by Peter Handke
* * *
He then gave both of them money and watched as they drove off in his car, the poet at the wheel, starting up with a jerk, then another. And that same afternoon he set out himself across the steppe that began at the end of the street. He’d already ventured onto it by day, in wide arcs, returning to town each time toward evening. Now the tie that had always pulled him back to Santa Fe was broken, and his destination lay somewhere else entirely. And for the first time in his story the direction was also clear: to the northwest.
According to the calendar at the inn, it was supposed to be a new moon. But in broad daylight there appeared in the firmament a sickle; the calendar was one from the year before.
My storyteller struck out energetically, away from civilization for the time being. He strode energetically out onto the steppe. A thousand roads you must travel, or your adventure will never be brought to an end!
FOUR
As on his exploratory excursions, he took off his sunglasses as soon as he got past the houses and out into the grassland, not only because the light was less harsh here than among the houses, most of which had white stucco, but also because the details out here had a different effect on him without them. Not for a moment did he use his dark glasses in the period that followed, even during the most glaring midday. Besides, hadn’t he already taken every step once before, in just this way? Or had that been his ancestors? Which one of them? King Gilgamesh, the steppe-runner? And simultaneously, just as every time in the past when he felt he’d already experienced something or other, it seemed to mean a great danger was looming over him.
* * *
The town at his back was still very much with him—cranes, power saws, jackhammers. Yet with the first step from the end of the paved road onto the savanna, he entered a different sound-realm. His actual footsteps suddenly became almost inaudible—as if he’d passed a tipping point or a sort of sound-divide—or at least they were no more pronounced than the thousands of other sounds in the grass—like taking off your shoes while walking.
Yet “grass” and “grassland” weren’t really accurate. This particular highland steppe—but wasn’t every steppe unique—consisted not so much of grasses as of late-summer-dry herbs and thistles, and, in between, patches of fairly friable soil, like deposits of rubble or ash; or each spot on the steppe was reminiscent of a buried road. And indeed, far into the area, glass shards, pieces of porcelain, bottle stoppers, and the like were sticking out of the ground. A single nut tree was growing there, with already cracked shells, into which he dug for a first bit of nourishment. The steppe’s predominant color was gray, silver-veil-gray. And there were no smells until he plunged both hands into the gray-faded chamomile, the anise stalks, the likewise gray-faded tufts of lavender. But the aftersmell was still there when he told me his story the following winter.
* * *
For quite a while he walked backward through the steppe, casting a few farewell glances at the town of the nocturnal wind. Not so much the houses there contrasted with the surroundings here as the suddenly vibrant green strips along the rivers that merged down below, with their vegetable gardens and stands of poplars. Without the rays of sun striking the very tips of the poplars—the only parts of the lower town still reached by the sun—the region would have appeared to him shrouded in a uniform gloom. A distant hammering was multiplied by the echo-cliffs, and the sound bounced off them as if very close by, while all of it sounded like muezzins’ calls from the town’s minarets—many, very many. At the same time, beneath his backward footsteps, the scattering in all directions of myriads of gray grasshoppers, a flicking-away-sound like that of fingernail-clipping.
* * *
All right! Onward! He made a 180-degree turn. After all, he was out on the steppe in order to bring something back from there. To whom? To whomever. Simply to bring something back. He was still wearing his work clothes, by now faded to a pale blue, a roomy smock and wide trousers. Now he also tied a cloth around his forehead as protection against the sun. As he pulled it tight, his eyebrows were caught as well, and it felt as though his eyes were being tightened. And in fact he was seeing more distinctly. Although the ocean was almost a thousand steppe miles away, ocean blue rose above the nearest horizon.
* * *
He walked until evening without coming upon any adventure, not even a larger animal. The largest he saw was an eagle, spiraling toward the savanna, its wings two almost-open knife blades, and in its wake for a while a squadron of deep-black sparkling town-cliff jackdaws, which, while the eagle uttered at most a monosyllabic croak now and then, emitted salvos of cries that resounded rhythmically through the air, a chorus of cracking whips overhead.
He, however, kept his eyes fixed in front of him, mostly on the ground, in search of special steppe mushrooms, preferably bitter ones—if he was an expert on anything, then on bitter mushrooms—for his mushroom book, which he wanted to finish at last when he got home, but also because that felt better for the time being. Almost the only time he looked up or turned his head was when he heard the sound of a car on that vast prairie, far from any roads (only a very finicky car would have needed a real road there). During his first hours out walking, a couple of cars did pass him, at more or less great distances, and each time it was another of those Santana all-terrain vehicles, of which there was apparently an inexhaustible variety of sizes and shapes. Later he noticed that this kind of carefree rolling across the steppe merely appeared to be that; in actuality, the drivers had to be on the lookout for the crevasses created by the occasional brooks, some of them as deep as gorges, and drive around them, just as he circumvented them on foot.
