by Peter Handke
At the commencement exercises the following summer—after the second year at the little school—the adult detects a physical change in the child. He has got into the habit of regarding her as awkward and helpless. But now she is taking part in a kind of round dance in the garden; from the very first step she is self-assurance personified; and in this dance she isn’t just one among others; no, as soon becomes evident, she is leading the round, without the slightest glimmer of the embarrassment the onlooker had feared. It is she who signals “faster” or “slower” or “change direction.” And in the onlooker’s afterimage, her air of quiet triumph makes the entire garden group amid the clouds of schoolyard dust burst into flaming color.
No doubt the transfiguration was largely a product of leave-taking, for on the same day the little school ceased to exist and its pupils went off in different directions. The following fall they dispersed to many different state schools.
7
They moved to a suburban house on a hill across the river. The new, state school was outside the city limits, not far from a main railroad line to the sea. The adult felt that the change would be bearable for the child; indeed, he was optimistic because the building and its location were similar in many respects to those of the beloved “little school.” Here, too, the ivy-covered façade and the dark timbering of the walls suggested a country inn or manor rather than a school. And, likewise, the interior, the layout of the classrooms, the windows looking out on the garden, whose trees with their aerial roots, bushes, and underbrush offered the same sort of hiding places as the old garden (except that everything was a little bigger). One of the paths was even unsurfaced like the path leading to the other school, and also sloped gently—couldn’t that be expected to make the child feel at home?
But the child froze at the sight of the new school, and time did not dispel her revulsion; indeed, it increased from day to day. Here the evening-walk formula was ineffectual—yes, the school grounds were a place of peace, but in the morning the placeless misery was back again. (Anticipatory strings of anguish spittle on her breakfast roll.) At first, school friends came to the house, but unmistakably avoided her the next day in class. And the child—who was not yet eight—knew the reason why. “They hate me because I’m German.”
But that wasn’t the worst—the hostility that could be expressed in words wasn’t so bad; what hurt her most was being ignored, being shoved aside, looking in vain for a place—the most dreaded part of the day became the “recess.” When the adult called for her in the late afternoon, she almost always, even if she was in some remote corner, saw him coming.
Grownups have their ways of hiding despair; in a child it is always noticeable; and the sight of a child who has given up hope was unbearable. He felt, with something approaching urgency, that his charge must be taken out of school; and once in those months when, to his own surprise, he said aloud that they could perfectly well manage by themselves, without other people, an almost uncanny cry, or sigh, of agreement came from the child’s innermost soul.
He reflected: hadn’t he learned something from the image of the child dancing around with other children?
No, the child did not belong to him alone. She needed a larger community; she was not only capable of “social life” but made for it. That was the right way, the right community existed, there could be no question of turning back.
A strange repetition of that dance brought certainty. A teacher from the “little school” had died, and one November evening the adult took the child from the suburb back to the old city neighborhood to attend the funeral service. Nearly all the former pupils had come to the church with their parents, and even during Mass the children, most of whom had not seen one another since the commencement exercises, kept turning to exchange looks. In the somber, vaulted church, not only the children’s clothes seemed strangely brighter than those of the grownups, but their faces as well, and everything about them; or was that only because the grownups sat so still? Afterwards, when the mourners gather outside the church, children’s voices are just about the only sound to be heard. The children scream, laugh aloud, grab hold of one another, run shouting among the soft-spoken mourners, who make no attempt to stop the dance, but are perhaps more deeply moved by the wild merriment all about them than they were by the funeral service. It’s an unusually bright evening, with a shining yellow full moon overhead and the demonic dancing of the children down below. Parting comes hard, a disentangling of intertwined arms and legs, which had briefly belonged to a single body. It’s late by the time the child is sitting in the suburban bus, almost alone with the adult. She is exhausted yet wide awake, and undoubtedly in seventh heaven. Most of all, she’s surprised: suddenly seeing all those old friends, being greeted by them with such joy, and in dancing completely forgetting the teacher’s death. The light inside the empty night bus is very white. They cross the bridge. The river is at high water and looks unusually wide and dark, with here and there a glimmer of moonlight and the top of a submerged bush. To the adult, the child’s face, glowing with life and enthusiasm as she sits there reliving the hour spent with the other children, is a picture of tragic beauty.
The dead teacher had been especially fond of the child, and after the funeral it dawned on the adult that what repelled the child about the new school was not its “state” character—as he had overhastily concluded on the strength of his own past experience—but her class teacher, who was not right for her (for her alone?). It came to him that there is a kind of passionless, lifeless friendliness (without life-giving will to exert power or influence) which, coming from a teacher, can have the effect of hostility and unkindness. In this he may have recognized his own self-absorbed absence and realized what an inhuman effect it could have. (To make matters worse, some teachers live their whole lives without the vaguest notion of what a child is. They talk to a child—voicelessly; look at it, unseeing; and all their calm and patience with children in general is nothing but indifference.)
After the first term, the child gave up her resistance to the new school and from then on hardly spoke of daily happenings. She even seemed to accept her lot. But sometimes, when she looked up at him, the adult detected an air of resignation such as he had hitherto seen only in the eyes of one, much older person—a look suggesting the saddest, most extreme constraint.
