by Peter Handke
Meanwhile, from the inn’s front door, the pavers could be seen behind their fire, distorted by the flames and the smoke: “If only I could at least stand in a fire like that!”
* * *
It was chiefly this shared work that made the storyteller stay with the two others. Once the repairs were done, he increasingly lost track of the athlete and the poet. One factor was that the latter moved out of the inn, closer to town, to the center of Santa Fe (soon followed, as always, by his companion). His daughter had disappeared in the meantime—following the festival musicians, people said. Yes, the festival could still be smelled along the entire length of the street, precisely in its absence.
And without a word, he, the storyteller, had allowed the accordion player, his son—if indeed it was him—to move on. “It was the right thing to do,” he said. “Father and child have to go their separate ways eventually. And this time it was the moment, and maybe not a bad one. Right? At any rate, suddenly I was the only person living in that inn there on the edge of the savanna.”
* * *
Here his search began for the woman known as the “winner.” Yet shouldn’t he have been afraid of her? The wounds she’d inflicted on him with her bare hands during that first night of struggle—a one-sided struggle—still weren’t completely healed. Especially the one on his forehead, on the spot where he’d had the small growth removed earlier, kept starting to bleed again, seemingly for no reason. And that was exactly where the blow out of nowhere had struck him way back then on the end of the woods by the Salzburg airport—“way back then?” yes, that was his thought.
But he wanted to and had to find the woman, even if it might involve a third blow on the head. This was the first time he’d been fired up with passion this way, “and perhaps less for the object of it,” he said, “than for the trailing and tracking down.” A piece of the woman’s fingernail, broken off during her violent act and picked up from the floor by him in that mountain house, had seemed to him a clue rather than a bad omen. Looking at it, he felt all the more intensely that she must be nearby.
Yet she no longer made herself noticeable. Once, on the edge of the steppe, when something struck him hard on the head, it was an apple, but where was the tree?—none there—but where was the thrower?—none far and wide—and only then did he see, already at some distance, the raven from whose beak the fruit had presumably fallen, out of the clear blue sky.
* * *
To an outsider, his searching was barely noticeable. Simply by staying in his blue work clothes, so practical and good-looking, he managed not to stand out at all in that town on the steppe, which wasn’t large, merely spread out. And likewise his movements, facial expressions, glances were more like those of someone hurrying from one workplace to another; no looking to the side, no pausing. But in his mind, too, he often wasn’t paying attention to what he was doing: “Precisely because she seemed overwhelmingly powerful to me, she could go out of my mind between one step and the next. The search for the woman felt so significant and urgent that there were times when my consciousness couldn’t keep a grip on it anymore, when I literally forgot about it for long stretches and was thinking of something entirely different, which, however, had the same glowing intensity as what I was supposed to track down—the way you’re sometimes so filled with gratitude that you forget to say thank you.”
* * *
For days and days he roamed through Santa Fe, mostly through the lower town, where the weather from the surrounding savanna was much more extreme and said to him, “Hot!”
Only a couple of times did he follow the alley up to the old quarter on top of the cliff, still a center, but as a rule he did that only toward evening, when the squares up there, in contrast to those down below, gradually emptied out and the nocturnal wind then made its presence felt, with a force very different from down in the lower town. To stand in the uppermost and most deserted of the squares, on the edge of the cliff, and let his face, the roots of his hair, his memory, and who knows what else be refreshed by this wind, blowing out of the blackness. “I’m a nocturnal-wind person. And where are my nocturnal-wind people?” Responding not with his palate or tongue, but with his temples.
And in such a nocturnal wind he also found himself thinking one time that he was glad to have been struck dumb. Good that he couldn’t speak any longer. He’d never have to open his mouth again. Freedom! Even more: the ideal condition! Establish a party, even a religion: the party of the mute, the religion of muteness? No, remain alone with it. Mute, free, and ultimately, as it should be, alone.
In another nocturnal-wind moment he again received a blow on the head, or at least he felt as if he did; in reality he was merely brushed by the coat of a mouse, spat out by an owl, sitting on a wall somewhere, that had just choked down its prey.
* * *
In the daytime he invariably stayed down at the foot of the cliff. “Foot of the cliff” didn’t mean, however, that from there the town extended right onto the plain. Beyond the two rivers that came together here, the terrain immediately rose again, only much flatter, then fell off, and so on, till it reached the rocky steppe.
The many cliffs, as well as the crevasses, and gorges (with rivers and brooks) created unusual echo conditions throughout the town. These conditions didn’t merely amplify sounds. They also confused your sense of direction, even where up and down were concerned. Near and far also often became indistinguishable. Especially in the morning, when far and wide only a few people were up—sleeping late seemed to be the habit in this region—suddenly two voices would be talking loudly right under his window at the inn, and when he leaned out to look, no one was there, not a soul on the street; but way out on the steppe he could just make out two gesticulating figures, no bigger than dots, yet every word echoing clearly in his tiny room.
