by Peter Handke
After an era of peace, not phony but healthy, robust, confident peace, when many of us felt happy about their era, “our era,” the present, the darkness of a prewar period had closed in again. But this was a prewar era such as had perhaps never been experienced before. Peace continued to dominate the picture, the word “peace” written everywhere in the sky by planes, traced in the night by torchbearers, just like “love.”
And at the same time war had already started, the old kind that pitted peoples against one another, as well as a new kind, pitting every individual against every other, the second kind more ruthlessly bent on annihilation than the first. Not only did she, as a lady banker, or whatever, have many enemies: by now anyone could be surrounded by enemies, and was their archenemy in turn, their enemy to the death, and that included the participant in a friendship banquet or lovefest just as much as Delegate No. 248 to the International Peace Conference, No. 2 in the Council of the Twelve Wise Men of the World, as well as Dying Man No. 3 in the ward of the House of Death, and us idiots, hiking through the woods with our fellow idiots (who said this, who was narrating this story?—the Council of Idiots).
This war of each against each—often most cruel against those most like me, against those closest to me—was never formally declared. In the past, if someone said, “From today on, we are at war!” or “I will destroy you!” or “Your hearse has been ordered!” or merely “Die!” that was more like a joke; at least one could ignore it. The current war was waged without a formal declaration. It took place wordlessly, behind the façade of the streaming images, sounds, and pictographs of “peace,” not limited to a dove with an olive branch in its beak. Instead of “War!” as a threat, one was now more likely to hear “I love you, and I will always love you!”; instead of “From today on, I am your enemy, and you will find out soon enough what I can do to you!” it was “As your friend, I …”; and a threat that meant almost certain death was “We will never ever abandon you folks!”
Do the minutes of the meeting of the Council of Idiots end here? No, they continue a bit, something along these lines: in the current era, ancient enmities between peoples, usually going back hundreds, if not thousands, of years, had flared up again. After a period in which we thought we had finally and definitively been saved from them, at least on our continent (what deserved the name of salvation here, if not that?), all the hereditary enmities had bubbled to the surface in Europe, in their most naked form. Long ago, very long ago, even among the prejudices peoples had against one another, there had been a few affectionate ones and many that were at least ambivalent: if the X were lazy, at least they were jolly; if brutal, at least reliable; if bad cooks, at least good musicians; if bandits, at least not sociopaths; if reeking of garlic, at least the best beekeepers. But now all that mattered between peoples were the terrible memories, the most terrible ones, which completely dominated the present. Where did people today get these memories, when they had grown up with history books from which any trace of antagonistic allusions to other countries had been expunged?
Grotesque memories in our part of the world, meanwhile unified as a legal and economic entity and thus almost a single state, as once before in time immemorial; all intracontinental borders eliminated meanwhile, so that one could travel by reindeer sled from Lapland to Thessaloniki, on water skis from the Wörthersee to St. Petersburg: “You Spaniards stabbed my brother with a spear in Cambrai in July 1532”; “The Liechtensteiners betrayed us to the Turks back in the Middle Ages”; “The British are mining the English Channel as they did under Henry VIII”; “The Swiss are swearing fealty just as they did long ago to a land where the sun never rises”; “There’s not a single Frenchman who does not bear collective guilt and will not have to make amends for the beheading of Marie Antoinette …”; “Your goalkeeper killed our defender.” End of the Council of Idiots executive summary?
By now every people detested every other—and detested completely—detested each other as never before in human history. Declarations of friendship between peoples and celebrations of eternal reconciliation held official significance only, and were merely temporary, not for the long haul: soon evil thoughts emerged among the official representatives, too, among them especially (what the population as a whole thought was not expressed openly, as had always been the case?, and only a god could have articulated it?).
The “people’s representatives” on the one hand and the “political educators” on the other were the first to drop all restraint toward the opposing country and appoint themselves leaders in the war of words. This phenomenon, too, was no novelty in history. What was new and unheard-of in this transitional period—or will it turn out to have been the end of time?—is that the “leading statesmen” and the “opinion-molders” were saying precisely those things, which they then put into action, for which in previous historical eras the mob had been known, or which had at any rate been ascribed to it.
There were no longer any borders? Yet restrictions and prohibitions as perhaps never before. When a current leader of one sort or another found his prohibitions colliding with the many recent restrictions, something coalesced in his person that we had thought consigned to the distant past, long buried in the obscurity of legend: in him, things that played a role only in historical-recreation films, and were increasingly fading from human memory, all the malice, murderous impulses, lynching fantasies, and bestialities buried in the ancient rubbish heap of his country’s mob, found their new mouthpiece and third rail. Everywhere the perhaps overrated mob of formerly existing countries, reduced long since to dust and bone fragments, was reembodied in the current leaders; and each of these revenants rivaled his predecessors in defiance of the law, blind rage, and homicidal hatred.
