by Peter Handke
the end, welcomed, embraced, initiated into their secrets, I shall never be one of them.
Strangely pleased with the outcome of this internal dialogue, he pulled himself together and at the same time met the eyes of the man beside him, who was still moving his lips. He had stopped blinking, but the immobility of his gaze was the exact opposite of "resting on something." They had detected the absence of the supposed kindred spirit, and absence meant betrayal. A brief look of contempt was followed by a long turning away. And in turning away, the inaudible interlocutor finally became audible. "You're a weakling," he said, "and a liar." And addressing the whole room, he said on a mournful, deep-chested note: "None of you know who I am." Then, in a twinkling, he grabbed the writer's notebook and covered the still empty pages with a hodgepodge of dots and spirals. That done, he stood up and began to dance, executing figures that seemed to follow the choreography of his scribbles.
The dancer, graceful even in his staggering and stumbling, had vanished one-two-three into the crowd. Now the writer caught sight at the next table of a man whom he called the "legislator," though they had never exchanged a word. The man was younger than the writer, he was always wearing the same sheepskin jacket, he was broad-shouldered, his ears stuck out, and under his high, arched brows his eyes were set so deep in their sockets that they seemed small. His unflagging attentiveness gave him a military air. Yet he was the only one at his table who kept out of fights. Indeed, he moderated them, not by mixing in, but by expressly ignoring them. The others at the table were constantly jostling one another; he alone kept his peace. The look of quiet sorrow that he trained on two neighbors who were exchanging slaps stopped them from going at each other with their fists or possibly drawing knives. Silently he took in detail after detail and had a mute reply for everyone. When he opened his mouth to deliver a short sentence, his constant attentiveness seemed to have set the tone for his voice: never wavering, it laconically disposed of questionable behavior. This man who seldom spoke was the authority in the room; the power he radiated was the power of judgment. His kind of justice, however, was not static, not an unvarying rule; it was different in every instance, it was justice in action, a nascent justice with a wordlessly sympathetic rhythm, which pronounced judgment and at the end discharged the parties into silence. This silent listener with the flashing eyes, which took in a picture of everything, and the broad rolling shoulders that seemed to move in rhythm with whatever was going on in the room: was he not the ideal storyteller?
Had he been watching the legislator for hours or only for a moment? In any case, it now seemed to him that he had been sitting too long in the gin mill, and not for the first time he thought he would never find his way home again. He felt glued to the spot, incapable of movement; it seemed inconceivable that he would ever stand up and "make it" to the door. He would first have to think about each leg of the return journey, as if it were an expedition and the caravan routes, jungle trails, fords, mountain passes, and base camps all had to be mapped out in advance. In his precipitate flight, a billiard cue grazed him, a dog snarled at him, and, lastly, the belt of his coat got caught on the door handle.
OUT IN THE STREET, he rebuttoned and retied everything from his jacket to his shoes. If he had now, as he planned a short while ago, hurled his notebook like a discus, it would have landed at his feet. The snow had stopped falling, the sky was covered with clouds. The snow was deep and firm; the dripping from the street lamps had gouged out pockmark patterns, in which the madman's "city of ruins" was repeated. As in childhood the writer had crouched down over rain trails in the dust, he now stooped over these craters; when he stuck his hand into them, the snow burned his skin as healingly as nettles had done in years gone by.
His eyes on the ground, he headed straight for the city despite his impulse to take the opposite course from all the people moving in the same direction, or at least to walk faster or more slowly than they. This was the niggling hour, when his thoughts turned not to work but to his daily omissions: again he had failed to write the promised letter; again someone's manuscript had gone unread; again he had neglected to put his tax papers in order; he hadn't paid that bill; he hadn't taken his suit to the cleaner's; he hadn't pruned that tree in the garden . . . And in the same vein it now occurred to him that he had an appointment in the city, that he would be very late if he walked, and that even the cab, which he immediately hailed, would not get him there on time . . .
