by Peter Handke
So was there nothing else he experienced? (Our interrupter could not control himself.) No, there was: when he stopped for lunch one day, the impoverished innkeeper, hear this, was deaf and scraped the last crumbs together for him: so delicious! And one time, hear this, all of you, he sat for an entire day at a crossroads. And? In an abandoned garden gladioli were growing. And the clouds mostly came from the east. In the school buses the children sat crowded into the back. The election posters, even the newer ones, all looked faded. Nut trees and plum trees also far outside the villages, and he assuaged his hunger with the previous year’s nuts, lying in the grass, and with plums that had dried on the trees. Clouds of dust preceded him along the side of the road or swirled on the ground. And the path that unexpectedly led through a remote cemetery. And in one of the monasteries, let’s say the one in Grgeteg, the fresco showing Jesus having the Last Supper with the disciples outdoors, under trees, with fields in the background. And everything greening in that incomparable Balkan way. And the bluing. And the nightingales singing in the sun. And for a day he pitched in on a field, as long ago in boarding school, planting potatoes. And daytime began as soon as he started to hear, or when shadows started to play. And in the course of time and his walking, hear this, his shoes turned into footgear, and his clothes into garments or “hose,” and the old young Europe awakened in his moving body, in its interstices, and less countries than various obscure corners, and the corners joined together as limbs of a sort, without borders, without a border.
And encounters with human beings? A long pause for reflection. No one? No one encountered anyone? On the contrary: one time he fell into conversation with someone, or merely listened to the other person. That was the day of getting lost in the area called the Balkan Desert. From the highway all sorts of paths or trails led into it. But, hear this, they all terminated somewhere in the middle, at the end of one last field, usually planted with corn, beyond which stretched in all directions an endless, arid, slightly hilly landscape of sand and clay, where from one horizon to the other there was nothing more to harvest, at most, perhaps, as in the taiga, things to gather or to hunt. And here, after a meander in the bed of a brook that had probably dried up ages ago and looked deceptively like a path, he came upon a very old man who, hear this, all of you, was squatting in front of a clay bank pocked with birds’ entrance holes, as if serving as the watchman there; the place looked like a burial site for urns. And without returning the wanderer’s greeting, he promptly began to explain that he was a refugee from the other side of the Drina, from Bosnia, and had been searching since the end of the war, now almost two decades ago, for his son, who had gone missing. In the meantime he had combed through almost the entire Balkans without finding a trace of his child, and many, he said, were out looking as he was, usually the fathers, while the mothers stayed home to take care of the house and wait, if they had not died. And the old man told him where the lost son had been seen last; described him—eye color, the shape of his ears, scars—and traced a picture of him in the air, especially his shoulders and head, all this more for himself than for the other person, who merely offered him a pretext to utter out loud the conversation he had been having with himself for decades. He wanted to bring home at least one bone belonging to his son. The bone he measured in the air, however, stretching out both arms, was that of a giant, as long and as large as an entire person. And no one else? No. Or rather, yes: all the ferrymen who took him across the hundred and one rivers. And the other old man, the other refugee, the one with eyes like a child’s, once condemned to death in the former country as a such-and-such dissident, who had become a philosopher in the course of fleeing the country, and who now, shortly before his death, still wanted to rethink the entire world: “We must come up with a new way of thinking!” And the woman with eyes like cherries. And the sunburned Coptic pope, out on the road with nothing but a toothpick between his lips. And the general ducking at the sound of planes high overhead, peaceable though they were. And the secretive old lovers, both of them white-haired, with flushed cheeks. And much seemed simple. And then nothing was simple. These were wounded peoples, from one remote spot to the next, knowing peoples, wise ones.
At the bus station in the White City. (On the latest maps it was once more called, as in the time of foreign rule, “Weissenstadt”—how had Belgrade of all places come to have this name?) Waiting for the bus to take him back to the enclave. Only one bus a day went there now, and so the homecomer, or whatever he was, had plenty of time to sit and look. The sun at his back was a help, as was a certain weariness and the spot he chose, the terrace of one of the many restaurants surrounding the large bus station. And as it happened, his field of vision was confined to the bays where the buses pulled in. Had the country become small? Not to judge by the sight of the buses here at their last stop. Not only did one arrive right after another in an uninterrupted change of scene: one bus, empty, heading off to the depot, and already the arrival, or appearance, of the next one, filled with passengers. Also each bus offered a different image, starting with its markings or body style, its age, its color, or, as was understandable, given the many peoples of this country, unique within Europe, even or precisely in its truncated condition, the variations among the passengers getting off—a different image, however, from that presented primarily by the bus windows, and a particularly clear one once all the passengers had left the bus, in the brief moment before it drove away. The sun, shining through the empty space inside, made the glass more visible and lent contours to the traces remaining on the panes from the trip. Bus windows without traces, or with old traces, possibly there for weeks or months, encrusted, hardened, would have evoked thoughts of a trip from not far off, from one of the suburbs. But such buses never pulled in. All the buses, including their windows, had obviously been washed before setting out, and the traces on the windows were, without exception, fresh, left over only from the trip just completed and now at its destination. And all the trips had lasted more or less long. The traces were fresh, that they had in common, but how greatly they differed otherwise from one another. How differently the windows had been breathed on: over there a child’s breath, over here an old person’s breath. Sleep breath. Fear breath. Observer breath. Rage breath. Hesitant breath. Abandonment breath. And most of the windows in one bus showed the imprint of noses, in another more that of foreheads, in a third more that of cheeks, in a fourth more that of hands. The buses could also be divided, just from the outside of the windows, into those that had only a day’s journey behind them and those that had traveled through the night; those coming from mountainous regions and those from lowlands; those from dewy regions and those from rainy regions; those from landscapes with hailstorms and those whose windows had been covered with frost that morning—the traces were still there—or which had gone through a snowstorm; those traces, too, though long after the snow had melted, clearly inscribed on the windows, like those of a sandstorm, a shower of blossoms, a wave of mosquitoes, a swarm of grasshoppers. Maps of the country on the bus windows, unusually detailed. But were they accurate? Yes, for the moment, and for a good long while to come.
