by Peter Handke
And every time, my memory reminds me, I found myself alone afterward. I see her dashing away from the circle, and already she is around the corner, out of sight, inaudible. Since she always presented herself as a sort of adventurer, disguised or shrouded and veiled, she did not leave behind the smallest image.
As a rule we arranged to meet in third locations, settings neither of us knew, usually even in third countries. In one such foreign city we were lying once in the summery darkness, and suddenly I heard her saying that I should live with her. It was less this statement than the voice echoing from the pitch-black emptiness that made me fall silent. And then she repeated what she had said, with the same ghostly echo.
I have never known what verb to use to describe physical love. The verb that came closest was from the Odyssey, where it is said of a man and a woman that they “rested” together, often “all the night through,” “until rosy-fingered dawn.” That is how I had rested with this woman, time and again.
Such rest was now at an end. The voice talked and talked, saying always the same thing, with variations. And then the invisible being next to me, a moment ago nothing but a giddy summery body, resorted to violence. At first there was just a kind of stomping in place. Then it began to flail around and grew to giant proportions, or as our lover of local legends, Filip Kobal, would say, became a “Berchta mummer,” a worshipper of the pagan goddess. And the heavy, massive body of this spawn of darkness sat on her victim, just as in legend, threw herself over him, kneaded him, plucked at him, pressed down on him, stuffed him into herself. I have felt horror like this only in the one dream I had of sleeping with my mother.
It was also appropriate for a dream or a legend that I “freed myself with my last ounce of strength,” “I do not know how.” I fled the bed, the room, the dark house, and when I turned to look as I ran, the devouring woman was perched above the door, like in olden times in the village, as tall as the façade, her legs spread over the lintel and dangling to the ground on either side of the entrance, and as I ran I got hopelessly lost, took the bus going in the direction opposite from the railroad station, ended up in suburbs where, in the bright light of morning, I could not even decipher signs that were as clear as day. And I did not feel liberated in the least, but rather, in spite of the fresh air and the passersby who shielded me, still suffocated by that slimy placenta-darkness.
Since then I have never rested with my former chosen one. For a long time we also did not meet, and neither sent the other any sort of sign. Then I saw her again, in the harbor of Split. At the sight of her I at once felt summery all over. And suddenly I had no other memories of her, had forgotten everything else in her new presence. She was rolling with a stream of others down the gangplank of the car ferry just arriving from the Dalmatian islands, and what I had seen first was not her face but the bunch of flowers in her hand, which was also holding the steering wheel, flowers so small and richly colored and native that they could have been gathered only on an island, on island cliffs.
Then she approached me perfectly naturally. She had married in the meantime, but she still played the adventurer, the independent woman, or, as she had been called during our time together, the “loafer,” taking off on her own once a year, though with her husband’s money and also with her father’s, and going far away. To be sure, I kept thinking as she talked, “How threadbare this woman is!” or “How worm-eaten!” But such thoughts did not count. And she acted as if nothing were wrong. And thus nothing was. And that is how it has remained between her and me ever since.
It is not she I see at the moment, not even her hand, but only the white pebbly seashell cudgel in the midday light at the foot of the Taurus range, still snow-covered on the peaks, while here outside my study a thrush leaps like a cat out of the bushes, and the shadow of a bomber from the air base passing high overhead darkens my writing paper for the twinkling of an eye.
The wooded hills around the bay are greening. The greening began on the ground, crept upward, and in these first days of April has reached the level of the underbrush. The trees themselves still look bare, except for some crowns rounded out by a veil of green, which yields tiers of parachutes floating down. Here, too, lizards leap and dart, a type different from those my woman friend sees in her Middle Eastern delta, more adapted to tree bark, and the other day, when I dug out the rotten stump of the poplar tree in the garden, then sawed it up and split it, along with still-motionless stag beetles, the pulpy interior was swarming with hornet larvae, from which, some of them already clearly formed, the heads with their hornlike protuberances stuck out and stirred, next to them their dead ancestors as mummies, surrounded by wood in which, when I dumped them out, their hollows remained.
Before I move on to the seventh and last of my distant travelers and also describe, describe in an interrogative mode, the temporary rift with my son, consummated only in my thoughts, already long past, yet still alarming to me today, I should like to try to clear up a problem of form, perhaps for the last time in the course of this undertaking. (My son, still retracing my footsteps, in Yugoslavia, far to the south in Montenegro, will have to hurry to reach by Easter Sunday that tiny church in Thessaloniki where Christ resurrected after the Crucifixion is portrayed in a way that I, so needful of images of resurrection, have otherwise never in my life seen.)
It sometimes seems to me that in my writing, and not only this present project, I am threatened by completeness: instead of leaving space, of filling up all available space, something of which I always accused the woman from Catalonia; of not creating a line for my story but cluttering it up with intricate variations. So: away with variations? Away with completeness, which threatens to reduce my freely streaming narrative to a kind of catalogue? I, the cataloguer, as the internal enemy of my other I, the narrator? To avoid a catalogue, should I now leave the episode of my alienation from my son out of the narrative? I do not know.
