Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

by Peter Handke

  That same night her brother, released from prison, crossed the last of several borders since his departure from the country of his imprisonment and arrived in the country he had chosen as his new home. It was snowing there, as almost always in wintertime. By now he was driving a car, lent to him by the woman with whom he had stayed all day until an hour after the early nightfall. At a signal from him, she would follow him to a place yet to be determined. There was no woman who would not have done everything for her brother, after spending at most an hour with this almost silent man, who alternated constantly between monumental weariness and flashes of alertness.

  It is said that even to her, his sister or somewhat older sibling, the brother meant more than any man, suitor, wooer, especially in their early youth. Yet that supposedly had nothing to do with their personal relationship, also not with the fact that they were orphaned early, but was a tradition with this Slavic Sorbian or half-Arab population, small and becoming smaller with each day that passed—the last villages almost completely absorbed into the German ones around them, and these long since incorporated into cities—: the love between brother and sister, as the author’s research discovered, had remained a prime characteristic of this people (see also cultural continuity); “the attitude peculiarly characteristic of all the women there consists in the exceptionally lively friendship they bring to their brothers; the latter sometimes seem to have greater worth in their eyes than their husbands. Their most sacred oath invokes the name of their brothers. And one of the most common formulas goes thus: ‘By the life of my brother!’” (historian from a previous century). And on each of the rare occasions when she, the sister, had seen her brother again, the terrorist and enemy of mankind, after she had kissed him on both cheeks she had also kissed him on his brow and shoulder, that, too, part of this tradition—or did she merely think she had done so, in retrospect?

  Yet her brother despised his Slavic people. (He refused to believe in any Arab ancestors.) He despised them because they had not merely affiliated themselves with the infinitely larger, all-powerful state majority, for the sake of money, positions, the right to participate in decisions and live under the flag of a world power, but had also sold out to this people, body and soul, heart and mind, language and “customs” (?, yes!). Her brother hated his people because they had given up their identity as a people, without war, without mounting even the slightest resistance.

  And he hated them even more because they nonetheless continued to call themselves a “people,” or rather allowed themselves to be characterized as a “minority”; while in reality they had long since been reduced to appearing as a merely tolerated folkloric ensemble, one of twenty or thirty song-and-dance numbers trotted out for a festival produced by the national tourism office or in a promotional video, and beyond that?—nothing, nothing at all. Did this imply that her brother, in contrast to her, the sister, still believed in something like a people? Yes. And such a thing was even a necessity to him.

  “I am lost without a people,” he had told her once, close to tears (and at the same time had jabbed a knife into the table). And since he was convinced that his maternal and paternal people was now no more than a “national propaganda lie,” and was “worth nothing and good for nothing” as a people, a minority, a population, or whatever, he had chosen another people for himself, “the only one far and wide,” as he was also convinced, “that still deserves the name”; whereas his sister was careful, and not only lately, not to take sides for or against anything, or even to get worked up over a sports team, for or against it—if for no other reason than that the few times when she had committed herself to a cause, a movement, or a group, after a very short while that same cause, movement, or group had dissolved, fallen apart, with such regularity that she had come to believe that this had occurred precisely because of her advocacy and support, as that soccer team she had rooted for as a girl whenever it played, merely on account of a certain player or even just the appealing sound of its name, had promptly begun to slide farther and farther down in the standings.

  And now her brother was driving on this snowy night through his chosen country, with the window open, heading for his chosen people, which was at war with almost all the neighboring states, out-and-out war (not merely an undeclared or rumored one like the war in the nearby Sierra). And among other things, his chosen country and his chosen people would be saved, thanks to him; would emerge victorious; and would show the world. Thanks to knights errant such as him, a new era would dawn, or an old one, the forgotten one, the legendary one that still existed only as an object of ridicule, would be reinstated as never before. But wasn’t the country of his choice hopelessly lost? A defeated people, defeated once and for all, which had long since given up on itself and yet behaved as though life went on—precisely the sign of being defeated? And wouldn’t heroes like him actually help administer the coup de grâce?

  And now, in the depths of night, in a heavy snowfall, he took the secret route through the mountains with which he had long been familiar. All the roads across the valley were blocked off. The country was blacked out. He drove without headlights, no faster than a walk, except when he accelerated as the road climbed. A woman was sitting next to him; not the one from earlier in the day. A little light came from the trees laden with snow, enough to make the shadows, or rather shapeless specters, of the snowflakes outside dart across the faces of the two people in the car. The knight Feirefiz, Parsifal’s half brother, had had just such a body with dark and light speckles. “Feirefiz”—that would have been a good name for her brother.

  Somewhere halfway into the mountains he had come upon the young woman standing by the road, with a basket on her arm. Her brother had started: a seemingly congenital jumpiness, which had nothing to do with fear—constituted, as he had always appeared to be, of fearlessness, sheer courage, and excessive, ridiculous jumpiness; sensitivity to anything abrupt, whether a sound or something visual—and yet he himself was an abrupt person, given to sudden anger, sudden friendliness, sudden displays of goodness, sudden violent impulses (although directed only toward things, for the time being).

