by Peter Handke
The row of pine trees at the end of the street proves to be the entrance to a cemetery. Now and then a drunk is shoved out of the nearby inn, stands at the door for a while singing defiance, then suddenly falls silent and goes away. It is a large cemetery. Several parallel paths lead through it to the south. Over them towers a statue of Christ on the cross, who—as in no existing painting—is first glimpsed from the side. The paths are long and narrow, and in the archway at the end of them the approach to the Morzg Forest shimmers green. Now and then a slow funeral procession moves past, bells toll, and for a moment a stranger walking behind the coffin becomes a friend or relative of mine.
This approach is a wide, flat, almost treeless meadow, suggesting a recently dried-up lake; windy and, after the balmy stillness of the cemetery, often wintry cold. Part of it is used for sporting events, and a random passerby may be called upon to play the role of referee. All in all, the children here are more trusting than anywhere else; they draw grownup strangers into conversations about the weather, which usually begin with “Cold today, isn’t it?” At one point, one skirts the long wooden poles of a paddock, and on foggy days one seems to be looking through Japanese sliding doors. An old farmhouse has been preserved and fitted out with old-fashioned trappings, a well, a watering trough, a wooden bench, and a great pile of firewood—but all that doesn’t add up to a farm. Now the forest can again be seen: brown (inky at dusk), and taking up most of the horizon; yet narrow; in places, that is, one can see through to the other side. To the right, high above the forest, the truncated pyramid of the Untersberg; to the left, farther in the background, a jagged cliff which, with its regular fluting, shines in the sunlit haze like a giant scallop shell. The road leads straight into the forest; the meadow is part of it, a vast clearing.
The first indication that one is in the forest (apart from the wooden benches) is the hazelnut bushes with their catkins, which wave in the slightest breeze—fine, densely parallel lines, falling like rain in diagrammatic sketches. The trees are dark, intermeshing spruces; each tree—and consequently the whole forest—is about to start spinning.
A wide, straight road—apparently the main entrance—leads into the forest. The threshold feeling is a calm that leads one onward without purpose. Once inside, you find that the forest, which looked level from outside, conceals a low chain of hills running eastward (visible from outside the forest only when there is snow on the ground and the rising ground shows through). The people of Salzburg are familiar with the hill of Hellbrunn, with its park and the castle at its feet; they go there on excursions. But few have heard of the Morzg Forest in between, and hardly any know that a part of this forest lies on top of a rocky hill. Here there are only logging roads and irregular paths, and you seldom see a walker; at the most you may hear a jogger’s panting and see the skin of his face, mask replacing mask, change from dead to alive and back again at every step. A picket fence in a large bomb crater; a part of the wood—a circle the size of a face, suggesting yet another mask—seems to have been gnawed by rodents. On closer scrutiny, what seemed to be a wooden partition proves to be a target, and what looked like a bench in front of it is the shooting stand that goes with it. In origin, this rock is closely related to the civilized Hellbrunn hill. In an interglacial period, the melting ice deposited masses of rubble in a Garda-sized lake and with the calcareous water cemented them into the present rocky hill. This one, however, is not nearly as high (perhaps four stories) as the one in Hellbrunn, and scarcely longer than a long city block. In a schematic drawing it would be represented as an escarpment to the south of Salzburg, rising gently and then descending steeply (with sheer cliffs at the top).
From the road, you first glimpse the western foot of the hill and at the same time, like an enclave of color in the mass of spruces, a lighter-colored, almost parklike zone of acacias, alders, and hornbeams, through which a number of possible paths lead uphill; here the only conifers are larches, under which the grass is unusually soft and thick. At the edge of this deciduous copse there is an enormous beech tree. Its roots rise like cliffs, twining around an old boundary stone and almost concealing it. Directly behind it, still at the bottom of the hill, a water hole is partially hidden beneath a thick layer of leaves. At first sight, one takes it for a rain puddle, but this water is clear and rises in almost imperceptible jets through the blackish leaves from deep underground. It is drinkable (a secret supply in case of emergency). One is struck by the rounded stones under the grass, ordered as regularly and compactly as cobbles in a road. They are many-colored, and on each one the lichens have etched a distinct picture script, as different from one to the next as traditions originating in different continents. A red, bell-shaped hump is a replica in miniature of Ayer’s Rock in Australia, the largest monolith on earth. Another shows an Indian hunter’s tale. At dusk, when the vegetation above them disappears, these stones reveal their secret writing and become a somber-white Roman road, leading into the forest.
Up the hill the cobbles lose themselves and the Roman road becomes a sunken lane with wagon tracks. The village children have made clay balls, which have dried in the meantime, but now when breathed on give off a fresh smell of rain. Often, when I look up, a lone bird is sitting in a larch tree; small as it may be, it seems strangely large silhouetted against the slender branches of this kind of tree. The rust-brown windward sides of the tree trunks, which point the way from east to west, remain white for a long while after a snowstorm, and it looks as if these trees were all birches. When it rains, there is nothing blacker than the elephant legs of the beech trees.
