by Peter Handke
Was there such a thing? Could one regain one’s purity? And what then?
* * *
One fall evening they reached the environs of Salzburg. The woman parked the bus at the airport, and they walked together in a westerly direction on a road through the fields, toward his house. They saw every image razor-sharp, heard every sound as if for the last time. And suddenly he dreaded the remainder of his life, or the days that were to come, or initially just the next day without her, and he said, “Stay with me.” And she said, “No. Don’t you know it’s too late, at least for the two of us—perhaps not for other couples.” And he said, “But you asked me for help.” And she said, “You’ve already helped me.” She turned and went back to her bus, and he continued on his way home. But in their good-byes, it was as if both of them were bursting into bloom.
* * *
In the only shop, already closed, on his street along the border-river dike, the display window was lit up—what, were Advent calendars being sold already? On the other hand, in Saragossa, too, the lottery ticket vendors had already been hawking the Christmas lottery on street corners, in the middle of October.
Large autumn leaves had blown far into the shop. And he climbed onto the dike behind it for a look at the Saalach, the border river. What was the river doing? It was flowing. And having arrived in front of his house, he noticed that without realizing it he was already holding the key in his hand—since when?—clutching it.
The house was dark. He didn’t go inside yet, despite the stormy weather, with wind and rain. A neighbor’s child came along the otherwise deserted street and said in passing, “I know you. You live here. This is your house. You’re the pharmacist of Taxham.” That’s how caringly the child spoke. And his car was standing in front of the house, its engine crackling, as if it were just cooling down.
First, a turn through the garden. All the fruit harvested, except for a few figs on the tree, one of them popped into his mouth as he passed. So was there such a thing, fig trees, and with figs that ripened, this far north? Yes, in the meantime almost everything could be found everywhere.
He moved about with eyes closed, as if someone were leading him by the hand. Eyes open! Beneath the cedar, which had meanwhile wandered from his neighbor’s yard into his own, there was a glow in the dark from three and nine and fifteen, from twenty-seven parasol mushrooms, no, even twenty-eight knee-high ones, from all of which the rain was dripping as it does only from parasol mushrooms. “As for you, we’re going to leave you here for now!” (He said “we.”)
In front of the door, stumbling over something unfamiliar: a tree root had broken through the earth there, and now its entire length protruded unevenly in front of the entry. When he opened the door upstairs to his wife’s part of the house, there was a racket as if from an object falling to the floor, a rather small and light object. To judge by that, his wife had probably gone out as usual, but was back from her holidays and again living in her area, separated from his: Even invisible, her things gave evidence of that, in their always highly unstable order, with only a breath of air somewhere needed to bring things tumbling and crashing down.
“Of course it wasn’t the mushrooms that drove us apart,” said the pharmacist of Taxham. “One time—I don’t know when or how—I must have hurt this woman so badly that without really being irreconcilable she couldn’t stand to be with me any longer. But she couldn’t leave the house, either. And it seems to me that the two of us aren’t the only people like that.”
* * *
In his part of the house, everything was as he’d left it. The only mail a couple of postcards from his daughter on her holiday island, from which she’d meanwhile long since returned to the pharmacy that would one day be hers. “Dear Father,” two words that did him good. And then the pathologist’s report on the small growth on his forehead that had been removed back in the summer. “And?” He didn’t tell me.
He sat down in the dark facing the blank white wall, where, in the light of the river-street lamps, the shadows of the garden trees tossed in the storm, thrusting forward like animals and snapping back, then during quiet moments like runners in the starting blocks—and now a lightning start! He closed his eyes, and behind his lids saw the delicately sparkling soil of the steppe, stretching far, to the ends of the earth. Gradually the house became populated with his dead. Was his son among them again? “No, not this time.”
An ax struck him in the neck, and his head landed with a thump on his chest. The execution? No, he’d merely fallen asleep. But his head had fallen forward with such force that he could have broken his neck, just sitting there quietly. How dizzy he was. Into bed. No, no sleeping yet.
Down into the cellar, a place in the house that he’d always avoided before. But today he felt at home in this underground spot, as if arrived. And it wasn’t filled with those foreign interlopers he’d dreamed about one time, but empty and silent.
Upstairs again to read. Reading light on. A glance at his shoelaces, because of something eye-catching: a faded thing entangled in one of them and sticking out—a stalk of steppe grass. Opening the epic of Ivain, or the Knight with the Lion. Where had he stopped reading? So he’d set out so abruptly that he’d forgotten to put in a bookmark?
At last he found his place. He read on. But suddenly he paused and began to tremble. Now he was trembling. Only now was he trembling.
EPILOGUE
I had a meeting with the pharmacist in the middle of winter, during night duty in his Taxham pharmacy, that curious flat bunker on the open expanse of grass right in the center of the village, surrounded by scattered apartment houses.
