Absence

by Peter Handke

  The listeners accede without protest to the old man’s command. The gambler, who always has what is needed ready at hand, distributes walking equipment. The clothing is airy and the shoes, too, are light. The odd part of it is that on the four even the most ungainly garments acquire style, as though made to order for them. For all the disparity of their dress, its elegance enables them to form a group. The woman wears her headband like a tiara, the soldier his parka like a dress uniform, the gambler his dust coat like a robe of office. The last two load heavy knapsacks on each other’s back, and instead of crumpling under the weight, they seem to grow, as though the extra weight were just what their shoulders needed.

  The camper has been left behind deep in a shadowy thicket, where its slats gleam like a forgotten woodpile. The forsaken spot is enlivened by a bird; its wispy legs are perched on a stone in the middle of the brook and its longer-than-body-length tail keeps bobbing up and down. Incessant, too, is the sound of the water, racing over the massive round stone, a dark, rhythmic pounding that pervades the general roar, a sonorous vibration as of a musical instrument, or the after-echo of a forgotten epic. The bullet holes in the ruined building are covered by spiderwebs sprinkled with mortar. From the bridge rises the vapor of thawing ice and snow; the planks creak. The place has the feel of a forbidden zone.

  The walkers did not cross the bridge but followed an old mule track along the river. We were heading downstream, but sometimes, when we looked to one side and the waves came fast, we seemed to be moving in the opposite direction, that is, upstream; in the end, the picture became so reversed that we were confused—as at old Westerns, when the stagecoach wheels appear to be moving backward.

  Our first stop was at the point where the river emerged from its valley and the bank on our side flattened out into a plain, while the opposite slope, though still steep, receded from the bank in a long arc, leaving room beside the water for a road, a railroad line, and finally fields, before turning into a long mountain chain paralleling the river at a distance.

  Here, at the end of the defile, we crossed the river on a high footbridge so narrow that we had to proceed cautiously step by step. From then on, it was a different river, bathed in southern light, shallow, its water dispersing into rivulets between broad banks of gravel. Sparsely inhabited; as far as the eye could see, only an occasional lone fisherman, none of whom so much as raised his head as we hove in sight.

  When we came to the road on the other side, we saw why it was unused: it had long fallen into disrepair and had never been open to ordinary traffic; it had been specially built during the world war to carry troops and supplies to the front. Grass was growing in the cracked asphalt; whole bushes and small trees had taken root, and their tops had joined to form a leafy roof. We could have walked comfortably on this straight empty road, with an elastic ribbon of moss under our feet, but our leader motioned us to the railroad embankment that ran parallel to the road.

  The railroad had not by any means fallen into disuse. Trains kept passing, those heading upriver gathering speed, those heading downriver slowing down, as though approaching a considerable city—though of such a city we saw no sign. In the trains moving away from the invisible city, the passengers were sitting still, while in those approaching the station, a jolt went through the cars from first to last, ushering in a general rising from seats, and there were also repeated scenes of conductors in seven-league boots racing through the corridors from back to front. After crossing the embankment through an opening shaped like a portal, we took a gently winding path up the mountain slope, wide enough to have permitted us to walk abreast. But all of a sudden our aged leader was in a hurry and apparently wanted to be alone, so that even at the start of the climb we walked in single file. A little later the woman passed him with a cocky side glance, signifying that she no longer needed a leader, and vanished around a bend, only to reappear much later on an open stretch, silhouetted against the sky, high above her companions. Not once did she look around. Even on the shortcuts, she moved with swinging arms and head aloft, on steep hills as on level stretches. The gambler and the soldier with their knapsacks brought up the rear, walking slowly. The soldier came last, so as not to leave the gambler alone, for he was not accustomed to climbing and his knees kept buckling.

  Only a short time has passed since they left the plain, and yet the very first S-curve has carried them far away: the plain’s details and movements stand out clearly all the way to the snow-covered mountains on one side and the luminous mist on the other which, along with the dark ships that sail it, is called the “sea.” At the same time, almost all its sounds have been swallowed up, and those few that are still audible transformed: the clanking of trains into a soft knocking, as though from behind a glass wall; and the crowing of cocks, also as from behind a glass wall, into incessant call signs. The clear, varied, quiet design is that of medieval panels, in which for the first time pure landscape became subject matter, and taken together, sea, tilled plain, and high mountains represent the whole world. The car flashing somewhere in the distance is also a part of this silent world, and despite their many different colors the houses of a settlement plunked down in a niche in the mountainside give off the same sienna tone of earth shooting up at the sky. So sharpened is the hearing by the silence here that not even the grazing of butterfly wings against the sand of the path goes unheard.

  As the S-curves narrow and become more and more overgrown with brambles, they seem to be leading nowhere, and there is reason to fear that after the next bend the path may end in an abandoned quarry and prove to be the wrong one. The boat by the roadside halfway up the slope, as thick-walled as a dugout canoe, seems to have been washed up here in prehistoric times when this upland was still covered by the sea.

