by Peter Handke
Yet as he turned toward the woman, he knew that she did not share his acceptance of absence and privation. Her eyes were black with anger, not anger toward him in particular but general anger, fundamental anger. What had just taken place between them could not be all there was. As far as she, the woman, was concerned, her time was not up, not in the slightest, would never be up. And thus he, Don Juan, discovered that he had to get away from her instantly—not that he wanted to flee, in fact he resisted the idea—but he had no choice. He returned her to her husband, who, by the way, gazed at him from afar as if he were a very dear friend, just as he, too, now that he finally noticed him, was filled with a sense of genuine friendship; and then it was: out of there!
That was what happened. Except that Don Juan’s escape coincided with that of his servant. And the latter’s was very conspicuous, in contrast to Don Juan’s, offering all the features an escape can offer. His own escape was observed only by the deserted woman, by her eyes alone, and later, when he was already miles away, “out of shooting range,” he thought, he could hear her grinding her teeth, spitting, and above all sighing. (Don Juan, who otherwise sighed all the time, had never sighed for a woman; there was never any question of that. It was simply not appropriate and would have demeaned the woman—and him.) The servant, however, fled with everyone watching, and he and his master, who was already waiting in the car, were pursued by any of the wedding guests who were mobile in the slightest. In classic style, not only did stones land in the dust behind the car (except that the dust did not form swirling clouds) but a veritable hot pursuit also occurred (except that it came to a sudden halt at the village limits, at the exact spot, as if this border, like the borders between American states, also marked the jurisdictional limits).
The old scratches on the servant’s face had been joined by new ones, some of which continued to bleed for a long time. He drove without his elegant jacket, and his white shirt was ripped, the scratches extending far down his back. His lower lip was swollen, in its middle a single blood clot from a bite, the tooth mark clearly visible in the flesh. Shortly before they reached Tbilisi he regained his power of speech. After the scare with the guest writhing on the floor, struggling against death, he and the ugly woman had slipped away without another word, as if by previous agreement, and hurled themselves at one another. In truth it was more the woman who pulled Don Juan’s traveling companion away and hurled herself at him in a kind of broom closet, et cetera. Yet he did not deny that he had had designs on the woman. He explained to Don Juan that to him she had not seemed ugly at all, from the very beginning, without even the additional influence of the festive atmosphere, wine, or excitement. Altogether he had always been attracted to those who were generally considered unappealing. The moment a pockmarked woman appeared on the scene, a kind of sympathy moved him. And at the same time he wanted to possess the woman, scars and all. He seemed downright embarrassed the moment a woman considered more or less unattractive in the conventional sense turned up—embarrassed with empathy and desire for conquest. He literally blushed every time this type of woman crossed his path, which Don Juan came in the course of the week to be able to predict—blushed and at first looked away, confused and almost crazed. And the fact that he pounced on such women was, according to the servant, not the result of a lack of taste, let alone a perversion. These women whom another man might see as slightly disfigured, and likewise those a bit past their prime, the wallflowers and ones who slunk along indoor or outdoor walls, were simply his type. With them he promptly undertook an adventure; no question of love’s playing any part.
He had been caught with the “ugly one” in the broom or ironing closet, among the brooms or on the ironing board, caught by people who chanced to pass by and thought they were stopping a murder or involuntary manslaughter. It was because of the girl’s local status that the entire Caucasian village then wanted to punish him for his action: she was considered feebleminded, and the feebleminded were considered untouchable, were strictly taboo; as a native, he should have known that. Yet he swore later to Don Juan that although he had been aware of the taboo, he had also known that his partner was not “abnormal.” That had become clear to him earlier, as the hours passed. A person with eyes like that could only be normal, indeed on top of the situation. And what soft hands this supposedly retarded woman had.
By the evening of the following day, Don Juan and the other man were landing in Damascus. That was what I was told a week later. It goes without saying that I was not allowed to ask how they had got there. And I did not ask. It was enough that it seemed possible to me. Nor did I ask where Don Juan spent the night in Damascus, or where his servant slept. That was left to my imagination, as was the case with the next stages of the journey. But I did not need to picture settings, which would only have interfered with my listening, just as I did not need the Syrian weather report: it was clear that there, too, the May air was filled with swirling poplar-blossom fluff, and, as the story continued, I saw it rolling along the reddish yellow earth and floating past the likewise reddish yellow walls, while the material in its wake seemed increasingly weightless.
To Don Juan it was absolutely certain that on the very evening of his arrival in Damascus he would meet another woman. The coming period, of indefinite duration, would be a time of women, and one woman would lead to the next. As a result of becoming involved with the Caucasian bride—he did not say “with her”—he found himself in the sights of the special women who provided the subject of his story. That had nothing to do with a scent, as his servant, by now his confidant, contended in his tirade against all women (of which more later): “They can smell across seven hills when an available man is approaching.” That he was received as someone they had ceased to expect stemmed from his entirely new readiness, or rather a readiness awakened for the first time, that affected those women quite unlike any passion for adventure, and was combined with obvious availability, as well as a sort of carefreeness or cheerfulness that promptly infected the woman of the day, making her almost saucy or, to be more precise, daring.
