by Peter Handke
The wanderer had not been in the karst for a long time. Without the “conference” he would hardly have gone there anymore: the place had had its day. And besides, it had changed markedly. True, everything was still there that made it unique: the updraft from the sea below that fanned the high plateau with incomparable gentleness; the big sky; the brightness of that sky, reflected on the ground by the porous limestone used in the construction of village houses and the stone walls leading from the fields into the wilderness, or by the fields themselves, formed as the underlying limestone weathered; the silence, of a sort possible only in an out-of-the-way location; the far-flung villages, out of sight of each other and recognizable only at night, and then only when cloud cover hung low over the plateau, from the reflections, usually round, here and there on the underside of the clouds; and of course the dolines. But the silence of the karst was no longer its only distinguishing feature, and the area set apart from the surrounding countryside, as well as from the sea, held its own at most for moments at a time, among many others of a different character. It may be that even in the past the karst had been an area fairly central to Europe. In the meantime it had explicitly become part of something—first a feeling, then a conception, then an idea, and finally a norm—known as “Central Europe,” right? Over time this norm had become dominant—well, more or less, but more more than less—and according to this dominant norm the karst belonged, without any special status, to the unit called Central Europe, or to what else should it belong? Perhaps even to the goddamned Balkans, consistent with a previously prevailing norm? The newly introduced norm of “Central Europe” was in any case hardly less potent in the karst; omnipresent at the very least in the language. There had never been as much “center” in the region as now. One “Center festival” after the other. The small main town of the karst received a new name, in translation “Centertown,” and a group of villages had themselves renamed into what would translate as “Central Village One,” “Central Village Two,” and so forth, in the same way that many of the old wagon roads were turned into hiking paths with informational signage, part of the “Great Central European Hiking Trail Network from the Bohemian Forest to Dubrovnik,” as “Central Trail Red,” “Central Trail Blue,” “Central Trail Black-and-White,” and so on, marked as such on the “updated official trail map of Central Europe.”
And so the dolines of the karst had been declared “Central European Natural Monuments,” and the largest and most beautiful of them, the Delana Dolina, close to one of the Central Villages, had received the status of a national shrine in Central Europe, a “shrine of the Central European Nation.” Not only down there, in the expansive earthen depression—but also in the entire karst and the surrounding area everything Balkan or even distantly reminiscent of the Balkans was frowned upon, from foods to clothing to music (music especially: only Central European melodies and instruments were allowed, preferably Viennese waltzes, and the radio stations from Central Village to Central Village to Central Village set the tone, day after day). In the Central Doline, as the Delana Dolina was now officially known, the Central European regulations were enforced with particular strictness. Unthinkable that a Balkan clarinet or trumpet would have been heard, that a lamb would have been roasted on a spit (not to mention a suckling pig), or that anyone would have eaten onions raw. Day and night the plateau and slopes of the karst basin witnessed Central festivals, solemn Central masses, readings by Central European writers, matches between Central European teams, Central European congresses.
None of this did any harm to the “conference.” Precisely amid the welter of celebrations, the unbroken succession of public events, the few attendees could preserve their secrecy unobserved (though not entirely so). Besides, there were only three of them left, three who had been scattered to the winds, who, as they came together down in a quiet corner of the doline—such a thing still existed—already had a premonition that this would be their last conference, their final farewell. So as they sat on the shore of the man-made lined pond—the dolines, like the entire karst, were otherwise extremely water-permeable—and looked up at the round horizon of the depression, they filled each other in on those who had been unable to join them. A man and a woman, he from France, she from Spain, had been the group’s trophy couple. They had met during the divisive Balkan wars and had thus become a couple, both of them dedicated for years to aiding the affected peoples, all of whom, as they always said in unison, were “walking barefoot over thorns.” After all these two had been through, they could only stay together forever, right? And now it was reported that the woman had left the man, feeling that she was locked in a relationship with a “cold cadaver,” whereupon the man had gone after her and shot her, and then himself. Another person had become convinced that the principal blame for the smashing or falling-apart of the large country rested with a small Buddhist country on a South Sea island, and accordingly he made his way to the island and in a suicide bombing blew up the one-story structure that was more like an administrative building than the seat of government. And another one crisscrossed for months the former country, from one statue representing a hero of the Second World War to the next—not many were left—demanding at the top of his voice that they restore the country to its former glory, until one night, when he was running back and forth between hero sculptures in the Kalemegdan Park in Belgrade, falling on his knees, embracing and imploring them to intercede for him, he was taken away to a locked mental institution, with not the faintest hope of ever getting out. All that had been reported long since in the newspapers, but apparently none of the three were keeping up with the papers?
