by Peter Handke
Breathing deeply—without moving, he saw himself striking a pose—he felt a longing for such a decision, an almost indignant expectancy and impatience; and the strange, for Sorger unprecedented, and at the moment of falling asleep not at all funny thing about this phenomenon was that in it he did not feel alone but for the first time in his life felt that he belonged to a people. In this moment, he not only represented the many but committed himself to their demand—the demand that united them and gave them life—for a decision.
For a moment he even saw the uniform window patterns of whole complexes of high-rise buildings as congealed expectation machines which had been let into those barren walls for this sole purpose and not to admit light or air. Unusually for him in his half sleep, he had before him no uninhabited landscapes but instead, very close to him, many passing faces, sorrowful, and not at all plebeian. Not a single one of them was known to him, but taken together they formed a living multitude, to which he belonged.
Was he prepared for a decision? He didn’t know; and would never find out unless he took the leap.
But what decision? Now almost asleep, he saw but one answer: a silent picture of himself sitting in a small room in a tall building, a round-shouldered, hardworking public servant; and the composite window fronts beckoned to him from beyond a large body of water, which separated him from everything.
A strange desire came over him to exert himself to the point of exhaustion; and he saw himself, in the event that he lacked the strength, disappearing into an arcade which led him on into a refuge, still closed at the moment. A great deal was at stake, but something very different from life and death.
Warmth spread through his whole body, and he found himself in the hollow of his limp open hand. Contented, he was aware of his male organ, but without excitement; at the same time he felt hunger and greed. The cat jumped up on the bed and lay down at his feet; “an animal in the house.” The narrow cot was just right for him. In the next room Lauffer was laughing in his sleep; or was that he himself? The wind outside became a cloud. Doubled up in her bed, the Indian woman was forgetting him, forgetting everyone, even her children. (And now she, too, was right for him.)
During the day, in the “township” (as his chosen terrain, the square of wilderness that had become his “field of operations,” was called), his work made him one with himself and the landscape, but at night, asleep on his iron cot, Sorger remained alive to his remoteness from Europe and his “forebears.” What he perceived then was not the unthinkable distance between himself and another point but himself as a distant one (guilty of being far away). His sleep was disturbed by no image of this other point, only by a constant awareness of not sleeping in his own bed. Conscious in his sleep of being wrenched out of place, he never, though years had passed since his change of continents, enjoyed a quiet, homelike sleep; immediately on closing his eyes (a moment against which he invariably struggled), he began to gravitate, growing steadily heavier and more clodlike, toward a magnetic horizon. And what happened then?
A group of screeching, drunken Indians were standing around a fire on the riverbank. One reeled back and fell, still clutching a bottle, into the smooth swift current and sank; but instantly the dreamer jumped in after him. He didn’t come up again, and no one paid attention to his disappearance.
Seen in bird’s-eye view (from a low-flying helicopter, for instance), the river was so transparent at its surface that below it, as though framed in clear, still water, the brownish-yellow clouds of mud became a self-contained image of turbulent power pulsating upward from the riverbed, rolling westward, and filling the whole breadth of the stream.
Over these clouds, but just below the transparent surface, drifted, unrecognizable from the shore, dark tree trunks, for the most part birches, stripped and blackened by the current, occasionally veiled momentarily by a surge of mud. Clearly visible from the bank were singly drifting dwarf pines, weighed down at one end by their roots, so that the tops would intermittently rise above the surface and dive down again.
A few tree trunks, diverted to the shallower spots, anchored their roots in the bottom, so that only their spreading crowns could be seen.
No more cries; in the gray of dawn, the river arched, becoming a quiet bay in an otherwise turbulent ocean. Occasionally, breeze-blown ripples crept darkly in all directions.
