by Peter Handke
Later the two of them set out together for Arabia, where he worked as an engineer building a pumping station along an oil pipeline and after a few years committed suicide, or, as she said, “went of his own accord.” She told the story that way so that the listener, instead of asking why and how, would merely nod.
She returned to Yugoslavia, to the city of her birth, for a time managed her parents’ inn, engrossed anew in the citywide roof-tile images, and the processions of ridgepole tiles heading toward the Orient. Either she was seen only in the taproom, now in heel-revealing clogs herself, and with grim, dark eyebrows, intentionally penciled in this way, or far away on the wintry back roads, recognizable by her rapid pace, almost like the jerky movement of a speed walker (an athletic discipline), shoulders back and rolling.
Then she became, the first woman in Slovenia to do so, a forester, no, godzar, whom, almost as famous as the former Miss Yugoslavia, no one connected with the latter, superior to the men because of her sharp eyes and ears, especially in the forest dusk and night; then married again, a local “co-worker,” both of them in uniform and studded with decorations from the Communist Party; then she returned alone, “single,” without work, to her room under the eaves, where she made herself, as she said, “beautiful again,” simply by looking and reading, and began to draft maps of imaginary countries, on a very small scale, painstakingly precise, with every watering place, cave, pier, cliff, following the example of the map in her copy of Treasure Island, which had remained more deeply engraved on her memory than the entire story; drafted, measured, outlined, entered; otherwise did nothing besides her work in the taproom except, on her morning walks along the edges of the fields, dig out hren (i.e., “horseradish”) to be used as a seasoning for the “cold-cut platter” in her restaurant, long, always amazingly white-white roots, until one day we met on the bridge over the river and each of us reminded the other of someone else, she me of no one in particular and I she perhaps of everyone but her first husband. With our shared story consigned to the past, my friend married for the third time, after an interval long enough, she wrote me, for her to feel “pure again,” and she moved to join her husband in the “city where the cathedral is an imperial palace” (Split) and gave birth to her children (two).
Not only did she take on nothing from her new status in life and continue her solitary trips as well as her Treasure Island studies; her children even seemed to be born without her, slipping from her body without labor pains into the world, and this, it seemed to me, was how she dealt with them later, more than merely unconcernedly, I thought, roughly, irresponsibly—but who knows?
It was similarly disquieting that in the intervals when she assumed the role of a housewife she became one with a single-mindedness that left no breathing room for anything else. She would be constantly cooking—and overcooking—washing laundry—washing out the color —washing the dishes with such forceful motions that they broke, and she went around, even on the street, along the pier, in felt slippers, every inch the slattern or the caricature of a concierge, with the two ends of her headcloth sticking up like rabbit ears. But might she not be on her way to a parachute jump in this getup? Yes, who was she?
And then again it sounded believable when she said, “The supermarkets and shopping centers are my native turf.” And once she also let fall, as if it were to be taken for granted, that she, who hardly had to worry about money, participated in a housewives’ circle like those in American suburbs, in which the women took turns inviting each other to their homes, and combined a convivial afternoon, with no men around, with the selling to each other of plastic kitchen utensils, like peddlers, except that it was in their own houses, she! and in “our Yugoslavia”!
She had come to Turkey this time in response to a classified advertisement, either delivering or smuggling to someone in Izmir a Ford Mustang, the luxury car with the galloping wild horse as its insignia.
After this she continued to head east, almost exclusively on foot, not only from bay to bay but just as much through the interior of the country, where on a single plain there were often numerous little brooks and rivers—marked by a succession of high natural fences consisting of reeds—often in the middle of nowhere, each like a living thing, flowing side by side toward the sea, slowly, and easy to cross (for her).
To stroll across such deltas, to wade, to swim, to dive, with a new watercourse every couple of stages, without bridges or boardwalks—of all the varieties of being underway she found this the airiest and most lofty, “my golden proportion.” These plains were similar to those of the Isonzo, Tagliamento, and Piave rivers in northern Italy, which streamed toward the Adriatic in parallel, each one as the other’s neighbor, only the plains here were far more remote, and smaller, and the watercourses, often nameless, were closer together and simply more ancient-seeming, and that not only because of the older history of the region.
It could happen that she did not cross such a brook immediately, but continued in it and with it—she was equipped for that, or sometimes not—to where it flowed into the nearby bay, where the ocean was often so still that there was a clear boundary between the two types of waves, those of the brook and those of the sea, their encounter with and merging into each other as gentle as imaginable, or that even the individual waves came from the fresh water streaming out into the salty deep, or at least the individual ones that made themselves heard.
For her it was something special to feel this borderline, slightly rocking, against the backs of her knees, at her hips, or on her thighs, one water in front of her, the other behind. (And although she subsequently referred to herself only in the singular, I think she was not always alone, “not absolutely alone.”)
In such spots she also regularly found, underwater, something resembling a treasure, which, however, soon lost this aspect once outside its particular zone.
She was even more powerfully attracted by such river-mouth areas, the miniature ones, than by the ocean.
