Slow Homecoming

by Peter Handke

  After landing, Sorger stood motionless at the edge of the little airstrip. There he and his suitcase loomed as in a fun-house mirror, with short fat legs and a great long neck. He hadn’t been gone very long, just time enough for a short plane ride, but the whole village seemed to have turned into “premises” closed to the public. Sitting down on his suitcase, he turned “village” and laughed at himself, Sorger. Never had he come home to such unreality. How was he to avoid being seen? He stood up, started walking, and, shrugging his shoulders, changed direction. Play was no longer possible: the phony colors of the empty housefronts, the disenchanted water of the phony river—and through this utterly threadbare world, with an affectation of hail-fellow-well-met-ness, zigzagged not a face but the grin of a simpleminded dupe.

  Not knowing where to go, he became dangerous—not as an aggressor, but as a potential victim.

  A man of no particular age was walking ahead of the irresolute Sorger on the narrow path; moving as slowly as Sorger, he was not deep in thought, but neither was he looking at anything, and as a result the slowness of his walk gradually took on an air of viciousness. He didn’t look around, but from time to time showed a bit of eyeless profile, as dogs sometimes do in running past. At length he stepped to one side, pulled a tire chain out of his pocket, and, clutching the heavy thing in his fist, came straight at “me!”

  Just as he had no age, the man seemed to belong to no race. Bright eyes without a center. Whenever his knees threatened to crumple, he twisted his lips, but did not smile. When he (“actually”) hauled off with the chain, neither of the two had a face left; in that moment the whole world contracted and became tragicomically faceless.

  “Dear brother.” The drunk brought the chain down on the suitcase, which burst open, and fell on top of it, dead to the world.

  Sorger pushed the inert body away and, taking his belongings under his arm, went straight to the gabled house, which greeted him with its earthly beauty. By then he was so furious and hated everybody so intensely that all his movements had become angular. The door was locked, and he sat down on the wooden steps in front of it. A falling leaf touched the back of his head like a paw, but the cat was inside the house, strolling about the deserted rooms, now and then making a play movement, wholly absorbed in its own reflexes, which helped it to pass the time, whereas the man on the steps outside was humiliated by his forced idleness. The boot scraper at his feet—which reminded him of the floorboards in a bathhouse—and the basketball lying beside it seemed to add insult to injury.

  The assault had humiliated rather than hurt him; more than violence, it had been an expression of contempt for his person and belongings, as though a voice had shouted: “You and your photographs! You and your drawings! You and your scientific papers!” Only then did Sorger hit back—with his fist in the air. There was no more Far North, only the weather, which was cold and gray, as it had always been for an idler who, in the space under the huts, saw not Lauffer’s “small static earth forms” but only rusting junk; while in the meantime his work, whose secret, he had thought, was known to him alone, was being done by some anybody, effortlessly, with one among many simultaneous manipulations. For a moment, when that creature lifted his chain to strike, Sorger had been dead; now he was alive again, but the formlessness was still there; the next moment of formlessness was already pulsating in the immensity of time; as in dire pain, he felt at once minute and limitless, an intolerably heavy dot and an intolerably weightless immensity. Once again the Indian woman was the “other race,” and whatever might happen in the interim, she was sure in the end to plan his destruction. “And you, Lauffer, if you lie to other people”—said Sorger, grown abusive in his formlessness—“it’s because their company, whoever they may be, makes you miserable—but on the other hand you don’t want them to know it, because you’re an amiable, kindhearted, compassionate sort, yet basically morose.”

  At this point the angry orator, becoming aware of himself as a formless creature with, somewhere, too small a breathing hole, looked up and saw the surface of the water, as though it were gazing at him. This level ground was much too quiet; Sorger expected an eruption; he felt the need to see a mountain coming into being that minute, or at the very least a boulder breaking off from a cliff. He jumped up and kicked the ball against the wall of the house, so violently that, in rebounding, it whistled in his ear; then he went on playing without catching his breath until the pebbles before his eyes sparkled like flowers and he felt creepy, playing by himself.

  When he stopped, he saw the rows of low clouds behind him over the water. They were pale-bright and motionless, not flat underneath as usual, but rounded. A gust of wind blew from deep within the landscape, and suddenly great snowflakes were falling, whirling darkly on the horizon like a swarm of locusts, not from all the clouds at once, but from one after another at short intervals, breaking loose from the clouds and rushing downward like a series of avalanches, until at length a brief but powerful squall descended with a dry crackling sound on the house and the man standing in front of it, while not a single flake was falling on the great fluvial plain.

  Just then, under the uniformly gray sky, a dense, windless, slow snowfall set in which tickled the lips and turned the surroundings of the house into a fairyland. Radiant joy! Delicious sweat! Unable to breathe only a moment before, Sorger ran into the recaptured air; a bundle of life, he ran several times around the house, shouting as in eternal childhood. Soon his dear colleague (visible at a distance in the flat tundra) turned up and was not a little surprised. So the hours passed in a new, sad, and formally perfect friendliness, until the next day, when Valentin Sorger, equipped with a different suitcase, flew from that nameless neck of the woods, where already the wintry dusk was taking over (but in which two pairs of eyes belonging to Lauffer and the Indian woman were clearly discernible), into the world of names. In the university town on the west coast of the continent where he had once spent a few years, there was a wide street, lined for the most part with gas stations and shopping centers, named Northern Lights Boulevard.

