Slow Homecoming

by Peter Handke

  Often in the Far North, and particularly in the wilds, it had pleased him, in contemplating the vastness of the country, to know that he was in a nation. But this city on the coast remained a place apart. There was no particular character in its look, no unity in its confusion. Once upon a time, even the traffic noises had spoken to the inhabitants, saying: “See what we can do together”—that at least is what the trains rattling along the coast had once seemed to say—whereas now, even if the city seemed to offer itself in the sunshine, there was no other sound than the tooting of foghorns in the still-opaque bend of the bay. Of course there were houses and cars, resplendent as only luxury items can be, but there was nothing to carry the gaze farther, over land or sea, to similar people in a larger world. In the North, the distances to other points on the earth’s surface had been fairy-tale numbers (in the tiniest settlement, signposts with bundles of arrows pointing in all directions indicated the distance in miles to all the world capitals), but Sorger had never felt as remote from all connection with anything as he did here. Thinking back later, he had difficulty visualizing an airplane rising above the houses or landing, but he could always see the colored paper tails of kites twisting and turning beyond the rooftops.

  And yet, in passing, he often felt that someone was waiting for his sympathetic glance. When he turned away, he seemed to turn a second time as though to see into a distance which often enough was not there at all, his true purpose being to prevent people from noticing him; at other times, he would sit alone, grave and attentive, in a dark striptease joint, wishlessly daydreaming—“the man with the wineglass”—to the rhythmic movements of naked bodies. Or he would sit with other unknowns in a porno movie—“the man with the folded arms”—and recognize himself as one of the performers on the screen. He withheld all personal communication, not by lying, but by corroborating—always with a secret feeling of triumph—the many misstatements he heard people make. He kept appointments with strangers, determined to forget their faces before he had finished looking at them, and he, too, in leaving, was often asked: “What was the name again?”

  Rediscovering the “thundering interior of the jukebox,” Sorger converted himself into a player. Thus he became many-sided and discovered that he could be different—entirely different—anything and everything. Later, it seemed to him that all through these weeks he had understood no one but that with a gambler’s instinct he had foreseen every reaction. He no longer experienced the momentary shifts between strength and weakness that ordinarily gave him a feeling of endurance; he just roamed unsteadily, accompanied by a clinking of coins, through this city, where autumn leaves figured as permanent decorations in shop displays. He was glad to have stopped passing himself off as a scientist, glad that, though he worked every day at his science, it had lost its professional character; that at last he was going through the motions of his life, as he wished, with the uncommunicative, somnambulistic gravity of a layman; averted from all, sharing his time with no one, he sometimes felt surrounded by a magical beauty.

  Detached from the nation and indifferent to the self-confident world religions, the West Coast city was a festival of sects, a ballet of cryptic symbols. Here no one seemed related to anyone—but persons who chanced to be like-minded for a short time would get together and hastily hide in meeting halls. Thus one evening Sorger found himself moving down the street in a long line. Then he was standing in a spacious, darkened auditorium surrounded by “the masses,” who like him were waiting for the singer, who had been a hero of their youth.

  He had no great desire to go there; rather, he was fulfilling a self-evident, rather burdensome duty. Not for years had he been able to let someone else think, feel, and act for him. Now he required the guidance of forms which, unlike the final measures of songs, gave him the idea of a perpetual new beginning, something on the order of the first age-old, poetically appealing rather than coldly demonstrative literature of his science, or the formal investigations of painters, in which he could lose himself as in the music of this singer, but at the same time find himself again, strengthened by his own resources.

  The singer was a short, broad-shouldered man; he seemed excessively strong and totally absent. He came out on the stage, stared at the light, and immediately began to sing. At the very first measure, the entire auditorium imitated the twining cord of the microphone, which the singer held in his hand. His voice was powerful but never loud. It didn’t come from inside his chest but existed independently of him, firm yet impossible to localize. What that voice produced was not song but rather the sounds made by someone who after long, intolerable brooding suddenly lets loose. Only as a whole did each of his numbers have a tone; its elements were quick, strident, bitter, menacing, sometimes stuttering and repetitive cries of pain (never, in any case, of relief).

  He never smiled. Once, with his heavy body, he jumped high into the air. Staring vacantly, he was able, with a voice which he took from outside and drove deep into himself, to tell about the people he had inside him—what he wanted most of all was to have nothing in common with anyone. He didn’t sing with feeling but searched frantically for a feeling which was as puzzling to him as to anyone else.

  For a long while, partly because he was accompanied only by rhythm instruments, he seemed lifeless, damned by his own machinery; but little by little the steady mechanical beat gave his voice the vibrant undertone with which, toward the end of his performance, though inwardly raging, storing up his almost vindictive disdain of the world, he broke through to a hymn that embraced his entire audience. Along with everyone else, Sorger learned what a “hymn” can be and saw this ungainly man, who resembled no one else, as a reluctant freedom singer. In earlier years he had revered him, though strictly speaking he had no right to; but now, as no more than an interested listener, he felt upraised to the singer’s level. Going out into the crowded but quiet street, he wondered why he had forgotten almost all the heroes of his youth, and was glad that, body to body in the slowly moving crowd, he could still hear the singer’s voice in its sounds, even in the scraping of his own shoes on the pavement.