In the meantime, along the paths, in the Turkish villages, she transported her few things on a cart she had “borrowed” somewhere, and thus gave herself the appearance of a pilgrim to Jerusalem.
Then, too, sometimes, when it was already spring, not in order to disguise herself but for protection against the sun and the dust on the road, she went along with a jacket over her head, pulled down over her eyes and mouth, looking thin and so black-clothed that she appeared more peasantlike than any native woman. In the light shining through the material, filtered by it, the most harsh and naked landscapes were softened as if by an eclipse of the sun, a different sort from the kind we associate with certain battles during the Crusades: a calming one that sharpens one’s powers of observation, and she wondered why no one wore sunglasses made of this different kind of transparent material instead of glass.
If she attracted attention at all, it was only because of her bare legs, which, from her knee breeches down, were scratched and rough, even revealing the beginnings of varicose veins, “appropriate,” in her words, “for a Slavic woman.”
Then one morning she was jolting along, her heels almost in the dust, on a mule; trotted by toward evening on a horse; was sitting the following day behind the windows of a bus that were shaking like a kaleidoscope, which also made the countryside look kaleidoscope-like; turned up by the sea a few days later in a thickly wooded, seemingly uninhabited bay, high on the hump of a camel, looking from the other end of the bay like the advance guard of the scattered “Orient Circus” that had lost its way, appearing from close up, with her sooty cheeks, like a guerrilla or simply a charcoal burner’s wife—higher up in the forest a charcoal pile really is smoking—who now settles down with all her earthly possessions on a dock in the reeds, by a carefully carved-out channel, little by little joined by similar figures loaded down with bundles, who, like her, seem to emerge from the underbrush, several children in tow, all of them now waiting, in silence, for the weekly motor launch that will carry the group on to Fethiye or Marmaris, where t
hey will change to the bus to Istanbul or to the steamer to Antiochia, Alexandria, Heliopolis, Leptis Magna, while the camel, now riderless, already far away, circles the bay at a leisurely pace, and a child who stayed behind on the shore fills with stones the shell casing found by my woman friend on her way there but then left lying on the beach.
Although she did not keep notes or make sketches or take pictures on her trip, sending her husband and children only picture-postcard greetings and sending me, in loose imitation of Heraclitus, only fragments like “The village of Kokova shouts its poverty out over the sea,” it seemed to her as though all her movements, back and forth across the country, were being recorded.
With her peculiar style of being on the road, always and intensely focused on the subject at hand, prepared to let herself be surprised and to surprise others, she pictured herself making tracks not only through these regions but simultaneously on a particular map of the world. There each of her present steps seemed at the same moment to be placed as a marker, like the markings of an explorer, and ineradicable, which gave her a good conscience in addition to the pleasure she could experience alone with herself this way: as if her crisscrossing were now a form of work, for the common good if any work ever was.
In addition, as she saw it, not a single step in the course of her journey could be such that it contravened that transfer onto the “trail map” as she pictured it. One false step or thoughtless action, and the entire marker script that she had paced out would be eradicated; her work, her oeuvre, would have been in vain.
From such consciousness she then derived something like an ad hoc ethical imperative: “Conduct yourself on your journey in such a way that you see nothing you do as a violation of your leaving traces.”
But then why did she still expect that the next time she came around a bend she would finally have before her eyes that which she found sorely absent from such a way of life, scandalously lacking? Why did she search, and search, and search?
And from time to time she thought that what she would encounter around the bend would be the ax murderer intended just for her, and her presumed leaving of traces was merely a sickness, part and parcel of that irresponsibility that led her to tell herself that what she was doing should not be judged and punished like the actions of others, simply because she was the one doing it?
And with the outer-space-blue Turkish sky above her, she saw herself as far from where duty told her she should be, indeed as torn away from it, never to return. No matter how faithfully she continued to follow her personal rule, which, again paraphrasing the stutterer Heraclitus from Ephesus—a place already irretrievably left behind—went as follows: “Go well!” and which she had mastered and now modeled for the world around her as otherwise only the woman apothecary of Erdberg (from my unwritten novel) could: in such moments she was behaving, in the eyes of the agency responsible for her, like a vagabond, as a disgraceful neglecter of her main concern.
But what was her main concern?
The others, even her children—thus experience had taught her—were better off without her constant presence; her long absences did them good. Her assignment—thus experience had taught her as well—was her way of being on the road in this original fashion. “My way is my assignment, nothing else!”
Yet now that was no longer valid—for hours, even days, at a time. No matter where she struggled along, eyes opened wide to the millennia-old life of the Orient, her graceful movement providing at the same time an example of pure presentness: nothing more of it appeared on that map that required no reprinting, located—plotted—recorded—transmitted. Among thousands of good news items this was the bad news from this journey. She did not feel herself to be either in the Orient known for its patriarchal atmosphere or in the Levant fabled for cinnamon and clashing cymbals. Spaceship Earth did not answer anymore, even to the most imploring SOS scraped by toes and pounded by heels.
