by Peter Handke
Behind the glass façade the day was unchangingly dark and clear, and I stayed until the first couple of sparrows appeared in the sleeping tree; they were gathering there, however, long before they were ready to go to sleep. Their wings, constantly whirring up and down the tree, provided brightness on this dark day. The smooth trunk of the plane tree, in its dew-dampness, still looked iced. And behind it the heads of the commuters in the trains up on the railway embankment repeated those of the sparrows: “If you knew how beautiful you look as silhouettes,” my thoughts continued, “you would never want to be anything else again. Stay that way! If I were a painter, I would never paint anything but silhouettes, fragmentarily illuminated, in buses, trains, métros, in planes above the clouds, and these pictures would be the new Georges de La Tours.” And in the plane trees on the plaza there were still multicolored lights from Christmas Eve, among which the sparrows were the other Christmas illumination, or simply a more living component.
Outside there was a smell of fish from the morning market; shreds of jute with Chinese and splinters of crates with Spanish lettering swirling into the air, and sparrow footprints on the asphalt, already slightly blurred, had the formation of the fighter wing that at the same time actually thundered over the plaza, dark as a storm cloud, heading home to the base on the plateau. But it was still the case that I gained deeper insights from the birds’ traces down below on the earth than from anything in the heavens.
And I thought further: “But isn’t believing in human silhouettes, at a certain remove, which must be preserved, my fundamental mistake? Wouldn’t it have been essential for me to get closer, but how? To cross the threshold between silhouettes and—well, what? The figures just now in the bar: if a television interviewer had been there, how they would have spilled their most intimate life stories, from their first fear of death to their first murder and their mother’s letters to them during the war. I have not asked, not once in this entire year.”
Having set out for Porchefontaine, I first took the footpath between the railway line and the suburban houses, heading west. A woman was running along in a zigzag, shouting again and again, “Where’s my paper? Who’s seen my Parisien libéré? What’ll I do? I have nothing to read. What’ll I do?”—followed by two police officers, a rare sight in the bay, who asked whether anyone had perhaps seen an old man, “in pajamas, without glasses,” while at the same time they peered farther down into the railway cut; also followed by a woman in a fur coat who said as loudly as calmly, “I’ve lost my husband”; and finally followed by an unknown person who took aim at me—did he shoot?—at any rate he made the noise with his mouth, and I continued on.
The palm at the crest of the path represented the bay’s western cape. I paused in front of it, and at first only the kinked fronds of the palm moved, slightly, calmly, as if tuning up, and then suddenly all the fronds swung into motion, skyward, earthward, one-hundred-handed, pounded the keys of the present-day air, and following their example, I spread my fingers, let the intervals blow through me, and thought, nonetheless: “In my appreciation for music I have never got beyond the blues.”
From the cape I turned to look back, with my entire body, at the no-man’s -bay once more (meanwhile renamed thus), while on a side street another person also turned to look back, but while walking, once and then once again, and more in sorrow than in high spirits. The route through the broad hollow to the hill horizons on the other side led as if through one vast runway, while the veil of mist hovering over it made it seem as if something were being hatched there; as if, without factories, office buildings, research institutes, something were going at constant, silent full blast there. I saw, on this different sort of world map, finely drawn, the first, the New World. Or: the forest bay as a book, open before my eyes, clear, voluminous, colorful, airy. And this was not, as I had once thought, to be achieved through slowness, but through carefulness, or deliberateness, whether slow or fast.
But what to do with it then? Had I done anything with it? In the backyards of the bay, the clotheslines were hung with nothing but the usual tiny dust rag—of a widow? of a widower?—and the lit-up bus there in the background, at full speed, was a gym, in apparent motion from the children running along its horizontal bars, and as always I felt sad when after the last yard no other came. To leave the place seemed to me each time like a leaving-in-the-lurch. In magnificent Paris nothing required my observation anymore; here, however, in the suburb-bay, almost everything did.
It has been a long time since I went out to Porchefontaine.
Our year’s-end celebration there had been discussed on the telephone by the proprietor of the Auberge aux Echelles (The Ladders) and me. How long ago it is that I saw the man over there beyond the foothills and myself as those two cottage dwellers on the Japanese scroll in the Kyoto Museum, each of them on his own side, to the left and right at the foot of a knoll, in an infinite, otherwise unpopulated mountainous landscape with heavy snow falling silently, as they sit at their work behind the windows of their hermits’ huts, with the most serene expressions, in the knowledge that what they are both doing fits together, and that they will shortly visit each other again.
Farther up the path, the picture became more lively, without any need for snow. I was developing an appetite, not only for my friends, but just as much for my petty prophet. And that almost painful appetite in my breast was called longing.
And I also had in mind what one of the guests in the Bar des Voyageurs had just remarked: “There are no borders.” As special as my region was, the one through which I was now passing differed from it in no respect, at least during this hour’s journey. All day, dark and clear, as it remained, the houses in the next suburbs stood just as well anchored on their hill foundations, or growing out of them, and the overlapping regions exuded a strength unlike that of any skyscraper metropolis; and when I considered it now, I had never been anywhere, with the exception of the boarding school, where I had not eventually been happy to be.
