On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House

by Peter Handke

  “No,” the pharmacist said. “We don’t have any problems with each other. Only now is our life perfectly peaceful. The arrangement developed spontaneously, and we don’t even notice it, or at most as a kind of harmony we never enjoyed before, which allows us to share things for a few minutes, in passing, to have something in common.”

  “Yes, in passing,” his wife said. “In the wink of an eye. On the doorstep. Between window and lawn chair. Between treetop and cellar window.”

  “What, for instance?” I asked.

  The answer, once from her, once from him: “Always in silence. — When we’re both listening to what the neighbors are saying. — Or to people walking along the dike on the other side of the fence. — Especially when a child’s crying somewhere. — When an ambulance siren wails. — When we’re in our own rooms at night and see through the window the emergency flare flashing up in the mountains over on the other side of the border. — When in last spring’s flooding the drowned cow floated down the river. — At the first snowfall. — Yes? Oh, well. I don’t know.”

  * * *

  The sun rose. Not a drop of dew in the garden after the warm, dry night. But a sparkle from the apple tree: a hardened lump of sap exuded by a twig there, with a first ray of light shining through it now, a tiny lamp. The swallows high in the air deep black, as if it were still dawn. Only when one of them briefly raised its wings straight up as it swooped was there a flash of light up there, too, the sun gleaming on its feathers; it was as if the bird were playing with the morning light.

  He butted his head against one of the already fat apples hanging at eye level, as if it were a ball, but more gently; then he walked upstream on the dike and let the morning and mountain-water air buffet him. No one else was out and about, and, as they always did in summertime, the rock-strewn banks of the Saalach took up more space than the actual shore and water flow; they stretched, bright and bleak, seemingly all the way to the river’s source in the distant limestone mountains.

  The pharmacist thought of his dead. His son also came to mind. But he wasn’t really dead, was he? No, he’d thrown him out. Or was that too strong an expression? Hadn’t he simply given him up, lost sight of him, put him out of mind, forgotten him? “No, I threw him out,” he said. “I threw my child out.”

  * * *

  He swam in the river, which chilled him to the bone, first fighting the powerful current, then letting himself drift, almost exactly along the line in the river where the German border ran. The bushes along the banks rushed by incredibly fast, in a gallop. He dove so deep into the water that little pebbles being washed along the river bottom got swept into his ears, where for quite a while they jostled each other, scraping and rattling. He felt as if he could stay under water this way forever, without breathing, and as if from now on this would be his life.

  Then the pharmacist almost forced himself to head for the bank, just before the steep drop-off farther down. An early plane was coming in for a landing, already low over the treetops, and in one of the windows he made out a child’s face. That was how keen his eyesight was, and not only after his swim in the icy river. And maybe in that respect the name his brother had given the pharmacy in Taxham was justified.

  * * *

  At home he showered, rinsing off the gray, chalky river water, and drank the coffee that had been brewing during his swim, Blue Mountain Coffee from Jamaica, the best coffee he could get in this area, as always. Not a sound from his wife’s part of the house, while her suitcase was already standing down in the vestibule, with an airplane ticket resting on top, which he hadn’t looked at. “Just as before each of her departures, I suddenly found myself picturing the strawberry slope,” he said, “the spot she once told me meant summer to her when she was a child.”

  He’d traveled a great deal himself when he was younger, almost all over the world. By now nothing tempted him anymore, not a single place. Right here, in this very location, he felt every morning as if he were setting out, or had set out long ago, and today would put the next stage of the journey behind him. “I wanted to stay here, much longer, much longer.”

  Now on the dike, visible through the garden shrubbery only by the bright colors of their outfits, the first runners, in pairs, single file on the narrow path (but in Taxham, beyond the meadows, almost no one ran, even to catch the bus), talking too loudly, as if they thought their voices wouldn’t carry otherwise.

  And from one of the neighboring properties a child’s shriek and then crying—heartrending—and then promptly the same from the house on the other side. He listened. And he was sure that his wife was also listening behind her door. They listened together, even when the crying and sobbing to left and right had died down and had long since given way to talking and calls back and forth, with voices that seemed clearer and more resonant after the earlier bawling. They also heard the train go by over on the German side. “Heading for Bad Reichenhall.”—“Yes.”

  * * *

  On this particular morning the pharmacist rode his wife’s bicycle; she wouldn’t be needing it for the next few weeks in any case. He took the road parallel to the river bank, then a stretch through the meadows along the river, then turned off and rode through the fields to the farm village of Siezenheim. The cemetery there had a piece of conglomerate with a crucified Christ—without the cross—scratched into the rock, the cross indicated only by Christ’s posture—a hydrocephalic head on a Lilliputian body, the little arms spread wide, the grooves in the east-facing rock, usually hard to make out, weathered almost beyond recognition, appearing deeper and more distinct in the morning light.

