by Peter Handke
“What was your man’s name?” the unknown neighbor asked after a while.—“Labbayka,” she responded after a while. “That is Arabic, and it means something like ‘I am here for you.’ But why do you say, ‘What was his name?’ instead of, ‘What is his name?’?”—The unknown neighbor: “I ask, ‘What was his name?’ because I think your lover must have disappeared long ago, or is dead, or is imaginary. And if none of those, his name is something else entirely. And I think you, too, actually have a different name. You are living under an assumed name. You have changed your name several times in your life. I know all your fake names. I am on to you. I can smell your guilt. When that comes out, it will be the end of you. Look at the red dress of that girl on the swing!”—She: “The child in the red dress went home ages ago, and besides, her dress was not red.” —The unknown neighbor: “Do you want to know my name?”—She, already getting up to leave: “No.”
For a long time after that the suitor kept his distance. Nonetheless she constantly sensed his alien presence. She felt not only observed and spied-on but also recorded and registered. With her special perceptiveness, which in an instant could capture everything between the tips of her toes and the most distant horizon, she searched the surrounding area, without her stalker’s ever showing up—or only as in a puzzle picture, where body parts belonging to the person you are supposed to find might be inscribed in the foliage of a tree, or in the pattern formed by cracked stucco on a house.
At the same time, it seemed as though she were holding him at bay with this capacity for perception. He apparently did not dare to venture closer, not yet. But then she began to catch sight of him with increasing frequency, always from behind: when she stopped at a traffic light, he would suddenly be there in one of the cars up ahead, or he would be on the overpass above the highway leading out of the city, visible from head to foot, but again only from the rear.
At last one morning, as she stepped out through the gate, there he stood in the flesh (she actually thought: “At last!”) facing her, so close that he looked as if he were cut out of cardboard or plywood, a figure in a tunnel of horrors. What preoccupied her later was less the fact that he drew back to strike her than that he had both hands full of flowers that he had pulled up, roots and all, from the border along the drive, and that the unknown neighbor was dressed up, wearing a tuxedo that called to mind, as she later told the author, a dance on the upper deck of a luxury liner, complete with brass band and the Southern Cross. “Did he throw himself at you?” (the author).—“Do not ask! I cannot tell the story if I am asked questions” (she). Besides, the author should know by now that so long as she was under the protection of one of her images no one could harm her.
A path through the Montana Rockies wedged itself between her and the attacker, leaving the latter flailing his arms behind the spruces over yonder, scraping his knuckles raw on their Rocky bark. Unripe cranberries growing along the edge of the path formed little whitish ovals, with the occasional riper ones among them looking all the more red. Were those bear droppings beside them? Wasn’t what she said next expressed in an Indian language, meaning in translation “Out of my way, stranger. This is my territory”? And in fact he did beat a retreat, backing away slowly, as she, too, slowly walked backward, he taking one step, then she taking one, until they were out of each other’s sight. Never again would the nameless neighbor raise a hand against her. Finally, before their reciprocal disappearance, they even laughed. As she told it, she had also laughed earlier, from inside the image.
Instead he tried to get at her with words again, both spoken and written. And she let him try. And since the oral modality suited them both better, she also agreed to a meeting occasionally; by now it did not matter to her where—so long as it was not in her house—sometimes for dinner, and also at her office.
At such times she was the one who ordered food or picked up the tab (he accepted it as a matter of course). And that was not the only factor that would have led an observer to conclude that their relationship must be based on some collaborative project, with her making all the decisions and him merely taking orders from her. Some thought they were witnessing a medical consultation, or saw the man, sitting there with the woman, as her research subject. At such moments, the idiot of the outskirts—at the time of this story the idiots lived on the outskirts, where they belonged—would be crouching nearby, as her protector, and indeed everyone’s, listening in silence, eyes wide open, and thus assisting her.
Only the suitor spoke. And onlookers would never have guessed that every time he spoke exclusively of her. Viewed from the street or from the kitchen pass-through, he sat there looking like someone who was revealing his innermost feelings to a chance acquaintance. And she seemed to be all ears, saying nothing, as could hardly be otherwise in such a case. His many gestures, flowing one into the other, seemed to refer only to him. They underlined what he was saying. Would the woman listening have followed them so attentively otherwise, even the smallest of them, her attentiveness concentrated in the corners of her eyes, as she read his words from his lips?
From the outside, a passerby one time could see him talking and talking at her, making an expansive gesture, pointing outward and upward to the outdoors. He swung his arm so vigorously that his sleeve slipped back. And she followed his index finger without specifically focusing on it, simply by widening her eyes and face somewhat. And in fact there was something to see in the direction in which he was pointing: it was summer, a thunderstorm broke out, from one minute to the next, and over there, on the far side of the plaza outside the restaurant, a mighty old cedar suddenly toppled over, coming to rest at an angle, then a jerk, and another; and then, as its roots were ripped from the ground, it came crashing down on the plaza, just missing a family running to take cover; the two children laughed out loud at the fallen tree, while the parents …
But the man talking and talking in the window had not noticed the tree coming down, and had gone on talking without a moment’s pause, his apparent pointing giving way to a plucking and tearing at his own hair, while the woman took in the tree’s fall but at the same time maintained her listener’s pose—as if that were the way to bring the stranger to his senses? to placate him?
