by Peter Handke
During the last days of winter I walked and walked in the cold wind through the woods, and pondered whether it was not I after all who had been forgotten by the others, who had been given up for lost by them. Perhaps I am the one who no longer counts for them, who holds no more surprises for them, who appears in neither their daydreams nor their night dreams?
What, for instance, about the one who of late has been most powerfully present for me in my thoughts as I walked, Filip Kobal from Rinkenberg, the next village over from Rinkolach, whom I once viewed as my successor in writing, more flexible than I, more generous, more warmhearted, more colorful? Yet at one time we often said to each other that it should actually be the other way around, since I came from the village on the sunny side, and he, a few years younger, from the village on the shady side, beyond the hill, which was much steeper there.
We first met as adults, he a lawyer as well; I already had a book to my name, and he at the time was nowhere near that. He did become my successor, at any rate in the legal affairs bureau of the Southern Railway, as a tenant of the house in Sievering, and in other respects, too. Although he was bigger and broader than I, had a more powerful voice, lighter skin and eyes, many mistook him for me. Then, at a distance, I read his first texts and talked him out of all the guilt and self-flagellation he had put into them: “From the shadow of Rinkenberg into the light of Rinkolach!” He, who had previously groaned at the thought of having to go down to the garden gate, learned from me to go walking. Likewise he, who at one time had to clear his throat before every sentence and even then remained almost impossible to understand, became a sought-after reader and panelist, from the heart of Switzerland to Schleswig-Holstein. When he told me, his confidant, that he secretly felt superior to all those around him, that he spent entire evenings sitting alone as if enthroned, with the lights out and the entire world at his feet, I encouraged him to go ahead and let people see that from time to time; it was appropriate for him and his writing, within limits, and since then, whenever he stands up and reads, out comes a mighty voice that drowns out any contradiction, a most remarkable contrast to the diffidence, mumbling, and word-swallowing he still displays in everyday situations. Perhaps he has become an authority even more with his voice than with his books, and at the same time a folksy figure; wherever he appears, he is immediately invited to sing along, to play cards, to go bowling, which is probably unique for our Austria and a homegrown writer, especially nowadays. Yet he still dreads the physical work I recommended to him, partly for waking and schooling his imagination; he recoils at the thought of it, as if this were asking too much of him; a quiver of revulsion runs through him if he has to so much as pick up a trash can. True, he has moved from the shade to the sun of Rinkolach, his house is open to all—natives, refugees, readers—but his elder sister does everything for him, from polishing his shoes to chopping wood and mowing the lawn; with her there, he hardly lifts a finger.
And this Filip Kobal, who could count on being understood by me in a way that a person probably experiences only once in a lifetime, has, I think, turned his back on me forever.
The last straw was his visit to me here in the bay over a year ago. Since then he has sent me not a single sign of life, not even a card from the places where he gives readings, whereas previously I would receive big fat letters from him in his enormous sign painter’s handwriting, for which I once praised him, like so much else. A reason for his silence toward me may perhaps lie in the country once so dear to both our hearts, Yugoslavia, which he, as he puts it in an article, has unmasked as his “own personal illusion” and has “smoked out of himself,” and which still shines on before me as a reality. But I know that one hour of double-voiced storytelling about that country would suffice, and Kobal and I would be reduced to completely unanimous weeping and cursing, weeping, laughing, and cursing.
No, Filip Kobal has written me off because I settled in a faraway country, rather than where he is convinced I belong. He disapproves, as he told me at the end, of my obstinate, and, according to him, arbitrary, abandonment of my place of origin for something that in no respect seemed necessary, certainly not essential as an “exile” (which, to be sure, I have never in my life asserted a need for). It did no good that on that last visit he roamed for days at my side through the hills and valleys of the Seine, dropped in with me on hundreds of bars, churches, hermitages, houseboats, transmitters, and local radio stations.