Who were the other two, along with him, the former writer, the remnant of the minority of the minority? One was the former minister of justice of a country not only very large but also extremely powerful. Now he was an old man and long since retired. He occupied himself primarily with traveling the world and representing the losers’ cause, a self-assigned mission. Without going to the courts, the national as well as the international ones, to plead his case—they would not let him in, even as a witness—he viewed himself as the lawyer he had been at the beginning of his career, and presented himself as such in the environs of the tribunals, almost unnoticed or at most smiled at pityingly. He thought of himself as a successor to the criminal defense lawyer Abraham Lincoln, and was coming to look more and more like him, especially with his bushy eyebrows and deep-set eyes. But had Lincoln also been so gaunt? And certainly Lincoln had seemed less rickety, being nowhere near so old. It was quite possible that Lincoln had also had very thin legs—but they had not been clad in jeans like those in which the former minister traveled tirelessly from continent to continent. The wanderer had never seen him in anything other than work boots, a plaid shirt, and those everlasting blue jeans. Out on the street one could mistake him for an elderly vagabond. What strengthened the impression was that he always came alone and that his luggage never consisted of more than a bundle. Even at the “conferences” or as a member of a “delegation” he seemed solitary, the others avoiding him a bit. And he was definitely alone once he had made his presentations and intervenings: alone at the end of the table, alone on the top step outside the entrance to the tribunal, alone also the next morning at breakfast in the hotel on the outskirts, usually more like a flophouse; while his colleagues of the previous day—if there were such—still huddled together, he sat, quiet and forgotten, almost invisible, in the darkest and farthest corner of the breakfast room. He booked all his own flights and train rides, washed his own laundry on his travels, darned holes and sewed on buttons. Yet this “lonesome hobo” was always approachable. If someone spoke to him, even abruptly, he showed sovereign presence of mind, like someone who is prepared for anything and has thought through every contingency in advance. That the current world no longer took him seriously seemed not to trouble him. That was how it was, and it was all right, that was how it was supposed to be. He at any rate would have represented a different system of just
ice, would have presented himself as a different citizen of his country, would have spoken a different language, above all in a different tone of voice, not at the top of his lungs like most of his fellow citizens, and not with sounds suggestive of bugs being squashed. And indeed, for someone in the role of a lawyer, his voice, in harmony with his body, while clearly audible, at the same time sounded dreamy, also intimate, as if he were speaking, even when several people were present, to only one, a high-pitched quavering singsong. But that impression was misleading, as was his fragility. He, this American who over time and in these times had become more and more quiet, would not die all that soon, and also not suddenly. Or might he after all? And never, ever, would he, was he allowed to, lose his mind. Or perhaps after all?