By the boarded-up arcade of the long-distance railroad embankment, the walled-up former weapons depot used by the Germans, a young couple was lingering, distraught with desire, and on the decorative dice mounted on edge on top of a garden wall the dots had been repainted, as had been the billiard queue along with the black and white balls on the flank of a drinking trough. Not only the gaps between the houses, but also the spaces under the steps leading up to the houses, which in many places were as if barricaded, had been cleared out in the course of the year, and many a house, with its outbuildings and crushed-rock paths, the courtyards expanded into plazas, formed an entire village.
And then cats leaped from windowsills, the whistles of express trains echoed from the hills, people stood in telephone booths with their backs to the sidewalk, driving-school cars went by, on a terrain vague a circle of pale grass served as a reminder of the recently departed little circus (to which children now, to paraphrase Rilke, went to smell the lion), in a pediment above a sundial stood in Greek letters the inscription “God is forever measuring the world.” And a procession of workers came toward me, with flags, on the last day of their protest march to the president’s palace in Paris, to prevent the closing of their Land Rover factory far off in Brittany.
And then? The one moment of sunlight that day: like another epistle. And then the forest again. It occurred to me that it was Monday, the quietest day, on which things in nature, mistreated during the weekend, revived. Branches and sections of trunks lay across the path, snapped off by the morning’s ice. Here was the range of hills between the two inhabited spits, and the wind was growing stormy. I plunged off to the side through stalks of wild currants, a single one of whose tiny fruit balls in summer had the taste of an essence, and thus came upon, put on its track by a raven with something round and yellow in its beak, the tree, long since sensed, with the wild apples (but edible only in dried form, like dehydrated pears).
Striking how often in the course of the year I have got my hat and hair tangled in
the thicket of the forests, almost hung up on a branch, and I thought again of Absalom, enemy of a father who stayed out of sight, and in his war against this father inescapably caught by the hair by the forest and then beaten to death by his pursuers.
Up above on the crest was a large clearing. I was dizzy and sat down there on an oak trunk. The day remained dark and clear, and whenever I closed my eyes, there was a flaring of retained images, as only in winter.
From the forests all around came a mighty roaring, to which I surrendered myself. Just as there was the expression “ravages of war,” now for the stirring gray-on-gray all around there was the expression “ravages of peace.” From the ground up, all colors contributed to it, and the garlands of clematis, with their appearance of gray roses, looked brighter than the white of the birches and darker than the black of the alders. “My son,” I thought, “or someone else, will one day recite the epic of this thirty-times-thirty-fold winter gray, how it has overlapped and will continue to have its accumulated effect, backward and forward into the cosmos.”
And I thought further there in the clearing, in my style of jumbled thinking: “I still have much walking to do. Going on foot, precisely in this automobile-dependent civilization, is more adventurous nowadays than ever. Walking, easy knowing. Too close to the human race, I feel horror. I have love of the world. It is within me. Except that I cannot keep love of the world at the heart of the story. For that I had to go to the margins. The silhouettes: I feel the weakness in them, the lack of presence. And yet a fieriness emanates from all of you, scattered as you are. The world is full of dark colors from commonalities among people unknown to one another. Perhaps the outsider is in fact best equipped to see you as all together. Long ago, during my time in court: justice came not so much from the presiding judge as from the associate judge. And since I have been here in the suburbs, I have come to see myself as such an associate judge. As a reader. To read a book of a new-blown world. Once more I should like to feel the gray wind of Yugoslavia rounding the bend. Where do I belong? At home at the edge of the field. And here I am closest to that. And yet here I walk past walls different from those in my homeland. The time has come for different words. But which ones? When something has disappeared, it means that something different is now to be found. My friends and I, we are not in any sense victors, but also not doomed to extinction. But perhaps I am lost to nature. And a terror has taken root in me, deep and ineradicable. And Ana and I: such a waste. The two of us together time and again became the black planet. And yet in my life I wanted to bring something home every day. Bring home where? To those entrusted to me. What have I given up in the course of time? The legal profession. And rightly so. My homeland. And rightly so. But not right that I gave up my family. When alone I appear to myself again and again as a villain. How often I wish I could shoo myself out of my own head, as a mother might shoo her dozen children out of the noisy house. And then again, at the thought of being alone, upon contemplating in the evening a rustling plane tree along a highway exit, I should like to spend my whole life this way. How unburdened all those men in bars used to seem to me, long since without housemates. And how does that song of the singer’s go? Who knows, who knows. And how did I wake up this morning? With a hair in my mouth that was not mine. Dream and work!—that was on those factory workers’ banners I just saw. Do not exhaust the possibilities of the day; put it all into the book; that is where it belongs. And where are the readers? Mysterious brood! Passersby, hieroglyphic mankind. No new time? Did I write that? This year? Oh, man of little faith. Those who have not undergone metamorphosis have done themselves in. New World: like walking on a street in new-fallen snow, where no one has been but a little bird.”