Or during the deepest, most silent night, nothing but the monotonous hooting of the owls—from down below? from up above?—and from one of the river narrows, the one in which the only larger gardens on the savanna were laid out, following the course of the rather sporadic flow of water, came the small sound of a watchdog gulping for air, one of several, the sound promptly echoed by the cliffs and now answered by the dog with its first bark, which, along with the echo, the next dog promptly returned, which in turn was followed by that bark’s echo, doubled by the narrowing of the valley, whereupon a third dog up the valley chimed in, along with its echo, multiplied by a curve in the river, and all this getting louder and louder, the echo being multiplied through the entire highland and lowland, until in the end—no, no end for a long time, it seems—although it’s only three dogs there barking at each other, it’s as if a whole army of dogs were launching an all-out attack.
* * *
It was still summer, yet you could become completely confused as to the time of year. That had little to do with the numerous electronic thermometers in the town, each of which displayed a different temperature, often with variations almost as large as those between summer and winter. The leaf drop, sometimes even in early July, wasn’t altogether unusual, either.
No, here there was a curious back and forth between the seasons, one minute way ahead, the following just as far back. On one of the days there the storyteller went for a swim in the river, the one that had more water, with the whispering or rustling of the poplars on both banks and that summery sound of crickets chirping, if there ever was one, and all of a sudden—he was swimming upstream—a seemingly unending deluge of fallen leaves swept toward him, yellow, red, blackish, an interminable train, drifting on and under the water in garlands, which further reinforced the autumnal impression—while in the next moment a cuckoo could be heard, as if it were at most late spring.
And that mulberry tree that still had almost all its fruit, most of it unripe, while the one in Taxham had long since dropped all its berries, and even the red stains on the ground had long since faded. And likewise the elderberry here, blooming in cream-colored dots, while in that same instant your eye lit o
n the sunflower fields, blackened as in November and reminiscent of world-war cemeteries, above which, however, midsummery air still shimmered.
* * *
Yet he hardly lost his way, and when he did, he calmly let it happen; now, right now was the moment to experience something like this.
Many of the local folk lost their way more often than he did. Again and again he, the person most a stranger to the place, would be asked for directions, and usually he could help, too, with a mute gesture.
True: those who asked him were sometimes tourists, but just from the province whose capital the nocturnal-wind town was, people from the country; there weren’t any other tourists. And these tourists or day-trippers were a welcome sight, in their inconspicuous outfits, and especially with their timidity in this unfamiliar territory, and also with their little exuberances, such that even old folks could be seen skipping (just one step each time).
Once he saw a wedding procession tearing along the main street in the lower town in cars decorated with streamers, accompanied by rather cautious honking, clanging of tin cans, and then he caught sight, in the newlyweds’ car, of two such oldsters, obviously from a village.
* * *
But as a rule, when he was out walking, searching for the woman or with his thoughts elsewhere, he kept his eyes on the ground. As he wandered out of the town onto the all-encompassing steppe, he thus regularly came upon a few mushrooms, various kinds that were familiar to him, even if they were varieties specific to the region, deviating from the general species.
These he then ate, sometimes even on the street, or in a bar, always the same one, because there he needed only one or two gestures to make himself understood. It was striking how strange, even uncanny these things that grew in their own region were to the natives. When it came to the most common and most tasty mushroom—to be found wherever you went, even behind the houses—they viewed him as someone gambling with his life, and they almost backed away, as if the very sight were life-threatening, yet some—many—seemed attracted by the mushrooms, more as a marvel than the devil’s handiwork.
But many other plants or fruits from their own region were also unfamiliar or taboo to the inhabitants, and not only those in the town. One day he came to a settlement on the outskirts similar to the street with the inn, with the same squat, longish buildings, extending up the slopes of the steppe, but on another side of town, and there he picked in passing a fig from a tree growing right next to a doorway, whereupon an old woman ran out, shouting—not because he was stealing, but because of the presumably poisonous type of fig: “Don’t eat that!” In her entire life she’d never tasted the figs, and now she wanted to preserve him from being done in by her doorway figs.
Beneath her troubled gaze he then ate precisely two of the fruits, which tasted so delicious he would have liked to eat every one on the tree, but took only the smallest. This ignorance on the part of even the oldest inhabitants about what was growing right by their door, along with their fear of it, was something he encountered from morning till night.
* * *
A couple of times during this period of searching he also ran into his two traveling companions. Although they’d separated only temporarily, the poet and the star athlete acted as though they no longer knew their driver. Or perhaps when they saw him out on the street, far from the car and the inn, they actually didn’t recognize him, a phenomenon he was used to from Taxham.
And they also overlooked him because they seemed to be preoccupied with something else entirely. They, too, were searching, but much more obviously than he was. What were they looking for? A fight? Money? An audience? A helper, more effective than he was, one who would save them, not just for one evening but once and for all? And not a lone savior, but a whole savior people, a people of saviors? Or weren’t they looking instead for one who would destroy them at last—their terminator, their executioner? And each time the two of them appeared more ragged, in spite of the elegant suits with which they’d replaced their work clothes. Finally they even turned up almost completely toothless, and that in the space of just a few days. Or had they had false teeth before, which they’d now lost or swallowed?
