On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House

by Peter Handke

  And the former skiing champion in the back seat of the car—hadn’t he been the Hahnenkamm winner that time?—now remarked, more to himself but also as if he’d been reading the driver’s thoughts and were answering him: “Exposing yourself to speed is essential. If you don’t pull it off, you’re unequipped for living, and that’s nothing new. I think I didn’t get out of diapers and become my own man until the moment I deliberately committed myself to speed, or deliberately let the highest speeds possible have their way with me. They cured me of my Why-me? and Why-always-me? existence, without making me any less myself. I felt at home with these speeds. Maybe what’s finished me is that I’m not so fast anymore.” (Burst of laughter.)

  * * *

  Yes, it seemed to be fine with the other two that he was driving rather unhurriedly. They had time. At least that was the phrase that was repeated over and over, like a mantra. “We have time,” the poet said in the middle of one of those Trans-Europe Tunnel traffic jams: “I’ve heard the village festival we’re on our way to lasts for several days, and anyway, it’s supposed to take place mainly at night.”

  They had time, and stopped fairly frequently at one of the generic European roadside eating places, though no matter what they ordered, they always ate standing up. They had time, and at one roundabout they turned off onto a dirt road, got out, and let themselves be rained on a little—the driver stayed in the car. They traipsed through quite a few filling-station shops, purchasing various trifles, and showing off to the driver, who went in with them, how many languages they spoke.

  The rain didn’t let up. The light changed. One time a car passed them so fast that their driver almost snapped the steering wheel in two. Wasn’t it the woman from the previous evening, racing by in a Santana? It occurred to him that he’d never seen her head on, even during the blows she’d administered, but only in profile, for instance when they’d reached her house and found her standing in the doorway, in the guise of the unapproachable grieving widow.

  * * *

  The last tunnel was even longer than usual. Yet the other side, which they were supposed to reach eventually, could be glimpsed from far off, at first as small as if you were looking through a piece of paper rolled up as tightly as possible, or through the tiny knothole in a barn wall, or through the dot-sized gap in your own fist.

  He drove even slower. The tunnel road was so straight he hardly had to pay attention to steering. In this way the end of the tunnel remained constantly in the picture, growing almost imperceptibly larger. For a while it actually looked rather like a picture—that’s how one-dimensional the image appeared, a light pinprick in the midst of the encompassing blackness (the tunnel wasn’t lit, and he hadn’t turned on the headlights, had completely forgotten to at the sight of the bright spot far in the distance, and that didn’t seem to disturb anyone else in the car; all of them had eyes for only one thing).

  Wasn’t it perhaps an illusion that the road led into the open, way off there in the distance? The image of the tunnel exit appeared so rigid, also so artificial—including the light, which wasn’t dim at all but rather bright and sunny—that in their eyes, and until shortly before they emerged, it looked like part of the subterranean gallery they were in. A miniature photographic slide, in glaring colors and overexposed, seemed to be projected onto an otherwise completely dark surface, a kind of leaf-green flickering and cliff-face reddish yellow.

  And for a very long moment this sight created the impression that they weren’t moving anymore, weren’t budging from the spot, indeed had wandered out of space, were just being shaken a bit to preserve the illusion, and soon it would be all over—over how?—all over.

  And strangely enough, the impression, or the hallucination, gained strength as the image of the tunnel exit gradually grew larger. The brilliantly colored surface moved toward them, getting bigger and bigger, but showing no movement whatsoever. Already bushes and eventually grasses, too, could be made out, seemingly overilluminated, more true to life than life, and also seemingly larger than life. Yet all these details remained motionless. Where were they? Were they still anywhere at all? Why was no one else driving through the tunnel? Why wasn’t there a single car in the opposite direction?

  And now the hole already took up almost the entire surface, just as motionlessly colorful as at the beginning. “Evil passage,” he remembered, had been a term in the old epics for a struggle ending in almost certain death. And at the same time this was splendid. To his surprise, he saw no harm, just as earlier that morning, in speeding up. Onward and inward!

