Absence

by Peter Handke

  We assumed that the old man had gone on ahead of us, that he had left the map to enable us to follow him, and would be waiting for us somewhere along the way, at the latest that evening in the city. A light, steady breeze blew in our faces from the start—hadn’t that breeze been raised by his steps? Surely it was so fragrant because of the herbs he carried—mixed, concentrated, and warmed—in his trouser pockets. If we had called him, it wouldn’t have been out of worry but out of playfulness—yes, but by what name?

  All day we walked with the thirst for knowledge that had taken hold of us in our moment of waking. Though supposedly there was nothing more to investigate or discover on earth, we approached every new landscape with the eagerness of explorers, and circled each object in a collective joy of discovery. Our perception was never purely external; it was always an assimilation, which engraved colors, forms, and relationships indelibly on our minds and strengthened us; we never so much as thought of appropriating, but saw things as values in themselves; their mere presence made us feel that we had recovered from something. We wanted only to embrace them, feel them, measure them, and transmit them; didn’t even the most unassuming blade of grass deserve to be noticed and communicated—at least with faint cry? Our day of discovery brought us news that obviated the need for any conceivable newspaper.

  That day nothing could happen to us. Of the snakes in the rubble we saw only the dark tips of their tails as they disappeared between stones, and the gambler, despite his lack of exercise, proved unexpectedly nimble in jumping from boulder to boulder. The woman, with the old man’s cape over her shoulders, danced as surefooted as in a dream through the rocks and stumps that encumbered the dazzlingly white riverbed. And when the soldier, racing up to the bare hilltop ahead of us with the knapsack bobbing up and down on his back like a child’s schoolbag, staggered and fell as though shot, he was merely acting out a scene from his past.

  Instead of pausing at the summit, we descended directly to the lake; in addition to walking and jumping and climbing that day, we kept arriving. At first sight the lake was only a pale-yellow forest of reeds. At its edge we found a boat, chained to a tree. The view from above had shown us that the other side could be reached most easily on foot; but we followed our scout’s directions and took the boat, though we first had to bail it out and then use our hands as paddles. The unusual things about this small lake were the trees half submerged in it and the clear water that rose in visible whirls from the stony bottom. The woman soon left the paddling to the others, draped herself in the cape, and stood erect in the bow. Though the breeze was barely perceptible, the leaves of the tall alders all around the lake rustled incessantly, and the rustling grew louder and louder, more and more tempestuous, until it seemed to do away with every other sound; no waterfowl screamed and no fish leapt out of the water. When in the apparent jungle on the far shore we saw a signboard—the first indication of human presence in a long while—were we relieved? Weren’t we equally disappointed?

  On landing, we found that the sign was rusted through and barely legible; we finally deciphered BEWARE—HORNETS; to judge by the style of lettering, the sign dated from before the war. The dock, too, was rotten; the remaining piles were crooked, some driven more deeply than others, and overgrown with moss; in addition, the dock was well out of the water, because the lake had shrunk considerably over the years. The dead willow trees had great holes in them; the moss line on their trunks indicated the former water level.

  Our first sign of the present time was the “log cabin.” This was a café with its own adjacent generator, which—CLOSED FOR THE DAY—was not working just then. In the dim light behind the large glass window we saw a bar and behind it a fireplace piled with logs ready to be lit. Outside, among scattered garden benches, there was a table-soccer game; in passing, we turned the knobs, and when we left, all the little wooden men had their feet in the air.

  Although the path shown on the map proved to be a wide grass walk and we had plenty of room to spread out, we stayed as close together as we had been in the boat. The slightly raised green path was springy; from time to time the woman would take the soldier by the wrist and the two of them would dance along in wide spirals, while the gambler, smiling, brought up the rear. For a while it was possible to imagine that this was a region offering an escape from history, yet at the same time a new country where something might be begun.

  On the “old road,” which our descending path suddenly joined, the plateau reverted to stone-gray. Though the gravel surface seemed well kept and even new, we saw no trace of any vehicle, nor was there any dust on the bushes. As sudden as the transition from green walk to desert track was the change from sea air to heat unstirred by any breeze. For hours we were directly under the sun, as in an everlasting noon. Outlook there was none; the road, straight on the map, rose and fell at such short intervals that there was never a distant horizon. The few clouds, somber with bright edges, remained motionless, grouped together in a sea-blue sky like a cluster of islands seen from a space capsule high overhead: the Sporades. The abundant blackberries by the sides of the road brought no refreshment; a whole handful slaked our thirst for hardly the time it took to swallow them. The silence in which we had been at home up until then degenerated into soundlessness; even the soft familiar hum of the crickets was gone—at our approach, their black heads disappeared into holes in the ground; the only sound apart from our own was that of the grasshoppers darting from under our toes.

