by Peter Handke
As time went on, instead of the signs for towns, crooked, half buried in the scree (the towns themselves completely buried), like “Santa Ana,” “San Juan,” or “San Francisco,” he found himself wishing for a sign that would read “Santa Paciencia.” He would never have thought he could tire of gazing at the constellations, for instance the sparkling image of the huntsman Orion, spangled across the sky, and meanwhile, with fall approaching, visible every night; yet now he looked up at it only in order to see all those stars fade with the dawn, including those representing the huntsman’s knees, belt, and quiver—first the quiver disappeared, then—it was time—the first of the three belt stars, and the most stubbornly persistent were one of the two shoulder stars, and even more so, the last to disappear from the day, the glittering knee-star Aldebaran. “Ah, finally gone, the sky empty—a sign for being able to get under way!”
But a closer look detected another flash emanating from the huntsman Orion, with daylight almost there; even the belt and quiver leaped forth from the sky’s brightness, or weren’t those black residual images? Santa Paciencia!
* * *
“The first step onto the soil of the steppe always brought a fresh sense of excitement,” he said, “the transition from the concrete, asphalt, paved, hardened surfaces in front of the garage, the barracks, the railroad station, the abandoned cattle shed, and into and down to and up to this ground under your feet, where the springy effect immediately set in, relieving the body of so much that weighed it down. How lightly you floated along, almost too lightly. For that reason, too, I put stones in my pockets, and now understood better the poet who once said that he ate so much, or in general took in so much, because he hoped in that way not to get rid of his state of constant agitation but to load it down with gravity.”
Could it be that such a condition was even intensified by the smells that wafted up at him from the ground, which was that of a particular aromatic herb-steppe? — “Yes, but these aromas were by no means the main intensifiers. Toward the end of the day they even gave me headaches every time, close to nausea. There was such a wealth of them, and from plant to plant such gradations, distinctions, refinements, and refinements of refinements, that I imagined all of them together should yield a tincture or essence such as had never been smelled or tasted before, and that I absolutely had to bring home with me—with healing powers simply because, without instructions or urging, it made you breathe deeply. An essence in another sense, in time I absorbed something else entirely from the world of steppe plants: Nowhere could you find, in bloom or bearing fruit, those things, which, probably lasting far into summer, would have made for an utterly different steppe, at least to judge by the infinite range of dull yellow to dull gray dried puffs, balls, tufts, and strands atop all the tall stalks, stems, and shafts. Even the fruits and the withered remains of flowers had burst for the most part, fallen off, and blown away. Of the transhorizontal sea of blossoms and small fruits, almost all that remained were the things that provided stability and protection to the petals, anthers, pistils, and the like: the stems, of course, and additionally and in particular the sepals, the blossoms’ empty bottoms and supports, the empty fruit capsules and husks. Myriads of flower and fruit skeletons, from small to minuscule, often also dull brown and chalky white, poked up all across the steppe from their likewise bleached, gangly stalks, with an incredible wealth of forms—cylinders, spirals, gears, combs, also threes, eights, and nines on these miniature skeletons! It was these infinitely many and extraordinarily varied little steppe-plant skeletons that leaped out at me as an essence such as you seldom find. I felt as though tiny vegetative skeletons like these revealed an entire vanished and swallowed-up world that you could study anew. For here it wasn’t the case that ‘vanished’ also meant ‘evaporated.’ The empty lavender skeletons smelled of lavender—and how. The empty poppy capsules were redolent of poppy seeds—and how. The bare caraway stalks smelled more powerfully of caraway than ever. And added to this was another smell, which simply came from the hundreds of empty shapes, the essence, to be precise. In observing and inhaling the dear little skeletons—yes, I felt a sort of tenderness for them—and also in listening (for instance to the rattling of the capsules), I became conscious of my own bone structure, and I can’t say it horrified me. Bending over the plant remains, I experienced for moments at a time an epiphany, and where did I feel it? — In my bones. And must I add that after a day like this, at night in my sleeping place, I was amazed to have gotten out alive from such a deadly sinister steppe?
