by Peter Handke
So now over the wall, just as long ago—mission accomplished. But where were they, the apple, pear, and plum trees? A wild forest had sprung up, one without fruit trees. Here and there amid the underbrush some were still standing, but they had been dead a long time. He came upon one living apple tree as he forced his way through the thicket, and it was in bloom, with white blossoms, and at the same time was already bearing some apples, little ones that would never get any bigger: it had reverted to being a wild apple tree. And it was dark in this forest that had returned, dark as night. And wasn’t it actually night already? Single lights could be seen, flickering through the tangle of brush and vines, which came—was it possible?—from tents, yes, tents, and a few voices could be heard, isolated and scattered, like the lanterns and the tents, actually all shelters made of plastic, some of it tattered; they were occupied by the homeless, who did not even have dogs. Yet in some places a doormat lay in front of a shelter; or what looked like a genuine kilim, strawberry red, peeped out from under a sheet of ragged plastic; or a beeping could be heard, as if from a battery-operated computer; or a flowered porcelain bowl stood on a tent’s proper threshold, crafted out of pieces of bark and ceramic, and the bowl was filled to the brim with shimmering reddish-black Chinese morels that had been peeled off dead elderberry branches, not from China but from the surrounding area, mushrooms that the long-standing residents of the Old Village had called wood ears, while those in the bowl were labeled with their Asian name, “Mu-Leh,” perhaps to be sold to the other homeless people. And farther on by a few steps—also leaps over, scrambles up, slips through, head- or feetfirst crawls—he came in the near-darkness upon an actual Asian. He had encountered the other inhabitants of the forest only with his ears, hearing them talking from time to time behind the mostly blue sheets of plastic, talking to themselves. The Asian, the Mongolian, was the only one to show himself, and indeed as one without any roof over his head, not even one made of sticks. He sat there, clearly alone, in the wilderness in a hollow that the wanderer recognized as the crater from a bomb that had landed in the former orchard, his head and bare torso erect and motionless, his face in profile, as perhaps only someone from Asia could hold it, so absent, ghostly, out of this world and almost in the beyond, and at the same time entirely present and drawing a circle around himself merely by the way he sat in the hollow, a throne circle, as it were. No, this person could not be described as homeless. This was beyond all homelessness. A hermit of the hollow. Beware of disturbing his circle! (Indeed it was marked off all around with piles of files, pages clipped together, all of them numerical tables.) Tiptoeing around him in a large arc, and, as in a night scene in a Western, heaven forbid one should step on a dry branch! And somewhere on his journey he had encountered this particular “homeless” person before. But where?
The rear wall of the former orchard: caved in. Picking his way through the rubble. There: his grandfather’s house, now his brother’s, all the windows lit up, no more forest flickering, and on the roof the neon sign with all its letters: OLD VILLAGE INN. It was the only property in the Old Village that had survived the years and the times. And it had also, at least to judge by the outside, largely preserved its original character as a farmhouse, including the stable wing and the wooden hayloft above, the latter with a wooden gallery, where bundles of dried corncobs hung as in earlier times, or still. Even the stable lantern below them was the same, and the white enamel shade over the bulb looked as if it were spattered with fly droppings, even if it was perhaps pure white. Not a trace of other properties. The farmhouse, which his brother had converted to an inn, stood all by itself, the vegetable garden with the grape arbor—there it was, wasn’t it?—now a garden for the inn, the site of the manure pile now a parking lot. Cars could reach the lot from the expressway that had been constructed in the meantime, its lanes disappearing not far from the house into the tunnel under the mountains that formed the southern border, the traffic swallowed up suddenly, along with its roar.
The way he approached the house, however, in the last daylight, was by one of the many intersecting footpaths that led from the forest in the former orchard to the inn—no upgraded route; so the path appeared to be available to the homeless, or whatever they were. How brightly lit the house was, and how quiet. No trucks in the parking lot. No silhouettes in any of the windows. A single person sitting on the long bench by the stable door, now the main entrance, in the dim light of the lantern and the residual glow of the sunset, blocked by a small birch like the ones traditionally set up at Pentecost to the right and left of the front door. Was it Pentecost already? No. The figure sat so motionlessly that as the leaves of the birch sapling fluttered in the evening breeze the figure seemed to have blended with the tree, as its reinforcement and human protector, while the birch, fluttering and fluttering, seemed to remove the human figure from its time and its story, it, too, serving as reinforcement and protector. Who was sitting there? Surely not the woman? Don’t let it be the woman—or do? It was not the woman, it was his brother. The dog that had followed the wanderer for days finally caught up with him, and its constant growling gave way to joyful barking, directed at the person seated on the farm bench, up on whose knees the dog jumped; by contrast, however, the dog lunged at the new arrival. No longer just threatening, it uttered a howl of rage, signaling that it was ready to bite: the family dog did not recognize him even there, in front of his birth house, did not want to recognize him.
