by Peter Handke
FORTIFIED BY these images, he stepped out into the open; he now felt able to continue on his way out of town straight through the busy street which—because he had never seen an unaccompanied individual there, and because as a rule he, too, lost himself by the time he had gone halfway—he privately called Mob Street. Over the years he had tried repeatedly to see this segment of street as a place like any other and to describe it with its bends, bumps, and points of view—as though such "localization" were a writer's business—and time and again, long before the end of the street, he had silently crept off into some arcade. But, this time, wasn't it a good sign that he had passed a bookstore with his head in the air, so to speak, instead of glancing involuntarily at the display window to see if any of his books were in it? (He had often imagined that he had shaken off the habit and then, still cheered by that proud thought, automatically turned his head in the direction of the window.)
It was already getting dark in the long street with its many bends that cut off the view and its tall houses with overhanging roofs, while the strip of sky overhead was still bright like an afterimage of the street below. In shop after shop, the same Christmas music interrupted by loudspeaker voices celebrating articles of consumption in a litany consisting almost entirely of numbers. People flowing in the opposite direction seemed completely wrapped up in themselves, yet the writer was not overlooked. At the very beginning of the street he was assaulted by the collective glance of a group of young people, a glance not of recognition but of incomprehension or even hostility. He surmised that they had just come from school, where they had been made to discuss the meaning or purpose or source of a literary passage and that when at last restored to freedom they had resolved instantly and unanimously never to open a book again and to look with contempt on all those responsible for such torture. And he couldn't blame them, for, though he often regretted it, he was not one of those, be they demagogues or bards, who spoke up boldly, sure of their mission—on the contrary, when called upon to speak he would all but lose his voice; at best he would be carried away by his words, and later, if the result was published, he would be seized with terror or shame—he would even feel guilty, as if he had broken a taboo. Was all this rooted in his own nature, or was it the people of this particular country and their particular brand of German, in which, if there had ever been a tradition, it had long since gone out of existence? This collective evil eye, in any case, made him feel like part of a film, being shot and projected at the same time, of himself walking down the street—his eyes were the camera and his ears the sound recorder. Some of the passersby stopped short, obviously wondering where they could have seen his face. Wasn't that the face on the "Wanted" poster in the post office, the only picture that had not yet been crossed out? A few, still puzzled in the distance, smiled at him as they came closer, not out of friendliness, but because they at last knew where to place him; but a moment later their faces froze, because, unlike an actor they had seen in some role or a politician they had watched on TV, he was not someone they could connect with anything. Just once, halfway down the street, one of the passersby seemed to know something about him. In passing, for the barest instant, he encountered, or so at least it seemed to him, the glance of a reader. Afterward he couldn't even have said if it was a man or a woman; one or the other, he felt, belonged to a sex apart, and this sex, he thought, was recognizable by the eyes which showed gratitude, wished him well, believed in him, and unwaveringly trusted him to go on with his work. But this very experience, brief as it was, gave a jolt to the film which up until then had been flowing along uneventfully. Encouraged by the earnestness of those reader's eyes, the writer, grown overconfident, began searching the crowd for other kindred spirits (where one member of this rare species had shown himself, there was bound to be a second and a third!) —and from that moment on, an enemy army was marching toward him. He saw himself confronted by dagger-eye after dagger-eye, secondhand readers who hated books but, because they were well-informed, thought they knew all about them, as they did about everything else in heaven and earth. But wasn't their malignance a mere figment of his imagination? No, the experience wasn't new to him—they really were ready to leap, to go for his throat, for he stood for everything they detested: daydreams, hand-made writing, dissent, and ultimately art. Just wait till I get you in front of my mudguards on the open road; till I get you in front of my ticket window; till I get you in the dock at my courthouse; till you lie chained to your hospital bed and I, at last, get the job of giving you your daily injections . . . Yet none of these like-minded people had conspired with any of the others; none of those who fired off that look at him knew that his predecessor had done the exact same thing. All these so very divergent people—young and old, city dwellers and rustics, dwellers in the past and devotees of progress—had only one thing in common and that was their obvious hatred, which the writer—reminded of one of Chekhov's stories, the hero of which says of an upright woman, who respected only those who contributed directly and tangibly to social progress: "She disliked me because I was a landscape painter"—called "hatred of landscape painters." He stood up to the advance guard of the enemy, he may even have mollified them by pretending, as he often did, to be immersed in a silent inner monologue. But then so many stepped into the breach that all his powers forsook him, even the power to project a wordless conciliatory look, which he regarded as his special gift; incapable of grasping the overall context of the film, he was assaulted by disconnected details—for instance, he mistook a pair of glasses, bobbing up and down between someone's fingers, for handcuffs. And in all those identically creased foreheads and bared teeth he seemed to see his own image, very different from the way he had looked on the open squares. Surprised by the stare of a bunch of keys held in someone's fist, he looked down at his own hand in the belief that the person armed with the keys was himself . . . He tried looking up at the sky, but the milling crowd was repeated in the heights; and when he lowered his eyes, all he could see, instead of the human footprints often discernible in the asphalt, were manhole covers, every few steps another, inscribed with the words SANITATION DEPARTME NT. Nor was it possible, on either side, to look into a workroom or a home. Shop shouldered shop, and because of the way they were lined up, all their brightly colored merchandise looked like dummy displays, while the mannequins, for all their exaggerated flashing of teeth, gave the impression of living beings. In the arcades, the eyes of the cripples and beggars were searching for the man responsible for their misfortune; and on the upper stories, deserted in contrast to the milling crowd down below, there wasn't so much as a plant to be seen, not a dog or a cat quietly sitting there, not even a globe (or rather just one, and two children, hardly more than babies, visible down to the neck, looking at it; profile to profile, quite motionless, they were clutching each other's hair). The film, so smoothly flowing at first, did more than jump; it broke off. But the voices and sounds aimed at the writer from out of the hubbub could be heard all the more clearly. A surprising number of people, who had been quietly thinking about him and wanted to have him in their sights, were now in the street. If they hadn't been thinking about him, would they have been so ready to fire off their pronouncements at the top of their voices? True, they never once addressed him; they spoke into the air or to their companions, as often as not in a whisper, so that nothing could be heard but the questions: "Who?" "What did you say?" "What about him?" "What would you like to do?" Even those representing themselves as couples, holding hands or even with their arms around each other, broke apart the moment they caught sight of him and, visibly relieved at not having to play "couple" anymore, began to talk about him. Not only did their words pertain to him, but certain sounds as well, even a sucking in of air. While one sang a sequence of sounds deliberately out of tune, a second yawned with might and main, a third cleared his throat, the fourth jabbed the sidewalk with his metal-tipped cane, the next snorted, and then came a chorus of scraping stiletto heels. Toward the end of the street—not bad to hav
e made it that far—the writer was decisively defeated. A voice called him from behind, he looked around involuntarily, and his picture was taken. A man in black barred his way and announced solemnly: "I have been following your output." And finally, still another man, without looking at him, demanded "an autograph for my child." While the writer complied (wishing, to be sure, that he had a third, mechanical arm for the purpose), it seemed to him that he was no longer a writer as he had been during the hour after work, but was merely playing the part of a writer in a forced, ridiculous way; wasn't it ridiculous, for instance, that when giving the man his autograph he had had to reflect a moment before remembering his name? On the other hand, he said to himself, it served him right for allowing his face to become known. If it were possible in his profession to start all over again, he wouldn't allow a single picture to be taken of him.
Looking back at the scene of his discomfiture from the road into which the street broadened, he thought of the author who was said, every time a book of his appeared, to be going "from triumph to triumph," imagined that there were no more readers left in the whole country, and recalled his dream about a book which—like a ship that had just set sail—was full of bookmarks, all of which were gone when he awoke.
AFTER THAT, it was a pleasure to be surrounded by the crashing and pounding of the traffic. Strange how easily his composure could be shaken after all the years and how, after long, often enthusiastic work that made him glow inwardly, there was still no certainty in his life. And now another of his vows: To change his afternoon occupations until his present work was finished. Until then he wouldn't open a single newspaper and he would avoid this street, the whole city center in fact. Straight out to the periphery, that's the place for me! Or why not stay home in his room, where he belonged and where he experienced neither hunger nor thirst nor any need for human company—where he could still his hunger and thirst and become integrated with the procession of passersby by merely meditating, observing, recording his observations? Wouldn't the last light of day at this very moment be shining on the paper in his typewriter and on the pencils around it, pointing in all directions, while on the hill nearby the signals for the evening planes blinked at regular intervals? The whole house, steps, banister, and all, seemed to have been left high and dry; it was as though the plants in the entrance with their few winter blossoms were asking to be looked at.
The road soon became an arterial highway. At the crossing, back to back, hung two crucified Christs, the one facing into the city, the other toward the periphery. On the bench below, surrounded by plastic bags, sat a gray-haired man, shouting into the traffic noise, haranguing all mankind. In passing, the writer heard something like "You swine, looking for the old city of ruins, aren't you, when you yourselves have destroyed it!" Invigorated by the shrill voice behind him, listening to it as long as possible, the writer strode briskly onward, convinced that he had discovered, in the trunk of a recently pollarded plane tree, the turrets and battlements of the madman's "city of ruins. "
Relieved when the driver of a car that stopped abruptly in front of him merely asked for directions, the writer hoped for more people who didn't know the way; he would gladly have helped them all. A knot of dangerous-looking customers by the side of the road proved to be waiting for the bus. From that point on, there was little to be seen but gas stations and warehouses, with more and more wasteland in between. As he looked back toward the city, the gulls circling high above the roofs gave him a sense of the river, which he could not see. The trees by the roadside were followed by hedges and thickets full of little white snowberries. How varied the summer's green had been and how varied now was the gray of the winter branches—the greens easier to distinguish from a distance, the grays from close at hand.
