by Peter Handke
A rusty stove was lying among the ruins, with an oven from which old newspapers and books stuck out. I eyed the book on top, actually more a large brochure with a picture on the cover that still had some faded color, a princess surrounded by dwarfs, with the Spanish words “Los cuentos de los Hermanos Grimm,” The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm.
Venerate the unfathomable in silence. But isn’t the act of circumnar-rating it an essential part of that? Suddenly I was seized by the certainty that my book would remain a fragment, and that that was as it should be. And that was not yet all: it was not even a fragment, but, unbeknownst to me, narrated to the end.
New lids grew over my eyes. I leaped to my feet. For a while nothing more could happen to me. I ran up hill and down dale, my first time running in how long? And at the same time I remained rooted to the spot: everywhere it was the same, one place. The little brooks in the pastures, together with the granite-glittering fence posts along their banks a sort of signature of the Cerdanya highlands, were rushing, wherever I looked, as though just thawed, and the randomly scattered turret blocks of the Chaos of Targasonne, above the tree line, likewise looked as though they had just been melted free of the glacier, long since gone.
And I swore fidelity to such a picture of the world. Never again should it change suddenly into a chimera, and that was within my power. It was my gaze that made it this way. It was my blinking that divided it up and organized it. But now I had to get going, down to where people were. From now on, that was my place.
Without suffering any harm, I let myself drop that day from a cliff higher than I, stuck my hand into the thorns of a juniper cypress, waded through the icy waters of the Río Mahur along the border. On the last stretch, going uphill again to the terrace of the sturdy little capital of Puigcerda, I was accompanied by a shaggy dog, which then kept close to my side until late that night. In the local movie house, the Avinguda, more roomy than almost all movie houses in large cities nowadays, I saw a sequel to Jaws, whose adventures, so harmless or peaceable compared to those I had just survived, gave me a warm glow around my heart. Afterward, with the dog tagging along, I followed in the darkness a woman who I thought had given me a sign with her hip, and at the very moment when I had decided to accost her and broke into a run, I fell flat on the street, tripping over the dog or a loose shoelace. Satisfied, I then dropped into the municipal casino, at that time still a traditional male stronghold, black with men’s suits under white neon patterns on the ceiling, and, standing beside a stranger, I played pool with a sureness of aim and a casualness such as I otherwise have only when I am throwing something or sometimes selecting a word. I kept one eye on the always busy television screen, felt as caught up in the advertising images as in the reports of terrible events from around the world, absorbed it all with grateful gusto. Then I invited my partner to dinner, whereupon, on the terrace of the Maria Victoria Hotel, with a view of the snow-glowing highlands and the railroad station at the border, with the dog between us under the table, he told me his entire life story, including the bombardment of Puigcerdá in his early childhood, in which the casino was almost the only building left standing. I decided that if I wrote anything at all after my book, it would be simply as a chronicler. And then we went down the steep slope to the station. I had the choice of traveling from there either to Barcelona or to Perpignan, or, by way of Toulouse, to Paris or God knows where. In any case, I would leave the enclave the next day. Extraordinary how the world was open to me, into whose neck, just a few hours or moments ago, that string had still been cutting by which, according to an old custom of Cerdagne, killed moles are hung up in a row. That was the first time I felt balls of air swelling in my armpits.
It is another story altogether that the mutt ran off on me as I was making my way home in the dark, that when I passed the lonely border station in the no-man’s-land just outside Llivia I wanted to be there in place of the uniformed guard watching television in his bare room under the stars of the Pyrenees, and that I choked on the final sentence of my book all through spring and summer, from one city in Europe to another, with the last line finally typed in Munich or somewhere or other, on the day of the Blessed Virgin’s birth or some day or other, in the garret in the house of my reader, who later told me he had just made up his mind, after days of silence behind my door, to break it down, when finally the typewriter started up, then again nothing for a long time, and then Gregor K. with a packet of manuscript and his traveling coat asking where the nearest post office was.
And it is also another story that for at least the following year I considered my salvation or release into a new freedom, or this change, a delusion; I thought the verdict on me was still in force, and now, right now, the time to execute it had arrived.
That this relentless pressure finally let up I owe to reading, not Holy Scripture, but the poet Friedrich Holderlin, who filled my veins with new blood, and then Goethe, who could be counted on to raise my spirits. This reading provided me with roots in the air and the light; and only on this basis did I then develop a sense for the Gospels, and not only the Christian ones. And simultaneously, although at the time I clearly understood religion, no matter which, as a given, even in previously incomprehensible variations, I still felt it was the highest calling to be a storyteller.
As for my book on prehistoric forms, alias the chimerical world, I thought during my relapses that I had ended it wrong, and was thus a failure and at the same time finally in the place where I belonged, and then again that I could build the rest of my life on it, or at least a piece of my life.
My notion that no one would read it was not borne out. To be sure, many people, especially members of my own generation, distanced themselves from me and my project, wordlessly as a rule, almost considerately, and when someone did say something, he said he found the sentences too long, the words too archaic, the focus on nature too exclusive. But then, with the passage of time, new readers turned up, younger ones, and, something I had always wished for previously, above all older ones.