  And then the pharmacist chose to continue in an easterly direction, riding into the sun: In that way he avoided having his shadow in front of him, a sight he’d always found upsetting. From the grass, as earlier from the river and then from the grooves in the stone, rose the smell of the last few weeks’ drought (the stories you heard about Salzburg and all its rain were often wrong). As he reached the camouflage-spot-colored barracks of the Siezenheim army base, a city bus drove by, painted and decorated for the festival as if it, too, were part of these camouflage-colored façades; an airplane’s shadow swooped over the ground like the blink of an eyelid.

  * * *

  As he turned off into the hedged-in settlement, or, as he secretly called it, the “Lost Island,” someone said hello to him—a rarity here—then a few others, between Lindbergh Promenade and Lilienthal Avenue, the greeting followed each time by embarrassment—until finally the pharmacist realized that the greetings were directed toward the familiar clunky prewar bicycle, usually associated with his wife, the “lady pharmacist” (which, in fact, she was, as almost everyone in the family was a pharmacist, in both the older and the younger generations, with the exception of his son).

  His two employees, an older woman and a young man, still almost a child—the woman was his mother, for here, too, pharmacy work was a family tradition—were already waiting on the grassy plot at the center of the village, lounging, overpunctual as always, outside the barred entrance to the bunker, with a good-weather cloud high overhead. They’d come from the south years ago, fleeing the civil war, and had brought with them a curse commonly hurled at enemies there: “May your only inn become the pharmacy!”

  * * *

  The pharmacist also had a daughter, who’d been working with him lately, since completing her studies, but for the summer she’d left the Lost Island for another, together with her boyfriend, he, too, a pharmacist, but also—a novelty in the family!—a physicist.

  At her departure he’d had the impression that she was reluctant to go and for the first time, curiously, was worried about him. Yet it seemed—as it always had, incidentally—that precisely her absence, or the absence of all those close to him, protected him, or so he thought at least, just as this absence also compelled him to do everything, or to live in such a way, that the other person could stay away for as long as originally intended, and calmly, free of worry, fully savoring the trip,
the island paradise, and—why not?—happiness.

  The absences of his family members—“a pharmacist doesn’t have friends, or at least I can’t picture having any,” he said—also gave him an existential jolt every time. “If I could formulate a moral or lifelong imperative for myself,” he said, “it would be this: Comport yourself in such a way that the relatives who happen to be absent at any given moment—relatives in the broadest sense—can always stay far away without you, in a good state of mind, unperturbed!”

  “And if none of the relatives is away?”

  “One of them is always away.”

  * * *

  Like quite a few pharmacy employees perhaps, the two in Taxham were something more than just clerks; in fact, they were salaried employees. Or at least, with the passage of time they had come to be viewed as more than clerks by the customers, or rather advice-seekers. And as a result, the refugee woman and her son no longer had anything subservient about them, but were considered authorities and acted accordingly. Their work gave them more satisfaction than that of ordinary salespeople, presumably.

  For that reason the pharmacist let them work as much as possible on their own, and not only since this particular summer—and of course it helped that there were far fewer hypochondriacs or sufferers from anxiety or despair: as if others, not only he, benefited from the summer absence of family members; it cheered them up, gave them strength, a very special medicine.

  * * *

  And that allowed the pharmacist to retreat into the back of the shop for as much as half the day. “I can’t be around people all day,” he told me. “And why should I, anyway?” For the most part, the preparing of medications in pharmacies had become pretty much superfluous. But he still enjoyed working with a few basic ingredients now and then, transforming them into another substance by means of techniques learned long ago, or simply being there, after mixing them, to see them transform themselves through spontaneous reactions. Such production—physical as well as chemical—of headache remedies, heart drops, arthritis salves, was expensive, time-consuming, and for the moment seemingly pointless, since out in front the same things were available, in the same form, with hardly different tastes or smells, and, furthermore, factory tested.

  Yet he couldn’t break the habit of doing things from scratch. In his imagination he was keeping in practice for hard times that weren’t far off, hard times that would affect not so much him as the others, his customers, the people from the village, the immediate environs (actually this was all there was, for no one came from the outside, except during his infrequent night duty). And his hand motions were nothing like what people, or people like us, probably associate with a “pharmacist”; they weren’t painstakingly precise, carried out in a confined space, “picky,” but rather expansive, with running starts, retreating, swooping down, beating the air.

  Once, during an attempted robbery—the first, by the way, since the pharmacy’s founding—the intruder came upon the pharmacist thus occupied in the back room, and promptly dropped his knife and fled: “But he also noticed that I wasn’t afraid. At moments like that you musn’t be afraid.”

  “How do you manage that?”

  “You musn’t be afraid.”

  * * *

  The pharmacist even had a specialty. He was an expert—to the extent it’s even possible with such an infinitely varied subject—on mushrooms.

  Many pharmacies, at least European ones, post charts in the window at the beginning of summer, with pictures of the edible and especially the poisonous varieties, sometimes even set up three-dimensional models, carefully arranged in real moss. But when an inexperienced gatherer comes in from the woods and fields with the real mushroom he’s found and asks for information, most pharmacists just shake their heads without a word, or perhaps tap the earthy things lightly from a distance—please, no sand on the glass counter—and almost invariably issue unfavorable oracular judgments: poisonous, or at least highly suspicious.

