by Peter Handke
Back in his own part of the house, he turned his bed pillow over; nothing. Strange contrast between the two pillows: one quite creased, the other one, next to it, completely untouched and smooth, the ironing folds just as they had been for years, as if in a glass case, a bed in a castle, unoccupied yet comfortable, waiting for someone to return.
* * *
His daughter had phoned from the island where she was on holiday; she planned to stay a while longer; and then his wife, too: She had arrived safely, though she didn’t say where.
He played a game of chess with himself, letting “the other person” win. Through the open casements the fast-flowing river could be heard, invisible behind the dike, along with the chirping of crickets, actually more a delicate, nonstop trilling from the dike, the underbrush, holes in the ground—that most summery of sounds. A veil shrouded the moon.
“What do you want?” one of the players said to the other. “Is there anything at all you still want?” “Yes, I want the continuation. I’m quite eager to see what happens next.”
“With what? With whom?”
“With me. With us. With my story. With our story. But we’re going to have to do our part. And by that I don’t necessarily mean deep-sea diving or scaling the Himalayas.”
“And how do you picture such a continuation, for instance?”
“Well, someone might jump in now through the open window and ask for help. Or hold a knife to my throat. Or tomorrow morning I might find a snakeskin next to me in the bed. No, it would have to be more than just a skin, and something more terrible than just a snake.”
“And why does your voice sound so choked up?”
“My daughter just asked me the same thing, even my wife. My voice sounded as if it were coming from a deep well, one of them said, from down a manhole, said the other.”
On this day the last thing the pharmacist did was practice throwing: the chess pieces into their box, which he moved a bit farther away for each toss.
Perhaps it was his dried mushrooms, of which he bit off some pieces, perhaps not: At any rate, that night he had two dreams that took place without him, beyond his person. In one of them, adjacent to the small cellar in his house were suites of underground rooms, one grand hall leading to the next, all sumptuously decorated, festively lit, yet all of them empty, as if in expectation, awaiting a splendid, perhaps also terrible event, and not just recently, but since time immemorial.
In the second dream, the hedge barriers to the neighboring properties were suddenly gone, removed by force or simply fallen away, and people could see into each other’s gardens and onto each other’s terraces, and not merely onto them, but also into every corner of their houses, now suddenly laid bare, and likewise one neighbor could see the other, which in the first moments caused immense mutual embarrassment and shame, but then gradually gave way to a kind of relief, almost pleasure. (It should also be noted that all these hedgeless houses appeared as pole or moor dwellings, each one with a boat tied up down below.)
But after that came, quite unexpectedly—was it still a dream? a blackness, and then there was nothing but this blackness, no action, no film, just the end of the film, the end, quite simply, of any kind of “I am,” “you are,” “he is,” “they are,” “you people are,” a blackness that filled every inch of space so completely that it jolted the pharmacist out of his sleep; yet it didn’t dissipate at that point; it remained.
“I’d actually forgotten,” he said, “that a few days earlier I’d had a small black growth on my skin removed, and the lab results were due soon.”
Had he slept all night on his back this way, with his legs crossed? Now and then, through the wide-open window, the seemingly tipped-over waning moon had appeared for just a moment, in a rapidly swelling wall of cloud, with its face pointing down.
TWO
Wind gusts, the smell of rain, fallen somewhere else. And now, in the first light of morning, it was that kind of dark, clear, wide-horizoned day that he loved and that he hoped would stay that way until evening. (The relentless summer sun and the blueness had been rather like eternal ice.)
On a dark day like this the smallest ordinary occurrences began to vibrate, like test starts for a departure. And at the same time peace and quiet all around, without any more mirages from the sun. A sense of transitoriness accompanying this dark clarity, also carefreeness: In harsh sunlight, the nocturnal blackness from before would have lingered much longer.
Out for a swim in the river behind the house. Without the sun, its water glistened in an entirely different way, and also seemed less icy. On the other side of the border, as he let himself float, a house appeared amidst the trees on the banks, a house that hadn’t been there the day before? And yet was old?
Similarly, out in the garden, as he gazed at the pyramid of the distant mountain, he saw a rock wall emerge that had the shape and brightness of a sail—also new overnight? Involuntarily he stretched out his arms through this dark air, reaching for someone at hip level.
Reading his medieval epic. Curious that when the “loveliest meadow in the world” was evoked, you could be sure the hero would soon come upon some terrible sight—a bleeding knight on a stretcher, with his legs cut off and only half his head left, or a virgin hanged by her braids from a tree.
Was it raining already? No, tiny animals were dropping in a steady stream from the poplar in the garden—which explained the constant crackling in the grass and also on the pages of his book. And they couldn’t be blown away: The harder the blowing, the more stubbornly they crouched among the letters on the page, moving on only when the wind died down. And a bat darted out of a bush, a leathery sound, a rarity in the morning hours? not on a morning like this, and you could also follow it with your eyes for a long time, as if it were flying more slowly than usual. The first birds in the sky not as high perhaps as in the usual blue, or higher after all? and at any rate at an altitude at which no airplane or even satellite would ever be seen.