“And since I’m speaking so boldly now,” said the pharmacist of Taxham, “I’m going to tell you briefly about myself and the steppe mushrooms. Only briefly: because my passion for mushrooms estranged my wife from me, and I don’t want to lose my scribe as well! Let’s get it over with, so we can move on with my story. On the other hand, I also want to mention quickly that I’m convinced the last conversational topic human beings will have in common, aside from current events in the newspaper and on television, will be the various types of mushrooms—the last subject on which everyone will agree, even total strangers, pricking up their ears, amicably. Perhaps the last shared adventure available to all of us nowadays, also because it’s so hard to describe. Yet inexhaustible. Like the steppe, also hard to describe because resistant to images. And my mushroom book will be one that will make people exclaim: Yes, that’s just how it is, that’s what I’ve always said, too!—even if they’ve never said it.
“And the fact was that with all the rich discoveries of plants and rocks on the steppe, I had the sense of making a real discovery only with the mushrooms. Along the way I even bit off, or at least stuck under my tongue, pieces of even the inedible or poisonous ones—yes, that’s how stale I often felt from being alone and mute: I wanted acidity for my mouth, and especially bitterness for my tongue, and the bitterest mushrooms were exactly what I needed. Some were so bitter that the bitterness hit me again, from inside. In my mushroom book I’m going to make a point of recommending a couple of bitter mushrooms like that, for eating raw. But the good steppe mushrooms, the sweet ones: how they opened my eyes!”
“And?” I asked.
The pharmacist: “Yes, isn’t that enough for a start? The mere sight of them woke me up.”
“The way his prey wakes up the hunter?”
“Yes, maybe. Except that the mushrooms didn’t run away from me, but on the contrary seemed to be waiting for me: At last you’ve found me! To be sure, it wasn’t good if there were too many; too much splendor overstimulated and dulled me. — And another thing, but then that’ll be all I say about mushrooms for now and in this context: In them I smelled all my kin again—my father, my mother, my grandparents; above all, my children, when they were still children.”
* * *
Later came days when my storyteller was no longer looking for anything at all as he made his way across the steppe. And it felt to him like a kind of freedom—“which I wouldn’t have found without the searching that preceded it.”
On the top of a hill someone was sitting, fishing in the air. Thistle flowers far below on the ground were black sea urchins at the same time. For one whole windless day, clouds of pollen billowed from the male elderberry bushes to the female elderberry bushes—so there were still blossoms after all on the autumnal steppe? — Yes. In a pine forest—so there were forests, too, on the steppe?—there was a particular cone-eating-tree for the squirrels (just as in cities there are sleeping-trees for birds); the needle-covered ground blanketed as if with the remains of apples. And the high grasses there—one place on the steppe with only grasses—nodded and shook their heads at the same time. A cloud field, white, rippled, foamy, forming dunes. Flat oval stones here and there on top of the highland scree, with a black circle in the middle: pebbles polished by the Ice Age, which had sunk into the ocean here as the snows melted, called “eye stones.”
Even when he blew with all his might on the small and smallest steppe animals that lighted on him, they stay
ed put. One night, in the coolness, he stuck both hands into a bovist he had picked during the day, the size of a bull’s skull and deep reddish black—what a mushroom!—and let the sun’s warmth inside flow into him: It worked. A single butterfly wing was moving along the ground, upright, wobbling slightly and in a zigzag, multicolored, like a military standard: carried by a cave-black ant. And the ants here didn’t seem to form a state anywhere—at most three or four would come out of a hole at a time; so only little ant villages and hamlets, which were located far apart and had nothing to do with each other.
