by Peter Handke
Where I come from, I was never considered a native, a villager. But I can say that deciphering the aforementioned legal code helped make a villager out of me in the cities, at a distance, and only there. I read: “When someone steals the bell from a stranger’s pigsty …” and I recall the bell, although there was probably no such thing, in a pigsty back home, and see or visualize our village as located in an imperial province, isolated yet within easy reach of the capital.
And yet the law, even that of classical antiquity, does not provide sufficient reading for me. Give me a sentence that begins with “In the days when” instead of “Whenever,” and I am electrified altogether differently.
I fear, though, that I have read all the “In the days when” books I am referring to. The last one was the Bible, and there I kept putting off the end, finally rationing myself to two sentences a day of the Apocalypse. After that I stopped my kind of reading for the time being. I do continue to read, but it is really more a reflex action, like watching television, no longer a way of life; it does not penetrate to a deeper layer, and just as I soon switch off the television, I soon hit a snag in my reading.
The “In the days when” books still rank highest, as far as I am concerned, although those written nowadays usually soon catapult me back into the outside world, the here and now, instead of keeping me in their “It was” and “It happened.” And I feel just as comfortable there as earlier when reading stories, even if nothing happens but a cloud’s passing overhead. I do not know why. The only strange thing is that I am back outside most quickly, have no desire to enter into a present-day book at all, when the story pretends to be one from olden times, like a classic tale. I also cannot manage to read the “In the days when” books that merely make a game of those earlier ones in which everything is possible. I need a kind of narration that is initially problematic, lifelike, urgent —“What is the question?” means to me “What comes next?”—and then, when it can finally answer all questions and take up where the earlier or eternal stories left off, comes across as something very rare, as a happening, suitable to the kind of narration I have in mind.
At the mere idea of such a thing achieved in this day and age, I, who have not taken leave of my reading, feel immeasurably relieved, a feeling that is conferred on me only in bits and pieces by the kind of hairsplitting over definitions that occurs in the texts of the various scholarly disciplines, no matter how animating and pleasurable that may be. An idea or merely a wish? A new book full of narration, that’s what I wish for. And then I again see before me and in me something grand that calls for a form entirely different from that of conventional narrative. But what sort of form?
As recently as last night I had a dream in which I was doing nothing but reading. It involved a passage from the Gospel according to St. John with which I was unfamiliar, a pure narrative, with nothing but “And he departed … and he ate … and they said … and when it became evening … and they gathered together … and he sat down … and when the sun rose … and we washed ourselves … and he said,” in large, clear print with large spaces, as if winged, and I could see simultaneously everything I had read, in the form of a constant succession of “he” and “they” and “we,” set in motion by letters and blank spaces, concrete and at the same time dancelike in a way I have not once encountered outside this book.
And like my reading, so too my writing. I need … and I hope … and I wish … and I have a dream.
For this narrative I have needed for a while all the open questions, the working-out of possibilities, the greatest possible comprehensiveness, as if it were a law. Now I hope to extricate myself from the dovetailing of objects as well as of words and to shake off the heavy hand of compulsion. More than ever I wish I could be swept away in unquestioning narrating, vibrating sympathetically just as with reading, the kind of narrating to which, it seems to me, I have not once had a breakthrough for more than a paragraph.
But I have dreamed the dream of it again and again, and that was the most profound thing in me. And in my imagination for some time now, precisely because of my taking so many detours with this present project, my starting off down so many side roads, I can feel this dream shaking free, ready to soar aloft and take wing, for the day, the desk, and the deed. I sense that it is no longer a dream. The image has changed into a tone, a voiceless one, to be detected only by my sense of taste, with which, instinct tells me, something will begin and continue, and persist, finally without more fuss or reservations or question marks, that will give whoever reads it the ability to hear without sound and to see without images and to sample without taste.
I also find myself wondering whether this might not be my second metamorphosis, which I have been waiting for and working toward since the beginning of the year. Might this presumably last metamorphosis consist in my setting out to narrate, in sentences that would be absolutely straightforward, in the sense of “Let your speech be yea, yea and nay, nay”? And might I thus be at the moment no longer the one I was at the beginning, nor yet the person I will be, but also not the one I appear to be?
The more freely I sense what is coming, the more constricting my present condition feels. This becoming aware has always been a problem for me. Whenever it has manifested itself, it has cut me off in the midst of life from living. Suddenly I become aware, and instantly my breath falters and runs out, in the middle of a sentence, in the midst of life, in the midst of an upswing. My awareness has nothing in common with any form of reason, but rather meddles like a daimon, destructively. Like my love, it has also destroyed my narrating every time.
But now, having advanced as never before to a stage on the verge of what appears to me as my destiny, I sense that I could rid myself of my daimon, my nemesis, the crocodile in my heart, the antithesis of the mythical beast. This metamorphosis—is it going to turn into a struggle again after all: between me, the monster of awareness, and me, the Tom Thumb of narration? I have gambled away my social being, my life with others, through my awareness. Grant that through my writing I may, at least in its main purpose and its main theme, find my way back to the realm of the dream, preserve the underlying tone and become as clear as day.