The man waiting for him was a translator from a foreign country who for some days had been tracing the itineraries of a book set in the region and now wished to ask the author a few questions. The meeting place, a bar, was all that was left of a former movie house. The letters CINEMA on the front had been roughly scraped off but were still visible. He was sitting there alone in the farthermost corner of the room, at first barely distinguishable from the photos of movie stars on the wall behind him. He might have been sitting there for an eternity, an old man, seemingly enlivened by waiting. He gave the writer a mischievous look, suggesting that he knew all about his afternoon, and greeted him as usual with a trope: "Is it not true that the abundance of fruit at the edge of the forest lures us into the middle, where there is nothing?"
The translator's questions were quickly answered (for, when asked about a word, the writer was able, after all, to explain what he had been up to). Once that was taken care of, the old man turned toward the dark lobby of the former movie house and launched into a speech, which came out as calmly and coherently as if he had composed it while waiting; and although he was foreign, not only to this city but also to Europe, his voice resounded in the bar as though he owned the place; for a moment, the fashionably dressed white-haired proprietress, who sat listening to the radio behind the long, curving brass counter, seemed to be his wife. Certain of his sentences were preceded—heralded, one might have said—by a long humming tone.
"You know, I myself was a writer for many years. If you see me so happy today, it's because I'm not one anymore. And now I'll tell you my reasons for feeling liberated. Listen, my friend. At the beginning of my writing days, I saw my inner world as a reliable sequence of images, which I had only to observe and describe one after another. But as time went on, the outlines lost their clarity, and in addition to looking into myself I found myself listening for something outside me. At the time I believed—and this belief was confirmed time and again—that a kind of Ur-text had been given to me in my innermost being, a text even more reliable than any interior image because the passage of time had no effect on it, because it was always there, identical with itself. I was convinced that if only I immersed myself in it in disregard of everything else, I would have no difficulty in transferring it to paper. In those days I thought of writing as a process of taking dictation, of translation, in which visible "copy" was replaced by a secret inner voice. But this dream fared no better than my other dreams; when instead of jotting down bits and pieces of it I tried to record it systematically, day after day, so as to produce a great Dream Book, it shrank and lost more of its meaning; what couched in occasional fragments said everything said nothing when put forward as a systematic totality. My attempt to decipher a supposed Ur-text inside me and force it into a coherent whole struck me as original sin. That was the beginning of fear. More and more, I dreaded the moment when I would have to sit down and wait. I alone of all the writers known to me was afraid of writing, afraid day after day. And every night the same nightmare: I'm on a stage with a group of others, facing a big audience; all the others knew their lines, I was the only one who didn't. At the end I broke off in the middle of a sentence without feeling, without perception, without rhythm. That sentence hit me like a verdict: You are forbidden to write. Forever. Nothing more of your own. I remember how I went out into the hot sun that day and stood for hours under blossoming apple trees. I was as cold as any corpse, and yet I laughed as I thought of a great man's maxim: 'Just blow on your hands, then you'll be all right.' And after an interval of silence, I became
what I am. Nothing more of your own! Don't cross the threshold. Stay in the forecourt. At last I can be a member of the cast, instead of having to act alone. Only as a member of the cast can I finally let go. Only as the translator—of a reliable text—can I enjoy the workings of my mind and feel intelligent. For now I know, as I did not before, that there is a solution for every problem. Yes, I still torture myself, but I no longer suffer torment and I no longer wait for my torment to cease so I can feel that I have a right to write. A translator has the certainty that he is needed. So I've got rid of my fear. And when I wake up in the morning, instead of dreading exile as I used to, I'm eager to get home to my translating. As a translator and nothing else, without secret reservations, I am entirely what I am; in my writing days I often felt like a traitor, but now, day after day, I feel that I'm true to myself. Translation brings me deep peace. And yet, my friend: I still experience the same marvels, but no longer in the role of an individual. The mot juste still gives me total satisfaction, and despite my age, my creeping gait becomes a running. I still feel the same urgency—but far from making me brood, it allows me to be refreshingly superficial. And by displaying your wound as attractively as possible, I conceal my own. And now that I've become a translator, I would gladly die at my desk."
