by Peter Handke
For in the course of time the traveler seems to have discovered that children without exception are deprived of something and also expect something. The babies he saw on planes, in waiting rooms, or elsewhere were not just cranky or restless; they screamed from the depth of their souls. In the most peaceful countrysides, children bellowed for a member of their family. But apparently they also needed the random stranger who crossed their path: on crowded boulevards, in supermarkets and subway stations, time and time again the adult found his only certainty in those wide-open, almost unblinking eyes at a level with a grownup’s waist, which took in every individual in the largest crowd, on the lookout for a responsive glance. The passerby could count on their helpful notice.
Then he realized that the modern times he had so often cursed and rejected did not exist, and that the “end of time” was also a figment of the brain. The same possibilities were reborn with every new consciousness, and the eyes of children in a crowd—just look at them!—transmitted the eternal spirit. Woe unto you who fail to see those eyes.
One day he is in a museum looking at a painting of the Massacre of the Innocents: an infant in the snow raises its arms to its mother in headscarf and apron; one of her legs is twisted back; already the soldier, crooked index finger, is reaching out for the child, and as though all this were happening now, the beholder thinks, literally: This must not be! And resolves for his part to embark on a different tradition.
One Sunday afternoon in early summer, on his deliberately circuitous return journey, he is on a steamer, crossing a large lake—already in his own language zone. The much invoked community (which he, too, had dreamed of) had long—of that he was now certain—ceased to exist; those who had fostered the beauty of the country were long dead; and most of the living population glowered and sulked because there was no war. From all the walnuts on the trees—such was his curse—let sharp knives fall on these unfruitful people down in the shade and wipe them out! But on that particular day a man in a black suit and an open white shirt sat across from him on deck; beside him a child, dressed in pretty much the same way. It’s unusual for the two to be together like this. The man is employed on some large construction project and seldom sees his child; they’re from a region where there are neither lakes nor ships. But they are not tourists from a far country; they are natives on an excursion. This may be the first time they have gone anywhere together, and in any case it is only for this Sunday afternoon. They don’t seem especially joyful; they sit still and very straight, attentive and wide awake. The air is clear, the shore seems hardly a stone’s throw away, chains of hills cloaked in conifer brown. Man and child sit with their hands on their knees. From time to time the child asks a question; not a childlike voice; the man answers in monosyllables, but with thoroughness; not a trace of the sugary tone (masking indifference) with which adults so often speak to children; some going so far as to affect a sort of baby talk. The trip takes all afternoon, zigzagging back and forth across the lake from landing to landing. The unknown man’s face is more and more shaded; the child is as grave as ever. They are still sitting at the same distance from each other, forming a dark group of their own—the only one on the boat. They emanate sorrow, but also dignity and nobility; for the first time the observer sees their blackness as a color and recognizes it to be the color of a people; he has never seen two human beings closer to heaven—heaven, that is, no longer seems so very far away from them. Behind the chain of hills, a wall of thunderclouds; and the treetops on the crest show a bright border, not a mere glow, but something substantial, out of which ocean waves raised by the wind squalls roll one after another to the horizon, heralding the target age, the age of humanity, eternity. In the dusk, the two will leave the ship and walk through the town to the bus station. Folding doors will open and clouds of dust will blow across the deserted field. With the first raindrops, balls of dust will form. All night long the bus will stand empty, out in the country somewhere, in a village named Galicia, ready for the return trip to the city in the gray of dawn. (The third place name in the story of the child.)
Foggy day of arrival in the late fall; only the returnee is real. Without him, the child has become more robust. Now she is able to defend herself and can’t see why in the past she “never put up a fight.” But she remains as vulnerable as ever, with a tendency to stand aside, as if she didn’t belong.
The many changes of place haven’t impaired her orientation; she even knows the direction of the North Pole and the South Pole from the house where she lives. She has taken on very little of the local accent; but a few grownup expressions have turned up in her speech (along with some far more acceptable comic-book locutions), and the adult is inclined to ask her: “Are you still a child or have you become a German?” Her playmate, however, is not a local child but hails from a good old foreign country, and the kinship between them is such that one can phone the other “on account of a cloud.” (To most of the other children, trees and the stuff that goes on in the sky are “nothing at all.”)
She listens to the same songs, popular and folk, which gave the man his first notions of charm and freedom. Worrisome perhaps how often, when alone, she spends her time moving absently from TV to cassette player and back. But the adult commands himself to be trusting; here again he recognizes the order behind the confusion and is able, sometimes at least, to refrain from interfering.
At times he surprises in himself a novel impulse “to educate”—though the only thing he could teach her springs from the innermost language of the “I am the strongest of all” (and he refuses “to tolerate a badge with any slogan whatsoever on your school bag!”). But to be heard by the child, one would have to be much more succinct. And so the child remains the teacher, for she teaches him to have more time for the colors of the world outside, to see forms more accurately; and therefore (not only as a matter of atmospherics but in a deeper sense) to read the changes of the seasons in an uncurled fern, in the leatheriness of a leaf, or the new rings on a snail shell.
