by Peter Handke
As time passed, the racket from the new settlers’ district on the outskirts receded, or did he merely imagine that? At any rate, the closer he came to the former village center, the more dense the silence seemed. Aside from him there was no one on the path he had once taken to get home, transformed into an alley almost urban in character. Hardly a tree was left, and nonetheless he heard a rustling, as if high in the air. Suddenly a large limb broke off and came crashing to the ground near him; it missed killing him by a hair. And after another bend, it, too, familiar, the alley turned back into a road. It was laid with wooden planks, slightly elevated above the ground, with a hollow space underneath, and the sound they made as one walked on them was like a ship. And again he was probably imagining that he had already seen this boardwalk, from the plane. Had his gaze been so intently focused on the village that he had not even registered all these new features? And along the road he then discovered other traces of the old village. Of one house all that remained, if anything, was a blank window, perhaps merely painted to look like a real window, complete with crossbar, and in the window a painted geranium, carmine-red, and next to it the upper body of a child leaning on the painted sill, welcoming him with large, pale blue eyes? or rather fixing him with a Medusa-like stare, which, like the dog’s intermittent growling, was supposed to force him to back off or leave altogether. And the ladder leaning against another house, which at first also seemed painted on, then turned out to be real and seemed familiar. He climbed up a few rungs: yes, it was the one he remembered. One plank, much longer and also broader than the others: left over from the bowling alley? Yes, it was. And in a ground-floor window a real carmine-red geranium, and behind it, her head and toothless jaw wobbling, the face of an ancient crone he did not recognize, although she apparently recognized him. Glowering at him over the leaves of the potted plant, she cursed him, without words, simply with her eyes.
There it was at last, the cemetery, with the church next to it. At one time both had been freestanding, but so much building had taken place around them that one had to be almost on top of the gate to be halfway sure of being in the right place. But was this really the graveyard? The voice of the muezzin calling to morning prayers was so close that it seemed to ring out from the old church tower. Or was that merely the echo, greatly amplified by the new buildings tightly packed in on the edge of town that bounced the sound from the minaret from one angle to the next? This was the cemetery after all, and this was the old gate leading to it and the church, with the stone bench built sideways into the gateway, and on it the weathered, indestructible wooden plank—ah, how wood guided him from place to place, wood upon wood—and the still mysterious dip in the plank, a narrow spot, just large enough to accommodate a child’s backside, where a child could be enthroned now and forever. Yes, this was the cemetery where his ancestors lay buried, and this was the proper gate leading into it, and if the gate, as an effect of the muezzin’s voice from the mosque in the new district, for the moment received an Oriental name, wafted there, so to speak, from Samarkand, namely Bab el Mandeb, or Gate of Mourning, this effect strengthened the sense of being in the right place, the consciousness and the certainty that that was really true here.
How many things, to be sure, seemed to want to prevent him from entering, not to mention the in-house dog and the death-wish gaze of the old woman, whose last day on earth this one almost surely was. How many things assailed him physically as he stepped through the Bab el Mandeb: a butterfly that jostled him from the side with an unexpectedly hard body, a dragonfly whose knife-sharp wings scratched his cheek, a hummingbird, or was it a wren, in Samarkandian a minmina, that beat its wings around his ears? to say nothing of the swarms of black flies, not necessarily from the Orient, that zoomed from all sides at his eyes, heading directly toward them. Even the harmless bumblebees, which really ought to have been grateful for his taking such sympathetic notice of them earlier, surrounded him on left and right with buzzing so loud that as its volume increased he was reminded of the droning of hornets? no, of something else, something seriously threatening. No, of the threat itself.