And he spent more than half the night telling me his summer story, with a few interruptions. Once an old woman came in and picked up a chest-pain powder that allegedly only he knew how to make. The second time the bell rang it was already past midnight; a young father was bringing his child, who had fallen out of bed and hit his head, which was bleeding and was now dabbed and bandaged by the pharmacist in his white lab coat. It was also already very late when a cry for help was heard from nearby, and the pharmacist immediately leaped to his feet—even if the cry came from a late-night movie on television. Another time a loud howl suddenly went up outside, animal-like, as if a dog had been run over, and the sound was magnified inside the laboratory: a man of indistinct age who seemed assailed by unbearable pain, or perhaps more by sorrow and misery, but without being able to communicate except by means of such howling, combined with a few gurgled, completely incomprehensible syllables; this went on for a while, accompanied by wringing of hands, his eyes wide open, as he unleashed his anguish on the pharmacist, face to face, and then just as suddenly fell silent and vanished into the darkness.
Remarkable how no matter what he was doing, whether mixing a powder or tending to a wound, the pharmacist worked in the smallest space, with hardly an expansive gesture, and also remained almost soundless; so his style of working had changed? And of his medications he handed out only the smallest units, the smallest boxes, or only single pieces; the powders and elixirs by the spoonful; and he had spoons lined up in water glasses, like Balkan hospitality spoons—except that instead of being intended for honey, they were for medicines.
Watching him warmed me. Even though he remained solitary in his work, it could be felt that he was doing it for someone, for others. And these absent others were all his kin.
But one time someone came out of the night whom the pharmacist ran to meet while he was still at a distance, then twisting the man’s arm behind his back, even though he was waving something like a proper prescription, and pushing him away, wordlessly, almost violently.
* * *
At some point, long before the wintry dawn, the pharmacist was done with his story and brewed us his coffee from the Blue Mountains, just the smell of which did something to me.
Then we stepped outside, onto the grassy patch with a few rose bushes, one of which still had a blossom at the very top; and in the earth beneath it there
were still a couple of strawberries, pale red, but edible. The pharmacist had exchanged his lab jacket for a coat, but even without that it seemed to me as if at the first step the medicine smell had dissipated.
I observed him from the side. I don’t know why I’ve always had this reluctance to describe people—their faces, their bodies, especially particular features—and why I read such descriptions, no matter how skillfully done, with distaste, as if they were unseemly. Nevertheless, this is perhaps the moment at least to suggest the pharmacist’s appearance: He wasn’t especially large, but instead broad, with broad shoulders, and the most noticeably broad part of him, in fact the only noticeable thing about him, was his nose: with permanently distended nostrils. A little unusual also was his rather dark—not tanned—skin; in this connection he told me, another time, that during his student days he’d been involved in theater and had appeared in a free adaptation of the Mesopotamian Gilgamesh epic—as the king? He ignored my question.
And then it occurred to me how in my childhood so many people on the street had seemed to me copies of the movie stars of the time, and how in the meantime that never happens to me anymore—except now with the pharmacist of Taxham, who reminded me of Gary Cooper, Pedro Armendariz, and other heroes, and at the same time of comics like Stan Laurel, Jerry Lewis, and especially Buster Keaton; but also of female stars, those apparently unapproachable ones; and even of screen villains like Edward G. Robinson and Ernest Borgnine. That didn’t result from any similarity, but perhaps from the story I’d just heard, but certainly even more from his way of looking and following things that happened: In his eyes, everything seemed to have the same tempo; there was no difference between speed and slowness; a car passing at top speed was met with the same quiet gaze from him as the steam rising from his glass coffee cup. But hadn’t he told me something altogether different? That speed could fill him with panic, even just as an observer?
And I asked him whether he’d been changed by his story.
He replied, “In the middle of it, I swore to myself once that if I ever came back here, it would be as a changed person! But the only thing about me that seems to have changed is that my feet are bigger; I had to buy new shoes.”
And I asked him why he’d become a pharmacist.
“That was because of my clan,” he replied, “a pharmacist clan. Back in the High Tatra we even had our own coat of arms.”
And then he asked me in turn whether I’d intentionally not taken notes. I affirmed that.
“That’s fine,” he said, “the main thing is that you write a sweeping account of what I’ve just told you. Otherwise it’ll all have been for naught. But I want to have it in black and white. I want to have my story in writing. From speaking it, orally, nothing comes back to me. In written form, that would be different. And in the end I want to get something out of my story, too. Long live the difference between speech and writing. It’s what life’s all about. I want to see my story written. I see it written. And the story itself wants that.”
“But who else is supposed to get to read the story?” I asked. “After all, what kind of storytelling do we have nowadays—not in the marketplace, not at the royal court, not for a middle class, not even addressed to an individual—merely for the person to whom the story happened, himself?”
He responded, “Perhaps precisely this is the original form of storytelling? This is how it first began?”
* * *
No stars. The sky over Taxham completely black, except for a brief moment of moonlight from behind a cloud shaped like a Venus shell. “Tarsenefyde!” the man next to me exclaimed.
The nocturnal wind was blowing here, too, hardly noticeable but just as potent. It was as if a second wind were blowing along with it, one intended specially for us standing there outside, a mere caress. And we let it make the hair on our necks stand on end. And behind us now the chirping of a cricket. In the middle of winter? Yes. And the chirping came not from below but from above, from a crack in the pharmacy wall. And farther off in the darkness a drunk was staggering along.