  In the end, something changed after all: the city split into two parts, both of which became steadily stranger (and Sorger with them).

  Beyond the flat, narrow coastal strip and the pine woods where Sorger’s house was situated, the land rose gently to a densely populated, woodless hill and then sank to the level of the narrow bay that delimited the university campus. The road leading there crossed the hill in a barely perceptible trough, which daily use had transformed into a “pass.” The campus was not far from the Pacific (Sorger often walked there), and yet in time he came to feel that in crossing the little pass he was moving in and out of a mysterious gateway that held some vague meaning for him. On reaching this “summit,” he would involuntarily stop still or at least cast a brief glance over his shoulder. Though lined with the usual bungalows, identical on both slopes, this pass was to Sorger an important place where a “decision” would be made (though the only striking thing about it was the fog bank which in late afternoon rolled over it like a slow-moving avalanche and descended to the center of the city).

  Sometimes, when Sorger thought about the city, he saw the pass rising from it, unreal, uninhabited, and even without vegetation, sunk in the somber-gray granite of a stony mountain range; and toward the end of his stay his own person became just as unreal to him. Talking to no one, he had finally stopped talking to himself. For a time, long and short breaths had conveyed secret code messages, and he was almost relieved at the thought that he could manage without speech; it gave him a sense of perfection. Then he sensed a danger in his inner muteness—as though he were an inert object whose sound had died away forever—and he longed to have back the suffering of speech. Unreality meant that anything could happen, but he was no longer able to do anything about it. Wasn’t he resisting an overwhelming power? Sorger feared the decision, because he would have no part in it. He had lost his image of himself (which ordinarily enabled
him to take action); and there was no one—though he often looked around for the women from Earthquake Park—to set limits for him by touching him. He consistently did his work (preliminary notes for his projected paper), without side glances at anything else, without stopping, in a state of frenzied concentration. And the city moved away from him, as though, little by little, all the windows had been closed to him. Yet “being forgotten” had once been a pleasant thought, and “arranging to be forgotten,” an art.

  Far from creation, unapproachable in his pride, always running off without saying goodbye, he awaited his “punishment”; and meanwhile one of the singer’s hymns ran through his head. “The day of my greatness is at hand.”

  The days were still warm. Like most such rooms, his workroom on the campus could also serve as living quarters. He sometimes spent the night in the lab and slept on a cot. (His house was up for sale, people were already going in and out.) Next to the microscope there was a shaving brush, and next to that a coffee maker. The lab was situated in an unusually long, one-story glass building, which in the architect’s intention may have suggested a great skyscraper lying flat on a lawn. Sorger’s window looked out on the aluminum wall of a shed where research animals were kept (for another science), and right behind it lay the rippling, almost always calm water of the bay.

  The institute was divided lengthwise by a corridor; across from Sorger were the lecture halls, connected by double doors, which were always open when the halls were not in use, so that the eye could look from end to end of the long row of halls. To one side of Sorger was the windowless triple-locked room with filtered air where softly humming machines measured the age of rocks; to the other side, on heavy marble tables that would remain in place despite the most violent tremors, stood the seismographs, whose metal rollers ordinarily revolved slowly and quietly but could suddenly start racing with a shrill whistling sound. (One machine received sound waves from inside the earth, which produced a distant throbbing and intermittently, within the throbbing, a high, almost singing note.)

  Here, too, Sorger had “his domain”; that was outside in the direction of the bay, the lawn between the aluminum shed and the lab, which (like some railway compartments) had a separate door leading into the open. Beyond it there were eucalyptus trees and, protected by a fence, a special variety of fern, one of the oldest species in existence. There was a table on the grass and beside it an iron chair.

  When he had finished working, Sorger, as he often did, stayed a while doing nothing. The door to the corridor was open, and a dog ran past. Sorger called him, but the animal didn’t even raise his head. Then, announced by the jangling of keys, came the campus policeman. He, too, ignored the man in the lab.

  There was a typewriter on the table outside; a blank sheet of paper was in it. The sun shone through the paper, and it fluttered slightly; beside the typewriter lay an orange. Suddenly the sun had become an evening sun; orange and paper turned reddish. A stiff eucalyptus leaf clung for a moment to the back of the chair, then fell to the ground. A croaking was heard from the animal shed. Down below, crests of foam passed along the stone wall bordering the bay, not single waves, but a great flock, driven by the wind (or by a small earthquake far away) into the arm of the sea. The surface of the water remained smooth as far as the eye could see, but Sorger saw it at a slant, and thus tilted, it plunged headlong into the bay. Then the air in the foreground clouded and the fog descended in thicker and thicker layers on the crowns of the trees.

