Jukebox and Other Writings

by Peter Handke

  Was that supposed to mean that he regretted the disappearance of his jukeboxes, these objects of yesteryear, unlikely to have a second future?

  No. He merely wanted to capture and acknowledge, before even he lost sight of it, what an object could mean to a person, above all what could emanate from a mere object.—An eating place by a playing field on the outskirts of Salzburg. Outdoors. A bright summer evening. The jukebox is outside, next to the open door. On the terrace, different patrons at every table, Dutch, English, Spanish, speaking their own languages, for the place also serves the adjacent campgrounds, by the airfield. It is the early eighties, the airfield has not yet become “Salzburg airport,” the last plane lands at sundown. The trees between the terrace and the playing field are birches and poplars, in the warm air constant fluttering of leaves against the deep yellow sky. At one table the locals are sitting, members of the Maxglan Working Man’s Athletic Club with their wives. The soccer team, at that time still a second-division club, has just lost another game that afternoon, and will probably be dropped from the league. But now, in the evening, those affected are talking about the trees for a change, while there is a constant coming and going at the window where beer is dispensed—from the tents and back. They look at the trees: how big they’ve gotten and how straight they’ve grown, since they, the club members, went out and with their own hands dug them up as seedlings from the black mossy soil and planted them here in rows in the brown clay! The song the jukebox sends out again and again that evening into the gradually oncoming darkness, in the pauses between the rustling and rasping of the leaves and the even buzz of voices, is sung in an enterprising voice by Helene Schneider, and is called “Hot Summer Nites.” The place is completely empty, and the white curtains billow in at the open windows. Then at some point someone is sitting inside, in a corner, a young woman, silently weeping.

  —Years later. A restaurant, a gostilna, on the crown of the Yugoslavian karst, at some remove from the highway from Stanjel (or San Daniele del Carso). Indoors. A mighty old-fashioned jukebox next to a cupboard, on the way to the restroom. Visible behind ornamental glass, the record carousel and turntable. To operate it, one uses tokens instead of coins, and then it is not enough to push a button, of which there is only one; first, one has to turn a dial until the desired selection lines up with the indicator arrow. The mechanical arm then places the record on the turntable with an elegance comparable to the elbow flourish with which an impeccably trained waiter presents a dish. The gostilna is large, with several dining rooms, which on this evening in early fall—while outside the burja, or bora, blasts without relief over the highland, coming from the mountains in the north—are full, mostly with young people: an end-of-term party for several classes from all the republics of Yugoslavia; they have met one another for the first time here, over several days. Once the wind carries the distinctive signal of the karst train down from the cliffs, with the dark sound of a mountain ferry. On the wall, across from the customary picture of Tito, hangs an equally colorful but much larger portrait of an unknown: it is the former proprietor, who took his own life. His wife says he was not from around here (even if only from the village in the next valley). The song, selected this evening by one student after another, that wafts through the dining rooms over and over again is sung in a self-conscious and at the same time childishly merry unison, even, as an expression of a people, dance able, and has one word as its refrain: “Jugoslavija!”

  —Again years later. Again a summer evening, before dusk, this time on the Italian side of the karst, or, to be precise, the border of the limestone base, once heaved out of the sea, of the cliffless lowlands, here marked by the tracks of the railroad station of Monfalcone. Just beyond it, the desert of stones that rises toward the plateau, concealed along this section of track by a small pine forest —on this side the station, surrounded by the abruptly different vegetation of cedars, palms, plane trees, rhododendron, along with the requisite water, pouring plentifully from the station fountain, whose spigot no one has bothered to turn off. The jukebox stands in the bar, under the window, which is wide open after the heat of the day; likewise open, the door leading out to the tracks. Otherwise, the place is almost entirely without furniture; what little there is has been shoved to one side, and they are mopping up already. The lights of the jukebox are reflected in the wet terrazzo floor, a glow that gradually disappears as the floor dries. The face of the barmaid appears very pale at the window, in contrast to those of the few passengers waiting outside, which are tanned. After the departure of the Trieste-Venice Express, the building appears empty, except that on a bench two adolescent boys are tussling, yelling at the top of their voices; the railroad station is their playground at the moment. From the darkness of the pines of the karst, swarms of moths are issuing forth. A long, sealed freight train rattle-pounds by, the only bright spot against the outside of the cars being the little lead seals blowing behind on their cords. In the stillness that follows—it is the time between the last swallows and the first bats—the sound of the jukebox is heard. The boys tussle a bit longer. Not to listen, but probably quite by chance, two railroad officials come out of their offices to the platform, and from the waiting room comes a cleaning woman. Suddenly figures, previously overlooked, appear all over the scene. On the bench by the beech, a man is sleeping. On the grass behind the restrooms, soldiers are stretched out, a whole group, without a trace of luggage. On the platform to Udine, leaning against a pillar, a huge black man, likewise without luggage, just in shirt and pants, engrossed in a book. From the thicket of pines behind the station swoop again and again, one following close upon the other, a pair of doves. It is as if all of them were not travelers but inhabitants or settlers in the area around the railroad station. Its midpoint is the fountain, with its foaming drinking water, blown and spattered by the breeze, and tracks on the asphalt from many wet soles, to which the last drinker now intentionally adds his own. A bit farther down the tracks, accessible on foot, the subterranean karst river, the Timavo, comes to the surface, with three branches, which in Virgil’s time, according to the Æneid, were still nine; it immediately broadens out and empties into the Mediterranean. The song the jukebox is playing tells of a letter written by a young woman who has ended up far away from her home and from everything she ever knew or dreamed of, and is now full of brave and perhaps also sorrowful astonishment; it floats out into the dusky railroad land of Monfalcone in the friendly voice of Michelle Shocked, and is called “Anchorage, Alaska.”

