by Peter Handke
The Avenue of the Present, where Sorger and Esch continued on their way, jogging now and then along with the many night joggers, took on life before them as a place in itself, with its own unique nooks, vistas, and eminences, just as a neighborhood takes form for people who have lived there for years: and, indeed, a number of shop windows displayed signs reading “Sunday Brunch on the Avenue,” as though this avenue, leading straight through the metropolis, were a traditional sightseer’s goal. On the left, the park appeared at the end of every cross street, as though inclining downward into the darkness, but here and there a light arose from its rocky hillocks; on the right, the waning moon, which at every street corner appeared slightly higher in the sky. Gradually—the air had grown noticeably cooler—the moon put on a wide halo, and at a crossing where the two walkers stopped outside an all-night grocery store (as though this were the place to part) vanished in a great cloud that reflected the city lights. Then swarms of vague shadows raced across the pavement, soon followed by the bodies belonging to them—great snow crystals, which descended with a softly crackling sound from the night sky. Each man said: “An hour ago I’d have taken these shapes for rats.”
They were now in the vast American region of “Snow Flurries” (vision of hilly countryside with wagon tracks and a single fence post) and had time to stand side by side in the snowfall. It was past midnight; but everywhere, far up and down the avenue, people were still afoot; some were even scraping the snow from car tops and trying to make snowballs.
Close by the two walkers, a woman hugged a man, who merely responded with a smile. But when, after a short conversation, the man tried to fondle the woman, she turned away. Speaking softly, he tried again, drawing her whole body to him; she stiffened and he turned away with a gesture of discouragement. His cheeks went violently red; and Sorger, who now noticed for the first time how young the two of them were, thought of the skiing instructor, whose face in the “chapel” had worn an expression of bitter disappointment. And he drew the young fellow entirely into himself—that is, into the shimmering worldwide snowy night, into the healing wintry space, to make him well again.
Then, behind the window of the grocery store, the sad people reappeared—a grotesque, mocking world—in the form of two elderly men (the one sitting behind the checkout counter, white; the other, standing in front of it, black). They avoided each other’s eyes as though—aside from the actual circumstance (which undoubtedly played a part) of their being “clerk” and “customer,” “black” and “white”—something more, something worse than personal enmity had erupted between them: the wretched incomprehension that blurs the features and muddles the mind—something that neither wanted and that made them both miserable.
Unlike the young couple on the street outside (where the man, with face averted, was timidly tickling the woman), the faces of the two old men in the grocery store were deeply pale. They did not speak; they hardly moved (except that the black man kept crumpling a brown paper bag). Both kept their eyes lowered; their lids quivered; not once did either appeal for support or help to the other customers, who stood congealed with their purchases, not even impatient, just as pale, silent, and forlorn as the protagonists. Only when the black man, soundlessly moving his lips, finally opened the door, did the clerk raise his face to the next customer, but he did not grin (as the witness outside had expected); he merely showed (to no one in particular) his dark, desperately wide-open, and for a moment earnestly imploring eyes.
Immediately thereafter, while Sorger’s eyes followed the black, who, occasionally throwing up his hands, disappeared down the avenue, a beam of light flashed over the two companions and all those who were still abroad, including a group some distance away, waiting in the darkness for a bus—and then continued down the street like the beam of a searchlight, though no cars were passing just then. The trembling of the ground and the wind that followed made it clear that the flash rising through the street grating came from the subway below.
Sorger looked at Esch, who had turned into the half shadow; Esch answered his look, and glancing at each other from time to time, both went their common way: first helplessly rounding their eyes in a fervent plea for counsel, then half closing them like “enlightened ones,” then almost roguishly winking at each other, and finally bidding each other goodbye with pure veneration (as if they knew that they could also have been enemies)—until their eyes turned away from each other into the nocturnal city, where snow and the autumn wind pursued the people descending the stairs into the subway, and where night plane followed night plane, occasionally flaring up in the sky, as though their course were just one more avenue.
