Slow Homecoming

by Peter Handke

  It seemed to Sorger that his first sight of Indian children at play had been in this spot, as though this had been his first experience of children in the Far North; and as though even the adults had become so friendly that whatever they did in his presence—even if it was merely to rush past in their cars—they seemed to be playing for his benefit. He overcame his inhibitions—and they began to play.

  And in the evening he actually sat down in the bar among them, huddled in close-packed rows as in the half darkness of a movie house. He looked at no one in particular (always taking in several figures at once), nor did they look expressly at him; but their movements around him were always attentive, almost like dance steps. A threatening face might approach him, then would withdraw with a look of contentment, because the threat, but not the face, had been disregarded in Sorger’s first answering glance. (If the drunk persisted in his threatening attitude, because he couldn’t bear to meet anyone’s eyes, an Indian woman, usually of a certain age, would draw him away to a long, sad dance of appeasement, from which he would not return.)

  Sorger did not belong to the Indians as one belongs to a tribe, but he was one with them when he met them in the bar, in the village, or anywhere else in the district; he had not forgotten the color of their skin, but when with them he was no longer conscious of his own. Sometimes he could even see himself adopted by one of their clans and staying there for good; or rather, this autumn with its thoughts and perceptions had the effect of a natural daydream going beyond Sorger’s personal world; as though for this man, who was contentedly present and no more, nature itself was a transpersonal history. He would live with his family in the village, which of course included church and school, and with his work he would even make himself useful to the community. Church, school, family, village, offered the possibility of an entirely new life, and to Sorger the smoke that arose each day from the huts in the middle ground was something new; of course he had seen such smoke before—but where? when? Freed from where and when, he was relieved at no longer having to think that the people here were lost souls in a godforsaken hole “where there was nothing.” Actually, everything was there.

  Now he met the Indian woman without secrecy; he even introduced her to Lauffer, though ordinarily he kept his dealings with women to himself: “This is my girlfriend”; and after that she came to the gabled house now and then with her children, or by herself in the evening to make a third at cards. Sorger actually longed to show himself with her, though he couldn’t have said to whom. Formerly he had not felt concerned by the gaze of her strange eyes, with the black pupils barely visible in the dark irises; now he trusted her—and welcomed her gaze (which had not changed). While with her he was just absent enough to feel constantly at one with her, and he no longer had guilt feelings about her, only a feeling of pleasure, which now at last was just the kind of pleasure he wanted and no longer upset him. (It was as though he first experienced the weight of the world through her. One night they seemed to be lying on a high plateau, which was suddenly too small for them; they grew and grew until, incredulous with pleasure, they became the world to each other.)

  Long ago Sorger had thought himself capable of happiness. This took the form of a brotherly light-headedness, which sometimes communicated itself to others. Since then he had ceased to demand states of happiness; in fact, he avoided them like the plague. Still, it had surprised him now and then to see how easily others could be happy with him; for a short time this had given him the certainty of being able to live an acceptable life even at cross-purposes with the times, but aroused guilt feelings because he made no attempt to make anything last. At present, however, he promised no future; he had ceased to be anything more than a stimulus; in his thoughts he saw the woman and himself nodding to each other and going their way; being together as they were now was to be united forever.

  In taking his leave, he moved at ease in the foreign language, but made no pretense, by using slang or homegrown intonations, of being native to it. In speaking, he lost his awareness of his own voice; just as his being had merged with the autumn landscape, so his speech now seemed to blend with that of the people around him. Altogether, he found a new pleasure in foreign languages and made up his mind to learn several more. He said: “In my native country, I couldn’t even conceive of belonging to the country and its people. The words ‘my country, my people’ meant nothing to me. Can it be that the wilderness has helped me to form an idea of what a village can be? Why is it this strange land that has first given me the thought of permanence?”

  And with Lauffer it was very much the same. Though he ordinarily yearned for his Europe—going to bed early and lying abed late like a child at boarding school, “so as to think about home”—the region had become his “geological garden,” which he tilled with an almost peasant-like devotion.

  He often got up before Sorger and with bottles, planks, and strips of metal fashioned devices with which to measure the wind and water erosion on the riverbank, the movements of slopes (underground “creep” or “flow”), and the frost in the ground.

  Lauffer, the student of slopes, even forgot in the end to lace himself up in the stiff professional garb that gave him, it is true, the look of a scientist, albeit a strangely uninspired one, and converted himself, with a checked flannel shirt, wide suspenders, and light linen trousers baggy at the top but tapering toward the ankles, into the rather bulky sort of figure one was likely to meet in this region.

