by Peter Handke
To lose the power of speech: What was that like? Like that sensation in dreams when you’re supposed to run, flee, or, more likely, rescue someone, a close family member, the closest, from water, from fire, from the abyss, from a wild beast, from a Tasmanian devil, and you can’t budge from the spot, as if you’re weighted down with stones.
Nonetheless he now opened his mouth to speak, to express his desire, even passed his hand, as if casually, through the candle flame on the table, through the bluish transparency there, hoping that the pain would help get his dead tongue moving again. Not even a stutter. Not a sound.
And it wasn’t that he had no desires. First of all, he was ravenous, as he hadn’t been for a long time, probably also because of this rain, which made everything around, and not just the dishes on the menu, seem fresher and more appetizing.
And then, stimulated and dammed up by his loss of speech, another desire had awakened, or broken out, or broken through, tangible less inside him than simply in the air. There’s the saying that a question is hovering in the room; with an entirely different justification, the same could be said here. Desire was hovering in the room. What kind of desire? A rather awkward, clumsy one, never acted upon or consummated, a desire that had pretty much gone out of use or possibly had never been in use, a childish, sheepish desire, ashamed of itself and thus inelegant, expressing itself badly and unclearly, easily mistaken for a toothache, stomachache, an urgent need to relieve oneself, or also for pleading for mercy.
He couldn’t even manage to point on the menu to the food he so greatly desired. He merely gesticulated wildly. He knocked the proprietor’s notepad out of his hand. Luckily the day’s special was recommended to him, exactly the one he wanted, and his head jerks were correctly interpreted as a nod.
“With all this rain, soon I’ll be able to serve you your mushrooms again, as a side dish,” the proprietor said. And then: “You have blood on your forehead, a lot of blood. An accident? Did you hit the windshield?” And he personally dipped a cloth in cold water and tied it around his head, watched only by those at the very next table, without curiosity, with silent sympathy, also with a kind of soothing attitude—“It’s not that bad!” and “The cloth looks good on you, could have been made for you.”
Then hours of nocturnal rain pounding on the roof of the lodge. And this rain would continue for days in that area. It was as if you could see all the people in the root cellar from the rear, and from up high, without a roof, sopping wet and calmly going on with their meal. Sometimes you saw yourself this way in a dream, from the rear, with a couple of other total strangers, as the heroes in an adventure movie, for which you also made up the audience.
The guests left a few at a time, having paid cash, with large notes that they peeled out of their pockets. They were picked up either by taxis or by chauffeurs, who always dashed to the door with umbrellas big enough for two. At least every other guest bumped his head on the frame of the cellar door, and this was true of one or two of the women as well, most of whom were tall. As she went out, one of them said to him with a quick smile, “Good luck!” And the others had an expression in the corners of their eyes as they stood in the doorway—not an actual movement, not a wink—that meant Good night! Yet all of them had had something shabby and down-on-their-luck about them, and not only because of their unshaven faces, their stringy hair, their shambling gait: something profoundly broken and dilapidated, a help- and hopelessness, and as if none of them could even be sure of even making it through the night.
In the medieval book, open on his table, cleared in the meantime, a sword blow landed on someone whose heart then lay revealed in his chest.
He, too, paid right out of his pocket. (To be sure, this was nothing new for him.) The kitchen crew were already standing behind the glass partition, their arms at their sides or crossed, except for the dark-skinned dishwasher, who also seemed too big for the place, looking stooped not only over the faucet, but also while putting the dishes away on the shelves up above.
Another table was still occupied, as on the previous evening, this time by two men. Despite the dim light in the room, they were wearing sunglasses, and seemed even more down-at-heel than the other chance guests, or merely acted that way—how else could it be explained that the proprietor now brought them his guest book, which they both signed without hesitation?
And finally he recognized them. One was a winter sports champion once known far beyond the country’s borders, a skier, who maybe three decades ago had brought home a gold medal from America, and that despite having lost one of his ski poles. And the man across from him was a poet who’d been famous in a different way, a refugee and foreigner, who was said in his day to have written a German that no native had in his head and which nevertheless made instant sense to many, especially the ordinary masses who heard him read his poems aloud.
And hadn’t all the previous guests been celebrities of long standing, who had met here by chance, perhaps on the strength of an article praising the food and saying that here in the root cellar a famous person could “hide from the world”?
Whatever the case: the two remaining guests had sweat on their brows, and he smelled it at a distance as cold sweat, and also saw how every time the sweat had almost stopped, it would suddenly well up again. And intermittently the two would laugh again, at times with their whole faces, at times giggling, at times as heartily as only babies can laugh: Willy-nilly, and without knowing what it was all about, you had to laugh along with them. Were they giving him a little wave? Were they drunk? In the candlelight, rodents seemed to be dangling from their cheeks on both sides, their teeth sunk into the flesh.
* * *
Then he sat outside a while in his car without driving off immediately. Out here the nocturnal rain made an entirely different sound on the roof. Besides, he had a habit of simply sitting somewhere, gazing out the windshield or reading. In the days when he still traveled a lot, he’d often seen people sitting this way, alone in their cars by the sea, doing nothing, or reading, usually by steep cliffs, facing west, with or without a sunset, and he’d patterned himself on them.
