The Moravian Night

by Peter Handke

  Here the driver fell silent. The end of his angry outburst, uttered half under his breath. He did continue, however, after a pause, though in a different tone and louder, almost in song, introduced by a humming in which the opening bars of “Apache” could clearly be heard: “But what of it. Let them declare each of their hay sheds a national hay shed, or, for all I care, every marker of a property boundary a national border marker, every little rock-thrower a national icon. I am stateless, and proud of it. I was always stateless. And hope to be stateless always. Apache, Apache. No proof of nationality and no passport, and my only anthem is Apache, Apache. No travels tempt me, and you can keep your free world. Stateless persons of all lands, stay where you are and what you are. Apache, Apache. Foreign countries: leave me alone. No more getting up early and standing in line for a visa, for no matter what country. Apache, Apache. Staying for all time on my reservation, where the eagle flies, but not on a national crest. Taking pride in my reservation, where the silhouette of a jaybird in a pine tree does not compel me to think: Ah, our national bird. Being content for all time with our reservation, where in school the question never comes up on tests: What is our national flower? Apache, Apache. Bear droppings in the sunset. Love after midnight. Gray-blue on yellow. Dogs’ barking does not interfere with the clouds’ drifting. All paths lead to the mill. Better to be alone than to sit together in discord. Vinegar tolerates only its own eels. You’ll dance for the worst ape when its time comes. He who knows himself knows his master. May you live or die: Hello, my love, adieu, my love.”

  Night had long since fallen when the bus finally crossed the river (had we heard right? Ibar? Abar? Sabar? Samar?), the river that after the war had become the border. It was a border without checkpoints and without barriers, and if it was guarded, then unobtrusively, downright secretively, on both sides. Nevertheless it was a border in the fullest sense, and like none before it. What had appeared earlier along an interminable stretch to be a far-flung no-man’s-land became for the few moments on the bridge an intensely concentrated one. The same passengers who had not reacted in the slightest to all the rock-throwing now involuntarily ducked. In the water, fast-moving but not deep, under the bridge, neither especially long nor especially high, which one good spurt of gas was almost enough to speed the bus across, pipes stuck up out of the darkness that were not necessarily to be mistaken for stove pipes or the exhaust pipes of threshing machines. And both on this side and the far side of the river, in the dim light of the few intact streetlights in this border town, stone buildings could be glimpsed whose only distinct feature was their ruined and vandalized state—with the exception of one house or another on either side that was not simply unscathed but actually glowing inside and out, festively, and also peacefully, illuminated, surrounded by a tended garden like something out of an Oriental fairy tale: despite the time of year, roses in bloom, artificial waterfalls cascading over miniature artificial cliffs, torches lining winding paths of white sand, and through the rattling of the bus one almost thought one could hear, from inside the villas, the sound of shepherd’s pipes and lutes.

  As if in a countermovement to their ducking, some of the emigrants rose from their seats once the bridge and the no-man’s-lands on either side were left behind. It looked as though they were getting ready to disembark, once and for all. Yet they still had a long journey ahead of them, through the night, with a different driver, across several borders of various sorts, as far as Belgrade and then perhaps on another bus or by train to Budapest or Vienna by way of Novi Sad, and some of them on to Copenhagen, Lyon, Seville, Porto, one of them perhaps by plane to Canada, but primarily they would be traveling by bus, for there were bus lines connecting even the smallest town in the Balkans with the rest of Europe. Only the bus from the enclave of Porodin had Belgrade as its last stop.

  But then at a hotel, in the city that had been split in two by the war, everyone got off, if only for the supper scheduled to be served there. The only ones leaving the bus for good were the driver, who would wait here for the bus to return the following afternoon, and the solitary traveler. He decided then and there to spend the night in the hotel, the only one in this part of the two-people town, a border town far from every other border marked on maps. There were plenty of rooms available; in fact he was the only guest; the driver would find lodgings elsewhere—perhaps because he really had no passport, or did not want to show one? The hotel room, under the eaves, looked out on the bridge, distinguishable almost only as an even darker darkness down below in that dark town. On the far distant horizon the outlines of the slag heap belonging to the local magnesium mines, out of operation for many decades now. No more profit could be made here, ever again? A chunk of slag began to roll and struck another with a sharp retort audible far and near, that was how deserted the border town seemed.

