Slow Homecoming

by Peter Handke

  In the preceding years he had often been at odds with his wife. He respected the enthusiasm and conscientiousness she devoted to her craft—it was more magic than work, an outsider could detect no sign of exertion. And on the whole he considered himself responsible for her; yet often, in his secret heart, he was convinced that they were not right for each other, that their life together was a lie and, measured by the dream he had had of himself and a woman, utterly trivial. There were times when he cursed this marriage as the mistake of his life. But it was with the coming of the child that this episodic disunity became a definitive breach. Just as they had never been really man and wife, they were never, from the very start, real parents. He took it for granted that you went in to the child when it was restless at night; in her opinion this was wrong, and that in itself could provoke her to sullen, almost hostile silences. She went by the specialists’ books and precepts, all of which, however grounded in experience, he despised. They infuriated him as presumptuous violations of the secret between him and the child. Hadn’t the child, in its first appearance—the little face behind the glass partition, scratched by its own fingernails and yet so peaceful—been so world-shatteringly real that anyone who had even glimpsed it would surely know what was to be done? Just this was the woman’s recurrent complaint: in the hospital she had been cheated out of that guiding vision. Through the fault of others, she had missed the moment of birth, something had been forever lost to her. The child, she said, was unreal to her; that was why she was afraid of doing something wrong, why she observed other people’s rules. This the man failed to understand: hadn’t the child been put into her arms practically the moment it was born? And besides, he couldn’t help seeing that she handled it not only more skillfully than he but more patiently as well. Didn’t she concentrate on what she was doing and follow through, whereas he, no sooner had he achieved the brief moment of bliss in which it seemed that with a stroke of the hand, thanks to the one crucial pulsebeat that was still needed, he had imparted the soothing, life-giving magic of his own self to a sleepless or sick little being, than as often as not he ran out of energy and the best he could do, bored and positively yearning to escape into the open, was to sit out his stint with the baby.

  To make matters worse, the hostility of the outside world seems inevitable in such situations. No sooner was the child brought home, for instance, than ground was cleared for a high-rise building directly across the street; the days and nights resounded with jackhammers, and most of the adult’s time was spent in writing letters to the builders, who reacted with expressions of surprise, alleging that “this is the first time,” etc. etc.

  Still, it takes an effort to recall such moments of unpleasantness or even depression. What preserved its reality and importance was in every case an image to which the memory, with no attempt to transfigure it but with the certainty that “This is my life,” returned in grateful triumph; and even in connection with that period which, to judge by the dates, was one of apathy more than anything else, these flashes of memory revealed a vital energy, which nevertheless endured and gave promise for the future. The woman soon went back to her work, and the man took the child for long walks around the city. Avoiding his accustomed busy boulevard, he went the other way, exploring those old, uniformly dark districts where, more than in any other part of the city he had known, the pavement takes on the coloration of the earth below it and the sky above. Thus, as the adult maneuvered the baby carriage from roadway to sidewalk and back, the city became the child’s native place. Leaf shadows, rain puddles, and snow-fraught air stand for the seasons, which were never before so distinct. The all-night pharmacy, where, after a race through driving snow in a spacious, festive light, the needed medicine is procured, becomes a new sort of landmark. On another winter evening, the television is switched on in the apartment; there sits the man with the child, who after crawling all over him finally falls asleep on top of him; with that warming little burden on his stomach, the TV becomes for once a pure joy. A late afternoon in a deserted S-Bahn station far out of town even leaves him with a Christmas Eve feeling (Christmas was indeed imminent): though alone on the platform, the adult is not the lonely young man or curiosity-propelled gadabout of old, but a prospector in search of lodgings for those entrusted to his care (yes, they were planning to move). The unusually large, glass-bright waiting room; the closed but well-stocked newsstand; the snowy air in the hollow below, where the curving tracks glistened in the beams of oncoming trains: all these are good tidings, which he will take home with him.

