Absence

by Peter Handke

  A warm sun shone in our faces. We bounded along as over a mountain meadow; what seemed to be tall prairie grass was the sparse, thin stalks which, without being trodden on, bowed under the air current raised by our steps; underneath it was dense, stubbly meadow grass. We had the feeling that we were still on a road thanks to the woven pattern of the plantains, as reliable a companion as the sparrows flying along with us from bush to bush; every time we looked there were more of them, and as they streaked through the air they took the place of telegraph wires.

  Shoulders rolling, eyes fixed on the tips of his shoes, our leader was wholly taken up with his walking; his steps shook his whole body up to the bristly whorl on the crown of his head; in his preoccupation with his walking, he made one think of a blind man going his daily rounds and familiar with every bend and bump and pothole. Now he began to slow down and his shoulders grew broader. When we overtook him, he seemed entirely self-absorbed and yet on the alert, his ears wide open, receptive to the slightest bird sound or stirring of breeze. Apart from our steps there were no others far and wide.

  Then his lesson began. Time and again he would stop, gather us together, and with a simple gesture call our attention one after another to the things of war and of peace, sometimes both in one. When he tapped on what looked like a woodpile, making it known to us as a wartime dugout; when he unmasked the line of brushwood zigzagging across the hollow as a trench; when he bent down and picked a handful of raspberries out of the prairie grass; when he picked up a quail’s egg; when with one movement he plucked a whole bundle of herbs—a wave of fragrance, sunny-warm, and so strong that it went straight to our heads; when he pushed aside the curtain of bushes, revealing to the left of us a stone quarry that had only been deserted over the holiday and, to our right, a field of ripe corn as green as a mountain brook, its broad leaves waving in the wind; when with a wave of his arm he disclosed a treetop beheaded by lightning; when he made a golden eagle come sailing out of the empty sky and caused a streaky white cloud to grow out of the pure blue and then disappear—he was merely continuing the process begun when he conjured up the inscription.

  Suddenly he broke off, forgot those around him, and pulled out his notebook, the used part of which, blackened and bloated by his entries, was as thick as an imposing volume. The barely audible sound of the CUMBERLAND pencil fell in with the other persistent sounds that intensified the silence; its rhythm was that of a Morse transmitter. The pencil spoke, interfered, argued, asked questions; it was trying to make a point. Though we could not see what was being written—the notebook was half hidden by the writer’s elbow—it must have been verbs which, when we looked up after a time, had acted on the landscape. Every part of it was shot through with a soundless whirring; so that the towering of the cliffs and the lying of the savannah were as much an action as the perching of the birds in the bushes. In the grass at our feet a perpetual greening, in the sky overhead a vibrant bluing, and in between, at eye level, the forest’s constantly renewed marching-across-the-plain and climbing-the-slope, all its trees, even the dead ones, as though on duty, like streetlamps advancing in long rows, their branches swinging vigorously. What was happened again and again in the rhythm of the pencil, and became, time and time again, what it was.

  We too were seized with undirected energy. Each for himself, we swarmed out over the barren land and the tilled fields. Actually, we did nothing, we just walked. We walked singly, rapidly, strung out at a distance from one another, seldom looking toward one another, but when we did, we could be sure that our glance would be answered with an immediate wave, even by a figure at the limit of visibility; no need to shout.

  The only one of us to act like a harvester was the old man. He had dropped back, as though we had no need of his leadership for the present, and kept bending over, moving back and forth as though following furrows; retracing his steps as though gleaning; spinning around or taking a few steps backward, as though to make sure of missing nothing; or from time to time just standing there, with one hand on his hip and the other shielding his eyes. When he then entered something in his notebook, he leaned into the curve as though pushing a plow around a bend. Whenever we looked in his direction, another figure was moving around the fields, not instead of but behind the one we had seen before, who was still walking there. In the end this one person became a miles-long procession.

  When the clouds rose on the horizon, we got together again. By then we were deep in the interior; we had long been walking on the bottom of the hollow, still on the strip of prairie, which had widened until it filled the whole valley. We could tell by the clarity of the air and the light but steady contrary wind that we were still on a high plateau.