But strangely enough: the old mob now became visible to us only and exclusively in the person of the revenant—no mass of people presented itself as the new mob, only those who in each other’s company styled themselves the “leaders.” Our memory preserves from earlier times a specific image of the traditional mob: how after a speech in a hall or a stadium by the leader of the day, in the surrounding streets and squares, up to then deserted or peaceful, the manhole covers begin to pop up, and his followers, who have been lurking underground, are catapulted into the light, an instant majority, for the moment just grinning palely like ghosts and shoving a bit, not yet pouncing and crushing—but wait, just you wait.
And almost the same image fits the modern mob: it, too, in the guise of the so-called leaders, suddenly hoists itself out of a sewer opening, one over here, another over there, ready to pounce and strike—except that they remain isolated, without a trace of a following or a people behind them—and why do they not wage their wars in single combat, as used to happen in the Middle Ages or in legend, man-to-man, woman-to-woman, etc., stabbing, shooting, bombing each other out of existence—instead of their respective peoples—after posing for a photo opportunity for posterity, for all I care?
The prewar gloom: the wars between the countries of the continent, outwardly united and border-free, had not yet broken out; would perhaps not even break out in the true sense; would not be declared and would also no longer be called “war” but, for instance, “peace operation” or “love action” (see above). Yet one of the new leaders, from the former cornflowers-in-the-gun-barrel movement, made a revealing slip of the tongue when his favorite slogan—“Not war—love!”—reversed itself in his mouth into “War and love!”; and in fact, during his last “Operation Outstretched Hand” (against another country), his wife, barren for many years, finally got pregnant (his caressing of her belly in public).
And at any rate, the incidents preliminary to war were piling up, and again it was indicative that they were always mob actions committed by the leading personages, and that these mob actions were directed against what was probably one of the first basic laws of primitive, still stateless, societies—that more and more leaders, invited to visit another country, trampled the ancient law of hospitality underfoot, worse
than any old-time mob.
One of these characters took his morning jog, dressed accordingly, by zigzagging through the valley where the host country’s kings were buried (a photo that later appeared on the dust jacket of his how-to book for joggers). A picture of another leader made the rounds showing him in a bomber flying over a country that had been almost completely wiped out in the last world war by his forefathers. He was laughing uproariously, his feet in tennis shoes propped on the improvised map table at 5,000 meters. A third leader (wasn’t it always the same one) could be seen at a compulsory peace conference jabbing the host in the chest with both hands, one finger on each hand extended like a dagger. And a fourth, while touring a foreign city destroyed in civil unrest, did not go on foot or by car but had himself pulled in a small cart by a couple of natives, so that he towered above the crowd, with an expression on his face as if he were also the camera by which he was having himself filmed for television, along with the city and the victims.
And the fighter-bombers now far below the passenger plane, menacingly close to the plateau: Wasn’t this the long-awaited open war against the legendary people—these days a mere tribe, a mere sect—that had allegedly retreated into the most remote reaches of the Sierra de Gredos?
6
She had never spoken of the fact that she had another brother. In all the articles and brochures featuring her, the only brothers mentioned were the alleged microchip–half brother and the one who had died as a small child in an automobile accident, along with her parents. She was the eldest of the three siblings; the unmentioned brother was the youngest, born just before the parents’ death, and plucked unscathed from the wreck.
On the very day in January on which she set out on her portentous journey, her brother was released from the prison, or “detention center.” For several years he had been locked up there as a “terrorist,” not merely over the hills and far away but in another country. She to the author: in the accounts of herself and her business prowess her brother had obviously had no place. But now he was to appear in her book. She had not withheld information about him because she was ashamed of him. (On the contrary? Also not on the contrary.) And she wished, she wanted her brother not to be merely mentioned in the current book, “my definitive book,” but rather to figure as one of the main characters, “of course along with me and also various others.”
What should be told about him? The events leading from his childhood up to his crime, from the trial to the completion of his sentence? Primarily his story from the current morning on, when he steps through the narrow discharge gate of the “Institution for Implementation of Justice” a free man, his hands now free like hers, over the hills and far away and even beyond the dunes. Unlike the visitors’ gate, which is as wide as a barn door and opens onto the beltway, this gate lets out into a cemetery, the size of about ten stadiums, with light-colored smoke eddying at that moment from the crematorium there, in which flakes of rust mingle with snowflakes, the smoke now intersected abruptly by a flight of wild doves, shimmering in exactly the same color, as if the birds had just been given birth to by the smoke or had slipped out of their shells there.
“Along with my adventurous journey I want you to tell my brother’s as well,” she directed the author, “describing how he will have made his way from the prison gate across very different lands, during the prewar period and later in the middle of war, to the country he had chosen in his youth as his future home—but he is still young, of course!”—The author: “But how? Should I invent a story?”—She: “Don’t pretend to be dense! And stop making yourself out again to be more insignificant than you are! If I picked you to be the author, you may be sure I had my reasons.”—“And what were they?”—“Although you may have invented a detail or two in your books from time to time, and perhaps even everything (I have not the slightest interest in knowing that): all in all, your long tales have always been accurate, and in particular will remain accurate for the foreseeable future, infinitely more accurate or real than any conceivable factual accounts, and they were, and are, also infinitely more real than the alleged reality that people boast one can touch and smell.”
