by Peter Handke
He insisted on it, however. To present himself as this kind of authority from time to time was his duty. Of course he considered himself one of them, if anyone was. Yet it was not acceptable for them to keep letting themselves go in his presence; they had to give heed to his central concerns, at least now and then. In the long run he preferred to be cursed as a preacher than to be their pal. It filled him with conflict that, except perhaps when he was celebrating Mass or writing his sermons, he appeared outwardly to be anything but a “Reverend.”
How he loved driving, and fast, especially on this broad, rather deserted plain along the border, where during the period when he was engaged to be married he had even participated in an amateur auto race, with the same number painted large on the Volkswagen that he later used for his laundry in the seminary for latecomers.
Yet Carinthia north of the Drau, where he was headed today around noon, remained, as in his youth, a cold, unfriendly region, almost enemy territory, as if—though this was actually not true, if you looked at it the right way—southern Slavic soulfulness and earth-dreaminess came to an end there, and starting with the northern bank of the river, the landscape, including the fields, which were really no different, and the scattered church towers, were pierced by the gaze of the Germanic front soldiers, extinguished by a word-rattling German-speakingness that kept everything else at bay. This image—where did it come from?—he had still been unable to exorcise entirely; not long ago he had looked at the faces of schoolchildren from the capital city bouncing along in the back of army trucks on the tenth of October, the anniversary of the referendum that had joined the southern region to Austria in 1920, and had seen the faces of these children, obviously gleeful at having a day without school and high-spirited because of getting to ride in such a special vehicle, as those of grim volunteers, or at least children who were up to no good.
Such moods, which he called his “daily dose of dementia,” were calmed now by driving, also by the sight of snow high on the Sau Alps, which ran across the entire countryside to the north, and finally dissolved in thin air over on the other side of the rift carved out by the river, at dinner, where he sat with his “brother in office,” simply by virtue of his now having for the first time that day, not shadowy ghosts, but a person with clear outlines sitting across from him, and quite a young one at that, his mouth, cheeks, eyes, forehead nothing but young.
And thus, when his neighbor told him that the sole remaining Slavic grave inscription in the Ruden cemetery had now been removed, or at least hidden, squeezed in between the wall and German-gold stones, it was he who said that did not mean anything; to overlook it would be a form of strength; what mattered was something else entirely!
And he continued talking, about how urgent a German translation of the New Testament was, one neither as colloquial as Luther’s nor like one of the more recent ones, pitched to the understanding of the average newspaper reader, but one that was as literal as possible, from the Greek, which was akin to German, heart and soul, as were no other two languages he could name.
On his way back he thought he heard from a house standing alone at the bottom of the rift a loud sobbing, which turned out to come from the television there.
Out of the river rift, up on the Jaunfeld Plain again, back in his south, open in all directions, he saw from the highway, at the foot of Rinkenberg’s hill, which seemed closer on this dark day, the ancient priest from the village out walking; he had recently gone completely blind, and was being led across the fields by a child, his outstretched hand on the child’s shoulder, a gesture with which the blind man continued to celebrate the Eucharist in his church, proclaiming the texts from the Introibo to the Ite missa est by heart.
My friend turned off to the east, to the village called Dob, or in German Aich, where his parishioner lay dying and at the same time a single figure stood waiting at the edge of town in front of that railroad station he had always associated with Westerns, those films he had watched in his youth, and not merely to kill time; in his thoughts he got out and waited there with Jimmy Stewart.
In the heart of the village—there still was one here—by the outdoor clay bowling alley belonging to the restaurant now no longer in operation, he actually did stop, simply to roll into nowhere the one mud-encrusted, half-rotted wooden ball lying around.
Only after that did he enter the house next door with the dying man, who was fully conscious and at first shrank into his corner at the sight of the man in black, hair and eyes also black. What calmed and strengthened him at once was precisely the odd scorn in the priest’s gaze, which certainly did not pertain to him, the invalid in the last stages. This man facing death asked for the priest’s blessing and did not want to receive it lying down, but instead got out of bed and knelt for it; and thus received Extreme Unction, this sacrament that has almost gone out of use, practiced now simply to ease the conscience of the relatives, to whom the priest in departing indicated outside the door that their father would not die during the night, but tomorrow morning—for a long time now he had had a sense for the moment. And what if he himself died now, this very evening? they asked. He was indignant. “I’m not finished with myself yet.”
Alone, heading back to his car, he found the remote village in midafternoon still permeated with the freshness of morning. In the courtyards turnips were heaped up; a pear, at eye level, felt heavy in his hand; the mountains forming a great circle around the arena of the plain stood there in a color for which the name “Wyoming blue” came to him out of nowhere. How long had it been since he had gotten away from this region, the entire year thus far. He ordered two youths who were sitting on motorbikes and talking at the top of their lungs, while repeatedly revving their engines, to turn them off, went to his car without trying to hear what they were saying about him behind his back, and himself stepped hard on the gas.