  Suddenly, like everything that happened in this high country, a crackling and whirring as of rain came from above, though the sky was still bright. The road narrowed and became a mere passage through head-high underbrush, which on one side had the appearance of a hedge purposely planted there. Here the old road met the “new” one, but did not merge with it; the two ran parallel for a short way, then the old road, now no wider than a smuggler’s trail, lost itself in the prairie grass. A hare appeared, sniffed the air, and vanished. The sound of rain came from a power line; no sooner had we climbed the embankment than its wires, leaping from otherwise empty space beyond the new road, came so close to us that for a few steps their crackling was a downpour.

  Narrow and winding, the road was more like a track, but a sturdy one, built for the centuries, as though it were the only thoroughfare in the land, comparable to a segment of the Silk Road or the Pan-American Highway. Surfaced with neither gravel nor asphalt, it was a stone track which its builders had developed into a road merely by scraping the layer of humus off the rocky base, as the shoulders, barely a foot wide, indicated. This natural road was compact, without cracks, and so smooth from the very start that there was no need to roll it; the few bumps had been worn down. Who but ourselves had traveled this road in recent years? Perhaps a few vehicles, covered wagons laden with heavy sacks, barrels, and emigrants. (In spite of ourselves, we kept looking back over our shoulders for the next trek.)

  The steady rise of the road encouraged us and made us breathe deeply. Because of the many bends, there was still no outlook; we were confident that the country would open out at any minute. No road marker, no indication of distances. Only the dead butterflies stuck to the ground here and there and the spots of oil showed that this was a motor road. Certain that we were alone on it, we walked side by side until, on rounding a curve, we saw a handcart parked in a recess in the rock and automatically stepped aside, as though it were coming toward us. The impression made by the presence of this cart in our no-man’s-land was strangely contradictory; on the one hand, it suggested that the familiar rhythm of time had caught up with us only too soon—we ought to have stuck it out a lot longer in the land of uncertainty and explored it; on the other hand, those two wheels in the otherwise total wilderness struck us as amazing inventions, made in that moment and thanks to us!

  Then suddenly the landscape became a battlefield. On both sides of the road tanks appeared, their guns apparently aimed at us. From every opening, fire and thunder shot out in our direction. Soldiers laden with clan
king metal came charging through the bushes. An observation tower glittered with binoculars. No more bird sounds.

  After the next bend our eyes fell just as suddenly, in the midst of the long row of natural caves, on an improved cave dwelling, recognizable by the wooden props at the entrance and the barred gate. On the clay floor lay not stones but a great heap of potatoes. In front of us we saw, instead of the expected field, a stand of spruces, young trees that seemed freshly planted, their dark-green tips in serried regular lines. The road that led through them, straight and unexpectedly wide, appeared to be a farm or a forest path. Again our delight in all this warred with our distress at being back so soon in familiar Central European surroundings. We were therefore well pleased when suddenly, after the reforestation, we found ourselves surrounded by prairie grass, and out of the corners of our eyes we saw the mirage of a wheat field. In this phase, such optical illusions became more and more frequent, and in the end we saw nothing else. The cause of this, more than fatigue, was our searing thirst, which dulled our senses and scorched our mouths and throats. In vain we waited for the gambler, who ordinarily had something handy for every emergency, to conjure up some liquid; one great desert extended from our throats to the horizon.

  Were we on the wrong road? Had we in our half blindness overlooked a turnoff? We were immensely relieved when on a last curve, after which the road opened out into a plain that might have been the very roof of the high plateau, we suddenly saw a human form far ahead of us. We broke into a run; our shadows on the crevice in the rocks quivered like torches. The figure ahead of us, clothed in bright colors, swinging not only his roundish head and his shoulders but his whole body, could only be our old man. We would have shouted if thirst hadn’t extinguished our voices. We had to get closer before we realized that he was not coming toward us as we had thought at first but moving in the same direction as ourselves; and closer still before it became clear to us that the supposed old man was a child with a schoolbag on his back. But we had not yet caught up with him when a large, shiny, new bus that we hadn’t heard coming emerged from a side road, picked up the child, and after a short straight stretch on the highway turned off into another side road with a loud blowing of its horn, as though gathering up children dispersed in this wild country. The next person we saw really was an old man, and even from fairly close up we took him for ours. Almost invisible behind the standing grain, he lay sleeping on the roots of a lone tree a short way from the road.

  For the first time that day we halted for a short moment. Our instant image of our old man was composed from the hand on the ear, the blissfully idiotic dreamer’s face, and in particular the hazel stick leaning against the tree trunk —but even before one of us shook him awake, that image had succumbed to the reality of a sleeping farm worker in an apron, with a straw hat on the back of his head, and blackened, cracked-claw-like arthritic fingers, which could no longer have wielded a sickle, let alone a pencil.