In a thicket shading from one gray to another, the writer caught sight of a bright-colored form. At first glance he took it for an overturned advertising dummy, but then, by the bend of the fingers, he knew it was a living person. There lay an old woman, almost hairless, her eyes closed. She was stretched out prone, not on the ground, but on a tangle of branches that sagged under her weight. Only the tips of her shoes touched the ground; her whole body slanted, making the writer think, partly because of the outstretched arms, of an airplane that had made an emergency landing in a treetop. Her stockings were twisted and across her forehead there was a bleeding cut, made no doubt by a thorn. She must have been lying there a long time and might have stayed a lot longer, for pedestrians seldom came that way. The writer was unable to lift the heavy body—which was surprisingly warm—out of the thicket. But his efforts attracted attention, several cars stopped, and without asking questions helpers came running. Someone pushed a coat under the woman's head, and they all gathered around her on the footpath, waiting for an ambulance. Though no one knew anyone else, they—even the foreigners among them—stood chatting like former neighbors, whom a splendid accident had brought together after all these years. An inspired namelessness prevailed. Nor did the victim, who was conscious, supply a name. She stared fixedly at the writer out of large, bright eyes. She knew neither her name nor her address, nor how she had got tangled up in these brambles along the highway. She was wearing a nightgown and bedroom slippers under a dressing gown; the people who had gathered conjectured that she came from the old people's home and had lost her way. She spoke the language of the land without dialect, but with an accent suggesting not some far-off region but childhood, as though her childhood language had come back to her after long absence. Actually, her speech consisted only of disjointed syllables or sounds, addressed like her glances exclusively to her discoverer. Speaking incoherently but in a clear voice, she was trying to tell him something important, something that he alone would understand—but that he would understand fully and without difficulty. In a few fragments, unintelligible to the others, she told him the whole story of her life, from her girlhood years to the present. Already in the care of the ambulance, she was still talking to him, urgently, as though entrusting him with a mission. And indeed, when the helpers had gone and he was alone again, it seemed to him that he knew intuitively all there was to know about the confused old woman. Hadn't he always learned more from intuition than from objective knowledge? Looking up at the empty hedge, he foresaw that the heavy body with the bent fingers would be lying there time and again, forever and ever. "O holy intuitions, stay with me."
As he was walking across country, snow began to fall. To his mind "snow" and "begin" belonged together more than almost any other two experiences; the "first snow" was rather like the first brimstone butterfly in the early spring, the first cuckoo call in May, the first plunge into the water in summer, the first bite into an autumn apple. Yet, over the years, the expectation had become stronger than the experience itself. And today the flakes that were barely grazing him had seemed in anticipation to strike the middle of his forehead.
As he was crossing the open fields by his usual diagonal path, his just acquired namelessness, favored by the snowfall and his walking alone, took on substance. This experience of namelessness might at one time have been termed a liberation from limits or from the self. To be at last wholly outside, among things, was a kind of enthusiasm, one felt one's eyebrows arching. Yes, to be rid of his name was ground for enthusiasm; like the legendary Chinese painter, he felt himself disappearing into the picture—he saw, for example, the claw arms of a trolleybus brush like an insect's feelers over a single tall fir tree in the distance. Strange that so many people, when thinking themselves alone and unobserved, reminded him, with their grumbling, throat clearing, and puffing, of those crackling trolleybuses, which really ought to be brought back into use, and that with him it was usually the contrary: it was only when nameless and alone with things that he really started functioning. If someone had asked him now what his name was, his answer would have been: "I have no name," and he would have said this so earnestly that the questioner would have understood him at once.
The snow settled first on the middle
strip of grass; it looked as though birch branches had been laid on the road, one after another, and so on to the horizon. In a bramblebush, single crystals would balance on thorns and then encircle them like ruffs. Though there was no one to be seen, the writer had the impression at every step that he was walking in the traces of someone who had been there before. This place at the edge of the city corresponded to what he had been doing all day long at his desk. He wanted to run, but instead he stopped on a bridge across a brook. An ascending plane filled the air with its sound; the grass at the bottom of the brook wriggled. The snow, no longer gliding flakes but little hard balls, plunged deep into the brook, as acorns do in the fall; at the same time, the sliding and crashing of village curling stones reached him from far off through the twilight, and with them the writer's forebears came alive to him for a moment. His shoes were pleasantly heavy shoes, they held his ankles snug and warm, and as though these were the first comfortable walking shoes in his life, he addressed a hymn of praise to them: "With your predecessors I was always in danger of rushing headlong. You are the right shoes for me, because in you I feel myself stamping the earth, and above all because you are the brake shoes I need. You know of course that slowness is the only illumination I have ever had."