And his brother, too, did not recognize him. It would not have taken much for his brother to sic the dog on him. But no, that was not his brother’s style; he called the dog off. So had the wanderer become that unrecognizable overnight? He was standing in front of the man on the bench, had greeted him, had let his voice be heard. The greeting was returned, but directed at a stranger. So had his voice changed overnight? Did he have to explain to his brother who he was? “Don’t you see? Listen: it’s me!”? That was out of the question. Explaining, much less proving his identity by showing his passport, for instance, or something else, or calling his brother by the name known only to the two of them, or speaking the magic word they had come up with an eternity ago: that would ruin the moment of being reunited after long years of absence, would suck the air out of it, and not just for that moment but for the entire episode of their reunion. How could he clue his brother in as to who was standing before him without being explicit but also without engaging him in a guessing game (this was not the moment for games)? Inspiration: did such a thing exist? The concept had never been part of his vocabulary. “Intuition,” yes, and then, as had become his standard practice with words during his writing period, not in the form of a noun but in the form of a verb: not “intuition” but “to intuit.”
And thus the wanderer intuited in this second that he should recapitulate a scene from one of their mother’s stories, a scene that both of them, his brother and he, had carried with them since childhood as revealing one of the characteristic behaviors, if not the fundamental behavior, in their family’s and clan’s history. The episode involved their mother’s youngest brother, who was supposed to become a priest but was overcome with homesickness at the diocesan boys’ seminary, could not take it anymore, and ran away one night, heading home by way of the Old Road. He arrived as day was breaking, but did not dare to enter the house. It was a Saturday, the day on which every week the courtyard in front of the house was thoroughly swept in preparation for “the Lord’s day.” Sweeping up chicken shit, cow manure, or chaff, or just sweeping the bare ground, leaving broom marks in the sandy courtyard. With the sky still dark, he took the twig broom from the wall of the stable and began to sweep. The sound of the broom outside gradually woke everyone in the house. Without looking out, they realized who had returned and was signaling that he would not leave home again, at least not voluntarily, would never go so far away again, and never be absent for so long. The twig broom was still leaning against the wall of the former stable, the very same one, even if it was not the same. Picking
it up. Sweeping. Being recognized after only two or three passes with it. Laughing on both their parts. “Ah, it’s you. I must be blind and dumb. Come into the house, brother. Wash up; you need it—you smell. And put on some clean clothes. I’m not exactly going to slaughter a fatted cow for you. Or throw a party to celebrate your homecoming. I know you’ll be pushing on tomorrow. But come in and stay the night, in your old room, in your old bed, as you’ve been wishing you could do for a long time now, right?” They were only “half brothers,” with different fathers? “Only”? Hairsplitting, and not just for the moment. How old his brother had become! And he put his hand to his own face. How old had he become himself?
In the taproom, formerly the stable, he was alone at first, at the smallest of the tables, in a niche. His brother had not forgotten how he liked to sit and what he liked to eat and drink. The dog stretched out peacefully at his feet. Chains clanked as the cows munched their hay. Bats swooped through the open stable door, even though it was closed and was no longer the stable door. A clear evening, with the moon shining through one of the windows, and on the wooden gallery on the upper level it was broad daylight, with rain spraying in under the roof, a summer rain, onto someone who was sitting there cross-legged, with a book. Later that night the tavern filled up: closing his eyes briefly—or had they closed involuntarily?—he opened them to see the room full, with forest dwellers in their Sunday best on the one hand, with long-distance truckers on the other; among the guests some residents from the new district, New Samarkand, if you will. Only men in any of the groups, and not much to observe; at most that the new settlers sat at a right angle to the tables, according to Oriental custom, and did not drink, did not even smoke a water pipe. But no, one woman was with them, heavily veiled, but seeming to be in disguise, in truth a man, Melchior, the journalist and writer? who was photographing them all surreptitiously and had secretly switched on a tape recorder? Let him be; he did not exist, had never existed.
Later all three groups gathered around one of the Orientals, the oldest man present, who sat there very erect and received one after another, as if he were holding court. He was something like the local oracle, giving each person a few words to take away with him, not prophecies but rather transmissions, articulations, and illustrations of something just then happening inside the oracle, as yet unspoken and unvisualized. And inside him something was always happening. What was it? Where others perhaps heard voices, he heard sounds, in his head, in his ears, ever changing, sounds that had nothing to do with those in the taproom or the kitchen; and where others might perhaps have suffered from these sounds as a constant, indistinguishable, tormenting noise in their heads, he had the ability to separate the sounds and keep them apart. At the same time, he listened to them as if they had been sent to him from a distant place where inner and outer merged. And translating these sounds, simultaneously, into words, sentences, auditory and visual images, made him in the eyes of the people of New Samarkand a medium, or simply an oracle, and that was also his profession, which he practiced with natural dignity, unapproachable, unsmiling, or at most smiling with pleasure at his translations and at passing them along to those assembled.