  The large campus, which Sorger now left, sloped so gently in the direction of the water that the incline was discernible only in the tapering substructure of the buildings. It was a quiet neighborhood, but always seemed lively, even without the purring of the electrical buses and the sound of steps, which seemed to start up all through the day as though coming from all directions, and to die down again; and in the midst of which a male or female cough might be heard as distinctly as nowhere else in the city. The whole campus was covered with fog, not white but hazy, and of uneven density, so that here and there the sun formed almost motionless circles of light in which the grass sparkled and whatever moved through it took on color for a moment. On one of the tables an empty beer can rolled slowly forward and backward in the fall wind that was still pressing down in the fog, keeping time with the sustained but tinnily distorted strokes of the campus clock, which offered an electronic imitation of chimes. Just then a large plane with a gleaming metallic belly flew low and almost soundless over the trees.

  A straight road led along the bay from the campus to the city. As far as the eye could see, cars and pedestrians were moving in the last rays of the sun, while already the upper stories of the high-rise buildings above them were bathed in gray mist.

  Looking back, one should have seen the crenelated university tower above the campus, which in the distance looked like a virgin forest; instead, there was only a great cloudy bubble, which had shot up from the ground and congealed—a dome of mist, gleaming metallically in the evening sun and, demarcated at its edges from the magnetic sky blue of the surrounding country, engulfing the whole campus.

  It was already dark when Sorger stopped at the top of the pass (walking had become harder and harder for him, but his memory had not, as usual, returned); the first trembling lights appeared in the distance, and at length the city, which had almost disappeared, widened into a vast glittering ribbon. The fog had not fully dispersed but had become so thin and translucent as to be scarcely visible in the darkness.

  Sorger turned to the midtown section, which unlike the residential areas hardly twinkled at all but formed a rigid luminous design, and saw himself floating along the housefronts. The place where he was standing (the “pass”) became as palpable as the ground under his feet, and he sat down on a bench at a bus stop.

  In the cars, which were passing in unbroken procession, the drivers were almost always alone; highlighted by the car behind, their silhouettes emerged from the darkness, and after a while the uninterrupted sequence of motionless black busts, passing singly (faceless heads surrounded by wreaths of light), formed a leisurely cavalcade despite the speed at which they were moving and the assortment of engine sounds; as if there were no drivers in the cars, but only silhouettes in identical, evenly lighted frames, unconnected with the seemingly autonomous four wheels that were carrying them through the night.

  This otherwise endless, transparent procession was punctuated here and there by the massive and opaque shuttle buses. Behind their dark-tinted panes, one could only guess at the existence of passengers. Still, an individual or a small group might become visible now and then when the spotlight was turned on above them. Then one would see not silhouettes but clearly delineated human figures, made especially distinct by the surrounding blackness. Most of the passengers thus illumined sat with their heads against the backrest and tilted slightly to one side; seen through the tinted windows, their features were reddish-yellow. These rapidly passing faces were images recalling a forgotten era of peace, an era of “sitting,” “thinking,” “reading,” “resting” figures which provoked a shock of recognition in the eyewitness by suddenly coming very close from far away.

  Then a brightly lit city bus turned into the stop, and in it Sorger saw the neighbor woman with her children. The children were talking to each other while the woman looked on in silence. He had noticed her because in the bus she had removed her hand from her forehead with almost the same gesture as he on the bench outside. On her face, he thought, there was a “touch of pain,” which (as occurred to him later) he had only sensed in himself. She smiled to herself and took off her scarf as if she were at home, and in the white light her magnificent hair seemed for a moment “a kingdom of its own.” He waved. When the bus started moving, she turned her head, saw him, looked at him from top to toe, but failed to recognize him. He jumped up, tapped on the window; but it was a different window with a different face, which looked back at him in surprise as the bus drove off; and then unseen, under the open night sky, Sor
ger blushed violently.

  At first he was only confused, and in his confusion he spoke to a woman who had got off the bus and was standing there undecided. Without looking at him, she said “No!”; and when he tried to explain, she (her face still averted) showed him her closed hand (not even a fist) and walked away, sauntered off into the darkness without him, a melody unknown to him in her body.

  Much later, when Sorger was able to remember and understand that decisive moment in his life, it seemed to him that it would have sufficed to “call a halt,” to “slow down” everything (his movements, thoughts, breathing), and then “nothing would have happened.” But in that moment, as he followed the woman for a few steps, his only thought was: But I have money. Then the ground at his feet became as distinct as if he had fallen. Silence as after an accident, a barking of dogs. The fall was sudden; the emptiness quite unexpected. Instead of “No one knows where I am,” it was now: “I no longer have anyone. Everyone else has someone.”

  He paced back and forth, incapable of thinking. He had thought himself indestructible. He stood still, sensing that where his projected scientific paper was concerned, he was doomed to failure; perhaps he’d be able to write it, but then no one would hear him. “No chaos!” That was all he could say: then like a rocket of speechlessness he shot out of space, which shrank and was gone.

  “Space prohibited!”

  The ocean became sinister, unreal, but so did the colony in the pine woods; the whole city was black, but so was every suggestion of nature. “Ye buses, take me away from here.”

  He paced back and forth; he stopped; he had forfeited not only his “pass” (for a moment it struck him as no more than a “hole” and then as a joke between the knuckles) but also all the spaces and places of his imagination: the table under the eucalyptus trees as well as the northern river, which, with the most poignant parting sorrow, he saw vanishing for all time behind an embankment.