The Moravian Night

by Peter Handke

  How did he even know it was a woman, when none of the letters, written in a clear, decisive hand, were signed? He knew, just as the other writer immediately knew whether a bag of nuts or a feather had been left by a male or a female reader. Did he also have an idea of how she looked? (A question shouted by a pushy listener.) “Her face came to me clearly in a dream.” “And how did it look?” “In no way as ugly as the woman, the reader, in the story by Stephen King, I think, who takes the writer hostage when he happens to fall into her hands, and eventually wants to kill him. Quite beautiful. Actually beautiful. Downright beautiful.”

  Escape? It was probably an exaggeration to characterize his setting out on the tour as an escape. One day or one night he had simply had enough of all the evil or horrid signs left in front of, behind, next to, by, or under his houseboat on the Morava. He wanted to breathe. Besides, the trip had been planned for a long time, and this sense of being hemmed in had perhaps provided the necessary impetus. So if not escape, at least a sort of capitulation, which, as one of us flattered him, “isn’t really like you”? No. He wanted to face up to her, or, on the contrary, had been burning the entire time to make her face up to him—except that this person did not show herself, refused to let herself be seen. And he toyed with the idea that they would finally meet precisely while he was traveling. And what exactly did he have in mind? To kill her. He would kill this woman. Really? Yes, really. Absolutely. And why? Because she had pestered and persecuted him for all these years? No? Then why? Because—because in one of her letters, no, not just in one, in all of them, she had insulted his mother. No, not merely insulted, but called into question, no, doubted, no, besmirched her memory—and she had escalated this besmirching through her signs. On his tour he would confront the woman and kill her. No, not with his own hands, but with the help of a killer, a female killer, a hired killer. He himself would not touch the woman. To hell with her.

  A few stations on the tour had been planned in advance. In addition to his (still uncertain) participation in the aforementioned conference or symposium, or whatever, on the topic of “Noise—Tone—Sound—Silence” (or such) in a godforsaken village in the Spanish Meseta, not far from the ancient settlement of Numancia, destroyed by the Romans long before Christ, he intended to look in on his brother in Carinthia, who had been ill for a long time; also to stop in to see his former colleagues Gregor Keuschnig and Filip Kobal in villages nearby, who, in contrast to him, had not yet sworn off writing; to circle around the birthplace, in the southern Harz Mountains, of his father, whom he had never known and who had been dead for a long time; to roam the island in the Adriatic where, as a very young man, he had written his first book, working almost entirely outdoors, in the blazing sun. But one station or another, one direction or another, would also be left to chance, to whatever came up along the way and might give him ideas. What came would come. It came as it came. “As chance would have it,” as people said, and not only back home.

  Yet he also planned to be back soon in, and on, his Moravian Night. But what did “soon” mean? Some of us felt his absence had lasted far too long. Others, however, had the sense that hardly a month, indeed not much more than a week, had elapsed between his departure and his return. To me, for instance, it seemed as though both his departure and his return had occurred only yesterday. I, on the other hand, felt the former writer had left me alone all winter, while to me, yet another friend, it seemed like a whole year. And what did “yesterday,” “winter,” “year,” “a long time,” “a short time” mean? To the boatman or traveler himself it seemed during the night in which he narrated the story of his departure, or had someone else narrate it, as if he had “just then” taken his small suitcase, after locking up the houseboat rather carelessly, then stood on the gangplank, which he then “locked up” as well, and teetered down to the bank of the Morava, yes, as if he were just in that moment teetering there, on and on; as if he had “just now,” while crossing the Semmering by train, encountered the person, the near-child, reading an old book, who looked up from the book and immediately recognized him, even though it had been a long time since anyone had been able to “recognize” him, and how; as if “just then,” lying in a woman’s arms by the Atlantic, he had realized in a terrifying moment, yes, a moment of terror, who his unknown enemy was and what her face looked like.

  So he had returned to his point of departure “in no time”? “In no time” from A to B, from B to C, and so forth: had driven, walked, stumbled, roamed? Had been on the road “in no time”? Which time, which tense, which type of time was the operative concept for the former writer’s round-trip? First of all: no “round” form of time, just as the trip itself had in truth not been a trip, and certainly not “round.” The operative concept was all times at once, together, intermingled, juxtaposed, parallel, running in opposite directions, canceling each other out, crossing. And primarily, most prominently, connecting, uniting, and obliterating all these times, tenses, and types of time were the seconds that came into play now and then, and not merely the seconds of terror, not merely the seconds of terror and being terrified. Second of terror. Second of pain. Second of sorrow. Second of joy. Second of horror. Second of love. Second of patience. Second of letting be. Second of taking pity. Second of taking heart. Second of inhaling. Second of exhaling. When it came to the condition of being on the road as well as telling the story, seconds were the appropriate, the vital, the natural measure of time. (Some other measure would have been operative for the enumerating and reporting.) Not minutes, not hours, and also not, definitely not, tenths and hundredths of seconds: only my, your, his, our, your, their moments, the quivering, crackling, alarming, reassuring seconds. The seconds that mean both what comes after something, what follows it, as well as the primary thing, the thing that precedes it, that combines what precedes and what follows. Praised and feared be the second.