How dark an airport could be, darker than any other civilized installations, and that included the runways, edged with ground lighting. The downpour had washed out a huge chunk of the tar applied to the former wagon road; it had slid down the bank, and poking out from underneath it were portions of a house used as fill, or even of a ship—a length of railing, a stairway down to steerage, an up-ended bow, out of which the sky-water was being sucked, with a loud gurgling sound, into hollow spaces lower down, into the belly of the house—or ship.
* * *
Now the two last guests were leaving the root-cellar restaurant, where the lights promptly went out behind them. Without coats or an umbrella, they were soaked the minute they stepped outside, yet they moved without haste, almost as if they were out strolling in this downpour, and had made up their minds to do this. He pulled up to them and motioned them to get in the car.
As they drove on, all three kept silent, until they were out of the spandrel between the take-off and landing runways, the highways and the railroad tracks, and also out of the natural spandrel or triangle of the confluent rivers. The man at the wheel kept silent because he was still struck dumb, and the two in back were sitting as if in a taxi, for whatever reason. They’d taken off their dark glasses. Their eyes were narrow and alert, and they didn’t give off any smell now, or at most a whiff of wet hair, like scalded chicken feathers, at any rate nothing from their drenched clothes. When the heat blasting through the roomy car had dried these rather quickly, the former slalom champion slid into the seat next to him and began to address him.
That was during the drive through a tunnel, where the pounding on the car roof let up for a moment. The man had a curiously toneless, hollow voice, as if he’d just been lying on the bare ground for a long time, and he said, “I’ve known you a long time. Back when I had my accident in the Rocky Mountains, you administered first
aid, then disappeared the moment the ambulance arrived. Later I saw you again, swimming in the Black Sea, way far out; we were on a yacht with friends and thought you’d been in a shipwreck, but you signaled to us to sail on; you had a cloth tied around your head just like this one. You’re in the government here, behind the scenes; you pull strings.”
And when the man at the wheel didn’t reply, the retired poet in the back seat picked up where the other left off—as they went into the next tunnel under the Alpine foothills, or the Alps themselves—in accented German, which he seemed to exaggerate on purpose, to make people pay more attention, and said, “You and I are the same age, but you remind me of my father. You have the same genial nature as him, and the preoccupied air, which he would suddenly shake off when I disturbed him, and beat me. And like him you have several other children and are a good father to all of them. And you’re lonely, and it’s your own fault—wretchedly”—(or did he say “retchingly”?)—“lonely. Yes, how quickly a person can become isolated, in the time it takes to open a door, close a window, turn onto a side road.”
The driver, who couldn’t say anything and wouldn’t have wanted to anyway, honked the horn. But even that sound came out rather feeble.
* * *
Only one thing was clear: All three of them were free and had time, at least for the next few days. A holiday was in the offing, the feast of the Ascension, which meant a long weekend.
But that applied only to him. Apparently his two passengers had no obligations, from now to the ends of their lives, whether distant or imminent. They had neither work nor family, and this was no recent development. Yet they had money, or acted as though they did, not only playing with bundles of banknotes but also flashing their credit cards. What they showed off had certainly not been acquired very honestly. But no one cared, and on the other hand, it didn’t seem especially dirty, either, didn’t come from drugs, or from pimping—although the two of them certainly appeared capable of the latter, especially since the names they mentioned were almost all women’s, foreign ones. They both seemed rather like desperadoes, though polite ones, and at certain moments overly polite ones.
The thing the poet had spread out to dry and kept sniffing wasn’t his notebook, but rather a deck of poker cards. The former Olympian was hacking away with a jackknife at the loose threads on his trouser cuffs. At the same time both were sucking peppermints, so as not to reek of the root cellar’s wine as they talked; upon climbing into the car, both had almost automatically stubbed out the cigarettes they’d just lit.
They didn’t take on the air of desperadoes until after the drive began, with the departure from the immediate area: open, caved-in mouths, as if prematurely toothless; a jitteriness as if they’d just escaped from some authority that had been oppressing them for too long, or from an aged mother or aunt who had been loyally taking care of them; a confusion about where to go, but in their aimlessness a death-defying energy; a sort of idiotic pleasure in the most fleeting moments and tiniest trivia, in the feeling of being on the road, such as you otherwise see only in mongoloids; at the same time, as if they were not merely lawless but also above all laws, could walk through walls and on water, could fly, could make themselves invisible, and permit themselves any misdeed you could name—because of who they were.
He briefly imagined it was these two who had struck him on the head in the woods beyond the airport, and he was now their prisoner.
Suddenly a small bird was fluttering around inside the car, a sparrow. The poet had found it somewhere, and, thinking it was dead, had stuck it in his pocket, from which it had now escaped. They stopped by the side of the road and each of them rolled down his window.
* * *
That happened past midnight, in a valley high in the inner Alps, after they’d driven over several passes, and here the rain was accompanied by lightning and thunder, lightning and thunder. The sparrow promptly flew off, its peeping actually more a piercing cry; as if this confinement, like being buried alive, had lasted much longer than just a few hours.