So was everything ganging up on him? Did every object and every being oppose his entrance into the place he sometimes in his own mind called his “center,” at other times his “sanctuary”? Did nothing welcome him, provide an escort? Even the gate’s threshold, paved with round river rocks pounded into the ground, had tried to block his way by making him slip on their smooth humps, damp from dew. A wind gust came along, and a clump of shoulder-high stinging nettles by the gate whipped him in the face. His gaze sought out the trusty three kings of the Orient sculpted in stone in the arch above the portal of the thousand-year-old church: Hello, old boys, here I am again, here we are again!—and the round-heads’ response? An unmistakable triple turning up of noses (odd, given the flatness of those noses), a gazing past him, a refusing to recognize him, not only from Melchior in the middle, who turned into his adversary from the Old Road, but also from Caspar and Balthasar flanking him, and the gold, frankincense, and myrrh in their hands turned into rotten apples. There, in the nook in the high, thick wall built to keep out the Turks—they, too, from the Orient?—was the bumped-out sexton’s house, whose darkened wood and light-colored window frames had always exemplified coziness; but on the sills of the grimy and in some cases broken windows, instead of flowerpots there perched doves and more doves, all of them looking mangy, an indication that the place had been uninhabited and abandoned for years. And as abruptly as the wind gust earlier, after the homecomer’s first steps into the cemetery grounds, the earth under his feet quaked for a moment, during which the sparrows present everywhere scuttled back and forth before him like rats, and the gaps, otherwise outlines of a still possible and different world, took on the form of pursuers closing in on him.
When the ground shook, he almost fell down flat. But he stopped the fall, quivering in the aftermath. At the same time, as was usual after a near fall, he saw everything around him more distinctly, each detail as if enhanced by a postfright magnifying glass. And through this glass, between the blades of the cemetery’s grass, a very strange migration came into view. He saw tiny frogs, not much bigger than ants, making their way along. A short while ago they had been swarming, still black, slippery tadpoles, in the village pond that bordered the cemetery, actually more like a large puddle, and overnight they had metamorphosed into fingernail-sized pale gray frogs, each with the most delicate four legs in place of its tail. Four legs? More like a pair of legs and a pair of arms, which made the animals resemble tiny humans, also in the form of their heads. The impression that one little human after another seemed to be moving through the grass was reinforced by the way they did not follow close on each other’s heels like ants in a procession; instead each made its way alone, at a slight distance from the others, yet taken all together they constituted a people on the move. They lumbered and wobbled awkwardly along, zigging and zagging, out of order, sometimes veering to the side; crawling, groping, scouting their way forward, away from the water in which they had been born and toward the forest, where, if there was any forest left, they would live for the time being and mature. Again and again they stopped in their tracks, as if exhausted, and finally dragged themselves onward, their arms pulling the rest of their bodies along, which gave them the appearance, although they were moving on a flat surface, of mountain-climbers extending one tiny arm after the other. Thus each one reminded the viewer not merely of a human being but of the very essence of a human being, and if this impression stemmed from the gaze through a magnifying glass, it was through one that magnified and reduced the image to the same degree, and to the degree that here and now, on this particular morning in this particular place, it had this effect, at the same time reaching retroactively into the night of time, and illuminating it for the moment. A new rapture was occurring, yet another, that constituted a form of repair. Even if the procession of protohumans in the grass was headed in an entirely different direction, he allowed it
to lead him, and at last he reached, without encountering further obstacles, the grave site that had been his destination. Day of the first brimstone butterfly. Day of the falcons’ cries. Day of the bumblebees freezing in the cold wind. And now the day of the miniature-frog migration.