  What he built was chiefly “sand traps” of different kinds, horizontal with juxtaposed compartments (with which to measure the horizontal movement of the sand), and vertical, on several levels, with which to measure the lifting power of the wind. He also made use of a “sand bottle,” which he buried in the ground, so that nothing protruded but a sand-catching device attached to the neck, with the opening turned toward the ground wind. To avoid the admixture of secondary debris, which would have masked the true movement of the slope, the conscientious Lauffer attached long plank gutters to the rubble boxes he placed at the foot of the slopes. And in order to register the “heel clicking,” as he called it, of the stones in the subsoil of the slope, he sank strips of lead vertically into holes in the ground, which he had made with a drill the exact size of the strips, and then measured the movement of rubble by carefully uncovering the strips and observing their inclination. Having planted the area with these devices, he stalked about like a trapper, waiting for results.

  But his special interest was the ground under the raised huts, where the miniature geological formations, sheltered from the effects of precipitation, differed from the originally related but subsequently ruined forms in the outside world.

  This little discovery had greatly excited him: here civilization, instead of destroying natural forms as usual, had preserved them almost entirely from the action of time. Conversely, in a South American desert where there had been neither wind nor rain nor dew for more than a century, human footprints and the marks of horses’ hoofs dating from a time long past had remained untouched by nature. (The rocks in that desert had weathered to so dark a color that the heat radiating from them served as a barrier against the wind.) Lauffer was planning to write a paper comparing the two phenomena: “It won’t be a study,” he said. “More like a description of pictures.”

  Sorger said: “Sometimes when I try to form an idea of the age and genesis of different forms in the same landscape and their relation to one another, the incredible diversity of this one broad canvas starts me daydreaming. I’m not a philosopher, but at such times I know that it’s natural for me to philosophize.”

  Lauffer: “I’m sure your thoughts in the matter are not what the professors would ask for, and there would be no place for us in a discussion among professional philosophers. I for my part can boast only momentary bursts of philosophical imagination, and these exclusively for my own benefit. My science gives me daydreams that no one else could equal even in his sleep.”

  Sorger: “Then you should have things to
tell me.”

  Lauffer: “About the landscape?”

  Sorger: “About the landscape and about yourself.”

  Accumulation of passion; enjoyment of order (of a rectangular table, for instance); the joy of just living somewhere; rediscovered pleasure in study; enjoyment of my body, its needs, even its mere activities. Nothing more to desire; no harm in that. Nothing supernatural about fulfillment. Not thought out of existence, but stripped of individual meaning. A feeling of constant warmth in my head: no personal or purposive or predigested thoughts, breathless (“Help!”) and then breathing deeply (“Thanks to whom?”). No thinking that is not a “thinking with.” Thinking the earth with the earth as a thinking world without end. The earth whose circling begins with my circulation, with me, the finite object of thought, the only remaining object of thought. No more blood, no more heartbeat, no more human time: only a universal transparence, pulsating mightily and trembling with my pulse. No more century, only this season. From lying to standing; from standing to jumping or running. The joy of talking and arguing. Loath to play, but glad to watch others play. Strong wind, but not a leaf falling from the birches. Moment of stillness; then a light breeze and the leaves fall to the ground in swarms. On a dead arm of the river, a serried flock of gulls, drifting as slowly as a cloud. White crow droppings on dead fish stuck with red willow twigs. Empty cartridge cases in the gravel, shots elsewhere. In the house a shirt is hanging on a chair; the low-lying sun shines through the topmost buttonhole. The room cowers in the shadow of a passing bird (or airplane). “Greetings, ye smiling dead”: but only my own memory smiles, behind my forehead, too weak to bring back the dead, which turn up for a moment in the form of lopsided sacks. River. House. (Outcries.) Just back from work, my friend is standing outside, in the open window frame. Leaves circling in the puddles. Blades of grass—they, too, look like fallen leaves.

  The day preceding Sorger’s departure from the northern lowlands was a holiday, the anniversary of the discovery of the continent. It was almost mid-October. In the morning the water clicked against the narrow frieze of ice growing out of the riverbank; bristling snow crystals lay on the ice; the many little lumps of snow on the surface of the water were drifting gulls.

  Beside an abandoned, tumbledown hut there was a birch tree; the basketball net fastened to it had been blown over its iron frame by the strong wind. In the fine-grooved river landscape, dark wind spots moved like wandering underwater sandbanks. Later on, spots of shadow on white tree trunks would remind Sorger of the cat, which, with its head buried in its fur, lay on the table by the window, as at peace with the world as only a house cat can be.

  Lauffer was still asleep, his head buried like the cat’s; he had got up in the middle of the night and wandered about the living room. Questioned on his return, he had only mumbled with thick, heavy lips (which reminded Sorger, who was sitting up in bed, of his brother) and no tongue, shutting his eyes for a moment (and not just flicking his lashes) at every syllable, as he sometimes did when telling a lie. Only then did it dawn on Sorger that his friend had been sleepwalking.