  The first second was rather slow in coming on his tour. For a long while each hour resembled every other, each day resembled every other, each moment passed like every other. And for a while that was fine with him: although no seconds pulsed and darted through him, at least there were moments, one after another, at a steady pace, as seemed normal for any departure. The single cup he had left standing on purpose, unwashed, on the table in the boat’s galley. The single map that he then removed from his luggage, having decided he would try to find his way without technical assistance. Likewise the pair of shoes, and the one book (of two). Then blowing, as on every other morning, on the ship’s bell, oversized, with its massive, heavy clapper, in actuality a bell from one of the churches farther to the south, where it was no longer needed: the daily attempt to make the clapper swing and strike the bell with a mere breath, a gentle puff—if he succeeded, it would signify something, something in his imagination. Something important, indeed earthshaking—but once more nothing, his morning and departure breath too weak—the only effect being that, as on every previous morning, the clapper’s bracket gave off a tiny whirr, audible probably only to him. And then, from the bank of the Morava, a glance over his shoulder at the entire boat, which by now, in the course of an entire decade, had become his domovina, his little house and home, with the thought—or was it a premonition? no, premonitions had no hold over him, for either the future or the past, but only for now, for the moment, for the present—with the thought, then, that he would never return from this tour to the boat here. Wasn’t this one of those aforementioned seconds, a quivering one? And again no: the thought did not dart through him, caused him neither sorrow nor pain. In the meantime such thoughts came to him daily, even if he simply went shopping in Porodin for half a day, even if he simply disappeared for an hour into the floodplain forest, the luka, to collect firewood or do something else; came to him just as much as before the great departure. His refuge glowed blue-white-red at his back, and from bank to bank the ceaselessly pulsing streaks of the Morava shimmered, and again that could be his last glimpse of them, and—? All right. Whatever.

&n
bsp; I was the one friend of his who did not live farther upriver or downriver but directly across from the river in Porodin. My farm, or rather my late father’s farm, was located there, if hardly operated anymore, and likewise, outside the village, was located my, or rather my father’s, vineyard, which I would have liked to keep running, if only it had not become life-threatening to do so, as it has become for all of us in Porodin to use the land beyond the ever narrower village limits, since, well, you know since when. Our only outlet was a sort of corridor to the Morava, which was the route I took to pick him up on the morning of his departure, on my tractor, which thus had something to keep it busy for a change. The man on the boat had at one time done a lot of driving, or so he said, but since his accident in Alaska, which he described to us in the same words almost every time we saw each other, he had stopped driving. Wearing his hat and long coat, with his suitcase on his knees, he looked on the tractor rather like a refugee or evacuee, this impression reinforced by his facing backward, his eyes fixed on the river landscape. Was he looking? Not really.

  I had suggested that I drive him—he seemed not to object to the tractor—to Velika Plana, on the other side of the Morava, roadblocks be damned, checkpoints be damned, and even farther if he wished, and why not all the way to Belgrade? But he wanted to take the bus from Porodin, the one daily bus, and also the only one that went anywhere outside the enclave. Our bus station no longer existed, and neither did any proper bus stop or stopping place—and how should it, after all, when the bus did not arrive from anywhere, and always simply parked overnight, after returning in the evening “from out there”? Its parking spot: not the village center, wherever that had turned out to be, or in front of the church either (at least the church had been left us, though with almost indescribable additions—of which more later, perhaps), but in a rear courtyard, in rear courtyards that changed from one time to the next. “Towns with rear courtyards,” you say, “yes. But a rural area with rear courtyards—where do you find such a thing?” It did exist, there in the Wallachian village of Porodin, where behind the former farmhouses one courtyard bordered on the next, one rear courtyard extended farther into the fields than the next, some of them as long as freight trains and as wide as a highway, some of them with patches of lawn and flower beds, finally merging into orchards, lined on both sides by cow, sheep, and chicken sheds, barns, equipment and machine sheds, except that most of them had long been neglected, like the fields beyond, or stood empty, or had collapsed and been torn down, so that most of the rear courtyards had become enormous dumps, rutted, muddy, hummocky—but where else could our enclave bus have parked?

  On the morning of departure, it seemed to me that the entire enclave had gathered at the debris-filled depot. Yet only a few of those present were travelers. As happened every time, these few were given a big send-off, not only by their relatives but also by their neighbors, more distant ones rather than closer ones, than ones who lived next door. The gathering made a positively cheerful impression on me, perhaps because of the huge amount of luggage, stowed in a trailer, not so much satchels and suitcases as crates, which I imagined as containing equipment for the various acts of a traveling circus. In addition, beds, wardrobe chests, and mirrors were being loaded, looking more like found objects than heirlooms (there had been nothing, at least of that sort, to inherit here for a long time, had never been). Patches of snow formed a pattern in the courtyard, so it must have been winter, the beginning of winter or the end? never easy to tell in our region. The crowd was so dense that these patches were promptly compacted, along with the tracks of doves and sparrows from the previous hour, when the courtyard was not yet serving as the bus station. “And nonetheless you could see traces of birds’ toes here and there,” the retired writer intervened in my narrative. “Retired writer?” Who posed that question? He could have been the one asking, too.

