by Peter Handke
Later, when we were newly together again, I had such a conviction that she had been with me in certain situations that when we wanted to recall them together I complained each time about her poor memory.
And now our first exchange of glances was repeated when we met, a day before the appointed time, far from the appointed place, I coming from Mexico, she coming from North America. Although preoccupied with her in my thoughts, I did not recognize her at first, and turned to look at her perhaps only because this woman appeared to me so amazingly “pale and young.” But afterward: heaven help us! And she, too, she told me, had recognized me only when she looked back for the second time at someone who, literally, “looked so pale and young.” How tired each of us was then, how tired.
But only her return banished the last vestiges of the crotchetiness I had developed during my period of solitude. She loosened my knotted limbs and relaxed my false fists, and through her new presence I learned to be there with my entire body in every movement, a forcefulness that at the same time could be as little as a gentle touch.
In the Japanese imperial city of Nara we made up for our skipped honeymoon, and then I lived in her two rooms high up in the Adams Hotel on 86th Street in Manhattan, with a view of the reservoir in Central Park. Our harmony there had a trace of amiable irony about what had been done to each of us by the other during the previous decade, and that seemed to make it durable. (And yet a decade later we lost each other for the second time.)
Toward the end of winter I then had the courage, with her in the next room, to sit down at a desk again. All the snowing in New York also made me want to write, especially in the evenings when the lights of the constantly landing airplanes were switched on and in them one could see from my skyscraper window the snowflakes whirling from the potholes in the street up into the heavens.
It turned out to be my shortest book, also because at that time I expected the narrative to unfold more from my groping my way back and questioning myself than from a masterful windup and playing of my trump card, with all the components that had seemed to me to have been part of my repertory far too long.
My piece, although ultimately it was supposed to be nothing but a story, was called “Essay on Neighborhood,” and was a sort of description of the life of one person through the voices of the various neighbors with whom he had had dealings since childhood, and then, privately published, under the pseudonym Urban Pelegrin, by my friend the reader, a printer by trade, it became my worldwide success. The Peking People’s Daily called me a progressive humanist focused on the here and now; the Osservatore Romano (Via del Pellegrino, Città del Vaticano) recognized in my language something related to the gaze of a rural laborer, to whom, sitting on the edge of a field after many hours of toil, the only pleasure left is to gaze at the sky; The New Yorker printed it in English translation before the book appeared, and invited me to a party at the Algonquin Hotel (except that by that time I was long since here in my Paris suburb bay, and did not want to leave anymore). Only The New York Times, swollen with daily reality, could not find its reality in mine, and on the other hand saw my way of writing as too emotional, or too cold, or too subtle, or too old-fashioned. And my enemy in Germany, who meanwhile had become the much-flattered first-name buddy of my former publisher (but even before that, whenever I went to see the publisher, my chair would still be stinking hot from the other man), exclaimed, when I crossed his path—no, he had no path, he was everywhere and nowhere —as he deviled by, with the rolling eyes of a mad dog that to his chagrin was kept away from the object of his rage by a fence: “So, Herr Pelegrin-Keuschnig, how’s sales?” (Once again he thought he had outsmarted me; what he did not know was that Keuschnig was also an assumed name. And as always he, otherwise so adept at sniffing out and tearing to shreds, lost the scent when it came to things that mattered, for these have almost no smell.)
I had actually written my little book simply by lying down and snapping my fingers. All the sentences took shape when I was half awake or dozing, drifting in and out of consciousness, and whenever a sentence came clear, I would jump up and write it down. Word after word emerged as soft as it was immutable, and up to the final sentence, when in the next room, where my wife and lovely neighbor was sitting, a summer wind already wafting through the open window was rolling the pencils back and forth on the table, not a single one needed to be changed.
When the woman from Catalonia and I, on the evening of the same day, were waved by the elevator operator on the top floor of the Adams Hotel into his brass cage, and on floor after floor during the leisurely trip down, more of the monthly and yearly guests got on, until at the end all races and ages were represented, it was decided that the moment had come for us to be with our child again.
New York at that time was the last big city in which I felt at home.
But in the meantime every town offered itself as the hub of the world—much as more and more individuals, without particular deeds or natural gifts, took on the roles of heroes and srars—including Sp. on the Drau, renamed on the signs Sp./Millstatter See, where I went to pick up Valentin, while the woman from Catalonia, who could break out in a rash at the mere sound of Austrian dialect, waited for us in Paris, deserted now in August.
My sister lived in one of the satellite developments in Sp., built in what had once been the meadows along the Drau, now officially called the Drau River, and with her husband operated the only restaurant in the area, located in the next block.