In a peaceful hour, when he was once again able to question her, the child told him she didn’t like herself anymore. The others weren’t so bad, she said; but “there’s just something wrong with me.”
The next day the man went to see the class teacher, as he had done a few times before; he tried his best to keep calm but was unable to avoid such words as “loneliness,” “despair,” “exclusion,” which in the foreign language may have sounded even more stereotyped than in his own. All at once, he noticed that the lady facing him did not—in the fullest sense—understand. A strange expression, which the petitioner would never forget, crept into the teacher’s face—there was amusement in it, and, intermittently, outright contempt—the look of a person living in an airtight world, where such a thing as “forsakenness” was inconceivable.
In that moment, his mind was made up; midterm or not, the child would leave the school that very day. (An unconcealed grin on the face of the teacher, who, however, hands out leaflets for a faraway cause.) But on the other hand she would not spend a single day at home with the adult. From this interview he goes straight to another school, which is also near the railroad tracks, but on the other side. The one thing he knows about it is that it bears the name of a saint, who has his statue in the paved yard.
This school partakes of a religious tradition which in his childhood immersed him in deadly chill, belief in ghosts, and hatred of the intellect, but on his way there this does not trouble him; what he sees in it now is glorious color, fervor, neighborliness, childlike innocence, joy of life, and mystical unity, a view justified by the millennial history of the church (or at least by its basic writings). Living alone with hi
m, the child had absorbed little of any tradition (except for a few Bible passages, in which only the events counted and no reference was made to the underlying meaning). A few times they had gone to Mass together—on one occasion the child had even remarked that the people had been “so good” to her—but as a rule they had been bored stiff at the very first sound and deeply offended by the mechanical, unfeeling demeanor of the false present-day priests and the equally evil, heartless, mindless voices of the false present-day faithful.
Nevertheless, on his way along the railroad tracks, the man is convinced that the school at the sign of the saint will now be the right place for the child; and he knows in advance that they will have to accept the child, that if there’s no room for her, they will make room.
It’s a bright cold morning in March. Behind a lone, broad-branching cedar, a smoky, tumultuous sky. Down in the chasm, the whistling, whirring, roaring of express trains; and cityward, the river, with its seemingly frozen meanders glinting through the jumble of buildings, lies like a sleeping giant. The adult quickens his step, as did the man approaching a decision according to the historian; rings at the wrong door, is taken to the right one, and there, sure enough—with his more stuttered than spoken appeal—he is successful. The very next morning, the misery school on the other side of the tracks is abandoned forever, and the child, convinced by the adult’s enthusiasm that she will be happy, slips willingly, even gratefully, into the new surroundings. It was only a change of schools, but for once it seemed a matter of life and death.
The child finished out the year at the denominational school and stayed on for the following year (when it would have been time in any case to transfer to a so-called secondary school). It was not the school of schools—that lay behind her, it had gone out of existence (and the dirt walk had been surfaced). But the simplicity did the child good. The children came of different kinds of families but were all from the immediate neighborhood, and in this the suburb, which at first had seemed to merge undifferentiated with the surrounding communities, showed its individual, still rural character. And there was something “common” about this school which, as it turned out, did the child a world of good. She surprised the adult by showing that it suited her to be common now and then. At first the adult wanted to make her stop saying certain supposedly silly things, which, to make matters worse, she seemed to spout under remote control, but then he saw that the most idiotic jokes and turns of phrase helped the child in the group games of which she had so long been deprived. And another thing he liked was that there was never the slightest indication of piety; was a pious child even conceivable?
All in all, the child’s life in that period, in contrast to the preceding years, was shaped not so much by her hours in school as by the time spent at home, during most of which the adult was her only company. Often, each was alone on a different floor. Someone who visited now and then remarked later that they had struck him at first as “rather sad figures,” and that it took him some time to notice that they were not unhappy at all but actually quite cheerful and pleased with themselves. And the adult, too, reflected at a later day that he had never felt so close to perfect bliss as at that time.
But the great conflict of all those years in the foreign country became more and more pervasive, and the harmonious aspects of their life together did not enable him to think it away. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the adult began to feel at home in the foreign language; the child, however, who had quickly learned to handle it better than many native children, disliked speaking this second language. It became clear that so-called bilinguality was not an unmixed blessing, that in the long run it could lead to a painful split. At home with the adult, the child never used the foreign language (or at the most in jest); all day long in school, however, she heard not a single word of her home language. When the adult saw her with native children out of school, he hardly knew his child. In speaking the foreign language, she put on a different voice, different gestures and facial expressions. The foreign manner of speaking brought with it a whole set of foreign, marionette-like movements, in which he discovered not just fear but panic (a phenomenon that may have been so prevalent as to seem hardly worth mentioning). In any event, a release of tension was always evident when the child came home to her first language. Once again she found her tongue, her body relaxed, she looked quietly around her. She herself told the adult how she had to “get ready inside” for the second language, and in particular adjust her voice.