On the other hand, he didn’t turn to look when, as still happened during the first hour, runners came panting up behind him; initially tempted while still ahead of them to speed up, as they did, he then slowed down instead. Nor did he look up for the cross-steppe-bicyclists, who usually stormed by in herds on their bazooka-width tires, preceded from afar on the meanwhile treeless grasslands by a shouting and crashing; they remained his most persistent companions, all the way into the areas with nothing but crickets chirping on all sides: He didn’t need to look at these helmeted, swaddled faces and streamlined figures shooting back to nature, under whose tires anything living was splintered, uprooted, squashed, or lost its just-established foothold in the soil. And each of these riders evidently considered himself the very embodiment of adventure. But this wasn’t the adventure he was seeking.
* * *
Before sunset, alone with the steppe at last. A “larger animal” meanwhile turned up after all: an ownerless dog who lived in a hole in the ground and accompanied him for a long while, at first baring its teeth, later licking his fingers. Now it grew so quiet that he involuntarily cupped his hand to his ear to catch the few almost imperceptible sounds, mostly from inside the earth. When a breath of wind passed through the dry vegetation, it produced a slight ringing, like the sound of onionskin pages being turned.
Yes, he’d been in this area once before, a very long time ago, and, as he now felt in every fiber of his being, not alone. And soon he would be needing a place to spend the night, but as he shaded his eyes against the last sun, as far as the most distant cloud-shadow over the landscape, as it were, that shadow there as motionless as the few others, he saw not a sign of human habitation. And at the same time, at his feet, in the pathless waste, under a tangle of blackberries, there appeared an almost vanished steppe-milestone or signpost, according to which he was not all that far from “Los Jerónimos.” On the other hand, hadn’t he already passed a sign announcing the village of “Los Lobos” (the wolves)—but the village itself was missing, and likewise a “Weymar”—and after that nothing, nothing at all.
Here, however, the crowing of roosters could be heard, and even something that sounded like turkeys gobbling. He headed toward it, and found himself entering a previously hidden valley, nothing there but a chapel in ruins and a garden with a shed next to it. He hadn’t been out on t
he savanna all that long, and already he’d acquired a different gait, a broad stride, slightly pigeon-toed, snow-plow-like. At the garden entrance a hedgehog hobbled by, something he hadn’t seen in a long while, but now, with the sun setting, in the moment before its disappearance, suddenly appearing huge and primeval, “the biggest animal on my entire trip.”
* * *
At the time when this story takes place, Europe had more and more hermits again. One was also living in the steppe valley, and he gave the storyteller a place to spend the night. He was offered something to eat and a bed in the ancient caravan behind the ruined chapel.
Neither of the two had opened his mouth, and not until the next morning, with the whistling of the coffee water, did it become clear that the hermit was deaf. Now my storyteller noticed the resemblance between this man and someone who had once been a good friend of his and mine, the vanished classics teacher from Salzburg, Andreas Loser. Yes, it was him. But they both acted as though they didn’t know each other—except that the hermit fetched out that “Blue Mountain” coffee from Jamaica. So of the three of us, the one who had depended primarily on listening and hearing had become deaf, perhaps precisely from the eternal silence of the steppe?! And in a part of the country that was called, of all things, the “Sabana de la Sonora”? “Even from that one night there,” my storyteller said, “my ears were overwhelmed; it passed so soundlessly, with even the rooster and the turkey silent, and upon awakening I wanted to rub a file over the hermitage bell, so as to have something to hear—anything.”
“Did that Loser at least do what a hermit’s supposed to—cut some grass for your horse?”
“Yes. And by the way, during my entire time on the steppe it felt as if I, though actually on foot, were galloping along on horseback.”
* * *
As he continued onward, what disturbed him at first was constantly seeing his shadow in front of him, for the eastern sun was at his back. For that reason, too, he walked backward again for a while. But later he observed the individual details on the ground, which appeared more distinctly in his shadow. And toward noon the shadow was almost out of sight in any case; he now welcomed having it in the corners of his eyes, for in the relative sameness of the steppe, from horizon to horizon, it provided a sense of forward motion and of being unobtrusively accompanied.
And so he went on for days. He never came upon a village. But there wasn’t a day when he remained constantly alone. One time he saw, far off, as if on another path through the steppe, a figure pulling a cart. The figure turned in his direction, and then he heard a few measures of music, as if from a flute, but more shrill, also carrying farther, piercing, the melody repeated ceaselessly. The wanderer was a peddler, who, on a metal rod with holes punched in it, announced his presence, welcome to the storyteller, for in the meantime his shoelaces, both of them, had broken. On the peddler’s cart, the word ULTRAMARINOS was written in large letters, which was actually supposed to mean “overseas wares.” — Or the peddler turned up merely to shine his shoes—but how!
One afternoon he lay down for a nap on a stretch of prairie with the tall grass providing shadow, and when he then scrambled to his feet, next to him something heavy suddenly leaped into the air, with a howl—again a stray dog that had probably wandered onto the steppe as a puppy and had been lying there asleep, with each of them oblivious of the other, just inches away in the waist-high grass, but the dog now fleeing, frightened, from what seemed to be its established hollow. And on the houseless steppe gray chicks likewise fled from him, first at a deliberate pace, then suddenly speeding up and arrowing crookedly into the air, a whole colony of quail, at which a couple of hunters promptly fired, seemingly springing up out of the ground over here and over there.
