On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House

by Peter Handke

  “Pharmacist?” The smell of medicine, which, whether he wanted it or not, clung to him in his workplace and for a while after he left it—at any rate his car was always filled with it, and he sometimes avoided the car for that very reason—had dissipated long since, on the way. And his clothing was so inconspicuous that in cut and color, at least there and at this moment, it was hardly distinguishable from that of the woodsmen. And besides, he was barefoot like them, had already taken off his shoes coming in: Noon was the time of day when he felt a great weakness inside him, and not from hunger, so it helped him to have the ground directly underfoot, especially in these woods, where for a few steps the path was soft with recently fallen piles of chestnut blossom strings, but then for instance offered a stretch with nothing but the hard ridges of protruding roots, and finally ended here in a veritable field of angular, sharp beechnuts, a massage from his feet to the ends of his hair.

  They all ate their midday meal in complete silence, and remained silent for a good while afterward. If they looked in the same direction, each did so independently of the others. The man from the beech drank from the clearing’s hidden spring under the sycamore in such a way that the others could watch him, then went back to his place, while the workmen had already resumed their cutting and sawing, and read, as he usually did in summertime, one of the medieval epic tales of knights and magic.

  “Weren’t those epics actually meant for wintertime—telling of blossom freshness and bathing in the lake, while the castles were snowed in and isolated?”

  “But in the summery landscapes they describe I can also recognize the current summer world, the world of today; it appears more distinctly before my eyes, and as something that by now has become a fact, no longer merely a magic and fairytale trick.”

  “For example?”

  “See above, see below. Or you fight your way for hours through the underbrush, and suddenly a door opens automatically in front of you, and someone takes your bag from you in an air-conditioned hall and escorts you to the next adventure.”

  “A so-called adventure?”

  “No, a real one. In that plantation, the forest-within-the-forest, one early afternoon, while I was reading, and especially in the intervals of closing my eyes, whole subterranean hosts were seated there, gray on gray, but poised for action, ready to show their true colors, and they were sitting in their saddles not over there, under the transparent mountain, the Untersberg, with Charlemagne, but here beneath the summery plain.”

  * * *

  He still had to go into town for the monthly meeting with his colleagues, the “pharmacist of Taxham,” whom his colleagues knew only as such, not by his name.

  For him the meeting was not at all inconsistent with the hour he’d just shared with the woodsmen, who moved through the light and shadow cast by the single trees as if they were riding, whereupon he leaped into the saddle and rode toward them; it was odd, though, that such things happened to him only with these outsiders, or outcasts even. Because he was a refugee, or descended from refugees, and had always seen himself as outside the community, tied to no community (if also long since without regret)? Because he was always working in the outer districts, neither village nor town, without a town council and proper authorities?

  No explanations, no reasons—“leave it vague.” At any rate, at the meeting and for a longer time afterward the beechnut smell on his hands still awakened associations of a deck of cards.

  Above the woodsmen’s heads, clouds had drifted by and single-engine planes had droned. The pharmacist of Taxham had been overcome there by hunger, first an actual physical hunger, for fruit—but there was hardly any to be found, only a dried-up wild cherry and an equally dried-up currant, from a lone bush, an escapee from a garden—and then an undefined hunger, with no particular object, but a ravenous hunger, a drive? a compulsion?

  Even the dead black mole he saw on the way back, its pointy face in profile, had reminded him again of a knight’s visor. It was that transitional time of year when nature, otherwise his province, so to speak, had nothing to offer—no fruits, no mushrooms, nothing. Normally he missed having something to gather. But this time, he told himself, it freed him—for something else? “A good thing there was nothing to gather?”

  * * *

  In the center of Salzburg the pharmacist moved around as if wearing a cap of invisibility. During all those years I saw him face to face only twice. Although he told me he wasn’t close to anyone in town, I did catch him there, though each time by means of a singular visual detour.

  One time I was walking along a little-used path on the Mönchberg when I saw the Spanish prime minister coming toward me, casually dressed, accompanied by a broad-shouldered man in dark clothing, wearing sunglasses—his bodyguard, no doubt—whom I recognized only after we had passed each other as the pharmacist of Taxham.

  And likewise another time, as I was crossing the Staatsbrücke, I saw, on a balcony of the “Österreichischer Hof,” an American movie actress famous at the time (she later drowned in the Pacific), who was giving a small, almost shy wave to someone below—certainly not me? No, for as I looked around, I saw an elegant foreigner—a rarity in this town—but dusty and ravaged like a second Richard Widmark, waving to her the same way—it couldn’t be the pharmacist from the outskirts, could it?—yes, it was him, and gone already, as was the beauty from her hotel balcony.

  * * *

  The monthly meeting with the other members of his guild was summery and short: Several pharmacies were closed for the holidays, and most of the new drugs weren’t scheduled for release until fall; for now, at least in this area, the old standbys were sufficient, though because of the tourists larger supplies had to be laid in; this didn’t affect the Taxham pharmacist.