During the school year the conflict was often forgotten; but it turned to disaster at the end of vacation, which the child always spent in her own country. The misery of the return to the wilderness of foreign signs and sounds was unparalleled; and of all foreign parts, there was none more glacial than this foreign-language suburb.
Her first days back made it plain to the adult that she would have to be taken to a place where her native language was spoken, and as soon as possible (though this step was regularly postponed, because by the following morning the misery was usually dispelled by the house, the nooks and crannies in the garden, the usual sights and itineraries). And wasn’t it reason enough to return home that in five years in the foreign country she had not made friends with a single native child, but only with other foreign children, mostly from other continents and of different races?
No more shilly-shallying, the child would return to the place of her first language. The decision had become possible because the adult now saw the need for a change in his own life as well. Because of the child (who really did not leave him time for a project of any length), he had gradually forgotten his old ambition and sunk into a more and more pleasurable idleness. If he had a clear conscience, it was not only thanks to the child but also to the foreign surroundings, in which no one asked him about his occupation. Here, in a manner of speaking, he was a “licensed foreigner,” which fell in with his existential ideal. There was no compelling need to work, since sufficient money remained from earlier exertions. On long walks through the many overlapping suburbs, a marvelous landscape spread out before him; years later he could have sketched a perfect map of those suburbs. Wasn’t this the life? How would it be to undertake no new work but just remain sequestered with the child (looking after her to the best of his ability) in the clearing named “abroad”; sequestered in a foreign suburban house near the foreign school; hidden in the ups and downs of the admirably deserted suburban streets, from the high points of which the metropolis below could be seen to glitter in forever-new moments of eternity?
Yet this very pleasure in doing nothing led to such imperious visions of a larger, more peaceful, more generous plan of existence, the only good one, that he came to long, more and more urgently, to do something persevering, something continuous, that could be handed down. “If not for my love of form, I would have become a mystic.” The idler, often unnerved by solitude, had taken these words, spoken by a kindred spirit of the last century, as a guiding maxim. Yes, he, too, was becoming an ecstatic or visionary, contenting himself with pure contemplation; he must become master of his insights, and for that he would have to get back to work.
He therefore decided to part with the child for a year. She would stay with her mother, who had never become an “outsider,” and would go to school in her own country—her birthplace, as it happened. The separation was no great blow to the child; what she needed now was her own language and friends (for the first time she had friends living in the same house). And the adult, who had once despised those who gave up their normal everyday life for the sake of “work,” went away convinced that he had every right to do what he was doing; after six years almost uninterruptedly alone with the child, he was entitled to commit himself to the fullest, and that seemed possible only if there was nothing to distract him. (Besides, he felt sure the absence of her “constant companion” would be good for the child.)
The day of parting comes at the end of summer, in a third country where they have spent their last weeks together. The child leaves first,
heading in the new direction with her mother. The man stands on the airport balcony and sees the plane taking off. High in the sky, already very small, it loops northward. In the end, it is only a flashing light in an opening between clouds. At my feet flagstones, still wet after a shower.
8
Ordinarily the adult had looked upon children in general as an alien race; sometimes as a relentlessly cruel enemy tribe “that takes no prisoners”—barbarous to the point of cannibalism; if not exactly hostile to humans, at least disloyal and useless; and in the long run stultifying and dispiriting to one who had no other company but such utterly asocial hordes and mobs. From this recurrent estimation he did not exclude his own offspring. But in that year of absence and work, which he spent almost entirely traveling on different continents, children, with little effort on their part, became his great helpers. They are the “strangers” who “greet” him; they prevent his gaze from going too far and losing itself. In a moment of crisis—one such crisis engendered the next—a child rang his doorbell, having stopped at the wrong floor, and the sight of this child was a disturbance just when needed; it inspired him—like caravan music—to carry on. In the late fall, while sitting on a bench in a hilly park, he watched a group of schoolchildren playing ball in a gully. One child remained apart from the game; he worked his way out of the group in larger and larger spirals, all the while looking around for someone. When the ball rolls toward him, he calmly moves out of the way; he stands for a while, swaying from side to side, then sits down on a bench, slides forward and backward, soundlessly opens his mouth, closes it, opens it again. He seems not only forlorn but also gentle and self-assured. His coat, which is too long for him, is buttoned up to his chin; a smoke-like vapor rises from the mud in the gully; a dancing of light on the children’s hair. Late that winter, a bus ride through a mountain valley; the only other passengers are strangely quiet children on their way home from school; they alight singly or in small groups and vanish down the highway or on side roads; early twilight, snow flurries, frozen waterfalls; once, through the open door of the bus, an exchange of song between two birds in the cold outside, heartbreakingly sad, yet so beautiful that the listener wishes he could remember it forever and write music. The following spring, on a train trip through a dismal wet valley, he sees a child hop-skip-jumping along beside the tracks and says to the child in his thoughts: God bless you, hop-skip-jumping stranger! And then another bus ride—once again accompanied almost exclusively by children, in the dusk and then darkness—and the involuntary words: “Can the children be saved?”