  And only now, just a few turns of the wheels, it seemed, before their being swallowed up, did the images of blistering yellow cliffs draw apart, while the grassy and leafy surfaces on all sides began to move, as if released from a spell—which had perhaps not been so evil, after all? For in the moment of the car’s leaving the tunnel, wherever they looked, the trees, including the largest trunks, were moving all the more freely, positively frenetically, and how three-dimensional the cliffs appeared out here on either side of the road, which itself suddenly looked three-dimensional, too; yes, indeed, how much space the cliffs gave the new arrivals.

  One of them even clapped, the way people do upon landing after a transoceanic flight in an unexpectedly beautiful and especially promising place. A new day had begun upon their leaving the tunnel, or could now begin, also thanks to this tunnel here. Curious adventure. A modern adventure?

  At any rate, from this moment on, their attention was focused on the festival they were now approaching. They were looking forward to it. The driver, too, the stranger, the third party, whom the others didn’t even bother to ask?

  “Yes, I, too, suddenly felt, and for the first time in ages, in a party mood,” he told me. “And that emergence from the hole was also the first time during that trip that I thought of the poet, the Olympic medalist, and myself as ‘we.’ We were looking forward to what was in store for us. But after that I wasn’t able to think in terms of a ‘we’ like that very often.”

  * * *

  As for the outward circumstances, the new day was already over after just a few more turns of the wheels and perhaps a single blink. It was only the tunnel opening that had made what lay ahead appear as bright as day, even as bright as the sun, with apparent burning intensity.

  In reality dusk was falling. To be sure, it wasn’t raining here, and hadn’t rained either. The sky was cloudless, high. Curious that it already seemed autumnal, indeed almost wintry. Perhaps because the whole landscape was at a higher elevation, was a plateau?

  In fact, the road was crowded with trucks and tractors carrying full loads of firewood, and the isolated houses along the way had woodpiles reaching up to their windows, surrounding the windows, stacked up to the eaves. And what were all these utility vehicles doing on the roads? Wasn’t today a feast day, and a special one in this region, the major feast day of the year?

  * * *

  The poet didn’t know the way, and not for the first time on this journey; he’d never come to the village by car.

  Besides, the name of the village had slipped his mind. All he knew was that it was a name with resonance, a famous one, but only the name, not the village. It merely bore the name of a world-famous town, had been named for it. Or was it the other way around, and the town in question had been named after the village eons ago, and perhaps the village’s name was the original one? Or did innumerable settlements exist, independent of one another, all over the world, with the same name, conferred because of their particular location, because of a common patron saint, or simply because of the sound, and one of them had then become the one everyone talked about?

  “What is the name of the town where my child lives? Belo Horizonte? Alexandria? Lodi? Bethlehem? San Sebastian? Santiago? Fort Apache? It could even be something like Manila or Danzig!”

  And although he described the village down to the smallest detail—above all in such detail, and that seemed to be where the poet was in his element—to the
athlete, who’d already been all over the world, the athlete couldn’t help him either. In that broad, rather undifferentiated rocky landscape, all the settlements resembled each other, at least in the eyes of someone like the athlete, who had passed through there only once, and now, with night coming on, they seemed even a shade more alike, and besides, in the past the competitive champion hadn’t been paying attention to the small features the poet described in such an odd state of excitement.

  And something else: many, indeed almost every town marker they drove by—and soon they were lit up—displayed the name of a well-known town, for the most part a large one, or at least closely resembled a famous one, and could at first be mistaken for it. Except that, after such promissory signs, fulfillment never followed, or at least so it seemed on first impression (but on second impression there was nothing left of the specific village in any case), and the poet just shook his head guiltily each time.