I took him to the wintry birds’ sleeping tree by the railroad station, even had my opera glasses with me, so that my nearsighted friend could distinguish the massive branches in the plane tree’s crown from the motionless sparrow-balls. I shared with him the minutes of the last session of the town council, filled him in on the proportional assignment of seats to the various parties, from community to community within the département, with its population in the millions, gave a scintillating account of the early history of the region, from the days of the Romans and the Middle Ages to the liberation in 1944 by the division commanded by General Leclerc. In the church in Sevres he found himself standing with me by the tiny spiral staircase from the twelfth century that began high above our heads in the wall—there was no other staircase, not even a ladder—and ended who knows where; in Ville d’Avray, as the wind feathered the water, I showed him the ponds painted by Corot; on Mont St.-Valérien near Suresnes we breathed the air in the former Gestapo death cells; in La Defense we stood together, buffeted by the night wind, in the ghostly light of the Grande Arche.
In the forests we crouched side by side over the secret springs from which I had scraped away the leaves for him, whereupon they began to pulse before our eyes. I slipped with him into the underbrush to find the foxes’ lair, climbed down with him into the ditch of the giant toad, pointed out to him in passing the rivulet flowing around a menhir, bought apples and milk with him on a farm on the plateau of Saclay, sniffed at his side the great mill of Versailles, passed with him four forest rangers’ lodges in a single afternoon, approached with him, without saying a word, as we made our way uphill on the path taken by Jean Racine and Pascal through the meadows along Rhodon Brook, the barns of Port-Royal, of which I hoped to hear my Filip Kobal say that he had never, not even in our Jaunfeld region, seen such noble threshing-floor roofs, soaring so high toward the heavens, mirroring the centuries.
I introduced him to the waitress in the church-bar of Jouy-en-Josas, who unexpectedly addressed him in Slovenian and turned out to have been born in Kosovelje on the karst and to the tarot players in the back room along the Route Nationale 10, who were a group of itinerant Serbian stonemasons; attended with him the Russian Orthodox Sunday service in the blue wood-frame church in the bay here, no larger than a garden shed, but how many people unexpectedly inside, what an enormous missal, and above us all, in a cloud of incense, the eagle of St. John the Evangelist. I showed him the smocks of the local craftsmen, just as blue as those of the cottagers back home, the shopping bags of the older women, dangling from the crook of their arms on long handles, the pocket knives with wooden grips, so similar to our penknives back home, the numerous blank windows in the houses along the bay, even a hillside with ancient cow paths.
Yet Filip Kobal, after all the days we had spent hiking together, after he had remarked briefly that the region here was exceptionally lively and varied, and that anyone could see I knew my way around like a taxi driver, geographer, and forester all in one—why else would the many people who got lost here instinctively turn to me and receive reliable directions—Filip Kobal said I had spent enough time away from home now. For a long while I had represented a standard for him. As long as I had stuck it out, as his fellow countryman, in writing and also in life, that had given him and a few others the strength to carry on, he would assert. But in the meantime my example was no longer valid. Of course, he himself repeatedly left our country and its people. I, however, had overstayed my time abroad, and it was henceforth inconceivable that he should read my admittedly very original and special writings
as before. Of course, he saw the similarities between this place and the region from which we both came, precisely through the differences, but a spiral staircase in Sevres could never be “my” or “the” spiral staircase, something characteristic, something for a book. With all due respect to the pear tree in my yard, likewise to the even older cherry tree, to the neighbors, to the bar acquaintances, to the cattails, bullfrogs, snakes, and otters in the forest ponds, to the air base, the atomic plant, the secret vineyards, the tangle of vines above the brook known only to me: when described, woven into a narrative by me, one who had come of his own volition, they amounted in his eyes to nothing but interference in others’ business, the opposite of a well-founded book—something superfluous, and with all those plane trees, cedars, bamboo stalks, even fig trees and palms, to boot.
