On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House

by Peter Handke

  In retrospect it seemed to him he’d spent the rest of that night sitting there, and the following days and nights of the festival, too, and was still sitting there as he was here, telling me his story. For something else came up: In one of the musicians strolling from table to table that night he recognized his son.

  Despite the arrest of the queen, the festival had to go on, and it helped that after the first few moments of consternation the music struck up. (In the brief interval, however, between the banging shut of the police car’s last door and the trumpet’s first note, the people out there had shown themselves united as neither before nor after—precisely in reaction to the shared shock: not one who didn’t try to catch someone else’s eye.

  It was a large instrumental group, without singers, mostly gypsies, who all seemed to come from the same family or tribe. But even the few non-gypsies, white-skinned and blond, were visibly, and then audibly, part of the family. They were playing almost exclusively wind instruments, rather small, stumpy ones, the trumpets short like the clarinets. And thus the music blared in a mighty yet short-winded racket, which for several measures at a time resembled a kind of stuttering in unison—unabashed, self-confident, and hymnic. Hymnic stuttering? Yes.

  The only other kind of instrument was an accordion, always eye-catching when it was drawn apart, but clearly audible only occasionally, when it played a solo, fragments of a strangely soulful melody, in contrast to the rhythmic passages of the trumpets and clarinets. This accordion’s keyboard was worked by his son. And among the few outsiders in the group, he was the one who could most easily have belonged to the tribe.

  “It was not only because of prejudice,” the pharmacist of Taxham said, “that for a long time I felt uneasy around gypsies. Probably unnecessary to mention that in my youth I even felt drawn to them, or to the hearsay about them. But later, in my travel and journeyman years, I was ambushed and robbed several times, and almost every time by gypsies. I’d told my son about this, too, and that the sight of this people, even from a distance, and even if it was small children or infants, fills me not with hatred but with panic: I promptly feel the knife held to my stomach again, all those hands under my shirt, even poking into my armpits.”

  And now he found his son among these gypsies, not only dressed like them but also with the same facial expression; he didn’t know what to call it—neither “impudent” nor “shifty,” perhaps closest to “there yet not there,” unapproachable.

  And so the son also gazed at his father while playing, almost kindly, but without focusing on him in particular, and just as kindly as all the other members of the orchestra, whose trumpets, always pointing slightly up into the night, gave off a much more powerful gleam than his modest accordion.

  And the father was incapable of even making a sign to him. And he remained so throughout the rest of the days and nights of the festival. The musicians went on to the next table, made the rounds of the street, and filed past him again at the next sunrise or sunset, their trumpets glowing differently each time, the son unvaryingly kind, without any trace of tiredness, with his accordion. And something else came into play, on the very first night of the festival. The woman from the watershed fountain, the widow, the so-called winner, for him more the blow-striker and stone-hurler, turned up at the long table, was suddenly there, out of the darkness. His impulse was to recoil from her, step back a few paces, not out of fear but out of surprise, but he couldn’t budge. And she did nothing but walk around him for a long time, her face always just a hand’s breadth from his, silent, with wide eyes that seemed to want him gone.

  Then at some point he managed to greet her and smile at her. But she didn’t respond, merely circled the man once more and disappeared, with a last glance over her shoulder, like the earlier times.

  Did he sleep at all during the festival? His memory says no. He stayed awake for several nights and days—which he’d always dreamed of, as something to experience, or as a possible turning point. And on the other hand he had a visual memory of waking up in an inn—the street also had a posada, right next to the church—and for a moment, just one, lying in his extremely narrow bed, with her back to him, is the strange woman.

  And what’s certain is that very soon the poet and the Olympic hero returned to the festival, with the festival queen between them, released now, and that for a long time afterward they were all just as mute as he was. (Only then did the poet finally notice that all this time the chauffeur hadn’t spoken a single word.)

  * * *

  “Despite everything,” the pharmacist of Taxham told me, “even despite my son, who soon vanished from my sight again—the last time I saw him, he was dancing with the young festival queen—I wasn’t unhappy in the least, didn’t wish for a second to be somewhere else. That’s how it is! I thought. What mattered was to be out there in the nocturnal wind, with the others, with these particular people, for a while, and then to see what would happen next.”

  THREE

  The person who told me this story stayed in that country long after the festival there. During this time he let two of his employees, mother and son, run the business in Taxham; these refugees from the civil war knew all about the various medications, those for physical ills and more particularly those for what went beyond; and when it came to dosages, they also knew the right proportions; and besides, in the presence of these two and what they had so obviously gone through, some customers were promptly cured of what ailed them.

