by Peter Handke
Every enclave, including that of Porodin, to which he had allegedly at one time “linked his fate” (Melchior) meant nothing to him by comparison with the unknown. To stumble into a region in which every step led deeper into the fairy-tale-like unknown: nothing could top that. Ah, the great unknown, with colors never before seen, with noises never before heard. What he saw on his way through the village, beginning with the new bus station, all glass—for one arrival and one departure per day—with bird silhouettes pasted everywhere on the panes, seemed fairly familiar, however. A strange sight in enclave times would have been the many runners, all with name badges, as if for a permanent conference, wearing the track suits now worn all over the world; if a single runner had swerved around the slow-moving or seated enclave folk, that would have been strange—but no longer. The footgear and clothing and not just that of the runners: internationally known brands (although they might be knockoffs). The former chicken pens had become bright green lawns, the grass scalped even shorter than at Wimbledon, and here and there in the middle a marble fountain. A single turkey strutting over the bare ground in what remained of a farmyard, around and around in a circle, but silent, not gobbling; all that could be heard was his stiff feathers, which hung down and brushed the ground with every step, making the sound of a leaf rake. The enclave sounds and especially the smells? Once upon a time? Instead the constant racket of alarms from parked cars, factory-new. All that was missing was a pedestrian zone and smiling Tibetan monks. Were they missing?
At one time he had thought all these “new folk” came from another planet, were extraterrestrials. But no: they came from here and were firmly anchored in the here and now. The planet belonged exclusively to them. The ones from another planet were him and his kind—“You, my audience!” And those who were holding the fort now ran and ran, and continued holding the fort. If they were to stop running, not only their name badges, complete with photos, would promptly fall off.
He did come upon a few of the original inhabitants. They were all old, and they had all been old acquaintances—except that on the evening of his return they looked right through him. It was not only that they did not recognize him. They had no eyes for him. (The only one who had greeted him had been one of the runners, who shouted in broadest German or Danish, “Welcome to Porodin!” adding considerately, “Beware of strangers’ looks!”) The couple of natives sat huddled together at a small table in a former transformer hut, which, emptied out, had been made into their clubhouse, among them the friend who, way back when, had driven him on his tractor to the bus. And for that friend, too, although he looked in his direction, he did not exist in his hour of return. To be sure, the oldsters were busy singing their enclave songs at the tops of their voices, fervently yet so preoccupied that what was taking place around them probably did not enter their consciousness. A new song had been added to the repertoire, up to then just a saying, and this saying and the new song were “To je to!” (“That’s that! And that’s that!”) And so forth—that was all there was to the lyrics.
Who had died in his absence? In earlier times one could see who had died from the house façades, where black banners would be hung bearing the names and the dates of death. Now: not a single banner, neither a new black one nor one of those from the enclave period that were left hanging for several years, to be used the next time someone died, becoming faded and eventually almost illegible. And the cemetery? In the meantime it had been surrounded with a high wall, which reminded him of the rampart in his Old Village, erected to keep out the Turks—but here, according to the posted Internet link, protecting a “European Cultural Monument.”
More and more abandoned houses, only gradually revealing their presence between and behind the new construction. The shutters closed, the hooks that secured them when open dangling uselessly. Luxuriant blooming in the equally abandoned gardens behind the houses—a lilac bush amid tangles of weeds, known by its Balkan-Turkish name as jergovan, and a single peony glowing amid stinging nettles, with all the colors in the world gathered in its center, glowing its heart out. And all the fruitfulness, the trees laden with apples, plums, apricots in the gardens of those who had been gone so long, or were dead? He did not ask, did not want to hear the word “death” right now. And the ringed dove in the crook of a tree, with no letter in its beak, or was there one after all?
Whooshing back to the living. Where were they? There: on a bench by a wall, sitting in the evening sun, were a few, this time old women, and for them, too, he did not exist; they had eyes only for the mobile telephones they all held in their hands, waiting for their children and grandchildren, the emigrants, to call, from Canada, from Australia, from Brazil.
Outside the former enclave, making his way to the Moravian Night, to his boat: no danger anymore? But he still felt it, from the years of being surrounded, or imagined it, as an element of his life, or an element of his story. The sense of menace remained. He almost hoped for an attack that would prevent him from returning, there, at the crossroads between the fields. The sound of a shot, coming from a balloon bursting or an automobile tire popping: disappointment. A wild boar, snorting, lumbered out of the underbrush behind him, coming closer: unfortunately just another runner, dripping with sweat, self-absorbed. The figure by one of the huge oaks on the edge of the Morava meadows (let’s hope he’s lying in wait for me): another lone wanderer, leaning against the tree, as if trying to draw strength from it. And another figure at another crossroads on the riverine plain, holding something metallic with noticeably sharp edges that glinted ominously in the setting sun, with everything else already in shadow: just a third solitary wanderer, reading a book as he stood there. And the black great Dane that hurtled toward him from the green meadow rose into the sky and turned into a raven—he had rejoiced too soon. And the person yelling clear across the fields, still fallow even in summer—“O old man, O rage, O despair”—was an actor, not even all that old, in fact very young, practicing for his role as an old man in Le Cid. But then, finally, someone who was not just playing at being in despair: a man who was lost—a native, in his familiar region.
