by Peter Handke
* * *
A blow on the back of his head, this time positively tender. And the woman’s shadow disappeared. And when he turned around, there was no one there. And now he had to get away from the steppe.
Now he was in a hurry. He, of all people? Yes. Something he had hardly ever done: He broke into a run.
And now it was downhill all the way. Occasionally he would also leap, without hesitating. Even when something he’d lost long ago flashed up at him, he snatched it from beneath his feet and ran on at once (yet he’d lost this thing—he didn’t say what it was—somewhere else entirely—had a raven served as the transporter again?).
At this speed, his perceptions were even sharper. The steppe lizards, no bigger than a person’s little finger, tailless, scurried away, into the fissures of the rock. The only snake he came upon during that entire time, as thick as an arm and grayish-black, shot with a rattle up a pine trunk that was also grayish-black, and remained there in the exact position of the pharmacy emblem, and both of them, the man here and the snake dangling in the tree there, had the same gaze: out of the corners of their eyes, fixed.
Moths then flew up like dust from the gray of the steppe, the moth the same gray as the steppe, but when one of these late butterflies spread its wings, they were translucent, incised on the inner surface with a moon, stars, planetary orbits, and somewhat resembling stained-glass windows, not medieval but modern ones. Meanwhile the air was abuzz with universal signals, coming from small cracks and holes in the earth: toad calls and cricket chirps. A few bats zigzagged by, and he became aware of how much he’d missed them. He wouldn’t turn back again. “Better to die than to turn back!”
* * *
One of the first signs of the city was a couple of cross-steppe bicyclists, shooting downhill with brakes screeching from horizon to horizon. “With the stick I had with me, I killed them as I ran past,” my storyteller said, “and since then the steppe’s been more or less free of this plague.” Another sign of the city’s proximity: the found objects, smaller and larger, scooped up from the ground, which he tossed as far ahead of him as he could in his unceasing forward motion, to give himself boost after boost—at first mostly rocks or sticks, these more and more replaced by empty bottles, tin cans, batteries, and chunks of brick.
Before a final ridge, with the city beyond it, and probably way below it, still not visible at all, he heard from the distance a thousand-voiced singing, a chorale, which seemed to come from a monumental cloister: It turned out to be the cars, zooming by on the highway one right behind the other, the evening rush hour.
The first glimpse he got of the city was the airport down below, at his feet, with the landing lights on the runways pointing like fingers into the distance, and in the sky above it a traffic helicopter, seemingly hovering in one place, its lights flashing, while he stood there, directly across from the bulky machine, at the same altitude, in the high steppe grass, holding a steppe potato he’d snatched up somewhere, and at his back, above the deserted expanse, the waxing, almost lightless moon, while before him, to the left and right, lay the highway and, crossing it, the railroad tracks: back to the spandrel world.
At least he hadn’t been going in a circle the whole time. For this city was situated completely differently from his point of departure, Santa Fe: It was still on the steppe characteristic of all of Spain, but in the lowlands, where the herb steppe gave way to a gone-to-seed savanna; and that was fine: no more headache. And upon arriving, he’d blown out the blockage in his ears. Although this city was just a provincial capital, you could have fit ten Santa Fes or nocturnal-wind towns into it, and was it simply another coincidence that it was called Saragossa? No, this was the real Saragossa, with the Ebro River far off there in the lowland background.
* * *
Now it was a matter of getting across this large city of Saragossa, all the way to the road leading out of the city in the north. And he’d been walking so long already that he wanted to keep going this way to the end, and straight ahead.
What turned out to be a problem were not the distances but the obstacles in all directions. Thus he had another adventure: To get from the country-wide steppe into the spandrel world of the present, on foot, could be quite adventurous, even more adventurous than finding your way out of it on foot.
