Slow Homecoming

by Peter Handke

  The plan of his life was destroyed: there was no longer a “field”; nowhere; gone was even the possibility of orientation by the stratification of the ground under his feet. Along with the Beautiful Water, he too was drying out; he burst; his skin was pulled off; and from under the earth “the living corpse” rose up into him.

  Sorger paced back and forth, conscious of having seen through himself. Hitherto his moments of self-knowledge had shaken him alive, but now, with the loss of “his” places and spaces, which had meant a secure future, he saw himself as a bungling cheat: “Your places and spaces don’t exist. It’s all up with you.”

  Who said that? What was this voice that had held him down ever since he had consciousness? For a moment he heard a buzzing inside him, as though he were his own Evil One; and saw a shapeless carcass: his soul, which, if this unceasing voice of condemnation were to be believed, was due to be separated from his body; an afterimage of the cat which he had once taken with him on an airplane and which in its terror had put on a death’s-head.

  A few years earlier, just after his arrival on the West Coast, Sorger had experienced an earthquake. Sitting on the edge of a swimming pool, he suddenly saw the water slant. The air was full of dust, a strange light prevailed, great mountains seemed to be moving. He felt the tremor, in fact he toppled over, but he couldn’t believe it. And now, likewise, he felt that his end was near but at the same time impossible: “Me” die? How beautiful were the smell of food from the houses, the evening light, even the sound of someone spitting in the darkness.

  Then, luckily, when the supreme judge went into greater detail, his voice brought up more and more refutable not to say preposterous accusations (finding fault with Sorger’s name, reproaching him for not having helped to build the houses in the region, and in the end even accusing him of “failing to offer resistance” in the days of government by violence—Sorger had hardly been born at the time).

  Walking back and forth, back and forth, he had gradually lulled himself to the point of saying nothing but numbers.

  Then a car stopped alongside him and his neighbor’s voice rang out in their common language: “Hey, neighbor.” In the next moment, as Sorger got into the happy heap, he thought: “Be thanked, ye powers.” He had been waiting so intensely for something that he saw the car as “revelation,” and his own skull as a “dome of expectancy.” Certain that he would not have found his way home by himself, he put his hand in the crook of the man’s elbow. To whom had a man ever been so palpable? “Divine fellow man.”

  Sorger followed his neighbor to his house. He stood for a long while in the hall, as though that were a special place. As he stepped into the living room, the experience of the “threshold”: he was back in the game of the world again.

  He even said several times to the wife and children: “It’s me.” To sit at the table with them; to lift the children up (they let him); to look at the food (ineffable radiance of meat); just to be sitting under a roof. That evening Sorger basked in the joy of certainty. This was the home of a family who unassumingly lived a possible life; and he himself was part of this house where the objects were beautiful and the people innocent.

  It was an evening of compliments. He said to the couple: “I cherish you”; and with the same air of almost momentous gravity (to the husband): “In Europe, I shall miss the sight of your striped cotton shirts”; while (to the wife) he praised “the natural polygonal pattern in the crust of your white bread.” And he recognized himself in his politeness; that evening it fostered the idea of a “country” embodied by the polite Sorger; indeed, his name suggested the province that the bearer (and countless homonyms) hailed from; and he ended up speaking his almost forgotten dialect so naturally that no one saw anything amiss.

  That evening he cast off all the stiffness of the usually rather formal guest; he propped his elbows on the table, plucked his hosts by the sleeve, and studied their faces with candid familiarity. Unable to be alone for a single moment, he followed his hosts all over the house—the husband to the cellar, the children to their room, the wife to the kitchen. The beauty of the threshold! He poured the drinks, he put the children to bed; they told him their most private secrets, things unknown to their parents. Later, while talking, he paced the living-room floor, as if he were the master of the house. “You’re so far away,” he’d say to his hosts, and ask them to move closer. Provided he took (sole) responsibility for every sentence he addressed to them—keeping his compulsive logorrhea under control—it would help him to make his peace with the human world. With every word that Sorger (with difficulty) uttered that evening (Shape your words slowly, he thought), he gained admittance to this house, to its people—to its “country” (Only if I create the form, shall I be with these people), and he who had lost his large spaces immersed himself studiously in the smallest ones.

