Absence

by Peter Handke

  The woman and the old man, who have taken their clothes off behind the camper, run down to the lake without a trace of embarrassment; the old man starts his run with a jump—like a child—and his way of running is equally childlike; the woman waits a moment, as though to give him a head start, and overtakes him at the brink of the water. The gambler and the soldier, each with a toothpick in his mouth, watch as the two swim out into the pond. The water is warm. The woman turns to the aged swimmer beside her and, speaking as though they were strolling down a path together, says: “I wish I could just stay here. Any other place I can think of would be too hot or too cold, too light or too dark, too quiet or too noisy, too crowded or too empty. I’m afraid of any new place and I hate all the old ones. In the places I know, dirt and ugliness are waiting for me; in the unknown ones, loneliness and bewilderment. I need this place. Yes, I know: it’s only on the move that I feel completely at home. But then I need a place where I can spread out. Tell me of one woman who lives entirely out of suitcases and I’ll tell you about all the little things you can’t help noticing the moment she arrives—a framed photograph here, a toothbrush there. I need my place, and that takes time. I wish I could stay here forever.”

  Her swimming companion dives under; when he comes up, he has the face of a wrinkled infant. He answers in a voice made deep by the water, which resounds over the surface of the lake: “That wish cannot be fulfilled. And if it could be, it would bring no fulfillment in the long run. Whenever in my life I have thought I arrived, at the summit, in the center, there, it has been clear to me that I couldn’t stay. I can only pause for a little while; then I have to keep going until the day when it may be possible to be there somewhere else for a little while. Existence for me has never been more than a little while. There is no permanence in fulfillment, here or anywhere else. Places of fulfillment have hurt me more than any others; I have come to dread them. It’s no good getting used to staying in one place; wherever it is, fulfillment can’t last. It loses its magic before you know it, and so does the place. It is not here. We are not there. So let’s get going. Away from here. Onward. It’s time.”

  The garden has undergone a transformation while the swimmer was speaking. Though the light is unchanged, the lake has taken on a late-afternoon look. The spring has almost dried up and the water level has fallen, uncovering the usual junk—tires, metal rods, whole bicycles—along with bleached, barkless tree trunks. The skeleton of some animal appears in the underbrush at the edge of the forest, and elsewhere a collapsed shooting bench comes to light; prematurely fallen leaves are blown over the springtime lake, and those soot-gray spots in the hollows are deposits of old snow. The clouds grow longer and are joined together by vapor trails of the same color; the faded scrap of newspaper in the bushes shows a distinct date; and that importunate noise is the persistent blowing of horns on an expressway.

  The clearing is deserted, the boathouse sealed. The swimmers have left no trace in the wind-ruffled lake. Only the mud bank reveals the prints of bare feet and of the camper’s tires, vanishing in the gravel path as it mounts the moraine.

  The four have been on the road a long time. As they sit in their camper with legs outstretched, it’s plain that they feel at home on the move. The gambler is at the wheel, the woman beside him is watching him; the old man and the soldier sit facing each other on the back benches, as in a minibus or cab. It’s not only the raised seats that give them the impression that they have been climbing; the light as well is an upland light, clear and spacious. And instead of a landscape, the naked sky appears in the side windows, yellow with sunset, hazy as though from smoke but in reality from dust. The bright gravel road, which the camper has all to itself, is bordered by a forest of diminutive trees, scarcely larger than bushes. In the fading light a dark tent city seems to extend to the distant horizon, where, as though on top of a barrier, the built-up center with its domes and towers and radio transmitters is situated. So tempting are the manifold forms of uninhabitedness that the four are determined to go there at once.