No more walking backward in his usual fashion—only forward now. Finally dusk, and with it the smell of the river, and through the aspen and poplar trees the neon sign from his boat, no, his hostel, flickering on, MORAVIAN NIGHT, with some of the letters hidden by the trees, more the consonants than the vowels. Smoke: black and strong from the funnel. Fire? No such luck. A surge of joy, and at the same time he delayed his return. That was how it was, or that was how the story wanted it. Or perhaps he really could not find his way, on a stretch he had traversed hundreds of times before. Passing through bomb crater after bomb crater—the last section of his journey: a trip through bomb craters, left over from the Second World War, from the Thousand-Year Reich’s assault on the country, which in those days became former for the first time. And since he was thinking of numbers: the craters came from the first of three bombardments the country had endured in the twentieth century (in the twenty-first century since the birth of the Son of God, who became a man for us and died, that we might live in him, bombardments had not yet been necessary).
The craters were not large, but instead came thick and fast, one after another, in a fairly straight line, as the bird flies, so to speak, across the meadows to the Morava, and in this way they marked his route for him. This hike was a pleasure, with its gentle up and down, which created a rhythm, and that rhythm possibly enhanced even more the pleasure of walking. And besides, the bottoms of the bomb craters were firm, yet at the same time soft from the dead leaves that had collected there over the course of the almost seven or eight decades since the bombs were dropped, with the result that one bounced along. There could be no more harmonious and peaceful up and down than this walking from crater to crater, the leaves at the bottom so thick (and as fluffily soft as otherwise only the pinfeathers of birds of prey) that one involuntarily began to walk like a crane. One was almost tempted to use endearments: “Dear little cr
aters. Sweet little bomb craters!” The evening dew collected at the bottom much more plentifully than elsewhere in the meadows, began to flow, forming little roundish puddles in the gaps among the leaves, good not only against thirst, and there he again found the human frogs from his Old Village; scores of them were crouching on the edge of the evening-dew puddles, their teeny-tiny human fingers stretched into the water to moisten them.
An interruption of the rhythm then occurred only with the last of the bomb craters: this one much larger and above all deeper than the 248 previous ones (with the rhythm he had started counting, and 248 had been his laundry number long ago in boarding school); it was a true crater, more than a mere hollow, extending way down to the water table, dug by one of the mother bombs from what had been the last war, for the time being, against the country, dropped by no one in particular, and at least without the intention to kill—enough of that had been done already—but rather to get rid of the extra weight still on board after the successful attack farther south on the Varvarin bridge and the civilians on it celebrating Christ’s ascension. Naturally—according to what nature? (our interrupter, once more after all)—acceptable pretexts had been found yet again for the solicitous release: necessity as the mother of invention.
Not a good idea to cross this crater, in which, after the mother of bombs detonated, there were still some son and daughter bombs, small but—oho!—waiting to explode. The impact had hurled clods of clay from inside the earth against the most distant tree trunks, where the clay still clung to them like cement, and the fractured rock that had pierced the bark to the core had in the meantime been encapsulated by the wood, also growing with the trees, so that rock after rock was trapped in the forks of the trees and way up into the crowns. He made his way around the crater, seeing a bronze reflection on the forest floor—although the sun had long since gone down?
And also bronze—where was the light source?—was the reflection on the water, flowing silently and rapidly along, when at the end of this hike he stood on the bank of the Morava. At his feet, in the grass that grew along the bank, the familiar hedgehog, it, too, with a bronze glow on its spines, and what did it say? “I’m here already!”? No, it said, “I’m still here!” And that now the ship’s bell tolled: for real? And the scent of honeysuckle, which he otherwise knew only from books. But what did “only” mean? He tossed his pack into the river, together with everything in it (not much). Yes, he would return empty-handed. And that was as it should be.
13
THE NIGHT WAS at an end. The writer opened his eyes. Broad daylight. Morning sun. He pulled the woman, the stranger, to him, but no one was there. Yet they had just embraced each other as no couple had ever done before. Love? The woman had let him feel that she was there for him. What was so special about that? To him it was a miracle. And now, in the morning, he wanted to snatch her, was panting in empty space for her body. Yes, did the woman then not exist? On the contrary, she did exist, outside of the dream, and how, but she did not belong to him. Ah, the pain at her absence. He was at odds with himself, for good.
And where were the rest of us, who had listened all night on the boat, the friend from Porodin, the dentist from Velika Plana, the former officer, now a mushroom grower, the successor writer, the unemployed lawyer, the unemployed teacher, the night porter? No trace of us either; no question of a “we”; the writer was alone in the salon, with not even the bus-chasing dog at his feet; looking around for “us”: again nothing. Yet the thought had been that the story would end with all of us on deck, under the awning, and also no longer on the Morava but farther north, past its mouth, in the middle of the Danube, ten times wider, heading toward the Black Sea, toward which we would have chugged in the gray of dawn, once again fleeing. Nothing. Ah, such pain, so great: separated forever.