  For the time being he stayed on at the inn in the lower town. The street, as became apparent with the first light of day, led directly to a sandy and rocky steppe, which apparently wasn’t cultivated. Seen from the window of his inn, this steppe looked not completely flat but hilly in places, alternating perfectly level surfaces with gently rising ones, and extending into the vast and empty distance, to all the horizons except the one at his back, which was blocked by the random clusters of houses, large and small, in the lower town and the stern line of the upper town stretched far along its cliff. The entire town, surrounded by wasteland as far as the eye could see, seemed sealed off from the rest of the continent, the latter hardly accessible.

  Yet trains still traversed the steppe twice a day, or at least at the time when this story takes place, or did the tooting perhaps come from a tractor trailer instead? And even though there was no airport, all day long the sky remained populated, and not only by birds: A flight path must have crossed the area, not a heavily used one, to be sure—only two or three jet trails per day—but at least they suggested you weren’t completely cut off from the rest of the world. These jet trails were always very high up, or rather deep up, deep into the consistently blue sky, or even beyond it, and when the plane belonging to a trail actually came into view for a change, with a momentary flash, or for a second could even be heard—a delicate hum in the remotest part of the atmosphere—those who found themselves beneath it received the unmistakable impression that the plane already had thousands of such flight miles behind it, had taken off long ago in an entirely different country, and would remain out there for a long time at the same altitude.

  * * *

  The inn also served as the bar for the steppe street, and was managed by the young girl, the queen for the few days of the festival. Her mother, the actual owner, remained absent during the entire time, and my storyteller also told me that if one reader or another really needed some sort of explanation I could add that maybe she had set out to find her former lover and surprise him, and was just then roaming around his part of the world, as the poet was roaming around hers; they’d just missed each other.

  * * *

  The girl, left alone in charge, was having a hard time of it. Of course, the place must have been run-down even before this. Much was broken or unusable, and seemed to have been that way a long time, and many things were missing—had disappeared? or had never been there at all? The sink in one of the rooms had no drain, while the one in another room let the water flow out directly onto the floor. No
t one bed was long enough (except perhaps for the dwarfs in the area, of whom there were quite a few—had the inn originally been intended for them?). And the rooms themselves were so small that instead of walking, at most you could take one step at a time: one step from the door to the bed, likewise one step from the door to the window, and from the bed to the window, the bed to the wash basin; and from the wash basin to the view out the window not even one step was possible—or necessary?

  For as the days passed, he came to accept such cramped space for living and sleeping, and then to like it; if he slept at all, he slept deeply there, quietly and dreamlessly—unusual for him; and when he sat there, especially in the morning—there was hardly anything else you could do in these rooms—he sat so still, with a few everyday objects within reach, that from time to time just sitting there felt like a form of activity, perhaps even one that was good for something.

  What wasn’t good, however, was the lack of keys to the doors, even to the inn’s entrance downstairs, or of bolts on the inside. He wanted to be able to lock himself in there, at least now and then, but even in the lavatory that wasn’t possible. Some of the windowpanes were also broken. The threshold at the front door, as high as a person’s shinbone, was rotted and partially caved in. The roof wasn’t exactly missing, but here and there the tiles had been tossed or pushed on top of each other, not by a nocturnal wind but by a storm. And the gutter was clogged with steppe debris that had accumulated there, was gummed up with the sand that had also blown in from there, sand that not even the copious dew of the region could wash away. And the usual highland firewood, which elsewhere was stacked under the windows along the street, was strewn all over the back courtyard and also inside the inn’s kitchen.

  Yet the building and its major and minor features exuded an aura of nobility: the stone walls with their bluish granite shimmer; the interior walls, not smooth anywhere, and slightly bulging and wavy, clad up to eye level with small tiles; next to a plastic cup, a blackened silver spoon; a stuffed wolf and, in a dark corner of the inn, a tall, slim cast-iron stove, where even now, in midsummer, a wood fire burned constantly, visible behind the old-time translucent, flameproof stove door made of mica, the firelight transmitted by the sheet of mica to the wolf’s glass eyes; a football game table—most of its figurines missing their heads or legs—and in the glass case next to it a Moorish wedding robe; in the inn’s bathroom, the only larger space besides the bar, the doorknob, the tub feet, the towel racks made of rock crystal, and the door of press-board, and the tub itself of the kind of metal used for cans, and on the rock crystal towel racks, a whole batch of them poking in star form out of the tiled wall, one small washcloth, which even when wet was stiff as a board.

  * * *

  During the street festival the three of them remained busy with other things. One time, long after midnight, a herd of bulls was driven through the streets, coming from the steppe, very young ones, not yet trained for fighting, but with horns that were already almost full-grown, and anyone who felt like it could run ahead of them; at least no one stayed in his seat. (Or did someone?) And one time, on the eighth and final day of the festival, which was called verbena, a silent procession passed by, with statues of saints carried in front, and canopies, under one of them the hunters who lived on the street, under another the chess players who lived there, under the third the Holy of Holies; the procession circled far out onto the steppe, so far that the squawking of jackdaws and magpies was replaced by that of eagles and buzzards, and upon their return to the city, not one marcher’s Sunday best wasn’t covered with dust up to the knees and stuck everywhere with thistle thorns.