And besides, he’d made a bet with himself: that he’d see if he could stay as much as possible on the steppe, even on his way through the city, until he reached his destination; here in Spain that wasn’t inconceivable, in his experience. But the steppe was preserved primarily in the in-between patches created by the various transportation lines. And so he scrambled over highway barriers, waited for that one moment in a hundred when you could reach the other shore, running and jumping; in the same fashion he crossed the railway embankment, then had the next loop of the highway to get over, then the airport, then the second rail line, the local one, always by way of crabgrass spandrels, almost bare, getting narrower and narrower, more pointed, smaller, and so on, deep into the city and then almost all the way out again.
“I won’t add any more details here,” my storyteller said, “but if some day you want to write a very modern adventure book, it should be about a journey on foot from out in the open country—where that still exists—into the cities.”
As far as his own adventure was concerned, he mentioned only the many animals he came upon while crossing the spandrels, all the more as the space grew narrower, more hemmed in by the transportation lines, and also more species, more varied. The very ones he’d been missing on the steppe, the larger breeds, he encountered here on these tiny islands of savanna, shrinking more and more toward the center of the city, and finally enclosed like cages, which as a rule had the shape of triangles, with increasingly acute angles, in the end reduced to no more than a line: There, and nowhere out on the steppe, crouched the hares, massive, and next to them, fearless, stood the occasional fox by its burrow, likewise a white weasel—as if they all knew that in their grassy enclosures, railed and embanked in, they were sheltered from any eyes, except perhaps from above, from airplanes.
* * *
Although he merely brushed the center of Saragossa, he realized that there, as when he’d arrived in the nocturnal-wind town, a festival was in progress. The doors of the many churches were opened wide, the interiors brightly lit, in contrast to the shops, which were all closed (among them most conspicuously the pharmacies—his eye sought them out—for here in the city, unlike in Santa Fe earlier, all of them had their iron shutters rolled down).
Yes, it was the annual festival of the patron saint of Saragossa, Nuestra Señora del Pilar, Our Lady of the Pillar. That meant it must be almost mid-October by now? So he’d already been away from home so long?
He ran faster, as if he could make up for lost time that way. He had no eyes for this festival. And from another side street he suddenly heard the sound of the steel-rod flute, even shriller here among the city buildings than out on the steppe, frenetic, rising above the rooftops, the unvarying sequence of notes repeated at intervals determined by a few steps and pushes of the peddler’s cart, also wilder, unfettered, bold, and at the same time expressing an obsequious politeness and distance-preserving formality, for after all, the peddler wanted to do business, holiday or no. What mattered to the itinerant salesman was not music but crying and offering his wares. The sound penetrated all the commotion of the festival.
So the peddler had made the same journey as he had, straight across one province and then into the other, and then another, and now, after all those weeks, with each moving along in his own way, they’d reached the metropolis at the same moment.
The piercing sound continued, in a distant parallel alley, and always level with him, heading toward the Río Ebro. And for the first time in his story, for the first time altogether—in how long?—tears came to his eyes. And at that moment he wanted to go straight to the peddler and buy something from him.
But then they ran into each other anyway
on the Puente Piedra, and he had the peddler sharpen his knife for him.
* * *
Meanwhile night had fallen, and Saragossa revealed itself as a nocturnal-wind town like the other one. He went to his prearranged rendezvous: instead of to some palace of the kings of Navarra, to a bus station on the outskirts of town, beyond and to the north of the Ebro.
Although he didn’t feel tired, now and then his knees gave way under him. The bus station was a sprawling structure without walls at the end of a road leading out of the city, lined with apartment houses on one side, holding back the beginning of a new expanse of empty steppe on the other. The station roof was supported by a large number of thick, round concrete columns, each of which marked the departure gate for the various destinations: Huesca, Lérida, Tudela, and even more distant ones, beyond the Pyrenees. At their base, the columns were surrounded by pedestals. Although there was a glassed-in, well-lit waiting area, the pedestals were occupied by passengers, on each of the more than two dozen pedestals usually just one passenger—a different sort of pillar event from the festival in town. Quite a few passengers were also standing, leaning their backs against the columns.