  The sleeper’s place of work seemed to be a garden, fenced off from the prairie, all by itself without a house. There must have been a water spigot somewhere, for a hose came snaking through the tall grass and ended among the garden beds. The crops—the tomatoes and currants, for instance—had been harvested or else were of such a variety that the mere sight of them only added to our thirst: onions, garlic, and artichokes that might have been mistaken for thistles. Following the hose, we came to a long stone wall, beyond which the colorless prairie changed without transition to a light-green field of short grass; and the rock in the middle of it proved to be the work of human hands, in other words, a house. Presenting a sweeping curve along the road, its untrimmed stone and few porthole-like windows caused it to resemble a small fort, in any case a military installation of some sort; from a number of fires in the grass, all abandoned, smoke rose into the sky, so dense, straight, and sharply outlined that we really thought: pillars. The voices that came out to us also fitted in with the notion of a military installation, as though the rooms were enormous and almost empty. But when we approached the long wall, it proved to be the street front of the “village” marked on the map. It consisted of a single wide façade without demarcations between the houses. Of these there were more than a dozen, but this we found out only by looking through one window after another. Behind each window there were apartments with separate entrances and—on the far side—windows through which we saw arbors, flower gardens, and, lined up in depth, the back yards of inns. Here, each of us at a window, we were given water, each in a different kind of pitcher or jug—only the lemon we were each handed was the same. We drank and drank and drank; not until it came time to take our leave were we capable of speaking. None of us had ever exchanged such natural greetings, and for the time it took to say those few words, it seemed conceivable that the human language had originated in the need for such greetings and the pleasure they conferred.

  Our thirst slaked, we had new eyes for distances. As we went on, we saw the ridge of the plateau’s roof; it seemed weighed down and crowned by a mass of gigantic cube-shaped boulders. Toward evening a fluorescent brilliance flared up in one of the boulders and immediately afterward —there! there! there!—another and another, until the cliffs on the horizon proved to be a city. When we stopped on the road, we were overtaken by a slow-moving patrol car, barely large enough for a single policeman, who lowered his window and looked us over. Was it the special sort of look the young soldier gave him in return that made the policeman just nod and accelerate—a look that disarmed by placing a peaceful image between itself and the world and infusing light even into repellent ugliness?

  And again, as though in response to the soldier’s look, a bus stopped on the open road and let us get in. Was it the same bus as before, which had by then completed its circuits in the backcountry? If so, it had let the child off somewhere and picked up no other passengers. But were we “passengers”? We were alone in the bus, in seats high above the road; behind us there were small cars, none of which passed us. Little by little we became a convoy. Apparently we were being escorted to the city with a police car in the lead. And sitting erect with our hands on our knees, looking straight ahead, we found this perfectly natural.

  The city had no suburbs. A moment before in the paling light we had been passing country walls that gave the effect not only of being dilapidated but of having suddenly caved in. Already the road was ending and we were outside the railroad station. Was the whole city just an extension of the station? What other buildings were there apart from the offices of the railroad administration? In any case, only their façades were floodlit, and otherwise there was no street lighting. The revolving sign that flickered above the roofs in the twilight turned out to be moving trains. Proceeding on foot, we found other hallmarks of a city, such as a park and a movie house. There was no fountain in the park—a ring of palm trees around a cedar—and the movie house, like the country walls, had been reduced to a ruin, this obviously with great suddenness—clean cracks such as the passage of time alone does not produce; the ticket office had collapsed, and the clock on top of it, dial, glass, and mechanism, was a total wreck. The earthquake must have taken place a long time ago, the faces on the once-colored posters were all beyond recognition. The houses that followed were new, built of thick, undressed concrete. Suddenly the dark city seemed full of life, because the passersby were a mixture of all races, and there was no way of knowing whether these constantly moving people, foreigners like ourselves, none with eyes for anyone else, were fugitives or whether, each for himself, they were on their way to some feast.

  Standing in the middle of the sidewalkless street, a doorman motioned us into his hotel with a sweeping gesture. As with the bus driver before him, we took him for an agent of our old man. The lobby was resplendent, as though brand-new; we were the only guests. The one and only attendant let us pick our own rooms, which were in every way alike, all decorated with pictures of the city before the catastrophe and the day after it.

  Bathed and changed, we rep
aired to the dining room, which, like the whole hotel, was empty and brightly lit. A man’s voice, chanting in a cracked singsong to the accompaniment of a harpsichord, was issuing from the loudspeaker. Listening in the doorway, we assumed it to be the voice of our old man, and when seated we looked for him under the disguise of the waiter, previously the receptionist. Wasn’t his hair dyed? Hadn’t the liver spots on the backs of his hands been burned off? Weren’t the lenses of his glasses mere window glass? In the end we asked him for some information just to see his pencil and his handwriting. Dissemble if you will, your monogram imprinted in the sand of the cigarette urn in the entrance is trace enough for us.

  Though we were alone in the room, the festive illumination, the trailing plants along the walls, and the bay trees that flanked the tables gave us the feeling that we were surrounded by invisible people. Every time the waiter came through the swinging door with his brass, dome-shaped cart —revealing a kitchen so glaringly white as to efface any figures that may have been there-he was followed by cries and a hubbub of busy voices, as though this were a moment of feverish activity. We were sure that when the meal was over the old man would appear in the doorway in a chef’s hat and receive our applause, smiling bashfully, with the modesty characteristic of master chefs.