by Peter Handke
It seemed to the adult that the child’s life and his own were on the right track. And so he argued with the fervor of one imbued with the exemplary fitness of things as they were, when toward the end of the school year the principal suggested that the child should be transferred to a different school. In the autumn, she said, religious instruction would begin, and since the child came of a basically different tradition, no good could come of it. Citing his experience of many years, the adult tried to persuade the woman that no tradition, however longed for, could ever be meaningful to someone like him, and that he could certainly transmit no trace of any tradition to his child. But the elderly teacher felt that she knew better and merely shook her head. When he left the schoolhouse with the child on the last day, it seemed to him that she had been banished without guilt, and that he, the scion of an unpeople, an unworthy man-of no-people, bore the responsibility.
The same year witnessed a conflict between man and child that was something more than momentary irritation. In the past year he had adjusted his work schedule entirely to the child’s needs. During the day he could be little more than her “provider,” and in time he came to think of this as of a splendid role and worthy occupation (serving could be a pleasure), even when it proved almost impossible to switch to another activity in the evenings and he often sat silent for hours, not knowing how to go on, occasionally seized with a desperate longing for such accessories of leisure as wine, books, or a television set, until suddenly, amid a sea of silence, an idea might come to him and transform the table he was sitting at into a writing desk. But what emerged was transitional bits and pieces, and little by little he conceived a desire for the larger project he had long carried in the back of his mind. Often it appeared to him as a dream of paradise, the realization of which must, as hitherto, determine his continued existence.
The time seemed to have come—thanks to school, which in that country took up almost the entire day. But the eight hours of freedom were not enough; it turned out that his work “trip,” if it were to carry exemplary force and proceed in the right sequence, would have to go on day and night (at least in his head), and though the child never particularly disturbed him, she interrupted his work dream—or rather prevented it from getting started. The present arrangement might leave room for a coherent act of minor insights, but he was not often able to convert experience into invention as one must if a piece of work is to be glorious and a joy to others. And this absence of form, he thought, was the fault of the child, who by her mere presence paralyzed his imagination and diverted him from his destiny.
There was no violence between them, only unfriendliness; on the adult’s part, against his own better judgment, verging on hostility. He was unable to give himself wholly either to his work or to the child—and the child, sensing the change in him, withdrew of her own accord, not in an offended sulk, but proudly; on one occasion, she said of her father: “I don’t want to see him anymore. Let him go away.” This laconic threat of a rupture terrified the adult and brought him to his senses. He postponed his long journey and became suspicious of all those who, tied down as he was, had ever forsaken the day-today rut in the name of a lifelong dream. Their deeds lost their radiance; he no longer believed in them. (But still he dreamed.)
So once again he confined himself to his short-term projects, and in the end he was content with that. Often he did no work at all, wandered about the town in all directions, from its highest point to its lowest, and relished the freedom his idleness gave him. At this point his spells of activity coincided with the child’s absences (in the country with her so-called green class, or during the summer months with her mother). But then there was something uneasy and secretive about the fanaticism with which he then stuck to his project day after day, as though what was a vision to the adolescent had become almost a vice to the adult. Even in his moments of Magical Light, the emptiness of the house, where he no longer had anyone to turn to, was overpowering, seeping into him like a poison gas, until he became rigid and empty. And then he knew: it was the child who gave the passing hours their consecration. Without the child he was godforsaken, and his activity seemed excessive and meaningless (though once he wondered how it would be to lead a life of debauchery, with the most beautiful woman in the world and without the child). Coming home one night, he stood leaning on something in the shrill silence of the apartment, and it occurred to him that some people must drop dead from sheer loneliness.
It was at that time that visitors began to tell the man that his way of living and working was taking him further and further from reality and the present. He had once taken such criticism seriously. But after all these years with the child, he felt that no one had a right to lecture him about reality. For gradually, through the insoluble conflict between his work and the child, he had come to the conclusion that with the child, free at last from the fraudulent life of “modern times,” he was continuing a kind of transtemporal Middle Ages, which had perhaps never existed, but which to him, when beside the child’s sickbed, when bidding her goodbye, or just hearing her bouncy step, struck him as the only true, authentic epoch, behind and beyond the so-called modern era.