In the end, Esch held out his calling card (the card of a “sad businessman”) and jangled his “European keys” as a sign that he was capable of going home (it passed through Sorger’s mind that he himself no longer had any keys at all); thrusting a positively puckish face into Sorger’s, Esch castigated him for his “absentmindedness” and recited a few lines from a poem: “The passage of beauty was as brief/as a dream in the snowy light,” and as a farewell gift gave his “compatriot” his hat.
Had the catastrophe only been postponed for a short time? No one would die. Sorger had the power to wish, and the repose of the horizontal world set in. The wind changed. Snow and leaves danced up the street: “There fly we all!”
Strange to say, the hotel entrance was below street level: from it a few steps led to the dazzlingly bright though deserted lobby, in a far corner of which the elevator man had fallen asleep on a stool, while the voice of the night clerk, who was himself invisible from the entrance, welcomed Sorger, whom he had recognized in the hall mirror, with the words: “Got in late?” For a moment the air from outside poured in through the slowly closing door. Then it was suddenly very still in the lobby, and Sorger put in a transatlantic phone call.
He sat down to wait on a red-upholstered chair along the side wall, next to the sleeping elevator man, whose white hair was combed smoothly back. Only the house sounds were still audible: the rattling of a ventilator and the clicking of an ice machine as it spat out more and more cubes. A runner, as red as the chair, extended to the rear wall, and the brass cage of the elevator diffused its patina of age throughout the lobby, which at first sight (like the whole hotel, for that matter) seemed only sturdy. When had he last had time for such humble, undramatic, merely heartwarming objects? “Do I want anything more? Is it not my dream to live content, surrounded by the worldly-heavenly charm of things?”
Then the phone rang and Sorger staggered to the booth; he talked excitedly and at the same time felt a strange pain, which cut through him like a scalpel, from the center of his chest to the top of his skull, accompanied by a tormented sound, which was his own special and personal laughter. (“You having a party over there?” he was asked.)
After phoning, he remained seated in the dark booth, without feeling, barely alive. He hadn’t even spoken of a homecoming, and no curiosity had been shown. The only response to his expression of his feelings had been an embarrassed laugh. Sorger learned that he was not needed. He didn’t even mind; he sat sweating, preserved the other voice in his ear, and wanted to keep saying the same word. At the same time, he silently counted the stairs leading from the street down into the entrance hall. He wished for those he loved, and they came (they had all been in the adjoining room the whole while); and at the same time the ocean stretched out between them.
“He’s just an animal.”
Who said that? He opened the door of the phone booth and through an opening in the key panel saw the night clerk talking with the telephone operator, who was sitting caged at her switchboard. The words seemed to refer to none of those present; yet in spite of himself, Sorger looked at the dozing elevator man, and instantly noticed that he had a bleeding wart on his cheek and that the epaulettes were missing from his uniform. And again the night clerk said to the woman through the opening: “He’s just an animal—an animal gone mad. And there’s only one way to deal with mad animals: exte
rminate them.”
A deeper night descended like a sudden (and soon incomprehensible) foreboding over the cheerfully lighted basement. The ventilator rattled for a moment as though the four characters present were riding in a ghostly train: a space-time jolt turned their faces into murderers’ masks, from which poured the invariably evil slogans of the violent past, not only of other countries but also of this one, which the foreigner had sometimes looked upon in all its length and breadth as “God’s country.” That slight jolt sufficed to transform the day-bright lobby, along with the City of Light outside, into a jungle bristling with the shadows of bayonets. A train screeched, the ticking of teletype mingled with the sound; and in the shadowy face of the night clerk Sorger recognized an Indian mask signifying a man “losing his soul”: two mice sitting on the cheeks were eating up the soul. But then it turned out that the clerk had only been reading the newspaper out loud.
Which then was the truth: the beautiful prelude or the hideous cacophony of the end? “What do I want? What is real for me?”