  He ate the evening meal at the table with the passengers who would be resuming their journey. He had been invited to join them. They seemed disappointed that he would not be coming along. Listening to him that night on the boat, we nodded, for we knew how they felt. How could he leave them to their fate that way, not even witness it? Surely they had realized with time who he was, at least not a complete stranger or a reporter in disguise, and at any rate certainly not their enemy. If they felt disappointment, they did not voice it, however. One after another, they simply showed him hospitality, nothing more. The hotel restaurant might have been the emigrants’ very own dining room (so expressions like “very own” still existed?), and they wanted him to feel at home there, as their guest. Although there were no actual festive touches, such hospitality had something festive about it, and not merely because they had passed that long day together. A festive mood emanated from and around the table at which they ate and drank quite quietly, the food and beverages served by the emigrants themselves, who brought them from kitchen and cellar as if they had been cooked or pressed by them personally, as the hosts. And as the boatmaster described the individual dishes in that border-town evening meal, ah, how long ago that was, we who had been invited for his Moravian night, although we had just been served delicacies by the unknown beauty and had eaten our fill, all of us at our tables found our mouths watering, and we experienced a kind of longing to drink the same wine as the company gathered in the hotel had drunk that night, notwithstanding that it would soon be named not for a sparrow but for an eagle.

  After the meal he saw them back to their bus. It stood there, yellow, in the deceptively silent border-town night, under a tree (here, too, no provision had been made for a parking place). The tree was a linden, recognizable now in winter by its straight trunk and the unique, regular perpendicular lesions in its light-colored bark, and at the same time by its foliage, which in disregard of the season almost all remained on the branches, though withered, as if this linden, lipa, were too old and/or too weak to shed its leaves, or/and there were no wind where it stood. Up to this moment the emigrants had asked him as little as he had asked them. But now, as the first of them was getting back on the bus, he paused on the running board, making the others hold up, too, and said, looking back over his shoulder, which made his leather jacket creak, something that could just as well have been an observation as a question: “You’re an attorney(?).” And already the next one was saying, likewise: “You used to be a farmer(?).” And likewise a third: “You come from an island(?).” And yet another: “You’re a widower(?).” And another still: “You have no father(?).” And then one more: “You are homeless(?).” And then one more: “You were once a soccer player(?).” And one more: “You have money(?).” And: “You’re not a man of the times(?).” And: “You’re a sharpshooter(?).” And: “You’re a misanthrope, brother(?).” And: “You’re not a foreigner(?).” And at the very end: “You’re one of us(?).”

  As the bus pulled out, a woman suddenly began to sing. This was no highway music like “Apache,” and also no song of the Magistrale. It was singing from the depths of the Balkans. Was there really such a thing? Yes, for instance in t
his voice now. Notes held so long that after a while the voice sounded like an instrument, and yet remained, note after note, a voice, voice and instrument in one. And what was perhaps more remarkable: it was not this particular woman who seemed to be singing—she briefly showed her face at the bus window, completely impassive as the singing became loud and grew louder, her mouth hardly open even a crack—but rather someone else, a third person, more invisible, above her? below her? next to her? behind her? Yes, behind her, far, far behind her. The woman had had a rather old face. And how youthful the voice was.

  He did not wish he were on the bus with them; for the time being he had had enough of buses, even that one marked with the postal horn familiar from his early years. And nonetheless, as he stood there alone under the nocturnal tree, with the diesel fumes still in his nostrils, an unfamiliar loneliness overcame him, a sensation new for him after all these years of his earthly sojourn (the expression he used). It was painful. No, it was a momentary ache, although he knew he was still in the emigrants’ company. The ache of desolation? No, of abandonment. Momentary? No, for a second. It was that quivering second which, ache or no ache, along with the other quivering seconds produced the sense of existence, or indeed of the earthly sojourn, for the first time on his journey.