The reality-mongers, he felt, were the tyrants of a new day; with their mania for measuring degrees of reality, they reminded him of those sea captains in the oldest accounts of naval battles who, once the fighting had stopped, would total up the corpses and the wreckage washed ashore and diagnose victory or defeat accordingly. They, too, belonged to human eternity—but to the bad kind. If you listened awhile to these born public prosecutors, it soon turned out that as a rule, with their counting of worlds—the “third” and “fourth” were the most “relevant”—they were trying to drown out a secret guilt if not an unforgivable betrayal: they had all done much evil. These reality-mongers-in all likelihood the world had always swarmed with them—struck the adult as Empty Existences, remote from Creation; though long dead, they kept going with a vigor equaled only by their wickedness, left nothing behind them that anyone could hold on to, and were good for nothing but war. It was useless to argue with them, because they were convinced that each new daily catastrophe confirmed their beliefs. If you had an idea, you couldn’t talk to them or even approach them: they were strangers, and I don’t talk to strangers —away with you, I am the voice, not you! And so he decided to close his door irrevocably to these depressing intruders, and in general not to “let their ships bar the seas to him” any longer. Only then did he hear the murmur of a reality again. O murmur, stay with us!
In the summer of the same year, the child returned with her parents to the country they came from, where she was to spend her vacation with her mother. For her return to her father in the autumn a new school had been found, not far from the old one. Their motor trip took them from the Metropolitan Basin, hardly above sea level, through a vast terraced landscape rising in an even rhythm to the low mountain range, from the crest of which one can look down across the frontier river to the next large country; those hilltops were much disputed in a world war and their almost total bareness (which stems from another cause) provides a more enduring reminder than the many commemorative monuments of the battles fought there.
On the afternoon of the trip, the three of them are sitting on one of these hillside slopes, looking westward. From here the structure of the terraced country, extending as far as the Metropolitan Basin, almost a day’s journey distant, can be seen clearly. A quarrel starts up between man and woman. It is pretty much like some of their earlier quarrels and probably—as the man can’t help thinking—makes use of the exact same terms as are passing back and forth between disunited mates all over the world at this same moment. (If thus far he had made no move toward a final separation, it was only because a third party in a position of authority, however experienced and knowledgeable, could not possibly have been expected to know anything about the woman, the child, and himself, and any court decision would have struck him as presumptuous and outrageous.) But it’s serious all the s
ame; and despite his better judgment, despite the peace that pervades the country all about, he lets himself be engulfed in a mechanical exchange of insults.
When at last he looks up, he sees that the child has sat down at some distance from both parents. Her face looks pale and severe in the distance. Far across the slope, blueberries sparkle in the sun. At the foot of the hill, a marshy pond. The light of this day is glistening bright, interspersed with great cloud shadows, and the three figures sit there like white tombstones.
Years later, in another summer, the man would approach the same mountain ridge, this time from the eastern plain over a road that often led through vineyards; and not in a car but on foot. And toward evening, when darkness had settled on the ridge, the slowly moving wayfarer suddenly saw himself sitting with the two absent ones in the distant inky blackness, just as in old legends kings sit enthroned on mountains. But he saw them not as kings, nor yet as a “family,” but as an abstract triad, cloaked in an impenetrable substance. This was the only mystical moment in which the man had ever seen himself in the plural, and only such moments engender myths: the eternal story. The illumination vanishes, but a certain exaltation remains. Still, the wayfarer makes his way across the high plateau toward the blue-veiled mountain chain, still busy with the thought that can never be carried to a conclusion: I am working on the secret of the world. And this spot, like the square long ago, has a name of its own that is lastingly associated with the child: Le Grand Ballon.
6
But it was again through the child that in the following winter, a few months after their return to the city and the change of schools, the adult was brutally made aware of the hasty, impatient, and above all unrealistic nature of the striving for reconciliation that had guided him all his life—though he remained convinced that this was the rational attitude.
One day he received a letter with no return address. In rather ornate and recondite terms (which, when the adult consulted the dictionary, proved to mean just what they were supposed to), this letter, in the name of “the one people,” threatened the child, as a descendant of that people’s worst persecutors, with death.
In the general neighborhood of the “people’s” school, the man had made the acquaintance of a few adults connected with it, whom he continued to see later on, and whom he came to know much more intimately than any strangers he had ever met before. Thus it didn’t take him long to find out who had written about “dissecting, dismembering,” etc., inasmuch as “the millions of victims have not been raised from the dead,” and at the end of the threatening letter given himself an Old Testament name. Detective-like, he ferreted out the man’s address, put a knife into his pocket, and started out, feeling ungainly but at the same time aware of being at the center of a historic event. In the cab he visualized the exact sequence of quick movements ending with the knife thrust to the heart; he saw himself before the act, standing magnificent in an attitude of sternest judgment (for which the long ride to the opposite bank of the river was perfectly appropriate); but no sooner has he crossed the letter writer’s threshold than the grotesqueness of the situation crowds out all other thoughts. He doesn’t kill. Not this time. Weakness in the wrist. He does actually, in a manner of speaking, drive the other into a back room—where they just stand there with smug grins on their faces; both feeling rather flattered—the one, because his cleverness in locating the letter writer is admired; the other, because he is taken seriously. Together they leave the cold apartment and repair to the large cemetery nearby, where they trudge back and forth, talking of everything under the sun, at the end of which they know they will never be enemies, or allies either, for that matter.
