by Peter Handke
“It was not only for me that you weren’t good,” I would be able to tell her to her face again. “You aren’t good for anyone.” Or: “The right man for you doesn’t exist; there will never be someone who suits you, not even death, at most a god. But which one? Just as you not only filled the house with objects but also kept shoving them around, you have constantly been on the move from place to place yourself. Never will you find your place anywhere, with anyone, certainly not alone with yourself. And even with your god you will feel hemmed in sooner or later.”
On such a night the woman from Catalonia would actually listen to me, unlike earlier. At the very most she would say, in a quiet tone like mine, “You sound like your pal, the petty prophet of Porchefontaine.” And all the while the men next to us in the bar would have been trying not to hear us, making occasional remarks like “Smells like snow,” “When I was in the service in Indochina,” “Red gets you riled up; that’s why butchers are so riled up,” or “Before the war there were still charcoal kilns up there in the woods.”
But at a time like that, when I appeared as I am, and with patience to boot, the woman from Catalonia would never ever show up unexpectedly. She is not capable of taking anyone by surprise. Surprises were something she expected exclusively of the other person, if possible daily. If I managed to pull one off now and then, she was quite overwhelmed. I can recall a sideways glance of unusual gentleness, such as you sometimes receive from a child who has been given a present. But she herself never took me by surprise, as if that were beneath her dignity and were also not appropriate for her.
And besides, nothing would bring her back to this region, and certainly not at night. The very word “suburb” was repugnant to her. She equated it with banlieue, and had the conventional adjectives at her fingertips—“dreary,” “characterless,” “gray”—like a travel writer who goads his readers to seek out exotic places, as far away as possible, with a title like “Forget the Banlieue!”
She, who came from a town in the provinces, had always dreamed of getting away, and in the end found herself in a similar region, with the same poky houses and streets that were deserted at night, while the proximity of the metropolis just over the hills, its glow lighting up the eastern sky, tore at her heart rather than soothing it. With time she came to see some virtues in this particular suburb, made fun of the teeny-tiny middle- and working-class houses as amiably as she made fun of Gaudí’s edifices in Barcelona. She got to know merchants and tradespeople with whom I hardly ever exchanged more than a hello; in the special silence of the wooded hills she had her own spots, which she alone visited and which were off-limits to me. Yet life on a grand scale could take place only in the hub, on the other side of the mountains, as she called the barely hundred-thirty-meter-high ridge. The suburban world here remained for her—to use the expression of the singer’s, who, a child of this area, composed one of his angry songs about it—“rotten.”
No one would come. I would remain alone with a couple of strangers at a bar in the most remote recess of the bay. And stories are told, for instance: it snows; or: something is going on. I am receptive, and the others, I sense, likewise. And up there in the woods sparks would fly from a nocturnal horseback rider, and that mythical beast, which I expect to turn up any day now in the forest, almost devoid of wild animals and yet so overgrown, has pricked up its ears at least once already for its first appearance.
But every time this nocturnal storytelling has no effect. Because it takes place so remotely, among marginal people, and only there, only there now? “But that can’t be,” I think, “it has to have some effect.”
A year ago, when the priest from my native village visited me in this obscure corner while on his way to Chartres—about which he did not want anything said—“I’m here with you, not on my way to somewhere else!”—he spoke of how solitaries belonged together in the diaspora, which nowadays was the place where, for people like us, things were most likely to go on, one person here, another there, which I denied: I expected nothing from a community of the scattered people, the chosen, from secret circles with secret writings and initiation rites, but rather … and here, as so often before, I had no idea what I wanted to say next.
The priest, standing there, legs apart as at home, winked at me as if he did not believe me, and as though we both knew better. I now felt even more left to my own devices than before. He had come unannounced, as though my house, three countries away, belonged to his parish, and in the back of his car, which was splattered with mud from top to bottom as only the forest ranger’s was here, he had a plaster cast of the Romanesque kings from our village church, which the two of us then hauled to the farthest corner of the yard, where the three knee-high torsos now present their thick-lipped smiles.
A community of the scattered was something I believed in only during a period of transition.
And just as little am I guided by an earlier idea, the product not only of a lack but also of something visible: that of a people. I have never believed in a national people, equally little in a religious people, a linguistic people, and never in The People with the definite article. But neither can I believe anymore in a people of minorities, of people waiting, of readers, of sufferers and victims.
There was only one period in my life when I had the notion of preserving all the changing, indefinable peoples in whom I believed in some more durable form, and even then that could be only something written—not legal files—only a book.
That was at the time when I was a lawyer, barely thirty, and was not yet writing. I was renting a room in a house up in the hills of Sievering, in the north end of Vienna, and I was working with an older colleague in his firm out past Baden, outside the capital, along the Southern Railway. For several years my existence alternated almost daily between completely anonymous travel by bus, trolley car, and train, and contact, which grew more and more intimate from appointment to appointment, with society, the highest levels as well as the lowest, not only that of the city of Vienna but that of all of Austria. In both realms, as an anonymous observer and as an actor in the plot, I became completely engrossed. Yet I was not leading a double life, but rather a twofold one, each part in harmony with the other.