  But the Taxham pharmacist knew at a glance, or at first touch, or at the latest from sniffing or nibbling, what people had brought him (he could identify several almost indistinguishable varieties by the different worms, snails, earwigs, or spiders on or inside them). And above all, he showed enthusiasm for every mushroom placed before him, even when just a few gills of one, stuck to a child’s hand and then thoughtlessly popped in the mouth, could do very bad things, even when the mushroom in question stank and oozed in all directions like a three-week-old carcass.

  “I often wonder whether it wasn’t my passion for mushrooms that drove my wife and me apart,” he said. “Especially in the fall, when I came home in the evening, all my coat and suit pockets would be stuffed with them, and then the refrigerator, too, and the pantry, and even the cellar, where mushrooms keep best, with their aroma. Day after day she had to eat my mushrooms—there are far more edible kinds than people think—and well into the winter. Of course, after a while I stopped bringing them into the house, but then I hid them from her in the garden—how could I throw away mushrooms, these splendid gifts of nature?—and out there they glowed and gave off their unmistakable smell from under the shrubs and from holes in trees, the worst smell of all, like a dog’s cadaver, being that of the stinking morel, which, when it’s young, no bigger than a pigeon’s egg, is a delicacy not described anywhere as yet, for instance cut up raw and served with salt and olive oil.”

  Thus the second thing the pharmacist pursued in his laboratory, or rather his kitchen, was his mushroom studies, where he was sometimes the self-assured chef, sometimes the diffident apprentice, slow on the uptake; yes, he was even preparing a very special mushroom guide, in which he planned first to highlight the virtues of some generally despised varieties and then explore the effect of certain mushrooms on the eater—but he wasn’t concerned with the psychoactive species, the so-called consciousness-expanding ones, so much as with the “dream mushrooms,” the “dream-expanding” ones.

  Yet at the beginning of the time when his story takes place, the area around Taxham, and not that area alone, was suffering from a major drought. There were no mushrooms far and wide, and since the pharmacist needed actual samples for his project, especially for describing their smell, on this particular morning he didn’t get far with his mushroom fantasies; at most he could cross out observations in his notes that he intended to omit or skip.

  From the counter running the length of the wall with the large plate-glass window, he could see the parched lawn in back of the building, onto which a blackbird trotted again and again—only blackbirds could pop so unexpectedly into nowhere—with a black, shiny, seemingly eyeless head, a knight in search of single combat, his visor already closed. The hedge from which the bird always burst forth formed the beginning of a series of staggered hedges extending all the way to the high hedge on the horizon marking the end of the village, where, as the pharmacist could clearly see, only one leaf was stirring, but that all afternoon, a furious flickering and fluttering, standing for an entire tree and, in time, for an entire forest.

  In between he could be found in the front room helping out, even if only bringing a glass of water.

  * * *

  At noon the pharmacist went out for a snack, as was his habit, to the wooded area between Taxham and the Salzburg airport. Habit? It was more a matter of certain rituals or self-imposed rules that he observed strenuously, even though he sometimes had to force himself.

  A stranger coming through these woods would have perceived them as shady, in every sense of the word. Even for the local residents, they weren’t a destination. At most they drove by fenced portions on a road that was oddly winding for this plain. The fencing was unusual for woods anywhere in this country, and was interrupted by short wood roads that apparently soon came to a dead end in the underbrush. They had deep tire tracks, and were littered with trash, seemingly not only from vehicles on the ground but also from the hundreds of small aircraft passing overhead every day; even the trees had scraps of paper and plastic c
aught in them, all the way up to their crowns.

  But the pharmacist knew a second forest within this forest. This copse was surrounded by a ditch and a girdle of brambles, with a breach in one spot where he could enter by way of a plank, without even having to duck. After the semidarkness outside, it was light in here, as if in a clearing, yet many things were growing here, providing shade, but each tree or bush clearly at a distance from the next, off by itself—and thus the shadows were also separate—and as a rule only one of each variety—one raspberry bush, one birch, one pine, and so on, in a circle, but all random, without order, which precluded the impression of being in a tree or plant nursery. Also there were things growing here that were very unusual for the area and wouldn’t have been considered possible, such as a Spanish chestnut, a Serbian spruce (a survival from the Ice Age, thin as a rod but towering above the others), a mulberry tree, a sycamore.

  When he sat down with his old, cracked briefcase under the beech—it, too, a unique exemplar—the tree with the broadest shade there, he saw that he wasn’t alone for a change. A few shadows over, a group of woodsmen lay stretched out on the ground, taking their midday break, with their tools—saws and ladders—next to them. They’d set fire to a big pile of roots they’d dug out, and the fire was burning brightly, without smoke, another unique feature among the others. The pharmacist ate like them: the sandwiches he’d brought along in his briefcase—theirs were very similar—and, for dessert, an apple (from the Taxham supermarket).