What oracular sayings were these? Anything unambiguous was of course not to be expected, but neither did his utterances sound classically equivocating or even ambiguous. They issued from him without interpretation, defying interpretation, on the one hand in complete, syntactically correct sentences, on the other hand quite meaningless, yet also not posing a riddle but borne by the rhythm of the noises in the translator’s head and his voice, shaped by what he was hearing. And that seemed to satisfy those who gathered around the oracle, consulting him without posing questions. Each man nodded in response to the saying he received, seemed to be enlivened by it, lastingly, then went on his way, so to speak, the couple of long-distance truckers as well as the forest-dwellers and those who had moved there from Samarkand or elsewhere. And the sound-interpreter made each of them pay, more than a regular soothsayer.
Later the soothsayer joined the wanderer in his niche, did not let him out of his sight, and then began to speak, with the roar from the expressway in the background, muffled by the windowpanes: “Blue eyes need not be a misfortune. Uproot yourself even more, my friend. It can’t hurt to chew on the other side of your mouth for a while. Ah, all those who wave around their roots like whips. There’s nothing but rest for the wicked. You can’t have more than you have. And sometimes the way it is isn’t the way it is. And at one time God was on the side of the long-suffering. That time was long ago. It is rare to be saved. If only one could disappear, you think—but one can’t. The word “night” grunts deep in one’s heart. And the Babylonian welter of opinions. An attraction is no attraction. The spirit travels nonetheless down the road of darkness, man, and leaps out of one’s mouth for joy. The devil can’t rob you of the light. Nothing is not as bad as the farmer thinks. Go as a stranger. Destiny never comes from without. Each person is timid in a different way. You contemplate your mistakes too little. All is iniquity! And all is frazzled, and that was life. And somewhere someone is always laughing. And anyone who contemplates human beings dies of grief.”
And even later the wanderer and his brother sat alone in the half-darkened taproom. At one time the brother had been the black sheep of the family. And who was he now? They played cards, and as in the old days neither wanted to let the other win. In the old days? “In the old days” also meant walking along the Old Road, arriving in “Samarkand,” standing in the cemetery, passing through the overgrown orchard. The brother had seen the world, from the pipeline construction in Alaska to the rail-line-laying in Mali, and every place he had visited had lent its name to a hill, a brook, a road, a forest in this region. He would never take a single step to leave again. The steep hill above the tunnel, where primarily birches, ferns, and, in the gaps, brilliantly red strawberries grew, he called Bosnia Slope. The grassy expanse between their parents’ house and the virgin forest was the Virginia Meadow. The brook that curved around the Old Village was Elk Creek, flowing into Alaska’s Yukon River. Where the sunken road up into the foothills of the alp turned to yellow clay, it led to the Dogon area in Africa’s Mali. The frog pond belonged to the Danube delta. He had also worked in Arabia for many years, and accordingly his whole native Carinthian valley was called Wadi al-Yawm, or Valley of the Day.
As he pictured it, the members of the clan to which he and the wanderer belonged had been from the beginning and through the generations secretly mad, not seriously so, to be sure, but still … “We all have a screw loose,” as he put it, “including you, and each of us in his or her own way.” And what was his own loose screw? The brother could have mentioned all kinds of things, but he left it at one harmless delusion: he thought that all the places on the planet where he had ever spent time were stored inside him, not in his memory but in his body. The world he had experienced during his years as an itinerant worker, along with all its parts, even those of which he had hardly or only fleetingly been cognizant, even the most trivial ones that had made no impression on him when he was there, had been inscribed on him. The sites of his past had bonded with his flesh and blood. There was no part of his body to which a place did not belong. No cell, he was convinced, that did not harbor a place name. Except that the places around the world and their names in the cells of his body remained hidden most of the time. They were asleep. So did they emerge in dreams? Not in dreams, and not during the night, but exclusively by day. Then often but a single movement was needed for one of those earlier places, along with its name, to wake up inside him, for example in his knee, glowing or smoking quietly, and then quickly extinguished, though the flickering could continue for a good while. He might raise the ax, for instance, and his armpit would recall a particular village in the Himalayas. He might heave a kettle onto the stove, and a spot in his stomach cavity would promptly embody a particular highway barracks near, let’s say, Regensburg. He would jump off a ladder and his ankle, or his hip, or
his scalp would open up to—“Well, fill in a place yourself.” No reliable method for awakening all the places in his body existed. He knew only that stretching helped, and likewise exercising caution in his movements, one movement flowing smoothly out of another, and especially that the former locales stored in his body came to life only when he was engaged in his daily chores—he had to work them loose in his cells. But how alive they could become retroactively, in his neck, between his ribs, in his temples, more lively than they had ever been when he experienced them externally. “If you only knew how many places I revisited inside my body just this evening, while I was busy in the kitchen.”
Even later that night nothing happened except that the two brothers sat side by side in silence. If one of them sighed, their ancestors would sigh in response, only more loudly. A brief moan, and the ancestors would moan back, and then did not want to stop. A soft laugh, and in reply the ancestors’ peals of laughter. And then a cry from the depths. Who was that groaning? At least there was no echo, no one groaned in reply. An air hug, arms reaching into the void, as a child had once been observed doing. Why couldn’t they sit this way in the dark forever?