The only walk he took this day that deserved the name was on a path through the fields, back to the edge of the Dobrava Forest, his destination the roadside shrine there, from which, on his instructions, a stonemason was removing the stucco and also the postwar frescoes—in the priest’s opinion not only clumsy but also mindless—so that the little place of worship would once more have nothing to show but its medieval stonework, at least for the present.
Now he had his rubber boots on, and also a mason’s jacket and cap, and joined the silent workman in hammering away, one of them outside, the other inside, and the mason was then fired up by his employer’s encouraging shouts, growing louder and louder as the original structure became visible and began to shine through (hadn’t it originally been his, the mason’s idea?).
And later, wearing the same outfit, my friend back home in his orchard picked clean the one apple tree that had not yet been harvested, until the last glimmer of day, when, from the foot of the ladder, a man in a necktie inquired where he might find the priest here, saying the Eternal Light in the church was not working; he was a traveling candle salesman, and also sold electric ones (now preferred by acolytes as better for their lungs). “The priest is on a round-the-world journey,” my friend replied, coughing from the phlegm caused by the candle soot, which would get worse during the winter, and laughed at the salesman’s departing back, neither maliciously nor kindly, just determined to remain uninvolved, decisively unmoved, as the child of Siebenbrunn had been taught by his father the sexton.
Washed and changed and then out again! already in darkness to Rinkolach, the village at the end of beaten paths, the village through which no street leads onward.
The affiliated church there was open, except for the commemoration of its consecration, held on a Sunday in summer, only for the few Masses for the dead. On this particular evening it was for a small farmer or occasional farmhand, without any family, who had died a long time ago, from the windows of whose former cottage turkeys now looked out, being raised by the neighbors who had ordered and paid for the Mass for him. Aside from the almost obligatory stranger who had somehow wandered in and sat off to
one side, these were also the only people waiting for the priest in the dim church, praying, in Slovenian, the long All Souls’ Litany, actually more a sort of invocation, close to singing, and finally, very gradually and very delicately modulating into singing. At first, after entering through the open door, he had merely stood in the background, and they did not notice him until he joined in the last apostrophe, addressed not to the saints but to the Holy Trinity, at a terrifying volume, and also in another key.
The church of Rinkolach (Rinkole in Slavic), on its patch of meadow in the middle of the village, looked from the outside to be about the size of a hall; the inside, of the dimensions of a living room, though for a large family, did not provide enough space in the middle for a so-called “people’s altar,” and thus he said Mass at a distance from the people, raised above them on the stepped platform, usually with the nave at his back, from which, to be sure, the dove of the Holy Ghost embroidered on his vestments kept an eye on the congregation.
For each sacramental act, performed alone, without an acolyte, he stretched his arms wide, summoning all his strength, as if he were doing work that required muscular effort. At the same time he moved along briskly, without prolonging any gesture; even the pauses during which he collected himself or simply waited showed him in a sort of activity. Just as he spread his arms like a weight lifter, he also snapped open the book for the reading of the apostle’s epistle, leafed back to the Gospel, jabbed, with his thick finger, at the written text, hammered, gripping the altar slab with both hands, his forehead audibly against it, fell, with a crash, to one knee, pounded himself so hard on the chest that it echoed, unlocked the tabernacle with a powerful twist of the hand, fished out the chalice with his fist, thrust it toward the congregation—“eat!”—and sawed the air as he delivered the benediction.
Once he had even disappeared in the middle, running to that narrow passageway behind the altar where the wooden structure of the altar, without the gilding, rough, in its unexpectedly mysterious form, could just as well be an old, abandoned flour mill, a part of the flour chute; he remained, as during a Mass in Russia, absent from the action out in front, which merely increased the suspense, and returned only after quite some time, again at a run, for the continuation.
Outside the momentary gobbling of a turkey, the drone of a night plane, the seemingly even more distant screeching of truck brakes.
It was perhaps the last mild evening of the year, and therefore he sat for a while afterward with the neighbors of the deceased on their farmyard bench, long enough for an entire tribe to line up on.
With their backs against the wall of the house, half in darkness, half in the glow of the barn light a little farther off, they sat in silence, facing the barely discernible pattern of the ventilation slits in the barn—in the form of solar rays—hearing the rustling and crackling in the invisible famous branching linden tree (and the hundred-year-old cherry tree) in the middle of Rinkolach, and sat and sat, again as in an earlier time, with which, my friend now thought, something could still be undertaken, something could be done; and not at all sure that with artificial lighting of the dead-end street a “long-cherished wish” of the villagers would be fulfilled, as the community newsletter regularly stated.
How he loved the night wind, the black on black. No star was in the sky. No child was crouching under the bench. A riddle from the old days: “What’s lying under the bench, and when you grab it, it squeals?”—“A chain.” All across the plain ladders were standing in orchards. In the last train from K. the heads of the sleeping passengers were leaning against the windows, and the locomotive’s whistle echoed far into Yugoslavia. A palm tree rustled in the sun on the outskirts of Jericho. In a new German translation of the Bible he would put “confidence” in place of “hope.” The woman next to him brushed the dandruff off his coat collar with a hand that was neither cold nor warm, more mineral-like, like flintstone.