The skier knew a house nearby where they could spend the night. A woman lived there, “a winner, almost like me when I was younger, but in another specialty,” which, however, he didn’t want to name. Then, too, no one asked him, either, as if not asking questions were one of the unspoken rules of the game since they’d set out together.
As they tried to find the way—the driver, although he’d never been there before, had a clearer sense of where to go than the athlete, who allegedly knew the area; at an intersection where many roads came together, he very confidently turned in the only right direction—the poet in the back seat announced a sort of plan for the following day: “First over the border. I know a village there that’s celebrating its annual festival tomorrow. Besides, an out-of-wedlock child of mine lives there—the only children I have are out-of-wedlock—whom I’ve never seen. The child doesn’t want to see me, or at least not anymore. And then on, if possible, down the southern slope of the Alps, and up the next mountain chain, not as high, but where it can snow even now, in the summer, and where, in a forest up there, among flowers and ferns, there’s a deep hole, a shaft going straight down into the earth, which is filled all year long with ice, and when you thaw a piece of it—but you’ll see; I want it to be a surprise.”
* * *
The woman’s house lay just over the top of the hill that acted as a watershed for the area. The water from springs on one side flowed toward the Black Sea, and water on the other side toward the Mediterranean (or so the woman asserted), and two such springs, to the left and right of the divide, were brought together in a fountain that had two pipes and two basins, from which the water flowed in its appointed directions, east and south.
After their coming over the crown of the hill on this all-encircling, deep rainy night, suddenly the house in this isolated spot, far from any settlement, appeared as a house of light, a low but sprawling building of undressed stone, with not only the lanterns on both sides of the portal lit, but also the lights in all the rooms, dimmed in one wing, shining at full strength in the other, every corner brightly illuminated, even the ceilings bathed in rays as bright as the sun’s. The many silhouettes seemed at first to be flitting and zigzagging back and forth between these individual rooms, as if through wide-open doors, creating the impression of a great dance, though without music, indeed without any sound at all other than the twofold gurgling of the watershed fountain outside.
It turned out that they had come to a house of mourning. The husband there had just died and had been buried the day before, and his wife, the “winner,” was busy clearing out his part of the house, helped only by a distant neighbor; the speed with which they were going about it, the carefully coordinated movements they were carrying out, and the abundance of light, which multiplied their shadows: all created the impression of a house full of people.
No one, and not only he, spoke another word before bedtime. They were all very tired. Each of the three was given a room, in an annex. He heard the poet and the athlete talking a bit in the corridor, in very calm, also calming voices, like those of the two watershed springs outdoors, and he fell asleep immediately, just as he always did. And unlike his half-unused bed at home, this was the kind of bed he liked, narrow, in a very small chamber (that, too, delightfully different from home).
* * *
In that deep, soundless mountain night—even the gurgling of the watershed fountain seemed to have receded beyond the horizons—he awoke, or rather was wakened—because the light went on in the room, or rather flashed on, all the lights at once.
The woman was standing by his bed, her back very straight, wearing a heavy coat and with wet hair, as if she’d come a considerable distance, not just over from the main house. She went down on her knees before him. At the same time her face was turned in an entirely different direction, toward the room’s one window, which stood wide open. (Had she climbed in this way?) And her features displayed a surprising tranquillity, most unus
ual, and not just for her, the so-called champion, and not only in contrast to the expression of proud, unapproachable sorrow she had worn earlier that evening. Or was this thing in her eyes actually a sort of trance? Or even transfiguration?
He remained motionless, waiting. What would the woman do? For it was clear she would do something, and at once. And in the very next moment she threw herself on him and began to pound him. She beat him violently, left, right, with both fists, and she had big hands, which she clenched into fists like a man’s. And all the while she kept her eyes averted from him.
He put up no defense, and it was as if the blows hurt less that way and he remained completely unharmed. And nevertheless she was beating him with such force that eventually he fell out of his narrow bed. And only then did she let up, favor him for the first time with a brief glance, turn off the light, and disappear as she had come—somehow or other.
He climbed, or rather fell, back onto his mountain-night bed, and promptly went to sleep again, in an act of obedience, as it were. Then laughter. Had he laughed himself, in a dream? “I haven’t laughed that way in a long time!” was his thought, on the verge of consciousness, but for that reason all the clearer and more memorable. And: “Not even in school did I get beaten as much as today and yesterday!”
A smell lingered in the room, not from a woman’s perfume but rather from something burning, closest perhaps to the smell of two flintstones rubbed together for a long time, just before the first sparks fly. It made him breathe faster and harder, and it was a breathing that didn’t seem to come just from him, but from several people crammed into the small chamber.
* * *
The next morning was also the first time—in how long?—that he didn’t sit down to breakfast alone. The poet and the former Olympic champion were already waiting for him over in the main house, at a table set lavishly—and not only for that isolated mountain area—from which, however, the other two had not yet helped themselves, as if it were up to him to give the signal to begin.
