by Peter Handke
On the other side of the village stood a telephone booth, already partway out into the snow-dotted rocky wilderness, empty, with the rising sun shining through it, showing the impressions of the users’ hair, forehead, and fingers on the glass. The feeder brooks still had no fish, as did the first stretch of the river, where they converged—but past a certain spot, right after the first bridge, suddenly the lengthwise flashing of hundreds of trout through the water, tiny little finned bodies, but masses of them, water-colored, almost transparent, and not a trout in these dense swarms would have passed an invisible line on its way upstream, even if it was swimming ahead of the others, as if this line straight across the río Tormes barricaded its source area, reserved for frogs and dragonflies and off-limits to any kind of fish: their sudden hesitation there, hovering for a while motionless on the riverbed and then slowly turning and whipping back downstream.
At last she had bestirred herself and was zigzagging through the late-sleepers’ village, treading as lightly as possible. The notion that the items included in such a liturgy of preservation would also constitute a sort of letter, addressed to someone or other who was already waiting for it far away, and at the very moment when she was still engaged here in looking and listening, the letter was in the hands of its recipient; actually writing a letter was thus superfluous.
But could one really use the term “liturgy” for this kind of organizing, connecting, coordinating, rhythmicizing, setting in motion, loading the givens with the energy to reach a distant vanishing point? Wasn’t it more a sort of strategy? A strategy that was the very essence of the professional activity she had allegedly given up? Wasn’t it rather the case that even here, in the high Sierra, after she had, by her own admission, voluntarily withdrawn from the contemporary banking world, she could not resist looking for the “value” in objects, the element of value that could not be left to gather dust but had to be put into circulation, in combination with as many other such elements as possible, into constant, fruitful circulation?
Liturgy of preservation? Liturgy of accrual, with objects as capital? “That is true,” she replied, “insofar as on that morning in Pedrada it disturbed me to see that the only bank branch there, a very small one established at one time by my bank, had been converted into a sheep shed, and also chiefly because that bank building was perhaps one of the most remarkable in the entire world: the last cottage in the village and at the highest point, directly behind it ravines and the jungle of broom, hardly even a building, simply a hollow boulder used for money transactions, the one and only banking facility in a natural cavern: a block of granite equipped with a counter and a vault, the stone head or stone brain, so to speak, above stony Pedrada, the most remote branch of the twenty-story plate-glass headquarters situated by the mouth of the two northwestern rivers.
“And it is also true that I am looking for the capital in the givens. And I should like never to give up this search. And on that morning in Pedrada, too, I was looking for the one bronze dewdrop among the other water-clear ones. But there was no dew. Instead I found, here and there, baked into the granite outcroppings, a little chip of mica, which for moments in the sun became dark bronze among all the others that merely glittered. And from a number of tent-houses hung black mourning bunting, faded and torn, many years old. And several of those leaving the village and those accompanying them had worn similarly quite faded mourning bands on their arms.”
The morning’s seeing and listening, her liturgy of preservation, was then interrupted by a sound such as she had never heard in the Sierra or in any village, not even in the village of her childhood: a siren. It sounded less like an alarm than like a factory whistle. And a few blinks later the mountainous horizon was filled with a dull roar, and a heavy, dark airplane approached, very slowly for an aircraft, so close to the ground that it almost grazed the rounded cliff tops with its fat fuselage, despite the even whirring of its four propellers—she had always had an eye for numbers, seeing the number of objects along with the objects themselves—the wings teetering constantly in the air, hardly a rope ladder’s length above the roofs of the settlement, which almost seemed to sway sympathetically.
The airplane, blackish, and appearing from the ground, and probably from the same altitude as well, to consist of a thick, opaque metal envelope, more massive and powerful than even the largest of the centuries-old granite buildings below, did not remain alone. It was followed by a twelve-plane squadron—she involuntarily counted again. One warplane (they did not have to be bombers) after the other crossed the horizon, a ridge of the Sierra facing the sunrise, which thus took on some of the character of a rampart, and each plane then wobbled over the village, almost within hand’s reach, and seeming to set Pedrada in motion.
But none of the twelve followed the one ahead. Each flew breathtakingly close to the ground—as was intended—but then chose its own course over the houses and tents, having appeared from the same point on the horizon. And this course was painstakingly plotted: no spot, no bark-covered roof, no chimney, no satellite dish, no fruit stand—no corner in Pedrada without one—no root cellar, no structure occupied in any way, was to remain untouched and undarkened by “the rest of us” and the shadows of our air-supreme force (which, according to the external observer in his report, first and foremost gave the old and the new settlers a sense of being protected).
Before people even had a chance to get a good look, the morning flyover ended. The twelfth plane had flown its course over the village, then had gone shooting off to the common point on the next horizon, of which there was one after the other in the Sierra, and had promptly been swallowed up by it, along with the hearing-loss-like sudden cessation of the dull roar; only an echo, as if from a dozen distant waterfalls; or were those actual cascades?
