On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House

by Peter Handke

  It was the poet, incidentally—he let his athlete friend report this—who’d rounded up and prepared the essentials and the extras, even coffee from the hills of Jamaica, and had also gone out into the mountain forest at the crack of dawn to bring back brimming bowls of blueberries, blackberries, or huckleberries, still glistening from the rain. “For our last journey,” he commented. To whom was he referring when he said “our”? Did it include him, “our driver,” as the two called him at one point, or, at another, “our guest” or “the third in our group”?

  One way or the other, neither of the two seemed to have noticed that he hadn’t said a single word the entire time. Or it didn’t matter to them, any more than the fact that overnight the wound on his forehead had been joined by others on his face—on his cheekbone, on his lips, on his cheeks—the latter probably scratched by the widow’s wedding ring. They seemed preoccupied exclusively with themselves, with their own degeneration, under way for years now. And at the same time it buoyed them up, at least during the moments when they were talking about it.

  During the night the poet had heard his own obituary being broadcast over the dream radio. “It was read by a woman, a radio announcer who otherwise enjoyed immense popularity for her voice, which was warm and sincere, whatever the occasion. But in my case she sounded not merely indifferent but downright exultant, even vengeful. It was as if my death had eliminated a despised evildoer, had felled an enemy of mankind. Everything I’d written in the course of my life she dismissed, and apparently in the name of everyone else, and irrevocably, as worthless trifles. Worthless trifles! And then it was precisely this expression that put things in perspective for me. Justifiably forgotten! she said, and suddenly I no longer saw myself as alone at all, or at least as tangibly less isolated than in previous dreams and days. A succession of failures and defeats! said the radio lady, and I saw myself grinning in my sleep, from ear to ear. Just wait, I thought, I haven’t even written my book yet. And it will be a book unlike any before it, not tangible as a book, not forcing its way into the picture, nothing you get hold of, weightless, and yet a book—if ever there was one. The bush for it is already burning. Or it’ll take place in a realm beyond all burning bushes, Jacob’s ladders, and descents to hell.”

  He laughed over his whole face—or was it only almost?—and then counted his money—if that was all he had, he wouldn’t get far—while the former national champion at his side, likewise sorting his rather meager banknotes and the coins as well—among the latter a cheap metal reproduction of the gold medal he’d long since pawned—recounted how, after his winning days as a skier were over, he’d tried just about every other sport, thinking no athletic discipline was off limits to him, and indeed that anything he undertook would have to bring him victories.

  “That was true, at least for a while, but the price I had to pay was that little, then less and less, was at stake or was required for winning. I won a whole succession of motorcross races, but my competitors were mostly weekend athletes, and in the end I was winning on routes out beyond the most remote villages. And after that, in all my other athletic attempts, I could win, or at least imagine winning, only by going abroad, or rather disappearing, to more and more distant destinations, to the most foreign of foreign lands. As a ‘foreign competitor’ I had, if not success, at least an aura, as I’d once had in my homeland as a ‘grand champion.’ So I was the star player on a Korean basketball team for a season, and the following year went to a medium-sized city in New Zealand as both player and coach to establish European football there—and I was popular for that for a while—then shone in golf tournaments in Mongolia and in ice hockey in Fairbanks, Alaska. But in the end my only way out was to go home, to get a job or start a business of my own. Except that winning was so much in my blood that even here, in an entirely different kind of competition, I expected it, expected to have it handed to me. I demanded it. Out of the way, the rest of you, you also-rans. There’s nothing here for you. I have to be the champion. I’m the champion—who else? And so for the last ten years it’s been one disaster after another, and each more ruinous than the last. So this is my last journey. But who knows, maybe with the help of our fine driver here, it’ll turn into my first? A productive detour? Off to a foreign country where I can finally win something again!”

  And then he had laughed all over his face, and raised his arms in the victory gesture; but he, too, didn’t quite carry it off; and the tongue he stuck out as he cheered looked white from an exhaustion that wasn’t merely physical.

  It was still raining, and with every moment that passed the rain seemed to come down even harder, or more concentratedly. Water came shooting, squirting, spitting from the two pipes in the watershed fountain, hastening toward one sea here, the antipodal one there, and all the larches in the mountain forest, their fine needles—in contrast to the coarser ones of the spruces—long since unable to mount resistance to the wetness pounding down, stood there as if in a waterworks.

  Not a trace of the woman anywhere in the house. Or had the fire in the tiled stove been lit by her, in the middle of summer? And then, as he escorted the two others to the car under a giant umbrella, which seemed to have been put there for them in the door to the courtyard, the person simply referred to as “driver” felt something rustling in his jacket pocket that made him think involuntarily of a letter “sewn into the lining.”

  * * *

  At the wheel, the journey under way again, the recurring question: What was it he’d been missing all morning: his house? his familiar surroundings? the way to work? No. It was something he’d neglected, failed to do. Take a necessary medication? No, that wasn’t it, either—it had to do with a form of nourishment he was lacking, without actually feeling weak, some tonic. But hadn’t they had a good breakfast, and only good, wholesome stuff, as they said?

