halfway graspable feature of the village was the name Filip Kobal had used for it the previous night: Samarkand—although that was not its name, but rather? Nowhere a sign, and if there was one, smeared over, blackened, the letters riddled with bullet holes, illegible.
Samarkand? For an entire hour nothing homelike revealed itself to him, not in the dwellings and especially not in the inhabitants. On earlier visits he had seen only familiar faces, even if he was not personally acquainted with them individually: he saw features passed down from great-grandparents to great-grandchildren, the same features appearing through the generations. These features, as well as the traditional dress, including chamois-horn buttons, the groups of hikers with ski poles, the mud-spattered backs of mountain bikers with piercing voices and screeching brakes, the black cassock of the local priest, the old wheelbarrows planted with pansies in the front gardens, the local dialect—all these he could have done without, not necessarily with heavy heart. But this village seemed to be inhabited by people of all human races except the one native to the region, so to speak. And the majority were—well, see “Samarkand”—people who were, as would have been said at one time, “from the Orient.” They were alien to him not because of their dress and appearance but because they were strangers to themselves in the region. True, the houses, almost all of recent construction, could have been found anywhere. But the network of streets and alleys still typical of that country was thronged with numerous residents who apparently had not been settled there long and appeared out of place in an almost ghostlike fashion, and not only at first glance, also ghostly for the town, with its relatively few quarters, by virtue of their numbers. The Arabic signs on the shops—those in Roman script, here and there, were in the minority—the minaret and the women in head scarves, whom he at first mistook for nuns from the nearby monastery, also the few in veils, were not the decisive features, more an accompanying phenomenon.
Where was he? Good heavens, where was he? Upside down, that was how unfamiliar the presumed landscape of his childhood appeared, and he felt as though the next time he attempted to get his bearings his insides would be pushed to the outside and he would become part of the chaos that was closing in on him from all sides, wherever he looked. He wanted to move on, get away from there, get home to his village. But no matter in what direction he turned: the way was blocked. No entrance. Could he have used his guardian angel now? Too late. Earlier, before he entered this “Samarkand,” the angel could have helped, as a warning angel. And though he kept looking behind him for the woman he had struck, he could not catch sight of her, but he felt her behind him, now pursuing him in earnest. Where was she? Where was he? And who was he? No longer a wanderer—he was being pursued, hunted, by himself as well. Not even the dew, deposited during the night on the saplings that had obviously been recently planted along the streets and now spraying off the leaves like a blessing, creating a wreath of sparkling rays in all colors of the rainbow, gave him refuge or waved him on.
Day had long since arrived, and a bat zigzagged across his field of vision, teasing him. Or had it been a swallow, announcing a thunderstorm by swooping close to the ground in the sudden burst of mugginess? No, the swallows were flying around as if nothing were wrong, very high in the air, while already it was thundering and lightning: the swallows were teasing him, too. A camel ambled past, belonging to a traveling circus? No. But probably the lion did, which he heard growl just once? Or had that been a person, behind one of the closed window shutters? A cat jumped up on him, and, believe it or not, the cat crowed. A viper whipped across the road, actually a dead branch. A brake squealed, and he leaped to one side, but it was his shoes squealing. Likewise the hail of stones that made him duck came from the stones he had collected during his journey, jostling one another in his coat pocket. By a grassy patch he bent down to pick up a copper coin, which turned out to be a dewdrop, glittering bronze or copper-colored. Next he took a single red flower petal on a sidewalk for a shred of plastic and wanted to toss it into a trash can, likewise a longish, rough rock he mistook for a broken mobile telephone someone had dropped, and when he picked up a metal pin it turned out to be a fat earthworm. In general, things he thought would be hard turned out to be soft to the touch, and vice versa, which was comparatively reassuring; things he had seen as fluid turned out to be solid when he touched them, in contrast to things he thought were firm and dry, which turned out to be disgustingly moist.