For his gesticulating directly contradicted what he was saying. Every time they met, she was his exclusive topic. Yet he never pointed at or indicated the woman he was wooing; he even avoided looking at her as his eloquence poured forth. He squeezed his own throat with both hands and said, “Everything about you is ugly. Your house is ugly. Your car is ugly. Your toes are ugly.” He poked his fingers in his eyes and said, “The one who will be the loser is you. You have already lost. Just as your parents were losers and your daughter is a loser, you must become a loser, too.”
Each of his meetings with her ended with his reviling her; predicting or asserting the worst possible outcomes for her. Sometimes he began with compliments or pleasantries: “This morning the wind carried your name to me …”—“Today I would like to intone a gentle psalm …” —“Only you know your secret, evasive companion …”—“It was on a morning in April, O woman with the warlike eyes …” But after a few such sentences he invariably began to scold her, which just as invariably gave way to swearing and cursing, during which he might box his own ears, strike his chest, or bite off his fingertips. Yet the scolding and cursing was never completely devoid of meaning. Among the empty phrases he stammered out, there was always one combination that hit home, revealing unsuspected acts and omissions, committed, she had thought until then, only in a dream. An act of cruelty, of forgetting, of malicious desertion—had actually occurred.
In the period just before her departure, the suitor/neighbor’s vilification of her had applied exclusively to the future. Not that he threatened her—threats were out of the question with her—he spat out imprecations. What began like a poetic traveler’s blessing (“Thou shalt find flower-strewn paths …”; “The dark and lowering sky will enrapture thee one night”) unfailingly end
ed with an unvarnished curse. She would lose what was most precious to her. She would never return. She would be done in. Let mountain lions devour her, her still quaking flesh!—When the author asked why she wanted to have this tale of confusion included in her book, she said only, “The more confused the tale, the clearer the pain.”
Where was her rejected suitor now, on the morning of her departure? Where was he standing, recording her final rounds? And what if this were indeed her last journey—something less to be wished for than to be feared? And at what moment had the owls stopped hooting amid the crescendo of morning sounds? And at what moment had the moon ceased to shine—casting light and shadow—as its disk sank silently into the sky, pale and without reflection? And at what moment did the last of the stars become invisible, leaving not the faintest flickering at the spot where it had just been shining on the horizon, already bright with day? And at what moment had the weather changed, the crisp, silent frost that had held the area in its grip for weeks now giving way, from one instant to the next, to a mild breeze?
How exciting to experience, with disarmed senses, without instruments and machines, all these transitions occurring in a speck of time, and yet, even if one seemingly succeeded in doing so—“Look! Venus is still there, no, now, no, now, now, yes! all gone!”—the awareness afterward of having missed the critical moment again, and that it had always been that way, and would be that way to the end? Having missed even that modest moment when, after stepping into a forest, one grew conscious of oneself as a complete being, surrounded by forest?
Unexpectedly, so the story goes, the “world champion of global finance” (as she had been dubbed in a magazine article) found herself whisked to the midst of the wooded slopes on the outskirts of the riverport city, borne through the morning air as if on the wings of the portion of the story that had already been told, and especially the portion that was yet to be told. And it was as if her journey had already begun; as if she were moving, as previously in the orchard on her property, in widening spirals, gathering impetus for setting out. No one but her in the forest that early, tremendously alone. And why was she alone? Where was her suitor? Was he asleep? He could not be sleeping through this, could he, missing her and this morning?
As she mounted the slope, she repeatedly wound up to throw one of the chestnuts she had gathered along the way and stuffed into her pockets. (Maroni! Wouldn’t they give away her geographical location? No, by now these nuts grew almost everywhere, they were practically ubiquitous on the continent.) She wound up without throwing. “Just the act of winding up and setting one’s sights on a target,” she told the author, “brings this target into view—a hole in a tree, a crack in a cliff—as an image, together with its surroundings. Winding up without throwing: another way of generating images from one’s own stock. But what is the point of such an image? With my target images I defend myself without defending myself—I attack without attacking—I wage war without having to wage war.”