Wishing to take a last look by himself at the city from which he had fled half a century before, the old man declined to let the writer accompany him back to his hotel. But the writer followed him in secret (as he often did with friends as well as strangers). Unobserved, he trailed close behind him across the squares, across the bridge, and then along the opposite bank. Although the translator, with his bobbing head and the hopping movements of a hare, seemed to be hurrying, his shadower, much as he had already slackened his pace, had to stop from time to time, for the old man not only zigzagged as though drunk but also paused every few steps to shift his bag with the translated manuscript to the other hand or set it down. It wasn't exactly a bag, but a wide, rectangular basket with a handle and a black leather lid that glittered like pitch in the light of every street lamp. What could be in it that's so heavy? And the writer saw it as the basket in which Miriam entrusted the infant Moses to the river Nile in the hope of saving him from the King's myrmidons. As far as the hotel door he had eyes only for the floating, bobbing basket in which lay hidden the infant Moses on his way to Pharaoh's daughter.
BACK HOME in his garden, he didn't know how he had got there. The details of his itinerary had escaped him, though he had walked steadily uphill, over stone steps and winding paths. The man on the dark riverbank, who had accompanied the river's murmuring on the saxophone, must have been a hallucination. Wasn't it another hallucination that he was in the garden now? Wasn't he in reality still sitting in the gin mill or lying dead somewhere, stabbed, shot, or run over by a car? He bent down and tried to make his first snowball of the year, but the flakes didn't stick together. It seemed to him in retrospect that in his hours away from his desk he had been locked in single combat—now at least it was no longer a hand-to-hand fight or a wrestling match. He paced the garden, circling every bush and tree, until his slowness became deliberation. There were lights in the house, he had left them on for his return. He sat down beside the door on the long wooden bench, which was something like the benches that peasant families sat on after the day's work. He was so warm that he unbuttoned his coat. He stretched out his legs and his heels felt the bumpy garden soil in its wintry quietness. Light fell on the fresh snow, which smelled more and more of fallen leaves and the rocky subsoil. The last campanula had been blasted by the frozen snow in its calyx; in a matter of hours, the luminous blue corolla had become shriveled and blackish-brown. The shell of the house next door, almost entirely overgrown with shrubbery because the owner had run out of money, stood there like a ruined temple on another continent. Then for a moment a workman opened his rule, shouts in a foreign language were heard, and the drum of the windlass, long still and choked with rust, began to turn. He remembered a day when during the lunch break the young apprentice had been lying on the flat roof, and he in his room, pounding away at the typewriter, had sent the apprentice his cosmic sound through the open window. Did he want a neighbor? Over this question he fell asleep and knew it: Receding voices, replaced by the One Voice, toneless and yet filling his cranial cavity, which told him his dreams. Told him about a book written by his predecessor, containing every single word he had written that day. The dream upset him for a moment, then soothed him. He gave himself a jolt and went into the house.
As usual he looked down involuntarily to see if some note or message had been dropped through the slit in the door, and as usual there was none. As usual he tangled his shoelaces while trying to untie them, and spent quite some time undoing the knots. And as usual, long after he had stepped into the entrance, his nameless cat stood motionless, staring at the door in expectation of someone else. Not being in the mood to talk to the animal, he fed it, and to make up for the withheld words cut the meat extra-small.
He switched off all the lights. Because of the snow and the reflection of the city in the clouds, it was light in all the rooms, a nocturnal light that made the objects in the rooms all the darker. In the kitchen, with his eyes on the luminous dial of the radio, he listened to the late news. Though it was
midnight, the newscaster seemed as wide awake as if it were broad daylight. But in the middle of the news he was overpowered by emotion—what he was reading at the moment could not have accounted for it, it was due no doubt to something that had been on his mind the whole time. Almost voiceless, clearly on the brink of tears, once lapsing into a palpable silence, like a man clinging desperately to a window ledge from which he would fall with a scream. He barely made it to the weather report. After managing to squeeze out a "Good night," he was doubtless led away from the microphone. Had he just been fired? Had his girl left him? Had he been told of someone's death just before going on the air?