With the siren and the flyover, the village of Pedrada in the remotest and innermost Sierra had finally emerged from its slumber, which, as time passed, had come to resemble hibernation (as if the residents had turned overnight into dormice). Village? Quite a few large iron shutters, not very village-like, were raised. A garbage truck—and not only one—thundered along, and here and there on the paved roads urban street sweepers turned up. One man stepping out of a tent-house was wearing a necktie, and he did not remain the only one. Convoys of delivery vans were forging their way across the farflung mountain region, almost the only vehicles in the area, except for the very similar ones belonging to hunters. Other than in size, their vans differed from the delivery vans only in that their contents—if there were any—remained out of sight (barely even a trace of blood in back on a loading door). The goods being brought in and shipped out remained in equilibrium, and among the goods that were, so to speak, exported, local crops and products—venison, fish, honey, fruit—did not particularly predominate, and among the goods imported, those unique to cities or industrial areas similarly tended to be in the minority.
Now, although around Pedrada there were droves and droves of rather small white mountain pigs running around loose, whole truckloads of different pigs were arriving, those enormous black-bristled ones with black hooves, fattened up with acorns from the plains of Extremadura to produce that famous flavorful meat, now destined to be processed—winter, pig-slaughtering time—in the Sierra factory up here.
And, likewise, the square in front of the local oil press, to whose existence nothing had previously called attention, was unexpectedly darkened for a while, in a way that differed from the shadow of the air squadron, by the trucks uninterruptedly rolling up, filled to the top with blue-black olives from the “sunny sides” of the Sierra: winter, olive-harvest time. And among the goods—the usual herbs, cheese wheels, juniper berries, rowanberry schnapps, etc.—which moved in the opposite direction, out to the rest of the country—were equal numbers of refrigerators, washing machines, flashlights, knives.
In this respect, too, the place had become quite different since her last visit. And there was a local school again (all the previous times it had been closed,
as if for good). The odd thing was that the teachers seemed to be in the majority—until she realized that these adults, although without book bags on their backs, were going to school just like the children, pupils among pupils. Such things occurred otherwise only in nightmares. But this was nothing of the sort.
Had all of Pedrada in fact lain in a deep slumber until now? The not infrequent columns of smoke from the stone chimneys had spoken against such an assumption, and in particular the silence, less dozing than breathing. And then when the grilles, the curtains, the doors to the stores—every third tent-house was a store, a stand, a business—and the cafés opened—every ninth tent an eatery—an image presented itself to her such as she had never seen or experienced before, either in the Sierra de Gredos or anywhere else in the world: in all the interior spaces of the village, the day had long since been under way or going full blast.
The activities inside the stores were not just beginning or being prepared for. Nowhere were the goings-on in these places taking place in expectation of the first morning customers: the hairdresser, for instance, was not straightening a pile of magazines (he was long since busy cutting hair); the jeweler was not taking items out of the safe and arranging them in his window (they were already there); the restaurant managers and waiters were not removing chairs from the tables (which were already set); the butchers were not spreading sawdust on the floor (it was already there, in many cases showing fresh footprints).
Wherever one looked, the daily routine was not just starting but rather was going on as before; not a new beginning but a continuation. Before this, after the opening of curtains and doors, turning out of lights, raising of shutters, opening of barriers, there had indeed been a moment when the stores and businesses of Pedrada had been not empty but at a standstill, which, if the paused images had not revealed an almost imperceptible swaying and quivering, one might have taken for paralysis or doll-like rigidity. The hairdresser and the woman under the dryer formed an almost motionless ensemble, the comb and scissors in the hairdresser’s hands suspended in midair, halfway to their destination. The already numerous diners in the small eating places, as if having a first coffee break, might here and there have their fingers wrapped around glasses and cups, but one did not see a single one of them drinking. The bicycle dealer, kneeling by a child’s bicycle, seemed to pause in the middle of pumping up the tire, next to him his customer, the child, with its hand motionless on the saddle.
The impression that this barely perceptible moment, when events were at a standstill, had been preceded by moons and entire years of the same. And that now, let us say, “ten years later,” all at once, let us say, at the boom of a gong or a blast on a whistle, the interrupted game resumed, as if nothing had happened, no multi-year interruption, not even a momentary one.
Wherever one looked in the village, suddenly a steady bustle of activity, as if it had never been interrupted, only much more audible now, a veritable racket—a great variety of sounds (reminiscent, in turn, of the coppersmiths’ street in Cairo, or elsewhere). The rushing, hissing, bubbling of coffee machines. The bone-hacking of butchers. Now even the snipping of the hairdresser’s scissors could be heard, the magazine-page-turning of the waiting customers, the thread-biting in the tailor’s shop.
And although these continued activities and busynesses on that morning high in the Sierra did not yield any story for the tabloids, one saw all the people in the village engaged in them telling their own stories through their activities. That something could tell its story in this fashion, without anything added, was a sign that in this place things were all right again, or still, something by no means to be taken for granted, but rather, today, or from time immemorial, well-nigh miraculous.
24
As the story goes, in that early-morning hour she even forgot her wrath at the conversion of the bank branch into a sheep shed. Did she forget it? That she could be wrathful sometimes, in a way unusual for a woman, or indeed for anyone, also belonged in her book, as she insisted.