The rapture, and the peace it brought, did not last. “Why, oh why?” the storyteller on the nocturnal boat burst out, while the woman, the stranger, now dashed from the prow, where her presence had hardly been detectable, to the stern, taking herself completely out of our line of sight, as if what came next in the story should be crossed out, as it were, or blotted out. The hour of insanity that had seized hold of the wanderer upon being reunited, at the spot where the Old Road met the New Road, with the woman intended for him was apparently not yet past. One indication was that he remained silent as he stood before the grave of his ancestors, just as they, the ancestors beneath, above, and behind or around the gravestone, did not speak a single word to him. On earlier visits there had usually been a lively exchange between them, lively and silent, as silent as lively. A round dance consisting of statements and replies, replies and statements, lipless but all the more impassioned, had occurred, and in the worst case he had at least greeted them, and they had responded to his greeting. In this hour, however, he did not manage so much as an inner greeting, although he acted as though he were formulating one and bowed his head. Instead he was thinking that it was high time he cleaned his hiking boots, muddy from the nightlong tramp, that he needed to find a cash machine as soon as possible, that after the meeting of the noise victims and that of the jew’s-harp players and before his return to the Morava—“Ah, if only I were there already”—a third meeting was scheduled, that … All he registered of the grave was the faded inscription, with one or two letters missing and whole names blocked by the beech sapling that had shot up in front. And he was distracted by every trivial thing: by the sound of a water spigot squirting in one corner of the cemetery, by a contrail in the sky, by a molehill. Finally, by his mother’s grave, he ate a few blackberries he had picked earlier.
The old woman who had emerged from the sexton’s house, as if out of the massive defensive wall itself—so the house was not abandoned after all?—then undertook a not-at-all-trivial task. She had with her a cauldron-sized pail, apparently filled to the brim with water. This she hauled with both hands back and forth along the rows of graves. And in front of each she put it down, and with the help of a spray of beech leaves she sprinkled the grave, likewise the ones that had been cleared out and the spaces between the grave sites. The same thing happened with the plaques for suicides in one corner of the cemetery, where the ground was not consecrated. Soon she could carry the pail with one hand. And when she paused at the grave of his ancestors and sprinkled the holy water over it, she greeted him as the neighborhood child who, on his way home from school, had come into her house almost every day—like all the houses in the village, it was never locked—while she was out working in the fields with the other villagers, and in the front room had read everything he could lay his hands on, the newspaper, the farmers’ almanac, the Holy Bible, paperback Westerns, and whenever they returned from the fields or elsewhere, he would be sitting at the table in the front room, so lost in his reading, whatever it might be, that he did not so much as look up when they came in, let alone wish them a good day.
He did not recognize her, any more than he had recognized a soul in his childhood home up to this point (and had also not been recognized by anyone), as if such nonrecognizing were part of his hour of insanity. As a distraction, a diversion, the wanderer overcome by insanity brought the conversation around to what the former neighbor, now transformed into a sexton, was doing in front of the graves. Her sprinkling would not have been necessary. As if of her own accord, while she was already bestowing consecrated water on the next grave, she explained: the dead needed this, expected it, were veritably panting for the few drops, indeed daily, and she made her rounds daily, directed to do so not by the village priest, certainly not by him, but by the dead themselves.
Once she had disappeared back into the house in the wall, he thought he had been freed of the insanity. Insane: at the moment of his outburst at the end of the Old Road, part of him had clearly understood that the violence the other part of him was perpetrating was an act of insanity: the woman he was stomping on there was absolutely not the one he thought he saw. It was not the woman who had been pursuing him all his life but rather the love of his life. But the other part of him remained all the more blind in the face of this certainty, all the more insane, and he lashed out all the more mindlessly. And now, in the cemetery, alone? What had the old neighbor just said about the dead and the daily water? They “panted” for it. And in the same fashion he now panted for her, the love of his life. He thirsted for her, was starving for her. Outwardly motionless, silently engrossed, he was consumed with longing for her. He veritably begged, in silence: “Come. Come back. Come back to me.” And, as once upon a time, one neighborhood child would say to another: “Let’s be friends again.”
