by Peter Handke
Incidentally, it did not strike me as at all strange to see myself, perhaps more than ever, as someone from an Austrian village, then as now almost completely untouched by the outside world, and yet to have found the way of life most suited to me in a hinterland like this, more foreign than the most remote place from my years of travel. In this sense I viewed myself as a modern, one of the first in a series, in an avant-garde.
In various parts of the world I had run across one person or another from this avant-garde, almost always a stranger, and each time I had seen this person as my model. One time perhaps he was sitting in an outdoor café by a railroad station on the border, and amid the natives and the foreigners he stood out as a third type, who, without specifically looking at anything, was entirely caught up in what was going on; in spite of his large knapsack and his ankle-length coat, he seemed to be in camouflage (he was the one whom the patrolling border guards gave a wide berth); and with his untouchability I felt I was in good company with him, and went looking for it, though in vain, the following evening as well.
Years later I encountered my model again in the form of someone else, on a bus trip through the Yucatan, and knew afterward only that he came from Australia; we were on the road together for no more than a day, in a small, cobbled-together tour group. When the bus stopped, he was always the first one out, as if he already had a direction charted inside him, and involuntarily I followed, though whenever possible choosing my own path; I simply felt the urge to have him in sight, for wherever he went, away from the Maya pyramids, toward ash-darkened and glowing-hot present-day burned-over rain forest with almost nothing else, there had to be something to discover, and without attaching myself to him I wanted to see it from a distance.
A third time I even came across my model in the form of a fellow countryman, from a neighboring valley. He still spoke its dialect, though only when he slipped briefly back into German from English. Otherwise he had become a well-adjusted resident of the American Midwest, at the same time remaining the spit and image of a Carinthian villager, whom I could imagine pulling the rope of a church bell, a heavy one, or as an adolescent suffering from raging hormones, spittle gathering in the corners of his mouth as he stood before the girl of his dreams during the “begging-in” customary in our area, at least in those days. He seemed perfectly at home in Minnesota, so established in and familiar with the place, and also in charge of his domain, to judge by his outstretched arm and the space between his firmly planted legs, like a local lord. Yet he did not exaggerate or imitate anything. I just saw him as more alert than the natives, more on the make (without being called Schwarzenegger), at the same time more thoughtful than his fellow Americans and more contemplative, like someone leading his life on a sort of rampart or fort, a quality indeed possessed to some degree by his house, far from Minneapolis, alone on a prairie, on top of a little mound of fill, with an almost endless view in all directions. And in the city of millions where he worked as a physician, “more or less with my left hand,” but what a left hand, he remained just the same. At the time we were both young, and I was convinced he would make a great name for himself. “I escaped from home, and it’s right here!” he said. “With the smallest sip of coffee I drink, far from my Maria Rojach, not seen or thought of by anyone in the village, I make a contribution to the future of the world!”
I have not heard from him again. Where is he? It has been a long time since I last met the modern person in whom I thought I could anticipate a new world. And I, too, have not stayed the same as during my years in that first suburb.
Without especially holding myself aloof or participating, I learned just enough about people to have life brush me in passing and hardly exert any pressure. During those few years I did not hear bad things about anyone (it was quite different for my son in school, but he did not tell me about that until much later).
The settling, spreading uphill, hardly noticeably yet steadily, was dense and at the same time scattered, and I felt as if my house were protected by the many harmless strangers and their almost constant presence, as quiet as it was palpable; I often forgot to lock up.
The majority of the residents were older, yet quite far from being frail; primarily former retailers and railroad employees, who lived for their inconspicuous, yet on closer inspection practically sculpted, vegetable gardens, and otherwise, too, seemed to be constantly out and about, going for cigarettes or the paper, betting on horses in a certain café, then streaming together from every direction for the Sunday market in front of the station (as now in the bay), knowing in advance and in detail what would be there, and where; I once heard two local people exchange in passing what still echoes in my ear as the customary greeting of the place: “We have it good here, don’t we?” - “Yes, we have it good here!”
In my memory at least I have only people like that as neighbors, and there was a similar couple, a man and his wife, who took care of Valentin when I was away, with whom I sometimes sat for a while after I got back, and not merely out of politeness, also enjoying the apples from their own trees that they served (while on the other hand my son later told me story after story about the mustiness peculiar to their house, a different kind in every corner).
In my imagination they are all still alive, even though most of them meanwhile are probably in the ground, and when I occasionally venture across there, over the two hills, I no longer encounter a single one of them; the greeting, if I get to hear it at all, is different from before. The descendants of the Portuguese, the largest foreign group there, often no longer use their language with each other, or speak it with a French accent. The graves of the Armenians and also the Russians increasingly display, under their own, far-traveled script, lines of the locally customary Roman script.