Sometimes their faces were beet red, sometimes pale as death. The loose soles of their shoes flapped as they walked. There were sticky trails—like those of snails—across their beards. The only part of them that still seemed neat and proper was their carefully manicured fingernails (which additionally gave them the air of deviant killers).
Thus they roamed, probably ceaselessly, almost day and night, making grandiose gestures, through the upper and lower town, blocking the path of other pedestrians, making fun of them for their appearance, their gait, their voices, but it was like a game, and their invective was rhymed, in poetic form, and sometimes also sung, with the result that no one stopped them, and they were even paid now and then for their performances.
One time he saw them on the Plaza Mayor in the upper town, on the hottest day of the year, offering blocks of ice for sale, “not artificially frozen, or fallen off a truck, but born during the Ice Age in primeval muck, then by Emperor Constantine as imperial ice chosen.” And another time they blocked his way down on the large bridge over the river, again without recognizing him, and wanted him to take their picture (which he did), their faces garishly painted, jet-black raven and magpie feathers in their hair.
* * *
He walked past all the town’s pharmacies—and there were unusually many of them for a provincial town like this, almost two dozen; he didn’t need anything, after all, wasn’t sick; or was there something he could take to get his voice back?
He saw hardly any old pharmacists there, and also hardly any old interiors. All these highland pharmacists made a robust impression, and had rough-skinned faces and hands, as if in their free time or in general they were mountain climbers or hikers, or at any rate more at home out of doors than here, with the cosmetics in Aisle 1 and the medicine case in Aisle 2.
He saw the only old pharmacist in the upper town, in the only pharmacy up there, it, too, new or renovated: Once, when this man had night duty, his face appeared in the little hatch next to the locked door, yet with no customer anywhere in sight on the nocturnal-wind street—perhaps he wanted a breath of air; and once in the middle of the day as a silhouette against the large rear window that looked out directly over the cliff’s sheer drop, a cliff window, through which the profile of the old man, alone in the place, without employees, stood out against the steppe, devoid of people as far into the distance as the eye could see—grass-, sand-, and cliff-yellow, now bleached almost white in the midday sun, and out there on the street he felt as if he were seeing his self-portrait, from later on.
* * *
The only person with whom my storyteller had contact now was the proprietor of an out-of-the-way bar in the lower town. (But what does “out-of-the-way” mean? Every other one of the many bars seemed like that, and also bore such a name: “Hideaway” or “Corner.”) This bartender was also old, in such a way that everything about him, instead of turning wrinkled and white, had become callused and bristly. Without his having to open his mouth it was clear the man was a widower, had been one for a long time, and his children had gone away even longer ago, never to be seen again, and this was the last season that he would spend behind the bar and that this place would exist at all. And he wouldn’t be around to see the next year arrive.
“Whenever I came into the place, the proprietor would be standing not behind his bar but in the middle of the tiled room, which you entered by going down a few steps, in dim fluorescent light. And not until he recognized me as a guest would he duck down and slip under the bar flap into his realm. And he didn’t open his mouth any more than I did. In any case, he had only one beverage to offer, which filled his shelves from top to bottom in identical bottles. Only what he placed before me in the way of snacks varied. But there was no need to ask for these in any case—the olives, the pistachios, the miniature octopuses that he deep-fr
ied in a flash, the partridge eggs, the crayfish, the mushrooms—which I brought and he prepared in silence; what he served was entirely up to him! So we stood, with the bar between us, always just the two of us, and as a rule looked past one another, while he used my presence as a pretext for eating and drinking like me, the same things and in the same rhythm. His hair stuck straight up, motionless and stiff, way above his head, and also stuck out of his ears and nostrils. The counter was a thick slab of white marble, part of which formed a shallow basin, where there was always some water, perfectly clear, without a drain: In this hollow he would wash the glasses, dull with age, after every use, each one separately, after scooping out the water and pouring in fresh. And things were at their most silent in the rincón when all the small, delicate glasses had been washed and placed in rows on the marble, and the hollow had been filled with fresh water again, everything else had been put away, neither of us was eating or drinking anymore, and instead we were both gazing at the neatly lined-up old shot glasses and the bit of water, so clear, in the drainless hollow, this round miniature pool with its bright marble bottom, just as, perhaps at that very moment, in a temple garden in faraway Asia, a visitor and a monk might be sitting on a boulder in the middle of an empty patch of sand, raked in long, wavy rows to represent the Sea of Japan.”
* * *
One morning my storyteller came upon another settlement on the outskirts, the kind that could be found all around, extending into small dead-end gorges and climbing the rocky slopes of the steppe to left and right. And again the general smallness of the houses, actually stone huts: wherever rock walls protruded between them and behind them, even the lowest were taller than the dwellings.
Only one of the roads leading into the settlement continued all the way to the top; the rest soon gave way to steep steps.
At the various levels, here and there, and easy to pick out among the small structures, stood a few cars, not many, and it seemed more as if they were enthroned one above the other on the slope, with one car, as high and as long as a house, way at the top, already beyond the edge of town, on a promontory, as the lead or chief vehicle.