Real was the child’s drawing over the key panel; real were the tired, unmoving eyes of the telephone operator; real was the ceremonious gesture with which the elevator man, awakened by the loud voice, invited Sorger into his elevator with its glass chandelier and red-velvet bench; real were the almost parallel strands of the old man’s hair stiff from wet-combing, his sloping shoulders, and the shiny patent-leather shoes. Standing with his back to his passenger during the leisurely ride to the penthouse, the man treated Sorger to an incomprehensible sermon, at the end of which he raised the two fingers, between which he was holding the bank note Sorger had given him as a tip, in a gesture of dismissal: “That is something!” Real was what was peaceful.
The short corridor smelled of paint. Sorger noticed that his door, which had been green that morning, had been painted dark red. Wasn’t there a store that had shone bright with pyramids of food the day before but on his way home last night had changed into a burned-out hole, where the only sign of food were a few apples with burst skins lying in the ashes? (And the back of his coat showed deep gashes that seemed to have been made by razor blades.)
Sorger entered the room with one of the singer’s songs in his head. It was about a man who, “to keep away from the hole of death,” had even been willing “to ferret and pry like a cheap detective”: “Born to win.” The bed was turned down as though for two, and the bedside lamps lit. The folds in the sheet figured a map of the world. In one breath Sorger experienced the time from his birth far away in Europe to the present, as a gentle, steady upward movement, and felt himself grow strong.
He opened the curtains and blinds (flakes scraping against the glass and the blackness) and looked through his notes of the past few years. In the process, he saw how radically his ideas about his projected paper had changed: his interest in enduring natural forms had been augmented with a feeling for the episodic configurations that can crop up anywhere (and not just in nature) when “I, Sorger” became, in a manner of speaking, “their moment” —and could there be a terminology for unique happenings that slip away, leaving, at the most, words and images in the memory?
The smooth heavy thing which Sorger now saw in front of him and which was also taking up space inside him was a glass mountain, which barred his way home, and he looked across at the white bed as a possible escape. Would it not be fitting to narrate these brief dreams, which could not be substantiated because they were too bound up with his innermost being? Did this brief “circuit of forms” not on every occasion fill him with enthusiasm as a lucky insight, which then demanded permanence in a form and thus communicated to him an idea of true human work, which would eliminate feelings of disgust and the sorrow of parting between him and the world? But how would it ever be possible to “narrate” forms which knew no “little by little”?
Sorger spread out his notebooks, each with its special color, on the table. The tabletop became a sort of geological map, with different colors indicating the different geological eras. He was seized with an intense but vague feeling of tenderness: naturally, he wished for “more light”! He stood motionless, bent over the varicolored pattern, which in places was pale with age, until he himself became a tranquil color among the others. He leafed through the notebooks and saw himself disappearing in the writing; in the story of stories: a story of sun and snow. Now he would be able to win everyone to his view, and the dark terrestrial globe revealed itself as a machine that could be mastered and even understood down to its innermost core.
“Falsification!” But this was no longer an accusation; rather, it was a salutory idea: he, Sorger, would write the Gospel of Falsification; and he triumphed in the thought of being a falsifier among falsifiers. (An isolated individual was capable only of patchwork.) Still, he saw himself capable of facing up to failure, and already he was vanishing through “his” arcade. In the brook there was water, in the water there were pieces of ice.
In bed, with the feel of the mattress, he threw off the last traces of forsakenness and, while turning out the light, wished everyone well. The objects in the dark room spoke with the voices of relatives. He saw two eyes by which he felt loved; and a voice that was far away or quite close to his ear said: “I love you.” He didn’t breathe, desire came to him, and then he was asleep.
Europe stretched out below him, a labyrinth loud with night sounds, strident with auto horns. He saw the Great Manuscript in which his life was laid bare, and actually read a sentence in it (which stood out bright from the rest of the writing): “He could only be himself, and the mirror, nothingness, and gravity touched one another.”
