by Peter Handke
A similar openness to death also took hold of him on that January day during his solitary trip through Scotland, as he was making his way on foot through the hilly fields above Inverness.
He had been working all fall on an album, was exhausted, yet also in a good frame of mind—less or differently irritable than usual—but still had enough breath, as was generally the case after an effort that excluded everything else, for a further undertaking, which promised for once, in contrast to his trademark works—ballads, angry tirades, sung narratives—a pure song, in fact “The Last Song.”
For now, however, he was simply glad to be out of the studios and the big cities. Precisely because of his (powerful, not loud) music, which he wanted to authorize to be played only in places where it belonged, he was elsewhere extremely sensitive to noise, and he found it soothing to be away from the clacking and scratching of high heels on the streets of Paris and London and, after a short visit to his mother in Brighton, to have escaped to this Scottish rubber-boot landscape. Even the women, the young ones, came toward him here in rubber boots, and not just in the fields, and from their footsteps there was a sighing behind him, and accordingly he, too, went about in rubber boots.
It was a mild winter day, then warm as he mounted the slope, and he, in Scotland for the first time, at least out in the country, thought at the sight of the grovelike rhododendron bushes along the path, blowing in a southerly way and greening in the rainy wind, that it was always this way here. At the crest of the hill he spread his arms, turning his palms upward. The ridge was broad, almost part of the highlands already, and he still had to swing himself over several granite walls, chest-high because he was so small, until, in the narrowest sheep pasture, he stood facing the stone circle of the Celtic burial ground.
He did not approach it immediately, even avoided focusing on it at first, just gazed around for a long time. A couple of oaks, the only ones in these bare surroundings, groaned, and in the northern distance, beyond the arm of the sea, or firth, by Inverness, snowcapped mountains shone clear. In all the pastures roundabout were sheep, but in one, just as crowded and of about the same light color, was a herd of swine, munching away, on muddier ground; and instead of the usual dog among the sheep, there were several hares, distributed evenly among the herds.
The singer took off his woolen cap, stepped up to the one stele that stood twice as tall as the others, outside the circle, and leaned his head on it. Against his forehead he felt not so much the stone as the lichen, spreading, rust-colored, and scratchy. The predominant sensation became the beating of his heart, noticeable at the spot where he was touching the rock, filling his entire body, pulsing, pounding, as if passing into the interior of the column, and at this moment it would have suited the singer if the tall stone had given way and crushed him. He even shook it, without success. But this time no line of a song came to him instead, or only a word for one, “present,” or a fragment, “On the road … practice the present.”
When he opened his eyes, two sheep with raven-black faces were staring up at him from the grass. He squatted down at a distance from the circular cairn and shared his provisions with them, bought in the railroad station of Inverness; the apple he ate himself. Thus removed from the burial place, he became witness to one of those tenths of a second from so-called prehistoric times when the main stone, set up by the Celts or someone, became perfectly perpendicular, as it had remained standing through the millennia to that moment. It grew quiet on the knoll, including the bleating and grunting.
Still expectant of death, the singer, much later, set out to return to the valley, again cutting across fields, without paths or even wild-animal tracks. He crossed in a zigzag, from one field to the other, every thickly wooded gorge, where one false step in the slipperiness could have made him disappear, never to be seen again, on the bottom, under the unbroken canopy of leaves over the bog. And on the other hand he took each step carefully, and if he had fallen he would have kept his balance and would, broad as he was, have rolled over and over like a ball and landed softly on his feet.
He moved through the often thorny thicket in such a way that he did not receive so much as a scratch, and in his folk-dancer-like agility he would not even have been prey for one of the descendants of the pumas once released into the Scottish hills and surviving in these almost inaccessible gullies. The singer made his way along his path with the help of only his two legs, for he needed both hands to strike the Jew’s harp, the only instrument besides a harmonica that he had taken along on this hike.
Down in Inverness he fetched his backpack from the locker and took a room in the hotel that formed a part of the monumental granite railroad complex and had a suitably fine lobby with a grand staircase and chandelier.
No one recognized him, and no one would recognize him. That was his decision.
When after a shower he stepped out onto the square in front of the hotel, it was already long since dark, and it was raining, heavily and at the same time inaudibly. Having ducked into a rear courtyard to listen, the singer said to himself that he had never heard such a quiet rain as this Scottish one. All the louder the cackling of the sparrows, which were fighting head to head for a sleeping perch up on the ledge of the main church, or were chattering with each other before going to sleep. Like the plane tree here by the suburban railroad station, in Inverness the ledge was far and wide their only place for the night. There as here the sidewalk underneath was encrusted with their thick white droppings.
In a pub he leaned against the bar like the others and drank a beer, glancing occasionally at the bull’s-eye when a dart landed in it. As everywhere, the singer could not be distinguished from the local people, except that he might be from farther out in the country. When he heard “Mr. Tambourine Man” coming from the jukebox at waist height, he thought that the songs of thirty years ago had painstakingly worked things out, while in the meantime they all sounded so glib, his as well? The beat he tapped on his thigh with his fingers did not fit the song.