  And yet there was something missing, or rather that emptiness you feel tickling your mouth, for instance when you have an apple or a piece of bread set aside and then don’t get around to eating it—except that the sense of missing something wasn’t localized in his mouth, but where? in his entire body? his whole person. The book! Right, this morning he hadn’t read anything in his book, the medieval epic, and thus he was missing something like his “breakfast.” A pharmacist who was a voracious reader—did such a thing exist? (And this was the last time, at least for the time when his story takes place, that he thought of himself as the “pharmacist.”)

  The poet, in the passenger seat, was just reading his horoscope out loud from the newspaper; it predicted that on this particular day he would be overtaken by a feeling of “incurable loneliness,” but there was no call for despair if he remained open to the possibilities lying right before his eyes—such an attitude could be the “cure.” No, it wasn’t this reading his organism had been feeling the lack of—and besides, the veteran athlete in the back seat now pointed out to the poet that the newspaper was a year old.

  Momentarily it seemed to the driver as if everything he was experiencing just then and everything that had happened with him and the others since the previous evening, were being simultaneously recorded and could be read somewhere, though in neither a newspaper nor a book. Hadn’t he already had some such a notion at one time or another in the past? Yes, in certain hours of love, of great happiness or great unhappiness, with his wife—was all that still true?—with his children—was all that still true?—with his mistress—long, long ago, or perhaps never? And in each case that image of simultaneous recording had turned up only in the depths of night, in the complete absence of any sound, as if no one were breathing. And now his current story was offering itself for reading in broad daylight, with rain pounding on the roof of the car, with his passengers coughing, scratching themselves, yawning.

  He uncharacteristically stepped on the gas, even on this serpentine back road in the mountains, still far from any pavement, and added a quick curve of his own, thereby missing, without particularly meaning to, the boulder that unexpectedly
hurtled onto the road.

  He alone glimpsed for a second their hostess of the night before, high up on an overhang, her back already turned to the scene of the crime. The two others had merely stopped their scratching and yawning for the instant, only to go back to yawning and scratching with a vengeance.

  And this wasn’t the first time he realized that since a particular moment he’d been in mortal danger, indeed in imminent danger, like that just now, and also in entirely different, unforeseeable ways.

  It was here, however, that he made up his mind—unlike the last few times when he’d landed in such situations—that he would keep his eyes and nostrils as wide open and for as long as possible, at the same time waging the struggle to survive, and would become a constant witness, phase by phase, to whatever was threatening him, was closing in on his body or his soul—no, even more, and beyond that: to keep all his senses alert to everything else, while this mortal danger was close, always close by; along with the main things and those accompanying them, to impress on himself the ephemera as well, the unconnected things, things taking place somewhere else entirely, so to speak—or rather, to incorporate them into himself, with all his senses, perhaps also (yet that wasn’t the reason) as a way out.

  The few times in the past when things “had closed in”—when he’d lost his way while climbing in the mountains, got stuck in a seemingly impenetrable tangle of brambles—he’d always managed to find his way out again, simply by instinct, surefootedly and -handedly, but at the same time blindly, deaf from the pounding of the blood in his ears, had found his way out like someone in danger of drowning who doesn’t flail futilely but swims purposefully toward land, yet in the process takes in: nothing, nothing at all.

  His first such experience had been in childhood, during the flight at the end of the war with his parents, in the predawn gray, across the mined border: Not even now, long after the event, did any image come to him, unless it was that of the gray before dawn, a cold grayness without a breath of air, and indeed without any atmosphere, which didn’t dissipate or come to an end; surely there had been pursuers, “on their heels,” but he hadn’t seen them, didn’t see them.

  But now, in the moment of evading the stone, he opened his eyes and saw, not only out of their corners, next to the woman up there, an effect born of the combination of pouring rain and a pale sun breaking through, something like her shade or double, and above their heads the cloudy sky. He, and with him all the others, were less in a tight spot here than in the midst of the action; in a sphere. Yes, it was one, albeit a strange one. And if the woman hadn’t had her back turned, he would have given her a sign then and there, any sign.

  * * *

  At the time when this story takes place, wherever even a remote trail, such as the one they found themselves on, met a main road, however deserted, the intersection was structured as a roundabout, and this was true all over the continent.

  And this circling continued on the highway, and occurred even more often here because there were correspondingly larger numbers of roads feeding into each other. Just when you’d got somewhat accustomed to the straightaway and were imagining you could make headway toward your destination at last, or at least move ahead unimpeded, you came upon another roundabout, and then another, and so forth.

  And at the end of such a journey, even one lasting for days, you could find that you had no sense of the direction in which you’d been traveling, or sense of having traveled at all.

  Indeed, your head might be spinning, as after too long a ride, which also seems to end up at almost the same spot where it started, even when it lets you off in an entirely different country.

  Arriving this way at a presumably distant destination could leave you not only dizzy but also fed up with travel altogether or even with just setting out, travel-sick—which was even worse than seasick—and filled with disgust at any movement whatsoever from place to place.