  Only clouds coming from the sea can cross the horizon so quickly. In a moment they had covered the whole sky. The storm did not give the advance notice usual in inland regions: the few drops which at first only wet the stones and make them pop out of the ground in all colors, the crackling as of chirping crickets in the grass, followed by an interval of dead calm as the storm musters its forces. Here the rain broke over us unannounced, streamed down the backs of our hands, slammed into the hollows of our knees; bowing our heads, we saw sheets of water breaking over the tips of our shoes and dividing into ankle-deep rivers, through which we tried to wade. This water was heavy and increasingly cold, terrifying. Of course the gambler had a raincoat in his knapsack, large enough in fact to cover us all, but the wind had risen and the rain splattered us from the front even more violently than from above. Before long it had half blinded us and made breathing almost impossible.

  In search of shelter, we headed for the bushes at the edge of the prairie, but our progress was as slow and awkward as in dreams; we kept sinking into the mud, stumbling, pulled down by the weight of our clothing, shackled at the knees, falling, stopping to catch our breath; our pursuer, instead of being behind us, was everywhere. At length we found makeshift shelter in the thicket with its roof of tough, dense-layered leaves, which reduced the watery onslaught to spray. There the four of us stayed a long while, each in a separate niche, cut off from the others by wooden bars as in individual cells, staring at the deluge which before our eyes was reducing the high plateau to a swampy, mist-shrouded plain and turning our bushes into an island.

  The rain abated in fits and starts; every time it seemed to be stopping, it started up again, fortunately for shorter and shorter periods; in the end, it was falling only from a single tree in a last onslaught of the wind, which was also dying down by fits and starts. While the rain was falling, the water on the ground had been so deep that the prairie looked like a rice plantation; now, before we knew it, the water was sucked up by the soil; all that remained was a quickly receding gurgling, giving way to sounds suggesting the uncorking of bottles. The water in the bushes had dispersed into myriad drops which, instead of falling, hung from the branches in motionless chains.

  There were no puddles and consequently no birds that might have bathed in them. The storm was followed by a deaf silence: the old man’s word for it—he was writing again, his pencil made no sound on the dampened paper —was “nonstillness.” The gray around us was not fog; it was the kind of haze, dense, uniform, without puffs or wisps, which settles on a snowy landscape when the snow has turned to rain. Our only horizon was ourselves and a few leaves, which in the dingy light looked like symbols drawn in India ink; the outermost limit of our field of vision was still within reaching distance: a black, sharply delineated, beak-shaped thorn, pointing into the unknown.

  In emerging from our niches, we had to tear our clothes from the brambles in which we had unwittingly become entangled in our search for shelter. On the next leg of our journey, it was useless to look persistently at anything, as we ordinarily did. In the illusory calm, any movement, however slight, would have been noticeable; but there was none; even the bit of fluff on a blade of grass seemed to have been pasted on; even if one had blown on it, or so it seemed to us, it would not have stirred.

  The
wind did not start up again until late, and then from the opposite direction, as though it had turned around behind our backs. As we sensed from the start, this was an entirely different sort of wind. The former one had made itself heard by means of things—clearly distinguishable varieties of needles and leaves; the new one came on as a single undifferentiated blow, whistling and clattering like a wind that is traversing not a desert but thickly settled country whose population—just a few birds, to be sure—has sped away, all with flattened wings, lamenting like prisoners.

  In no more time than it took the clouds to gather and roll away, our clothes dried; the almost inextricable knots in our shoelaces were our only reminder of the downpour. Thanks to the wind, the air had become painfully clear; whatever we looked at was too close, too sharply delineated —and deceptive to boot: side by side with trees, we saw incessant lightning flashes, their negative images; the apparent herd of antelopes that passed us by with a loud clatter of hoofbeats proved to be a single deer. The prairie grass in front of us was so thoroughly combed apart that far and wide nothing remained but the naked stone desert. This wind howled through our skulls and seemed to dominate all space; under its harrying, the moon seemed to wane, while the countryside below lay trembling, pressed into an inclined plane.