  Thus they passed through St. Quentin, Löwen, Santo Domingo, Venice, Ragusa, Pireos (sic!), Jeruzalem (sic!), Rangun, Fährbank, the scatter-settlements or hamlets of Rosental, Troy, Jerico, Pompey, Heiliggrab/San Sepulcro, Monterey/Königsberg—bilingual signs—Leiden, Bethel, Dallas, Lustenau, Liebenau, Valparaiso, Boston, and even passed a signpost that read “Taxham” (so there were at least two of them in the world!).

  The driver up front had long since ceased slowing down at any of the signs, no longer turned inquiringly to the poet, after a while simply drove right by all the villages, drove with increasing confidence, as if he were perfectly sure of where he was going.

  * * *

  And in fact, during the one and only stop they made, outside “St. Quentin,” he had slipped out the letter sewn into his suit, without anyone’s noticing, had opened it and cast a quick glance at it, without actually reading it for the time being. There was a sketch included, with their destination clearly marked, along with its name, and unmistakable arrows showing where they had to turn off.

  Ridiculous or not: the village, or whatever it was, was called “Santa Fe,” one of perhaps thousands on all continents (surely there was one even in Australia, or in Asia, on Goa, or near Macao?).

  Of course, they could also have listened for sounds coming from a festival or looked out for cascades of light in the rock-and-steppe-scape, so easy to take in as a whole, and where, when you stopped and listened, even small sounds carried a great distance. Yet once the trucks with firewood had disappeared at quitting time, it had soon turned out that there was hardly a village in the region that didn’t have its own special festival under way on this particular day; even at an intersection with only two or three houses, a tent had been pitched next to them, leaving these flat structures in the shadows, such was the din, smoke, steam, and stamping emanating from it.

  “And it must be said,” the “driver” told me, “that at first we stopped now and then not so much to ask directions as to join the action, the dancing, singing, and playing—at least that was true of the athlete and the poet fellow. Pretty remarkable, how enterprising these two allegedly lost souls could be: the way one of them jumped into the dance without a moment’s hesitation, yet wasn’t looked at askance or as an interloper or stranger by anyone. And the way the other fell in with a procession as if it were completely natural, and even seized one pole of the canopy under which the statue of the Blessed Virgin was being carried. The way one of them was no sooner out of the car than he was participating in the bow-and-arrow contest already under way, and won a bottle of wine. And the way the other likewise picked up an instrument lying idle and played it, applauded even by the musician to whom it belonged, when he returned from his break. And the curious thing was that in every case the one could also have been the other. That surprised me most with the poet. On the other hand, I had meanwhile long since forgotten that he even was any such thing. And it seemed to me then that I was the only one of us who felt urgency about reaching our destination.”

  * * *

  At first the poet didn’t recognize this “Santa Fe,” despite the steep ridge on which it perches, carved out by two rivers that converge there, and thus very distinct from all the other clusters of houses in that part of the country. Finally, while they were still down below, at a ramshackle, overgrown railroad station, the headlights picked out an oval enameled sign indicating the place’s altitude above sea level—almost a thousand meters “above the Mediterranean”—and he exclaimed: “This is it! We’re there!” but then surprisingly fell silent, and probably not only because even now he didn’t know which way to go to find his former lover and the child.

  * * *

  Throughout the town—no, it wasn’t a village—in the lower as well as the upper portion, festival sites turned up. The sketched map even contained the name of the street or alley where they were supposed to go. The driver wordlessly showed it to the poet, with the letter part folded back, and he registered no surprise.

  None of the passersby they asked could help them. Were they strangers here themselves? No, but at the time when this story takes place, most of the local inhabitants and long-time residents hardly knew their way around anymore, hardly knew the town except for their own immediate neighborhoods. At first it seemed as though all the people they approached for information were travelers, too, in fact from the same country as those who were asking them. The reason was this: As soon as the car windows were rolled down, they heard, from those standing around outside celebrating, mostly in larger groups, something like their familiar German language, even Austrian dialect. But no, it was an entirely different idiom after all, that of this Santa Fe (the two passengers vied with one another in speaking to the people on the street to prove their mastery of it)—and had all languages in the meantime come to sound so similar at a distance?