The reviews were nothing special. Only one of the critics, the cleverest and at the same time the most limited, a man who presented his limitations as simplicity, sniffed out something and offered the opinion that the longing for salvation that presses on one of the heroes’ eyelids was an infelicitous image, and wondered whether falling to one’s knees, which happens to one of the characters in the course of events, provided a suitable position for thinking.
During the following year I remained in my birthplace, Rinkolach on the Jaunfeld Plain, taking shelter like a child in the cottager’s house that had belonged to my parents, recently bought back by my successful brother, my almost-twin, the uncrowned king of our family, and yet again and again the loser (at the appointed time perhaps I shall write my first play about him, with the title “Preparations for Immortality,” a tragedy?).
Earlier I had thought of the house, which belonged to us three siblings, as my last refuge. Now it felt as though there I would finally make a real beginning. In my ancestral region, the world in the form of details now opened up to me as it had revealed itself to me in the suburbs of Paris. The way of seeing I had developed there had become so much my own that it persisted in this area, similarly simple and unpicturesque, as I now realized. At last Austrian objects, along with the spaces between them, showed themselves to me, and spread out to form an environment.
None of these things forced themselves on me any longer (which in my childhood had often made the impression of hypertrophy). Now on the plain the pines and firs stood there, and Globasnitz Brook and Rin-ken Brook flowed as all over the world, as above them much more than a purely Carinthian sky hovered blue.
And thus the place names in my more immediate homeland also acquired resonance and rhythm, even if only those of the villages: Dob, Heiligengrab, Mittlern, Bistrica, Lind, Ruden, and of course Rinkolach. The names of the towns, as small as they were—Bleiburg, Völkermarkt, Wolfsberg—remained mute, not to mention Klagenfurt or Villach. Only on the other
side of the borders did it continue, with Maribor, Udine, Tricesimo.
And likewise the natives, though again only those in the villages—which in any case were almost all I saw during that year—struck me as people from anywhere, with the appropriate horizon as a backdrop.
All this I took in, and yet for a long initial period I was utterly incapable of having dealings with anyone. Even with my brother I could hardly get out a word. It was a kind of violence that forced me to hide myself from him as from the others, or to turn my head the other way.
And even the simplest daily tasks I seemed to have to learn all over again: to put my jacket on a hanger, to make my bed, to get on a bicycle.
Once, when I was swimming absentmindedly, I paused and almost went under. Another time, when with my brother I had set out after all for the town of B., he sent me off to do an errand, and secretly watched me from outside on the public square, and afterward described how I had suddenly stood there with a package of butter in my hand, not knowing what to do next, and the cashier had had to reach into my pockets for the money, and, when I finally found my way back to him, the butter had melted between my fingers.
That I finally got my bearings can be ascribed, I believe, to the location of my bed or sofa, in the back corner of the entrance hall, under the stairs leading up to the former granary. My brother had hung a lamp for me there, with a switch next to it, and a table and stool also graced my little realm. Here, while reading, looking up through the cracks and knotholes, and likewise while sleeping, I was plainly gathering strength for the world outside. What a relief, simply to have the top of my head touching the underside of the stair treads when I sat there.
During the day I then sat more and more at one of the windows, which as in all the old southern Slav peasant houses was very close to the ground; leaning one elbow on the unusually broad windowsill, the grass of the little orchard in front of the house at eye level, I was merely an observer; I did not touch a writing instrument once during that year, and even longer.
And just as on that evening among the blocks of stone along the harbor of Piran when I was a young man, I had forgotten all knowledge and also no longer had an opinion or a judgment on anything. My brother teased me for having become so tolerant. “Where’s all your anger gone?”
And it was a fact that my way of just staring resembled that of a village idiot. Whatever I saw, I liked. And in the same fashion I accepted everyone and everything I could. In this I felt not limited but slow-witted. Only as one who was slow-witted—this I had experienced again and again—did the person I was awaken in me.
It implied no contradiction that I continued to enjoy studying, even if that was confined to the leaves and blossoms of the weeds in the area, which altogether, the longer I bent over them, swung into motion in a marvelously varied and yet symmetrically delicate round dance. They had names—spurge, valerian, hemlock, plantain—yet for now I wanted only to take in the colors and forms, all intermingled. “Remain impressionable” …
The out-of-the-way and rather inconspicuous vegetation was almost the only thing in which I became engrossed during this time.
So how did I define my metamorphosis? There was hardly anything from earlier, from childhood, to see anew—this I recognized. The old mushroom places in the woods, for instance, were bleak and bare, and the clearings, if any forest was left, had shifted, like moving sand dunes, often without the strawberry and raspberry patches that had previously been there. Even the field paths, along with their deep dust, had disappeared or now took an entirely different course; on the other hand, they had cleared even more logging roads through the hills. The Crab Pond was now that in name only, just as the Inn on the Bend was now located on a straight stretch of road and is supposed to be renamed the Trout.