  Driving at the speed of a walk up the mountainside, the new pair will now consume their middle-of-the-night meal. Until now they have not exchanged a single word, and from one rotation of the wheels to the next, they are more and more in agreement that until they touch each other for the first time, and altogether until the end, they will remain wordless like this; leaving it to their bodies to act, stretching toward, tensing against, arching over each other; or merely leaving it to the snow, sporadically blowing into the car, or to the spruce branches, likewise sporadically brushing against the sides of the car.

  They will have helped themselves from the basket between them to slices of cold leg of lamb and corn bread. But while the young woman drinks wine diluted with water, the brother will drink milk—not that he always has, but as he has done since the time when he came to believe that he could rinse away all the darkness, blackness, blind rage inside him by drinking that white liquid. And again there were not a few people who, seeing him constantly drinking milk, sniffed his glass for disguised whiskey or vodka.

  And in the most silent hour of the night, the one before the predawn graying of the sky, still at the speed of a walk, the two of them will have neared, by way of the secret route, the crossing point, recognizable only to her brother, devoted to even the smallest feature in his elective country, and thus to the alpine-hut-like shelter of his new lover. In the meantime, that moment when the brother will have become aware that he has just shaken off the last breath or scent of the years in prison, the mustiness swept away and out of the world by a clump of stones under a snow tire: a powerful push from deep, deep inside, which is followed as a matter of course by his free hand’s groping for the hip of the strange woman.

  15

  The principal traveler awakened as if someone had been moving through her all night, crawling through her armpits, stepping on her ribs, balancing above h
er legs. She opened her eyes: in spite of the heavy curtain, the red light of dawn filtering into the berth. A body next to her; or no, her own body, her chest and stomach and knees, nestled against the back, buttocks, and knee hollows of someone else, almost as if her body and the stranger’s were one.

  She found herself waking up in the company of the young girl from the next compartment. Had the girl crept in with her during the night? No, again the opposite: in her sleep she had sought out her neighbor. So she was sleepwalking again, as she had done long ago in the village, as a child, but never since then. And how she had nestled against the other person’s back! This person, the girl, lay there sound asleep, with sleep-puffy lips; the rock-crystal chess pieces set up in orderly ranks for a new game, within easy reach.

  Moving, as if weightless, from the stranger’s berth back to her own. Everywhere else, blessed stillness, not only in the venta. “Saved!” Falling asleep again in her own bed, this time without any dreams. Awakening refreshed, after a couple of deep breaths. Pulling open the sleeping compartment’s curtain, carefully, so as not to wake anyone.

  She wanted to be the first one up, and to remain alone like this for as long as possible, surrounded by the thousands who were sleeping peacefully at last, if only for the time being. In the morning chill of the mesa, gusting from above into the open inner courtyard, a larger, intensely frosty, almost breathtaking cold: a breath of the air from the peaks of the Sierra de Gredos, invisible from the new settlement down in the hollow.

  She made the hostel bed, shaking the bedclothes out over the patio, smoothing and stretching the linens, as if the bed were located on her own estate and she were beginning the day there with simple household chores. Yet she carried them out several degrees more meticulously than back home in the riverport city; she could not leave a single wrinkle or lump in the bed—from which the hostel maid would later promptly strip the bedding. In the same way, after her solitary, ceremonial morning ablutions in the still empty common bathroom, as big as a hall, she applied shoe cream and polished her laced boots with more obvious care than ever at home; combed her hair longer than before going to a party there (not to mention before going to the office).

  She did notice that, unlike on the other mornings, not one image from other places where she had once been flashed before her or came dancing along, although she performed these everyday actions so much more carefully and calmly, but this fact did not trouble her: she ascribed it to the peculiarity of the “Zone” of Nuevo Bazar, including its location in the hollow.

  It gave her pause that one of her bootlaces broke and that her brush split in half while she was brushing her hair. She had always experienced such misfortunes, often precisely after a confident awakening, and from one time to the next, the more trivial they were, the more menacingly they restricted if not the day then at least its first hour, which had seemed so open to possibilities. No matter that the author indicated to her that according to his research “all truly beautiful women” (“truly beautiful” in the sense that they goaded everyone who saw them to go forth and seek his own lost beauty) were clumsy, and that precisely this trait animated their beauty and produced a soothing effect: she herself remained cross at her clumsiness, did not consider it harmless, but rather an expression of the guilt she was keeping to herself—whereupon the author, as was actually to be expected, retorted that “all truly beautiful women” were afflicted with a more or less vague sense of guilt, and precisely that … and so on.