And the few people from that population of whom I had perhaps a less good opinion during my time there must be doing worse things today, yet even they cannot have turned into complete villains, but at most, appropriately for those suburbs, stock types or minor characters from gangster comedies: for instance, the doctor, the only one in the neighborhood, who filled out prescription after prescription, never really looking at the patients, and in the same breath wrote out a bill, to the bottom line of which would be added, as I said to myself, the profit from the volleys of medications, especially for small children, shared, according to a secret agreement, with his accomplice, the proprietor of the pharmacy, two streets over and around the corner, where, even without my telescope, with the naked eye, I could see the parents of the district coming out, laden as if for all eternity with accordion-sized boxes (and at least once I was one of them myself).
But what do I really know of that place today? Other than that the brooms of the still mostly black street sweepers are now made of plastic rather than of twigs; that the photo automat at the railroad station now takes colored rather than black-and-white pictures; that the one homeless person who used to sleep up in the woods has meanwhile become several?
All that time the shelter up on the railroad platform had no glass in its door, and once, when I went to push it open, I tumbled into dead air. Now glass has been installed. And from the upstairs apartment where I dragged my son to his piano lesson no tinkling can be heard now.
I, too, did no one any harm there, did not get worked up even once, and wanted it to be that way always.
On the other hand, I gradually came to recognize that I also did not take anyone seriously, and this was true not only of the local residents filing past but then also of my absent friends. I hardly wanted to hear about them anymore. I was dissociating myself. My going it alone, in my place and domain, seemed so much richer in content than any togetherness. I barely skimmed my friends’ letters, and then did not answer them. The simple fact that they were constantly doing things and appearing in public made me indifferent to them; if one of them had appeared before me with his activities, I would have scoffed at his scheming.
Yes, from a distance I was unserious, and at the same time hardened tow
ard my friends. And at the side of my son, too, toward whom I outwardly seemed so attentive and patient, I quite often caught myself merely feigning interest. Certainly I listened to him, but I had no heart for the child. Did that not become clear from the fact that I would forget him if he was away for more than a couple of days? Why did all the world treat me in his absence as a single person, someone without attachments who could be enlisted for the craziest adventures?
If I seem to be making myself out as worse than I was at the time, my intention is not to ask to be refuted but rather to have something to tell. Can it be that this was the only way for me to get started? When I was in boarding school, crammed in like a sardine with the others at Mass, didn’t I invent sins or upgrade venial failings to atrocities so I could slip away to the confessional in back, from which I would emerge energized and proud of my stories?
But then I did become more closely acquainted with someone in the region: the later petty prophet of Porchefontaine.
At the time he was proprietor and chef of the restaurant in the hollow of the Fontaine Ste.-Marie, by the clearing in the middle of the woods, as now at a restaurant by the railroad embankment in the suburb of Versailles: since then both of us have moved our base of operations two valleys to the west in the Seine hills, and each of us still finds himself at about the same distance from the other. Between our houses there is a similar set of foothills to cross.
In that period in my lire—which, for all my idleness, was a time of preparation—he became for me something that meant more than friends: an adversary whose acumen awakened my own; a misanthrope on whose rationality I honed the substance of my illusions; a tester in the face of whose deliberate heartlessness my own heart opened up as if in the presence of a secret.
The entire person attracted me as just such a secret. He was as he was; in contrast to me, he did not merely feign disgust and distaste; and yet that could not be all there was.
Even though he was my double as no one had ever been before, and finally the one I welcomed, there had been a time when he had made entirely different choices. At moments I was convinced my thoughts mirrored his exactly, yet when I articulated them, the tone was wrong. Only when they came from his mouth did they sound authentic. Again unlike me, he stood by his condemnation of the world. No, he was not my mirror. And at the same time, when I was by myself, I experienced—a word that otherwise only my friend the priest can use without embarrassment—longing for him; likewise for his place.
The stone cabin there on the edge of the clearing, long since gone without a trace, is still for me the most charming tavern on earth, the epitome of an inn. The first time I approached it, after a two-highway, three-secondary-road, four-forest route, I took it for a snack bar, or, with the ponds nearby, a fishermen’s pub. But then there was a door, of glass, with a lace curtain; and the Egyptian standing outside, seemingly moving in his motionlessness, like a dancer, in combination with his black suit and white shirt, transformed the barrack, and my long journey there contributed to the impression, into a caravansary.
Its proprietor did not, to be sure, return my greeting, and I had to go around him to enter, and same with a Doberman that unexpectedly, soundlessly, rose from the threshold on long, gangly legs. The dining room, one step beyond, was bathed in green from the forest outside all its windows. The few tables stood well apart from each other, with light tablecloths and napkins artfully swirled in the glasses, in which candle flames were mirrored, although guests were sitting only in a corner in back (in any other restaurant they would have been given a table by the window, also to make it look inviting to passersby).
I stood for a while, and when no one came, I picked a table. I waited patiently. No matter what happened now, I knew I was in the right place for a meal. If not today, I would eat here another time, and then again and again. Unlike in other nice places, I felt no immediate urge to ascertain the particulars. I simply waited, deaf to the conversation at the table behind me, tired from my long walk and happy.