  The only calm spots were behind bends in the cliff. There, sheltered from the wind, we found ourselves in a warm, clear midsummer afternoon. In one of these oases, the soldier crouched down and pressed his fist to his forehead. The others gathered around him, looking down. At length the soldier raised his face, which had suddenly become the face of an old man. In attempting to laugh, he showed all his weakness and a moment later laughed at it without restraint. He stood up unaided, gaining new strength from the avowal of his misery. As he walked on, he moved his lips, as though preparing to say something. In reality, he was only counting his steps to himself.

  Under the evening sun—long, apparently flickering shadows—our leader suddenly quickened his pace, but intimated that we could take our time. Well ahead of us, he entered a gently rising mixed forest, in the middle of which we discerned a row of cypresses that might have lined a cemetery walk. The wind was blowing so hard that the thick multiple trunks, usually cloaked in dark foliage, gaped wide in their nakedness. This was no optical illusion. At the end of the walk, the old man vanished through an arch of light, and a moment later we saw woodsmoke rising—smoke signals, we thought. Clearly, this was our goal for the day.

  The old man was waiting for us at the entrance to something halfway between a natural cave and a man-made structure. Our first impression was of an ivy-clad, windowless dwelling with an ingenious door opening—on the lintel a festoon of stalactites, in the clay floor a matching threshold; between them creepers hanging like the string curtains one sees in southern countries; and a flat roof green with shrubbery. While the old man parted the strings with a gesture of hospitality and showed us in, one of our number automatically took off his shoes in the grass and the rest of us did likewise. A black-and-yellow salamander, motionless, looked up at us—the heraldic emblem of the cave hostelry.

  This cave had once served as a bunker and the inner walls had been reinforced with concrete; the stalactites hanging from the ceiling were as sooty as the meat in a smokehouse. But this was only the vestibule; rounding a bend, we entered another cave. Though deeper in the rock than the first, it was lighter, thanks to a number of almost circular, seemingly artificial windows in the thin roof, where once trees had rooted and now the outside world shone in, its colors intensified by the windows; the entire cave seemed irradiated by the summery green of the bushes on its roof and their reflection in the likewise round puddles on the floor. A plank led past the puddles into the background: a dry “chimney corner,” recognizable at a glance by the cast-iron stove, in which the fire burst into life with a roar that drowned out the howling of the wind (so that was why the old man had been picking up wood on the last stretch of the way). The stove was connected by two slanting pipes to a hole in the wall; the thicker one served to evacuate smoke, while the thin one carried rainwater into the reservoir of the stove. Consonant with the picture of a hostel were the wooden table beside the stove, the long bench against the cave wall—whose stalactites were like smooth backrests—and the adjoining sleeping quarters, an alcove floored with a thick layer of foliage intertwined with corn husks and straw, which one might have taken for mere animal litter if not for the carefully folded gray army blankets on top of it; an overhanging rock, this one without windows, made the half-darkened alcove look something like a room.

  This time the old man was the cook. Deftly he prepared the evening meal from the provisions which the gambler as usual had in his knapsack, seasoning and freshening them with the herbs—the kernels of corn, the mountain figs and juniper berries he had gathered on the way—which made even canned goods tasty. The rest of us were too tired to go out again. At first we were not even willing to get up from the bench; while our cook washed up—that evening left us forever with the unique image of an old, old man, an aged innkeeper, standing high over the stove in his world-famous kitchen, with an invisible brigade of apprentices gathering round him—we looked out at the entrance to the cave, where more and more leaves were blowing around the bend leading to the bunker and coming to rest in the quiet, or up at the window holes that had long since turned night-black. It was a warm, wakeful weariness, in which all of us not only heard and saw the same things but in addition were all of the same age and sex, and had no story but the fatigue we all had in common.

  Our host hung an oil lamp on the wall and sat down with us. The circle of light wavered at first and barely extended to our hands, which lay heavy and motionless on the table, still swollen from our exertion; between thumb and forefinger, as though forgotten, a last piece of bread, a bouillon cube, a pea, a cigarette; our fingertips still shriveled and drained of color from our hour in the rain, as though our hands had been under water the whole time. Then the wick was turned up and the light shone evenly through the room, darkening the spaces between the stalactites on the walls and so accentuating their shapes. A limestone surface showed the regular folds of a window curtain drawn for the night, and the divers stalagmites rising from the floor provided a row of sturdy but graceful household articles—jugs, bottles, cups, and bread molds.

