by Peter Handke
The reader had time. In the following days he not only returned several times to the scene of my near-crime in Wilhelmshaven, where the wintry desolation made him feel less like murdering someone than like hugging someone, but also visited the area on the edge of town where my father lived.
Since the death of his lawfully wedded wife (whom I sometimes think my father poisoned), he had been living alone for a long time in his little, pointy-gabled row house, and the reader watched and followed the old man until the lights went out at midnight (after that, in the stairwell, where the steps could be dimly made out through a high milk-glass panel, from time to time a ghost light would go on to frighten off invaders from the planet Mercury).
My father hardly went anywhere on foot anymore. He rode his bicycle to the Rathaus tavern for his early-evening beer with the two or three pals still alive, and on weekends drove to Oldenburg to see his lady friend, who was his own age, in his Mercedes, the new model of which he had already ordered from Untertürkenheim for delivery in the spring. During such drives he would pull over to the side of the road several times and take a catnap; or perhaps it only looked that way. In the company of his elderly friends, he, although also elderly, seemed by far the youngest, and when he spoke they tended not to register it. Each time he began with a stutter that was not a speech defect; it sounded as though it came from a schoolboy, the type who always contradicts and knows it all. But when they drank he was the one who replenished the others’ glasses, always to the rim. One time he unexpectedly took a young woman in his arms and danced with her through the pub. And one time the eighty-five-year-old mentioned, without being asked and again almost unheard, that he had a son by a foreign woman, his great love, and his son was a joy to him. The reader reported to me that my father had said this without any stuttering.
Keeping himself in the background this way was something at which the reader had less and less success during his travels. Otherwise, wherever he was, he managed with his way of reading to achieve more than merely being overlooked: he created a zone around himself, just wide enough for turning a page, where even guests at a stag party would give him a wide berth. He became taboo, even directed the happenings around him.
But this time, as the days passed, he became downright suspect, except in the vicinity of my father. For he merely pretended to be reading, or he did read, and could have, if asked, recited every detail of the exemplary tale in question, but he remained uninvolved, receptive at most to the elegant structure of the Spanish sentences, and this was not his way of reading. It was like the repeated attempts he had made since childhood to read Don Quixote. He could neither take seriously nor find comical these self-anointed heroes and their flailing around. And yet he kept trying. At some point he had to enter into the world of Miguel de Cervantes. He believed, if not in the author, then at least in his, the reader’s, predecessors, through the centuries. This time he would find his way into the book. The wintry light on Jade Bay, clear, dark, as if from below, would help him.
One time, to make himself receptive for reading, he even swam in the cold February sea, and then thought, with one stroke: “Now!” No. The book remained mute. And afterward, as he ran over a bridge that crossed the locks, he, this corner-of-the-eye person—he picked up things more quickly this way than by looking at them head-on—who had been a goalie in his youth, caught sight of a car following him at a snail’s pace, and the merest thing would have had to snap inside him for him to toss the book into the canal and go after that metal hulk with an iron rod. The car was a police car and in it the young policeman with the gentle voice, who asked if he was still working his way through Novellas ejemplares, whereupon my friend discovered that the person in uniform was a lovely woman.
The reader tried to make headway with the book on Helgoland, and back on the mainland in Delmenhorst, Buxtehude, Hameln, Run-storf am Aalmeer, during Carnival, on Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday, on Ascension Day: Cervantes’s sentences galloped, bounced, and danced, but they did not carry him along with them. Meanwhile he carried on his business, inconspicuous to an observer, yet when the moment came, completely focused, a dedicated businessman.
In a church in Hildesheim, looking at the roundheaded figures from the centuries of a very different Germany, and even looking at the Gothic ones, he wondered how Goethe could have been so disdainful toward such luminous figures and found them distorted and barbarous, he, for whom the human skull matched the vault of the heavens.
But without his reading my friend saw his Germany as more desolate than ever, and himself along with it. Without his reading his Germans appeared to him as usurpers in their own country, either hacking the air space apart with their excessively loud voices or whispering as mythological ear lindworms. When he still read, then under duress: “Liposuction,” “Utilization Factor.” And once, in another German pedestrian zone, he read a sign that beggar children held up to his chest, read it from top to bottom, only to find that they had stolen everything off him but his paperback book.
But he had time, after all. And thus on a day in late spring when he was watching a national soccer match in Frankfurt’s Waldstadion, he saw at halftime, out of the corner of his eye, a person next to him who picked up a book. It was a young woman, in profile. And she held the book away from her, at first still closed, which somewhat resembled the initial position in a wrestling match, also because her shoulders were leaning back and her eyes lowered. The woman’s entire body was involved, and remained so when she began to read. It became just a bit quieter, at the same time more mobile, with the addition of silent exclamations or breaths, as if she were cheering the book on.