The patron appeared, the man with the Egyptian profile, coming now through the swinging door from the kitchen, and wordlessly set before me bread, wine, water, and olives with stems, and had no sooner given the bread basket another turn toward me than he was already out of the small room. The bread was warm, saffron yellow when broken open, with a fragrance of the Orient that went with the pattern of the dishes. The courses that followed, likewise presented in silence and without my having ordered them, on ordinary plates, were classic French cuisine, and yet they seemed different by a degree. There was something more to them; later I noticed that, on the contrary, this effect actually came from something’s being left out. Besides, each dish, served by the chef, the proprietor, was sliced and arranged in a way that brought to mind the story of a Chinese butcher: this butcher had learned how to carve in such a way that in faithfully adhering to the original shape he created entirely new shapes.
Thus it was as if I found myself sitting down to a meal that would have been equally suited to the Mongolian steppe or to a salmon river in Alaska, and as if I were also that far away, out in the open. I had not been particularly hungry. But even before the first bite it occurred to me, just at the sight of the modest dish, simply presented in the right light on the scratched cafeteria plate, that something had been missing up to now. Why else should I heave such a great sigh of relief? Why else should I have to keep such a tight grip on myself so as not to cry? Did this mean I had been miserable all this time, and had not realized it until this moment of nourishment?
Then the proprietor’s voice made itself heard. He admonished the guests behind me, whose clothing hardly differed from his, to laugh less vulgarly, also to speak more softly, and about something other than food, wine, politics, business, and winning games, for instance about the eclipse of the moon last night or the biography of Pythagoras, which he strongly recommended for the way of life it depicted.
The group seemed accustomed to hearing such things from him and hardly paid him any heed. Nor did it bother them apparently that he then remained standing by their table, arms crossed, as if to speed their departure from his place, and, while they were still making their way to the door, was in a hurry to set the table while still clearing it, to eliminate every trace of them.
And no sooner were they outside than he laced into them, as if talking to himself: They were like everyone nowadays, synthetic human beings, placed in the world to wreak havoc and cause commotion; conceived without love; instead of being born innocent from a mother’s body, extruded somewhere, ready for use and for molding; their youth devoted to sharpening murder weapons; their maturity, behind their human masks, an endless massacre; and in the end they would just splinter, unseen and unheard, canceled out, wiped off the radar screen, neutralized.
I only half listened, not knowing whether I should take this seriously; objected, feeling it was my duty, that an innkeeper was there for everyone and should keep his opinions to himself. I did not allow myself to be deflected from my enjoyment of the meal, my delight in this out-of-the-way spot, and I thanked the chef and proprietor for it. Without looking at me, he said that it was not for the sake of me, the chance guest, that he had served up this meal, but rather to pay homage to the good things to eat and to celebrate the day as it came. And after he had poured me mint tea, in a high arc from an oriental-style onion-shaped pot, I had no sooner stood up than he slapped the seat of my chair with a thick waiter’s towel, as he had done with the others while they, too, were still there.
After that I stopped in there regularly, also because of the view.
It was as if the dining room had neither walls nor a roof, and as if outside, amid the heavy foliage of the mammoth oaks, dots of the sky shone like bluing onto the set table, and as if the clay path under the trees were the picture into which not the painter entered, but his people, and without disappearing into it.
Once, when a light rain was falling, the patron barked at me that I should go out onto the terrace; because of
the trees I would not get wet, and besides, looking and listening, in combination with his dishes, slowed down one’s breathing and kept one warm.
And in fact his inn in the hollow seemed an oasis of summer far into the autumn; as one came up the path, a curiously dry air crackled through the oak leaves, now riddled with holes, which apparently dropped only in the middle distance.
Since in the meantime the proprietor had offended his usual guests for good, and the most recent edition of the restaurant guide now warned people about his gruff manner, there were only a few of us left. Yet even if the place had been packed, running at full steam—which I sometimes wished for—the experience would always have been the same for me there.
The sound of the trees in the clearing, a seething, swelling, blazing, made me understand why one of the auditory ossicles is called the “stirrup.” I felt something tugging at me; gratitude galvanized me, followed by an exuberance that wanted to go somewhere and then nowhere at all: I was there, and I was innocent.
And one day the proprietor stood next to me and said, his hand on the back of my chair: “Sometimes when it gets quiet in the clearing, a fist seizes me by the scruff of my neck from above and hoists me off the ground like Habakkuk in your Bible, one of the minor prophets. I, on the other hand, am the petty prophet, and insist on that.”
From then on we no longer dealt with each other as host and guest. From time to time he sent me handwritten invitations to his place, with descriptions of dishes and wines. Or, when I could not get away, for instance because my son was sick, the restaurateur from the clearing would come to my house, in the evening, on his (very flexible) days off, bringing his pots and pans, and would cook and serve a meal. He would lock himself into the kitchen, and except for faint Arabic music we would hear not a sound from him, and he always took a very long time. Afterward we would play chess in silence—something he nowadays always invites me in vain to do—he with grim intensity, I casually, while inside us, it seemed to me, it was often actually the other way around. He was a stern winner and a laughing loser.