  And one day an eclipse of the sun was part of the street festival; the first moment of it, the first tiny slicing of the moon’s orb across that of the sun was rather like a bite being taken out of the sun, and long after the end of the festival this image continued to burn and glow on many people’s retinas, a sort of photographic negative.

  * * *

  But then it was time to give the girl a hand with the inn (she continued to display some of her queenliness there). Besides, not a few parts of that street on the edge of the steppe, where the Ascension feast tables had stood just a little while ago, now reverted to the work sites they had been earlier. In place of the reviewing stand for the royal entourage, the disappearing underground of the sewer workers, and at the main gathering place for the musicians—when they hadn’t been strolling up and down the street—the resumption of the paving operation, heading toward the steppe, and from the wide-open church, being freshly whitewashed, instead of the sound of the organ, voices from the painters’ transistor radios. Especially when the workers had gone to get something to eat and their tools were standing or lying around unused, it was tempting to pick up a shovel, hammer, hose, or tool chest and go to work with it.

  And in fact the three of them did go to work in this fashion. One of the pavers, while leveling the asphalt, playfully tossed them a wire brush; it landed at their feet, and one of the three bent down and began to scrape away at the exterior walls of the inn, at first also just in play or trying it out, but then without stopping, intently, and continued working this way and in other ways, and elsewhere, on the building for an entire week. And similarly one of the three picked up an orphaned carpenter’s level on the street, and so on.

  In the inn—in a glass case, along with top hats and officers’ caps—were also the work clothes common in that region, which were then handed out to them by the barmaid, and one of them worked in a blue tunic, the other in a white one. And after just a few days they could hardly be distinguished from the more or less professional workers on the street. Their hair now almost impossible to get a comb through. Dragging footsteps. Sagging pants seats. Loud, thoughtless talking, such as you hear from roofers, for instance—actually a necessity when one of them has to communicate from up on the ridgepole with another down on the ground.

  And so they periodically went with the other crews to get a drink of water at the only public fountain on this slightly sloping street, just a pipe poking out of a wall, from which a trickle of spring water ran constantly; and during the noon hour they lay under the only tree on the entire street, and on its only patch of grass, sprawled among the painters and pavers—but who was who?—without anyone’s saying a word.

  The only one who didn’t get completely caught up in his task, even though he did manual work like the others, who seemed disguised somehow, was the poet. Without his being sloppy or clumsy, or shirking work—on the contrary: he immediately did whatever he was told—whatever he did had a slight casualness to it, and even after the greatest exertion he didn’t pause to catch his breath with the others but promptly went off somewhere, out of the circle or the triangle. And so the local workers soon sensed that in reality he wasn’t really a threshold-repairer and window-shutter-painter at all; no, it was more like a suspicion. “You’re not what you say you are, and not anything worthwhile, either.” And not until he presented himself mainly as a chef, at first just for his daughter, later, as the offerer of little delicacies to those resting out by the fountain, did he become a believable worker: That was how jolly the atmosphere became all around him, how caught up he seemed in the hacking of bones or the most meticulous dredging in flour or the plucking of down, how flushed he grew even over a cold stove.

  When it came to all the different sorts of repairs that had to be done on the old inn, the former star athlete, the forgotten Olympic medalist and world champion, turned out to be quite amazing. It was understandable that from his period of fame and his short-lived wealth he knew his way around hotels, pensions, and bars—he’d owned several such properties, though at increasingly short intervals he’d become known as the “owner on the run.” But who would have thought that the world champion in downhill skiing would get such pleasure out of patching, clearing out, tidying, cleaning, sanding down dining-room tables, and all for others, for strangers? In addition to the more strenuous tasks, for which he was the o
ne among the three who was the planner, assigner, and supplier of materials, and without showing off at all, he was filled with enthusiasm for those kinds of activities known as “services.” During the time there in the posada he made the others’ beds, shined their shoes, ironed everything in sight that needed ironing, did the shopping, sewed and darned, and always promptly and with few words. If he was no longer a champion or a businessman, he was something like a cheerful caretaker, at least around the inn. His face glowed when he brought a glass to someone’s table. And you could easily picture him in his youth on the gold-medal podium.

  Altogether, it was only in this way that the old athlete acquired a face. And what was it like? It made it possible for you to call him by name, again for the first time, the given name that could finally be spoken out loud: “Hey, Alfons!; Hey, Alfonso!” To which he merely said, “Yes, a person’s got to work. This work is my vacation, my leisure. I’ve never had so much leisure time. A person’s got to work.”

  Except that in the midst of his élan this face time and again, for a brief frozen instant, seemed stricken with hopelessness: “No, I’m done for. There’s no hope for me.”