Wasps zoomed around like everywhere else, only close to the ground here. And one time a large grasshopper (“hay-horse” was the Austrian word) was carrying a smaller grasshopper on its back, whereupon the latter fell off and hopped around looking for its carrier. And then the two of them, one atop the other again, displayed profiles that actually resembled horses, while the steppe moths had the profiles of sheep. One of the moths, stone-gray, was fluttering next to a cliff, also gray, and was visible only because at the same time its shadow was moving over the cliff.
From time to time he saw beehives lined up on the steppe—mostly next to another such cliff—which produced a constant hum, and upon the bees’ returning and slipping into the dark holes, their little pollen-dusted legs glowed—“So there was still something in bloom after all?”—and whenever he passed a little colony like that he was immediately attacked by an animal that came shooting out at him, the watchman or people’s policeman on duty, and was usually also stung, regularly on his cheekbone.
Little patches of green, surrounded by the tall, sparse steppe vegetation, not visible until you were standing directly in front of them, were wild vegetable gardens, with sorrel and something reminiscent of dandelion greens, only fatter, softer, and more juicy, but, like dandelion greens, slightly bitter. “I’ve hardly ever eaten such delicacies as I did there,” he told me, “of course just small things, but all the more delicate. And for a change, I didn’t read at all, or only this way: The steppe, the villages were my library.”
* * *
Then fewer and fewer beehives, and the bees creeping into them also had less and less yellow on their feet. And finally their back legs were completely free of pollen. And likewise, the blackberries he still managed to find were all only half ripe; the other half was green and wouldn’t ripen any more. But at the same time a magnolia was in bloom next to the ruins of a steppe house—a spring tree, as if blossoming for the first time that year.
The prevailing impression, however, especially in the island-like pine groves, where a ceaseless swishing of needles could be heard, was that of the days just before spring. And on a sunny, rather cool day like that, he was resting in late afternoon in a spot by a clay-yellow, almost vegetationless little slope, sheltered from the wind, a bank, of which there was a duplicate behind him: He was stretched out there between the two banks as if on the bed of a sunken road. He was lying on his side, the needle-strewn ground beneath him, from which here and there a plant poked, always consisting of only one leaf, thin as sheet metal, atop a naked stalk, and the leaves gave off a metallic clanging.
He had an unobstructed view of the clay wall, close enough to touch. The wall was hollowed out lengthwise, forming a kind of niche, and he thought this niche, with the soft clay dust and a bed of pine needles, would have made a good place for spending the night. He had nothing before his eyes but the red-gray-yellow fissured surface of the earth, illuminated by the last sun, now low in the sky.
He’d always been drawn most powerfully to observation when he witnessed the simplest, most undramatic occurrences and processes, for instance rain coming down heavier or tapering off, or simply continuing; snow melting; a puddle slowly drying up. And thus he also observed the shallow clay semi-grotto lit by the last rays of the sun.
It was in fact a form of lighting, seeming almost artificial, like that of a spotlight or film projector: Every detail of the earthen wall emerged clearly—grainy, furrowed, like a relief. From the hair roots of trees sticking out here and there hung clumps of clay and also a few shreds of moss, from which only now, as the sunlight reached them, for the only time that day, the morning dew was vanishing. (There was a lot of dew on the steppe, though clinging almost exclusively to birds’ feathers and the few mossy spots, but all the more concentrated there, making the moss cushions serviceable as sponges.)
The only thing that diverted his attention at first was the lone shell casing from a hunter’s gun, covered entirely by spiderwebs, including the interior—that was how long it had been lodged in the sand. And he left it there, as if it belonged. And then he also left himself. He left himself behind. And at first he lay there without breathing; didn’t need to for a while.