And so he then sat on the bus taking him back to Porodin and to the Morava. He had set out heading in a southwesterly direction and was returning from the northwest. The circle was closing. Did it close? The bus home to the enclave, unlike the one on the morning of his departure, was almost empty. Still, a passenger had sat down next to him in the rear, as if looking for company. He did not speak after all, but unfolded a newspaper, and as always the homecomer could not stop himself from reading along, in violation of his resolve to read no newspaper during his journey. New popes, new world champions, new heads of state, new stars, new volcanoes, new epidemics, a new planet, a new variety of wine, a new painkiller, a new mathematical puzzle: so he had been away that long? Halfway down the page a headline with his own name: it was a report, initially called a “tale,” about his, the former writer’s tour, written by the journalist and writer with
the lovely name of Melchior. He was known for publishing each of his articles in all the countries of Europe simultaneously, translated into each country’s language, and so, too, here, in the former country, whose—what was the word?—leading newspapers had long since been taken over by foreigners. His seat neighbor soon turned the page, but he had already been able to skim most of the article, also because it was written in a language that made it possible to take everything in almost at a glance; transparent language was probably the right term, with any need to continue reading obviated after the first few sentences—which spared one from wasting time on reading. And what was it that caught his eye? That he, as was already clear from the headline, had undertaken the tour just to get away from himself. That he had willfully sought out only the weird and out-of-the-way. That he had closed his eyes to reality. Serious writers were passionately concerned with current problems—and he? At most he brooded over them, hadn’t a clue. Destinies, characters, actions: not for him. Climate change; the hole in the ozone layer; the old and new primitives; the mass die-off of penguins; the Iroquois’ fear of heights, where at one time they had been able to build skyscrapers without vertigo; night-blindness increasing among cats and even owls; nuns getting married; genetically modified sorrel; amphibians turning back into fish: all of no interest to him. Nowhere did he show any compassion for his contemporaries. Instead he waxed enthusiastic over a glow worm, a hedgehog, a brook with a flake of mica at the bottom, an old road, a cow flop, a child’s cowlick, the red of clay, the white of quince blossoms. And as a person he was equally weird. Yet he had eyes everywhere, especially when it came to women’s posteriors. On the entire journey he had expressed himself vehemently and shown some feeling only once: when his cell phone fell in the ocean. Weird also in his religious observances—a regression to animistic practices: what else should one call it when he constantly turned around and listened to the faintest breath but was also constantly breathing on inanimate objects (for example: the rusted clapper of a ship’s bell). He apologized to a table he bumped against, to a stone, even to his own hand when he jammed it. And another time he threatened a creaking door with “Shut up!” while a broken shoelace was called “You no-good! You filthy pig! You wimp! You looney tunes!” and he shouted “Silence!” at a ringing telephone. A feral cat that he stroked he addressed as “whore,” and to a daddy longlegs he said, “Hey, doggy,” while he always addressed stray dogs with “Well, you old dodo bird!” And more than just a couple of times he was observed breathing with all his might on dead animals—flies, spiders, beetles, bees, even moles and mice, as if he thought he had the power to revive them—and that was the only time he showed passion.
The author of the article was already informed about the end of the journey, as could be seen from subheads like “Returning Empty-Handed” and “Even Well-Wishers Concerned About This Knight of Ill Fortune” and “Closest Friends See Through Him.” (Directly below the article the day’s horoscope, with a sentence that applied to him in quite a different way: “Work for peace.”)