  Two /

  Space Prohibited

  Sorger’s house was situated, along with similar small houses, in a pine forest in a flat section of the Pacific Coast. Between the sea and the houses there was no road, only bushes and low, grassy dunes. The roads through the forest ran at right angles to the ocean and ended at the dunes; from there, all the houses appeared to be deep in the woods, each with its own driveway, which circled around the trees in complicated loops. The soil was sandy, covered with prairie-high light-yellow beach grass, interspersed with small pine trees. Some of the dunes, displaced by the wind, had moved so far into the forest that here and there they formed light-colored embankments, colonized with new grass, above which only parts of the parched trees, still rooted in the old ground, could be seen; but in the course of time this vegetation had halted the movement of the dunes, and since they were the only hills in the area, they had become playgrounds for children, as had the strange dense prairie, which, because of the trees with which it was interspersed, could not very well be mowed. Nearly all the houses were within sight of others, and yet, because of the woods around them, they gave the impression of hermitages; though trimmed with bright-colored stucco, they were all, because of the constant threat of earthquakes, built of wood, as a tap of the knuckles sufficed to show. Some ten years earlier a tremor had sent a small hill on the coast nearby sliding into the sea along with the stucco villas on top of it, and since then the colony, its stairways and terraces and great, overgrown clefts, had become an uninhabited Earthquake Park.

  In the airplane the sky had long remained wide. Warmed by an afterglow of friendship for those who had stayed behind, Sorger saw himself with them as though imprinted in the triangle of the Arctic pediment. Immediately after takeoff, he had started saying to himself: “Last summer and fall I was in the Far North.” The West Coast was in a different time zone (two hours later), and night had fallen when he arrived. He had just see
n the dark mud rolling in the river he had left, there had been many people on the way, not companions on a long flight, just people picked up and put down by one plane after another. In landing, as the plane circled from the level of a snow-covered mountain range over a hilly countryside descending in distinct stages to the wide coastal plain shimmering with canals, he had glimpsed the sun setting in the ocean mist. Then he was walking over the plastic floor of the air-terminal building, past the backs of little television sets, each of which formed a unit with an egg-shaped chair and a temporarily egg-shaped viewer; and though he had lived here a long time, it was on his return to the Lower Forty-eight (as the Northern settlers called the rest of the United States) that he first noticed the imprint of government on this continent that seemed to govern itself, and though there wasn’t a soldier in sight, the glaringly lighted air terminal looked to him like a military installation.

  In spite of himself, he looked around twice. Though no one could possibly have known of his arrival, he looked for a “familiar face” among those waiting at the exit. And then he looked for the man with the too-short trousers and the stiff, white-leather shoes who had boarded the mail plane with him that morning and at each stopping place had taken the same plane as himself. They had not spoken, but had exchanged looks of silent amusement, and Sorger savored the thought that from then to the end of their days, always by chance, never exchanging a word, they would go the same ways. In approaching the exit, he purposely slowed down in the hope that this man (whoever he might be) would see him and catch up with him.

  He stopped the taxi before the housing development and walked the last bit of the way, sometimes in the glow of the house lights, which shone through the trees on the otherwise dark road. The houses in the woods seemed peaceful, yet festive because of all the lights. He trod the unaccustomed asphalt, at one with his image of himself as a figure resplendent with anonymity among the hosts of world travelers, devoid of origin like himself, hurrying this way and that between the arrival and departure gates. And because for him, coming from a different time zone, it was not yet night (and also because his few hours of flight had been largely in bright light above the clouds), he felt the daylight on his eyes and blinked his way through the darkness as though it were artificial.

  He picked up his mail at the neighbors’, deposited beside the bed the toy sleds he had brought for the children, and, barked at by a dog or two outside, glancing briefly at the sky, amazed that the shape of the waxing moon should be identical here to what it was a few hours before (in the gray of dawn) over another, so distant part of the world, he retired to his quarters, which were also his place of work.

  There were many letters, containing a good deal of news; most were friendly, some neutral, without threat or hostility. Some saw landscapes in their thoughts of him and wished he were not “so far away.”

  All the curtains in the house were drawn. He sat there in his coat, which was still buttoned. Rock fragments were piled up in a spacious glass case, as though they had slid straight out of nature and stopped behind the glass panes. A bluish fluorescent tube at the top of the cabinet illumined the stones and hummed softly (the only sound in the room). The seat of the chair was still indented where someone had been sitting months before. In the dark adjoining room, the door of which was open, he glimpsed the silhouette of a hydrant-like bedpost; there, for a moment, sat the cat with its pointed ears.

  The glass table was lit from underneath. On it, letters along with the empty envelopes had been tossed in a loose transparent heap; a few stood up like parts of a card house, confronting the addressee (who was no longer serenely musing, but just sitting there in silence) with their shiny folds and the frayed borders of their envelopes. They had seemed to be palpable objects, but there was nothing else near him that he could name; otherwise, there were only curtains, not falling gently, but stiffly stemmed against him.