That finally amazed me so greatly that for a time I visualized a human comedy, loosely modeled on Balzac, a narrative of society moving constantly back and forth between names and the nameless, but even freer than Balzac, I imagined, more open, less obsessed with death, since I, like him, believed not so much in a specific people as in this one or that one, even if only in walking or driving by. In my head the book already had a title. It was called “The Apothecary of Erdberg.”
My contemporary novel of society—through which wafted the ever-present epic of the undefined people encountered on the street and in public transportation—came to naught. I did not even begin it (although the real apothecary of Erdberg, who in those days sat next to me at table for an evening, still sends me material year after year from far away and hints that if we were together he would have a lot to tell me for my book). The more closely I scrutinized my plan, the less the people with whom I had daily dealings seemed suitable as heroes or even as characters in a book. And if they did fit into a book, then only one that had long since been written, for instance Doderer’s Strudlhofstiege.
But even in this saga, in those days already situated far back in the past, I did not find my Viennese and Austrian acquaintances anywhere as participants. When I sat in my room out in Sievering at the end of the 1960s and closed my eyes to the beautiful view and thought about them one at a time, they all, even the oldest among them, lacked that “depth of the years,” even in their fragmentariness, that would have qualified them to be developed by Doderer.
Whether as a thirty-year-old then or now, a quarter of a century later, I was not really interested in finding a past that would lend depth to the people in question for my book. But some sort of background, even if it were lit up just for a second as if by lightning, was what I ne
eded for them, for each of them, to let me get launched on telling stories around them, and finally even about all of them at once, if possible.
Nowhere did I see such a background, no matter how often I went over my acquaintances, one after the other. Although most of them, except for my outsider and criminal acquaintances, constituted members of one and the same society, in my mind they did not fit together anywhere. That had nothing to do with my assessment of them or society. They were simply out of the question, no matter how I respected or hated them, for inclusion in a book. Not even the solitaries, the outlaws and strangers, with whom I often had a more intimate association than with the others, appeared to me against the background of a book, or the background remained dull and lifeless. For my imagination, for the book, it had to be alive, bright or dark, short, incomplete—as short and incomplete as possible.
I knew too much about my people in those days. Since I was someone to whom people confessed things, I knew the most secret lives of many. Of course, the heroes of my book were supposed to have a second, secret life. My image of it was completely different, however. So why not attribute it to those unknowns who, as fellow passengers, as people in line with me, as passersby, were supposed to populate the book from beginning to end? No; for then the passersby would lose their fantastic contours in my eyes, too. In those days I was coming to know so many in my country’s society from close up that eventually all sorts of people hurrying through the streets appeared to me, when they spoke their first word, if not before, as those I had known by heart for a long time. There, wearing a Tyrolese hunting cap, went the police commissioner, or someone just like him. There, crowded together on the back seat, were all those I had defended that year. There, leaving the perfume shop, was a woman who could be the secret mistress of the professor of Roman law. On the outskirts, in Rodaun, in Mauer, in Weidling, in Hiitteldorf, in Heiligenstadt, in Schwechat, I encountered in strangers the waiters, teachers, judges, pimps, and women with whom I had been on first-name terms for what seemed like forever, and to whom I had just said goodbye in the inner districts. That silhouette over there on the commuter train was my landlord. When the exotic-looking person on the bus opened his mouth, he turned out to be my neighbor, the one with a boat in his backyard, with the wife who took a fatal tumble on the stairs, with the child whose heart stopped beating during a tonsillectomy.
Only once during that time did a stranger pierce me through and through and yet remain unfamiliar, without dissolving into the double of a type I knew from society. It happened on a streetcar, not an ordinary one but one that went out into the country, the so-called local to Baden. One day, for almost an hour, a woman I did not know sat diagonally across from me, all the way from the Opera House to a central market somewhere outside the city. Beauty is something I have very seldom seen in people, and then always this way: a person was initially not beautiful but became so, over time or all of a sudden. The woman in the local was beautiful immediately, and remained so until she got off; nothing could touch her. When I say, “The beautiful woman was warm and friendly,” it sounds to me like “The grass was green” or “The snow was white,” and yet it is the only thing I can say about her (although I recall various features). She made me see what mattered, in my life, in the book.
It was summertime, many empty seats on the streetcar, a lot of light, especially out there in the meadows, beyond the city limits. A child, not a small one, was sitting beside the beautiful woman, then on her lap. I did not manage, and this was fortunate for me, to see the woman as a mother, as the wife of some man, of a doctor, an architect, a soccer star. She defied all categorization. She could not be a hairdresser, a businesswoman, a television anchor, a speleologist, a poet, a model, a motorcyclist, a second Marilyn Monroe or a second Cleopatra, a queen or a singer.
