Slow Homecoming

by Peter Handke

  Even so, he could not conceive of being alone with the helpless little creature. In his wife’s absence, he only stepped into the breach, so to speak; an incompetent nanny, he counted the days until she returned to her duties. But he worried about her as he had always done; he took his role of protector seriously; without him, he felt, she would go to the dogs.

  As for his work in that first year, he postponed the great project he had in mind, though without losing sight of it for a single day. For the present, he was content with the little things that were not beyond his reach; they, too, bore his mark.

  3

  The idea made its way that the child should grow up outside the city’s bustle, and not in an apartment, but in a house, in the open air. Early the following year, this culminated in a return to base—they were not unhappy about it, because it was also a return to a country where their own language was spoken. Later, in the spring, a plot of land was found. It was situated in a belt of woodland, with a view of a broad fluvial plain which day and night, on the ground and in the air, shimmers with the light of the metropolis nearby. The woman handled most of the business; the man didn’t see the place until late summer, when the framework of the house was already complete. He contemplated it with a feeling of uncertainty; a flush of pleasure at his future independence was tempered by the thought that a house, especially a brand-new one, in a hitherto unspoiled bit of nature, was no longer the right thing.

  The house would not be ready for some time, and in the meantime they stayed with friends, a couple with a large apartment in town. For the first time they lived at close quarters with others, and in the community resulting from the daily pursuit of common, previously recognized interests, the irritable, defiantly solitary man felt that he had at last discovered a natural mode of life. Accustomed to having no one to sympathize with the needs of his work, fully expecting to withdraw into his inner realm at the first sign of such disregard, he encountered, for once, not only respect for the results of his effort, but constant consideration for the effort itself. The group, whose members he could now rely on interchangeably, also helped him, not only to subordinate the state of the world to his work as he had done before, but, in addition, to clarify his demands on the world. And thanks primarily to the always present child, these demands became images—without which, of course, nothing could be clarified. No longer belonging to anyone in particular, she moved on those beautiful autumn days from one to another with a saving naturalness; she was the regulatory principle that seemed to foster unity among the various rooms. The calm severity of her features—most likely it’s a jolt in the mind of the viewer, who takes her as a model. In the evening, a long oval table; on the square outside the window, the screeching of the streetcars and the luminous sign of a bar named after the bend in the tracks.

  But the builders took longer than expected, and the necessary extension of the apartment-sharing arrangement brought about a change for the worse: the friends became landlords, the nomads became unwelcome guests, and all looked forward to the day when they would move out.

  These friends were a couple who had deliberately remained childless. Each had adopted the other instead of a child. The consequence was that, once the “visiting” period had elapsed, the real child threatened the field of taste, smell, and touch that had grown up between them over the years and taken on vital importance. They were no longer inseparable as they had been, they became unsure of each other. More than a troublemaker, the child was a threat to their way of life. The adult had long seen his child at the receiving end of bored, exasperated, inconvenienced, out-of-sorts looks—which he himself may have caused; but never had he seen such merciless eyes in frozen faces, such unforgiving frowns as in that childless couple. These were looks of impotent rage, brought on by the consciousness that despite their perfect goodwill they were without rights as opposed to the little creature’s outrageously overwhelming right. Of course they revealed nothing of the kind to the child—at most, they spoke more and more softly and coldly to her—but they showed it in the increasing criticism of the parents’ pedagogical methods. (For this, there were frequent opportunities.) And their reproaches—or silent disapproval—struck the man not only as stupidly banal but also as coldhearted, perverse, and presumptuous.

  He was later to come into contact with far worse prophets of childlessness, singly and in pairs. For the most part they were sharp-sighted, and thanks to their own terrifying freedom from guilt, they were able to say in technical language what was wrong with the child-parent relationship; some of them actually made a profession of their insight. In love with their own childhood and its continuance, they proved on closer acquaintance to be grownup monsters. After every encounter with them, it took the man a long time to purge his mind and soul of their analytical certainties, which cut into him like cankers. He cursed those mean, self-righteous prophets as the scum of modern times, and swore to hate them and combat them forever. The ancient dramatist supplied him with the appropriate curse for them: “Children are the soul of all men. He who has not learned this suffers less, but his well-being is of the wrong kind.” (Something else again, it goes without saying, is the good-hearted, lovable sorrow and sympathy of other childless people.)

  And so, despite the distaste inspired by the nondescript new house and the almost identical new houses around it, the little family felt it was returning to peace and order when at last, in the late fall, it moved into a home of its own.