  In the house, the night was bright; there was a full moon. The children were playing in their room. In the clear light of that evening, where everything settled down in a new stratum of space, the “melancholy gambler” (this formula, he felt sure, was the key to his existence, and not only to this moment of it) saw the face of the woman across from him as he had never before seen any face.

  He started—though not for the first time—by noticing her hair; he delighted in its sheer abundance, in her curls, in the line of her part. Little by little the details of her face opened up to him: their beauty was beyond question, but now they became dramatic: one feature guided his eye (he had no desire to be anything more than an eye) to the next. This is happening for my benefit, he thought. But he was not staring at the woman; his gaze, rather, put the finishing touch to his politeness, for in perceiving her he became invisible, converted into a mere human presence. Again he saw himself transformed into a “receiver,” as when he had observed the polygonal pattern in the mud of the riverbank. But here, instead of concentrating his powers, he managed, in reconstituting the woman’s face, to expend every last one of the energies he found there, until at length the ability to assimilate another person (hitherto dependent on sympathy and confined to particular individuals) became in itself an all-embracing new energy: at present he had no other, but that sufficed.

  The first thing to come alive for him in that face was the slightly protruding upper lip, which, by casting a faint shadow on the closed mouth, made it seem open: in any case, Sorger saw it, not as mute, but as prepared to speak. Without fuss or pretense those lips would find the right words to say to someone, and even when done speaking, they would remain eloquent for that person. There was nothing unusual about her cheeks (in inventing this face, his unreservedly receptive glance found nothing more that was striking in it) except that they seemed firm, thus giving Sorger a momentary impression of spaciousness, which he could not hold fast but had to conjure up over and over again. And how helpful were the eyes (they too, with nothing unusual about them, solely as a living fact), darkened by shadow and all-understanding in their mere “darkness”; and how needful of protection the mere fact of the high forehead (calling upon him to act and bring the drama to its conclusion), this sensitively shimmering, one might have said bonelessly vulnerable, ever-luminous curvature. At length Sorger became something more than a self-forgetful beholder of happenings in someone else’s face; an overpoweringly gentle manipulation had incorporated his limited personal life into the face of mankind, in whose openness it would go on forever.

  All the while, he had been sitting at the table playing chess with the husband, while the wife was reading. Now he stood up and wandered about the house, removing himself from the face, which nevertheless remained close to him. And then from a distance, in the increasing shadow under the lamplight, this woman (just as the people in the darkened shuttle buses had appeared to him as embodiments of “sleeping” or “waking”) became a “contemporary,” an impression substantiated by the slight double chin resulting from the lowering of her head: “We come from the same region.” On the throat a small circle of light: “Strong enough
for two”; and though her hand seemed to hover in midair, one finger of it rested firmly on her book: “As down to earth as you.”

  Sorger resumed his place at the table and, instead of moving his chessman, began to speak. Himself almost invisible, he looked into the faces of the others, as though already separated from them, not by a leap, but by a very gradual lapse of time, which (as he spoke) carried him away, and which, as he told his story, he experienced as an unchangingly gentle contact; and thus, while circumspectly talking himself free, he thought: What I have thought to myself at any time is nothing; I am only what I have succeeded in saying to you.