It was a sleep of metamorphoses: the arm thrust between knees became a tree, the fingers were roots growing into the earth. And he was not alone: Lauffer’s unwieldy shoulder twitched under a wide suspender strap in the telephone room of the Indian village in Alaska; the neighbor woman on the Pacific Ocean arched her eyebrows. Each charmed the whole earth with the face of a famous actor, and Sorger was the joker which encompassed them all.
Then they were together in a snowfield under the bright sun, sitting at a table and holding a family council (which included the stranger). A fruit tree, with branches like elk’s antlers, was laden with large, yellowish-white early apples, many of which were under the snow.
Yet his senses remained alert: through closed eyelids he saw the graying dawn, and through the connecting door listened to the man in the next room, who, without a letup, cursed all men and all things between heaven and earth in a litany that became more and more violent.
His pillow felt like the touch of a baby’s bare foot, and as he woke there was within him a child who quietly, without batting an eyelash, playing with its own breath, looked out of the window. Everything in him that he wanted to be organic was organic; and everything that he wanted to be inorganic was inorganic.
“It’s me!”
Once Sorger had conceived the idea of a successful day: on such a day the fact of morning and evening, light and darkness ought to be beauty enough. During his last hours in New York he had an intimation of such a day. He got up quickly and quietly, washed “in the water of this city,” savored the long dawn in a calm yet festive mood, as though the daylight were being delayed a little just for his benefit. He was naked and would have liked to show himself in that state. He felt freedom in his armpits, and a Latin sharpness in his mind; even if he collapsed, it would not be death. The snow had stopped, and as the sky cleared, something that resembled a runaway house pet that was just coming back appeared in the west (“There you are again”): it was the declining, deep-yellow moon; the stars glittered all about as though to show the way. He saw near and far at once, so that, along with the dawn-black birds flying past the penthouse windows to the left and right, the day-bright hills of New Jersey appeared on the horizon. But from the unseen avenues far below, a yellow glow extended over the first floors of the buildings which were otherwise steeped in shadow, and here and there the headlights of hidden cars
circled the upper rows of windows. The park had sunk into the city, and the gray of the reservoir rose to view; the soft color made the oval surface large and soothing; the dark gulls resting on the water showed the white of their feathers whenever they rose for a moment into the air. The fringe of snow on the curving shore looked like frozen surf. The first joggers were already circling the reservoir, perceiving the world with their thighs, as it were, as reliable as the water itself, which with the rising sun quickly turned blue and glittered, now traversed by shady wind trails, which thrust forward, halted, and changed direction—until at last the radiance of morning detached itself from the water, became daylight, and evenly filled the whole city. In his thoughts Sorger was down by the reservoir, looking up at the room where he stood breathing the thin, invigorating air. Over all the roofs, smoke passed like a man, and powdery snow fell from all the trees in the park.
“This is the present!”
Every glance over the city, it seemed to him, was a recurrence (and confirmation) of happenings experienced elsewhere and believed lost. The hotel room was traversed by the quavering shadows of birds (and airplanes), and on the top floor of the neighboring building someone moved through rooms spotted with sunlight, carrying a pile of sheets, which turned bright and dark in their passage like the water of a brook flowing over brightly colored pebbles. A jogger with a dog running behind him rose into the air, turned into a sea gull, and was reflected in the water. “Build up a feeling for repetition. Go down and mingle with the people.” But first a chambermaid came in and said: “God bless you. Touch home soon.” (And, breathing loudly, looked at him.)
Sorger went to a church where, personally led to a seat by a man clothed in black, with a white carnation in his buttonhole (“Where do you wish to pray?”), he attended Sunday Mass. (Sunday had made its first appearance with a small number of cars rocking like boats on near-deserted, water-gray Madison Avenue far in the distance.) The faces of the faithful were reflected in the bronze covers of the collection boxes, and in making his contribution Sorger felt himself to be one of the community of money, while the hands of the ushers, tapping on the railings, made the sound of bakers taking bread out of the oven. The whole world swayed when the bread was transformed into the Lord’s body and, simili modo, the wine into the Lord’s blood.