  All his images of the life of that first year relate to the child—who, however, is physically present in few of them. Indifferent reminiscence might prompt the question: “Where actually was the child just then?” But when memory is warmth and its content is a dark color feeling outlasting the times of day as in an arcade, it can be assumed that the child is nearby, safe and warm. One such glance passes through the concrete gateway deep down into the still-empty grass of a giant stadium, blooming an unseasonable fresh green in the floodlight—white breath-clouds over every row of seats—where a famous foreign team will soon come running in for a friendship match; or from the top deck of a city bus through the rain-sprinkled windshield onto the urban colors which, reduplicated in the course of the ride, end by transforming little by little a chaotic jumble of streets into something like a hospitable city. In retrospect, the period when man and wife were still living alone became the time before the child. His vision of the two of them resembled one of the painter’s pictures, showing a young man standing with bowed head at the seashore, hands propped on hips, waiting; behind him, only a bright sky, marked, however, around the bent arms, with distinct whorls and rays, which one viewer has likened to the winged spirits that hovered around the central figure in the art of former times—and true enough, when later the man looked at a photograph of himself and the woman, it seemed to him that the unborn child was winging its way through the empty air between them.

  What determined the course of events in that first year was not harmony but a conflict exacerbated by the spirit of the times. For most members of their generation the traditional social forms had become “death,” and the new forms, though not ordained by any external authority, imposed themselves with the power of a universal law. Their closest friend, whom until then one could picture only resolutely alone in his room, on the street, or at the movies (and who possibly was so close to them for that very reason), suddenly took to living with a group, and to strolling down the boulevard arm in arm with any number of people; now he who had often been embarrassingly mute spoke with uncanny ease in the name of all; he, who for a time had actually thought of himself as the preposterous “last of his kind,” seemed justified in his opposition to the lone individual. The adult then began to look on the child as his work, as a pretext for turning his back on history. A pretext, because he knew that, even without a child and without work, he would never have been willing or able to play an active part in the manifestations of “history.” He halfheartedly attended a few meetings, at which every sentence uttered was a spirit-deadening crime, and regularly delivered a flaming speech forbidding these people, once and for all, ever to open their mouths again—to himself on the way downstairs. Once, he even attached himself to a demonstration, but vanished after the first few steps. His main feeling in the new social groupings was one of unreality, more painful than before in the old ones. In the old ones, it had been possible to imagine a future—the new ones set themselves up as the sole possibility, as a compulsory future. And since the transvaluation was taking place mostly in the city, there was no getting away from the innovators. Perhaps because of his indecision, he became an address for these people. He had long recognized them as one more hostile power, and his only reason for not expressly repudiating them was that the enemies they were combating had always been his own sworn enemies. Be that as it may, he soon drew away from them. But in their daily forays through the city, groups were always dropping in on him. He
will never forget the look which his intruders from the hostile system (as he then saw them) cast on the child—if they so much as noticed it; though without particular intent, that look was an insult to the creature lying there, to its meaningless sounds and movements, and signified contempt—as palpable as it was infuriating—for the trivia of everyday life. He was in a quandary; instead of showing these utter strangers the door, he usually went out with them—their presence in the apartment would impinge on the child’s air supply—and spent the evening in their “pads,” either, like them, sitting with earphones in front of the soundless television screen or witnessing in polite silence their mildly conspiratorial but in a way official deliberations, in which the slightest candid, spontaneous utterance would have been a source of embarrassment; in either case, feeling guilty and depraved, because, convinced as he was that he sometimes knew the truth and was in duty bound to transmit it, he was by his mere presence giving aid and comfort to these phonies.

  It was a friendless period; his own wife had turned into an unfriendly stranger. The child became all the more real, thanks in part to the remorse with which he literally fled home to it. Slowly, he passes through the darkened room to the bed, meanwhile watching himself from above and behind as in a monumental film. This is his place; shame on all those spurious communes, shame on me, for denying or making a secret of my one true allegiance! Shame on my lip service to your modern world. And so, little by little, it became a certainty to him that the only history his kind of man could acknowledge was the history he saw in the lines of the sleeping child. And yet, in retrospect, his diagonal passage through the balmy-warm room was associated with the concerted roar—never has anything more hellish and inhuman been heard—of a charging squad of riot police in the street below.