As he turned around, there she stood, smiling, to all appearances unscathed, as if nothing had happened. For a moment he smiled back. But then: the insanity surged through him again. Or wasn’t it real after all that at her side, also smiling, was the evil one, the pseudofriend Melchior from the Old Road, his mortal enemy, and not only his? It was the very one. And she was in cahoots with that Old Nick. Two devils were standing there, a devilish pair lying in wait for him. And again: part of him threw itself into her arms and remained forehead to forehead with her, once and for all. And the other part, which he clearly recognized at the same time as by no means part “of him,” did the exact opposite and resorted to violence again. And how? The former writer had forgotten to tell us how, during the night on the Old Road, he had cut a hazel branch and sharpened one end to a point, for walking and perhaps also for self-defense. Now he hurled this stick, the sharpened end pointing away from him, as a spear at the satanic pair. Nonetheless: he was aiming not at his love but at her evil twin, whom he of course struck directly in his artificial heart, whereupon the specter pierced by the hazel stick dissolved as intended with a bang into thin air.
But she, too, when he finally opened his eyes after hurling the spear, had disappeared, through the door in the wall into the area behind the village cemetery. Her response to his spear-toss nothing but a wail, which still rang in his ears as he described it during that night on the Morava, as if she were the one after all whom he had struck in the heart—a sound so piteous and at the same time so gentle, between weeping and coughing, that it would have brought anyone to his senses, except him in his hour of insanity. And at the same time a thought, a single one, in the form of a question: “Who will save us?” And as he described the scene to us, we heard this question repeated in the voice of the woman, the invisible stranger, now at the bow, but no lament, no pleading tone accompanied the question, or if it did, then only as we reflected on it later.
Like her, he made his way out through the door in the wall at the back of the cemetery. But he did not follow her. Much time was to pass after her disappearance. Just a short while ago it had been morning, and now the bell of the church in the Old Village was tolling for vespers, with evening around the corner. And in between, very far off, the muezzin of New Samarkand had summoned the faithful, the muminin, to five o’clock prayers. Had the wanderer fallen asleep on his feet in front of the ancestral grave? The vesper bell tolled as he had never heard it before: each time two notes, first high, then low, a diminished fifth apart, an interval that was actually proscribed, that was how mournful and inconsolable it sounded, beyond the familiar clanging for someone who had just died, not a death knell but a tone of general mourning and inconsolability, the two-tone sound more penetrating because of the unaccustomed interval of silence between the ding and the dong, in which the inconsolability intensified. This bell had usually reverberated across the landscape, far and wide, all the way to the horizons. Bu
t on this late afternoon its two notes remained each time confined within the circular patterns of the stone latticework high up in the church’s façade: they no longer let anything through, screening the sound in rather than sending it forth.
Was it a rule that after an action like the mighty hurling of the lance, which really should have thrown him off course and could have made events take an entirely different turn or made the story break off altogether, instead plans and projects perhaps worked out long before were now implemented with all the more determination, also more attention to detail, as if nothing at all had happened? At any rate, as if following such a rule, he made his way to the door in the wall and out into the fields behind the cemetery, heading toward the orchard there, it, too, enclosed by a wall. The fields seemed unchanged at first, except for an irrigation pipe cutting diagonally across them. But no, it was a pipeline, and the fields lay fallow, the patches of green on the bare earth actually more rust-colored. Climbing over the orchard wall had also been part of his plan, and accordingly that was accomplished, in no time flat, without the need, as in childhood, for a young partner in crime to give one a leg up. Crime was the right word, for the orchard in those days was forbidden territory, and the children scaled the wall specifically for the purpose of swiping fruit. From early on and to this day he had disliked thieves, except fruit or orchard thieves. All his life he had been a fruit thief, and freely admitted it. Stealing fruit was part of his self-image, far more so than wandering or writing. As a child he had already known when the first fruit on every tree in the area would ripen, and … he had called his first book The Pear Thieves. And to this day he could not pass someone else’s orchard without at least making an attempt, even if only in his thoughts, to nab some fruit. The fence or wall around the fruit trees, whose crowns beckoned invitingly to him, had to be scaled, called out to be scaled, admitting him to the forbidden realm, to the heart of the real. And no matter how much of a hurry he was in, nothing, however urgent, would deter him from making this crucial detour.