When the homecomer looked up from the paper, his gaze caught that of the third passenger (there were no more in the bus). The third one was—what was the expression?—a mere child. He was sitting way up front and had turned to face him, apparently not just that minute but some time ago. And it seemed as though that boy there, almost a child, knew what the man behind him had been subjected to by the newspaper his neighbor to the rear was reading. It seemed that way? No, he really did know, knew literally, from A to Z, and he confirmed that during the night on the Morava boat, for he was among us in the audience, the last one to have been invited, the mystery guest. And he took over the storytelling from our host for a few sentences: upon reading the article, our host turned into the person the article portrayed, or played that role, trying it out—nibbling his fingernails a bit, closing his eyes (not completely), glancing, as the bus passed a traffic accident, with his mouth open like an idiot’s, back and forth between the tips of his shoes and the bus’s ceiling, as if it were the firmament, puffing out his cheeks by the bus’s window curtain, and so on. He leaned with the bus as it went around corners, and without regard for his neighbor threw his arms in the air as if about to take off and fly into the wild blue yonder; and finally he did nothing but smirk, meanwhile moving his lips, from which the boy could read the shortest of all the Balkan curses: “May the mouse fuck you!” Where had this curse been heard earlier on his journey?
This was not what mattered to the boy as he told the story. Time and again he had become completely entangled in something he had seen. The crown of a tree stirred out in the schoolyard, and as he watched it he was up there in the treetop. A sparrow bathed in a hollow in the sand, and he bathed along with it. A pebble rolled with the current along the bottom of a brook, and he rolled with it. Was this actually a case of being drawn in, of losing himself? It was more a kind of seeing in which, little by little, he merged with the thing seen—in which he did not lose himself, on the contrary: the thing became part of him. Up to now, to be sure, he had hardly experienced this kind of transference with people, at most with his younger siblings, and only when he watched them sleeping. The man behind him was the first stranger with whom such a thing happened, and the boy could not even say why he was filled with empathy in the case of this particular person, when there was nothing to empathize with, least of all in his gestures and facial expressions. However that might be, in the moments of transference, in which the near-child finally became the other person entirely, he felt something wash over him that in one way or another would determine the course of his life.
As the night sky over the river gradually brightened, the boatmaster had obviously resumed telling the story, a few sentences back. He had interrupted the boy, but lovingly, with enthusiasm. And so he continued: in the way the young person on the bus had looked at him, in the “osmosis” taking place, body and soul, he, the abdicated writer, had recognized the future writer. The person who became so engrossed in looking, to the point of complete, self-forgetful participation, all of it unintended and involuntary, showed himself to be a worthy successor. A successor in the profession: so such a thing existed, who would have thought it! Make way for the successor! And how amazing that the boy did not try to duck what lay ahead, and not just for one or two seasons but for his entire life! Any escape to a different profession, no matter what, was senseless: if anything he could only become, practice, and continue practicing what he was made for, or, to paraphrase Jakob Böhme, his primal condition, or, in still other words, his beautiful yet terrible problem. Welcome, successor, repeater, message-bearer. Greetings to ye, little brother, maternal child. Hallo, new writer-in-the-air, new die-tosser, fresh-speller, old boy. And fear not: you are it. And be afraid: you are it.
12
THE ENCLAVE OF Porodin no longer existed. With it the last enclave in the Balkans, and in Europe as a whole, had disappeared, or “disenclaved.” Only he, the homecomer, had not known about this—the rest of us had long since adjusted to the changed situation. It had had to happen. It was how things went, and as far as Porodin was concerned, it had even happened peacefully for the most part, and the changes had not taken place all at once but very gradually, almost imperceptibly. Only at him, after what some of us considered his “unforgivably” long absence, did they jump out.
It was a warm summery evening as the bus rolled into Porodin, and it would stay light for a long time. He noticed right away that the sign at the entrance to the village was in Roman script, no longer Cyrillic, “PORODIN,” not “породин.” Another writer had said once, responding to a newspaper reporter’s question about things he disliked, that among others it was the Cyrillic script, and one could sympathize with him after what had been done to his people and his country under the banner of this script. With Porodin, however, it was different, wasn’t it? The Cyrillic script did mean something, but not what one might assume, right?
The other thing that jumped out at him upon his arriv
al was above all what was no longer there and had previously given the enclave its character. A welcome change: no more rolls of razor wire marking the town limits and surrounding the fields and vineyards that belonged to the town; also the absence of tanks in a semicircle on the hills, their guns pointing in all directions, of surveillance aircraft thundering overhead—hardly above the tops of the poplars—of signs with crossed pistols at the entrances to taverns. The whole village unarmed and unguarded, freely accessible, no more rocks being thrown at the bus’s windows as it entered town, at most a few kisses being blown, more for old times’ sake than with hostile intent. Had he mentioned vineyards? They no longer existed either. They had become superfluous; there was no one to take care of them; the few remaining grapevines had dried up or been burned; or the vineyards had been bulldozed to make way for a golf course—the many hollows that had protected the vines from the wind were ideal for golf. Besides, the wine they had made, heavy and naturally cloudy, had been good only for domestic consumption. And the sheep grazing as far as the eye could see? Not a trace of them, not even their hoof marks. And the village idiots? Out of the picture.