On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House

by Peter Handke

  When my storyteller now broke into a run, quite out of character, and only for a few steps, he knew what he was doing. Most of the huts lower down had benches out in front, facing the sunrise, and when they weren’t occupied, which was the exception, the electric meters on the exterior walls, enclosed in glass boxes, revealed the presence of residents, actually residents who didn’t merely lodge there but rather were keeping mighty busy inside: Almost all the little counters were turning quite fast, some even speeding and racing.

  But the higher he climbed in the settlement, the slower the counters turned. Where initially all he had seen was the even flashing of the metal disk as it spun around, up here even the painted markings could be made out. In the glass boxes higher up the slope, some little disks were motionless. And this motionlessness increased steadily as he went up. Also most of these houses had their shutters rolled down, and hardly a chimney had smoke coming out.

  How strange, this motionlessness of the metal disks in the morning sun. Yet even up here, among the rocks, more and more of them, there were still outdoor lights, even some on poles that were quite shiny and new and stuck up above the houses, and fat electrical cables, several bunched together, strung every which way, the most insignificant structure more than amply serviced. At the same time, most of the houses didn’t look neglected at all, even if they were abandoned, for the day, or longer. One, located almost at the top where the settlement ended, had a for-sale sign and was ready for immediate occupancy. To one side of it, above the flat line of its roof, children out playing were just climbing, in single file, up the hilly steppe, already completely deserted there, their silhouettes visible against the early sky. Like the tall savanna grass on the ridge, their hair had a brightly shining streak on top, lighter than straw.

  “If the house had had a view of the steppe, I would have been a buyer that very day. But of course all the windows faced the town on the cliff.” And after a bend in the road, he came upon the first ruins. Here there were suddenly not only no more electric meter boxes, but also no doors and roofs. Small trees had rooted in the crumbled squares, almost always figs; at their feet, in the rubble, mattresses and bottomless pots and pans. But nearby there could still be a bit of a vegetable garden, blooming or bearing well despite the steep ground, or an overgrown chicken pen.

  And only after that, the last of the last in the settlement, even higher up on the steppe, came a structure that couldn’t be meant for domestic animals or raising plants, or even for storing garden tools. It was a sort of shack, a fairly large one, even cantilevered somewhat over the ledge on which it was situated. Despite its size, it gave the impression of having no interior space, more a frame than a shack; as if there were no room left for either tools or animals, and certainly not for a human being. True, there was a door, made of wood, like the rest of the building, wood that had apparently been gathered from far and wide, even several doors. But these stood, no, leaned, one against the other, and if you pushed or lifted one out of the way—that was the only possibility for opening them—you would immediately come upon the next one, and so on, until instead of reaching a room you would find yourself out in the open again.

  And it was similar with the so-called walls: as if they were nothing more than stacks of lumber, piled and staggered one close to the other all the way to the back, for instance parts salvaged from the house ruins farther down, also old window frames as material, not mounted to let in air and light, however, but propped at an angle or laid flat, stuffed with beams and boards, and all this stuff every which way, such that the only space you could imagine inside would accommodate no more than a rat- or mousehole.

  Simply incomprehensible, this structure at the very top of the cliffs. What is it? What’s it meant for? What it resembles most is a barricade. Except that on top of this barricade—the only part with any shape to it, the only recognizable shape in this heap of boards and planks—is a railing, a sort of balustrade or gallery. A barricade with a lookout platform? But otherwise nothing: no stovepipe, no tarpaulins, not a single head of lettuce.

  And this is already quite far past the last streetlights and electric lines, and yet the passable street extends most of the way here, and not far from the apparent barricade is parked that house-long automobile, almost a bus, another Santana jeep, though considerably larger than the one that passed them on the trip here, and this one has its headlights protected from the stones of the steppe by little grilles.

  Past the empty car and scrambling up the protruding pieces of wood—no ladder anywhere to be seen—to the railing. (“First, though, I took a few steps back,” he told me. “How the world begins to move with your stepping back that way, as it does with going forward only occasionally in childhood!”) And from the balustrade there becomes visible, down below in the shack or framework, reachable by way of an interior ladder, something like a space or a shell after all. Not climbing down into it, merely lying up there on his stomach, looking down for a long time. A bed, or rather a makeshift sleeping place, squeezed in below amidst all the wood. And a blanket, too, thrown off just this morning; otherwise nothing, nothing at all, the most extreme contrast to the triumphant splendor in the watershed house; and at that moment, no one to be seen.

  “Is that how she was mourning her husband?” I asked. “Or trying to do penance for something?”

  No answer from my storyteller, or then this: “During my travels, I was often lonely—something I could never say of myself otherwise. One time I took a piece of bread from the counter in a bar and carried it around with me for a while because it smelled of the perfume of the woman who had probably sliced it. Or on the street I looked for drunks, just to be jostled by them a bit as I passed. And I would push or pull open the same shop doors as the stranger in front of me. And in the bathroom at the inn I dried myself not with the clean towel but with the used one the person before me had left in a corner. And in public places, for sugar for my coffee, I always took the lumps that had already been unwrapped and had a piece broken off. But the loneliness there in the shack! (No, it was really more an inhabited barricade.) The ‘winner’! From reading medieval epics I know that such epithets or names often signify the opposite. So from the outset the ‘winner’ is a ‘loser.’ Of course, the secret of the epics is that if the adventure turns out well for a change, the ‘loser’ then actually becomes a ‘winner’—if ever there was one. She was given that name so that, or because, she could—or should—become one in reality. To become a winner was the destiny of the current loser. And somewhere in between, the adventure would perhaps take place.”