Not even a river, not even the Morava outside the windows, which certainly were no bull’s-eyes. Striking, the harsh light in the cracks of the swinging door, with the sign KUHINJA, kitchen. Pushing the door open—and again nothing, again the void. Standing, blinded, in the sun. No trace of a boat, of the Moravian Night? What had just recently been a boat had shrunk into a dugout, and now the dugout sank. And the river, the Morava? The Morava dried up. And Porodin was no enclave after all, had never been one. The Balkan enclaves were somewhere else.
What had he been seeking among the lost souls in the Balkans? Why had he not left them to their fate? And was it even the Balkans anymore? Wasn’t that the rattle of suburban trains rather than the roar of the Balkan expressway? Still lingering, the echo of the night, like the roar of the tractor trailer trucks and the rushing of the Morava, of the bellowing of the chamois, the croaking of the frogs in the reeds along the banks. And like the echo, the residual images. The one who was lost, wasn’t that in reality him? Had the night’s undertaking been nothing but seizing a handful of dust?
Now a third angel put in an appearance at the end of his story: after the guardian angel and the warning angel, this was the reassuring angel. And it reassured him. And he allowed himself to be reassured. That’s that. And that is that. To je to, I to je to—geography of dreams, stay with me now and in the hour of my death.
All his life the writer had worked on a book at night. And it was during the night that he had always finished it. Except that in the morning the book was no longer there. It had even appeared at night as a book, been published. But in the light of day: gone, vanished. Reaching out for it: into empty space. It had happened again and again that the writer could close his eyes and still have the book before him for a while. Just one page, a single one, showed itself to him this way, handwritten. The writing, however, was not his own. It was legible, yet he never succeeded in deciphering it, not a word, at most a letter here and there. It also seemed as though the book was not written in his language. So in another one? Which one? In a foreign one, no, in an entirely unknown one. And nevertheless it was one page of the book he had written during the night! He was still utterly exhausted from writing, his heart racing, his writing hand aching and cramping.
And each time this writing remained visible for an amazingly long time. And when at last it began to flicker, flickering apart and fading: what emptiness, what blackness. A planet all its own appeared in the blackness, scarred, craggy, with occasional bright spots, a chaos, pulsing, and accompanying it a music so quiet and fragrant that its like would never be heard again. Accompanying it the wing beats of an enormous bird, invisible, the sound almost identical to that of a cloth being shaken out and spread.
In the course of his life the writer had written not a few such nocturnal books, which had been dissolved into nothing by the light of day. Into nothing? Really? Something remained inside him from all of them, something tangible, so much so that he could not believe they had really disappeared, that these one-night books had never existed. And how did he define what remained, was tangible? What remained to him from every nocturnal book was a taste. The book existed somewhere; it was no nocturnal fata morgana; it had something durable about it, something he could taste. And the taste always had a foretaste as well. And something else remained with him from the night: a word from the writer’s Arabic period, which meant to “pass the night in conversation,” and the word was samara. Again, after Stara Vas and Samarkand, the threefold a.
It was a dark, clear morning, as if made for setting out—and for staying put. The forest outside the window here: not a riverine forest? The Morava River near the village of Porodin in the depths of the Balkans: swept away? The boat called Moravian Night rocking no more? Hauled ashore?
And a fourth or fifth angel grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, the scruff-of-the-neck angel: the rustling in the treetops now; listen, just think, here just as there. And then look, imagine, the cherry tree, turned red overnight: the night of the ripening cherries. And the swallows, look, here just as there in our Europe. And the quivering, rippling seconds here just as there. And the clouds here just as there. And the mosquitoes here just as there. And the peo
ple out on the street, hear this, all of you, really were those of Porodin, and I greeted them, hear this, through the window in their Balkan language, and—they greeted us back. And the morning bus driving by was a Steyr diesel, and the silhouettes in the windows were familiar to me.
Light streaming diagonally out of the clouds, look, that was how life sometimes was. May you be the son of your moment. And may the moment be your breath.
The writer had invited us onto his boat, saying, “Come along, all of you, I must tell you a sad story!” A sad story? That remained to be seen.
—January to November 2007
ALSO BY PETER HANDKE
The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick
Short Letter, Long Farewell
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams
The Ride Across Lake Constance and Other Plays
A Moment of True Feeling
The Left-Handed Woman
The Weight of the World
Slow Homecoming
Across
Repetition
The Afternoon of a Writer
Absence
Kaspar and Other Plays
The Jukebox and Other Essays on Storytelling
Once Again for Thucydides
My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay
On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House
Crossing the Sierra de Gredos
Don Juan
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Peter Handke was born in Griffen, Austria, in 1942. His many works include The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay, On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House, Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, and Don Juan, all published by FSG. Handke’s plays include Kaspar and The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other, and he wrote the screenplay for Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire. In 2014, Handke received the International Ibsen Award. You can sign up for email updates here.