  Now it looked as if he would sleep a long while; and meanwhile, the wind piled up sand in his sand traps. Gazing at him and the cat at the window, Sorger recovered his (so lightly forgotten) feeling for the passage of time, and realized that it had been absent from his weightless existence of the last few days, which seemed to have passed from him “after his time.” In all the images which had played without violence on a middle ground without birth or death, he had lacked not the feeling of himself but awareness of himself as the feeling of a form. And this he acquired now, for at the sight of his friend lying doubled up in bed he became aware of his own beholding, saw it in the oval of his own mortal eyes, which had just begun to capture the essence of the pictorial—consciousness was the feeling of this form and the feeling of form was gentleness. No, he had no desire to cease to be.

  Sorger had gone outside with the cat, which was following him and seemed that day “to know a thing or two.” On the beach, sticks of driftwood had been set down, or perhaps been accidentally washed ashore, in a circle. It occurred to him that the Indians might have made these circles to demarcate themselves from this holiday and what it commemorated, and at that point the whole settlement struck him as a secret magic circle in which he, now initiated, was making his last rounds.

  And true enough, totemic signs had been painted here and there along the military road. The tire marks in the mud might also have been signs in a secret Indian picture script; and the wide-spreading elk antlers at the top of the wooden privies may have been there to mock the foreign intruders. “Yes, we are open”—on a national holiday this conventional formula on the door of the market had a strangely unconventional meaning. A passing police car (never before had Sorger seen a police car in the area) paraded the closed, anonymous faces of an occupying power, at which the natives merely encouraged their dogs to bark. “Rounds and maunderings,” said Sorger to the cat, who was following him at a distance, stopping now and then.

  The children were in the schoolhouse; he saw them sitting behind tinted glass in the long, low building, but he couldn’t make out their faces, only rows of round, deep-black head tops, which were suddenly very dear to him. Someone played an American Christmas carol on a flute, not practicing, but evidently bungling it on purpose. A child came to the window and popped his bubble gum as Sorger looked up at him. Turning into a town hall, he leafed, as he had often done, through the warrant book chained to the wall. Many of those wanted were used to living in the open and were tattooed with the words: “Born to lose.”

  He turned to the cemetery. Almost all these people had died young. The ground was bumpy with fallen pinecones and spotted with clumps of white mushrooms. He stepped into the wooden church to rest. Leaves had blown between the chairs and even over the lending-library volumes spread out on the table; a book of music lay open on the harmonium; clouds of breakfast bacon blew in from the adjoining room, where the pastor lived. At the next bend in Sorger’s path he caught sight of Indians’ clothes, all dark, hung up to dry. Behind the windows of the huts, he saw the silhouettes of the inhabitants, who were so small that even standing they could be seen only from the neck up. And so, in going away, he managed to take leave of them.

  The wind was so strong that it unbuttoned his coat as he walked, but warm, interspersed with icy gusts that tasted like snow in his mouth. The cat stopped now and then and the movement of its head followed the shadows inside the houses; when Sorger picked it up, it arched its back and blew cold air in his face; it disliked being carried when out of doors.

  Followed by the animal, he returned to the riverbank, completing his circuit (at the end, his brisk walk had turned to a run). He thought: Today for the first time I’ve seen the yards around the houses and discovered that the village has a circular road around it.

  The water level had fallen so far of late that a number of small ponds had formed between sandbanks, and the water whirled about in them as though churned up by a captive fish: “Here, too, in a circle.” Though there was no one to be seen on the river, echoes of human voices came to him from all sides (along with the cry of a lone sand martin and the empty scraping of unmanned boats against the gravel bank). And Sorger saw the village population, a Great Water Family, gathered, as it were, head to head at the bend of the river. This whole river valley from source to mouth—“nowhere else but here” was a river valley worth mentioning; this, indeed, was “the only place worth mentioning in the whole world”—and that was the message of the lines which the sinking water seemed to have written in the sand (the opposite shore was already “beyond the last frontier”).

  The sounds that echoed from the river were Indian sounds, yet it seemed to Sorger (though he did not understand a single word) that he was listening to his own language, indeed, to the dialect of the region where his forebears had been at home. He crouched down and looked into the eyes of the cat, which shrank back from him; and when he tried t
o caress it, it seemed to find this so repellent, here away from the house, that it fled with movements rather like those of a fleeing dog.

  The dried shore mud at his feet had broken up into a far-flung network of almost regular polygons (for the most part six-sided). As he examined the cracks, they began little by little to work on him, but instead of fragmenting him like the ground, they joined all his cells (a void that he hadn’t noticed until then) into a harmonious whole. Something that rose from the split surface of the earth struck his body and made it warm and heavy. Standing there motionless, looking out over the pattern, he saw himself as a receiver, not of news or a message, but of a twofold force received on the two levels of his head. On his forehead, he felt the bone disappearing, simply because he had no other thought than to expose this obstacle to the air; and the surface of his face from the eyes down seemed once again to acquire the characteristics of a face; human eyes and a human mouth, each for itself but not separated by consciousness; and he actually felt that his lowered lids had become receiving screens. His head bent lower and lower, yet the meaning was not despair but determination: “The decision rests with me.” Raising his eyes, he was prepared for anything; with every look, even into the void, he would have met other looks; indeed, he would have created them.