If this were the case, that internal enemy would have to be the one with my first profession. Might I, the lawyer, the doctor of jurisprudence, be obstructing me the narrator? Might the form of the laws I once studied be turning against the form, not amenable to study, of my story? And again there come to mind the catalogues belonging to that Roman law I so greatly admire, codified later in Byzantium under the emperor Justinian. Although they constitute a closed system, as a legal code should, reading them still opens and refreshes my mind. And long ago that legal language helped me find my way out of myself. That was true especially for my writing, to which I was drawn as never to a place and also never to a human being. (It did not become a substitute for a country and its people; rather it stood for them from the outset, had from the beginning no intention of doing anything but narrate—but what?)
The question was: what language was suitable for my writing? When I was a young man, each time I sat down to write, full of inchoate longing, I found myself hesitating at the very first letter and realized that I had no language—no writing language. Usually I would then slink away from the desk or wherever, my mission unaccomplished, and whenever I wrote something down after all, it was the same word covering the entire page, or the stammering of mere syllables. And that was supposed to be the story I had just seen before me in chiaroscuro?
Until I learned the language of the law, and in particular the Latin terminology, I did not succeed at getting a single sentence to capture properly the light that at times shone so far up ahead of me, within me? Only the language of the historians, of Thucydides among the Greeks and among the Romans especially the laconic language of Sallust, had something to offer me, so it seemed, yet then as now I could not think of a story to fit this language; I, the inlander, would have had to go to sea like Joseph Conrad.
There was no question of using the language of novels, no matter which, for my narratives: I soon learned that that would condemn my primal longing to lifeless imitation and singsong. How, then, could I hope to find revelation in the language of the law, which instead of narrative sentences consist
ed of paragraphs, usually conditional statements following the pattern of “If someone … then …”? First of all, this language sobered me up, without in the slightest impairing my attraction to writing. The light I had previously intuited, who knows where, cleared my head through this language. And then the language the law offered me was by no means its own, but an entirely different one, one I still had to find for myself, a narrative language parallel to the language of the law, like it given to circumlocution, at a remove from the thing described, with a limited stock of concepts, so that the myriads of words that previously had perhaps contributed most to my linguistic confusion were now out of the question. Such avoidance, such a limited choice, as a result of which, above all, descriptors for feelings were eliminated, actually strengthened the presence of feeling in the writing process, and with the help of the language of the law, and also mindful of the historians, I was able to complete my first story, even if I occasionally ran into snags, as I still do today.
But even then the wholesome influence seemed to be coupled with a threat. As the law did not omit any facts of a case, insisting on one variation of the premise after another, and was also not at liberty to omit any variation, for otherwise it would not be a law, anywhere near a just one, I was correspondingly tempted to add to each detail in my story a further one, and yet another, all those that in my eyes pertained to the matter at hand, as if I could do it justice only in this way.
In that compilation of old Roman law, for instance, a distinction was made, in the case of one person’s striking another, on the basis of whether the blood “fell on the ground” or not. For if the blood dripped onto the ground, the penalty had to be more severe. And it also made a difference under the law whether the blood ran down to the ground from a blow on the head or from a blow lower down, and even whether blood flowed only after the third blow or sooner, and whether the blow was administered with a flat hand or with the fist or with a whip, and whether the act was committed by a freeman, a slave, a “Frank,” or a barbarian, which also applied vice versa to the victim. And the provisos for women who were beaten this way were different from those for men, so that the paragraph or “title” on hitting and bleeding, in order to be halfway comprehensive, expanded into subparagraphs and sub-subparagraphs. Likewise the determination of the penalty for someone who had cut off a boy’s hair without his parents’ permission could not make do with a single sentence but, as a law, had to have variants, at least depending on whether the child was long-haired or not, and so on, and in the eyes of the law at that time it was also not all the same if a native (Roman) man “squeezed” a native (Roman) woman’s arm or “grabbed” it, and whether he committed this offense against the arm below or above the elbow. (Then a completely contradictory form of justice in the paragraphs on setting fire to others’ houses “with people sleeping inside,” which differentiated according to whether the sleepers were natives or not, and in the last section extended likewise to setting fire to cattle barns, and in its final variant to pigsties, for which, I imagine, it imposed the same penalty as for arson involving non-Roman sleepers.)
Be that as it might: what attracted me so much, even on a first reading of the code, was, I now think, not any particular model of justice but rather a kind of ordering, a fanning-out, illuminating, an airing-out of chaos or of so-called reality, both in ancient Rome—which, at the time when these laws were codified, had already collapsed quite a while earlier and was probably supposed to be revived as an empire by this means—and in the present, my own reality, both internal and external; as I spelled out the pandects (digests), paragraph by paragraph, subparagraph by subparagraph, no matter how different the topics treated in them were from contemporary concerns, confusion and obscurity vanished from my world. Even distinctions that appeared at first to be hairsplitting organized this world more precisely and accurately, and at the same time widened the larger picture.