“All right, and now I shall read, too,” said my friend next to her, and spelled out in one fell swoop—that was no contradiction—a page on which a Cervantes hero is finally taken seriously by another character in the story, whereupon the reader likewise could finally take him seriously, and read, and spelled out, spelled out and read, on and on. Then he looked up. He had read enough for today and was looking forward to tomorrow, with the book. And he looked at his neighbor, who now, at the end of halftime, closed her own book. Yes, wasn’t it the pretty policewoman from Wilhelmshaven on Jade Bay? She had been following him all this time!
And she turned to him, and the two readers edged closer to each other, and then watched the ball together, which, when it went in the wrong direction, forced them to pay attention, and when it went in the right direction, on the other hand, lifted their spirits. And that was where? Where am I? And the reader could think there was a Germany still waiting to be kissed awake.
The thought formed such a clear image that he believed in it.
3
The Story of the Painter
Meanwhile late summer has come, or early fall already, and the painter is lying, his materials next to him, facedown on a bed of flint in the shade of the only bush at a bend in the Río Duero, at his head the steep, high, reddish-yellow sandstone terrace overlooking the river, and up above, already far off, Toro, with its façades of the same color, in the province of Zamora on the meseta of western Castile, about seven hundred fifty meters above the level of the Mediterranean at Alicante, while the painter is lying about one hundred meters lower.
The large birds surrounding the painter now in midafternoon are not ravens; they also have beaks too straight and too long for vultures; are they pelicans?—one of them is holding a fish crosswise—flamingos? no, they are storks, which, with their heads bent over their backs, burst out in squawks, one after the other, so that in the deserted and quiet river landscape it echoes like the so-called Ratschen back home on the Jaunfeld, the rattles that replace the church bells during Holy Week until the celebration of the Resurrection.
At some distance from the painter, down there by the bend in the river, on the almost white, almost glassy expanse of flintstone (I have a few lumps of it here on my desk and can smell the sparks in them), are lying fat dead fish, carp and pike, both gleaming gold from the solid coats of flies
covering them; the gills of one of the fish are still pulsing, but they, too, are already swarming with flies.
Every morning, upon making his way down from Toro, the painter wanted to ask the fishermen why they simply left some of their catch lying on the bank, and precisely the finest specimens; to this day he does not know. Although he is a Spaniard—he never calls himself Catalan—there are many customs in his own country that even now, when his hair has turned gray, remain a mystery to him, one he is reluctant to solve.
Meanwhile the fishermen are having their meal at the barrackslike bar under the poplar trees on the other side of the Roman bridge, whose low, squat, round arches let through the Río Duero, here white with cataracts, with a roar that scales the steep banks and penetrates far into the streets of the town, but at the bend where the painter is lying is audible only as some soft, windlike sound belonging to the expansive, bald Spanish or Indian summer silence.
It is already approaching evening, and at the foot of the earthen terrace, hardly visible for a moment between two of its foothills, as in the gap in a canyon, the storm-dark Talgo flashes by, the daily express from Madrid to Vigo and La Coruña, which does not stop in Toro, glimpsed just long enough for the silhouette of a passenger to appear behind the tinted window of the bar car; and then, at the next curve in the tracks, which follow the river, between the cliffs, again that Mississippi-wide tooting in the echo of the roar and whistle of this railway thing, as graceful as it is heavy, from which the entire fisherman’s pub on the other side jingles and jangles; this now you see me! now you don’t! is something the painter has not allowed himself to miss once in all his weeks here; and the way it slices through the alluvial plane appeared to him daily as a plowing up of the entire earth and at the same time catapulted him into a previously unknown loneliness. Up! Back to work!
So was it still possible, now near the end of the twentieth century, to be motivated and stimulated, as once in the age of the great engineers, by a machine, the sight of it, its sound, its speed, undeterred even by the thought of a catastrophe right around the next corner?
Was he still “the painter”? (He allowed himself to be called a “filmmaker” or “cinéaste,” despite his film, long since finished and even shown here and there, only with a modest step to one side, as if to make way for someone else.)
He had begun to paint long ago with a particular notion of distance, which, however, did not then become a feature of his paintings. The distance was there beforehand: his original image—the thing that motivated him—his starting point. It determined him.
And now, as a result of his one role change to filmmaking? as a result of all that went with and came after it? as a result of what? he had lost that distance, his material? Once and for all? So what had this strange phenomenon, about which he had found nothing, not even in the textbook on “psychogeometry,” meant to him in the past?
That distance had appeared to him way back in childhood as the blackness he saw when he closed his eyes.
Yet since birth he had fixed his gaze on the most distant horizon possible: from Tarragona in the direction of the sunrise, out over the Mediterranean, overlooking which, people said, the city lay as a “balcony.” The sense of distance he got from this was, however, one of apprehension, in the face of the emptiness and the height, and the infrequent ships or boats in the middle distance did not suggest safety. The inky or steely or leaden blue also contributed to his impression that in this boundlessness there was no destination, or, if there was, then over in ancient Rome, where, he was sure, one of his ancestors who had been dragged away from his coast had ended his life as a slave or as lion fodder.