From the window at which I sit, I see my narrative every morning, see how it should continue in broad strokes. It is a place. I noticed it at the very onset of winter, for the first time in all my years here: a spot in the woods on the hillsides, which since then, as a result of daily observation, has become a place (as Filip Kobal, at home on his Jaunfeld, takes those apparently insignificant little spots to which he is drawn time and again and “declares them a place”).
There are trees there, as everywhere, only these stand out more distinctly than usual, up hill and down dale. In part that has to do with my distance from them: they grow halfway up the hill, approximately midway between the forest’s edge below, of which the other houses allow only little glimpses, and the line of the horizon higher up, where the plateau of Vélizy begins, of which only the sky above it is visible, arching over the farthest treetops. Thus the place strikes me as the heart of the forest, removed from the foreground with its smoke rising from chimneys, but also certainly not yet far off in the distance. And for another thing, the spot has something special about it, for the oaks, the birches, the edible chestnuts are lined up on the brow of a foothill, behind which the land apparently descends again into a hollow. Of this hollow, with the fuzzy gray background of the forest rising again on the next slope, nothing appears from my vantage point but its light, which, however, picks out individually each of the few trees in front and forms them into a group. Sometimes in fog the entire line of hills appears lower by about half and ends right there, with everything above it and behind it vanished. For me, the hilltop and the hollow mark the boundary to distant parts, no matter what the weather.
In this particular section of the forest I then saw a water meadow, which in fact is probably nothing of the sort—for that there would have to be water flowing through the depression—an
d named it after a painter, the “Poussin Meadow.”
In the beginning I still visualized scenes from some of his paintings there: figures dancing off into the distance, two men carrying a basket of wine grapes as large as themselves on a pole between them, a man with a woman at the edge of a summery field of ripe grain, and all that at the bottom of the bright, broad hollow, which took on some of the qualities of a corridor. Yet I soon started looking up at the place on the hill, just to lift my head in the morning, for instance. But then, every day, against the background of more distant vistas, I perceived something in the silhouettes of the trees, illuminated by the light from the hollow below, or the sight set me to thinking. On the Poussin Meadow, even on dark, dim days, color predominated. Although nothing was happening, it was a lively scene. Although it was not far off, I saw far into the distance. Once I saw us there walking below the Acropolis.
Against the glow in the background, the trunks and branches of the promontory became struts, themselves already the finished structure. Or the one oak tree there, almost as large as the one named after Louis XIV in a neighboring forest, its form starting at a central point and rounding out toward the top, had the appearance of a wheel, with hub and spokes, driven only by the light in between and the upwind from down below in the meadow. Nicolas Poussin in his self-portraits was looking out, as I pictured it, into just such a slice of landscape. And early this morning—Easter week has begun, with storm and a haze of rain—I saw the branches of the royal oak, almost motionless, only slightly shaken amid the general swaying, and next to them and around them a wild tumult, a massive surge of green from the tops of the birches, the first trees in the forest to leaf out completely, and at the edge, the blooming torch of a single wild cherry, an isolated ghostly whiteness there in the depths of the forest, far from all the blossoming closer by in the suburban yards, while the predominant color of the meadow was still gray, a sporadic, all the more strongly glistening pre-vernal gray, whose light came straight across the forest from the east and gathered in the branches and in the multiple tall, thin trunks typical of the trees in the Seine hills. Not a person to be seen there, and yet the meadow appears as a window on the world.
Instead of “Who am I?” I have taken to asking myself “What is most unique to me?” I do not know. But I know its place, every morning, halfway up the hill, thataway.
But Poussin’s meadow often disappears with the morning light, or at least appears at midday so shrunken that the hilltop as well as the hollow could belong to one of the thousands of craters left by the bombs dropped on Velizy in 1944, whose victims are buried in the cemetery farther up on the flank, and at most I can still see Poussin’s Eurydice in the bushes, just bitten by the deadly snake.
And I belong to the green and gray glow out there only as long as I sit indoors at my table and stay put. The meadow loses its picturesqueness if I go so far as to look at it not from downstairs in my study but from upstairs: either I cannot locate it at first or there is nothing remarkable about it. And whenever I went up to the forest looking for it, I was never quite sure if this was the place I had fixed my eye on that same morning from my window, had scrutinized, studied, observed—even the oak, unmistakable from my house, multiplied as one approached, and had no regal dimensions anymore. And similarly, from my table here, morning after morning the eastern rays of light will dissipate more, like the columns of smoke from the suburban roofs gradually disappearing in springtime. The place is being overgrown. Its image is being veiled. Is its image being veiled?
Well past his childhood I did not think or say “my son” but “the child,” and was also more likely to address him that way than by his name.
Many were put off by that; my own father reproved me in a letter, in his own way, by reporting that one of his girlfriends was “puzzled” by it, and the woman from Catalonia felt that by my constant invoking of the “child” I wanted to immortalize this in my son and, on the other hand, keep him at arm’s length, as an exceptional being.