And again, without any movement, he felt, in the first hour of night, the approaching morning, this time, however, as something ice-cold that reached into his armpits and then alarmed him mightily. At the same time, he felt “longing” coming back, his favorite word. No, it was a hunger, in the middle of his heart, and it was not coming back, but had been there forever. And then he caught himself also thinking, “No, I did not give up today—not yet!”
What? Did he need a third manifestation?
7
The Story of My Son
To be asked about my son, by anyone at all, has always put me in a bad mood, out of a clear blue sky; it has immediately destroyed the harmony between me and the other person. It was even worse when I was expected to tell stories about him. “Tell us!”: the very form of this invitation rubbed me the wrong way, and all the more so in conjunction with my own child. At least one way out was to say terrible things about him, to revile him from afar, and in general to invent atrocity stories about him (which also could be counted on to elicit an entirely different kind of sympathy than when I morosely stuck to the truth).
Even very early on, whenever I told a third person something about him in his presence, he himself would break in, as if his father were guilty of betraying him. In his absence I still suffer the effects of this, such that when I am forced to speak of him I vividly picture his disapproval. But the law of silence that pertains to my son’s life, including trivial details (these in particular), originates for the most part with me. Already long ago, even without the child’s punishing stare, I was usually conscious when talking about him that this was actually a form of gossip, and inappropriate.
I also strenuously avoid asking other parents about their offspring, and when I happen to do so after all, out of politeness or heedlessness, or heedless politeness?, I feel hostile in advance toward any answer they may give, and then I am sometimes surprised at how enthusiastically they come out with the answer, even in the case of bad news, as if certain fathers and mothers found themselves in their verbal element only when speaking of their children—why else would their conversational tone be transformed into triumphal blasts?
My resistance to telling anyone about my son seems therefore not to follow a universal law. Isn’t it actually crazy that I already resent it when a person asking me about my son presumes to use his first name?: “So, how is Valentin these days?”
It is something else again when it comes to telling about my next of kin or ward when no one is asking me about him. Then I occasionally succeed in being perfectly relaxed about it, speaking in a voice seemingly made up of several voices together, so that my son, I am certain, would not only approve but would also feel validated. This kind of storytelling I have inside me. Only it comes out decidedly too infrequently, because it is either the wrong listener or more likely the wrong moment (is there even such a thing as the “wrong listener”?).
And telling stories in writing is something else again. There, without a specific audience, without my voice’s getting in the way, not forced to wait for the right moment—that is within my control when I write, which unlike any other activity gives me an awareness of having time —my telling stories comes to me in a way that oral storytelling comes only by pure luck, often invalidated the very next day. Only in written form is my storytelling suited to my nature, on the right path, at home, no matter whom it deals with, even my son.
This has meanwhile become a conviction, reinforced by the observation that all my life, whenever I opened my mouth to tell a story, even if I was bursting with it, I hardly ever found a hearing, but instead alienated others and spoiled their fun. Where was the humor I kept trying to slip in edgewise? Only through my writing and being read was a change brought about.
This year, when my son was traveling in Southeastern Europe, almost always alone, I did not worry about him, for the first time. Nothing could happen to him, and for moments at a time this very thought made me uneasy again.
Yet wasn’t it true that in the preceding years, at precisely those times when I knew him to be in danger, my otherwis
e constant worry about him had ceased, replaced by a pleasurable sense of acceptance? And since the dangers, always major ones, had multiplied of late, hadn’t that very fact rendered me immune to my age-old worry about my closest kin? But: was he really still my closest kin? And: who was I without my age-old worry?
For example, that time when Valentin was trying to hitch a ride on the outskirts of town and his leg was almost torn off by the kick starter of a motorcycle that grazed him as it whizzed by, and he would have bled to death then and there if help had not arrived immediately, as I left the hospital where my son was lying with shattered bones and went home in the middle of the night, I felt receptive as never before to this particular hour of the night, to the region altogether, and grateful; the way things were now was right; I had shed a part of myself, a part that was past its usefulness. Only an adult could be as light of heart and unshakable as I was then—or unmoved? At any rate, that hour, and the others that followed, almost fatal to my son, gave me a standard by which to measure.
It is not entirely accurate to say that Valentin undertook his journey to track down his father’s youth. One stimulus, among several others, was a story I had invented out of the whole cloth, a first-person narrative (a form that always suggests itself when the bulk of the task facing me consists of inventing and playing out the possibilities), the only one of my books he read, actually at the suggestion of, no, under orders from his girlfriend, although otherwise he knows the classics, as well as my contemporaries, from Filip Kobal to Kazuo Ishiguro, also Peter Turrini and Max Goldt, and now at twenty-two, out of fear of soon having nothing more to discover, is a great reader, the only one among thousands, but wasn’t I the same in my day? And besides, time and again he has knowingly deviated from the route of my story and has picked up the story again only at intervals, as a sort of travel guide, more testing it than using it (“many mistakes, but apparently intentional ones”).