by Peter Handke
Strange, the way she always picked up signs and portents before a departure. But she had never actually turned her head this way to follow the signs. Stepping a few paces to one side, she gained an overview of the bat’s flight pattern, so confused and erratic from close up but consistent and marked by regular repetition as a whole. And then it became clear that one figure in this pattern pertained specifically to her. As the bat flew back and forth, up and down, it was tracing with great precision the silhouette of the mistress of this property, in the very spot where she had been standing a few minutes earlier.
All her life she had been surrounded by animals this way. Especially those generally considered timid came up to her; used her as a zone of refuge or repose. The story went that as a young girl she had traveled home from Africa with a snake under her shirt, crossing several borders and traveling on ships and buses. She herself preferred to tell anecdotes about less ticklish contacts and encounters—for instance about the muskrat that came so close in a large forest, advancing and retreating in a rapid rhythm, all the while snuffling, and staring at her out of little black eyes, eventually coming so close that its whiskers and pelt brushed her toes: at times she could still feel a bit of that sensation on her skin. Or the dragonfly above the miniature puddle here the previous summer: she, the large human being, stood there, had been standing there motionless for some time, and then the small flying creature, the dragonfly, was hovering there in the air, directly opposite her, quite high up for a dragonfly, an insect that usually stayed close to the water’s surface, both pairs of wings whirring so rapidly that they remained invisible and it looked as though only the spindly body were floating there, with the oversized head in front, blue-black, a yellow circle in the middle, filling the dragonfly face, and eyeing her, the human being, even though this yellow did not actually mark its eyes: deep yellow, coming closer to her from minute to minute and ultimately drawing her into the dragonfly planet with this alien gaze. So was this something to fear? No.
She would suggest to the author in his village in La Mancha that the stories linking her with various animals also had something to do with receptivity to images. The most timid animals were precisely the ones that recognized (yes, “recognized”) when someone was “in the picture,” got the picture, registered the image. With such a person they forgot their timidity, and not only that. They pulled the person into their own existence, even if only for a moment, but what a moment! It was not only that they had no fear of the person; they all wished the person well, each in its own way.
Unlike the grafted mulberry, the quince tree in the former orchard on the outskirts of the riverport city was like all the quinces, or kwite, she remembered from her Sorbian village. Today as long ago, here as there, the trunk of the national tree in her former village grew slim and straight, branching at stepladder-height into a tangle of limbs, and in the crown, always low, the chaos of branches twisted without trunk or limbs, and here as there one could count on a few blackened fruit, from last year and previous years, to hang on through the winter. And the blackbird’s profile had also formed part of the image forever and ever, as had the third traditional element, again in close proximity, the empty, ragged nest. Around the nest now, piercing laments from the father and mother bird, robbed of their young, while in the grass below the marauding cat trotted off, twitching feathers in his mouth. No, that had been the previous summer, or several summers ago. And it will happen again next summer.
And—what was this now?—the hedgehog running toward her from the underbrush (which surrounded her garden), qunfuth! as she involuntarily called to it, “hedgehog,” in Arabic. Was this the baby born the previous fall? It was. And it had not only survived the intervening months, orphaned, all alone, but also, sleeping under the warm, fermenting leaf mold, had grown large, was almost a giant hedgehog. Upon being spoken to, it paused, then trotted toward her even faster, singlemindedly, poked her with its hard, rather cold, blackish rubbery nose, and said, “Don’t go away. The grounds are so desolate without you. I like hearing your footsteps in my sleep.” The hedgehog had roused itself just to give her that message, and now promptly burrowed into its leaf pile again.