  He leaped down from the shack. Wind sprang up. There was something that had to be done! From now on he had to keep focused on the task, or, as he, the smell-man, put it, “nose to track.” And stick to it—for what? To discover something, or rediscover something.

  * * *

  That same day he encountered the poet and the star athlete for the last time in his story.

  That town of Santa Fe, at least its larger lower section, was as loud as any normal town. But he’d never heard screaming there, not of the kind he heard now. Children, soccer fans, crane-guiders, lottery-ticket vendors, criers of all sorts didn’t scream like this. It was approaching noon, and he was just passing an abandoned bull-fighting arena in a rather out-of-the-way place, an arena that wouldn’t be used again until the next year, for the annual corrida had already taken place in early summer; the feria posters from June looked ancient. And the screaming came from outside, from a no-man’s-land spandrel between the street and the curve of the arena, on the somewhat neglected side, with seats that most people tried to avoid in summertime because they were directly in the sun; though for the late fall motor-cross races and concerts had been announced.

  On this outside strip, strewn with shreds of plastic and scraps of paper spiked on isolated thistles, his two companions were standing with a young man. He was the one who was screaming. Several other young people were there, keeping at a distance. During the last few
weeks it had happened again and again that people had gone after each other out in the open, serious for a moment, then turning it in no time into a mock fight: That was common in this country. But here it was in earnest, as you could see from the way the boy was dancing back and forth in front of the two others, and hear in his screams, actually directed more to one side. Not once in his life had he screamed this way. Up to now all that had come from him, in passing on the street, for a decade, was at most a murmuring, incomprehensible, and sometimes spitting. But now the moment had come, and he screamed his battle cries at the top of his voice. “Kill! I’m going to kill both of you!” So at last the two had been recognized, though perhaps in a different way from what they’d expected.

  * * *

  Figures like this boy had turned up more and more often of late. Although each went around by himself, or at most with one other person, they’d come to form a real horde on the avenues, but also on paths through the steppe, cheek by jowl with each other, a horde in the face of which the rest of the region’s population increasingly appeared as the minority.

  Out in the open, these characters, who were sometimes not all that young, were coming more and more into the foreground. The central squares, the bridges, even the entrances to public buildings were black almost exclusively with them. They stared right through the other passersby and also didn’t respond to either greetings or the simplest question. In each other’s presence they also remained silent, or fell silent the moment someone who didn’t belong to their group approached.

  Thus it became evident that they did belong together after a fashion. It was as if they rejected ordinary language, and even acted as though they didn’t understand it. They had a language all their own, and they wanted to keep it to themselves. Keeping it to themselves meant that in their region—and it was their very own region, for hadn’t they obviously constituted the vast majority for a long while now?—no one and nothing should hold sway but them and their language, and, connected with that, their claim to land ownership and power in these parts, which they would seize without further ado, and as soon as possible. Their habit of staring into the air out in public suggested a secret understanding. And never the slightest flicker of an expression, even with new people joining them day after day, and certainly never a smile, meant either for the person next to or behind them, or for or about themselves.

  By virtue of their numbers alone they seemed connected. Yet each one was poised for a collective, instantaneous, and unprecedentedly violent overthrow. One or the other would pose as a kind of challenger just by appearing on the street. Not that he would block the path of the others, who seemed to be growing increasingly scarce. It was mostly a certain way of walking, intended to provoke, a loose-kneed, almost boneless saunter, a glide, an ostentatious display of absentness, and then a sudden pounce, seemingly directed at someone, then just missing him, eyes staring into nowhere.

  These challengers were so deformed that it was often impossible to make out whether they were men or women. What they resembled most closely, with their casual movements, was women who’ve aged prematurely and intentionally make themselves look even older, uglier, and more shapeless, an insult hurled in the face of the world—and who then suddenly, eye to eye with the other person, with a jerk, at the speed of lightning, stiffen to become a squad of killers.

  * * *

  And the poet, who couldn’t refrain from getting involved whenever something excited him one way or the other, had now fallen into the trap of one of these challengers. It was entirely likely that he had taken the boy to task, without thinking twice, saying that the boy’s intentions or ideas were unknown or of no interest to him, likely that the mere appearance and gait of the stranger coming toward him had irritated him to the point where he burst out cursing him in a language and with words that the object of his abuse did understand after all, in a flash and at one blow.

  What became apparent: the poet was utterly incapable of defending himself. He couldn’t use force, had never used force. As when in a dream you may want to hit someone, but the blows lose their strength just before they reach the other person’s body and land at most as little taps, so he now experienced this in reality. It was still more remarkable that even the Olympic champion, adept in many sports, was unable to engage in even the smallest fight, and not because he happened to be drunk; he, too, had never defended himself, he, too, was defenseless, and had been so since childhood. And he was the one whose measure the assailant was now taking.