At my feet piles of dark droppings shaped like olive pits: did that indicate there were still rabbits here in the woods? Two heavy fists pressed down on my shoulders, which were then the hoofs of a horse that whispered something into my ear.
Everything splendid I have experienced since my birth awakened in me, and I wrote my ancestors the following postcard: “Come. Get yourselves here!” “And my friends,” I thought further, “in just a little while they will tell me their stories from this year, altogether differently from my versions, and also entirely different stories. Away! Out of the forest!”
Porchefontaine belongs to Versailles, yet the palace is far away. I have never felt really drawn to it, as though there, unlike in no matter what churches, final extinction reigned. The kings would never return? And a royal city without a river, even without a brook? Who knows.
Porchefontaine, more a suburb than a part of the town, has at any rate become dear to me. And at the same time the Echelles proprietor, with his establishment there, and I argue incessantly about whether his region has more to offer than mine. If I cite our transmitter, he counters with his “more essential and also more graceful” water tower (which, however, is not located within the township); if I praise our railwaymen’s hanging gardens, he rates the couple of flower beds at the Porchefontaine station above them, because the (sole) shed there is made not of corrugated metal but of solid railway ties (yet the majority of the beds have gone to pot, and no trace of terracing); and even if he concedes that there are hardly any palms in his region, he still considers the only two there, which, standing side by side, constitute a pair, more interesting than our eight or nine, in that they are “like an entire forest,” whereas ours are isolated, in my Goethe’s expression, merely “huge stalks.” The only things for which he envies us are our very own buses—those of Porchefontaine, long accordion vehicles, wide, space-devouring, belong to Versailles, the capital, which has priority. Yet we are in agreement on the fact that the houses in our two bays, with forests round about, are in all respects ideally sisterly, and therefore would not need sister cities anywhere in Europe (except that in his bay there have been rumors of the construction of an underground highway, straight through the foot of the mountain).
The day before the day before the day before yesterday, on the way there, going downhill, I pushed leaves with my foot over the traces of the wintertime mushroom seekers, if possible more violent than their predecessors, the earth churned up by them as if in a hasty burglary; or weren’t these perhaps the traces of birds going after worms? And at the campsite of the foreign-seeming windbreak workers, this time I found debris, an empty pack of not at all common cigarillos and likewise a bottle with the label of a fine Bordeaux. And a desperate dog went panting through the woods after his master.
It was stormy. An express train, visible halfway up on the Porchefontaine embankment, let out an Indian war whoop, while many passengers nibbled on shish kebab as if on a train through Greece. A temple bell rang, a muezzin called out over the sea, the settlement spread far inland along a fjord, by the sunken road at my back Scottish dunes overlapped, before me lay a giant’s glove, I brashly stuck my hands into the winter stinging nettles; didn’t they sting? Oh my, yes!
And what happened then? Evening could come now. The light down below at the edge of the woods was rocking in time to the wind in the branches, between flaring and fizzling. From the already dark thicket a stone flew past me, no, a bottle. A child playing? The transformer, long before the first house, was clothed in marble, as one might expect of the palace town of Versailles, and was called sirène. Then in the first house a woman was sitting in the lamplight, snipping stitches out of a piece of fabric, while two cats sat in front of the house like a pair of shoes, and an adolescent asked me the time (my answer, as I saw later, was wrong), and a few steps farther on the first driver asked me for directions (my information, as I realized too late, was completely wrong), and the next one asked me for a light (I had none, and he drove on, cursing).
I went, as the proprietor and cook had instructed me, to buy bread, watched, in the evening line at the bakery, as the inhabitants of Porchefontaine, at least the older ones, fished for coins in purses as shabby as those in my bay—which made me think they had at home not so much piggy banks as piglet
banks—and carried my sheaflike load, which my arms could barely encompass, to our place of celebration, hearing halfway there, from a sprawling orphanage, otherwise silent as the grave, the voice of my son echoing.
The restaurant gave the impression, as always, that it was just being renovated, because of the ladders leaning on all sides against the isolated building, all the way up to the eaves, so close together that from afar it looked as though they barred all access; and high above it all another ladder swayed, fastened by ropes to the ridgepole, of rubber, inflated with helium, covered with electric bulbs, which now at night were on.
The restaurant, looking from the outside otherwise like a house no different from the others in the area, stood, with a garden in between, at the foot of the embankment where commuter and express trains traveled at different levels, both above the roofline. The proprietor had secretly, immediately after moving in, uncovered the source of the Marivel brook, located there, as he had discovered from the original maps of the area, and long since integrated into the sewer system, all the way to where it flowed into the Seine at Sevres; he had lined the trickle according to the model of the Fontaine Ste.-Marie in front of his earlier tavern. For the first time after almost a hundred years under ground the Marivel has thus become visible again, at least up to the end of his property, and also sounds decidedly different from the way it sounds through the manhole cover down the street (whose course even today, as long ago, faithfully follows the windings of the vanished brook).
On this evening our tavern had a garlanded entrance, not very conspicuous, because so soon after Christmas other doors in the village were also decorated, only differently.