  During the weeks in Soria he sometimes managed to think this about what he was doing: “I’m doing my work. It agrees with me.” Once he found himself thinking, “I have time,” without the usual ulterior motives, just that one, big thought. It rained and stormed over the Castilian highland almost every day, and he used his pencils to jam the curtain into the cracks around the window. The noise still bothered him more. The fish-scaling down below, outside the kitchen door, became a daily dismembering, with a meat ax, of altogether different animals, and the agreeably looping paths out on the steppe turned out to be a motocross course. (Soria was even competing, he discovered, for the European cup.) Seen on television, this sport, with its heroes bouncing into the air like video-game figures, had something admirable about it, but now, sitting at his table, he found the buzzing of a hornet around his head a blessing by comparison. Again and again he came back from his walk filled with strength—his own kind of strength—for work, and promptly lost it in the racket. The noise destroyed something not only for the moment but for good. The worrisome thing was that it put him at risk of disparaging an activity like his conjuring up of images and then putting them into words, which required so much solitude. On the other hand, in silence he had in fact occasionally gone astray, and now actually drew strength precisely from his weakness—his doubts, even more his hopelessness—going to work in defiance of his surroundings. Every day he traced his arc past the façade of Santo Domingo—no, in contrast to the new buildings behind it, that w
as no façade. Peace emanated from it; all he had to do was take it in. Amazing how the sculptures told their stories: Eve, being led to Adam by God, was already standing back-to-back with her husband in the next scene, where he gazed up at the Tree of Knowledge, and word of Christ’s Resurrection, given by one of the women to the first in the long line of Apostles, was immediately passed down the row to the end, as one could see from the body language; only the last in line, motionless, seemed not to have heard yet.