  The area is not entirely deserted. A figure is standing by the roadside, signaling for a lift. The driver stops, and the hitchhiker, as nonchalantly as though getting into a bus, sits down in the back with the soldier and the old man. It is a woman swathed in a woolen headscarf, young, to judge by her eyes. The basket she props on her knees is empty, evidently she is returning home from a nearby market, where she has sold all her wares. (The only strange part of it is that she seems to have shot out of the bush, for there was no path at the place where she was standing.) Her presence underlines the feeling that this is a foreign country, but in what part of the world it is impossible to say. It could equally well be the far north or the deep south or somewhere in the interior; only the light of the particular moment lends any novelty. No attempt is made at conversation with the hitchhiker, communication seems inconceivable and undesired on either side. Only the two women have given each other appraising looks, then both turned away. The old man switches on a little overhead lamp—the light it throws on his notebook is very much like that on his lectern in the old people’s home—and tries to carry on with his signs, which the bumpy ride only makes more striking and picturesque. Before each of his strokes, always consisting of a single movement, he pauses for quite some time; shut off in his immersion, he looks at nothing else. Only the soldier, sitting across from him, manages to distract his attention. He too has a book in hand; it is still closed, and he makes elaborate preparations to open it. First he holds it out, eyes it as though to determine the right distance. What he does then is not so much to open it as cautiously to unfold it. He clamps a tiny, battery-operated reading lamp to the book cover and picks up the battery in his right hand, while with his left he places over the first line of text a semi-cylindrical glass rod, which magnifies the letters and lights up the spaces between them. The lamp sheds a tent-shaped light that makes the book appear transparent. For a moment it seems as though something is happening even without the reader. But the reader, sitting there so quietly, has his hands full, moving the magnifying glass from line to line and holding the heavy battery, which he hefts like a stone. He doesn’t even get around to turning the pages, the first page keeps him busy enough; each sentence takes time, and after each sentence he has to take a deep breath in preparation for the next. The reader reveals himself as a craftsman, and his dress, which only a short while before had seemed awkward on one who had long been in uniform, turns out to be right, a costume that leaves room for reading. Under the reading jacket his chest rises, his shoulders broaden, the mother-of-pearl button on his reader’s shirt shimmers, and the veins in his throat swell. The reader’s eyes are narrow and curve at the corners, widening at the temples as though the letters and words, though only a few inches away, form a distant horizon. These eyes show that it is not he who is digesting the book but the book that is digesting him; little by little, he is passing into the book, until—his ears have visibly flattened—he vanishes into it and becomes all book. In the book it is broad daylight and a horseman is about to ford the Rio Grande. As he watches the reader, the old man’s face copies his expression. He too has become all book, almost transparent.

  The mute hitchhiker has long been gone; the wrinkles in her seat have smoothed out; it is black night in the moving vehicle. Now the woman is driving, with an expression at once vigilant and faraway; beside her the gambler, sitting upright but dozing off now and then.

  The old man leans forward and motions the driver to turn off. The side road, almost entirely straight, descends steeply. The bushes are so close that they lash the roof and windows. Time and again the headlights pick a torrent, with frequent foaming rapids, out of the darkness. Just once the car comes to an almost level stretch, at the beginning of which there is a wrecked sluice gate with a chain still dangling from it, and at the end—indicated by a rotting wooden wheel with a few last stumps of spokes—an abandoned mill, its windows overgrown with hazel bushes, its loading ramp heaped with torn s
acks and smashed bricks, and in the shed behind it an old handcart with upraised shafts, as though ready to be pulled.

  They camp for the night at the spot where the torrent flows into a river which, in moonlight of a brightness seen only in old black-and-white Westerns, appears to be deep rather than wide. A wooden bridge leads across it, and on the other side a dark slope rises abruptly. This bridge was once an important crossing, perhaps even a disputed border, for at one end of it there is still a crank for a now-vanished barrier, and the plaster around the rusted flagpole sockets is riddled with bullet holes. But at the moment the place is almost completely forsaken, especially now at night; it’s not even a way station anymore; there has been only one late traveler, who was in such a hurry that he didn’t even stop to look at the camper.