The author: “But I do want to capture something you can touch and smell.”—She: “You’re splitting hairs again. Fortunately you do this only in conversation, not in your writing! Enough! There is a kind of touching and smelling that is different from grabbing and sniffing out. And besides, you are famous for being able to take a gesture, a hint of movement, a voice—that has come to you from afar, for only an instant, often only from hearsay—especially the gesture, movement, or voice of a stranger, and transform yourself completely into the other person. Someone down at the other end of the street limps ever so slightly, and you embody him here until he has disappeared around the corner, and long after he is gone. That is how my brother, just released from prison, stepped out of the cemetery that morning—”—The author: “—which lay beyond the Baltic dunes, and in heavy snow pressed the access code on the hand telephone given him as a going-away present by one of the guards.”—She: “You fool!”—The author: “But that is what happened, is it not?”—She: “Yes, that is what happened.”
She had visited her brother often during his years of incarceration. Each time it had been a long and momentous journey; and she wanted from now on to undertake only this kind of journey, if any at all, not necessarily to some legendary foreign prison or other, but certainly journeys with an undercurrent of uncertainty, fear, sorrow, pain, and the threat of no return.
She had stolen time for these visits to her brother from her busy schedule at the big bank. Flying in the morning into the city where the prison was located and returning, at the latest, on the evening flight. One time she arrived at the visitors’ gate after two hours on the plane and a two-hour taxi ride and did not see the usual long line. She was the first one there that day, and felt exultant. It turned out to be the only day of the week without visiting hours. And she had to go back that same evening. No admittance, no exception, even for her. She walked around the entire facility, the size of a small town and heavily guarded, sat on a bench in the cemetery, where she ate an apple and dozed off briefly; not a sound from behind the walls, and yet the sense of being close to her imprisoned brother as hardly ever before; in her one-minute dream on the cemetery bench he was bending over her and breathing on her.
Another time, as a participant in the annual conference of the World or Universal Bank, being held in the prison city, she was able to stay overnight, and took a penthouse suite in a hotel in the dunes offering a view of both the sea and the compound, with its electrified fence, searchlights, and watchtowers. At sunrise the rolling North and Baltic seas in the distance, and the momentary reflection of the prisoners taking their morning exercise—they themselves not visible—in the tilted sight-blocking screens mounted atop the far side of the wall over there, where for short stretches they consisted not of concrete but of smoked glass. Allowed in then, after hours taken up with the usual security checks and backups—one stalled line after the other, in the course of which the visitors at a standstill there eventually developed a kind of tribal solidarity, not only with the prisoners they were waiting to visit but also among themselves—allowed in and escorted to the so-called visitation room in groups of five or six at a time; in actuality it is a windowless shed, divided by a row of tables and chairs, and down the middle of the tables a glass panel, without an opening for speaking through; in the case of short prisoners or visitors, the top above the level of their heads; and this shed suddenly full to bursting with the five or six visitors on one side and the five or six prisoners on the other side of the panel (to which had to be added two guards on the right and left flanks); these dozen people all talking at once, in pairs, with a hug hardly possible because of the high panel separating them, at most a quick brushing over the hair or a stroking of the forehead with outstretched fingertips; no talking, just a din, increasing steadily during the brief visiting period, almost always cut sho
rt because of the noise; each visitor had to drown out the others to be heard at least somewhat by his imprisoned family member, or vice versa; but given the general necessity for shouting and yelling, with more and more words becoming incomprehensible, and even lip movements impossible to decipher after a while, because the mouths were opened so wide; at the same time the entire clan pretending to understand and make sense of what was being said amid the racket in the shed; and yet at the same time, even though they were now standing and speaking over the glass panel, on tiptoe, with one ear long since within spitting distance of the speaker-shouter, not making out a single word; and not even hearing their own words as they uttered a response at random, not a single word—and then “Time’s up!” and the next instant the prisoners, without being able to exchange even a last glance, already out of the room and on their way back to their cells; now deafening silence, in which each visitor separately, no longer part of a family or a clan, will have departed in a daze, making for the outside, for freedom.
Even discounting the pandemonium, she could follow little of what her brother said, and less with each visit. For one thing, he expressed himself more and more in the language of his chosen country (just as in the letters he wrote her, which she had to have translated—a problem: because outside that country hardly anyone knew the language, and anyone who did kept the knowledge to himself like a guilty or shameful secret). And then, with the passing years in the distant penitentiary, her brother expressed himself more and more exclusively in riddles and incomprehensible images—yet spoke and wrote in the same quiet rhythm as before (not falling silent or becoming frenetic).