Carefreeness: was my friend in the process of losing it?
It could even be that in the course of the summer, in some city on a harbor, in the bars and bazaars, she was listening for sounds of home: except for a bit of Russian, nothing. During this year she seemed to be the only person from her country spending time in this area, or abroad at all, and for the first time this was not a matter of indifference to her. For the first time she felt something like fear, or a prelude to fear.
One day she could be seen among the yachts, where, without needing money, she offered to help the crew with shopping onshore; and the next day she rented for herself, for continuing her trip eastward, a light cayman with crew, she being the only passenger, in which role she then stood erect in the bow, which was decorated with nothing, nothing at all, and sailed into a bay accessible only to ships and already sparkling festively when she arrived and filled with the sweet scent of wood fires, tying up in the last berth there, to the sound of “Death and the Maiden” drifting across the water from the most distant of the boats. And on a third day, still in the depths of night, she created a silhouette, standing before the glow of a village flat-bread oven in the interior. And in the first gray of dawn she was darting along a path through the hills, whose earth was cracked from dryness into an endless hexagonal net; she walked ahead of a herd of goats, the males’ horns clashing against each other. And that same morning, in a town already up in the mountains, she had a tooth extracted, and at noon stood in a house entryway without a door, contemplating a pair of canine lovers, glued together, no longer able to break loose, howling with strain and pain, tumbling around and around each other, until she felt hungry. And that same afternoon she crossed a mountain village, deserted except for an old woman and her hens, and robbed of its access road by an earthquake; she had to practically scramble over the village, like a wall of rubble and boulders, then wished a good evening to a soldier on patrol with a walkie-talkie, on a rise, in the icy wind, the eternal Taurus snow before his eyes, and then ran downhill, ran and ran, until she reached the next harbor, where the cook on her hired boat was already waiting for his queen of Sheba with the evening meal, while the helmsman lay on his back next to the cayman in the extremely salty water and by the light of the full moon read the newspaper spread wide between his arms, or made it look as though he was reading.
This particular day occurs in the August heat, when even the wind is blazing hot and makes breathing difficult, and my friend has had a taxi drop her off before sunrise near the ruins of an ancient temple to Leda, who was ravished by the chief god in the shape of a swan. Actually the temple was dedicated to Zeus’s lawful wife, his first, whose name was similar, Lato, but the traveler had decided to rededicate the temple in honor of the woman who bore Helen, which happened to be my friend’s name as well.
And indeed, in the darkly shimmering light of dawn, more part of the marly furrowed land than of the sky above it, in the midst of a heavy, soundless stillness, the swan in question swooped down among the fragments of columns, in a sudden dive, casting its shadow ahead of it, like a bird of prey about to pounce on its booty, landed amid splintering and cracking in a puddle, flapped its wings furiously in the air, and promptly lifted off again, vanishing immediately behind the dike along the nearby river, and in the temple precinct, as a branch usually bounces after the departure of a winged creature, the water rippled in widening circles, with the disappearing swan’s flight creating a sound like an immense coughing. “On with the day!” (Another of her favorite paraphrases of Heraclitus.)
After hours of heading inland in the heat, quite often running to make the breeze feel cooler, far from any water, once passing fleshy, hip-high stands of wild sage, once passing stinking sheep skeletons, she found herself marching through a broad stretch of hinterland, where, again for hours, all the umbrella pines and scrub chestnut oaks stood charred, which afforded a view of the world very similar to the one she had had with the black jacket over her head. For a long time she encountered not a single living being, just as the soot colors, up hill and down dale, remained at a distance, and
, in the absence of wind here, the only sound came from her footsteps. She waded through ash mixed with pitch. The smell of burning brought back to her nostrils the remembrance of the smokehouses of her childhood and thus now and then provided a sort of cooling by way of memory.
Once, when she crouched down to relieve herself, there appeared unexpectedly, from all sides, butterflies—small ones and large, blue, white, multicolored; in no time they had swarmed over the spot of urine and were drinking it. As she held still, all around her in the charred landscape she heard the very delicate chirping of crickets, which, like no other sound, wove together or dissolved proximity and distance, a welcome sound after the cicadas’ racket, which here in the dark light was absent for a change. And close enough to touch, glassy in the dull ash gray, a snake glided by, slithering in a zigzag, its head slightly raised, as if looking for its family after the fire.
On with the day. And toward sundown she came to a strip where finally some growth was beginning again, first in the form of blackberry canes, clambering green up into the dead branches, and their berries, which in such a setting somewhat resembled animals made up of thousands of black-gleaming eyes, for which she stood on tiptoe, jumped, took a flying leap. She followed the green strip as it widened, and descended by the steep path, with now and then a breath of ocean air from below, for a while adhering to the rhythm with which a long-bodied Mediterranean hornet flew time and again at a snail shell on the ground, pushing and rolling it along, until the house was finally lying with its open side up, into which the hornet promptly slipped, and my friend recognized, and heard as well, that inside it was now ripping and stripping the rotten flesh from the walls.