  The three of them then lingered on a terrace above the Salzach, where a faint breeze off the river fanned the heat away—the pharmacist from Itzling, the pharmacist from Liefering, and him. The pharmacist from Itzling was a young woman, to whom the Taxham pharmacist had once remarked, in the middle of another conversation about medications, quite absent-mindedly and unintentionally, “You’re really very beautiful.”

  He told me later that there was also a story to tell about this woman, at least as adventurous and mysterious as his own, and certainly more erotic—she would make a good main character for a book. Why me, anyway? Why not her?—I responded by asking whether he could picture a heroine called “the woman pharmacist of Itzling.” And altogether, he should just wait and see.

  That afternoon, which I view as the beginning of his story, he again became lost in thought, with the two others there, and abruptly said to the beautiful pharmacist, “Why are you so brown? Among the ancient Egyptians only the men were brown; the women had to be white as alabaster or cheese. And why do almost all pharmacists nowadays go around with these permanent tans, and especially the women?”

  “But you’re tanned yourself, actually as dark as a fellah.”

  “That’s my natural state, and it also comes from being out in the sun and shade and moving around, not like the rest of you from lying and applying lotion in the South-West Tanning Salon, where the rays are carefully calibrated to the white of your lab coats.”

  “Why are you being so mean today? There was a time when you wanted to erect a pyramid in my honor!”

  All this time the ancient, almost deaf pharmacist from the outlying village of Liefering was expounding, in a voice that boomed across the river, his theory of the signs of the Zodiac, according to which these signs governed not only people but also regions and entire countries. The fate of nations depended on the stars that ruled them. The history of mankind, of the peoples’ relationships with each other and individually, was determined by Leo, Scorpio, Gemini, or Taurus. Thus a United States of Europe was inconceivable simply because every European country had a different sign, all of them equally powerful; no country could claim an advantage. Even in Germany all the provinces had different constellations, incompatible with each other, f
or which reason the fear of this largest country, now acute again, was absolutely unfounded. On the other hand, one constellation ruled all of North America, and that was why the United States had come into being there, and of course stayed together, under the sign of Aries? Virgo? Capricorn?

  “Nonsense!” the pharmacist of Taxham interrupted him suddenly, after looking back and forth between the young woman and the river for a while, lost in thought again. “Typical pharmacist’s superstition! It doesn’t come from up there, up in space, but from down here, from beneath the ground. And from down here we, or the countries and nations, if you will, aren’t directed and constrained at all, but prodded, spurred on, set in motion.”

  “Where down here?” The young woman asked this, while the old man next to her went on spinning his stars-and-states theory at the top of his voice, without listening. “In the magma?”

  But the man from Taxham had gone under again, had closed his eyes and even seemed to have stopped breathing. And he didn’t move a muscle when the woman abruptly grabbed him by the chin and said, “Typical pharmacist’s superstition!”

  The pharmacist from Liefering was just remarking, “That business in Yugoslavia had to end badly: above every country there, a star that was incompatible from the outset with the others and at war with its neighboring star.”

  * * *

  He took the bus back to Taxham and worked there in the back room until after sundown—which was late in July—with the doors long since locked. Sometimes it seemed that time could be grasped in an image: now, for instance, in the image of a curve, in which he felt comfortably cradled as he worked silently away.

  First the shop out in front was being cleaned, and then from one minute to the next a silence fell, in which, although the sun was already gone, colors predominated, then blossomed. Something had been pushed aside, an obstacle, a screen, a minimizing glass, and a different map of the world came into view, on another scale, not intended for entering, and certainly not for consuming or putting in your pocket, but perhaps for a certain kind of measurement-taking—even though, as the silence persisted, it had promptly faded and shriveled up. He spread his fingers and let the air blow between them.

  He pushed himself away from the counter, several times. Through the open window, through the bars protecting the little building, came the smell of the settlement’s dusty streets, just sprinkled, which gave him a whiff of the soaking rain they hadn’t had in so long, and at the same time, swooshing in unexpectedly from beyond the last ring of hedge, a good Taxham mile away, the smell of the circus, although it had moved on way back at the beginning of summer.

  If the pharmacist was known at all in the area—for instance by Andreas Loser and me—it was for his sense of smell. In Loser’s case it was hearing and listening that counted, or, in his words, “moved his thoughts along,” and in my case it was primarily seeing and contemplating; but with our distant acquaintance it was simply smelling—not any special sniffing, but just having something in his nose, without any special effort, hundreds of things at a time, without confusion, clearly distinguished. (And obviously the peculiarities of one couldn’t always be separated from those of the other.) Just as some people could see a thing and keep its image on their retina for months afterward—they had only to close their eyes—time and again the pharmacist would have a smell from long ago in his nostrils, still fresh and even stronger than originally, a smell perhaps snapped up only in passing and long since subject to the statute of limitations, as it were. And just as those other people first perceived objects with real clarity and vividness in those residual images, so it was for the pharmacist with his residual smells.

  So along with the wafted-away circus, a leopard or perhaps only a miniature ape promptly leaps out of the nearest bush. And the pharmacist, lost in thought again, climbed onto his lab counter, rolled up his sleeves, and teetered on tiptoe. Amazing the way shifting your perspective a bit from the familiar could sometimes shift the gaps, give things a different twist, rearrange the entire state of affairs. “Wasn’t that also uncanny at times?”