  Yet, on the whole, the time spent with friends exemplified a life in an airier, more wholesome, less spirit-killing environment than that of a small family. It made possible the daring flights of solitude which alone give the mind the daily world-exploring freedom it needs and spared it the ensuing collapse into forsakenness and unreality, in which there are neither tangible objects nor discourse. In such surroundings, moreover, one worries less about the child; no longer is it the oppressively close one-and-all; here it lives at the right distance, “one among others.” And the child itself is freed from its confinement to its parents, those all-powerful duty figures who seem to block its freedom of movement; in the larger grouping, all become smaller and, whoever they may be, however awkward and self-absorbed, they become for the moment partners in a game. On the whole, the prevailing mood in those months was one of perfect naturalness, a balance between concentrated work in the daytime and relaxation in the evening, between introversion with its free, form-creating thought and formless extroversion; in short, a succession of days and evenings such as the adult would never again be able to give the child, except perhaps during short visits to the seashore.

  A dark day in November. If nothing else, a first little living-room light is burning in the barely heated new house. Even in retrospect, a moving-in feeling never materialized, for one thing because the house long remained unfinished, but chiefly because this house had not involved the great decision it might have in times gone by; it was a mere acquisition, comparable to a useful gadget picked up at a bargain sale. Besides, the man had had next to nothing to do with building it, whereas he had once upon a time worked so hard on a house for his parents that those days still lived on for him in countless images. Some days later he attended the neighborhood gathering at which local residents spoke to new residents of a plan to run an express highway through their community, of the chronic water shortage, and the lack of accessible schools, and sent them home with a few words of consolation. Be that as it may, the man trudges homeward through the winter night, full of mysterious confidence in the world, for never before had he gone home to “my house” or “our community.” The same snow-fraught air in the hollow below the S-Bahn as two years before on his return from a house-hunting expedition, followed by actual snowflakes, delicate taps in the darkness, swirls at the bends of the community’s streets, a whooshing up at the edge of the woods; aimlessly he makes a long detour, in the course of which, with the help of the snowy night, the entire locality, the flat-roofed cubes with the woods in the background, takes form
for the first time; and now the streets with their new houses and empty lots lead to something free, mysterious, old as the hills.

  Late that winter, a few months after they had moved in, the woman went away to resume her work; she had made a break of this kind years before; was she in earnest this time? Still, she had objective reasons for leaving, and there was no formal break; after a first prolonged absence, she returned periodically to be with the child, and not as a visitor; but the fact remained that to all intents and purposes the man was left alone with his daughter. Again he was of two minds: he thought his wife had done right, yet he condemned her. How could anyone leave a child, even on an impulse that was part of her being? Wasn’t a child a natural, obvious, reasonable obligation, beyond all questioning? Wasn’t any goal achieved by turning one’s back on this manifest, wholly-binding reality dishonorable and worthless by definition? And yet he knew that he, with his particular kind of work, was privileged; he had no need to “go out” as most people did—a circumstance which in a way justified his partner’s divergent behavior.

  Luckily he had a piece of unfinished work that could be carried on from day to day during his first period alone with the child. Early in the afternoon after his wife’s departure, during the child’s nap time, the adult crept almost stealthily to his unfinished project. He experienced the first transitional passage as a triumph against the rigors of fate (that day’s “Carry on!” was to serve as his secret watchword on many future occasions).

  But soon after the completion of this work, which had time and again brought something of the outside world, of the open air, into the walled-in room, the house with the child came to stand for a worse seclusion and immobility than ever before. It was this that first made him feel forsaken; and the embodiment of his forsakenness was the child playing by herself—alone in the room with the adult, who does nothing but stand there stiffly. Misery and forlornness—a sense of tragedy—spring at him from the crown of her head, the curve of her shoulders, her bare feet, though as a matter of fact the child (as he soon realized) was hardly conscious of any difference; she was already used to having only one parent look after her and after a while she made it clear, once and for all: “As long as one of you is here.”

  In those weeks of bewilderment, no future was thinkable, but he had no desire to go back. He realized that what had happened was irrevocable. His days, alone with the child, passed differently; they were no longer a mere interval. True, he still counted them, but now with a new kind of reckoning in which he had no right to appeal to an outsider for help. Beyond a doubt, he alone was needed, he and no one else; it was impossible to go on just doing his bit, undisturbed in his self-immersion, as he had done “before the war” (once in his thoughts he actually phrased it that way). Yes, the source of his inner happening—the free flow of his daydreams—was broken for good: by the crisis, which previously, during the period of listless peace, he had often thought would be the beginning of an alert, wide-awake kind of life, the right kind. And pathetically insignificant as this crisis turned out to be, the idea held good: the adult did not resign himself to his situation, he accepted it willingly, or so he thought. Of this, his new time reckoning, no longer implying an end, was a small, proud indication; and many a time his new way of counting helped him to go on. “Count and live.”