With eyes closed, he saw an entirely different distance. In all the blackness something like a harbor took shape, where he saw himself safely anchored.
And it was even more: in the black expanse, which did not seem all that black, but shot through with thousands of variegated little brigh-tenings, without movement, something was constantly being danced, played, sung, narrated, drawn, as a model for him. “Model for,” for it was not a question of images copied “from” anything. Besides, copies consisted only of foreground, and moved, vibrated, shrank, grew, as if on their own, while his stories in the blackness took place in the most distant background possible, and the movement he perceived in them seemed to come from him himself—from his heartbeat? no, for that it was too light, too disembodied—from his lungs? for that it was too quick—from his brain? for that it was too even, too powerful in imagery, too comprehensive, too intimate, too childlike.
It was even stranger that closing his eyes, without crossing them in the least, he could look away from the distant black happenings and then continue to watch them, except that the distance now shifted from its place behind his closed lids into his innermost self and became something whole, “one and all.”
To be sure, that happened during his childhood only when he was lying in bed, as he was waking up in the morning. So were they images between waking and sleeping? No, neither copied images nor images between waking and sleeping. For the distance behind his eyes, he had to have had a good sleep and be well beyond the boundary of dreams, clearheaded, and the distance also did not create concrete images, as the state between waking and sleeping created still lives, for instance, especially of landscapes, and it also dispensed with the succession of spaces characteristic of that other state, indeed with space altogether; the distance itself was enough. And nevertheless it was active, and what it did was to produce an effect. Produce what effect? This constant, marvelously delicate movement in him and at the same time independent of him, without beginning or end, a sort of motionlessly moving repeated figure in the blackness, drawn to guide him.
And then with the years, he could say, paraphrasing Paul Klee, “The distance and I are one, I am a painter.”
Yet it was something else again to get down to the images and get down to work. That was where painting began, art. It was not reproduction that counted but metamorphosis, or reproduction through metamorphosis. The starting point disappeared into it, or was absorbed into it. What was drawn for him, his model, formed only the bottom layer, and with scraping would perhaps have actually come to light sometimes, the mere appearance standing in baffling contradiction to the completed picture. For this he not only had to displace the original image, set it on its head, but also, so far as it was within his strength, invent things to add as well as subtract, so that as a rule something entirely new emerged in the end.
Precisely through such energetic distortions he could then, with reference to the distance, say of each picture: “I have reinforced a presence.” And it had been a long time since the painter experienced his source of motivation only with eyes closed, when lying down. And on the other hand, he still found nothing in just any old distant blue, or red, or yellow. The location of his particular distance was somewhere nearer, could shimmer out at him from a clump of earth, mixed with stones and wood, at the tips of his toes, or when the colors of someone’s eyes transmitted themselves to him from close up, also, in the mirror, his own (Black Sea black).
This distance could be most reliably tracked down, at least before his involvement with film, in a very specific visual realm.
That realm began at a certain remove from the eye, and yet long before what is commonly referred to as distance. The path leading to it was difficult to measure; earlier people would have said, for instance, “a stone’s throw” (how large was such a stone, and who was throwing it?). And then the sense of distance was limited to a rather narrow strip or spot; if he looked out past it, just a bit, that promptly put an end to the distance, even if the high sea spread before him or the grassy lane swept into a savanna.
Thus distance appeared, just begging to be circumscribed and conveyed to the surface of a picture, at the end of a garden, for instance, in front of that wall and the bushes over there, on the ground, in the grass. It revealed itself thus on a pond in the forest, just before the barway on the opposite bank, as a del
imited place there on the water, almost no more than a little tip.
And curious, too, that an ordinary meadow was already too spacious for such a unit of distance, while an ordinary backyard was too small. And the same was true of a lake on the one hand and of a mere puddle on the other. To offer material for an image of distance, the yard had to be larger than usual, just as the pond had to extend farther than a pond usually does—both, however, by just a bit, “to be recognized,” “by a factor of one.” And that, to be precise, was the measure of distance.
Only in this way did distance seeing come into being, as was fitting for a law of nature.
At the same time a displacement occurred such as no other distant horizon could bring about, neither that of the Himalayas nor of the Amazon delta: as a result of its limitation or framing, this particular distance drew the painter into a scenery, with a light on the water, on the grass, on the treetops like that in a mirror, and distance literally put in an appearance: there! It will start right there, there is the place to board, it will take place there, it will play itself out there, it will be hatched there, it will become concentrated there, it will catch fire there, it will be spread out there, right over there, in that narrow, limited patch of distance it is clear again, everything is being freshly polished, is gleaming as on the first day of the Creation.
And remarkable again that such distance occurred as if without movement, at any rate with hardly anything’s moving noticeably in it. It seemed to the painter as though quiet was a prerequisite for this effect: that the distant grass tip, the distant coast of the forest pond, the distant interwoven pattern of the treetops had to remain nice and still.