But what had the most immediate effect during the entire week was Don Juan’s obvious temporal alignment with her, the other person, which at first sight caused her to experience herself not as the other, just as she no longer perceived him, the stranger, as the other. If there was anything the woman could trust, it was this alignment. That was something she could trust; as events took their course, the two of them would constantly feel or act in sync. She and he had a completely congruent sense of time. In Don Juan—if any name for him occurred to her, this was one it would never be—the woman encountered her contemporary. What she did not know, and also did not need to know, was that the availability as well as the carefreeness that Don Juan beamed in her direction derived largely from his persisting sorrow. His years of mourning were not past. His involvement with women made him aware more poignantly than ever of his misery over the loss of his nearest and dearest.
Don Juan told me less about his encounter with the woman in Damascus than about her predecessor in the foothills of the Caucasus, and less and less about the women who followed. Only this: it took place in the hall of the whirling dervishes near the Great Mosque, whose precise name did not come to him—I could have supplied it, but I was afraid to add my voice to his, the storyteller’s, and besides, the name would have been too much for this episode; the Great Mosque of Damascus was good enough, just as in the following stories it was enough to say: by the fortress in the enclave of Ceuta in North Africa, on a dock by a fjord near Bergen in Norway, and so on.
During a concert that the dervishes accompanied with their dancing, Don Juan sat in the very last row. After a little while he no longer heard the drums, the lutes, the flutes (or shawms) as a concert, or as any kind of music. He heard nothing at all, was entirely a spectator, his eyes glued to the dancers in their wide, bell-shaped costumes, with towering cylindrical hats on their heads. The dance consisted of bodies twirling around themselves, slowly for
the most part; when it speeded up, it paradoxically gave the impression of slowing down, of majestic, imperious slowness, including the garments, which whirled along with their wearers, and their eyes, which gazed straight ahead, motionless, as the dancers spread their arms, one hand seemingly pointing to the ground, the other offered like a bowl, to the heavens. Ecstasy? Impossible to imagine anything calmer than these dervishes whirling themselves around and for moments almost invisible, or anything more inward-focused. The majority of the dancers were older, and for that reason the stillness that emanated from them was even less astonishing. Yet toward the end of the ceremony—for that is what it was, rather than a mere performance—a very young dervish, hardly more than an adolescent, took over the whirling from the old ones. He spun lightly and at the same time with extraordinary seriousness, projecting an aura of distance, but by no means emptiness, at eye level. And even at the end, when the spinning stopped, no smile, not even a flicker of one, at most an openness in his face.
And now Don Juan saw himself singled out again in that special way by a woman in the crowd. She was seated in one of the front rows. And here it was she who turned to look over her shoulder, for just one beat, it seemed, after the instruments fell silent and the dervishes’ spinning slowed to a halt. And again he did not describe the woman to me—needless to say, she was “indescribably beautiful”—but varied the account by mentioning that at first sight he had taken her for a nun, because of her headscarf and her dark dress, closed up to the neck. But then he had noticed that most of the other women in the room, including those who were hardly more than children, were dressed in the same manner.
Much of what happened after that took the same course as the experience with the first woman, the one of the previous day in that other country, exactly the same in appearance and in tone (although a week later, he, Don Juan, could not recall a single sound, tone of voice, or utterance common to the two of them, whereas he retained vivid images of her alone, and even more of random objects in her surroundings). But it did not disturb him that most of what had transpired before was repeated, and repeated again, with the women on the subsequent days of the week, nor did it cause him to hesitate, let alone recoil—he had recoiled for a moment only the first time, when there was not yet any question of repetition. Instead the repetition developed its own dynamics, each time more powerfully, and he let himself be carried along as if it were entirely natural, a law he had to comply with, if not a commandment. That was how it had to be: he had to do or avoid the same things with this woman here as with the one from the previous day. The very repetition lent him courage.
Not that there were no variations. A variation played a part every time, though perhaps just a slight one, a tiny little one. The variation enabled the commandment to be fulfilled and at the same time became part of a game, became a commandment and a release, or, as his servant later expressed it, the variation provided the spice.