“No,” the pharmacist said, “I know him. He’s not drunk; his wife and children have left him. I’ll at least say hello to him.” And he went over and did so. And elsewhere in the darkness a very young girl went by, in her arms an infant that seemed to have just been born.
The pharmacist took a few more steps into the night. Steppe steps? More like those of a small child, legs splayed to avoid falling. And in the direction in which he now pointed, his face twisted over his shoulder toward me, the current wars were being fought, since the transitional time when his story takes place. And suddenly, with the stone he unexpectedly hurled into the blackness, it seemed as if he could easily join the fighting, as violent as anyone else. So in that respect, too, he’d changed? And already he was back in the pharmacy, and already outside again, with a burning newspaper, which he tossed after the stone.
* * *
“In retrospect I realized,” he said later, as we were sitting, toward the end of the night, at the small table in his laboratory, “that I’d always been half-consciously expecting that blow, out there on the edge of the airport forest—but in the stomach instead of on my head. By the way, when you get to the place where I strike my son, I’d advise you to write that I merely raised my arm to strike him—not to soften it, on the contrary: To raise your hand, especially against your own child, without striking is more despicable, or at least uglier and more disgusting, than actually striking him.”
And after that I could finally put my questions to him better. I asked whether he was longing to experience another adventure like this year’s. “A strange year!” was all he said. And then: “Here I’m often happy, with myself and my work. But then that isn’t enough for me. That’s how loneliness sets in, and with loneliness comes guilt.”
“Guilt because of one mistake or another, and omissions in the course of your story?”
“Yes, I did a few things wrong in my story. And when the time comes, I’d like to do something wrong like that again. Whatever I’m doing here, I’m ready for the next adventure—the next significant distraction. And it’s perhaps less longing than greed. Just as my master Paracelsus said, in his fragment on mushrooms: He who catches sight of something precious is, in the same moment, already on the lookout for the next precious thing. Except that I can’t seem to find that particular black-glowing entrance again. At the time of my story, I had it. What wouldn’t I give to find that entrance once more!”
“The clearing in the airport forest, with the sycamore and the spring—is it still there?”
“It’s been bulldozed and drained, for new housing. And that’s all right.”
“And your two traveling companions, the poet and the Olympic medalist—do you still meet them here occasionally?”
“Yes, in the root-cellar restaurant. Besides, why should I avoid the restaurant and the two of them? They’re chance acquaintances, and to this day they’ve shown no surprise that I can speak now, when back then I was mute. I often feel a more lasting bond with chance acquaintances than with friends, and it’s less dangerous.”
“And the nocturnal-wind town?”
“The majority in the streets there has seized power, and is on the way to having its own state. One of the current wars is taking place there, and its main theater is the open steppe.”
* * *
And from then on my questions were limited almost entirely to “And?” — “And?” — The pharmacist: “One day she’ll come into my house, the woman who’s not my enemy.” — “And?” — “Don’t you feel this, too? It’s as if there were no one left of my own age: People either all seem much older than me or much younger.” — “And?” — “Yet I feel a growing-old in myself, in that my energy, which continues to be there, perhaps stronger than ever, is no longer accompanied by any drive to actualize it. Something lies before me, seemingly expecting me to get it going, and I walk right by it.” — “And?” — “A person usually remembers how a dream e
nded. Almost never how it began!”
* * *
And then I questioned him more searchingly after all: “Can you sing?”—whereupon he, who had been speaking all night with considerable effort, always on the verge of becoming voiceless, of merely moving his lips (just watching him was painful), stood up, bent over the sheaf of steppe plants—actually as thick as a sheaf—inhaled as deeply as possible, then letting his breath out, launched into a singsong, and was suddenly really singing, in a voice less powerful than penetrating, the following song, which sounded as though it had been in preparation a long time and practiced in private:
They fell into each other’s arms with unspeakable weakness.
They had unspeakable joy of one another.
They lay together in unspeakable exhaustion.
They awoke in unspeakable amazement.
They looked out all the windows with unspeakable impatience.
They drove on with unspeakable patience.
They loved one another unspeakably.
They grew unspeakably free with one another.
They grew unspeakably bold with one another.
They grew unspeakably grateful with one another.
They rewarded one another unspeakably.
They perspired,
shouted,
wept,
bled,
fell silent and
told each other unspeakable stories.
They parted in unspeakable sadness.
They went in different directions
in unspeakable anger
at the unspeakable.
No one else in distress came to the pharmacy that night. “What do you need?” were always the pharmacist’s first words. And for hours we sat there in silence, waiting for the predicted snow.
A dark, clear December day dawned, in the center of the Taxham triangle, between the runways, the rail line, the highway, all distinctly audible and distinguishable. The pharmacist saw me to the door, and I recalled the time when in the morning I hadn’t wanted to get down to writing until the first flights of birds across the sky. We stood there a while.