  All this contributed to the story of the child; what the adult chiefly remembered, apart from the usual anecdotes, was that it could show pleasure and was vulnerable.

  2

  The child’s arrival seems to have sparked off thoughts that would soon call for a decision. As usual, the adult was slow to make up his mind, but when in the following winter he finally arrived at a decision, it was, as so often, an irresistible suggestion: the three of them would go away for a time, they would go to a foreign country. At this idea, the adult for once saw himself, his wife and child, as a family (something not ordinarily in his good books).

  A glorious day in March, when the white enamel of an empty kitchen shines with the light of the City of Heart’s Desire, which unfolds its far-famed rooftops outside the window. The newfangled metal tips on the light switches blink, and the electrical appliances brought from home buzz to no avail because the voltage is too low. This was more than a move; it was an emigration, once and for all, to the right place, for the child as well as for themselves. At the table by the balcony door, night falls and the morning rises like nowhere else in the world, and there they sit, a wee bit frightened, but clearly outlined, at their first family meal. They have begun a new life.

  The city turned out to be totally different from the metropolis that had shown itself on their short visits. Instead of the miles and miles of movie houses, cafés, and boulevards they had looked forward to, it reduced itself to a small circle of pharmacies, self-service stores, and laundromats, smaller than any circle in their previous experience. The spacious places they had known gave way to the cramped little squares of the residential quarter, shaded by trees and housefronts, which day after day, when he went out with the child in his arms, resounded with the clanging of heavy iron gates and in time came to stand for a specific neighborhood consisting of sandy, dusty patches of bare ground studded with dog turds. The more distant goals are the woods in the west and south-west, accessible only by long rides on the Métro; and that one square where there are not only benches but also a miniature amusement park with booths and merry-go-rounds. This square lies deep in another neighborhood, beyond the inner ring of boulevards; the expedition takes all afternoon, including the walk there and back through a tangle of mostly narrow streets, with sudden shifts from silence to deafening noise, from gloom to a gray radiance, from showers to sunshine (the ocean is not far away). On the way they cross a long bridge, over a deep chasm lined with hundreds of railroad tracks, leading from a nearby terminal into an enormous airy valley between two steep banks of houses, with its whirlpools and vapor clouds and the roar of express trains, a foretaste of the Atlantic beyond. This walk was repeated almost every day; in time the child ceased to be a burden and became a part of the carrier’s body, and in the course of these afternoons the mere name—Square des Batignolles—came to stand, in the adult’s mind, for an eternal moment with the child.

  One spring evening he glimpsed the child there—“up there” in his private image—in a sandpile. In the midst of other children of about the same pre-walking age, she is playing by herself. Twilight mood, caused in part by the cover of foliage over the children; balmy, clear air, some of the faces and hands strikingly bright. He bends over the figure in the red dress. She recognizes him, and without smiling emanates light. She doesn’t mind being there with the others, but she belongs to him and has long been waiting for him. Now, even more than at the time of her birth, the adult sees the enlightened, all-knowing countenance behind the baby face, and the calm, ageless eyes give him, now and for all time, a look of friendship; for two cents he would hide his face and weep.

  Later that spring, in the same square, the child was sitting all by herself, astride a horse on one of the merry-go-rounds. It had just stopped raining, and the square is foaming white around the edge—like a reef. The merry-go-round starts with a jolt, and the child, distanced from the adult in a new way, looks up briefly, but then, carried away by the circular motion, forgets herself and has no eyes for anything else. Later the man, with this in mind, remembered a moment in his childhood when, though in the same room as his mother, he suddenly felt her to be heartbreakingly, outrageously far away from him. How can that woman over there be a different person from me here? The sight of the carousel with the circling, absent figure completes the picture: for the first time, the adult sees his child as a person in her own right, independent of the parent standing “over there”—someone who should be encouraged in her freedom! Indeed, the space separating the two seems to glow in triumph; the man and the little equestrian figure become in his eyes an exemplary group behind which the artificial waterfall on the square trumpets mightily. Wishing becomes possible; concomitantly, an awareness of the passage of time, painful, but not in the same way as his former inability to think of separateness.