  That was the idea—and in each of the separate phases it was practicable; nothing humanly impossible was asked of him; just that he had to give up certain habits. But in daily practice he often failed. Here for the first time it became apparent that he, who had scarcely an equal for thinking himself above ingrained habits, was as much a slave to them as anyone else—his whole existence, like everyone else’s, was made up of habits; they alone gave his life a semblance of regularity. Cut off from his personal routines (which now at a distance struck him as beautiful), his daily life, regulated by a child’s rhythm and consisting almost exclusively of child’s sounds and child’s belongings, struck him more and more as a brutal and senseless doom. Things were out of kilter, as evil and unreal as weapons, and the interstices were as airless as the compartments of an arsenal. This was the world into which he had been banished, and in his mind all was hostile confusion. It was a long while before he learned not only to tolerate the child’s playthings but in addition—however heedlessly and even contemptuously everything seemed to be scattered—to find order in disorder, and to feel at home in it as the child did (a free moment and an attentive look sufficed to bring a harmonious pattern out of the most hideous jumble). At first, however, he was seized with a frenzy for making order, though all he actually did was to thrash about in a vacuum. At such times he felt a malignant stupidity coming over him, and because he hardly saw anyone else, he stupidly blamed the child for it.

  Confined as he was to the house and seldom enjoying a moment’s peace, he gradually lost his feeling for colors and forms, as well as the spacing and arrangement of objects, and saw himself, in the sinister, vision-blurring half light, surrounded by them as by tarnished mirrors. And in the midst of all that, the child moved about like one indistinct object among others. This was unreality, and unreality means: You are alone. There is no one else. The next step was an absence of thought, scarcely distinguishable from madness. He had lost all power over himself, and fear deprived him of his will. Then came the day of guilt, the children’s hour. The spring was far advanced. After a rainy night, the ground floor of the brand-new house was flooded. It had happened a few times before, but that morning the water was higher than ever; this time (after the usual letters to the builders) an honest-to-goodness flood. Still half asleep, he stared, with murder in his heart, at the brownish water. From upstairs he heard the child’s repeated cries—something that stymied her—ending on a note of desperation. The adult, standing knee-deep in water, lost his head; rushing upstairs like a killer, he struck the child in the face with all his might, as he had never in all his life struck anyone. His horror was instantaneous. He carried the crying child—he himself suffering bitterly from his lack of tears—from room to room. Everywhere the gates of judgment stood open, bursts of heat struck him like blasts from muted trumpets. Though the child showed no ill effects other than a swollen cheek, he knew that he had hit her hard enough to kill her. At first he regarded himself as evil; he was not only a scoundrel, he was depraved, and no earthly punishment could atone for what he had done. One enduring real thing had given him his only happiness, and now he had destroyed it; he had betrayed the one thing he wanted to perpetuate and glorify. Eternally damned, he sat down with the child and spoke to her, more from the need to speak than really imbued with what he was saying, in the hitherto unutterable, unthinkable oldest forms of human speech. But the child nodded at his words, and then, as once before, there appeared in the quietly weeping face a clear, radiant pair of eyes, raised as it were above the mists of the environing world. Seldom has an unhappy mortal known brighter consolation (though the same person later declared herself to be “incapable of consoling”). So she understands the adult and takes pity on him; with this kindness the child, for the first time in her history, appears in the active role; and her action, like all her future actions on different occasions, is as casual as a meeting between forehead and forehead, and at the same time as perfectly laconic as the “Carry on” signal of an experienced referee (who is, in a very special sense, of this world).

  Of course this mute, visual consolation was not enough; the adult’s state of abjectness lasted until the incident had been explicitly, and not just once but time and time again, confessed to a third party (and even then it was only attenuated). That day stands out in the adult’s memory as one of those exceptional days concerning which it can be said that the grass was green, the sun was shining, the rain falling, the clouds drifting, that dusk fell and the night was silent, all these being marks of a different sort, assuredly the right sort, of human life, at times surmised to be eternal. Then the wooded hill at the foot of which the community is situated emerges in the distanc
e. From all sides the trees rise skyward in an even sweep, and the gentle, regular incline, which seems to lead onward to infinity, gives the hill a feeling of fertility. The bright rocky spots between the trees glitter in the distance like crests of sea foam and lie on the chest like liberating compresses. For a moment the foreign river meanders through the foreground, its radiance reaching out beyond all possible frontiers. Only in sorrow, over an omission or a commission (and then my eyes become magnetic and all-encompassing), does my life expand to epic proportions.