Was that a paradox? The more possible conflicts the law carved out of formlessness, the denser its net; the more chiseled and discrete the vicissitudes it illuminated, the more spacious the world appeared to me as I read on, and also the clearer and more open—linguistic form, whose deciphering, detail by detail, had the effect of unlocking, enlarging, completing, complementing me?
And another paradox connected with my reading of the laws, the most curious of all? That these laws, focused on everyday misdeeds and atrocities, of which they treated exclusively and on which they rang the changes exhaustively, gave me, the decipherer, more than a millennium after their compilation, fresh certainty under my feet, something like rootedness, simply on the basis of their language, generally applicable and binding, which first named stabbing, killing, ripping out limbs, raping, exhuming corpses, pillaging in all conceivable degrees—that in itself created order and tranquillity!—then organized them, and in such a way that even the most deviant and malicious act was, to put it briefly, “provided for.”
Because the legal dicta provided for every possible turn of events, I was no longer threatened by chaos, and the unreal—than which there was nothing more catastrophic in my eyes—evaporated. A legal work that catalogues crimes and punishments comprehensively does not merely order them, but, as I still feel when reading this text, also welds the world together and validates it. What then emerges at times is indeed something like an empire; not a vanished Roman one, but rather one that again brings to mind the phrase “New World”; I experience in this case the very opposite of a trance.
I also became rooted in another sense through the language of these laws: even while I was a student in various capital cities, whether in Vienna or in Paris, the occurrences circumscribed by the Latin paragraphs were always transferred in my mind to the rural area from which I came. Although, as far as I knew, violations of the law had hardly ever occurred there, at least no criminal offenses—there was just one person in the village who was constantly in litigation with his neighbors, as probably happens everywhere—I thought I recalled, as I worked my way through even the smallest subparagraph, a corresponding situation in and around Rinkolach. Such a memory would shoot through me, brightly outlined, an oscillating, vibrating image, electric in quality. What flashed by me as I pored over my texts were fragments of narrative images such as I had never seen in any actual narrative from my native region. The village tales told by my grandfather, who everyone agreed was a “born storyteller,” never aroused any memories, nor did the novels of Filip Kobal, he, too, as people said, made of “epic bedrock.” Memory, marvelous in quality, did come to me, however, by way of the generalizations and ramifications of those long since inoperative prescriptions.
As recently as this morning, when I was trying, with my now fairly faded Latin, to decipher the paragraph in the digests about stealing flour from a mill—and it mattered for the penalty whether the flour belonged to the miller himself or to a customer—I found myself transported, with the force of a hallucination, to the Jaunfeld mill, deep down in the already dark rift valley, furthermore on a gloomy rainy day, sacks of grain under the tarpaulin outside on the ladder wagon on which I had been sitting only moments before, facing backward, while now I was standing inside the deserted mill, surrounded by the shrieking and roaring of the millrace, high above me the guttering light of a naked bulb.
And when I read on, another situation is evoked for me, from the same region: “When a person enters a stranger’s garden for the purpose of stealing …” “When a person steals grain from a stranger’s field and hauls it away with a cart or on a horse …” and “But if he hauls it away on his back …”
One section even reminds me of a specific person, my grandfather, who, after the death of his wife, when he was already quite an old man, fell in love with a neighbor’s hired woman. In the law it is mentioned that anyone who consorted with the king’s maid and openly entered into relations with her was sentenced thenceforth to serve the king likewise. And thus, when I read the Roman law I see my grandfather on a certain Sunday afternoon, when he had bee
n left alone on purpose with his forbidden love, which was known to the entire village, being caught by his family when they returned unexpectedly—his own daughter, my mother, and also his second daughter are there. The almost seventy-year-old man stands there with his pants down, the hired woman, not much younger, in her slip. None of the witnesses laughs; that a man, and an old man at that, should enter into relations with another woman so soon after the death of his wife, and with this kind of woman, is serious, and the two daughters look most serious of all. The two elderly dissolutes have flushed cheeks, two times two small, bright red, perfectly round spots there, not from shame, but because they were just kissing, their mouths almost closed and their lips pursed like birds or children, and just as eagerly, at a frenetic pace, head against head, yet their bodies at a distance from each other. The hair of this purple-cheeked couple sticks out from their heads, the woman’s gray, the man’s still black. She looks at the bystanders while he gazes into her eyes as before. They do not pluck at their clothing, either one of them, and thousands of Sundays later, in his charity cubicle, with room only for his bed, this man, meanwhile almost ninety, pulls the blooming young woman from Catalonia, visiting with his grandson, onto his knee and breaks into dry sobs.