  Of the few passengers none was in a hurry to get on the bus, whose engine, as always, had probably been running since the first rooster crowed—if it were switched off, it would not start again all day, or at least not until late in the afternoon, and that would mean no departure today; any trip on the bus in the dark, the bus of the enclave, held dangers quite different from those of the daytime, even with police protection. But what a racket our bus made in that dump (and how black the fumes puffing out of the tailpipe, known in German very appropriately as the Auspuff, “and”—here the former writer intervened again—“by your Balkan loanword from the German, auspuh”). It was a racket that increasingly incorporated and absorbed other rackets, the rattling and chattering of the imperfectly closing rusted doors, the clinking of the windows—as if about to shatter, all of them with radiating cracks and loose in their frames—the passengers’ possessions crashing against each other in the trailer. Added to all that was the racket, alternatively the noise, alternatively the din, made by the enclave inhabitants as they shouted to each other, tried to outshout each other. (From my time as a guest worker in Germany, I have retained a few common turns of phrase, such as “alternatively,” also “notwithstanding,” “granted”—adopted from my friend—“including,” “be that as it may,” “gross income,” “clearance,” “seemingly.”)

  Seemingly a racket like that did not trouble the former writer. Perhaps he even sought it out. Why else would he linger in the crowd, in as little hurry to board as all the others? I seldom saw his eyes glow, ever more rarely with the passage of time. But in this situation they glowed. Still, no cries of joy of any sort from the crowd. These were no rejoicers (“rejoyers,” the boatmaster offered as a variant). The people there had to shout to make themselves heard amid the gradually escalating din of departure; every second person, at least every third one, was actually yelling. Yes, here and there you could hear loud talking, bellowing, shouting. But the underlying tone—if at top volume, then at a different kind of top volume—was a pervasive weeping, penetrating everything, yet not at top volume at all, the more quiet the more pervasive, the weeping of the children. And on closer inspection it also became apparent that not a few in the crowd, yes, maybe the majority, were neither shouting nor crying but were silent, not only at this moment but for quite some time already, and would remain silent for some time to come.

  But what accounted for the glowing eyes? During that night on the boat on the Morava, the time came when in place of me, born and bred in the enclave, the host picked up the story. (As for me, I merely added comments here and there to round out the story of the departure, now taking place at long last.) Yes, a profound sorrow was present in this rear-courtyard throng, a great sorrow. Squeezed in among the others, he felt his heart breaking, yes indeed. At any moment he might fall down dead, quite possibly with his forehead impaled on the jagged bottle neck poking out of the debris. And at the same time, yes, the very same time, his heart, this very heart, opened up to him, took on palpable form, and bled as it had not bled in “an eternity,” or so it seemed to him. He did not feel as if he were hemmed in by the crowd but rather free in its midst, free as a result of it, freer than he had ever been in all the years, whether alone or with us, his friends, on the river, wide as it was in some places, on the boat, which no turbulence ever rocked.

  He, so dependent, or so he thought, on distant horizons, presumably greatly in need of them, rediscovered in this crowd the advantages of narrow horizons, close ones, more than close. In fact, and in his narrative he emphasized the word “fact,” it was a rediscovery, a recovery. Everything had begun for him, long ago, with close horizons. It did not have to be his mother’s face—as he recognized, and not only after the fact—which often came too close and tended to block out larger vistas. Closeness could also be found, for example, in the so-called “eyes” in the wooden floors of his house, or the knots in the planks, wide ones, that came together to form a ship, a term whose etymology—just think of it!—goes back to the concept of a hollowed-out tree. Closeness could also be found in the heavily scarred chopping block in the shed, with the ax buried deep in the
wood and bloodstains that had seeped into the grain from the many chickens beheaded there. It was in the large fungus gathered in the woods, attached to a piece of wire and stuck into a bonfire outside the church at Eastertime. When you took it out and swung it through the air, it would glow red-hot. It was in the kernels of corn when you husked the ears, especially on those occasions, rare ones, when the kernels were not yellow but red or black.

  Close horizons like those, whose peculiarity was that they were experienced neither as close nor as distant, but simply as horizons, as something to be seen, something that offered itself to be seen, as something with which you came face-to-face (a phenomenon not to be taken for granted, at least not by him): they had been constituted in those days almost exclusively by objects, by things. No matter how intently he focused his memory—a long, long pause in his narrative—it did not yield a single close horizon made up of human beings, not a soul, either whole or in part. At most he could think of animals, and usually only very small ones, such as a frozen bee that one wanted to try to revive by blowing on it, a daddy longlegs, lying dead in a dusty corner of a room. There were also larger ones, alive, perhaps in the eyelash line above a cow’s eye or the curve formed by a horse’s back.