  After the bend, however, a first goal comes in sight: a military cemetery, as wide and deep as two or three quarries, laid out in gently rising rows—one for each letter of the alphabet. Larger than man-size marble slabs; affixed to each one a bronze tablet incised with columns of names, and over each column—unlike the names, legible even at a distance—the same word: PRESENT, in black letters which shimmer throughout this enormous field of the fallen and seem to shout from soundless throats.

  The soldier takes an interest in the cemetery and examines the inscriptions, while the others regard the place as a mere way station. They take a different attitude toward the field where the dead of the defeated power lie buried. No larger than a village graveyard, it is equally overgrown with grass. Few of the wooden crosses are marked with anything but numbers; most of the names are incomplete, followed by question marks or so garbled as to suggest nicknames. Here we stop, wait for one another, drink from a water spigot, and get ready to proceed together. Next we enter a steep defile through a vault of overhanging bushes that leave the clay floor in half darkness. It is a short climb, but numerous changes occur. At first audibly gurgling, the rivulet alongside narrows after a few steps, and at the same time the muddy ground gives way to bare rock; the dividing line is reinforced by a tree root shaped like a snake. This borderline tree between brown, bricklike earth and smooth, light-colored stone is a huge, wide-branching, solitary plane tree; it shades the path, and its roots draw the last available water from the ground; in the rock which now begins there is none. Here the defile culminates in a natural staircase. After climbing the last steps side by side, the four stop close to the tip of the plane tree’s uphill branch—snake-shaped like its root, thick, long, and with the bulbous head of a diamond-patterned python protruding horizontally into the air. Then, leaving the protection of the fairy-tale tree, they find themselves on the threshold of a vast plateau, at first sight so barren that the seedpod of the plane tree, swinging close to their heads, looks to them like the last token of a living world.

  But for the present it is also a boon to have turned their backs forever on water and the sounds of water that have been with them so long, the roaring of the torrent, the murmur of the river, the bubbling of the spring.
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  The plateau slopes gently to form an immense hollow—only in dreams might one expect to see a hollow so vast—which curves upward just as gently at its distant, but clearly outlined, blue edges. The edges, as far as the eye can see, are wavy and dunelike; every single hilltop, gently sloping on the lee side and steeper to the windward, seems to ride behind the next, and all—with no mountain peak, belonging to a region yet to come, behind them—border on the open sky. Thus the plateau, an almost perfect oval extending to the horizon, seems to be a realm apart, distinct from the familiar world, not a mere region, but a country in itself, a separate continent on top of our continent.

  The dominant form of this country is the oval, which spreads everything contained in it out before our eyes; between us and the horizon there seem to be no nooks and crannies, no clefts or hidden far sides of hills. All objects are seen clearly and without distortion. Thanks to the overall form, each is distinct from the others, but all are joined in a community of graceful shapes which within the oval create an illusion of active life, one might even say of frenzied expectation, as though a buoyant, festive mankind had assembled there.

  Yet this country is obviously uninhabited, showing no trace of any recent civilization, such as a settlement, a sentry box, a device for measuring rainfall, or any kind of trigonometric point. The neat rows of vines in the hollow are wild juniper bushes and the great midwestern fields of yellow grain waving in the wind are one vast barren prairie. Into the prairie from all directions, almost in human form, trees come running, withered, branchless, barkless trees, running through pale grass. The groups of small still-living conifers, rising at intervals from the hollow and forming a jagged line on the upper reaches of the oval, are so bemantled in a gray filigree of dead wood that their greenery looks like islands in it. But what makes the country look utterly dead is its empty sky, beneath which, when contemplated for any length of time, the trees, even the healthy ones, take on the aspect of ruins; for a moment it might seem that this sky is hostile to life, so much so that the tiny bird, hardly bigger than a fingertip, which darts out of a bush, loses no time before squeaking with terror and diving headlong back into its shelter. It is no doubt from such a sky that in a prehistoric era, which in this region is still in progress, the numerous, grotesquely shaped, bone-colored boulders, often as big as houses, rained down, filling the whole prairie, sprinkling the bare woods, and in places running straight ahead like rows of megaliths, a cosmic rockfall capable of recurring at any moment.

  This chimerical country, changing shape every time one looked at it, had a different effect on each of the four walkers. The woman clung to the gambler, so violently as to make him stagger, then looked back over her shoulder in the direction of the river valley, which had long since disappeared from view. In her panic, her face showed its beauty: widened eyes, taut cheekbones, blood-red lips. The gambler, ordinarily at ease under any conditions, raised his hand to his nose—something he had done now and then before throwing the dice or playing a card—as though to restore his self-confidence by sniffling (he had never gambled in such a country). As for the soldier, he marveled in silence at the unknown place, delighted not to know where he was, in much the same situation as a man who wakes up far from home, not knowing where, rid of his name yet certain that he is at last present—for the morning, the light, the step out of doors, the raindrops in the dust, the eyes of the first person to come along, the words of the old book.