The gully into which autumn leaves float at any time of year ends at a woodpile; at that point a night-black thicket begins—the only place where the forest shows anything like depth; the black hole tempts one to enter, but not even a child could squeeze through the dense growth. In addition, numerous alders rise abruptly from the ground; these are not trees with trunks and branches but crisscrossing poles (which in a storm are not uprooted but break in the middle); joined and reinforced by creepers, they form a kind of barrier before the underbrush.
This network catches the leaves, which in retrospect stand for the whole forest. They are windblown beech leaves, light-colored and oval—the oval shape accentuated by the grooves, which in every leaf radiate from the center to the edge, the color an even light-brown. For a moment, playing cards seem to be hanging on the bushes—and then they are lying on the ground all over the forest, sparkling and fluttering in the slightest breeze, reappearing wherever you go—a reliable game, whose only color is a gleaming light-brown.
The next strip of pines is rather wide-spreading for the species. Through them one sees, hardly a stone’s throw away, the steep ridge, which instantly strikes me as “something fought for.” Here the collective cry of a flock of birds flying overhead can sound like a burst of gunfire. Part of the sound is the sharp click of a stone falling somewhere in the silence—the ground is covered by moss all about—on another stone. The little white clouds flitting between the trees have turned out to be deer escutcheons, more of them with each glance. (They are part of the card game.) Or behind the trees appear the village children’s faces, strangely separated from their bodies, like the faces of saints in old pictures. In the spruce woods, often said to be frightening or sinister, it is fairly quiet and dry in time of wind and rain, and palpably warmer than in the open country (powerful heartbeat when you lean your forehead against a tree trunk). In the course of time, the fallen pinecones begin to shimmer light-brown.
On the hilltop there is neither a panoramic view nor the benches that ordinarily go with one. But the tree roots invite you to sit down and rest, and you can let your legs dangle over the cliff. The city to the north is invisible; to the south, only a broad grassy meadow shows through. The little cliff, as pale gray as a termite’s nest (it obviously provided the material for some of the tombstones in the cemetery just crossed), merges directly with the steep southern slope. Here the space between the trees is studd
ed with stones that seem to have been carried down by landslides. At first sight, the white of the many birch trees suggests a snowstorm. In time, the green of the empty field below becomes warm and deep, and extends far beyond the city. Across it cuts a path on which a child once ran after a man, jumped up on his back, and was carried from there on. Another time, a real horseman merged with his horse in the darkness, to form a single gigantic creature. From a distance, the dialect of the people walking down below sounds like all the languages in the world rolled into one.
On the hilltop the village children are about the only passersby. With their varied costumes, they are the bright color in the forest. The forest is their big playground, and they are bursting with information about it. Question: “Do you know the forest well?” Answer: “Sure do!” Even if you don’t hear a thing and there’s no one in sight, the hill is certain to be full of them. At the first peal of thunder, figures can be seen running homeward between the trees.
The pale-gray crest road running straight westward looks something like a military highway. Bare saplings screech as they rub together in the wind, or send out muffled messages in Morse code. The resinous spots on the bark of the trees mark bullet holes. Lightning has struck off the main branch of a solitary beech, and the bare trunk shows three bright patches of color: white where the limb broke off, the blue-gray of the southern lee side, the rust-yellow of the windward side (black in the rain). The white flowers in the grass turn out to be animal teeth. And maybe a dog will come running out of the thicket, his tongue flapping from side to side like a whiplash, and silently sniff at the hollows of your knees from behind. The sharp-edged nagelfluh niches along the road repeat the pattern of the ancient cliff tombs. But they are empty. Light-brown beech leaves have blown in. With their ovals and parallel lines, they radiate eternal peace.
Then comes the slope, where the only perpetual spring in the forest has its source (today a trickle, tomorrow a torrent). Farther down, it has formed a little valley, with the three classical terraced steps. Now, at the eastern foot of the hill, the long-awaited cave, sealed by an iron door. Dripping is heard from within, mingled with vibrant sounds, as of someone beating a drumskin lightly. Again the children provide information: they’ve been in there “lots of times”; no bats; mushrooms are grown in there.
Here, on the level stretch just before the village (already its houses can be seen through the trees), lies the pond the wanderer has been looking forward to. The spring runs into it, and the road widens. Until early spring, the pond is sheeted in whitish-gray ice. My progress is deliberately slow. The remains of a corduroy road under my feet are another vague memory. One is struck by the contrast between the numerous elder bushes and the towering spruces. Early in the year, the branches put forth shadowy-green leaves, often bluish at the tips. It is only here in the vicinity of the village that birds gather. Their complicated calls turn the forest into a railroad station. Some sound like call signs: a long-drawn-out whistle like the swishing of a cowboy’s lasso. The songs change with the seasons, and one is reminded of the slowly revolving sky in a planetarium. At dusk in the bright, intricately twining elder thicket a glow appears, as though rising from the ground. The last children pass, many of them barefoot. The pattern of a spruce bough suggests a palm frond.
In the round pond, now free of ice, the water circles almost imperceptibly. It teems with fish. Pieces of something that looks like volcanic tufa, but is actually polystyrene, are floating on the surface. At the edge of the pond, a raft hammered together from doors is rocked by a sudden wind squall as on an ocean wave. An evening shower taps lightly, kindly, on the wanderer’s forehead.