It was only on his way home alone in the darkness that the man began to understand what had happened. In a quiet street near his apartment he glimpsed, high up in the night sky, a single attic window with a peaceful reddish-yellow light in it. He stood still. Now at last he is seized with real indignation—or rather bitterness; and now he curses those non-beings who need history for their lives; he curses history itself and personally disavows it; here for the first time he gains a vision of himself alone with the child in the night of the century and in the empty crypt of the continent—and yet all this provides energy for a new kind of freedom to come. But from that day on, his dominant feeling with regard to the child’s history is one of bitterness. This was the feeling closest to reality—along with grief and joy.
During the first year at the new school the child was often unhappy. Yet one could not have conceived of a finer building or location. The building was small and full of twists and turns, yet as bright as a ship or a house on an island, and seemed to occupy a domain of its own, at sufficient distance from a large housing development. The garden surrounding it was irregularly shaped, offering plenty of hiding places for the not very numerous pupils. There were patches of tall grass or sand here and there, and chickens and other domestic animals in wire cages. Another part of it, fenced about as in an old manorial park, contained exotic shrubs and a miniature stone pool with bright-colored fish in it, and a small statue, overgrown with the same sort of foliage as the housefront. Strangest of all, the road leading to the school—which branched off a busy thoroughfare heading out of the city, passed a few shop fronts and two or three imposing portals characteristic of the neighborhood, then narrowed abruptly and began to climb just a little—was unsurfaced from that point on, transforming itself into a dirt path, clay-yellow, eroded by the rain, and on both sides flanked by low walls like a sunken lane; here light and sounds are different from what they were a moment ago in the metropolis. And yet there is nothing rural about this Elysian meadow.
Nevertheless, the child had at first to be literally pushed and pulled through the garden gate into the schoolyard. If the adult didn’t escape down the path immediately after disentangling himself from her grip, she would try to fight her way back through the crush in the narrow doorway.
The children who went to this school were not children of “the one people” but children of the city, of the neighborhood, of a wide variety of parents. During the first few months the adult, too, thought the school, compared to that of the year before, rather deadening. One reason for this—though the school had only a kind of transitional status, its function being to prepare children for the state secondary schools—was the blind learning of names without objects, which seemed to have the same effect on the child as ominous, though utterly unintelligible, official regulations. Later in the day the adult would see her at home, as she reeled off the lengths of rivers or the heights of mountains required for the next day’s lesson, and time and again he would say to himself: Let it never be forgotten, let it be remembered till the end of time, with what wide-open, terror-stricken eyes the children of the present day recite the so-called knowledge of mankind.
Not until late spring did the child feel more at home in the school. With nothing particular in mind, only because he himself felt like it, the adult took her for walks around the neighborhood on warm evenings, and regularly they would turn off into the dirt path. Now the child sees her school deserted in the dusk. Sometimes the grumpy old woman who is the principal is watering plants out in front, raking the sand for the next day, and feeding the animals. The timbering in the walls is visible through the ivy. Far in the distance, the horns of calamitous motor vehicles. A rustling in the dark bushes. The sleeping chickens. The shimmering of the stone paths. “Could we stay here a little longer?”
On the last days of the school year, it gave the child pleasure to pass through the gate in the morning when no one else was there, stroll around in the garden, and exhibit herself to the next arrivals as “the first.” In the following year, there were times when the child was reluctant to go home with the adult in the afternoon and would have preferred to stay outside the schoolhouse playing with the others. There, in what had become for her a particular place, she now found herself in good or at least satisfactory company, forgot her solitary brooding, but preserved her sens
ibility. In the winter, when she went to the mountains with her class, she hardly suffered at all from homesickness (which had dealt her progenitor well-nigh incurable wounds). On her first night away from home she had been one of the last in the dormitory to start crying, and even then it had only been “to keep the others company.” It didn’t trouble her that the teachers at school were sometimes unreasonably strict; sometimes, in fact, she welcomed this as special attention. When faced with injustice, she expressed surprise (which, come to think of it, is a rather effective form of revolt); and as time went on, the lessons lost their earthbound heaviness and even became a sort of game, contrasting with the rest of the day; opening a copybook could—for the adult as well when “hearing her lessons”—offer a clear bright vista.