He consumed his evening meal deliberately, with a bottle of wine over which he sat for hours, almost alone in the dining room at the window of the best restaurant in Inverness, as the new justice of the peace? architect? soccer coach?, directly before his eyes the river Ness, which seemed disproportionately wide for this rather small town. Besides, the river was rising and seemed to be galloping toward its nearby mouth at the North Sea. The water was of a blackness that did not come merely from the darkness outside, and also merely as the color of moor water would not have had such density and brilliance. The rushing from the January rains had to contribute to the effect. To accompany the mighty current, which he felt at the same time in his arms, the singer beat out the steady refrain “Winter—water, winter—water, winter—water.” Then he reminded himself that he was on an island, though not a very small one, and that for him, a person from the continent (with an English mother), an “island river” was a child-wondrous concept, especially one that raged this way.
The waiters, of whom there were several, had meanwhile not budged from his side. Instead of with a credit card he paid in cash, a thick packet of which, damp at the edges, he had loose in his pocket; the clip that went with it was dangling from his ear. He did not want anyone to be able to trace his whereabouts.
On the wooden bridge outside, of a length suitable for a metropolis, staring at the peat-black turbulent water, the singer recalled how once before, after a sort of concert on a cruise ship with a group of rich Americans in a Turkish bay, fairly far out, he had jumped overboard at night in his clothing and shoes and had swum toward land through all the lively motorboat traffic, looking neither to right nor to left, coming up for air with eyes closed, over and over again, in defiance of death.
On the opposite bank of the Ness the suburbs began immediately. In one spot the sky had cleared, with a star so bright it had a ring around it like the moon: Sirius. Below, in one of the huddled suburban houses, a window was open to the mild air. An old woman in a houseco
at was leaning out as if for a long time, and out of the silence she and the singer greeted one another.
Up the hill, along the Caledonian Canal that ran along halfway up, he stepped into a suburban pub, still open, though probably not for long; inside it looked like someone’s living room, with a fire burning in the fireplace, on whose mantelpiece stood a collection of books with the Pickwick Papers, one of the books he had in his tower house, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and The Bobbsey Twins in Echo Valley. He sat down with a glass of whiskey in a wing chair and gazed at the only other guests, a very young couple who kept sticking their tongues down each other’s throats, undeterred by the coughing and choking this caused. Having finished with that, they promptly moved apart, as if their game were over. The girl leaned back in the shadows, and the boy turned to the singer and asked him, out of the blue, in a perfectly calm, also polite voice, whether he was one of the lumberjacks. In response to his nod, the young man told him that he was a Gypsy, had come here as a child from Poland, and was in the process of training as a forester near Inverness. But in Scotland there were hardly any forests left, whereas after the Ice Age the entire land had been covered by the great Caledonian Forest, first bright with birches, then darkened by the Scottish firs, then mixed with oaks. Probably he would be the first Gypsy forester.
Up by the canal, the door to an automobile repair shop was still open, and the singer, who liked to look into such places, saw in the brightly lit bays a few young fellows at work, with a song coming from the radio of a car being repaired, accompanied by the clang of tools. He listened attentively, clenching his fists in agitation, and only when he was back in the darkness again did he realize that the song was his.
Through his sleep whistled the trains down below in the station, and he dreamed the usual dream about his children, scattered across the countries and the continents, who, entrusted to him, had under his very eyes torn themselves away from him and disappeared for good. This time, after a few swimming strokes, they sank in clear water, knee-deep, and remained impossible to find there.
The next morning there was a rainstorm, and although it was part of the singer’s routine to expose himself to something unpleasant, to withstand something each day, he did not set out on foot as planned toward the snow-covered mountains in the north, but took a bus of the Highland Terrier Line, with Dornoch as his destination. In such a storm, unlike in high wind, there were no sounds to be heard while walking. And besides, it was coming from the west and not from the north, where he would have had it blowing beautifully in his face. From Dornoch he would tramp westward.
If he had to ride cross-country, then it should be by bus, and not because he was accustomed to that from his tours. In Plato’s Critias there is mention of the melancholy, who should be sent on a journey by ship to lift their spirits, if possible when the sea is turbulent, so that the atoms in their bodies will be shaken up and can find a healthier arrangement. This effect, and an even better one, could be achieved by a long bus trip, preferably on winding mountainous roads.
An additional factor for the singer was that on the road this way, always in a window seat, either way in front or way in back, drawing the curtain, even in his own tour bus, only to sleep, he could sink into himself, down to a point of complete tranquillity, and at the same time see himself as connected with the surroundings outside, of which he, without even having to turn his head once, could also keep a large portion in sight through the front or rear windshield.