  Now it is parked on the stubbly grass between the road and a ruined building. Nimbly, the gambler and the soldier have made up the two bunk beds without once colliding in the cramped quarters. The interior is feebly lit by invisible lamps. From a radio in one corner, which seemed at first to be turned off, a voice is heard at intervals, rattling off frequencies and place-names, many of them overseas, in international radio English. The sound can also be heard outside—where the woman and the old man are sitting by a fire. She has slipped under his cape and is resting her head on his shoulder. But here the radio is almost drowned out by the murmur of the little waterfall at the spot where the torrent flows into the river. The river itself, by comparison, seems soundless, as though it had ceased to flow.

  Now all is still in the camper, and the lights are out. The fire in the grass has burned down. The woman is still sitting by the ashes, but now the gambler is there instead of the old man, at some distance from her. The woman is warming her feet in the ashes and she no longer needs a cloak. At length the gambler breaks the silence: “That battered washtub over there on the bank, big enough for a whole family, has never been a household article. During the war the partisans used it as a ferry. They would paddle it across the river at night, not here, farther up. It often capsized, and a lot of them drowned—most of them were peasants who couldn’t swim; they had a secret workshop that turned out quantities of these washtubs. There’s no war memorial here. Nobody even knows that this ruin was the only electrical power station for miles around; the irregular current sparked and flickered in the region’s few houses, even in the farm at the tree line. The place is known only from a folk song which makes no mention of all that. It’s only about the name and a love that began here.” The woman has listened reluctantly, as though afraid of being lectured to; it took the key word at the end to relieve her fears; she wants no stories about places, only stories about love. The gambler takes his time, twists his ring, and says in a changed tone: “I didn’t respect you then, when you were brought before us in the amphitheater; I desired you. I wanted you. Your hopelessness was so complete, your brow gave off such a radiance, that I fell in love with you. Your despair aroused me. Then, when in your calm, friendly voice you told about your way of wandering around—the professor thought it was pathological—it came to me: I’ve found the woman of my life, something I had only dreamed of up until then; now it had happened. A decision was possible—actually, once you appeared, the decision had been made. In your hopelessness you struck me as immaculate, pure, holy, divine, and yet you were all woman, all flesh, all body, a perfect vessel. From my seat high up in the last row, I fell on you, I penetrated you with such force and to such depth that our ecstasy rose to the point of annihilation. And in your features, though I was sitting far away, I saw no difference between the face of extreme misery, the mask of inviolable feminine beatitude, and the grimace of utter lewdness. That day we loved each other before the eyes of all, I you in your forlornness, you me in my pure compassion. Since then I have had no feeling for anyone or anything. Since that day I have had no encounter with that rarest of all things, a beautiful human being. In that hour we, you and I, publicly engendered a unique child.” Whereupon the woman might have asked: “What sort of child?” And the gambler might have answered: “A child unborn to this day, perhaps already dead, perhaps unviable—a faint image, faint and becoming fainter.”

  The woman has listened attentively to the gambler’s story. But from time to time she has shaken her head, as though the story were not to her liking, or in astonishment that such things were possible. And once she laughed, as though thinking of something entirely different. After the last sentence, she rummages in the ashes at her feet, finds a piece of wood that is still glowing, lights her cigarette with it; in the sudden glow her face is slit-eyed, masklike.

  The full moon, at first yellow and huge on the horizon, is now small and white overhead, but its light is stranger than ever. Not only the whole breadth of the river glitters but also the leaves of the bushes on the banks; not only the metal parts of the camper but the wooden parts as well. The curtains are drawn, soft snores of varying pitch issue from them. Smoke rises from the ashes of the deserted campfire. In the gleaming water, a far brighter spot appears, a moving object; it crosses the river, shapeless at first, with a V-shaped glow in its wake. Mounting the bank, it shows the silhouette of an animal, too small and furry for a seal, too big and tail-heavy for an otter. The beaver crouches motionless; his eyes and ears are tiny and black as coal, his belly and feet are coated with clay. He sniffs uninterruptedly; he is the guardian of the site, he is guarding it with his sniffing. He is the master here now; he toils at night, damming the river; he has just come home from his place of work downstream.