  For another little while the children’s laughter in the next room; then the distant cry of gulls. By then Sorger was calm enough to tell them quite simply how space had been “taken away” on his imaginary “pass.” “Suddenly one of my faculties failed me, I lost my special sense for earth forms. From one minute to the next, my forms ceased to be namable or even worth naming.” At that point he managed to raise his voice and say: “Listen to me. I don’t want to perish. At the moment of losing all that, I longed to return, not only to a country, not only to a certain region, but to the house where I was born. And yet I wanted to go on living abroad, in the company of a few people who are not too close to me. I know I’m not a scoundrel. I don’t want to be an outsider. I see myself walking in the midst of the crowd, and I believe I am just. I have friendly dreams, even about people who have wished me dead, and I often feel the strength for lasting reconciliation. Is it presumptuous of me to want harmony, synthesis, and serenity? Are completion and perfection an obsession with me? I regard it as a duty to become a better man, a better myself. I would like to be good. Sometimes I feel the need to be wicked, and then I am pursued by the thought of punishment; but then again I feel the need of eternal purity. Today I thought of salvation, but it wasn’t God that came to mind, it was culture. I have no culture; I shall continue to have no culture as long as I am incapable of crying out; as long as I whimper my complaint instead of shouting it out loud. I don’t want to languish with my grievances, I want to be mighty in my outcries. My cry is: I need you! But whom am I talking to? I must find my fellows. But who is my fellow? In what country? In what time? I need the certainty of being myself and being responsible for others. I am capable of living! I feel the power to Say how it Is; yet I would like to be nothing at all and to say nothing at all: to be known to everyone and no one; pervasively Alive. Yes, at times I feel entitled to a cosmos. And my time is Now; now is Our Time. I therefore lay claim to the world and to this century—because it is my world and my century.”

  Sorger saw himself move his head like a ludicrous but proud animal (and at the same time pump his elbows in a pathetic attempt to flap his wings). After his long speech he craved something sweet, and the lady of the house brought him a piece of strudel. He wanted music to go with it, and then he asked his neighbors to tell him their story. Probably to show they were on his side, they began with their mishaps, but soon dropped that, and finally—serene narrative gradually turning into excited dialogue, each playing his part and frequently interrupting the other—told him how they had come together. Sorger thanked them for the “hot meal” and added: “Please don’t forget me.”

  Afterwards, as he was leaving (with nothing particular in mind, he took the shortest way through the woods to the beach), it occurred to him that they had laughed at his last words, as though to ridicule the very idea. And so he added, speaking to himself: “I would like to sit under your lampshade soon again.”

  The night was warm, without fog. While still among the trees, he enjoyed the feel of the sea sand under his feet. Swarms of leaves blew through the pine woods, clung to the grass as to a wire fence, and turned out to be dried seaweed. A bicycle sound in the sand was made by a running dog. The wind roared in the stunted pines as in a forest of tall trees. Sorger had a sensation of air on his face, as though he had rediscovered reality—the air of happiness.

  Suddenly, as he rounded a jutting dune (it might have been a street corner), the ocean roared up at him in a white wave. The spray, flung high into the night sky, seemed for a moment to stand still and only then, mingling with new, lighter-colored foam, fell to the ground in brownish flakes. A moment later the ocean, along with the moon and the wave-skimming gulls, resumed its customary aspect; its crashing and pounding made Sorger think of a factory as he walked along. He didn’t so much as glance at the water, but looked only at his feet, which plodded over the sand far below him, as though in bird’s-eye view. “Shut the doors of your senses.”

  He began to run; closing his eyes, he ran for a while; then, still with closed eyes, he walked more and more slowly. A streetcar passed through the surf with an old-fashioned screeching of rails. As Sorger went on, the ocean sound changed from the clatter of an old-time farm wagon to the noises of his past. Boards were being unloaded in a thudding, screeching sawmill; heedless moving men were handling heavy furniture. The sounds were irregular, broken now and then by an almost blissful silence, evidently meant to last, within which one could detect only the sounds of a peaceful household, milk rising to a boil, boiling water, the click of knitting needles. But then the handle of a bucket fell off. (As though the sea could be gathered in a saucepan.) Then someone dove into a swimming pool, and someone’s face was slapped. Amid the rising street noise, a muffled shot was heard, and a body hit the ground. Cans of milk were loaded onto a platform. A brief clinking of censers, then the screams of the wounded. The rumbling of tanks; a crashing and splintering; a moment of war. Then the stillness of peace; or was it? Sorger opened his eyes, and before them an antique colonnade stretched across the sea into the horizon.