  He wished to be not on the emigrants’ bus but away from these Balkans, the Balkans with these border towns without specific borders, the Balkans of the thousand invisible borders, each and every one malevolent and bitterly hostile, from valley to valley, from village to village, from brook to brook, from manure pile to manure pile, the Balkans where little children threw rocks, where people blew kisses full of scorn, where garlic made vampires even more bloodthirsty. He wished he could get away from these gloomy Balkans to metropolises festooned with lights, bustling with sonorously honking taxis in skyscraper canyons, with bridges on which every pair of lovers was something like a peace symbol, located on rivers where weddings, baptisms, and business deals were celebrated on boats, where people just celebrated, for no particular reason, maybe on a boat with imitation paddle wheels like a Mississippi steamer called the Louisiana Queen. And simultaneously he wished he could get away from these Balkans to those other Balkans he had experienced so often in earlier years, as profoundly as no other region on earth, for instance on his houseboat on the Morava, wished he could be back on his Moravian Night, the journey be damned.

  For now, however, he just wished to be in bed. It had been a day full of adventures. Of course (an expression he seldom used), he needed such days. But the adventures he had had on this first day of his tour were not the kind he wanted. He had also found it difficult to describe them to us. Earlier, too, during his time as a writer, it was an entirely different kind of adventure that had excited and inspired him. What kind of adventure? A different kind. Only such adventures suited him. Only for those did he feel driven to find the right language. Thus it did not trouble him that after all the day’s fairly unwelcome adventures the sheets on his bed were ripped, holes had been burned in the one towel, and the radiator remained cold. He even found it appropriate. After the day he had just had, these things signified peace. For bedtime, he opened the skylight as wide as it would go and looked out toward the invisible bridge. He thought he could hear the river rushing, and from the half-buried tank muzzles came a drumming and a ringing, as if from a brook shooting over a cliff. O, language! How it bloomed in the gardens of the absent and the dead, how it bloomed and bloomed. If, God willing, he were to make his way back from his tour, he would cross this deserted bridge to gradually close the circle. The bridge would be his point of return. (That, too, was not to happen…) The Incas are not extinct. Sursum corda!

  The last sentences our host had spoken he had addressed more and more to himself, murmured to himself. It seemed as though the rest of us were ceasing to exist for him. Did he need a premonition of danger for storytelling? But this, too, was a danger, one entirely different from the one he urgently needed. He was at risk, now as always before, of losing consciousness of others, and the result, instead of speech leaping across the gap to us, was his solitary murmuring and finally falling silent, including toward himself. Whether as a writer or anything else, he represented his own greatest threat to himself. Which of us would get him to stop, like a high-wire artist who begins to wobble and must stop before taking the next step? And how to get him to stop? By inventing a threat, an external one? Painting in imaginary colors one of those dangers that would jolt him, or perhaps merely tickle him, out of himself?