And in spite of all that, in my eyes nothing about the area had changed. And just as before I was reluctant to block my view of these things with historical reminiscences. Of these, practically the only story people still told was the business with the American soldier, a black, who was dropped by parachute almost at the end of the Second World War, and got so hung up, head down, in a tree by a field that people came running from all direction with flails, scythes, and sickles. I went only so far as to examine, in the rectory, that turn-of-the-century chronicle in which house by house the occupations of the inhabitants were noted. Again: what was Gregor Keuschnig’s metamorphosis?
Since during this year he understood everyone, even the former SS man and the future one, he soon enjoyed an uncanny general confidence. He joined in all the celebrations, was a favorite partner at card tables, and the fact that later on he often confused himself in his memory with one of the others—“Was it me or was it you who was drunk and fell off that ladder in the apple tree?”—proved that he really was part of the village community. (On one thing he even became the expert: on lost objects, in particular the small and smallest ones. He could be counted on to go straight to the right spot in the general area, bend down, and even in the thickest gravel come up with the lost bead or contact lens.)
In his black rubber boots and floppy blue pants, cinched at the waist with a length of rope, he more and more resembled a native, one from earlier times, and he himself, when he sat there with his palm turned upward or sternly looked up and inspected the person facing him, sometimes saw a double image of himself and his grandfather, which the third party then also noticed.
In this region, as out-of-the-way as ever and lacking a middle class, he became a sort of authority, and not only as a finder of lost objects. Finally he was even offered an official position; don’t ask me which.
At the same time he remained aware that he did not belong among people. The same thing would happen to him as in elementary school when he had his only role in a play; as a dwarf among dwarfs in the background, he had nothing to do but sew, and kept pricking his finger (which, to be sure, only his mother noticed), and then in boarding school, where he was chosen to make up the rules for a new game, which turned out to be completely unplayable, and then as a magistrate during his year in court …
But only the children caught on to his chronic unreliability, for instance the child next door, to whom, while in the next room the child’s father lay dying, gasping for breath, to calm the child down he read a fairy tale in which someone’s heart was torn from his living body.
The person who at that time understood almost everyone, disarmed, reconciled, convinced people—that was not me. So, for the third time: That was supposed to be a metamorphosis?
Certainly, all that year I felt an authority in me, but far from the community, alone, as I remained for the most part, and often half asleep. If a metamorphosis, then one without deeds; without external consequences.
And at the same time it was the year during which the Rinkolach chess club won the Jaunfeld championship, during which in Carinthia a former partisan was elected head of the provincial government, and the Blessed Virgin appeared to his defeated opponent in the Bärental, during which, on the other side of the border, representatives of the youth of all the southern Slav peoples gathered and sang “Jugoslavija!” again, during which in Germany part of the population committed mass suicide, during which Japan erected its Great Wall, during which the world acquired a second moon, and at the end of which, on the highway bridge over the Rio Grande between El Paso, U.S.A., and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, for the second time, after exactly a decade, one and the same Austrian from a South Carinthian hamlet and the same Spanish woman from Catalonian Gerona, after both had in the meantime gone or stumbled their separate ways, were reunited.
It had become time to leave Rinkolach. Now my place of birth was to be only a temporary stopping place. What else could I do there, aside from whitewashing rooms, chopping wood, picking fruit, except let the sun shine on me, let the rain splash on me through the open front door, let summer and winter come (although I had a special liking for all that)? What did I write there except perhaps, and that merely dictated to my brother—anything
but touch a writing instrument!—one report for the community news bulletin on the annual meeting of the local water company (although I had a hard time with it, cold sweat and groping for words as always).
And the villagers, despite their tactfulness, a characteristic of small farmers, were relieved to be rid of me at last (although one—the innkeeper—then sent word that the village seemed empty without me). At last they, even the priest, even my brother, could be by themselves again. My presence made me the superfluous one; I was all right in their eyes only when absent. Even Filip Kobal in the neighboring village of Rinkenberg, already a popular figure there, found it embarrassing after a while, despite all the cordiality with which he received me, not to be the only writer in the region, and I could understand his feelings.
Only the dead seemed to need me there at home. At any rate, every time I left the cemetery they fell upon me in the form of an angry swarm of flies.
I had a wife, and now I had to go back to her. Without her as my Other, it was all over; this was my thought, an entirely new one for me.
I asked my sister if my son could stay with her a little while longer —or was it she who asked me?—and set out to find the woman from Catalonia, who in the meantime was back at the United Nations in New York. She knew of course that I was on my way to her, but not that I would take a detour by way of the bridge over the Rio Grande, which I did with no purpose other than to catch my breath before our reunion, just as with everyday appointments I had the habit of loafing around beforehand. It was always as if I wanted to gain time that way, but for what?
And why even now, when our reconciliation was overdue? All this while, I had been enthralled by the thought of my distant wife. Compared with her, even my childlike son was only incidental. I had very persistent dreams about us, in which we made love and just stayed together all night long, in majesty and affection. Similarly, during that period of separation, I often felt the woman from Catalonia there with me, invisible, for days at a time, and whether alone or among others, I would again and again turn toward her, looking over my shoulder into the empty corner; unlike in her presence, I made an effort not to do anything that might displease her, and when I did not succeed, my look over my shoulder became a plea for understanding: “Look homeward, angel.”