From her, too, he learns the truth about the essence of beauty: “Beauty is so hard to see.” At times (like many other children, no doubt) she really had magical powers—the man has learned that from the year of absence. Her modesty conceals demonic capabilities and skills, and one day, as she is exercising them, the adult for the first time smells something resembling sweat on the child’s body—the sweet, fruitful sweat of creativeness. One afternoon he sees her going about the city alone, seen by no one but taking it all in like the caliph in the legend. And then he sees other comparable vagrants, savoring the joys of invisibility, the secret sovereigns of all markets, streets, and back alleys.
At the same time, of course, actions (and, far more often, omissions) bring home to him the need for regularity in her upbringing. No malice or wickedness, something more like negligence or indifference to others, which is infuriating as only lawlessness can be. The adult once heard a man address the following diatribe to his own son: “Disgrace to your parents! Lickspittle! Unfeeling simpleton! Slave to your passions! Monster of ingratitude! Golden Calf to yourself! Great salt pillar of ruthlessness! Source of all my bitterness! Monument of selfishness! Heartless tyrant! Prodigy of sloth! Temple of laziness! Seat of every vice! Epitome of aimlessness! Wolf in sheep’s clothing! Preventer of greatness and goodness! My closest kin and worst enemy! Cause and content of my nightmares! Incurable wound in my bosom! Model of smugness, incapacity for sympathy, captiousness and philistinism! It’s all over between us! I never want to hear of you again! Never again shall your name be uttered in this house! Begone!” And the boy addressed with such biblical clarity understood; he went pale and hadn’t a word to say for himself. The witness thought he would take this litany as an example. But whenever he attempted anything of the kind, he failed to summon up the passion that had given his prototype the voice of a thunder god. The next time he emits soundless shouts, he notices in mid-harangue that his victim has been waiting the whole time for a glance, that she is not standin
g in front of him or opposite, but below him.
The following spring, the child turned ten. She enjoyed her birthday and accepted congratulations with self-possession. After that, she spent whole days without grownups and managed by herself or with other children.
In a forest (after another move, but still in a country where her native language was spoken—some people seem to require such a home), which she now passes through on her way to school, almost all the birdhouses have swastikas daubed on them. No one seems to notice them; but when the adult mentions the swastikas to the child, she knows all the bad places. During the following winter, when the leaves that half concealed the birdhouses have fallen, the sight becomes intolerable. The adult suggests that they go together and paint out the malignant symbols; at first he himself finds the idea rather extravagant; but to his surprise the child is all in favor, and they spend a whole morning among the trees with paint and brush. A trifling action; shouts of approval; darkly flashing avenger eyes.
The spring after that, on a windy Sunday—unusually mild for that latitude—the child is standing in a sandy front yard. The grounds, on a slight incline, are bordered by a row of bushes. Deep black gaps open in the bushes, in rhythm with the hair flying in the foreground, very much like the time almost ten years earlier when the child wandered off alone to the bank of the foreign river (except that her hair has grown longer and is interspersed with darker strands). Now she is moving through those gaps, while everything blows wildly about her, moving as though to the end of the world. Never should such moments pass or be forgotten; they demand more time and space in which to pulsate; a melody; SONG.
On a rainy morning the following autumn, the adult is taking the child part of the way to school. Over the years her school bag has become so heavy that its bearer has been nicknamed the “school slave.” Other schoolchildren come along, and the child continues on with them. The wet, dark road leads to a cluster of new houses. In front of them the steady swinging of the plane-tree crowns. The bright parts of the picture are the balcony railings and the flashing window squares at the end of the street, and in the foreground the metal clasps and nameplates of the bags on the backs of the walking children. Now the two combine to form a single, one and only, flaming, eye-catching inscription that remains to be deciphered. Now, and often later, the eyewitness ponders the words of the poet, which should apply to every story about a child, and not only written ones: “Cantilena: perpetuating the plenitude of love and of all passionate happiness.”
Translated by Ralph Manheim
Farrar / Straus / Giroux
New York
Also by Peter Handke
Kaspar and Other Plays
The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick
Short Letter, Long Farewell
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams
The Ride Across Lake Constance and Other Plays
A Moment of True Feeling
The Left-Handed Woman
The Weight of the World
Translation copyright © 1985 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. Originally published in German in three volumes, under the titles Langsame Heimkehr, copyright © Suhrkamp Verlag 1979; Die Lehre der Sainte-Victoire, copyright © Suhrkamp Verlag 1980; and Kindergeschichte, copyright © Suhrkamp Verlag 1981
All rights reserved
A portion of this book originally appeared, in somewhat
different form, in The New Yorker
Designed by Cynthia Krupat
eISBN 9781466807280
First eBook Edition : December 2011
Library of Congress catalog card number: 84-28597
Published simultaneously in Canada by Collins Publishers, Toronto
First edition, 1985