Marvelous walking: beneath her feet the hoarfrost, still sole-deep, crunching and crackling as no snow could ever crunch and crackle (not only much quieter but also much farther away, or more dreamlike)—and overhead in the crowns a new pliability and a transformation from hoarfrost-white to trickling-water-black in the gentle thawing breeze. And in the bare chestnut trees the spiky fruit husks, long since split open, but now and then releasing a chestnut that had been held there for months by the husk, a lighter brown than those strewn over the forest floor, and not soft or rotting like them but firm and healthy, with fresh, pale-yellow flesh. What, edible chestnuts in January? Yes. She to the author: “What is time? I am still as puzzled by it as long ago in the village.” The magical emptiness of a Monday, the emptiness of the week’s onset in the forest.
But remarkable walking, too, because the forest had been destroyed a few weeks earlier by a December hurricane such as even this northwestern region, accustomed to powerful storms, had never experienced. The hurricane came in the night, and although it raged for hours, she slept on, slept and slept, more soundly than ever. As had happened quite often in her life, she missed the event. After that, going into the forest was prohibited. “But of course I went in.” The first time, the destruction looked to her far less extensive than what was shown in the newspapers and on television, and not only because around the small section depicted she could see the rest of the wooded area. But each time she returned, the destruction seemed more drastic. Did trees continue to hurtle to the ground after the storm was over? On the other hand, didn’t the long period of frost that followed the hurricane anchor the loosened roots in the soil? And yet each time there were more trees, limbs, crowns that had apparently fallen overnight. Or had her eyes merely shied away from taking them in all at once?
Not a wood-road that was not blocked by trees or scattered debris. One had to scramble over, or slip under, or take a tedious detour—which brought one smack up against the next obstacle, and then another, with the result that one might inadvertently end up outside the forest. So she decided in favor of scrambling and crawling. Decided? No, it went without saying that she would court obstacles and danger, as she always had. Danger? Some of the trees she dove under were not yet resting completely on the ground, but were still hung up on splintered limbs sticking in the earth, often only one support, and not a sturdy one.
But what was there to look at amid this devastation? There is no secret to devastation, she thought on her first sortie into the forest after the millennial storm. Only with repetition were her eyes opened. Where the trees had been uprooted, huge masses of soil had been heaved up. These were almost perfect half-spheres or else pyramids of sand, clay, and scree, cross sections tipped up perpendicularly, from whose midsection the lateral roots stuck out like rays, their ends sheared off and shredded, while the middle consisted of a much thicker fragment of root that projected toward the viewer, the mother root, so to speak. The trees torn out of the ground by the hurricane had thrust thousands of such former root balls up into the air.
The cleanup had not yet begun; it would require a ten-year plan, an entire army: but even if all the tree corpses were to be sawn up over the course of ten or twenty years and turned into neatly stacked woodpiles, it would be out of the question to level the densely scattered halved balls, pyramids, and earth cones that now reared up before one throughout the forest, like primeval yurts; all the layers of subsoil dragged out of the depths into the light with the roots, from the horizontal to the vertical, would probably remain this way forever.
That would create a new landscape, an area such as had never been seen before, with new, crazy-quilt horizons here, there, and everywhere. And because the wood of the roots was particularly durable, it would continue to portray the spokes of a wheel, with the hub in the middle becoming even more unmistakable later on, when sculpted by wind and weather. She had little curiosity, a trait she shared with most of the inhabitants of her native region: but she was curious to see how the transformed landscape would look.
And then the craters in all the places where trees had stood before the hurricane, most of them massive old oaks: now one could see, layer upon layer, the material deposited by previous millennia. The snail shells at the bottom of the craters had not rolled into them recently, but seemed to have been there from time immemorial. And similarly the oyster shells were not left over from a picnic in the woods, were not trash tossed into the root cavities after a tour of the damage, but were stuck there, removable only with hammer and chisel, as if baked, a thousand years earlier, to their prehistoric oyster bed, lifted by the catastrophe from what had once been the sea. And the black basalt there in the next soil layer down came from a vulcanic vein. Where am I? When did that take place? And was that now? And when is “now”?
None of the other trees had such spreading crowns as the giant oaks, or oak giants. At the same time, the branches in the crowns were interwoven, forming a dense mass. And nothing made a more powerful impression of devastation than all the oak crowns lying
smashed on the forest floor. Yet even these almost countless heaps of broken limbs offered something to observe. On its way down, one of these giant trees had fallen on its equally large, equally broad, giant neighbor, which in turn had fallen on the oak in front of it, and now they lay there as a single trunk, forming a sort of transcontinental line, all pointing toward a common vanishing point at the very end of the continent.
This line was rhythmically punctuated by the ruined crowns, or crown ruins, which had the appearance, lying on the ground, of enormous cages, cages intended for games, for they were wide open in all directions, with remains of tangled branches. And never, in fact, had so many birds cavorted way up in the crowns while the trees were alive as did now down there amid the deadwood. Behind and between the bars of the pseudo-cages, birds eyed each other and whirred about, especially the smallest birds, the titmice, the sparrows, the robins, eating their fill of food that was otherwise out of range of their usual low flight orbit. They pecked and swallowed, and to the outsider seemed to be playing jailbird.