A dead pink salmon had been washed up on the sandy shore, a faint color in the rigid recumbent darkness, over which, strictly separate, lay a pale sky with a colorless moon that seemed to have fallen over backward. The fish, which lay lopsidedly bloated on the sand made muddy by the dew, as though tossed at random into the cold early-morning landscape, seemed to form a companion piece to the bloated mounds enclosed by white wooden fences in the Indian cemetery on the far side of the huts, whose black and gray walls gave no sign of life except for the humming of generators; the abandoned fire on the riverbank was still smoking.
Many of the countless paths that traversed the settlement did not even connect the huts with one another but merely led around clumps of trees or into the woods, where they broke off or led into tunnels that might be fox earths. The village was surrounded by wilderness; and indeed the whole region, including the village, was largely wilderness. The area had never been cleared; fields and meadows were unknown, as were all other features of civilized landscape; apart from construction sites, the natural relief of the earth’s surface had rarely been tampered with; even the wider roads followed the irregularities of the terrain, which seemed flat only when seen from the air (except for the landing strip, the only level space of any size was the short, wide gravel road, formed by alluvial deposits, which was off-limits to the civilian population and led to an army base in the swamps). And since most of the huts were raised on blocks, the original contours of the earth had been preserved even in the built-up areas, in the little hollows, ditches, and humps under the houses.
As though adapted to the rugged, primeval landscape, the houses scattered through the woods showed no systematic relation to one another; they were placed higgledy-piggledy, without regard for their neighbors, and many not only were far from the road but also faced the other way. An overall view of the colony was nowhere obtainable, though it was known to be the only settlement far and wide. Each dwelling seemed to appear out of the void, as though nothing came after it.
Only from a plane might one have unexpectedly discovered the design of an almost charming little town between river and virgin forest, a rectangular network of streets traversed by a diagonal avenue, a kind of Broadway—an ideal spot, civilized yet elemental, with here and there a brass doorknob sparkling in the morning light while at the same time mist arose from the measureless light-brown pine forest.
True, this friendly, fertile-looking valley—the bushy little conifers might have been grapevines—showed no sign of field or meadow (their absence seemed incredible at first sight), and the great overland road leading into the horizon was also absent. (Seen from the air, most of the huts, surrounded as they were by beaten-up cars and rusty electrical generators, were transmuted into vandalized garbage cans.)
Except for the white wooden church, the gabled house was the tallest structure in the region; it alone had an attic, which the present tenants occasionally used as a darkroom; the gable was useful as a landmark, because even within the village area it was only too easy to lose one’s way among the swamps and thickets.
Sorger got up early, eager to be doing something. The sun had not yet risen, but the smooth pebbles on the shore road where he was standing were already glistening and a nearby sandbank, marked with swollen lines composed of leaves, bits of branches, and pine needles, showed how the water level had fallen overnight. There was a nip in the air, but he wasn’t cold; all kinds of weather made him feel good, as long as he could be out in the air and active.
Even in his work, he preferred drawing to photography, because it was only through drawing that he came to understand the landscape in all its forms; he was invariab
ly surprised to see how many forms revealed themselves in what seemed at first sight to be a dull and monotonous vista. A place took on meaning for him only when he drew it line for line—as faithfully as possible, without the schematizations and omissions that had become customary in his science—and it was only then that he could claim with a clear conscience, if only to himself, to have been there.
As usual at that time of year, the river valley was deserted, yet on that morning, which might have arisen out of the depths of the earth, it seemed everywhere to have caught fresh fire from that short period at the turn of the century when, traveled by side-wheelers, parceled out by trading companies, swarming with gold diggers, it had made its mark on history: all that had passed irrevocably into plastic sieves from the phony Trading Post, into miniature dog sleds carved by Indian home workers, and inscriptions on tombstones, effaced more quickly than in other regions by the radical extremes of the weather. But in this moment it formed a conscious, eternal current in the timeless, unconscious river. In perceiving it, Sorger felt cheered and comforted and eager to accomplish something.