  In the morning it is summer. In the warm wind, the wall of foliage on the steep opposite bank has become a band of green, modulating from bush to bush, interrupted only in those places where the undersides of leaves shimmer pale-gray as though withered. The still half-dreaming ear mistakes the chirping of crickets for the din of cicadas. This bank as well is bathed in the light of high summer. In knee-length swimming trunks the old man stands under the little waterfall, which serves him both as shower and curtain; the woman sits with her eyes closed in a pool at his feet, quietly taking her bath, resting her head on a rock as against a bathtub; the water comes up to her chin.

  The gambler and the soldier sit in the grass, playing cards. The soldier seems to be smiling, but his ears are deep-red, almost black, and oddly enough, the same is true of the gambler, who is sitting there in his shirtsleeves. The gambler shuffles, arranges his hand, plays and gathers the cards as eagerly and excitedly as if he had been a mere onlooker until then and had now at last been given a chance to play. He puts much too much energy into his movements for a friendly little game that is not even being played for money. The perspiration drips from his hair, and his shirt is plastered to his chest and back. He has taken to biting his nails when pausing to think; once or twice he tries to take back cards that he has already played—but here his opponent stops him, laying a firm hand across his fingers; and after losing he clasps his hands overhead and emits a loud curse. The woman, in a dressing gown, sits with them, applying makeup and taking it easy. The game, in which there is a winner but no winnings, has slowed all movements around it—in it they find their time measure—and, conversely, seems fenced in by slow time. What is outside the fence has lost its attraction, it frightens; there only the usual time can prevail, daily happening, history, “bad infinity,” never-ending world wars great and small. There beyond the horizon deadly earnest sets in, the treetops mark a borderline beyond which the lips of those who have just died quiver in an attempt to draw one more breath; bands of men and women, outwardly using words of endearment, inwardly mute, join forces, zealots of every kind, from whom there is no escape, who move even the highest mountains into the lowlands. One would like to regard the card game as reality and, thus fenced in, remain at the peak of time. The card players sit in the grass facing each other, as though they have shed their armor and for once are showing their true faces.

  The old man is the spoilsport. Suddenly he steps in, gathers up the cards, and throws them fa
r out into the river. As though he had been absent a long time, his face is covered with stubble and sunburned. His cape, reversed, has become a bright linen sail. Wearing ankle-high shoes, a water bottle and haversack slung over his shoulder, he is equipped for a long march. On his head a bright checked woolen cap with fringed edges; in one hand an unfolded map, in the other a freshly cut hazel stick. Wearing baggy, clownlike trousers, he has thrust one leg forward and seems to be standing on one foot. Despite his violent action, he is in a cheerful mood; it’s just that he has made a decision and throwing the cards away was a part of it.

  After letting himself be inspected, he speaks: “The joyride is over. From here on we walk. No more riding. When people ride, there is no departure, no change of place, no sense of arrival. In a car, even when I myself was driving, I was never really traveling. My heart was never really in it. When I ride, I’m confined to a role that is contrary to my nature: in a car, that of a figure behind glass; on a bicycle, that of a handlebar holder and pedaler. Walking is the thing. Treading ground. Having my hands free. Swaying to my own rhythm. Only when absolutely necessary should one drive or be driven. Places to which I have been driven are places where I have never been. Only through walking can a place be in some measure repeated. Only through walking do spaces open up and the spaces in between sing. Only when walking do I turn with the apples on a tree. Only a walker’s head grows on his shoulders. Only a walker experiences the balls of his feet. Only a walker feels a current run through his body. Only a walker perceives the tall tree in his ear—silence. Only a walker overtakes himself and comes to himself. Only a walker’s thoughts have substance. We will walk. Walking is what wants to be done. And you mustn’t walk like other people who, anyone can see, walk only when they have to or by accident. Walking is the freest of sports. And now it’s time to get going. Places get their virtues from walkers’ virtues. Oh, my undying appetite for walking, for walking out of a place and walking on forever!”