  2

  BEFORE HE RESUMED telling the story, speaking clearly once more, as we were accustomed to his speaking, and also expected—sometimes more, sometimes less—he thought out loud about the nature of time. Time had always been his problem, or, translated back into Greek, something “thrown in his way.” We had often heard him begin to muse on the subject, with a deeper sigh, if possible, on every occasion: “Oh, dear, time…,” “Ah, time…,” “Ha, time…” And on every occasion he had got bogged down in his so-called basic problem, and that is what also happened now, to our relief and his as well. He said something like this: “No, time was and is no problem for me, but rather an enigma. In being, in this one life we are given, at the beginning a pure enigma, the purest enigma, the enigma to end all enigmas, the enigma pure and simple, and then, in time, no, counter to it, a terrible enigma, the euphemism for death, or also merely for boredom, boredom with myself and my not knowing what to do with my time. In my one life, in being, time either passes far too quickly or far too slowly for me. In storytelling, however, in my other life, time seemed from the beginning until now, and now, and now, a fertile enigma, no, enough playing around with the term: a splendid enigma. In one life anxiety-producing, in the other splendid. In storytelling, too, I don’t know how to deal with time. But there I also feel, or intuit simultaneously, that time, precious time, is on my side; so long as my storytelling is on the right track, I am moving in, no, am standing solidly on time. And the result, it seems to me, is that in narrated time, in distinction to clock time—which for me in everyday life all too often amounts in one way or another to mandatory time-calculation—instead of the overweening, generally imposed or prescribed dates, I find forms or even mere formulas for time with whose help I can play, no, leap, yes, investigate, and forget the generally accepted measures of time. ‘Last summer…,’ ‘The following winter…,’ ‘When the war broke out…,’ ‘When my sister was still able to speak…,’ ‘A year later…,’ ‘Shortly before Pentecost…,’ ‘At the beginning of Ramadan…,’ ‘The morning of the following day…,’ ‘The evening of the third day…,’ or simply, ‘And then … and then…,’ or even just, ‘And … and … and…’ Time in storytelling: a splendid enigma? Or a problem after all, but a splendid one? Or no, a fantastic one? A liberating one? A soothing one? O, time … Listen up, you times there! What do you think?” Whereupon, not unlike him, each of us at his table in the salon of the Moravian Night fell to shaking his head, which produced little more than a humming here, a muttering there, a hm-hming, a throat-clearing, nose-blowing, sighing—nothing that would have moved the boatmaster to continue his story. What did succeed in doing so, finally, was a pop, a mighty one, in the galley, even if merely caused by a bottle’s being uncorked, or perhaps not? No, that was it! A moment later, as had happened earlier that evening, a bottle was poured for us by the mysterious woman. Our host, easily startled as always, without being anxious (note the distinction), had jumped at the sound, as the myriad frogs in the reeds along the Morava had fallen silent for a second (and a bit more), along with the owl out in the meadows, whose constant hooting could be anticipated from one hoot to the next, and likewise all the dogs barking separately off in Porodin had uttered an unmistakable nocturnal yelp for a moment. But then came his voice, all the more quiet and deep, if also now and then, no, for short stretches, somewhat tremulous, and what he said, as mentioned, clear, sometimes more so, sometimes less. “On the evening of the following day.” “A g
ood while later.” “After many more river crossings.” “Then beyond seven mountains.” “Within three days’ walk.” “In one hour by car.” “Before takeoff.” “During the next leg of the flight.” “On a stormy morning.” “In the middle of a storm.” “In the hour of his death.” “At the time of the snow melt.” “And then…” “And then…” “And then…”

  A good deal of time had to pass on his tour before he no longer felt drawn back to the boat on the Morava. During the first period, when he was alone again after the long bus ride in the company of others, he not only counted the days but also the hours, and occasionally even the minutes: ah, another one gone, finally. The first few nights, during moments when he was half-awake, he thought he was back in his familiar bunk and cabin. All the more alien, then, his actual surroundings, different night after night, so alien that they did not even give rise to astonishment. And it took more than just a couple of nights in such unfamiliar settings before he stopped missing his own bed. And not until he had got lost, walking or riding, several times did any random place to sleep suit him, so long as he could stretch out. And he had to be on the road a good while before the moment came when he thought: “Now the adventure is about to begin!”

  For a long while the former writer continued to roam hither and thither across the Balkans. Although he sometimes moved in a straight line, it was as if he were going in circles. In the middle of early spring, winter returned with a vengeance, and then from one day to the next it was as hot as in midsummer, while above the snow-covered Dinaric Alps an autumnal blue sky shimmered, and that same evening a snowstorm might blow in from the east, complete with thunder and lightning.