by Peter Handke
Still later that night the brother led the wanderer down to the former apple cellar, and behold: it had been turned into a meeting space, but a very special one: wasn’t this an underground church, or at least part of one? And hadn’t they always been told, and seen it confirmed in old engravings, that the ancestral property had been the site of the first little village church? Yes, this was it, the sanctuary, which over the centuries had sunk deep into the ground as a result of the rubble piling up around it. The brother had discovered it one day while digging out the cellar and had secretly cleared it out: the vaulted ceiling of the fruit cellar had once been the church’s roof. And now it was serving once more as a house of God, but rather secretively, at least not officially, and not advertised anywhere, a sort of crypt or catacomb. Some long-distance truckers would come downstairs from the bar, using it as their highway chapel; some old-timers from the village—of whom there were still some left, and they were the brother’s regulars—would recite the Rosary and the Litany of the Blessed Virgin or the All Souls’ Litany down there after work before they began drinking upstairs (or not); and the new settlers from “Samarkand” used the cellar for their communal Friday prayers, at first just a few of them, but in the meantime more and more (who had gradually become tired of the mosque, which for their taste had grown too visible and ostentatious); in the small space, unlike in the mosque, they could easily crowd in so close together that, as their religion demanded, there was no room for shaitan, the evil demon, to slip into. And more and more often the three groups, the long-distance truckers, the locals, and the new settlers, met downstairs in the catacomb just as they did upstairs. And? That was all. Just goodwill, and people of goodwill. Not only goodwill but also a will to change! And the barriers? None. There was no such thing in the catacomb, or the barriers were no obstacles. Benches were positioned along the walls where once the fruit bins had stood, and the niche where the cider kegs had been kept was now the apse and the mihrab, with a long oval table; the entire crypt under the tavern was brightly lit and quiet, with no noise penetrating from the expressway, and the most prominent impression the smell: of cider and apples, apples and cider. And in one spot the echo underfoot. Long may it echo there.
Did the wanderer, even later that night, find his way upstairs to his old room? There, too, his brother had to show him the way. In the doorway—the walls were so thick that his brother could stand there sideways, legs splayed—the wanderer heard from him how the whole family had trembled downstairs when he, still an adolescent, had been engaged in his first attempts at writing up there in his room. They had not been allowed to make a peep. If one of them so much as coughed or scraped a chair on the floor, he would yell for quiet. And from time to time he yelled without provocation, into the silence, as if angry with himself. They had also been afraid of his facial expression when, after many hours, often an entire day, he came down to the living room, now the inn’s parlor: either his eyes shot bullets, with which he wanted to mow them all down, or he looked around as if not just asking for forgiveness but begging for mercy, or he stared wide-eyed at nothing at all, as if expecting to be confronted by an execution squad. Even when he smiled—which happened seldom enough—as if nothing had happened, as if he hadn’t just been ranting over their heads, and without missing a beat read aloud what he had written, forcing them to listen—their mother was the only one who did not need to be forced—he seemed uncanny to them, especially because his smile had something menacing about it, was a smirk, a villainous one, as if he had committed some evil deed. His brother had not read a single one of his books, had not so much as opened them. And nonetheless he thought he knew them all, each of the long stories in detail. He had experienced them, and the other had written them down, in a way that matched their separate realities, of that he was convinced, and so he had no need to read the fraternal books. There were not many books in the house, and most of those had been read, but not one from the family writer, and both of them found that completely natural. And before saying good night in the doorway, his brother returned to the subject of the family: with his attempts at writing the boy had not merely interfered with their domestic life but had furthermore thrown the rest of them into confusion, if not sown dissension and possibly destroyed the family. At least, he said, certain things might have turned out differently in their home without that initial writer’s tyranny. It had contributed to the split in the family. But that was not what he was getting at. This was not a night for settling accounts, and besides it would be the last time the other man spent the night in his ancestors’ house, in his old room and old bed. So what was he getting at? That the two of them, the sole remaining members of the family, only now constituted a family. That altogether it was only now, with the two of them alone, that one could speak of a family. And what did his brother mean by family? He could not say. “Family is family.” Or perhaps this: “Something nice … something heartwarming … something lasting … a rock of Gibraltar … an air-raid shelter … a border station, unarmed, at the same time a border-crossing … a round dance while sitting quietly around the table…” The family had grown smaller and smaller. And now, with only these two left from the entire extended family, the family was most present: a strange arithmetic again.
If the wanderer had harbored expectations for his night in the house where he had been born, none materialized. First he sat down in a chair by the window and tried to retrace the landscape lying there in the moonlight, inscribed on him since childhood, whereupon his eyes closed almost instantly. And when he got into bed, intending to stay awake as long as he could and to try to be conscious of where he was and of all the specific things he had experienced, suffered, done, neglected, done to others, and done wrong, he had hardly curled up under the covers as in the old days when he not only fell asleep but, so it seemed to him, lost consciousness. He fell away, as though a trapdoor, and the ground along with the trapdoor, or the universe, or whatever it was, closed over him, and he no longer existed. It was a voice then—but what did “then” mean? and what was “later”?—that called him back into the present, but into a different present. The voice belonged to his mother. Was he dreaming? No, it was no dream, even if he was sleeping, and deeply.