The other participant was a former motorcycle racer, a woman from Japan, who had gone on to study Slavic languages and was now a professor of Slavic literatures in a provincial university located in southern Japan. A soccer star from the Balkan former country whom she met while his team was competing in Japan had been the love of her life, and that had inspired her academic studies. Since her lover’s death she made a point of flying to Europe at least once a year and crisscrossing the Balkans by bus, train, and also on foot. She was still young but did not ride a motorcycle anymore, let alone take part in races. It was hard to imagine her ever driving one of those huge, heavy machines, a Kawasaki or a Honda: this Japanese woman was so tiny, almost dwarflike, and so thin. She must be, and have been, far too light for the mass of steel beneath her, although that could be deceptive: upon any attempt to heave her playfully off the ground—her fellow conference attendees were tempted to try it because she looked as light as a feather—she always backed away as they approached, with a sound of dismay. She did not allow anyone to touch her, let alone hug her, not even as a greeting or farewell. Each time it was more than mere avoidance; she shied away from the other person. Instead, when they were apart, she wrote letters full of warmth and expressions of gratitude at having been welcomed as a participant in the conferences, with all kinds of enclosures: flower petals from her garden and, especially, photos she had taken in the Balkans, always of a place she had sought out after reading a book set in the former country—and there was no place described or narrated that she did not, “like a typical Asian,” track down in reality, no matter how hidden or remote it was, or how encoded or fundamentally altered it appeared in the literary descriptions. Writers such as Ivo Andrić, Miloš Crnjanski, Miroslav Krleža, Ivan Cankar, had they still been alive, would not have ceased to be amazed at seeing the Japanese woman’s photos of the Balkan places they had had in mind when they were writing. Might she not someday mount a motorcycle after all and reveal herself to be someone else entirely?
So the three of them sat there, the sole survivors, in their quiet corner at the bottom of the doline, and in memory of their lost colleagues moistened the ground, according to Balkan custom, with a few drops from their glasses, while between them, on a cloth, lay the provisions they had brought along, including one or two items that were frowned upon. Strangely enough, people who passed by on their way to a game or a festival did not look askance at them, even at the sound of the allegedly highly unpopular traditional Balkan music that one of the three played on a minirecorder—instead, a brief pause, a recollecting, an approving smile, even from the constable of the Central Doline as he made his rounds. Strange in another way were the fish in the man-made doline pond, in water so calm and transparent that it might have been frozen. So was it that cold at the bottom of the doline? But when the three of them now got to their feet, a summery wind wafted over them from above, bringing a warm gush of fragrance—new-mown hay and grain, such as one would expect at the height of summer. Ah, summer! And a tree above their heads had a ship’s bell hanging from its lowest limb that had both Latin and Cyrillic lettering, the bell rusted, and likewise rusty and stiff its clapper.
Was this not the last time in the karst after all? Was this perhaps still the old karst empire, independent and free as no other great empire had been, allied with no one but itself? Would they all see each other again someday, the madmen no longer mad and the dead no longer so dead? And as if on cue the three survivors blew with all their might on the clapper, rusted to its bracket—without, however, getting it to swing, let alone strike the bell. The former writer, at one time described as bringing a breath of fresh air to literature, also had no luck … But at least they had tried. And when, after one last attempt, they turned away from the bell, they heard behind their backs something that sounded like a clang after all, more a pitiful tinkling, or a mere rustling, probably only in their imagination? Only?
11
THEN BACK AT last to the Balkans deserving of the name. If the vast majority thought of that name as a swearword, to him, and also to us, his audience during the Moravian night, it represented something else. Where had they begun, his and our Balkans? Long before the geographic and morphological border. The Balkans, for example, had been momentarily the steppe around the vanished Numancia in Old Castile, when a torn blue and white plastic bag caught on a purple thistle flapped and crackled in the wind. Balkans: the tiger-striped falcon’s feather next to the dead roebuck that had broken its neck falling off a limestone cliff in Germany’s Harz Mountains. The pole dwellings along the Danube to the east of Vienna, with fishing nets hanging outside, and under the houses all kinds of junk lying around between the poles—discarded refrigerators, gas canisters, automobile tires: the Balkans. The wood and coal smoke from the chimney of the jew’s-harp house and the apples there between the inner and outer panes of the windows that came down almost to the floor. The sawhorse next to his grandfather’s and brother’s house, tipped over, half-buried among beverage crates, piles of rock, tar paper, cabbage stalks, withered and freshly shooting onions. The whistling of a train echoing from a distant gorge in the karst. The pairs of butterflies in the sun, fluttering around each other in a narrow space wherever he came upon them during his travels through Europe, hardly larger than a thumbnail, reddish-brown, with Oriental rug patterns on their wings, circles and triangles, and always appearing to be three, if not more: all of that anticipated the Balkans.