The only thing that was loud: the ravens, the chief population, apparently, not only of this region, and long since changed from winter to year-round birds. For the most part they cawed out of sight, like old roosters that can produce only one note, but louder, and fairly high up in the air, and in between a powerful, low-pitched cackling, a blind pounding on a xylophone, as it were.
One among the thousands now showed itself, on the broad top of the cedar in the garden next door, it, too, noticed for the first time there this morning. The raven was gesticulating on the tip of one of the coati-shaped branches, displaying its profile, with a roundish fruit in its beak—the garden, and not only this one, was strewn with drops, fruits from somewhere else entirely, including pieces of mangos, lychees, kiwis—its feathers rumpled and in wild disorder, its wings snapped in many places, folded, extended, as if the bird had far more than one pair—or were several ravens perched there in a cluster? were they eating flies out of each other’s feathers?
“Raven, come and speak!” And the raven came flying from the treetop, landed on the outdoor table by the open book and the Blue Mountain coffee, first executed a series of mute directional signals with its head and wings, and then said, “…”
When it took off, a fat maggot was writhing on the table where it had been standing. And there had been a stench from the bird’s beak, and its head had had pale spots on it. “It’s time to light the fuse!” it had said, among other things. And in fact over there, next to a rusty piece of a child’s dart, something was poking out of the ground that looked like the white end of a fuse—which he lit, as he’d been ordered. “And cut your bread by hand, not with the machine.” And it really seemed, when he did as he’d been ordered, as he if were cutting bread for others’ breakfast as well.
Then, out in front of the house, the pharmacist washed his fairly new big car, almost as wide as the river-hugging lane on which he lived. He cleared out the back seat and felt ready, armed, and equipped, though with a vulnerable spot or two, which, on the other hand, aga
in according to the raven, was “as it should be.”
The windows open and, his hands on the wheel, another page read in the epic before he set out. No wind thus far on this dark day; instead, the breeze from the book. “From today till the end of the story no more newspapers!” (The raven.) And in fact the time when this story takes place wasn’t newspaper time. Didn’t someone shout his name just as he started up the car, from inside the house? from the riverbed behind it? piteously? for help? No, just the screeching of the raven again. “And from today till the end of the story you have no name anymore!” And a neighbor walked past the car without recognizing him inside.
His last glance at the moment of starting the engine was directed not toward the house but toward the mailbox out in front. At last: no longer that patch of sunlight, which, during the preceding summer weeks, had again and again created the mirage of a letter inside; this, too, an advantage of this dark, clear day—empty was empty.
Then, as he drove along, the sensation of a strength that didn’t come from the vehicle at all, but instead was a strange, perhaps useless and ridiculous strength, one that might also be the symptom of a life-threatening illness? He was missing the raven, or whom? “Urlage,” that was a word in the medieval epic for war. “They rode off to the Urlage.”
* * *
On the evening of this day, after his work and research, almost invisible and almost without sound, in the hedge-settlement or on the Lost Island, the road to the root-cellar restaurant.
Only once in the course of the day had he exchanged a longish glance with someone, from his laboratory in the back, through the bars there, with a child who soared into view on a swing behind one of the hedges, amazingly high in the air for one so small; or had it been a dwarf?—at any rate, at the right time for such an exchange of glances, toward noon, as his strength dwindled.
The day had remained consistently dark and clear. And now, halfway between Taxham and the airport complex, by the Winding Forest—given this name because of the road that tediously followed its perimeter—it finally began to rain, for the first time this summer.
Off onto a wood road at once and out of the car. He sat down on a stump, with underbrush as a roof. A pebble tossed at a distant tree trunk: bull’s-eye!
The pharmacy smell had already been gone for quite a while, or perhaps was still there, but in a different way—the first raindrops after weeks of drought. As yet just sporadic craters in the dust (yes, even the woods had a layer of dust a foot deep; you emerged with grayish-white powder all over your shoes), little clumps of earth rolling away under the impact of the drops, small pieces of bark flying away: Perhaps in just this way a new era had dawned once upon a time, or, after half an eternity of stasis and rigidity, something like time had first been set in motion.
Crouching down to see what was happening from close up; and besides, crouching you were closest to yourself. Yet the field of vision remained as broad as possible: the parked car, in which, with the increasing dusk all around, a curious brightness seemed to have been trapped, the seats very obviously empty, and as if there were more of them than usual, whole rows of them; beyond it the airfield with the last plane rising into the air, at one window that passenger who thought he could rub off the haze on the outside on the inside; to the right, on the highway, an almost endless convoy of trucks, white on white, United Nations troops deployed against a new war, or rather returning from there (a few trucks were also being towed, half burned out); to the left, the training place for police dogs, at the edge of the forest, where one of the dogs seemed to have just got caught in a culvert and was howling piteously, while another, growling almost as piercingly, kept leaping at a man hidden behind a wall, burying its teeth in the ball of cloth in which the “fleeing criminal” had wrapped his lower arm, then refusing to let go and hanging on stubbornly as the man ran in a circle with him, swinging the animal through the air.