He had learned to distinguish between dreams and apparitions. Both occurred during sleep. But he experienced an apparition entirely differently from a dream. Dreams were the usual occurrence, so to speak. They turned up, both nightmares and pleasant dreams, as happenings, as things taking a certain course, as precipitous events or long-drawn-out ones. Apparitions, on the other hand, took the form of intrusions, abrupt ones, images shooting into his heart and disappearing just as abruptly, but leaving an image burned into his consciousness. He often dreamed about his mother: that she was still alive, though always tired to death, wearing herself out for him and the others, exhausted to the point of collapse, her eyes bleary from exhaustion. But she had appeared to him only once, and that was in the weeks after her death. Abruptly she had flown to him from the night, the night of the universe—that was how he experienced it—no, had assaulted him, had taken possession of him at one blow, and had promptly zoomed back into the darkness where she belonged. And what had impressed itself on the sleeper from that one monumental second? Only his mother’s face, surrounded by darkness, and in her face her pitch-black eyes (not their actual color on earth), and these were against him, but did not express a reproach, certainly not a curse: they were simply against him, against the way he was, or the way he had been, but that with all the fire that could blaze in his mother’s otherwise gentle eyes, and even more fire, beyond that.
During his last night in the house where he had been born, his mother did not appear to the sleeper—she spoke to him, invisible, without face or eyes. And she did not speak to him from the darkness; what she said was accompanied by light, or provided light, or was itself the light. And to her sleeping son she said approximately the following: “You with your eternal sense of guilt and your seeking of guilt in othe
rs. You’re innocent, you silly boy, as innocent as those of whom you were suspicious, a bad old habit of yours, not congenital and not inherited, when you and they were absent. Just as you suspected me: suspected me of having given up on you from the beginning; of not believing in you; of not tolerating any woman at your side; suspected me of having lived an unhappy life, or of having loved only your father, of having despised your brother, and of having not told the truth when I wrote you that I was happy to die. Listen, son: I did love several other men. I loved your brother, even if differently from the way I loved you: whereas you intentionally brought tears to my eyes, they flowed by themselves when I thought of him. No doubt I feared that both you and your brother would go astray, but I could never quite picture the way that would happen with you. And if there were times when I couldn’t believe in you, didn’t that spur you on all the more? And it’s not true that I wasn’t happy when I was finally able to go to sleep for good, just as it’s also not true on the other hand that my life was unhappy. Some of my wishes were fulfilled, and more than that I never expected. And some unexpected things also happened, and there was never greater joy. No one in the entire extended family could be joyful as I could, there was no one who could infect others, except maybe you, with my pleasure as I could. My name should be Herzefreude—heart’s joy—not Herzeloyde—heart’s sorrow—you spoilsport. So get up this instant and bring that woman intended for you to your bed. The night is cold, and she’s been waiting under your window for an eternity. Do you expect her to serenade you and climb up to your room on a ladder, you fool? Enough of guilt and looking for guilt in others. Enough self-martyrdom and making martyrs of others, who were always those close to you, are those close to you. Why do you make a martyr of only yourself and those close to you, you lazybones, you village idiot, you last remaining know-it-all and phony sympathizer. No love without mercy.”
In this manner or one very much like it his mother spoke to him in his sleep, and he did as she ordered. From the depths of sleep he had wanted to reply that what she had corrected in his version of herself, her life, and her death was even less true than his version. She had said those things merely for form’s sake, for the sake of this story—but as always when he was sleeping he could not get out a word. And then he woke up with a jolt and in fact heard noises down in the courtyard. No, it was not a broom. It was footsteps, in the depths of night, and they were peaceable, in the gravel and the sand, also as if determined by the gravel and the sand, guided by them. And in fact he found the woman, the stranger, at the gate to the courtyard—which was not locked—why had she not simply come into the house? Had she wanted to summon him with her footsteps alone? How patiently she was walking up and down, back and forth in the moonlight, the very soul of patience, and her walking was a game of patience, following a pattern invisibly inscribed in the sand. Nonetheless she was startled when he appeared, held up her arm to shield her head, backed off as he strode toward her, the creature. He caught her, or it, brought her, or it, home (only James Stewart, Joseph Cotten, and Matthias Sindelar could have done it better), carried her up to the room (not even Lancelot and Gawain would have had stronger arms in that moment), and then lay down beside her.
At long last he understood her as she understood him, and laughed; it was rare for him to laugh that way, and as he was telling us this part on the boat there in the night we would never have believed our host could laugh that way, and the woman, the stranger, laughed back at us from the stern. Back there, beyond the mountains, she had joined in his laughter, also laughing at him, but benevolently, face-to-face, until both of them turned serious and that turned into a trembling, on her part also a delayed effect of the night out in the open, a trembling on both their parts, until they did not tremble anymore. And again they fell out of bed together from exhaustion, but not only that. Land of two rivers.