  But the soldier’s delight did not infect the others; for a time each of them, including the old man, the leader, remained shut up in himself; he who had been in such a hurry to reach the plateau stopped on its threshold, and the gesture with which he at first pointed out his kingdom was transformed by his lowered eyelids into an attitude of awe, discernible also in his voice, which did not find its level and was either too low or too high, too loud or too soft, as though he were constantly listening to it, as though he had never spoken an audible word in this country except possibly to himself—though obviously he had been there any number of times over the years and was thoroughly familiar with it.

  “This is the place. We are there. Now we have time. This is our day, and tomorrow will be like today. Just now you are afraid, and rightly so. Here it is winter in the summertime. The clarity of this country is an optical illusion; nowhere can this wilderness be framed, ordered, and tamed by a hotel window, nowhere is there flowing water; on all sides only silence, no creature who looks at you, no one who will speak to you, no mirror image that will reassure you; under every stone there may be a viper. Here you have no opponent who will let you think out your moves, no enemy into whose eyes you can look. In this country, unlike all other places, you will not find the right moment for anything, neither for drawing a knife nor for opening a book. Here it will not be a case of now or never, but of always and always! or never and never! In this country your knife will never cut into living flesh, and here you will always be able to read—in your books or in their commentary known as NATURE. I threaten you and I promise you. I promise you not only that here you will neither hunger nor thirst, that you will have a roof over your heads and a place to sleep, that you will return home from here—I also promise you beauty. We shall see things in a different light; as long as we breathe the air here, we shall perceive coherent, living signs in all that is lifeless and confused; after the first few steps, as long as we keep starting out in the morning and walking in the light of this country, our inner images will appear to us in space, in the form of a word, a rhythm, a song, in the shaping of a story. You are new here, but not strangers. Each of you has been here before! In the period when you were wandering around aimlessly, you wanted to return here, you traced the paths leading to this country on the watermarks of your banknotes; when a book didn’t speak to you of this country in the daytime, your dreams spoke of it at night. Desolate land, which for thousands of years has served the nations only as a place of transit or a battlefield, time and again ravaged and destroyed, disparaged by the poets who passed through, termed ‘insignificant’ by one who barely turned to look and ‘sea of stones’ by the next—‘as though God had stood here when he cursed the earth after the fall of man.’ Without treasure vaults or pomegranate trees, you, in your ever and ever regenerated emptiness, have always been the land of glory for our kind of people. All my life I have been disloyal because of my accursed notebook, my tormentor here; I have been faithful to you alone, barren, devastated, inexhaustible land of pathways.”

  Undoubtedly, if one looked at the country as he spoke, the old man’s words had the power to make things visible by giving them their contours, to raise, as it were, the lifeless hollow from the depths; but though the old man’s voice rose to a quivering psalmody addressed only to the country, our group did not accept his message. The soldier listened absently, as though he knew the text in advance and was actually listening to something else; the gambler stared at the bunch of keys in his fist, from which steel points protruded between his fingers like a knuckle-duster; and the woman looked at herself in a pocket mirror which she held so close that she could only see her eyes.

  With impassive features, the leader of the expedition took the mirror and threw it into the thicket; and at almost the same time he disposed of the gambler’s keys and his own freshly cut hazel stick. (As though they had duplicates at home, woman and gambler didn’t seem to mind.) Then he stamped his foot on the ground, bringing forth an unexpected reverberation which roused them all, including the soldier. He then called their attention to a half-buried stone slab, a fragment of a portal of indeterminate age, scraped off the lichen, strewed a handful of fine juniper needles on it, and carefully blew them over the letters, thus distributing the needles in the grooves. In this way he, as though by magic, raised a picture from the stone and, with a sweep of his magician’s cape, presented it to his audience: a weathered, ten-rayed, gnomon-less sundial scratched into the stone and made visible by the shiny brown juniper needles.

  With the same air, he tore
a blank page from his notebook, ripped it up, put the pieces in his mouth, chewed them in his right and left cheek by turns, took the paper pulp between his fingers, and laid it out in lines, on a second block of stone that seemed to have grown out of the ground. After giving it time to dry, he removed it and showed each one of us the imprint of the letters: DIM, which he elucidated as “Deo Invicto Mithrae” and translated as “To the unconquered sun god.” Thereupon he pointed at the depopulated country before us, and called out his usual: “Let’s get going.”

  This uncovering of script was what we needed. It gave us eyes for other signs of life in the wilderness: the vestiges of paving stones in the grass, the prewar milepost leaning against natural stones, the one cultivated cherry tree (in the foliage of which for a time we saw nothing, then the first glowing red fruit, and finally the sparkle and radiance that overshadowed the green of the leaves). Though the pavement soon broke off, the signs in themselves formed a kind of causeway or raised avenue, cutting straight through the wilderness as far as the most distant horizon.

  The old man proceeded quickly, with lowered head and crooked shoulders; seen from behind, he gave the impression now of a dying man, now of a schoolboy. The rest of us were seized with euphoria the moment we set foot in the strange country. The woman walked on her hands and did cartwheels; the soldier and the gambler tossed a basketball, which naturally the gambler had in his knapsack, back and forth; at one stopping place they found a concrete court, belonging to an abandoned army camp, camouflaged with creepers and even equipped with a pole and a serviceable basket.