And during all this time I played soccer on Saturday afternoons with, among others, a cabinet minister of about my age, who once confided in me, in the cafeteria of our suburban stadium, that since childhood he had been waiting for his father, who had disappeared in the mountains, to come home. And a surgeon, with whom I went hiking in the Vienna Woods on quite a few weekends, half circling the city, once described to me how during operations he often felt the urge to plunge both hands into the patient’s liver, for example (he had very large hands).
And frequently I also sat in a certain outdoor café alone, the last one there, and the proprietor, after the waiters and kitchen help had long since left, would come and join me, expounding on the variations in Austrian dialect, intoning the nuances in pronunciation from valley to valley, with barely perceptible sound shifts, like a series of magic incantations; or he would trot out hunting adventures he had as a specialist in sick animals, none of which he had ever left alive, and when he had followed their sweat trail for days, clambering over cirques and dodging avalanches: “There you are, finally!” and “Always a clean shot!” Often almost the whole night would pass while we talked under the linden tree, which kept the rain off the two of us, except for occasional drizzle. Or I stood in half-darkness in the closed ward by the rails of the bed to which the notary’s wife was strapped, while she implored me to report her situation to her husband (who had committed her to the mental hospital).
And the man who sat down next to me in all my regular bars, dressed in the light-colored suit of a man-about-town, was a monk, and every time he was coming from giving religious instruction to pupils each of whose ears he would have liked to box. And the man in a too small gray smock who waved to me from a distance while loading packages in the yard of a local post office on the outskirts of town—I realized it only out on the street—had been the headwaiter at the Bristol Hotel just the week before. And when I rang the bell of the artist couple’s apartment because I had left something behind, I heard from behind the door cries of passion, which the most insistent ringing could not interrupt—and just a moment ago, in my presence, and all evening in fact, they had been spitting their mutual hatred in each other’s faces. And the traveler to India told me that in the place where he went every year, to get away from society here, he rubbed shoulders with the world’s elite, whereupon his equally gentle girlfriend told me he went away only because he had his brother’s death on his conscience, and as she spoke these words she slipped her bare foot between my legs under the table.
I knew the place where the former Olympic bronze medalist in the slalom, long since homeless, slept in an underground parking garage, knew that the deputy mayor went fishing only because of his depression, spent several nights with my construction-worker brother in the barracks in Simmering where his crew of itinerant ironworkers from Carinthia was staying, was one of the few allowed to attend the funeral of the murdered gambling kingpin, a book publisher on the side, at which his SS friend, a presidential advisor at the time, delivered a graveside eulogy during which he repeatedly broke down, and his wife then had the St. Stephen’s concert choir sing the Mozart Requiem, practiced specially for the occasion.
My comédie humaine from the Austria of that period, modeled loosely on Balzac and Doderer and the Civil Code, remained a figment of my imagination.
Although at times I saw all the characters sharply delineated in my mind’s eye, there were still several rather strange reasons why the story did not allow itself to be written, at least not by me. Perhaps the strangest: on the one hand I intended to capture all of society, including the terrorist (today a housewife once more) urging her cause on me in a staccato whisper as we huddled in a broom closet at the chancellery; including the Yugoslav guest worker, his skin reddened from his work in a laundry, in his free time painting signs for pubs on the eastern outskirts of Vienna, a man who despised the Albanians because they “didn’t have any butts in their britches,” father of a half-Albariian child, off in distant Pristina with its mother.
On the other hand not a single person in this society seemed to fit with anyone else, no matter how I closed my eyes and racked my brains, not even within the established groups, academic
and social classes, associations, clubs, and cliques.
Each of these people appeared to me in my imagination alone, without a link to a second or third party of whatever sort.
Not that I had in mind a connectedness, even the most fleeting unity, for this society; its members merely refused to let themselves to be pictured in one and the same story. And the others out there simply appeared as doubles.
Another problem was that on the one hand the individuals whom I was considering as preliminary sketches for my own inventions did not cease to baffle me the more they revealed themselves, and on the other hand not one of them seemed inspired by anything—a cause, a mission. (In my conception, “The Society of the Inspired” had been the book’s subtitle, after “The Apothecary of Erdberg.”) After they unveiled their secrets I actually found not a few of them good and decent, and could even admire and respect quite a number of them, and not only a doctor for being on call at night or a politician for switching his allegiance from one segment of society to another or a bus driver on snowy mountain roads. The only problem: not one of them revealed anything that sparked my imagination.
And similarly I was preoccupied with the evildoers, no less numerous; they assailed me, would not leave me in peace, even in my dreams. Yet they, too, did not galvanize or stimulate me, not even the public speaker during whose hate-filled tirades I could picture all the manhole covers blowing off around his followers gathered on the open square, and the skulls of the dead emerging.