  At the time when this story takes place, it had reached the point that you could hardly get to the tops of mountain passes by car anymore. Most of the passes in Europe were out of service, so to speak, and for the most part also rendered impassable by uncleared rock slides, washouts, and the like. Instead of crossing the continent above ground by way of the passes, people traveled almost exclusively underground through tunnels, of which by now there were as many on some stretches as roundabouts on others. Although the number of national borders had increased—there were more than ever before, often coming in the middle of such tunnels—these went unnoticed, since all border controls had been eliminated, and a border guard was nowhere to be seen.

  Having these tunnels under this part of the world helped make any long trip seem like a ride through a chamber of horrors, a ride where the end seemed to be right back at the beginning. Having set out on an adventure in a foreign country, you found yourself on your own doorstep, with even the same knocker and a similar monogram on the doormat, or at least on a street almost identical to the familiar one at home, whether in a city, a suburb, or the country: out of the tunnel and promptly back home—even if you’d planned never to return.

  * * *

  On this particular day, the three of them had a different experience, however. True, they stopped and circled in thousands of roundabouts, rond-points, rotundas, and turnabouts, and rolled through about five hundred tunnels—some shorter, some longer—coming to a standstill time and again among millions of holiday cars. But their mood, and more particularly their condition, internal as well as external, proved stronger than all these circumstances.

  Each of them was in a different mood: With the poet, it was primarily nervousness, because he’d be seeing his almost unknown child—“I’m less nervous about the mother”; with the former Olympic medalist it was perhaps curiosity as to whether in this foreign country—recently become a “skiing nation” (but also a “football” and “sprinter nation”)—his name still carried weight; with the chauffeur it was a strange yearning, such as he had felt only in what he saw as his much too short youth, together with an unaccustomed sadness.

  What they shared, however, was their condition, or their consciousness: of an adventure, dangerous in some unspecified way, one in which a great deal, indeed everything, was at stake, an adventure, furthermore, on the verge of the forbidden, the illegal, even of a criminal offense. Against the law? Against the way of the world? And none of them could have said where this shared consciousness came from. In any case, what they were doing, or especially would be doing in the future, could bring punishment down on their heads, a punishment without mercy. But turning back now was out of the question for them.

  And accordingly, in spite of everything, they really experienced their journey as something new and unprecedented.

  * * *

  He drove fairly slowly. He’d never been on good terms with speed, in any case, had never succeeded in jumping onto the speed train.

  The few times he’d been on an airplane, he’d thought the speed would do him in, especially during take-off, when it could be felt most acutely. After the first time, he’d shied away from window seats—though that didn’t help much: The speed affected not only his eyes but also his whole body. It would destroy him now, right now.

  And this had come over him very early on, long before his first flight. At a certain speed it wasn’t just that he didn’t know whether he was coming or going. Even on a bicycle he would lose—from one moment to the next—all control over his body, and a fall would become inevitable. It had taken several concussions for him to recognize that these accidents out of the clear blue sky weren’t the fault of a particular bicycle, the road, or his clumsiness. Just as other people were claustrophobic, agoraphobic, or acrophobic, he was afflicted with what might be called tachophobia, or fear of speed, actually a kind of panic attack—when a certain, or rather an uncertain speed was reached—that would suddenly throw off his equilibrium.

  The only automobile accident he’d ever had had come about in just this way; he’d been engrossed
in conversation with someone in the passenger seat and had inadvertently exceeded his personal speed limit, hardly noticeably, by only a little—yet all at once he’d been unable to keep hold of the steering wheel, and bang! it had happened. (It was good, at least in the present situation, that he was still mute, and instead of speaking, just mused to himself or listened to the others in the car, something that had hardly ever caused him to speed up.)

  “Even as an observer, as an outsider,” he told me, “I could fall prey to some speeds. But they had to reach a specific point, for example at a Formula One race that I watched one time outdoors, not on television, on the urging of my wife, who was always crazy for speed and bloomed in its presence as nowhere else, and displayed all her beauty—a wondrously beautiful and, to me, sometimes terrifyingly beautiful speed demon—or another time at the Hahnenkamm, the most famous downhill skiing competition of that winter, and that time, too, I’d gone to Kitzbühel for her sake, to observe the champions live for a change. And when the race cars appeared, and she broke out in cheers—I don’t remember whether it was in the Eifel or in Estoril, atop the volcano or along the Atlantic cliffs—the sight literally made me stagger backward, and I had to hold onto something, because these drivers came racing along unbelievably fast, immeasurably faster than on television—unnaturally fast? no, superterrestrially fast. One minute they were there, the next minute it was as if they’d never been there. And my wife and I let out a cry at the same moment, but hers was a cry of delight, mine one of fright, of a sort of primal terror.”

  And the downhill ski race on the Kitzbühel piste affected him much the same: As the first contestant zoomed into sight up above, emerging from a patch of woods onto the long, precipitous descent, at an extraplanetary or at least inhuman speed, the sight hit him like a blow on the head—although, in contrast to the racing cars, this filled him with enthusiasm, as it did his wife, except that this time he didn’t cry out, but instead couldn’t utter a word for quite a while. “So it started that long ago, then?” I said. — “Yes and it wasn’t the first time.”