And abruptly, as Kobal was lecturing me, he seized me around the midsection, hoisted me in the air, and continued to speak, thus: “It’s true, in the course of these days you’ve let me see, without pointing it out, always only in passing, the Easter fungus on the tree trunks just like that at home, the moss in the ravines, the almost identical rural railroad station, the woman with the washboard, the cassis or currant bushes deep in the woods, the bus station like Klagenfurt’s, the wooden balcony with red geraniums like Kobarid’s, the root cellar like the one behind my family’s house in Rinkenberg. But it isn’t here. This here is a substitute. The originals are somewhere else and have been waiting for you a long, long time. What do I care if you keep a journal on the landscape and the people here, even a chronicle? Even if you sit out and walk out another twenty years here, nothing will acquire mythic depth for you. And the mythic dimension, the earth-fissure world, was your specialty, from the beginning. Without the mythic dimension your books are certainly more manageable, less circumstantial. But they aren’t really yours, don’t really yield a proper book. And don’t tell me you’re on the trail of the mythic world of the Ile de France just because you know the appropriate story to tell when we get to the ‘Crossroads of the Woman Without a Head’ in the forest of Meudon, and likewise at the ‘Crossroads of the Broken Man’ on the other wooded hill, which is called the ‘Forest of False Rest,’ and likewise in the forest two hills farther on, called the ‘Forest of the Hanged Wolf.’ Though the original inhabitants here, of whom, I admit, there are quite a few, like to describe how things looked in their childhood, even they are far from having a unifying history, let alone a legend, a tale, a fairy tale, a tradition. This people is simply not your people, and I mean not only the people of the suburbs here, but the entire French people, so enlightened and linguistically sophisticated that for every situation on earth it has, without even looking it up, a polished, definitive, if not always lucid formulation on hand. From what I know of you, the Mongolians were a more appropriate people for you, also the Indians, the Mexicans. Here in France not even all the stone graveyards with their exclusively elaborate plaques to which I’ve followed you have a mythic aura, certainly not those; these fields of sarcophagi look to me like nothing but sarcophagi, flesh-devouring containers. In this country you have to go back to the Middle Ages to encounter the fairy-tale colors and the gust of myth that at home brushes your forehead around every corner. You mustn’t be without a people, not you. You’re not cut out for mere reporting, for the role of the uninvolved bystander. Consider the warmth, rare though it may have been, that you’ve received from your people in the past. There’s no warmth like it. You’ve sidestepped your people, again and again, and now you’re in the process of losing it. Only yesterday when you came home you were hailed as ‘someone special.’ Today from one end of the country to the other no one greets you. You’ve spoiled your relationship with your people by your absence, and even you stopped believing long ago in a people of readers in the diaspora. By the Milky Way above the Jaunfeld Plain, by the double onion towers of Heiligengrab, by the brewery of Sorgendorf, by the fir forests of the Dobrava still full of chanterelles and a Russian sense of vastness, by the train shooting by in the autumn mist like several trains in one, by the freshly renovated clay bowling alley, by the monument to the partisans, by the IHS carved on the barn gable in Rinkolach, by the woman under the apple tree, by the windows of the farmhouses so low that children don’t need a door to go in and out, by the wilted wildflowers in tin cans in the wayside shrines, by the manna ash trees on the Liesnaberg, even without a pilgrimage up there, by the owl in broad daylight on the chimney of the house next door: connect again, if there’s still time, with our shared Slavic litanies, which always made you quake inside as otherwise only the Psalms, the Odyssey, and the bells of the Resurrection could.”
In my recollection, Filip Kobal dropped me as he spoke these words, rather than setting me down. I struggled with him, half hoisted into the air, half scraping the ground with one foot. But he was not my angel, not then, and not since. For his next folk novel he has returned to the valley we have in common.