The previous summer, during an entire week, its mother, or was it the father? had done something odd for a hedgehog: it had circled the entire property in broad daylight, without showing fear, at first merely squeaking softly but on the last day whistling more and more shrilly. In the end the hedgehog had halted its rounds at a flagstone path. The animal lay down on this spot, warmed by the July sun, but instead of falling silent whistled even more insistently, its head poking far out of its prickly armor. The whistling became trilling, more piercing than any alarm or police siren. The trilling became blaring. The hedgehog’s pointed mouth as wide open as it would go, and despite her, the woman’s, hand on its face, no hint of a retreat. The blaring escalated to the wail of an air-raid siren—from such a small body, such a tiny face! Finally the screaming animal’s leap into the air, with all four legs more than a hand’s breadth above the ground, and now another leap, diagonally into the air, at least as high again. Then the hedgehog’s stretching out on the sun-warmed flagstones as if to sleep. Its legs extended backward, its nose pointing forward on the stone. And hardly a moment later the prickly oval studded with iridescent blue flies, of which a few had been buzzing around the twitching nose earlier; in this sudden death the spines no longer in neat rows but pointing every which way, all in a jumble. And at almost the same instant the baby hedgehog groping its way out of the underbrush, hardly as big as an apple, briefly sniffing at its dead father or mother, and then already gone in the tall grass. And now that screaming of the father or mother also said to her, “Don’t go away. Protect my young one.”
During her travels in Asia, she had repeatedly come upon images of the death of the Buddha. Almost invariably he had been surrounded by animals. And in the images each of these animals represented a particular species; in the crowd around the corpse there was almost always only a single exemplar of a given kind: one horse, one cock, one water buffalo. Almost innumerable individual animals of this sort wept for the dead Buddha, who in each case was their own deceased, their relative, their dearest beloved. And they mourned him, as one could sense from the depiction, out loud, each with its mouth, its snout, its beak open, according to its kind. And all the animals there, the elephant, the tiger, the hyena, the goat, the ox, the crow, the wolf, wept real tears. Their lamentations could not merely be sensed; they also became audible, and not merely to the so-called inner ear. And those most audible were precisely the animals otherwise thought to be mute. The rain worm wailed its sorrow. The fish stuck its head out of the nearby Pacific and/or Indian Ocean and roared. A sobbing as if from a deep chasm issued from the wild pigeon, usually hardly capable of even a peep. And she, the observer, was in the picture. She was deciphering the images.
As for her neighbors, on the other hand, was there nothing to decipher? Did she even have neighbors? Yes, but their houses were so far from hers, originally a stagecoach relay station and inn, later surrounded by one of the large orchards once numerous on the slopes above the river, so that the inhabitants at most glimpsed its outlines through the trees now and then, on the far side of the road leading out of town. As time went by, she had worked at home more and more. Only now even fewer of her neighbors showed their faces than before.
And that was not her fault. She inhabited not only her own house and grounds, but also the immediate surrounding area. At night especially she roamed the densely settled outlying area, combed through the wooded hills. And increasingly she found herself drawn to places where people were. Yet she hardly ever caught sight of them, and not merely in the dark of night. Although she had the ability, without really disguising herself, to be disguised to the point of inconspicuousness or even invisibility, did her population avoid her? No, they closed themselves off from the outset, from one another as well. Every house formed a multiply gated and buffered precinct. Those who had
recently moved there (of whom there were more and more), at first loud and uninhibited, with their windows open—having escaped at last from rented apartments, now living within their own four walls—soon hushed their voices and their noisy machines, until by now hardly anyone far and wide let out a peep. Only the idiot of the outskirts, differing from the traditional village idiot in that he was brash and tactless, shouted, sang, and whistled on the streets, which were almost deserted, and not only at night.
It was only in the past few years that it had become so quiet in these parts (except for one hour in the morning and one at the end of the day during the work week). Sometimes the silence resembled the calm just before or after a war. But usually the silent yet well-lit landscape of the outskirts radiated a breath of peace. Credit was due to various longtime inhabitants. Often they were tradesmen, and often they were still practicing their trades long past retirement age—a shoemaker of seventy, a mason of seventy-five, a gardener of eighty. Younger, more up-to-date practitioners of these trades advertised in all the papers. But because their companies were almost always located elsewhere, the old folks just kept on working here, especially on small jobs. They also did better work, and they were more reliable—not because they were older and more experienced but because they had their shops and houses here in the area, one street away or around the corner from the job or the client; they could not allow themselves to mess up or do shoddy work.