Here, too, he could not tolerate any music, let alone a television above the driver’s head, as had become common elsewhere on cross-country trips. In that sense Scotland was probably too backward, for on this trip from the beginning there was only the landscape outside, seen through untinted glass, and the humming of the engine. The stormy wind, gusting and subsiding, seemed subdued in the rocking interior space. There was plenty of room.
The singer sat, together with one or two other passengers, on the east side, where the windows received the least rain, and from looking out he soon felt warm, although down below rain was blowing in through a crack, and instead of dribbling and trickling, swelled up with foam, blackish, as from a moor. And right past Inverness, on the suspension bridge over the firth, at the sight of the strangely curving, rounded waves down below, on closer inspection seals, he felt as if he had been cast among the animals, and spouted water, tumbled, let himself drift as one of them.
He was alert and feeling irrepressible. An element of pain, an openness, had to be added, and the song would come, he thought.
And then he thought nothing more during the entire trip. Although, besides him, no one on the Highland Terrier was looking at anything in particular, it was as if he were looking in consort with someone else, or as if he were following someone else’s eyes. The region, rolling off into the distance, was so bare that Mongolia came to mind, a place to which his travels had never taken him. The hero of The 39 Steps was fleeing through rain-drizzled rounded mountains, chained by handcuffs to an unknown woman, who was stumbling along behind him. A pheasant fluttered into the air and with its heavy body promptly thudded to the ground in the storm, as if shot down. In moments of clearing you could see, farther off in the North Sea, dusky oil-drilling platforms, like temples. And a year ago on the square in front of the bus station in Cairo there had been a sleeping place for the sparrows just as the night before in Inverness, in a single scraggly, mangy cypress there, and each time, approaching his Nile Hotel by a roundabout route, he had gone toward that shrill racket the birds made as they battled for a spot, audible above the roar of the entire city, so that at least he had something to orient himself by amid the African, or Arab, or whatever chaos. And the one old woman on the bus made him think of his mother, as did so many old crones in the country, although his mother was neither from the country nor a crone, and had not even been present at his first major performance. Whereas his father, who to this day, when his radio in the retirement home went even a week without playing something by his son, would comment that it had been a long time since they had heard anything by him, his mother had been concerned even back then, with his sporadic singing engagements at suburban summer festivals and graduations from Ville d’Avray to Courbevoie, that he was constantly being heard from.
At the sight of the stepped terraces in the craggy landscape, he felt in his own body the jerks with which aeons ago the glacier had withdrawn from there until it was gone from that area—that was how low the Scottish mountains were. All that had taken place unobserved. But someone must have observed it, with eyes that could still be felt? With what eyes? “I’m searching for the face you had before the world was made,” was a line in one of his songs.
Perhaps the singer was also lost in thought during the trip, brooding, bad-tempered, more than anyone else. But that was nothing compared to the moment when he was in song, as another might be in the picture. This being in song was very rare, rarer than a poem. Being in song was the original condition for him.
In the storm a sheep dashing across a pasture now, its damp fleece flying behind it like a coat.
In Dornoch, where the singer was the only passenger to get off, it was almost dark again. The gulls, for whom it was a struggle to fly forward, toward land, appeared black against the sky. The rain had stopped, but the storm from the west would blow all night. The cloud in the band of light left by the setting sun had the shape of a deeply frayed, broad-branched cedar, which, uprooted, came gusting through the air and then disappeared as if in a puff of smoke.
He gave up the idea of continuing his hike today, indeed forgot any plan for the time being. Here in Dornoch the singer felt as though he was already on his way. Was this a seaside resort? a town? a farm village? Except for him there was no one out on the street. Yet in the squat houses and the yards with storm walls he heard heavy steps, echoing, as if on the planks of a boat.
He stood still and watched for the moment when the now-clear firmament would reveal the glitter of the first star. He even knew the approx
imate spot. And again, as each time previously, in Archaia Nemea in Greece, on Mission Street in San Francisco, he must have blinked at the decisive moment. For there Venus was now, gleaming as always against the horizon, blue-black like a lining.
Below, almost out in the dunes, in the glow of the last streetlight, in front of a flat-fronted wooden house, the figure of a young woman appeared, who, out of breath, as if she had run toward him, invited the singer to spend the night in her house; the hotels in Dornoch were all closed during the winter. He could tell immediately that she did not recognize him, and accepted. He merely said he wanted to stay out until midnight, set down his backpack on her doorstep, and let her give him a key.
Then he made his way, up dune and down, to the North Sea, which came crashing up to the crown of the farthest dune; at first he felt as though he did not belong there, as with every ocean.
He went down into a crouch. Everywhere along the shore little seaweed fires were burning at regular intervals, with not a person in sight, crackling and sparking, intended as light signals out to the high sea. In the glow of such a flame the singer examined a plant sunk into the sand, around which a miniature dune had formed. A single kinked leaf still poked out, lance-shaped, rotated by some storm gusts almost around itself and snapped back into a resting position in between, whereupon the sand around it showed very delicate patterns of the quarter, half, and whole circles it had described, like a wind clock, with the seaweed frond as its hand.