  Behind the last column the moon was going down, and for a brief moment there was a moonset sky, a cloud field lit from below, the color of ironstone; and then the whole sky was black, except for the stars vaguely twinkling in the sea mist.

  Sorger felt the ocean at the back of his head, which became a large, very cold place. The crests of foam were snow-covered mountain ranges. The air brought him a smell of fire, and for the first time on the coast he had a feeling of autumn. Ocean, autumn, and colonnade: the world was growing old again. There he stood as though the season were his destination. His body became perceptible through the threefold dividing line between earth, water, and air, and he experienced something he had not known for a long time, desire in the form of an enormous longing to escape from his own heart and lungs; while at the same time he looked forward to his bed.

  He hurried back to his house. In the neighbors’ empty bedroom the bedside lamps had been on since early evening. Husband and wife were sitting in the half-darkened living room; the husband was holding his wife’s fingers. The river of return; in the warmth of Sorger’s bloodstream, the Indian woman, quivering smoothness, approached. A tiredness came over him in which he wanted only to lie in the dark and listen. A ticking clock sounded like a cat scratching its neck; and then the fabled black-and-white beast filled the countryside with its purring.

  Sorger lay down and, while the beam of the Land’s End lighthouse flashed regularly into the room, waited without impatience for the ideas that come with dreams. He even ventured to think of his child, something he had been unable to do in all these years; at the first attempt, his head had turned to stone. Now only his face felt heavy; it had a hot clenched fist in it. But his self-pity didn’t trouble him; for in it he sensed a desire for a faith that would give him form and enable him to think for more than brief moments of what he loved. “When I see her again, I shall worship her.”

  Gratefully he pulled up the blanket. Women and children were what made him real. In his sleep, a foam-born woman arose out of the sea and lay down with him. All night they lay side by side, eye to eye, mouth to mouth.

  “A few sunrises later” (that indeed is the impression these last few days on the West Coast made on him) Sorger saw himself packing his suitcase in the glow of a still-autumnal morning. He was about to leave for Euro
pe. The house was almost empty, the curtains and carpets were gone; one room still had a wooden table and a folding chair in it, the other just the bed, which had been moved catty-cornered. Sorger had thrown many, and given a few, things away; into his suitcase, along with the carefully stacked photograph albums and notebooks of the last few years, went the few objects of daily use that were dear to him. He began to dress for the trip: a linen shirt frayed with age, which fitted soothingly around his wrists; a solemn-blue “European” worsted suit, the trousers of which clung slightly at the knees; and thin woolen socks, which warmed him pleasantly from bottom to top; and his laced boots from the North. Looking down, he made a speech of thanksgiving to his faithful garments.

  The air was fresh and clear: “A fine morning, an American morning.” The sun shone on the floor of the emptied room as in the lounge of a ship, and the passenger stood beside his packed suitcase, reading his last mail and casting an occasional look at the house next door, where there was movement in every room. The children were getting ready for school, the husband for the office. With all the hectic excitement, there were moments of perfect calm: the husband bent over the papers he had spread out on a slanting desk like a missal; his wife sipped tea with an elegance that was almost grotesque; and the children, with their school bags already on their backs, stood hypnotized by a top that was spinning on the table.

  Lauffer wrote that the river was frozen, that at first he had worn a woolen helmet but had then taken to going about with his shirt unbuttoned like the Indians; that his paper was “amazing” him “more and more” (that he felt obliged to explore every bypath that presented itself, and invariably it stretched out ad infinitum), that he saw himself engaged in a kind of ideal competition with Sorger, since Sorger’s aim was to get away from matter and his to increase and enhance it; that his problem, accordingly, was too much “speech,” while Sorger was threatened with “speechlessness”; and finally, that the cat was becoming “increasingly regal and unapproachable” and would soon be uttering its first word.