  Also from nearby, the phrases and flourishes had an international flavor, to the point that the speakers often switched roles: If the foreigners greeted them with “Hola,” “Buenas noches,” “Adiós,” “Gracias,” they were answered with “Hallo,” “Hi,” “Guten Tag,” “Tschüs,” “Ciao,” “You’re welcome,” “Servus,” “Auf Wiedersehen.” To match, one neon sign read “Mozart” (a video arcade), another “Tyrol” (a bed-and-breakfast without breakfast), the third “Mainz” (a nightclub tiled in Moorish-Andalusian style). And from a steep alley, barely the width of a man’s shoulders and otherwise pitch black, through which people had perhaps once been dragged to the local Inquisition stake, signs flashed for “Gösser Bier” or “Hahnen Alt,” with the appropriate advertising slogans, they, too, all in German.

  Had they ever left the city of Salzburg? Illuminated, along with its looming, naked, vertically plummeting cliff, by a generic European, cold piercing light, mightn’t the old part of town here have just as well been the fortress from there?—But no, they were completely and utterly here, in this Santa Fe, as particular as it was unique, away from Salzburg, away from Taxham, far, far in the distance, which you could already sense from the different sky, and especially from the nocturnal wind wafting in through the car’s windows, now always open.

  “In the distance”: who determined such a thing? To some extent, as was already noted, it was they themselves, their mood and their circumstances, their situation, and then it was the story, the tale; the fact they knew that they were on a journey together in a story. So the awareness of experiencing a story, and a shared one, too, created a sense of distance, even if they might not have set out from home?

  * * *

  “Does this happen to you sometimes, too,” the pharmacist of Taxham asked me long afterward: “Suddenly you stumble upon something you’ve been looking for in vain for a long time? That’s how it worked out for me the evening we arrived in Santa Fe. All at once, after extended roaming around, back and forth through the town, I realized where people were expecting us, supposedly. I didn’t even realize it consciously, wouldn’t have been able to express it; but from one moment to the next I struck out for the place, without the slightest hesitation, guided by the m
oon, by an unfamiliar constellation, or simply by the nocturnal wind, which I let blow in our faces. And from that another name came to me for this probably somewhat misleading, disturbing, or deceptive Santa Fe in my story: Town of the Nocturnal Wind. And that’s what I’d like to call it from now on in this account. And then we got to the street we were looking for and went straight to the right house.”

  “Here we are!” the poet exclaimed, again not surprised at the driver, and as if he himself had guided them there: “That’s the brick missing from the wall, and inside the hole’s still the little bird’s hiding place!”—And the athlete in back said, “Yes, that’s exactly where it is, the sparrow’s niche in the hole in the wall”—as if he were an expert on the area and had even spent his childhood on this street.

  * * *

  That night it was almost impossible to make out anything about the street—where it was located and where it led. True, it had extra lighting for the festival—powerful streetlights and spotlights, most of them shining from houses or garages, which were opened as wide as possible, but the lights were only here and there, so that the long stretches in between seemed even darker.

  At first you were blinded, as was also the case outside the house in question. The driver guessed the presence of an even longer dark stretch at the end of the street, after which there were no more lights and the street didn’t continue but merged with—what? At any rate, here they weren’t in the upper town, where the entire surrounding area would have been lit as bright as day, or rather as brightly as a stage.

  And even though on his hands and also everywhere else on himself he could still make out the residual smells from home, from before their departure, and could have differentiated them all, named and narrated them—smells from specific rooms, from the garden, from the airport forest, from the root-cellar restaurant, from the border-marking river that still clung to him from swimming—now the nocturnal wind from that darkness at the end of the street wafted a smell past his nose that he at first took for happiness. And he was amazed. “But,” he told me later, “on the few occasions when there was any suggestion of my being happy, it was always as if I were getting above myself. And punishment always followed swiftly.”