But what about the moment when I no longer saw Valentin either as a child or as a son, and he did not even have a name, except perhaps “him,” or “that boy,” or “the stranger in my house,” “the ruffian,” “the good-for-nothing,” and the only thing I could manage to say to him was “I don’t know you”? When for his part my son, whenever we still went anywhere at all together, would rush on ahead, strike out in an unforeseen direction, and leave me panting along behind him? When the adolescent’s notebooks, which I did not leaf through until last year when I was cleaning out his old room here in this house, are full of hatred and loathing for me, the man who, according to him, merely put on a show of love, whose presence just got in the way, me, the false father, whose solicitude was an act; who took nothing seriously; whom he wanted to get rid of every single day, wanted to kill with his own hands, with the ax, with a club, with a medieval morning star; about whom he prayed night after night to the heavens above, when I happened to be away, that I would never come home; and in comparison to whom even “my so-called mother,” “the modern woman,” “the woman with the cold shoulder,” “the mournful wanderer,” ceaselessly roaming the world, at most leaving him a scrap of paper with a heart scribbled on it in the empty house, already off to her next nondestination, represented a reference point?
If I think back, it is touching that there were two different times when my son and I were at loggerheads this way: there was the time he secretly raged against me for about a year, while I, according to a memory that does not register the past but feels it, and of which I can therefore be as certain as of a fact, was intensely fond of him, as in the years before that. And the time when I, on the contrary, the father, moved away from him in my thoughts—this is putting it too innocuously—that was later, and I feel, likewise in memory, several glances of my son’s resting on me, as if from the far corner of a dim hall, and I know they stemmed from helplessness, a wondrously tender helplessness.
Unthinkable, back in his childhood, that there should be a question of anything between the two of us but a lifelong story. I experienced hours, even entire days with him that above and beyond that had to lay the groundwork for something, something enduring, a bond that could not be banished from the world.
That did not come immediately with his birth, when, at the sight of that fuzz-covered, dark-skinned little creature, in the presence of his almost bloodless mother, I recoiled as if the woman from Catalonia had foisted a changeling on me. During the first years of his life, which I spent without my family, far beyond the Urals, I saw him so seldom that every time he failed to recognize me and at the word “father” was more likely to look at the Mongolian faces around us than at me, and I, too, felt as though the word did not refer to me. Although I had felt a powerful urge to have a child, and with this particular woman, who would clearly bear me someone extraordinary, whenever “my family” came to mind, it was never the three of us, but, as always before, my grandparents, my mother, her brothers, long since dead, my sister, my brother; and that most decisively where I find the measure for what I call “real”: in my dreams. Deep in my dreams, the woman from Catalonia, my son, and I never appeared in the context of a family; the three of us did not even appear together. Even when we were finally living together in Paris, at first I felt so ill at ease with my son that I avoided being alone with him and often did not come home in the evening until he was sure to be in bed already.
Yet my memory also preserves a few very different moments from that period: the face of a child, behind a door in the dark, where he has hidden and is smiling, a smile in profile such as one sees only during hide-and-go-seek. And in a particular stretch of sidewalk, which I let him walk on the day they were paving it, his footprint, next to that of a large dog. And my searching for refuge and elan, and not only once, in his cowlick. And then, in our first suburb, initially so quiet after the roar of the metropolis, up there in the Seine hills, on the side streets the postman’s regular morning whistling, and inside the house t
he two of us, intent each time on not missing a note of it, our moment of shared experience.
And in spite of that our life together continued to be determined by an expression in my son’s eyes that has been gone for many years now, and even then appeared only occasionally. I understood that look as one of distrust, as a sign of a serious disturbance. The child’s distrust focused on no one in particular. It was a matter of principle, or at least in the process of becoming a matter of principle. I knew that kind of look from earlier, from myself, in the only photo from my boarding school, a group picture, and I encounter it likewise in children today, more and more, including smaller children. I see it every day in some here in the neighborhood.
For one in particular—he has not been walking that long, and speech is still new to him—the word distrust does not seem strong enough: it should be suspicion. This child looks around for suspicious sights, and not only from time to time—he does so uninterruptedly, eyes darting, somberly from below or over his shoulder. Paraphrasing a saying of the petty prophet of Porchefontaine, I then think, “Two years old—and already it’s all over,” and although it is clear to me that the blame rests with his parents (or someone else), I cannot help condemning the little fellow himself; that’s how upset I am by his unremitting wariness.
My son had that look, but quite unexpectedly, between two looks quite normal for a child. Yet even then I was repelled and felt a surge of rage, directed against him, myself, something unknown. In the face of this sudden darkening of his gaze it seemed to me that it would take only a little for that look to become permanently fixed on his face. I felt an urgent need to dispel that facial expression, by force. Something had to be done about this distrust, unbearable to someone who was subjected to it day in, day out from close up. But I did nothing.