The firm, smooth paper of his drawing pad; for the alternation of thin and thicker lines, a drawing pencil sharpened to an asymmetrical cone; the beautiful first glow of a cigarette; a windless day, in which the smoke did not fly away but sank slowly to the ground.
The first colors in the landscape were objects in their own right: a gravel red, an oil-drum blue, an ash-leaf yellow, a birch-tree white. Little burst puffballs in the grass. Elsewhere a hairy poppy stem, whose flower was not red but a wonderful silken yellow. The locusts—bushes rather than trees—had dark thorns all over them. The flaming-red rowan berries, icier than snowballs inside; you can feel the sting in the palm of your hand. The brick-red willow bark, as though to bind a book with. The brown shaggy bearskin nailed to a shed.
The first movements were the clouds of mist just over the river, drifting eastward. Sand martins darted out of holes in the clay embankment and soon turned back. The black mongrels, rooting about in the shore rubbish, proved to be giant crows, which rose into the air with a whirring of wings, circled around the man, and flew away with raucous cries; one came back again, this time without a sound, and flew over the standing man, so low that its wingbeats sounded like a flapping fan belt.
Almost all the fish washed ashore during the night had been eaten; here and there the picked-out eyes had left their imprints in the soft sand. A stray dog ambling down the beach was silvery gray, its head white from the bluish eyes down: a real face. He dragged a dead sea gull back and forth over the sand, crunching it—that was the only sound far and wide—with his side teeth. The chained village dogs emerged from their underground kennels and ran as far as they could, whining and yapping with still-tamed violence.
Then came the usual sounds of morning traffic: not a single car driving over dry land, but several small planes rose above the bushes, and the hum of others could be heard from beyond the river. “You must know that no one ever abandoned himself to such an extent in this life that he might not have abandoned himself still more.”
Whom was he to honor? Wasn’t that what he needed—someone to honor? Didn’t he want to be independent? Where was the person for whom he could do something? Where was he at this very moment?
The beer cans, which in addition to being crushed flat had been ground into the road, seemed to demonstrate extreme violence and a despair, which he had never known but could now suspect, over an insurmountable privation and a stony absence, that had set every last dog in the village to howling with murderous fury.
His colleague Lauffer, already uniformed in his coat of many pockets and his high boots, was trotting back and forth in the background, playing basketball with himself with the help of a windblown net that had been fastened over the door of the house. Sorger started running, snatched the ball from his friend, and joined in the game.
Far away in the flatlands, the sun rose slowly, darkening the landscape with deep shadows: a darkness, or rather a gloom, which would persist all day, with barely shrinking and barely moving pits of shadow among the trees and bushes; and on the spot, from the moment when Sorger joined in the game, time transformed itself, as on an open stage, into a dimly sunny space, without particular events, without day and night, and without self-awareness, a space in which he was neither a doer nor an idler, neither an actor nor a witness.
He had just jostled his opponent, sniffed at the ball, breathed in the other’s sweat and then his own, had once been grabbed around the waist and easily thrust aside by the powerful Lauffer. By then, only a few stray swallows, abandoned by their flock, white of belly, fatter and much smaller than elsewhere, were flying from their recesses on the shore to far beyond the middle of the river, from where they darted back as though from a secret boundary. They would repeat this long-short two-stroke movement all day long and day after day, occasionally meeting a gleaming-white eagle flying along the river, and going a bit of the way with it.
This was a time of constant presence, constant wherevemess, and constant habitat. The presence was an omnipresence, shared by the once-beloved dead, in which the most distant loves were sheltered and of good cheer in an accessible next-door; the whereverness was a foreign country, where no one forced you to run away home or to emulate the habits and customs of the natives; and the habitat was the home-and-workshop quality of the whole region, where it was possible to live in privacy, free from servitude to habitual inner partitions.