He sat down on his pedestal, the one closest to the road, where the breeze from the passing trucks buffeted him. The buses pulling into the station shrank by contrast with the rows of columns to the size of small vehicles, and emerged from there as giants again. The apartment houses along the road seemed almost depopulated. Apparently this festival was one of those that focus more on particular parts of town, so the others seemed all the more deserted. Shreds of plastic fluttered toward the outskirts. Balls of thistle spores, silvery, floated toward town, together with the tangles of briars familiar from the steppe, which rolled along the ground, occasionally skipping. Was time no longer passing?
And now he felt a hand on his shoulder, warm and gentle as almost never before. And likewise another hand was placed on his brow, and another hand. Many hands placed themselves on him, and then also draped a coat over his shoulders—he was freezing. And now the woman, his pursuer, said, “So, you’re asleep.”
* * *
The vehicle that had come to a halt in front of him, its folding doors open, inviting him to enter, was not a Santana all-terrain vehicle, also not the almost bus-length Santana he had seen before, but a real bus, in no way different from the others in the station, except that no one rode off in it but the two of them, she at the wheel, and he next to her, on that isolated seat seemingly meant for a tour guide, which swiveled and was considerably lower than hers.
Here he now sat, facing backward, for the entire time they were on the road together; at night he fixed his gaze on the empty rows of seats, by day also on the areas receding from view and even more on those that from this perspective came into view, not to be seen ahead of time but only when the bus was level with them: their individual features easier to grasp in their context, appearing first large, then growing smaller as they receded. Or was such a position—facing backward—a matter of growing older? “At any rate,” my storyteller said, “I resolved that if I should ever again in my life set out across the continents, I would sit facing away from the direction in which I was traveling, if possible—but still at a window.”
* * *
But the two haven’t driven off yet. First the woman sits down next to him on the pedestal in the Saragossa bus station and says, “Well?” He has the feeling he’s seeing her from the front for the first time. She’s beautiful. And that’s something very rare, and not only for the transitional time when this story takes place. And as she then listens to him, as he takes a bite from the bitterest of his bitter steppe mushrooms, and lets the bitterness spread from the middle of his tongue to the tips of his hair and his toes, then finally forces his lips apart and for the first time—since when?—makes his voice heard, she seems to be taking the words right out of his mouth. He breaks out in a sweat, different from the cold sweat of a while earlier. She laughs. Is she laughing at him? His heart begins to bleed. So there is such a thing? There is. So finally his heart is bleeding, and he can speak again, first only in a cry: “What do you want of me? What do you want of me, dear one? Tell me what you want of me!”
Along with his recovered ability to speak, or in the moment before that, love shot into him, accompanied by the thought: “Too late. Much too late, much too late!” And then he said approximately the following: “Crap. Him again. Her again. Well, well. So what. Crap. Not long now. When was that? Someone was fond of me once. Not just one person. And not just once. Crap. And I? Fond only for the moment. Then out of sight, out of mind. Was fond and then alone again. Unavailable. Crap. Life for! Life for whom? The noble types. Oh, the many noble types! Who will save them? Who will protect their rights? Something that awakens them from the dead! A monument to the peddler on the steppe. Crap. How happy I once was that I had children. Consecrated by them. My wife also my child. My mother also my child. Father, my dear child! Grandfather, strange little boy. Crap. Everything will be all right again. Everything was never all right. Today it’s actually better than ever before. Why does the feast of the Ascension come before the celebration of the birth? ‘I don’t recall’: That was the standard response of my father’s mother. Or of my mother’s mother? ‘I don’t recall.’ And the way she said that, it remained one of the most wonderful sentences I’ve ever heard. ‘I don’t recall.’ All her sons but one lost in the war. She died quietly of cancer. Oh, crap! And that I was just standing on the stone bridge over the Ebro—that was also long ago. And if I don’t get home soon now, I won’t ever get home.”