Whether tradesmen or others: these older residents, even when they did not open their mouths, were walking tales of adventure, or tales that had almost merged with the fruit trees’ interlaced branches, the shoe leather, the shovels yellow with caked-on clay. Once they began to speak, the whole world became the topic. Nothing wrong with collecting the dream narratives and ghost stories of Tibet or the desert Tuaregs’ nomadic songs: But why did no one pay any heed to the epics and chanted tales of these old-time residents of the outskirts, or those who had once migrated or fled here from other lands with their parents? Camera, film, video, microphones for them, too. For their numbers were visibly dwindling: the hand that closed the shutters there last week will have closed them for the last time; lost legend, lost lament, lost song of love; even the loss of a mere intimation—what a loss.
As time passed, she also picked up some information on the newer residents, no matter how they barricaded themselves in their houses. It always happened inadvertently, in passing. And it was precisely their shadowy outward existence that provided the background. These people were bound and determined not to betray themselves. There should be no hint of who they were, what they did, what their names were, where they came from. With them a new era began. If a piano could be heard once from behind closed windows, it always broke off immediately. No laundry was hung out to dry anywhere, or if it was, then only behind dense hedges, out of sight. Even the vehicles disappeared deep underground, into garages located beneath the basements.
And yet their stories did not remain entirely hidden. From time to time, and always without warning, fragments or particles of them would pierce the walls of silence. A single elementary particle, whizzing in from an often indefinable distance, was enough for a situation to leave a scorch mark. A situation? An entire story, more distinct and convincing than if it had been narrated from A to Z.
Such things occurred more at night and most often in the depths of the night, in the hours after midnight. One might be awakened by terrible wailing. Or what sounded at first like angry shouting, someone ranting and raving out on the street, turned to wailing. It was a woman’s voice, with a brief response now and then from a man’s voice, soothing or trying to be soothing. And something more serious than an ordinary quarrel was taking place. Something was drawing to an end; these were, or gradually became, sounds of dying. Eventually the wailing, impossible to resolve into individual words, became positively tender. Nowhere, not even in an opera, had she ever heard such an intense lament. The man’s voice, still quiet and controlled, was no longer answering but providing a soft accompaniment to parts of the song; and finally it vanished altogether from the tonal image. A pause. A car door slamming. An engine starting up. Silence. And the lament resuming, at the same time fading away, as if coming from someone slowly walking backward. Then the force of the nocturnal stillness, equaling the force of the now silenced lament. And she was not the only person nearby who listened, and listened, and listened. But then no ambulance siren either. And the following morning no hearse; only a raw emptiness in the street, and in the house over there, or had it been the one behind it? And not one neighbor who said a word about it.
And lying awake again in the hours after midnight. Sometimes she liked staying awake when she had some problem connected with her work to resolve. And again a voice. But this time from very close by. And she recognized the voice, too, although it sounded so different from usual. And besides, she could make out every word of what was being said. The voice was that of an adolescent, the son of the people to whom she had rented the former gatekeeper’s lodge, a remodeled carriage house at the entrance to her property. Although the contract called for the tenants to perform some gatekeeper’s duties in their spare time, she had learned hardly anything about the little family. She knew nothing about the man’s or the woman’s job, or where the boy went to school, if in fact he did. He did not greet her; looked away when he saw her. Unlike his parents, he did not respect the property lines, either the visible or the invisible ones. The second gate, which marked the entry to her own private realm but which she left unlocked, he used without hesitation for his shortcuts, skirting her house on his way to a gap in the hedge that led to a side street that was apparently important to him. One time she had even found him in her kitchen (she usually left the house unlocked as well), where he was sitting at the table reading the paper; at the sight of her, his leisurely loping away through the former servants’ entrance.