The autumn sun might be watery or hot, or it might shimmer only on a distant spot in the plain—in every case it was something more than the usual indifferent source of light behind one’s back or before one’s eyes. Leaves fell on dishes that lay on tables in the open, or blew down the river in colorful swarms; or they were not leaves at all but birds that flew back into the bushes from the grass, or stopped in midair and whirled about in a flock, or turned into land animals and scurried away in an entirely different direction; now they were frogs’ heads peering through the layer of leaves on marshy black puddles, or hares scampering off into the lowlands and somersaulting to the sound of shots; or perhaps, after all, they had only been leaves (just as the dead birds falling from the trees had only been bits of bark broken off by the wind).
At the time these phenomena were something more than the eccentric delusions of someone who happened to confuse his details. They were unmistakable signs implicit in nature itself (just as they could transform each season into the annual cycle as a whole) and had the power, regardless of who the observer might be, to convert themselves into great and diversified happenings in space—delusions only at first glance, then welcome as metamorphoses in the deeper area of vision, where, in a way that is always unique, plants coalesce with animals and even with humans, and absence merges with presence. In fusing Sorger’s individual history with the movement of the northern autumn, the landscape was in turn transformed by this human history into a temporal vault in which this self-forgetful man, without a destiny but also without sense of loss (freed altogether from fluctuations of feeling), was still present.
In this landscape there was one particular place (which Sorger sketched each day) where this promising history, in which nothing violent or abrupt ever happened, was clearly revealed to him. The place was not conspicuous as a scene or site; it took shape through the prolonged effort of sketching, which alone made it describable.
It was the middle ground of a quite commonplace segment of the landscape, chosen by Sorger because of an earthquake fault in the foreground and a fragmentary shelf of loess far behind it. Through no intention of his, this center, which disclosed no particular surface form, not so much as a small swampy depression, and which only a sense of having to fill up his page led him to sketch, gradually took on a decided individuality. It was a smooth bit of meadow, almost entirely bare of trees or underbrush, with a few huts and a straight path in the foreground demarcated on the far side by the sparse virgin forest, which, however, was so close that the
sketcher could look into it, while the foreground with its many perceptible details suggested a gardenlike fringe, distinct from the wilderness in the background. Between these two zones, which were clearly set off from the landscape as a whole, lay the formless middle ground. Though on a plane with them, it gave the impression first of a meadow that had formed in the course of the weeks and finally of a human valley in a possible eternal peace.
The Indians who traversed this sunny autumnal scene passed every day, driving left to work or right on their way back home, while their children passed one by one on their way to school and at noon in homeward-bound groups. Here their lives unfolded without the usual incidents. In every instance, the person who entered the stage from one side complemented the one who had just left it on the other side; those who met on the road stood together for a while and then separated; they were only on their way to farms, always in the same village area, and the howling packs of dogs on the trucks were their household pets, which they were taking for an outing.
Otherwise than in the market, town hall, or bar, the people who kept passing through this middle ground presented the picture of an indestructible, lively, and often 3exuberant community; and Sorger knew that he could trust this picture, which had freed him from several obsessive beliefs. Up until then, the Indians had indeed been a hostile race and he an undesirable intruder on their land, which moreover belonged to his Western world only in the most superficial sense. Formerly, he had been able to think of a Great Indian Nation—but now that the “intruder” and the “alien” had at last been swept away, he was not afraid to think of them with sympathy or simply to take them for granted; and then it turned out that their anti-white slogans and curses had hardly been directed against him after all.
Throughout the past months, they had ignored Sorger. They looked straight ahead when he passed, or jostled him slightly and possibly looked around, but more as one looks at an obstruction in one’s path, wishing to know what sort of thing one has bumped into. But now, perceiving them as members of a village community, he saw that through this very fact he had become noticeable to them and that it had been in his power not to be ignored by them. At present, to be sure, they did not in passing turn their heads in his direction as he stood there with his instruments, deep in thought, and nevertheless, relieved of his old misconceptions, he was sure of their closeness to him; he now no longer disturbed them, and their unabashed merriment was in itself an attention, an expression of friendliness.