Those had been traces in time and in various spaces, anticipations, islets, isolated moments. Now, however, he set foot on the Balkan mainland, on terra firma, far from any kind of coast and ocean. Back also in the interior, with rivers flowing through it, all aiming for the Danube and the Black Sea. Standing water? Hardly any. And all the dugouts on the rivers.
He set out on foot, downriver, downstream, cutting across fields in a southeasterly direction, over hill and dale, through the Pannonian lowland, over the one ridge plopped down on it, the Fruška Gora, which took two days to cross, and from there down in serpentines past the monasteries on its southern slope and toward the White City, or rather to the central Balkan bus station in the spandrel where the Sava flowed into the Danube, where buses still departed in any direction one could desire, and from there home to the enclave of Porodin, to the Morava.
Upon his arrival in the interior and continental Balkans it had been a day of mayflies; wherever he went, they were out on their short-haul flights during the morning, began to reel in the afternoon, and roosted in the evening to die; by the next morning at the latest they were dead, without having fallen over, either to one side or onto their backs; they stood still and stiff but not quite deathly stiff on their long, sharply bent legs, on windowsills, on television sets, on cement mixers, on watering cans, their transparent little wings displaying something like a delicate letter, thicker in one spot, resembling a W or an M, their posteriors slightly raised as if prepared for flight. They allegedly lived only one day, but during this day no one could touch them; they escaped from everyone, could not be caught. So why, then, their daylong panic, their constant leaps through the air? And how weightless they then were, as cadavers. Cadavers?
Then came the day of the ladybugs, each displaying Balkan ostentation with at least fif
teen or twenty black dots on its red-star-Belgrade shell. After this came the day of the vineyard snails, which left the wanderer’s pack studded with shells whenever he put it down upon stopping to rest and eat along the way, like the scallop shells on a pilgrim’s knapsack, except that the snails were alive, and how! all jumbled together, and their shells, unlike those of the scallops, rubbed against each other almost silently, without rattling, and by god he was no pilgrim, and if he was, then one going in the opposite direction from all established pilgrims’ destinations.
Then came the day of the emerald lizards, golden-green, some lying motionless in the sun at the base of monastery walls, others skittering ceaselessly back and forth until sundown, darting in front of him across the country roads in the lowlands, as large as dragons, especially their heads as they scuttled away, flat as a frog when they had been run over. Then the day of swallows, who, hear this, appeared unexpectedly way up in the blue of the sky, having flown there from nowhere, as if called forth by the blue of the sky itself, and in vast numbers, in a second filling the sky, which just a moment before had been empty, swooping, sailing, curving, fluttering, flitting. And then the day of bees in the white clover blossoms, which trembled as they landed. And then the day of mating dragonflies, which then continued their flight conjoined. And then the day of the Balkan horses, leaping and galloping up almost vertical banks, like chamois. And then the day of the jewelweed, which popped, softly, softly, in the wanderer’s palm. Then came the day of the “real” Balkan butterfly pairs, fluttering around the hiker’s wrist like a moving bracelet. And then, listen to this, the day of the first linden-blossom fragrance, a gust from the interstices, with a suddenness that did the opposite of startle him. The day of getting lost. The day of sleeping in a barn. The day when he sat by the side of the road and drew, before a thunderstorm, and when the lightning struck nearby, listen to this, lost control of his pencil, which traced a thick line across the page. And in between, the day of high summer, with crickets chirping from all the horizons of the earth. And the day before that: formations of wild geese, as in late autumn.