The gatekeeper’s lodge was not near her house, not at all, and yet that night she had the son’s voice in her ear as close as in a dream, and also just as clear. It was no dream, however. And the neighbor’s son said the following: “The two of you want me dead. Thanks for the bones you tossed in my cage. You will not be seeing me again. My bed will stay empty. Thanks for the flowers on my grave. But at least let me play one more cassette. Why do you not want me? Why did you not abort me? Why did you not stick me in the oven? Or into the false-bottomed crate? Burning desert sands. Your loving …” And then silence, here, too. The next morning a void. And the morning after that the adolescent just as before, but now riding a scooter instead of a bicycle.
And another such night, this time not so late. Her return from the bank’s headquarters down by the river, before midnight, in her Spanish Landrover, a sort of camouflaged vehicle (how fitting if she had been driving it in a veil). On the already deserted highway leading out of the city, by the turnoff close to her property, a lone figure flagging her down. She stopped. A very young woman, still a girl, really, about the same age as her daughter, with a face that seemed separate from her body, in the dim streetlights: “Don’t you know a house abroad where I can go, preferably in North Africa? I have heard so much about the light there. I must get away. I am older than I look. I know you. You paint, don’t you? How can one paint around here, in this country? A house where I can paint, in Tipasa or Casablanca, right now!” And without waiting for her reply, the girl disappeared into the darkness on the side of the road. And she, too, became visible again: sitting by a distant skylight, reading, as though nothing had happened.
Even the children of the newcomers arriving here in ever-increasing numbers during the last few years—on their front doors at most their initials, and then often of the sort that could belong to a Greek, Cyrillic, or even Arabic or Armenian alphabet—remained in the shadows. Bundled up and silent, they climbed with their bundled-up and silent parents or caretakers out of their outsize automobiles, and it was easy to mistake them for the supersize shopping bags being hauled into the houses from the super
markets after work (the small shops, still numerous, and the local markets were patronized only by old people and longtime residents: hardly ever an unfamiliar face there, and certainly not that of a child).
Coming home from school almost every child walked alone, eyes on the ground, as if to remain unrecognizable. And in spite of that they made an impression on her, too, sooner or later, more vivid than that of the neighbor children in her village back home—had she also been a child keeping her eyes to the ground in those days? And this impression always formed when she heard crying. No matter how far away the crying was, every time it seemed to her to come from the immediate environs. And she heard it during the day just as clearly as in the silent depths of the night, even at times when the road leading out of town was at its noisiest. Not all crying came this close, affected her this strongly: the crying of infants hardly, no matter how plaintive, also not the crying that followed a fall or some other physical mishap. It was the crying, usually without tears, brought on by a first major disappointment, already definitive: even sounds, not bursting spasmodically from the breast but closed up inside it, quiet sounds, actually, almost silent already, pitched somewhere halfway between sobbing, howling, wheezing, snuffling, with a deep, unidentifiable bass underneath, and all this continuing in an infinite loop, behind the closed shutters of a house, behind a tree in a garden, or somewhere on a street, in an alley, gradually receding, a one-person caravan.
She, the listener, remained glued to the spot and at the same time moved along with the caravan outside. What she heard from these neighborhood children was the sound of abandonment. This sound could be uttered at the same pitch by an adult—any adult? yes, any adult. (Except that in a grown-up it might be so piercing that the adult would be drawn and quartered by his own cry of woe?) In the past, long ago, one had gone around with just such a sound of abandonment inside one. And it stayed there for good. To be sure, it had receded into the remotest corner in the body’s labyrinth. But sooner or later, from one moment to the next, it would resume its place in the midst of things, with the force of an explosion. She had seen a film one time at the end of which a woman did nothing but weep for a quarter of an hour. She was sitting in a deserted stadium or park or an unfinished building, and suddenly she was weeping, without tears, like the children here, and she wept and wept. From time to time she paused. Then she resumed her weeping, fell silent again, but the weeping would well up in her once more, and so it went, with the weeping eventually becoming like that of thousands, the mother of all weeping, till the end. (The author, to whom she mentioned this, told her that in his youth he had written a play that consisted of a single sentence or stage direction: “Someone sits on the bare stage and weeps, for an hour.”) She herself had not wept in a long time. But occasionally she still heard her own weeping from ages ago.