  The gambler switched on a transistor radio, so small that it was almost invisible in his hand. We heard a fragment of the news; the speaker’s voice was soft and clear, shaping the words with excessive precision, as though addressing children or foreigners. And indeed the message was intended for a particular group. The fragment was as follows: “ … have been, to the best of our knowledge, no casualties. Nor has any property damage been reported. Trains, planes, and ships are operating normally. All the mountain passes are open. The search parties have returned safely. Those last reported missing are also safe and sound. The chief cities are calm, and there have been no reports from any part of the country of power or telephone failures. There is no food shortage and no threat of epidemics. The steps taken have proved effective. Since a recurrence is unlikely for the present, no special measures are under consideration. There has been a marked improvement in the weather …”

  From then on the wind, which was still blowing against the cave dwelling, and the dripping from the limestone roof were a part of the silence. From out of this silence the voice of our host in a tone of rising amazement: “How far we have come today! We have traveled halfway around the world: this morning a bone-chilling showerbath under the waterfall; in the noonday heat the crackling bronze tablets of the war cemetery; this afternoon battling the desert rain, without stopping for breath, attacked from behind by the Tibetan north wind; at last, toward evening, this cave behind a cave, this kitchen-bedroom-living room around the corner from a bunker … How many days have elapsed for me in this one day! It took me a whole day to watch you playing cards; a second to go down the river; a third to climb up to the high plateau; a fourth to get my b
earings there; then a whole week to decipher the road markings, to lead you through rain and wind to my stalactite grotto, and to make it seem as bright and hospitable to you as a mountain villa.”

  After a long pause, the gambler spoke: “My parents have long been dead. But each imprinted an unmistakable image on my memory. Though I probably saw them many a time afterward, I feel as though those images were their last. I see my mother weighed down with shopping bags, climbing a steep hill on her way home. She is alone—there’s no one in sight far and wide—dragging herself laboriously up the hill, and it’s not just because of her bags. She doesn’t notice me at first; her face is strange, a man’s face. For the first time I see her as she is. As she is? Forsaken, cast out of the human community, aching with loneliness; before her eyes, unblinking in spite of the sun, death. And her expression.doesn’t change when she sees me; she shows neither surprise nor pleasure; she doesn’t want to dissemble now, that’s her strength. With the strength of her despair, she aims a short contemptuous glance at the person who, for all she cares, can come to meet her until the end of time but still won’t be her child. Already she has passed him without a word. My father is sitting in a small clearing, deep in the woods, where the two of us have gone to pick blueberries. He is sitting in the grass at the junction of several paths, leaning with outstretched legs against a wooden cross. Though he is a practiced walker and still relatively young, he is suddenly too tired to go on. He doesn’t want me to stay with him, he tells me to go picking alone. Lying there with his hands on his belly, he really seems to be pleading when he says: Please go; and the look in his eyes expresses not only pain but acquittal and release. I may be dead tired—but never mind, leave me, my boy; I, your father, will stay here awhile and wait for you. In these two images, my parents are still alive for me. Whenever I come to that steep path, in reality or in my thoughts, my mother comes plodding along, looking through me in her saintly despair, and whenever I pass that grass triangle in the middle of the woods, I see my exhausted father watching me over his shoulder. But today I need neither that particular path nor that particular clearing; wherever I’ve been, my mother or my father has been there, too. Detaching themselves from those two memories, they come to me in the air, figments of light, consisting solely of glances. In today’s desert world, more than ever before, I have felt myself seen and observed by my parents. And the glances did not come only from my parents—all my forebears were there, watching me as I passed through the empty country; a whole far-flung clan, totally unknown to me before, has been looking at me. I too have the feeling that in this one day I have experienced several different days, so varied have been their looks, looks of horror turning to amazement, turning to indulgence, turning to approval, turning to understanding, turning to solidarity—until at the end of the long day the glance of my forebears was one with mine and fused into something else, a voice which at last has made it possible for me to mourn my father and mother, and also, for the first time in the fifty years of my life, bade me welcome on earth, while at the same time calling out to me, bidding me think about someone else, care for him, do something for him, do everything for him, this minute. Now! I would like to be on the move like this as long as I live.”