Far below, on the río Tormes, to the west, King Charles V and Emperor Charles I was walking along on his own two feet, without an entourage, alone, without hobbling. How he had yawned that morning after his night of dying—so plentifully and heartily, as only one risen from the dead can yawn.
And many people here in Pedrada yawned the same way. And almost all of them had, like the emperador—and like her, the fruit thief, former short-term film star, and current adventurer—their survivors’ wounds, which they displayed openly and as if proudly. She fell in with the throng of her people. Yet unlike elsewhere, here no one recognized her, although this time she would actually have wished to be recognized. (“Wished”: did such a word even apply to her: yes.) Yet not even the stonemason and his beloved seemed to recognize her. Overnight they had opened a store together, with ultramarinos and ultramontañeros, goods from overseas and beyond the mountains, where she purchased cheese and sausage, salt, ham, and above all olive oil for the coming crossing of the Sierra—and slipped one apple into her pocket.
She, on the other hand, saw in every inhabitant, most of whom had moved here from other parts of the world, the doubles of people who had been familiar and close to her at various times in her life. It was striking, by the bye, that as a result of the warlike turmoil in this region a couple of years back, never recognized by the rest of the world as a war (?), even the few remaining inhabitants from long ago had acquired the new arrivals’ timidity and fear of strangers, if anything more noticeable than in the recent settlers.
When one of them, in whom she encountered the image of “my faraway life partner,” had the gall not to acknowledge her, she stuck out her tongue at him (see “wrath”). And almost all the young people, including some males, appeared to her in the guise of her vanished child, yet these resemblances and this repeated phenomenon of a person’s being cut from the same cloth afforded her no comfort. And then one time she caught herself turning in her thoughts—this had never happened before—to her dead parents: “Father, Mother—tell me: Who am I?”
The people of Pedrada, on the other hand, not only did not recognize her; they treated her initially as an enemy. Or was it only her imagination that she was not wanted here? That from inside the store and restaurant tents looks like daggers were hurled at her? That the legs people extended were meant to trip her up?
It was not her imagination. A woman came hurtling out of one of the alleys between the tents—she, too, looked familiar; wasn’t she that neighbor from the Sorbian village who had once reported her to the police for a stolen apple?—and, her teeth bared, bashed her over the head with a heavy handbag, seemingly filled with rocks, and darted off down another alley. And children sprayed her with ice-cold water from one of the feeder brooks that ran in a canal between the houses, not in play but in earnest, with glaring, unchildlike expressions.
And finally, at one end of Pedrada, where only tumbledown field huts and abandoned beehives stood, just before the mountain wilderness took over, she was pelted from all sides with stones, the invisible throwers far away. The hail of stones around her refused to stop, as if she were supposed to be kept spellbound in this circle of missiles. Pedrada, the stone-casting village: So the ancient tradition of stoning intruders was still in force here? And none of the throwers showed his face or let out a peep. If they had revealed themselves, she would have known what to do. As it was, the only solution was for her to break out of the magic circle and get back to the center of the village, where she arrived with blood on her forehead.
Again that image from the Orient came to her aid. One time there she had found herself in a part of town with no other women (or they were hidden away in their houses). Nothing but men on the street, not a step without encountering a cluster of men. The street was actually an alley, so narrow that it offered hardly any room for walking and getting past those who were sitting and standing around. Wherever she appeared, each of these otherwise peaceable gatherings and groupings turned into a mob. They hisse
d, groped, jostled, grabbed, spat, and this was not playful but rather menacing, hostile, on the verge of violence, and the threat persisted at every step of the way, without any prospect of her getting through. The alley, narrow as it was, seemed endless, and the side alleys were, if possible, even more crowded with bodies, and were also, without exception, cul-de-sacs.
So she did what had worked for her since childhood. In her youth she had often gone about alone and repeatedly found herself the target of hordes of boys from neighboring villages. Whenever these hordes descended on her, the child, and later the adolescent, did not run away but instead stood her ground; turned and advanced toward her persecutors; plunged into their midst as though nothing were happening, and indeed nothing did happen; the rabble dissolved into individuals, and sometimes the individuals even became well disposed toward her—or at least she, the girl, became invisible as far as the boys were concerned.
A decade later she had similarly made herself invisible to the male fiends in the Arab casbah; from one minute to the next she turned aside from the gauntlet and headed into the midst of the men who formed it, sat down among them on a stool at a table belonging to the terrace of an eatery that narrowed the passage to almost nothing; like them she drank tea, mint, or whatever (to go so far as to suck on a waterpipe would have been excessive); like them, she did no more than sit there and gaze into the alley with eyes as wide open as possible: and thus it was out of the question for even one of the men to turn and stare at her, or reach for her, or pull her hair; she had hardly ever been left as much in peace as she was by these Arab men; and then, among them, precisely among these men who moments earlier had made her situation a living hell, she experienced a peace such as she had seldom felt—a profound peace, peace as the most all-encompassing sensation.