Day after day, the women themselves, eager to tell their stories and to be told, revealed their persons and lives to be largely repetitive. Up until then they had all lived in outrageous solitude; however, they did not become aware of it as an outrage, or indeed aware of it at all, until this moment. They were all natives of their respective countries, yet also conspicuously strangers. Otherwise they were all inconspicuous, as if without qualities, becoming beautiful only after their eyes were opened and they finally allowed themselves to be seen, and then they became indescribably beautiful. They all radiated something dark, even menacing, but it engendered fear only incidentally, at least in him, Don Juan. They were all of unspecific age, or seemed, whether young or less young, to transcend their ages. Wherever they were, each of them was on the lookout for the man who would be worthy of her, and they had enough presence of mind to leap into action, “in the twinkling of an eye.” They all existed primarily as if they had always been on the verge of dying, going mad, picking up and leaving, striking someone dead. They all had the capacity to become dangerous. And even when there was nothing to celebrate, neither a wedding nor a dance, they all moved through the most mundane circumstances in a shimmer of festiveness, or even more a fragrance of festiveness—in retrospect he saw all of them, yes, all, in white. And not one of them spoke of people who were sick or dying, if they opened their mouths at all.
In a further instance of repetition, the outward conditions that brought the woman together with Don Juan represented each time a kind of threshold. The role of the fish bone in the Caucasian village was represented in Damascus by a sandstorm. In the enclave of Ceuta it was perhaps the war expected to break out the following day, and in the dunes of Holland, on the fifth day of the week’s story, it was the spring flood bearing down from the North Sea. (Only in the case of the woman encountered on the day when Don Juan appeared in Port-Royal was there no need for an external threshold to provide the last impetus—the profound exhaustion both of them were experiencing was enough.)
The variations in the Damascus story Don Juan told me, and he limited himself from then on almost entirely to the variations in his encounters with the week’s women, but described each one with a gleam in his eye: if in Georgia the floorboards had creaked under him and the woman there, here it was sand that crunched under them. He waited for the woman not in the midst of the crowd but quite far from there, way behind the mosque in a recently bulldozed area, a temporary no-man’s-land. He was sure that she would turn up there, without his having to pace off the route beforehand by walking backward; it was a period when the women who constituted his tale’s subject matter had selected precisely such areas as their own personal territory—the out-of-the-way places were their preserves—except that they had no intention of hunting or gathering; usually they had nothing more in mind than going for a stroll unaccompanied.
He had a long wait. Earlier in the day it had been bright and sunny, and now it was soon deep night. The sickle moon seemed a bit plumper than the hairline-thin one under which he had set out from the Caucasus. Obviously it would have been more than fine with Don Juan if the woman had changed her mind. What was in store for him was a test, and he had not the slightest idea what it would entail. He did not know what would be tested, and was not allowed to know, and the test would be more than just difficult; it would demand the utmost of him (even if that could also be handled with the greatest of ease). He had to wait for the woman to turn up. The rule was that he could not flee, not at this moment. Besides, she would track him down, here as elsewhere. At this hour there was no evading the woman.
She appeared as the moon was already veiled by the gathering sandstorm. No footsteps could be heard that might have announced her coming. She was simply standing there. Don Juan had stared into the darkness so long that any light, even the smallest, would have blinded him, and without any light source she moved sure-footedly in the dark, over the rubble of bricks, coming straight toward him as if it were completely natural. No breathing to be heard, either, although she had clearly been running. How silent those women could be, and how quickly they always appeared on the scene—in a flash they were there—and how mysterious they remained from beginning to end (no, no end), without any secretiveness or fuss over secrecy.
Strolling back and forth together in the shelter of what was left of a high wall, against which the gusts of sand hissed. A week later, Don Juan described the iron reinforcement material poking out of the wall and the unearthly music the powerful wind made in the tangle of wire, rods, and pipes above their heads. The assault of air and grains of sand on the iron was intermittent, at least for a while. For moments at a time it would gain in strength, then ebb a bit, then rise to a new crescendo, then weaken to a whistling, then to a mere fanning, whereupon it would set in again, more violently than ever, and so on, without ever dying away and ceasing altogether. The wind set up a constant reverberation in the iron fretwork sticking up into the storm, and whereas nothing but a howling, roaring, and pounding, thoroughly monotonous, would have been heard if the air currents had remained st
eady, instead a veritable melody took shape, something that was steady in an essentially different way. And it was a harmonic melody. True, its measures were all different in length, and between the highest and the lowest notes steps would have had to be added to the scales at the top and the bottom. But the transitions between almost inaudibly high and barely audible low notes, and the alternation between the shortest and longest measures, between loud and soft, did not occur abruptly or suddenly, by chance or at random, but rather always harmoniously, and in time blended in with the melody—in a number of languages the word for “time” was the same as for “measure”—the instrumental accompaniment being provided by the vibrating wire, the half-loosened iron rods drumming against each other, and especially by the system of pipes, open to the storm, which served as the leaders of the melody, so to speak, while the wire and rods created the rhythm. Don Juan hummed and sang the music to me, his voice scratchy at the beginning, then increasingly powerful, as he rose from his storytelling chair and with arms outstretched stalked up and down the Port-Royal garden, and I, who for so long have not been sure of anything, was sure that if he had performed this piece of music in public, it would have conquered the globe as hardly any other music could.