The earthen niche, its smooth portions more and more lamplight-yellow, its fissured and raised surfaces more and more shadow-black, did his tired eyes good, more than anything green would have. It could also have been the side of a mountain, in some primeval time, beyond or at least outside of any recorded history, and there was the sense of lying stretched out by this prehistoric mountain range, extending almost as far as it did. The current wars were taking place far off on the other side. Sand seeped out of the clay, sand avalanches hurtled toward the valley. How old this world was. Or how young? Just at its beginning, or even before that? The concave vein of clay seemed not to be lit up by the sunset but rather lit from within; it radiated light, was its source. And the clay, displaying every shade of yellow, was the embodiment of light. Dear ancestors. Dear Father. Dear Mother.
From a hole in the clay poked a dragon’s head, a cricket, with an abrupt sustained chirping, while on top of the bank a steppe hunter appeared with his gun, and took aim at him as he lay there, whereupon down on the sunken road my storyteller’s double appeared, promptly shot dead by the hunter. And a grasshopper then took a leap in the air and went from hopping to flying, as he, too, sometimes managed to do, though only in dreams. As it took off, the insect had extended blue wings from under its gray shell, and during its flight had appeared blue all over, but once it landed it promptly became stone-gray again.
From the other side of the sunken road an all-terrain vehicle appeared, another Santana, decorated with streamers for a wedding, which stopped right by him, the driver the storyteller’s son, with his bride, the young festival queen. And his son bent down to him and said, “You didn’t throw me out, Father. I’m the one who went away, of my own accord. I left you, for good. And that’s what you wanted.” And he felt he had to reply to his son: “I’ve incurred great guilt, irreparable guilt!” but he couldn’t get out a single word, whereupon the newlyweds slowly drove on, waving to him. And now a cascade of chestnuts, hard as rocks and just as heavy, rattled down onto the road, striking everywhere but on his head, just where he needed them—and then his child was gone, vanished, and they would never see each other again.
He lay there, weary unto death, facing the groove where he had just had a glimpse of the Creation. His time was up. There was no escaping from this wall now. A snail’s shell jerked oddly along at the foot of the clay wall, as if empty, stood still, rolled on, and continued this way until he saw that periodically a wasp, its yellow hardly visible against the yellow of the clay, would dart down and give it a push, moving the shell forward in its efforts to pull out the snail cadaver. And another wasp had just seized a bee and was rolling around with it in the dust. And as he lay there, he dug out a mushroom that had just emerged from the clay of the ground; when he wanted to break it loose, it proved too heavy for him, indeed became heavier and heavier, and pulled the man who was trying to lift it down into the earth instead, which under the mushroom was hollow—increasing blackness and finally bottomlessness.
And now he broke out in a cold sweat of death. Was there really such a thing? Yes. This cold sweat was more viscous than normal sweat, and came out of all his pores, a sort of water that cut a person off from the external world and prevented the skin from breathing.
And now a shadow appeared on the clay wall lit by the late afternoon sun, not a hard shadow but the shadow of someone who unhurriedly, cautiously, came up behind him and squatted at his back, the shadow of a woman, the most beautiful shadow he’d ever encountered—never had he seen such a kind, warm-hearted shadow!
And this woman’s shadow now said the following to him: “Stop seeking the living here among the dead! You will shake off your speechlessness. Otherwise your not speaking will do you in this very day. Your silence is no mere taciturnity. It’s true that at first, and then for a while afterward, it enlarged the world for you. But the longer you remained alone this way, the more your muteness became a threat to you, and finally life-threatening. Your continued muteness not only makes the present unreal to you, no matter how significant it may appear to you in a given moment, but is also retroactively destroying everything you experienced in the past, even the most significant things—all the way back to childhood. It devalues and destroys your memory, without which you have no business being in the world, and makes you in-significant. You have reached the outer limits of the world, my friend. And you are in danger of ending up beyond the confines of the world. Therefore you will have to make an effort at regaining speech, at recovering words, at recreating sentences, out loud, at least audibly. And even if your speaking is dead wrong and ridiculous: the main thing is to open your mouth. And this very evening, down there in Saragossa. I need your help. Yes, you heard me right: I need your help. But to be able to help me you must open your mouth again!”