For a time the region was poisoned for me by his presence, as had never happened to me with anyone before, or at most with my publisher, the other one, who, when he still came to visit me in the bay, left me each time, after his equally hectic arrival and departure, feeling the kind of loneliness in my house, my region, and particularly my writing such as a writer can probably experience only through dealings with those who buy up the rights to his work: no sooner was his greed for the manuscript satisfied, or the obligatory visit, like one to a terminally ill patient, hastily taken care of, than he found my existence as incomprehensible as tedious; the silence around the house and grounds made him restless, the chair on which he perched seemed too small, the countryside in which I lived, with its forests, birds’ flight paths, barracks, orchards, all of which he took in sullenly, was not part of the civilized world, anyone with whom I had dealings was not worth mentioning. In the meantime I dream of a third publisher, a new pioneer for my books, and by the light of day have no hope for any such thing.
Yet only my obstinacy has saved me from that damning judgment rendered by Filip Kobal, my old pal, that I and my place of residence are out of the question for a real book, for a “Gregor Keuschnig book.” While Kobal was speaking in such terms, my obstinacy whisked me away to the titmice hopping about in the spruce outside the window, to a helicopter above the ridge of the hills, and to a ball of paper that kept rolling back and forth in the sun on the sidewalk as he hurled these charges at me; whenever something became threatening to me, I have always taken refuge in such sheltering images.
During the first period after this, when I walked the countryside, alone again and determined to remain unaccompanied in the future, I wanted my eyes to compel those mythic phenomena to appear that Kobal had declared absent from these parts, and, contrary to my usual practice, even questioned the bay’s native residents about them, like a researcher doing fieldwork, which I regretted as I continued on my way, precisely when the answers betrayed secrets and yet more secrets.
But perhaps only now, however confusedly, would I be capable of responding to him, thus: “It may be that where we come from myths and fables are cultivated more than here. Yet that very fact renders them hollow. No, for now I am not going home. You see, when I come home, no one is there. It’s actually more likely that I will move even farther away. In the meantime things are more lively here than at home, with the cliffs I’ve just discovered, something you missed most in the Seine hills, the blackberries, the yellow-headed dragonflies and hornets; and just a moment ago the first peacock butterfly of the spring crashed into the window, and yesterday the mythic woman from Catalonia brushed by it, and this evening in Porchefontaine I am meeting someone who collects ladders! And how do you know in any case that I’m still dreaming of archetypal images and stories? And that, if indeed I am still dreaming of them, I still have confidence in them? The following, for example, is the dream I’ve had repeatedly over the last few years: all the animal species in the world are running, galloping, flying, in all their variety and in harmony from all di
rections toward a watering hole in the desert, and each of the animals is equally large or small, the horses, the birds, the lions, the rabbits. But then when I reach the water after them, I see nothing but an infinite number of bees circling and about to drown. May it not be that the myths are still potent, but at the same time warped, corrupted, spoiled? Perhaps I would like to get rid of them once and for all, lest they, which only lead me astray now, become dangerous to me; perhaps I would like to cause them to vanish, and why not through the practice of making notes, lists, charts every day? Yes, it sometimes seems to me now as though the mythic may still be beckoning to me from a great distance, but it turns out to be a labyrinth with no way out. And by contrast I’d like to let the simple present have its say, the current day, the moment free of myth, and capture and accompany it in the language of the chronicler; smoke out my addiction to myth. And perhaps I left my country and yours because unlike you, Kobal, I’m not capable of maintaining a fraternal distance there, at least not in the long run, but get too close to people, know too much about them, and then become petty from all my knowledge. Yes, in my own country, no matter how happy I am to return each time, sooner or later I feel stifled, as much by its unique people as by my own pettiness. In a foreign country, away from the metropolis, surrounded by a language that is not my own and never will be, I can’t help preserving a distance, and I also do my utmost to avoid learning anything about the local people (question them only out of weakness), thus preserving all the more my peculiar intuitions, and as a result can do something that was impossible for me back home, namely dream deeply of one or the other of the absent ones, even dreaming at times, for instance now during the long winter nights, in almost unmutilated forms of myth, fable, or primeval tale.”