On a late afternoon, in unwaveringly harsh light that reflected blindingly off the densely parked cars, having reached this wasteland, covering the last stretch on boards laid over mud, after I had got lost again, the same as every other time, and had asked myself why in such places, despite the impressionability I was always cultivating, I immediately lost my keen eye, I saw, sitting under an umbrella on the concrete terrace of the Blue Lagoon Bistro, the only guest, a young man whose face from a distance immediately came within a finger’s breadth of me, as sometimes faces do that bend over you in the moment of waking up, and only when he jumped up, with a long-contained cry of dismay, did it turn out to be the child’s. It was the last time up to now that at the sight of me Valentin came running, and from a standing position, and how he ran. (Much later he told me that at that moment he had finally seen me in my weakness; he could never stand it when I acted strong; even when I held out my arms, he wanted to push them down.)
He was wearing glasses, and the once-dark gaze of distrust had been transformed into the calm, watchful gaze of a researcher. My sister stepped out through the beaded curtain in the doorway, invoked the name of the Madonna, and disappeared, for much longer than necessary, and that, too, was something new: that she, so alien to every tradition, having renounced any origins, voluntarily and self-confidently nothing but a figure in this no-man’s-land, here manifested the ageless behavior of Slavic village women: in her surprise and pleasure she first went off and hid. It accorded with this image that she then returned with bread and smoked ham, served up by her husband, a former ship’s cook, whom my sister constantly put down in my presence, so much so that it was only from quick looks they exchanged that I could tell how much they loved each other. (Though he later left her alone in her hospital room on the day she died; he said she had already long since been unconscious—but I am certain that she was conscious to the last, that all the dying are conscious up to their last moment.)
While we sat there together, until long after the first bat—they had them even there—the first mosquito, and the first star, I secretly resolved that if “my sales” allowed, I would help her buy another eating place, on a public square, like the Fontaine Ste.-Marie, or, if she preferred, at the end of a dock on the Wörther See, with Udo Jürgens as a regular guest arriving in his motorboat and with me as silent partner.
And once during this evening I asked my son, “Where are you?” and he, who in between was serving the few guests, pointed by way of an answer at himself, with both hands, but not at his chest b
ut into his armpits, and even stuck his fingers in there.
And then he described, with my sister as a witness, how I had done everything right as a father. But I knew better.
What has always suited me best is to narrate from one day to the next, as the Odyssey goes from dawn to the rising of the stars, and to continue this way the next morning, or in general just to treat a single day in this fashion.
But how to narrate the decade from our reconciliation to the beginning of this current year, since which I have been sitting here at my desk, and in the briefest way possible, for the story of my seven friends scattered over the world, as well as the chronicle of my year here in the bay, has been crowding in and knocking all this time, at every threshold? I shall try. I will do it.
As my, and our, future landscape, now mine forever, only the hilly suburbs here, open in all directions, could even be considered, with their unstuccoed clay-colored sandstone houses, the settlements poking like long or short fingers into the forest dunes that defined the visual image, and with a silence that made one prick up one’s ears.
Nobody would know us there, and we would be all the more available to each other. The woman from Catalonia wanted to be separated from Paris by one more range of hills than the previous time, my son wanted to go to a “school in the woods,” and my final choice of a place satisfied even my stern ancestors: on a day early in the spring of the following year, instead of falling upon me again as a swarm of flies, they peeped out at me somewhere among the hills in the form of pussywillows overhanging the path, and amiably reached out to shake my hand as I passed.
That was the day on which, after a fall and winter spent searching, I had found the house, but was still in doubt, not because of the house—I had immediately felt at home in it, along with its hollow, as the only right place—but because of its more immediate surroundings. It put me off that houses of the sort that attracted me were so much in the minority. Only en masse, one next to the other, street after street, did these fieldstone structures, in their slight geometric variations, retain a powerfully fairy-tale-like, very immediate character. Here, however, where they were few and far between, they seemed like leftovers from a bygone time, set apart from the mostly stuccoed, yet grotesquely different blocks from the periods between and after the world wars, many with names legible from a considerable distance (although I immediately scraped the name off my house, in the meantime I have come to be fond of some of them after all, for instance “My Sufficiency,” “My Cottage in Canada,” “Sweet Refuge,” “Family Ties,” “My Horizon,” “Our Sundays,” “My Parachute,” and recently I dreamed of a house in the bay with the name “My Births”).
And once during the decade a crow’s feather landed on the Absence Path; the older men in the bar called Fountain without Wine smelled snow one wintry evening, but it did not come; my petty prophet, who had meanwhile moved to yet another restaurant, scared off his guests with a tin cutout of a Moor by the front door, which blew over in the slightest wind; the Three Stations Bar was gutted by fire; a military airplane crashed right nearby in the forest before it could land at Villacoublay—beforehand its huge shadow over the house; I boxed the ears of my almost grown-up son after I had picked him up at the police station, where he had been taken for shoplifting; I threw a burning branch over the fence of a neighbor, the noisiest of all; during the Gulf War no trains passed through the tunnel to Paris for so long that the suburb seemed cut off from the city, as if at the end of time; my son left immediately for Vienna after his last examination at the Lycée Rabelais, halfway into the forest of Meudon; my sister died; the frozen-over Nameless Pond pinged from my skipping pebbles by myself; the woman from Catalonia left me for the second time; having reached the top of the transmitter here, the highest vantage point around Paris, for which I had special permission, I confirmed for myself that my suburb actually did cut into the wooded hills in the form of a bay, more remote than a village on a fjord or a research station in the Arctic; and this morning, in the construction fill of the Absence Path, I came upon the fragment of an inscription with the very words I recall from a tombstone, meanwhile disappeared from the graveyard, back home in Rinkolach: “Returned to His Fluid Ancestral Home.”