  In the autumn, when the child was able to walk, they often rode out to the edge of the city together. She sat motionless on the Metro, her dark eyes flashing momentarily as the train pulled into a station. On a warm day in October, the adult lay reading in the grass of the sparsely wooded Bois; in the corner of his eye the child is a patch of nearby color, which at one point disappears from his field of vision and does not come back. When he looks up, he sees her walking among the trees far away. He runs after her but does not call, and keeps his distance from her. She walks straight ahead, even when there is no path. Walkers with dogs pass between them; one of the dogs jostles the child and knocks her down. Without so much as a look at the dog, she stands right up again and continues in the same direction. Beside a rivulet—its barely flowing water is black with blown leaves—two turkeys are copulating. When it’s over, the male staggers and falls to the ground. The child keeps going, neither faster nor slower; she doesn’t look around, doesn’t even turn her head, and doesn’t seem to get tired, as she ordinarily does after a very few steps. Still at the same distance, the two of them cross a patch of meadow, where a breeze can be felt from the nearby river. Much later, the child told the adult that “meadows” made her think of “Paradise.” There’s a lot of rotten wood under the fallen leaves; the child keeps stumbling but does not change direction. The park is full of people, but they all seem to be going the other way; from t
he stands of the nearby racetrack, shouts of encouragement as the horses turn into the home stretch. It seems to the adult that they have both become giants, with heads and shoulders at treetop level, yet invisible to passersby. They are the fabulous beings whom he has always regarded as the real powers, in the thick of human realities yet above them. Arrived at the river, the child stops and folds her hands behind her back. Not far away, on the grassy embankment, another adult is sitting with another child, their doubles or stand-ins, so to speak. Both are eating ice cream; the river flows past the gleaming globes of ice cream and the shimmering lines of their throats. Half underwater, a row of wooden cabins left over from a former bathing establishment. Across the river, to the west, a densely built-up chain of hills; halfway up the slope, orange-white-and-violet suburban trains dart past incessantly. The sunset sky is silvery; single leaves and then a whole branch go whirling into empty space. In miraculous accord the wind blows the bushes on the shore below and the hair in the foreground. The eyewitness implores a blessing on this image, yet keeps cool. He knows that every mystical moment carries within it a universal law, which it is incumbent on him to formulate and which will be valid only when given its appropriate form. He also knows that to think out the sequence of forms implicit in such a moment is the most difficult of human tasks. Then he called out to the child, who turned around to him without surprise, as to her self-evident bodyguard.

  Throughout this period, relations between him and his wife were functional at best, and often they thought of each other as “that man” and “that woman.” Formerly, when he took a distanced view of her professional activity, or while they were together traveling, or eating at a fashionable restaurant, he had sensed the luster of untouchability which alone can make a woman the guiding light a man longs for; which alone had enabled him to regard her as “his wife”; and for which he consequently honored her with grateful enthusiasm, as only a chosen one can. Now that the baby was there, they met almost exclusively in the cramped quarters of the household; here he came to look upon her with indifference and in time with distaste—just as no doubt she, who saw little more than before of “her hero” at his unique work, ceased to regard him as someone special; even at a distance, on the phone, never a note of recognition, let alone of expectancy, as though the other had ceased to be anything more than “that person who keeps calling up.” Thoughtlessly, the man devalued the friendly, intimate, secret little gestures and exclamations, which had become habitual in his dealings with his wife, by transferring them to the child. It was almost as if in the child he had for the first time found what was right for him, as though a wife had become superfluous to him altogether. He even had the impression that he had “forced” the child on his wife—and that this was his “good fortune.” (Many of the “young mothers” he saw struck him as sanctimonious; often as potential cutthroats.)