And then the two of them fall into each other’s arms. Or she catches him. And since he’s heavy, there’s a hollow thud. But even then they don’t set out yet. First they have coffee in the bar at the bus station, not coffee from the blue mountain on Jamaica, and in a glass instead of a cup. In the restaurant there the winner removes a feather from his hair—not one from an eagle of the steppe—clips his fingernails—no one is watching—switches the shoes that he’d put on the wrong feet—how could he walk so far with them that way?—and gives him an outfit that he changes into in the men’s room.
Is this suit one of her deceased husband’s? She says nothing; altogether hardly speaks; speaks only once, already in the bus, in the moment before they start up: “In your medieval epics there are cases in which a man who loves a woman wrong, and wrongfully takes her as his wife, receives a magic potion that gives him the illusion of possessing her at night, and that for his whole life. Nowadays, however, this impression occurs and persists without a magic potion—a long-standing and widespread phenomenon. The man I was with merely imagined he was with me. And how insulting even that illusion was! Therefore, as soon as he was dead, I had his things removed from my house. And before his death I made sure he understood that everything between him and me was all a chimera. And long before my husband’s death it was decided! If I should ever be inflamed with love for someone again, the first thing I would do is beat him up, at first sight!”
* * *
The driver didn’t take my storyteller home by the most direct route. Where they turned off each time, he didn’t tell me, and I didn’t want to know, either.
What did the two of them experience together? He told me only about what they heard and saw. Even shared smelling or sniffing was out of the question for his way of storytelling. “Outside Pamplona we saw the first snow on the Pyrenees. In Biarritz we listened to the sea by the lighthouse bluff; it was so wild there, with a surf that seemed to be pounding from all sides, that we thought we were way out in the ocean on a tiny atoll. When we were sitting in a village near Toulouse, between the Garonne and the Canal du Midi, a child came and brought us things all afternoon—apples, stones, feathers, broken cassette tapes, rubber bands, two wine grapes, two little fishes, a dead mole, and finally a drawing that purported to be of us. In the salt works near Narbonne we climbed up the ridge of the salt-bearing mountain, sat on top and stared into the empty, rocky cou
ntryside, while beneath us salt crystals crunched, louder and louder. A day’s journey farther to the north we heard, somewhere in a deciduous forest, a screeching like the brakes of cross-country bikes, high above our heads, and saw the limb of a tree lying in the fork of the tree next to it, and as the wind rubbed the two limbs together and rocked them, it made a screeching and a whining and now and then also a sighing. One day and one night later we spent hours watching two cats courting. And having left a few more river, mountain, and climate divides and borders behind us, we stopped on the almost abandoned pass through the Alps and looked out the curved windows of the bus, which magnified the view, out over a snow-covered, smooth white mountain landscape, stretching in undulating rises, without rock outcroppings and cliffs, under the bluest sky and the warmest, quietest sun, and, in the few places where it formed hollows and curves, signs of the courses and meanders of small brooks under the deep snow—an additional shimmer of sun, a ‘blaze,’ they used to call it, and, where two trickles probably converged in the depths of the eternal snow, in a broad dip that was traced especially gently by the snow amidst the pure white hummocks, one small area in shadow, to which, however, the blaze also penetrated, shimmering more warmly than anywhere else, hot. And we didn’t drive constantly or just stop, but also walked now and then together over hill and dale, and I think anyone who’d seen us that way, even one who’d long since stopped dreaming about men and women, would have felt his heart beat higher at the sight of the two of us going along—at least for a moment, at least from afar!”
And on such a walk she spoke another of her sentences during the trip home: “That’s why you attracted me so, for better or for worse, because I once heard it said of you that you were the only man between the Untersberg and the Straits of Penedes who seemed as though he had a story to tell, even though it was a far sadder one than that of Aeneas and his flight from the burning Troy.” And during another such walk together she said to him, “I lay in the wooden shack on the edge of the steppe as long as was necessary for me to become pure again.”