In one of the downstairs rooms from which he could see into another, the writer sat down in his night place, a kind of movie director's chair, from which he could see things at eye level. For a moment the light jacket hanging on the back of a chair—it had been there since last summer—made him feel the swimmer's wet eyelashes in the river wind. Why was it only when alone that he was able to participate fully? Why was it only after people had gone that he was able to take them into himself, the more deeply the farther away they went? Why did he conceive the most glowing image of those absent ones whom in his thoughts he saw as a couple? And why was it only with the dead that he truly lived? Why could only the dead become heroes in his mind? He laid one hand on his forehead and the other on his heart. He was sitting in a night train, which at that moment he actually heard rolling over the steel bridge down below with a sound like a sleigh in the snow. When the telephone rang in the entrance, he did not answer it. He wasn't expecting anyone to call and he didn't feel like opening his mouth again.
Not because he was tired but to stop himself from thinking any more, he steeled himself for the journey to his bedroom. While washing in the dark—sickened by the mere thought of seeing his face—he had the impression that someone was doing the same in the next room. He stopped washing. A book page was again being turned in the farthermost corner of the house. Again a chair was moved, again a cupboard was opened, and again the clothes hangers jangled together. Strange how in memory all sounds, even the sound of pottering and the squeaking of door, merged into chords. Whatever was making that sound in the stairwell was too light-footed to be a human being.
As carefully as possible he took a glass and turned on the faucet very, very slowly so as to avoid the usual squeaking. Carrying the full glass in both hands, he started up the stairs; counting the steps made him slow down. Slow counting was better than brooding. It made him so light that the step he knew so well didn't give off the usual groan. Why had no one ever invented a god of slowness? Buoyed by his thought, he leapt over one step and a crash ran through the whole house as he l
anded.
He avoided going into his workroom and barely glanced at the table to see whether the white pile, to which a new page had been added each day since the summer, was still there. The nameless animal which had run up ahead of him lay there guarding the room, a hump on the carpet shaped like the hill the house was on. The writer opened the window beside the bed. This side of the house, opposite the garden, surmounted a sheer cliff. He saw himself falling; the impact, he thought, would be softened by the mass of pencil shavings that had accumulated down there over the years. (Often when falling asleep he had felt the tug of the abyss and resisted it by clutching the bedpost.) The treetops seemed rounded by the snow, and the sky had suddenly become starry clear. There, belted, stood the hunter Orion; at his feet the faint outline of the Hare, and a few handbreadths away, the Densely Sowed Ones, the Pleiades. The writer took a deep breath and was alone with the sky. The walking sticks of his various wanderings stood leaning against the wall in one corner of the room; the bronze hazel bark shimmered at eye level. What am I? Why am I not a bard? Or a Blind Lemon Jefferson? Who will tell me that I'm not nothing!
I started out as a storyteller. Carry on. Live and let live. Portray. Transmit. Continue to work the most ephemeral of materials, my breath; be its craftsman.
At last he would lie still and nothing else; yes, there was such a thing as rest. He thought of the next day and decided to tramp around the garden until his footprints were as dense as if a whole caravan had come through and until he had seen his first bird in flight. And he made another of his vows. If he didn't come to grief in his work, if he didn't lose his power of speech, he would give the chapel of the old people's home at the foot of the hill a bell which, instead of tinkling, would resound . . . And then he thought back on the afternoon and tried to visualize some part of it. Nothing came but the swaying branches in the opening between the curtains of the gin mill and the dog running around in a circle, baring its teeth as a boxer bares his mouthguard.