  After breakfast from her bag, which resembled something not just from the Middle Ages but from an even more bygone time—leftovers, but what leftovers! packed up for her by her friend the chef—in the gallery, at the one small table there (making constant noises, but the softest possible, so as to allow the others to continue sleeping, better and more gently than complete absence of sound), she went down to the ground floor. There, surprisingly, the entire hostel staff, which was numerous, already up and preparing for the day: filling out orders, writing up menus, carrying cases of wine down to the cellar. And from them, too, came no loud sounds. Voices uniformly quiet, yet without whispering, and thus also no hissing.

  And overnight various venta people seemed to have switched roles in some way. One who the previous evening had stood way in the back of the kitchen as a dishwasher was now sitting in the booth at the entryway, obviously the boss. The girl in the taproom the day before, hardly out of school, was now his wife, her hair drawn back tightly, wearing a gray suit and holding a child in her arms. The only other guest, at one of the neighboring tables, was busy today in the boiler room, serving as the house electrician and plumber. The chamber- or compartment maid from before, who had shyly backed away from every stranger, was the boss’s sister, now a teacher by profession, sitting this morning in a corner and, with a stern face and expansive gestures, correcting the last of her pupils’ notebooks.

  And similarly, out on the otherwise empty street, one of the falling-down drunks from the previous evening’s crowd had become a traffic policeman, on duty but with nothing to do, standing all the straighter out there with no one around. And in the next figure, the only one far and wide, she recognized the person who, the night before, had been filled with wild despair and looking daggers, but in the light of the new day had been transformed into a brisk jogger and, dressed accordingly, was bounding lightfootedly over all possible obstacles, even seeking out wheelbarrows, traffic barriers, and garbage cans as he circled the Zone for the sixteenth or twenty-fourth time.

  To the vacant lot, the only one remaining, where she had left her car the previous day: the site built up overnight, the exterior walls already erected, only the roof still missing. Had that really been the place? Yes; the splintered medallion with the white angel still lay in the construction debris, among other tiny fragments. On a side street her Santana Landrover: smashed and burned out. No surprise: she had already dreamed this. And no thought of reporting it to the police, but on the contrary: “All right. Time to go. Now everything can get under way.” (Here the author characteristically deleted the exclamation point—merely hinted at in any case—in contrast to his positively elaborate question marks.)

  So off to the bus station, to which no sign had pointed for a long time already, but which was familiar to her from earlier, together with the venta the only somewhat older structure in Nuevo Bazar, with a round inner courtyard in place of the hostel’s rectangular one. In this circle now dozens of buses, their engines running, roaring with readiness to hit the road, the rotunda mottled with blue clouds of exhaust. Boarding one particular bus without hesitation, taking the last free seat—how many people had suddenly turned up in the bus, after the hour of emptiness that morning—, the door closing, and off they go. In the mirror above the driver, her face, one among many: she almost does not find it, almost does not recognize herself in the violently vibrating bus-mirror image. But the turnoff from the previous evening is the same—except that the sign seems to have become even smaller and more out of date, as if no longer valid, scrapped: “Ávila—Sierra de Gredos.”

  The faces of quite a few of the passengers looked familiar. While boarding the bus, she had involuntarily nodded to them, and her greeting had been returned promptly and as a matter of course. And the driver seemed familiar as well. And she knew where she had seen him before, unlike the others. He was the one she had taken the previous night for the new settlement’s idiot, the one who had looked almost like an old man, with the harelip, shining his flashlight into her face. By daylight, in the rearview mirror, the same harelip, only less noticeable, under a broad pug nose. Yet no more resemblance to an idiot or an old man.

  As usual the driver was engaged in conversation with someone on the seat diagonally behind him, without ever turning to look at this passenger. But the person he was talking to was not the young girl who would usually stand next to the driver, displaying herself to the other riders and thus making herself the star of the bus trip, but a child, the driver’s young son, still far from adolesce
nce. And several more children on the bus, all crowded together in the back; the vehicle also serving as a school bus. And the windows in the midsection blocked all the way to the roof by bookshelves, every inch of space filled with books, a sort of darkened corridor; the bus also serving as a traveling lending library.

  From where did she recognize one fellow passenger or another? These were no cases of mistaken identity. They had met before, and not merely once, though not in this particular way and constellation, which was as new to her as to the others, but rather in their everyday settings, where she, the adventurer, and the familiar faces likewise, in contrast to here, were all at home. They had had a relationship—but where? in the riverport city? or earlier in the Sorbian village? or at some other way station in her life and his and theirs?—if perhaps not a daily relationship, nonetheless a fairly constant, regular one; and even if such a relationship far away in their shared setting had no doubt been a rather impersonal and fleeting/momentary one, for instance that of seller and buyer, of mail carrier and mail recipient, of cemetery superintendent and visitor, or simply of passersby on the, her, their, particular street, on opposite sidewalks each time, here and now in this unfamiliar and remote region, very early in the morning, unexpectedly together in this somewhat unusual vehicle, heading for a not exactly frequented region, they appeared close and familiar as never before, familiar half an eternity already, familiar almost like accomplices or even desperados who had already been involved in some pretty unsavory schemes together and were now setting out on a particularly shady adventure.