  The youth had no knife. Yet he didn’t need any weapon, as he was demonstrating on the athlete, in complete silence now, without screaming: The dizzying succession of blows he was miming would end with one that would prove deadly. The boy, who on closer inspection turned out to have a wrinkled, oldish face, was plainly working himself up for an execution as he repeated, faster and faster, the pantomime of blows and death blows aimed at the athlete, who stood there stiff as a board; but the execution was meant for the poet next to him, who had likewise frozen.

  “I realized: My story was at risk,” my storyteller said. “And I cared about my story—and how! But if I’d continued to stand by, it would’ve been done for, and everything that had gone before null and void. The same was true of turning my back, leaving the scene, looking away. And I didn’t want my story to be taken from me. That couldn’t happen! No!” It was the first word to cross his lips in a long time, almost inaudible, through clenched teeth. And then he said, in the same way, “Calm down, heart.” And his heart calmed down. That could happen.

  Nowhere in his entire life had he gone on the defensive; he’d been unable, or unwilling, to strike back. His only form of self-defense was calm; to become the epitome of calm. And now he simply ran down this fellow who, directly in front of his two victims, was chopping the air into smaller and smaller pieces, a hair’s breadth from their heads and throats, warming up for two neck-breaking blows. He ran him down, and the man slumped against the wall of the arena and didn’t get up. That, too, could happen.

  And after that the bystanders let the three go away together without more ado, some of them even seeming to approve of what had taken place; as if in any case it hadn’t been the moment for an act of violence that would unleash everything else, still too early for the outbreak of war in this country. And the driver’s car was standing right around the corner. That, too, could happen. And only now came a trembling, affecting everyone but him. His calm persisted.

  * * *

  That he then sent them home, mute once more, with an imperious gesture—having pressed the car keys, his own, into the poet’s hand and pointed them in the right direction—was like the slap he’d given his son that time he’d picked him up at the police station (he, the father, had been on the verge of striking out at the handcuff policeman).

  The two pals obeyed. But first they all had a farewell drink in the bar at the inn. There the former Olympic champion suddenly began chanting—it was a real chanting—a singsong recitation: “The stench at home in the barn. Milk squirted into the manure by the mad cow. My mother dying from a kick in the chest by the horse. Sparks from the pellet stove flying across the screen in the village movie theater. Looking under teachers’ skirts. Playing hopscotch among bomb craters. Stretching in bed and bumping into the stinging nettles Father had spread at the foot to dry. Our neighbor kicking his own son around outside the front door. Sleeping in a cornfield as a recruit. The sparks from the edges of my skis flying across the television screen. My brother vanished in Canada. My first love married to a Latter-Day Saint. The snow in Japan versus that in South America. My leg broken in the nighttime giant slalom. My father also dead for a long time now. My sister also dead for a long time now. The sparks from hundreds of horses’ hooves flying over the cemetery. The locks on the apartment changed by my last love with her own hands. No longer making it by the skin of my teeth. The medal sold, and not just once. Letting myself go. But up to now still always finding my way home. And the sparks in the darkness flying
across the screen. And sitting in the summer twilight with bats all around. And sitting on winter nights with friends. And as for ‘home,’ associating it neither with the place nor the house but with the wagon roads through the fields.”

  He shook the driver’s hand, and the poet, fixing his eyes unblinkingly on the driver, again as if he knew at least something about him and his story, stood up and said, “They rode from morning to evening, always straight ahead. A steady stream of butterflies flew by and shooed away any second thoughts. A cricket sat at the entrance to her cave, a veritable Pythia. The solution couldn’t come from purposeful pondering, but from an entirely different direction. Unlike in the days of kings, there was no higher authority. But why was there no higher authority? Never, at any time of year, had he been so alone. Ah, to write poetry the way mountain climbers talk with each other while dangling on the rope! Ah, born in Austria! But who could spend his whole life in fear and trembling? Let your heart bleed at last, and speak! How stupid a head was as a mere head, no matter how big—the bigger, the worse. Son of a king mustn’t ride alone. The lady sat two lance-lengths away. Woman without a name can’t be married. And no door was locked anywhere in the town during her nuptials. But no one knew that he still had much farther to ride. The unmatched loneliness of a proud woman! And soon both felt at home in their exhaustion. No tears, hero of our time: when you weep, you’re done for. A love without fear and trembling is a fire without warmth. May your heart burst in your belly, knight. And may Aaron strike it with his rod, and may it become a cliff—may Moses break his commandment anew from this cliff. You must travel all roads, or the adventure will never be brought to an end. And at the king’s court you must wait. But the most beautiful thing that happened to them in the end was a beautiful reception. — My place: with my face pointing down. There will be a wind, and I shall be no more. At bottom every day of my life was a shame and a disgrace—the only thing I’m proud of is the nights when I stayed up. The inky cap lies in its ink, the bleeder in his blood. You didn’t realize how tall the tree was until a person perched in its crown.” — And at that he had his hand shaken by the long-time poet as well.