On the threshold between forest and village, the cobbles of the Roman road reappear. Here there’s another woodpile, covered with a plastic tarp. The rectangular pile with the sawed circles is the only brightness against a darkening background. You stand there and look at it until nothing remains but colors: the forms come later. They are gun barrels pointed at the beholder, but each of them individually is aimed at something else. Exhale. Looked at in a certain way—extreme immersion and extreme attention—the interstices in the wood darken, and something starts spinning in the pile. At first it looks like a scarred piece of malachite. Then the numbers of color charts appear. Then night falls on it and then it is day again. After a while the quivering of unicellular organisms; an unknown solar system; a stone wall in Babylon. World-spanning flight, a concentration of vapor trails, and finally, a unique blaze of colors, taking in the entire woodpile, reveals the footprint of the first man.
Then inhale. And away from the forest. Back to the people of the present; back to bridges and squares; back to streets and boulevards; back to stadiums and newscasts; back to bells and department stores; back to drapery and glittering gold. And the pair of eyes at home?
Child Story
And so the summer ended.
In the following winter …
1
Often, in adolescence, he thought of living with a child later on. He looked forward to an unspoken sense of community, to quickly exchanged glances, to sitting down with the child, to irregularly parted hair, to being close together and far apart in happy unity. The light of this recurrent image was the darkening just before the onset of rain in a courtyard strewn with coarse sand, bordered with grass, outside a house that was never clearly seen but only sensed behind his back, under a dense cover of wide-spreading, sporadically murmuring trees. The thought of a child was taken as much for granted as his two other great expectations—the woman who, he felt sure, was destined for him and had long been moving toward him over secret pathways, and the professional life, which alone, he held, could offer him the freedom worthy of a human being. But these three yearnings had never once appeared to him together, joined in a single image.
On the day when the longed-for child was born, the adult stood in a football field not far from the hospital. It was a bright Sunday morning in spring; in the course of the game the puddles in the grassless space between the goalposts had been churned into mud, which sent up swirls of vapor. At the hospital he learned that he was too late; the child had already been born. (He had probably been none too eager to witness the obstetric proceedings.) His wife was rolled past him down the corridor; her lips were white and dry. The preceding night she had waited alone in the little-used labor room, on a very high rolling bed; when he brought something she had forgotten at home, there was a moment of profound gentleness between them, the man standing in the doorway with a plastic bag and the woman stretched out on the high metal bed in the middle of the bare room. It’s a fairly large room. They are at an unaccustomed distance from each other. On the way from door to bed, the bare linoleum floor gleams in the whitish, humming fluorescent light. In the flickering glow as he switched it on, the woman’s face had turned to him without surprise or fear. Behind him—it was long after midnight—the spacious, half-darkened corridors and stairways of the building were bathed in an aura of unique, inalienable peace, which carried over to the deserted city streets outside.
When the child was shown to the adult through the glass partition, what he saw was not a newborn babe but a complete human being. (The usual baby face made its appearance only in the photo taken later on.)
He was glad when it turned out to be a girl; but—as he later realized—his joy would have been the same either way. The creature held out to him behind the glass was not a “daughter,” let alone “progeny,” but a child. The man’s thought was: It’s happy. It’s glad to be in the world. The mere fact of being a baby, without particular characteristics, was a source of good cheer—innocence was a form of the spirit!—which passed by stealth to the adult outside: those two, once and for all, have become a pair of conspirators. The sun shines into the room, they are on a hilltop. What the man felt at the sight of the child was something more than responsibility; it was also the urge to defend it, the primitive feeling of standing on two legs and of having suddenly grown strong.
At home i
n the empty apartment, where everything had been made ready for the newborn babe’s arrival, the adult took a bath, more copious than ever before, as though he had just gone through the hardship of his life. And true enough, he had just finished a piece of work in which he thought he had attained to the self-evident, casual, yet reliable law he had been aiming at. The newborn babe; the satisfactory completed work; the fabulous midnight moment of oneness with his wife; for the first time in his life, the man reclining in the steaming hot water considered himself and saw a kind of perfection, small, unimpressive perhaps, but just right for him. He felt an urge to go out. The streets, for once, were those of a hospitable metropolis; to walk them alone that night was a feast. But on one condition: that no one should know exactly who I am.
That was the last oneness for a long time. When the child came into the house, it seemed to him, the adult, that he was falling back into a cramped childhood, when he had done little else but keep an eye on his younger brothers and sisters. In past years, movie houses, open streets, and the footlooseness that went with them had passed into his flesh and blood; these alone, he felt, left room for the daydreams that made life look like something adventurous and worth mentioning. But in all those footloose years, the handwriting on the wall said to him time and again, “You must change your way of life.” Now, inevitably, his life underwent a radical change. He who had been prepared at the most for a few minor adjustments found himself a prisoner in the house, and all he could think, while pushing the crying baby around the apartment for hours, was, unimaginatively, that his life was over for a long time to come.