The rain coming down harder, the field emptying out, perceptions growing dim, blurring, but in their place no greater clarity or memorable thoughts, for with them, too, a blurring almost to the point of cessation, nothingness: “Staring into the idiot box” was the name given to such a condition, actually more common among children.
And now it got dark faster than ever before, went completely black before his eyes, at one blow.
Or hadn’t it been a real blow, powerful and from very close by, right on the spot on his forehead where a week before the small dark swelling had been removed? Or several blows, many, out of the pitch black?
And if he’d defended himself in this single combat, or nine-against-one combat, then only at the beginning, in full recognition that no defense, of whatever kind, would get him out of this predicament, but only putting up with it as long as possible.
And if anything became clear to him, at once, with darkness falling all around him and the blow striking his head, it was this: From now on, and for the foreseeable future, he couldn’t take a single step without awareness of this new condition, which imposed itself on him as a sensation of being surrounded on all sides—though not so closely and seamlessly that there was no possibility of slipping through.
Had it been an ambush? “If it was an ambush,” he told me much later, “then one staged by my ancestors—at least I smelled them on me a long time after the blow.”
“Tell me more.”
“No. You, the recording scribe, mustn’t be the master of my story. After all, not even I myself am the master of my story. All I can say is this: When I’d gathered my thoughts, I was lying among the canes of the underbrush, as if I’d been hurled down there, scrunched up among the protruding roots, but not wet, even though it was pouring by now, as it can pour only around Salzburg. And I felt a curious joy inside me, or was it gratitude, or a kind of élan? Now things were as they should be. The struggle could begin. The blow in the dark had beaten the last of the pharmacy and laboratory smell out of me, and I would’ve been so happy just to stay there in the underbrush. I wanted to catch something, trap something, some wild animal. How quickly you could turn into a satyr, of a kind that never existed before. There in my bush basket a few drops of blood could be seen on the dry bed of leaves.”
“Was it no longer pitch black?”
“No one should be the master of this story. So I’ll mention just one more thing about that moment: A smell went along with the blow, a fragrance, or actually a sort of spice.”
* * *
Before driving on, he aimed his car’s extra-powerful headlights into the hidden copse. Several trees he had visited earlier that day at noon were no longer there. The wild cherry, the sycamore, the Spanish chestnut, the beech poplar—yes, that remarkable hybrid had been there—were gone, or perhaps merely not visible in the torrential downpour, which hardly left room for any image.
Instead, inside the encircling thicket, a lot of human bodies, lying every which way, stuffed into bags that seemed to be tied at the top, with only a wet cowlick poking out here and there. Corpses? A battle? In fact, it was a company of soldiers, stretched out there into the underbrush, though probably only from exhaustion—from the night march of the previous day?—so exhausted that only one of them stuck an eye out of his sleeping bag in the glare of the headlights.
* * *
Then, to his amazement, except for the table reserved for him every evening, the root-cellar restaurant was full, even though only the chef’s car was parked outside by the dirt road, in the turnout.
Were these passengers from a canceled flight, sent here from the airline counters beyond the vegetable field? But if so, they would probably all have been served the same thing, which wasn’t the case. Yet they all seemed to know each other. At least they acted familiar with one another. Without conversations from table to table, glances went back and forth constantly, not those hasty, furtive glances often exchanged by strangers in restaurants, but attentive, wide-eyed, friendly, considerate ones, which at the same time left the fellow diners in peace. When he entered—ducking his he
ad in the cellar’s low doorway—no one turned to look. Yet an imperceptible jolt went through those present, a jolt of recognition, and as if they were happy that he was there, too. And he felt much the same: as if he’d already met these people somewhere—at any rate, it hadn’t been anything unpleasant or bad, but had taken place under a favorable sign.
Nonetheless, even here he wasn’t free for a second of his awareness of danger, the danger not merely of a collision but of complete destruction, the possibility, furthermore, that with a flick of the wrist, a slip of the hand, even a wrong breath, it could be too late.
He was shivering. He didn’t want anyone to notice. Why not? After all, it could also come from being rain-drenched. And weren’t some of the others shivering, too? They looked pretty well soaked, down to their shirts and blouses (from their light summer jackets, draped over the backs of their chairs, here and there little puddles dripped onto the old clay floor of the former root cellar, coated with a transparent sealer). Except that his particular shivering didn’t come from some external factor but rather welled up from below, as if from the ground, and for moments at a time you couldn’t tell whether it wasn’t the earth that was shaking, violently, and not only at his feet. He had to grab hold of something, and in so doing dislodged the heavy table. The warmth from all those weeks of summer still lingered in the restaurant. No one could be cold.
“What is your desire?” (The proprietor’s question; he knew him only as a guest, and otherwise neither his name nor his profession.) Even before the guest opened his mouth, he knew that not a single word would come out. He’d lost the power of speech, and for longer than just this moment. But then why had the blow and the blows back there in the pitch dark not been accompanied by any alarm, or by any fear of death? — For a long time now, he imagined, he hadn’t been afraid of death anymore.