That was more or less the story of my metamorphosis. When I reflect upon what I have experienced in my existence up to now, it was neither the war during my childhood nor our flight from Russian-occupied Germany home to Austria, nor my youth-long imprisonment in the boarding school, nor, after many feverish attempts, that first quiet line that made me certain I was now on the right path, nor being with my wife or my child, but only that metamorphosis.
Why does it seem to me that this is the only thing I have ever experienced? I do not know, just as after writing this down I do not know any more about it than before. At any rate, the other happenings came about like something that had been foreseen, while the metamorphosis seized hold of me—like an accident? an assault?—no, as a completely unknown force it seized hold of what was deepest inside me, which only in that way became distinguishable, like something in the dark lit up by lightning. There was no deeper inside than that.
And what else? Nothing else. Even the word “metamorphosis” came only long, long afterward. But then why am I convinced that it is the only major thing worth telling about that happened to me in my fifty-six years of life, on five continents, on two moons, on the highest peaks on Mars and in the hottest springs on Venus, and why does everything else, no matter how inspiring or devastating, strike me as incidental?
How wretchedly cut off from the world I found myself time and again, how blissfully at one with it, and yet only yesterday I thought: “I have never deserved to be hurled to the ground except back in my metamorphosis period!”
At intervals I continued to view myself as the only one with such a story, for otherwise wouldn’t it have been told long since, and have become a classic? Or had I, on the contrary, had innumerable forerunners, and was I perhaps merely the first who had not perished in the process?
But didn’t my story therefore cry out all the more urgently to be told? Or, again on the contrary, had all those who had had this experience survived and yet found nothing to tell? Or were they afraid to try?
Hadn’t I, too, felt a great deal of resistance to continuing the narrative, as if it were somehow improper? And is it not true that I got into this only against my will?
What I do know: that metamorphosis, or expulsion, or merely a new orientation, has been used up. It seems to me that I have lost or frittered away all of its benefits: patience, mental acuity, magnanimity, boldness, empathy, receptivity, tolerance, ability to disarm, to forget. Or have I just muddled along halfheartedly? Failed from the beginning to make the right start?
This morning I saw the first hazelnuts of the year here on the edge of the woods in the bay. The little ovals in their pale green neck ruffs reminded me of the same hazelnuts from my metamorphosis period, as one of its visual images, and I thought: “That was a time of freshness! Now is not a time of freshness anymore, and not only for me. But who knows? What does a foreigner know?”
On to the story of my friends! Let them surprise you.
PART 3
1
The Story of the Singer
The singer was about my age, and wanted to go on singing as an old man, like Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker.
And yet there had already been quite a few moments in his life when he would have been ready to die on the spot. This happened to him once after a night without sleep in a one-engine plane over the source of the Mississippi, in a morning blizzard, when, thinking of all those before him who had perished in this manner, almost customary for singers, he wanted to give the plane an additional jolt, as it tossed about in the darkness, so as to hasten the crash and be scattered in all directions, with the snowstorm outside so thick that even in the long-drawn-out flashes of lightning, prolonged further by the whirling snow, one could not make out whether the flakes were falling down or up. Inste
ad, he promptly composed a song, his ballad, which had to be screamed almost from start to finish, with the title “Why Are You Not Serious?”
Another time he had been similarly willing to die in blissful exhaustion after a concert, not even a very large one, in the school auditorium of a midsized city in Switzerland, where (after that unfortunate period when people kept throwing themselves at him, he played at an even greater distance from them, often even with his back to them) for the encore he unexpectedly mingled with the audience, hoping a knife would be thrust into his heart, sensed that one person or another in the crowd might be the one, recognizable by his tense absentmindedness in the midst of all the elation, and even challenged him by stopping just far enough from the would-be assassin to give him room for the windup, and proffering his chest, as if that were part of his song; even at the exit, not a private one but the general one, he looked around, unprotected, in the lingering crowd for the “disturbed yet purposeful face” one could count on in such situations: “And in Switzerland my stalker was a woman every time”; and such a woman actually did pull a knife on him—except that the singer, prepared for this as he was, including dying, in that same breath, not at all bereft of will as he had thought, knocked it out of her hand. (The song occasioned by this incident began with “I’ll die at the hand of a woman.”)