  “Nothing was ever uncanny to me,” the pharmacist responded, long after the time when his story takes place: “At least not until that time.”

  From up there on the counter it could be seen that all the buildings in the settlement, forming, in that brightness without sunshine, a closed, wide-curving kraal, offered a perspective very different from the small pharmacy building at the kraal’s center. Their orientation was completely at odds with the pharmacy’s, even though it had been the first, the original structure in the village; they were set on an axis noticeably opposed to the pharmacy’s, as if to show disdain for the little structure in the middle, or as if it didn’t exist at all.

  And then, in driving away, if you looked over your shoulder, the squat cube there on the remnant of steppe seemed to be turning its back on the surrounding area, not even belonging to the soil around it, a sort of random boulder. No child awake at this hour. Not a bird in the sky. Yet there was a cloud overhead, a large, grayish-white cumulus cloud, its upper edge crumpled in many places, drifting slowly eastward, as if on pilgrimage; as if it were pilgrimaging. It might also have been moving westward, and it might also have been morning.

  * * *

  The pharmacist had the habit of taking his evening meal at a restaurant, and still out toward the airport. Except that his new eating place was located outside all the concourses, constantly being added or expanded, also past the parking lots and even past a field of vegetables. The building had grown out of a root cellar, or been built onto it, and the small, low-ceilinged dining room was half underground, so to speak, as if from time immemorial. How nice to go down the few steps from the hardly traveled road, which still suggested the wagon road it had once been, especially nice now, with the light fading, when you could look back up the stairs and see nothing, nothing at all.

  Unlike previously, the pharmacist now sat down alone to his evening meal, had already been alone for a long time, without a mistress, and his wife had joined him here only a few times in the beginning, until those fat-bellied mushrooms that turned blue as you sliced into them, then shaded into olive green, those mushrooms he’d collected and brought so the chef could prepare them, took on for her, when she was forced to eat them, “the taste of human flesh.”

  Outside, when he raised his head, dusk was falling over the fields, and the last plane was landing; there were no night flights.

  The one other table that was usually occupied stood in the opposite corner, but because the place remained fairly quiet, in spite of the open door, the conversation there, between a couple and a man who turned out to be a priest in mufti, could be easily overheard, even though none of them were raising their voices. The couple’s only child had run away and disappeared, years before. And in the course of the evening it came out that they had in fact thrown the child out, locked him out, then locked him out again, and finally put his satchel outside the door, no, a plastic bag, had rolled down the shutters and gone away on a trip, so as not to have to see what happened. And now their relationship was on the rocks, too. The woman: “I wish I were dead.” The man: “Me, too.”

  The priest argued that dying was perhaps a kind of salto mortale, after which a person landed on his feet again, entirely different feet; but he got all muddled, began to stammer, fell silent; and then all three of them sat there in silence; the couple wept.

  The Taxham pharmacist seemed invisible, and when he asked for the bill, he had to wave his arm several times. And when he said good-bye, he did so in a language that the proprietor took for Spanish. Spanish? He couldn’t understand himself what he’d just said. It had been no language at all.

  * * *

  As he pedaled home across the river valley on his wife’s bicycle, which was quite high, by the meadows, now pitch dark, he encountered a strong smell of sweat, which turned out, as he rounded the bend, to come from a squad of soldiers on a night march.

  One of the families next
door to him on the lane along the dike was still sitting out on the verandah, and he chatted with them for as long as it took him to open the garden gate (but the gate was unlocked, as was always the case when his wife left the house); over the others’ hedge, their heads could hardly be made out. In one of his skylights—was that a light shining? no, the reflection of a street lamp far off. And something like a spiderweb attached itself to his face as he made his way to the door and also indoors in the vestibule, as if he’d been gone much longer than just for the day.

  He switched the television on for a second, during which a man on the screen opened his mouth wide—and switched it off before he could say a word.

  As usual when he had the run of the entire house and was no longer restricted to his own living quarters, he didn’t know where to go; he had trouble finding his place. So long since he’d been in his wife’s rooms—since the last time she went away for a while. And now he wandered back and forth there in the dim light—every other lightbulb was burned out—and then noticed that he was instinctively looking for a message or a sign intended for him. But there wasn’t even a trace of their shared past, unless he counted, half hidden, a tiny picture of their son, taken in a photo booth and pasted into a panoramic landscape, barely visible in the crown of a tree, with his head pointing down, no less, like a rebus.

  And how precariously she had positioned all her things, big and small, not only in her bathroom, but also in her part of the kitchen: The seemingly rigid order she’d left behind could be thrown into complete confusion if some little object were dislodged in passing. Either something was hanging by a single thread, or it was perched on a ledge, usually high up, or this group of crystal balls was poised, in what looked at first like a miracle, on a slanting surface—but not another step!—or, like this open salt dish, it would tip at the slightest push, despite the apparently level surface under it, because one of its feet was broken, or, like this bundle of pencils, would break without the slightest pressure, because the points were so sharp. And what if this happened to be the very sign he was looking for?