  Hadn’t a steady blowing stopped suddenly when he opened the door, or perhaps when he turned in from the road? In less than a moment, a breathing quietness had turned to rigidity. Sitting upright, someone had tipped over, but had not fallen to the floor as usual in such cases. Now this someone was sitting motionless, pierced through by the plane of the tipped one.

  Mere warmth without blood, Sorger on that night of his return to the Western world saw himself dreamless, born into a planet without atmosphere (karst and grotesque emptiness), heavy as lead, but not falling; not alone in the world, but alone without a world; and within him—timeless—the stars and nebulae were eyes that did not look at him. He was forsaken not only by speech but by the power to make the least sound; and just as he lay inwardly silent, so he remained outwardly mute. Not a sound; not even a cracking of joints. Only in his imagination was he able to turn toward a rocky wall and, converted into a stone image, nestle in the stones. In reality, his flesh was trembling with weakness.

  “To be swept away by a whirlwind—into what native land?” In the image that followed, Sorger saw the reason for his rigidity; sitting in the “night of the century,” far back in the low, empty “lobbies of continents,” he at least was mourning for himself and his fellow men and this accursed century—and yet he was forbidden to mourn, because he “himself was to blame.” In truth, he was not even a “victim” and therefore could not join in the Great Lament with other victims of this century and find his voice again in the ecstasy of common suffering. Maybe the “unknown seated one” was weak, but he was descended from murderers, he regarded himself as a murderer, and the mass murderers of his century as ancestors.

  Besieged as he was by closed curtains, threatened by the pile of letters as by an enemy coat of arms, Sorger in that moment realized that without lifting a finger he embodied every one of the forefathers who had been foisted upon him; the rigidity of his paralysis repeated the rigidity of those violent monsters; and not only did he resemble them outwardly; he was inwardly one with them, more so than they had probably been with one another. Without a destiny, without human ties, without the right to suffer or the strength to live (those letters signified nothing but disorder), he was merely faithful—the faithful replica of death-cult masters. He smelled war; right there in his hut, it encircled him.

  But seeing to the bottom restored his speech, and then he was able to hate himself for having been possessed by dead monsters, as though they were his kinsmen. In his hatred, he breathed more deeply—breathed himself free from the suction of the tomb. “I no longer have a father.” He shut his eyes and behind his lids saw the bright afterimage of the river. His speech was “play” and in it he regained his mobility; he took his clothes off and washed; under the water he sang a wicked song, which ended well above the water; then he opened all the curtains.

  Speech, the peacemaker: it had the effect of ideal humor, reconciling the beholder with the things of the outside world. The wind whirled through the trees; in among leaves and scraps of paper, a whole newspaper spun about, opening and closing in its flight; folded, it rushed at the window in the darkness, but turned aside just in time and slowly opened (“for me”), as once more it fluttered away. Behind it the grass swayed like wheat, and from the ocean came noises of a distant playground. For a moment Sorger was able to think of his child in Europe. He opened the front door and swore never to close a door again.

  At length he lay down to sleep (until then the bed had been an unattainable distant object), and with the yellow of the sulfur-containing minerals in the specimen case the brightness behind his eyes vanished. The last thing that occurred to him was that he was lying with his head to the north (in the gabled house it had pointed south).

  True, something was lacking, but the clear fact of inexpiability had paled to a vague nostalgia; and he did not forget that he had been branded with inexorable rigidity, his true condition, beside which all others (speaking, moving) reduced themselves to unreal fuss-and-bother.

  In the sandy ground below him, a crag detached from the coastal cliff by the waves of prehistory formed a kind of bulwar
k against the ocean. Turned on its axis during the night, the house slowly settled on this reef (Land’s End) like a wooden ark.

  The neighbors had invited Sorger to breakfast at their house. From there, he gazed at last night’s trap, which in the morning light looked to him like the cottage of a retired old farmer.

  A dangling pine branch half covered the housefront, and in the tall grass that had grown outside the door in his absence a dog with the face of a human eccentric stood as though legless, watching the sea gulls gliding between the trees. Sitting with the neighbor family in a semicircular sun-bright extension of the living room, Sorger knew that for the present nothing could shake him; he was prepared for anything, capable of everything he wanted to be capable of. Without effort his eyes, which in the wilds had grown accustomed to long distances, adjusted themselves to the family circle on either side of him. Back at last, he participated in his neighbors’ life with the authority of a man who knows the earth, who is still somewhat tired from what he has been through, and whose tiredness makes him seem alive.

  He was not, as usual in company, divided among unstable, disparate images; today his imagination was one, encompassing himself and those with him. All attention, the (rather abstemious) Sorger actually grew strong in enjoyment; his pleasure in eating (and in things in general) moved him with an aimless desire for conquest; all the rest of his long life would be devoted to enjoyment. Meanwhile, he had a delightful feeling of his own face, especially his eyes and mouth, and the bank notes, which crackled from time to time in his trouser pocket, gave him another, related feeling.