  Before work he walked with short steps, afterwards with longer ones, not out of a sense of triumph, but because he was dizzy. Going up the mountainside made him breathe more deeply and think more clearly, but it could not be too steep, or his thoughts would grow too agitated. Likewise, he preferred going upstream to the other direction; there was an element of forging one’s way, with the energy that produced. If he wanted to keep from brooding, he walked along the ties of the abandoned rail line that had linked Soria and Burgos, or went even farther out of town into the darkness, where he had to watch where he put his feet. When he returned from the darkness of the steppe to town, he was so tense from groping his way along that he felt like having the playful figures of Santo Domingo loosen him up and smooth the tightness from his face. He repeated the same routes, just adding a variation every day; yet it seemed to him as if all the other paths were waiting to be taken. Along Antonio Machados’s promenade lay years’ worth of tissues and condoms. During the day there were, besides him, almost exclusively old men out in the steppes, usually alone, with worn shoes; before they blew their noses, they ceremoniously pulled out their handkerchiefs and shook them. Before work, he made a point of saying hello to at least one of them, intending to be greeted in turn; he did not want to go back to his room without having experienced this moment of smiling; sometimes he even stopped just for that purpose and let one of them catch up with him, so as to get in the “Hola!” and the jerk of the head. Before that, he read the paper every day, by a large window in Soria’s Central Bar, with the help of a dictionary. Llavero meant a “bunch of keys”: with a raised bunch of keys a woman took part in a demonstration in Prague; dedo pulgar meant thumb: the American President gave the thumbs-up sign to indicate the successful bloodletting in Panama; puerta giratoria meant a revolving door (through which Samuel Beckett in his time had entered the Closerie des Lilas in Paris). The news of the execution of the Ceauçescu couple he read not with satisfaction but with an old, newly reawakened horror of history. When time allowed, he continued to decipher the characters of Theophrastus, and came to feel fond of many of them, at least in some of their traits—which he perhaps recognized as his own. It seemed to him that their weaknesses and foolishness were indications of lonely people who could not fit in with society, in this case the Greek polis, and in order to be part of it in some way played their ludicrous game with the courage born of desperation; if they were overzealous, unsuitably youthful, boastful, or, more revealingly, always “in the wrong place at the wrong time,” the explanation was often simply that they could not find their niche among the others, even their children and slaves. Occasionally he would look up and gaze out the window at a plane tree—still with its withered foliage—and next to it an already completely bare mountain maple, in which, almost predictably, except in a violent storm, the sparrows would be perched like buds, so quiet that the whipping, flapping, swirling jagged leaves next to them were more like birds than they were. He experienced his most powerful sense of place down by the bridge that spanned the river, less at the sight of the stone arches and the dark winter water flowing past than of the sign at the highest point of the bridge: RIO DUERO. One of the bars down by the water was called Alegría del Puente, Joy of the Bridge, and when he read the sign he immediately took the detour, the rodeo, to go in. Along the riverbanks, where they were not sheer cliffs, smooth-polished glacial boulders protruded from the earth, and on the remains of the city walls, far out in the steppe, the wind of the centuries had ridged, striped, pitted, patterned the yellow sandstone, and he saw several old palaces on the Plaza Mayor built on foundations of pebbles naturally cemented at the bottom of glacial lakes. To be able to read the landscape a little in passing grounded one, and he learned that in Spain geography had always been subservient to history, to conquests and border drawings, and only now was more attention being paid to the “messages of places.” Sometimes colors were particularly alive in winter. While the sky looked sulfurous, a fallow field down below was greening up, and the paths through the rock-strewn fields also showed mossy green. Where everything else had long since faded, a rosebush covered with hips formed a glowing red arch. A pair of magpies fluttered up, their wings brightening the air like rapidly turning wheels. On a day when it was not raining, little puffs of dust sprang up around the town, and he got a feel for summer in these parts. The shadows of clouds passed over the bare highland, as if pulled from underground—as if there were cloud shadows everywhere, but their home was here in Castile. One morning there was an hour without wind for a change, and in the clear sun both the northern and the eastern sierra could be seen with snow cover for the first time, and although both mountain chains were a small airplane journey away, he saw the sparkling slopes checkered by cloud shadows, motionless, for the duration of that hour without wind. In his thoughts he was so preoccupied with the snow that he involuntarily stamped it off his shoes when he reached his door. A few times, when he was groping his way across the deserted area outside town (he sent himself there for this very purpose), the night sky cleared up briefly, and the effect was all the more amazing when Castor and Pollux showed their fraternal distance, Venus glittered, Aldebaran sparkled in Arabic fashion, the W of Cassiopeia formed wide thighs, the Big Dipper bent its handle, and Lepus, the hare, in flight from the hunter Orion, dashed horizontally across the firmament. The Milky Way with its numerous Delta branches was a pale reflection of the universe’s initial explosion. Strange, the feeling of having a “long time” during this December in Soria: already, after the first day spent writing, when he caught sight of the river down there, he found himself thinking, “There he is, the good old Duero!” When one weekend he had not made his rounds past the Rio Bar, he felt, back by its little cast-iron stove, as if he had not visited this gray cylinder “in ages.” Scarcely a week after his arrival, he thought, as he wandered past the bus station: “This is where I stepped out into the rain with my suitcase that time!” In the midst of a roaring gale, a toad lurching through the steppe grass. Before the plane tree’s leaves dropped, their stems broke, became fringed, spun on the fringes. When the cock was in the muddy garden where the unripe tomatoes were left as feed, did his tail feathers move of their own accord, or was that the wind? But his true heraldic animals were those dogs he saw wandering around in the evening, limping on three legs: at the end of his day’s journey, one of his knees usually gave out, too. Once, when according to the paper Soria was not the coldest town in Spain, he felt disappointed. Once, on the main street, a pot with a red poinsettia was carried along, beneath the green, still not fallen, always wet leaves of the plane trees; not once in those weeks did the puddles in the hollows around the roots evaporate. The fog was dark gray, and against that background the many white cocoons of the needle-eating processionary moths stood out all the more menacingly in the mountain pines. On Christmas Day it rained so hard that, during his usual walk through town, besides him only a solitary sparrow seemed to be on the street. Then, from the county jail, without an umbrella, emerged a very small woman and her big son and crossed the sea of mud to a temporary barracks set up there, and he imagined that behind the high walls they had just visited a relative, one of the Basques on a hunger strike, and were camping out here until he was freed. In the evening there was a sudden flash of light between torrents of rain, and something hit him on his forehead and chin, and when he looked around, he saw a car with its roof all white coming from out of town, and way up in the black of night a few flakes began to float as they fell: “Nieve!” he thought, his first s
pontaneous word in Spanish. In a bar they struck up a flamenco song, for once without the usual gypsy-like note of futility, but cheerful, confident, with the air of a herald, and a notion ran through his mind: here, finally, was the appropriate way to sing for—not Christmas, but Navidad, the birth; this was how one of the shepherds would describe what he had seen in that holy night, and his description was of course also a dance. Here, as everywhere in the world, he saw passersby who, at the first drops of rain, put up the umbrellas they always had with them, and even here on the meseta it was the fashion for young girls, when they entered a restaurant, to blow their bangs off their foreheads. Thunderous wind, like an airplane taking off (actually, something one almost never heard over the city), in the poplars along the Duero. A large hen tenderly groomed the comb of a little rooster, standing on one leg in the muck. In a bare almond tree there was already one branch with white flower buds. Most of the evils with which he was familiar from his accustomed surroundings, including those within him, remained at a distance here, housed as he was once again by his work, and yet, in the long run, a sense of life—this he recognized in Soria—could not come from what was absent. Hoarfrost lay on the tree roots that terraced steps into a path. One time, as he sat at his table, something outside detonated and he heard it as a temple bell.