Never had he passed through a less familiar place, with less familiar people, than here in the region from which he came. Was he passing through? He wandered around, not even in a circle, which would also have been comparatively reassuring. During the hour of his wandering around, he never came upon anything he had seen before. The traffic mirror that reflected the landscape around the bend was followed by one that seemed identical but this time reflected his image as he roamed aimlessly, making him recoil, and not just one step, as if before a stranger threatening to strike him dead. Even things that seemed unquestionable filled him with uncertainty, doing little to mitigate his vertigo, his sense of not knowing what was going on. In a parking lot, a perfectly ordinary parking lot, someone was sitting on a stool behind his car and playing a tuba, one prolonged note, which echoed off the walls all around like an alphorn. Another person was sitting on a bench by the road that looked as though it had been left over from an earlier era and was painted with a half-weathered edelweiss emblem. He was reading the Koran, his back held very straight, or maybe something by Ibn ʿArabi, probably a treatise on M, W, and N, the secret spiritual and ontological meanings of the letters of the Arabic alphabet. He was wearing only an undershirt, which revealed his naked arms and shoulders, completely covered with tattoos, none of which represented the sacred letters, however, and that, too, like the tuba player, was no hallucination, any more than the third person he saw standing in front of a closed door, as large as that of a former barn, and pleading with someone, or rather no one, behind it, then cursing, then falling silent and getting ready to move on, then turning back and resuming his pleas, which gave way to curses, then to silence, and leaving anew, then promptly turning back again and screaming and waving his fist at the barn door, and so on, and likewise it was indubitable that one of the resettled or refugee residents, in the midst of the crowd, which paid him no mind, was trying, with a rug spread before him, to pray, gazing into the distance, which did not necessarily indicate the direction of the Ka’aba in Mecca but more likely the hinterland behind all other hinterlands, and he was failing in his attempt, no matter how tightly he balled up his entire body, not just his clenched fists, failing each time he was about to merge with or disappear into the one god, a failure that each time brought the bitterest tears to his coal- or kohl-black eyes, and when one watched hi
m, one knew that sooner or later, this man, missing his goal time after time in his fervent praying, would pull out a submachine gun or, no, more likely a scimitar, and fall upon the disrespectfully indifferent crowd. And the one who was taking all this in? He would be the first victim, calling attention to himself not only by his gaze: as in some nightmares, no, nightmarish moments, he had the sense he was moving in broad daylight, filled with shame as otherwise only in a dream, barefoot through the huge crowd, or perhaps almost naked, wearing only a skimpy T-shirt that was not long enough to hide his nakedness, no matter how hard he tugged at it.
At last another grassy patch, and there he crouched down. And finally something appeared there that he could recognize. He saw a familiar form covered by the grass: a triangle. From where did he know the triangle, this particular one? And—quivering moment—now he knew: the grassy triangle, surrounded by sheds, barracks, sandy stretches, marked the place where the road branched off from the Old Road to the Old Village, his Old Village, marked its threshold; the two branches, equal ones, formed the merges on the left and the right onto what had formerly been the artery, long since built up and incorporated into the village. And the village itself was his village, in the meantime sprawling far past its original limits. Without his becoming aware of it, he had reached his journey’s main destination. With the grassy triangle, greening as it always had, on which he was squatting, began the original territory (was that the term?) of the village where he had been born. The wanderer now had only to continue straight in the direction in which the triangle’s apex pointed. The road to the village center still existed, now a tarred alley with apartment buildings, stores, also a bank with a sign saying WESTERN UNION instead of the orchards where pigs had grunted and turkeys had gobbled. And he walked along, slightly uphill as in the old days, looking back again and again, but no longer checking for a woman in pursuit. A dog ran toward him, the one from Porodin? his brother’s? No, the mutt did not recognize him, or did not want to recognize him; instead of licking his hands and face, it growled, backing away step by step into the village, or what remained of it. Samarkand, the would-be homecomer realized, had the same vowels as Stara Vas, the village’s name, and just the same number of them: a-a-a. So perhaps it was possible to go home again after all?