And one morning a runner came toward him—from where?—the fabric over his chest one big patch of sweat, and moving even faster than a runner anywhere else; then, once past him, turned, blocking his path, and had a gun in his hand, yet was no hunter: Aiming at him and releasing the safety catch, he accused him of raping his wife and ordered him to come along for a lineup, but then a glance at the few mushrooms on the other’s palm, and he was off, running without a word, in an entirely different direction this time.
And once, toward evening, he came upon a small group, a young woman on horseback and on one side of her an almost childlike soldier with a fairly tattered uniform and on the other a medieval man in a long, open dustcoat, on one shoulder a small, tiger-striped, yellow-eyed peregrine falcon, on the other, squeezed under the coat’s clasp, a deck of playing cards, and he was asked whether he’d perhaps seen an old man, lost and probably mentally confused, one who wrote in the air as he walked and now and then took a little hop, grotesque for a man of his age; they had been out searching for him for weeks but didn’t want to come home without him, alive or dead. Afterward, although he’d merely shaken his head curtly in reply to their question and continued on his way, it seemed to him that the man they were seeking had crossed his path after all, and just recently, and he subsequently brooded all night as to where and in what manner that had happened: No, he hadn’t seen him, also hadn’t heard or smelled him—he would have been sure of the latter—but? Perhaps, simply from the urgency the little rescue party projected, he’d formed a sort of phantom image of the man they were looking for.
And not just once, but now a thousand-times-a-thousand steppe paces farther west, did he hear again a few piercing, far-carrying steel-rod measures, and again the Ultramarinos cart with the steppe peddler turned off course to meet him and offered him exactly what he most needed or wished for, even if that was now an apple, now a bandage.
* * *
He walked as straight ahead as possible. If he got off track, it was out of the question to turn around, to make his way back to the point where he’d gone wrong. What mattered was pressing steadily onward and forward, even if this resulted in having insurmountable obstacles stand in the way of resuming his direction. A detour—perhaps (if it was a small one). But not one step back—with the exception of going forward by walking backward!
And sometimes he cut off even the most natural detours as if instinctively. Thus he slithered down the banks of gorges, fell, and tumbled head-over-heels, and not just once. He became almost addicted to such moments of sliding faster and faster, in the midst of which he now and then sniffed a tuft of thyme as it zoomed by, picked a few blackberries and popped them in his mouth, committed to memory the pattern of wood-worm tunnels in a barkless branch.
Probably not remarkable that his senses were sharpened by such exposures to danger. Except that the impressions lingered for a long time, and for that reason, too, he didn’t try to avoid them even once. Precisely the fear that didn’t spare him during the stumbling and falling opened the eyes of this man who’d wearied of the journey at least once a day, opened them in such a way that afterward, as he continued on firm ground, he took in the steppe in more than panoramic format.
“And there was nothing missing,” my storyteller said. “But just when I thought nothing was missing, sometimes everything was missing. For that reason, after a while I came to prefer that refreshing of the present moment and the day by means of frightening experiences to everything else. I realized, you see, that now and then, when I was particularly full of what I was encountering on my journey, I’d begun to narrate the story, in secret, not purposefully. Perhaps to no one in particular—or maybe that wasn’t true, after all?—but certainly not to myself. This storytelling extended as far as the steppe all around me. And precisely the contrast between such moments and those when my thoughts were somewhere else entirely, when I was worrying, wrangling with myself or the world, or, worst of all, was also inwardly mute—this contrast revealed to me what was most significant: When I inadvertently fell into such storytelling my thoughts weren’t actually elsewhere, even when the storytelling dealt with something absent and removed; I was actually taking in my surroundings more acutely than in and after a situation of danger. And if not mo
re acutely, then more colorfully and richly. The things inside me and outside of me interpenetrated each other, became whole from one another. Storytelling and the steppe became one. So this was the right place. This type of storytelling produced a sense of discovery, created transitions, made one look up, also in the sense of looking up to something, a bird’s-eye view, an eagle’s-eye view!”
One time he spent the night in a steppe garage, next to one of the fragmentary landing strips. In addition to a bar, it also had a sleeping nook. Another time he slept in a garrison surrounded by watchtowers and barbed wire, another time in a long abandoned little steppe railway building, amidst the piled-up junk there (which recovered during the night, however, and went back where it belonged).
He slept soundly and dreamlessly every time, if not for long. A previously unknown impatience roused him from his sleep—impatience to get going again across the steppe. He lay there in the new-moon darkness and couldn’t see why it took so long in this region for a first sign of day to appear. He cursed the darkness, unchanging for hours, yet so palpably spacious and promising. Where were they, the first light and the first birds of day? Enough of the owls’ hooting.
In that garage berth he’d eventually turned on the light, switched on a television set, tried to read a grease-smeared newspaper: But the newspaper called The Santa Fe Day—so he was still in the large province of the nocturnal-wind town—bore a date from the previous spring, and the television news was from the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow. And this one time when he couldn’t wait to continue across the savanna but set out while it was still dark, groping his way in the pitch black, had exhausted him so much that for the rest of the day he couldn’t get his eyes open properly.