When the wanderer introduced the woman the next morning to the homeowner, he did not show a second’s amazement, as if he were accustomed to such things, from his brother and others as well. If his eyebrows rose for a second, it was at her beauty. And what else? He arranged for his brother’s chosen one to hitch a ride in a tractor trailer. She wanted to go on ahead, in a southeasterly direction to the Balkans, to the boat on the Morava, and prepare various things for his return and for the night of storytelling. The wanderer still had one more stop on his tour of Europe. He had toyed with the idea of skipping it. But no, that was out of the question, just as with the previous stops. And why? As much as he longed to go back, he had to face the enclave and the river, the one he had imagined and that had engraved itself in him as his route and his plot. Abbreviating, skipping, avoiding would have not done justice to the story. Ah, justice! And the woman and he: what did they picture for the future as they parted again? To work together. (For the moment the interrupter had no further questions.)
10
IN THE TIME when this story takes place, there were still a few people left from a different time who clung to the idea, or the pipe dream, of a large unified country in the Balkans, in a different kind of Europe. They certainly could have known, and probably did know, that there was no way to alter what had happened, or been planned, or set in motion and implemented. But nonetheless this handful of people, or dear folk, stubbornly or obstinately held fast to the notion that one aspect or another of what had been put in place could be adjusted, especially if it were recognized that the former unified entity had perhaps stood not so much for something imposed as for a sense of belonging that had developed over time and with the generations. For a while one or another of them had even imagined that history, or whatever it was called, would one day prove him right. Meanwhile, however—with the exception of one or two incorrigible believers in history in their midst—they had long since ceased to believe in the allegedly decisive and final word of history, or of the historians, as the case might be. Or if they did, the decisive word did not absolutely have to be right, and those who had the last word did not for that reason necessarily have a monopoly on the truth. Wasn’t having the last word suspicious in any case? The last word: was such a thing even permissible?
The few holdouts used sophistries of this sort as a pretext for coming together now and then, and then one last time, and then one absolutely last time, and so on, to talk about the large country and what had happened to it. Initially they had formed quite an impressive group. By now only a few turned up. The reason was not, however, that they were tiring of the subject, let alone changing their minds and coming to their senses—none of them, not a single one, would ever give up his so-called convictions voluntarily or revise his opinion one iota—but an entirely different reason: the dying off of the group’s members, an almost strikingly frequent phenomenon. These people usually did not live to be very old. One of them had his heart stop as he was walking along the street. Another, driving while intoxicated, crashed his car into a bridge railing, which, together with the bridge, which had been destroyed by bombs, had just recently been rebuilt. The third had disappeared hiking in the mountains. Some of the deaths were also remarkably violent: one woman’s dress—polyester; what else would one have expected of a Balkan woman?—caught fire from a candle in church, an Orthodox church, of course, and in a flash she was totally engulfed in flames, beyond saving. One lost his life when he was struck by a ridiculously small rock, not even a stone, a pebble, that happened to hit his temple right in the spot where … One drowned while swimming in the river that formed the border, the river famous for its ever-green water. Quite a few suicides, too, of course. And even if they did not all die violently, they all died abruptly; their dying happened suddenly: heart, stroke, aneurysm, suffocating during an asthma attack … And those who did not die instantaneously—have you seen the like?—went mad from one moment to the next, in the wink of an eye, so to speak, just as all those around them had been constantly predicting, and anyone among them who had not gone mad yet was bound to do so soon, je lui donne au plus un ou deux ans; in one year or at most tw
o. Their deranged state had started with the conviction that they were being watched by the secret services of the whole world, not just by the CIA but also by al-Qaida, by the Mossad, and so forth, and the letters they sent each other were taped together so firmly, for the sake of secrecy, that the recipients were often unable to open them.
The little (nameless) posse of true believers, or screwball believers, called their periodic gatherings “conferences,” in reference to the secret “conferences” held in the woods by partisans during the world war, and it was not entirely certain whether the choice of this term was made only in jest. For like the partisans in their day, each of the participants, wherever he might be located, received instructions in code telling him to appear at a certain time in a certain place, and each traveled to the spot under cover of darkness, if possible, disguised as a lumberjack, as a nocturnal pilgrim, as someone looking for a lost pet, or whatever; approached the conference site alone, by back roads; used a false name such as Desanka, Varvarin, Kravica, Kolubara, or Ohrid. And the place itself always had at least the appearance of a hiding place—an earthen cellar, a cave, a ruin; and once they had even met at the bottom of a dried-up cistern, probably in memory of the resistance fighters who long ago (or only recently?) had installed their secret transmitters in such shafts.
The current conference was really supposed to be the absolutely last one—which it turned out to be. And it took place in a doline, a round, deep depression in the karst. What do you mean, another doline in your story? The karst again? Yes, but this one was in our own country, and besides, the doline was a field, a garden, a paddock, a stable, a playing field, a dance floor, a bake oven, a Red Cross post, a fishpond. It was that large? That large. And built up and furnished with all these resources, a delana dolina? Yes, a doline in the karst above Trieste, the one from which every karst in the world, including the ones in the Yucatán and Minas Gerais, take the name—the mother of karsts. And in spite of that, secretly there in the Delana Dolina? In spite of that, secretly.