The Afternoon of a Writer

by Peter Handke

  Although his house was on the hilltop, with windows opening out in all directions, he hadn't really looked into the distance that day. A distant view came to him only as his descent brought him among people. (At home he avoided the roof terrace for which visitors envied him, because the panorama made him feel too remote; he used it only to hang washing.) Now, in the mountains out of which the river burst, he saw a glassy snow field; and on the other side, at the edge of the plain, where the outer suburbs of the city were situated, a curved moraine that might have been sketched in with charcoal. It seemed to him that he might reach out and touch the moss and lichen under the snow, the brook cutting across the moraine, and on its banks outcroppings of ice, which made a clicking sound as the water rushed through. Beyond the housing developments on the periphery, he could see a row of smaller buildings, which, as he continued to look at them, moved through the countryside. He made out the Autobahn with its inaudible trucks, and for a moment he felt a vibration in his arms, as if he were driving one of them. Near the smokestacks of the industrial zone, in a strip of no-man's-land overgrown with bushes, a red light flared, and the dark container behind it turned out to be a stopped train, which, when the signals changed, set itself, at first almost imperceptibly, in motion, and grew larger as it approached. It would soon be pulling into the station, and most of the passengers had already put on their coats. A child's hand looked for a grownup's hand. The travelers who were going farther stretched out their legs. The waiter in the almost empty dining car, who had been on duty since early morning, stepped out into the corridor, cranked down the window, and cooled his face in the breeze, while the dishwasher, an elderly meridional, sat in his cubbyhole, smoking and staring impassively into space. Along with these distant sights ("Distance, my thing") the writer saw, above the roofs of the inner city, above the dome of a church, standing out against the sky, a stone statue holding an iron palm branch, surrounded by secondary figures as though executing a round dance.

  At the bottom of the hill the writer descended a stairway bordered by centuries-old urban houses. Here and there in the upper section, terraced gardens leapt like a row of drawbridges against the railing of the stairs. Farther down, close to the rocky slope, lights were on in all the rooms, as they had probably been all day. From each stair landing, one could look into a lower story of one of the houses. A table lamp cast a circle of light on a few open books, which the man sitting motionless at the table seemed to be staring at rather than reading. A woman was standing there in her coat and hat, still carrying a heavy shopping bag, as though she had just come in. A white-haired man with suspenders and rolled-up shirt sleeves walked slowly across the room with a coffeepot, followed a few steps farther down by a large tear-stained face on a television screen behind a torn curtain. From the last landing, one could see into a suite of basement offices: fluorescent lighting, rubber trees, filing cabinets, picture postcards on the wall; quite a number of people who belonged there and one helpless outsider, who kept moving out of the employees' way; a man's casually knotted tie, a woman's loose hair, branches of winter jasmine on the windowsill gave the place a homey look. The climate seemed to have grown warmer from landing to landing: high up on the bare rock, icicles as thick as pillars; here below, along with the usual box trees and spruce hedges, the gardens revealed an occasional palm trunk or a glistening round laurel tree, protected to be sure by plastic sheeting. Thus the writer, confident of being unobserved, made, as it were, his entrance into the city. His goal was a restaurant, not so much because he was hungry or thirsty as because he felt the need to sit in a public place and be waited on for a while; after the long hours alone in his room, he even felt that he had it coming to him.

  ON REACHING ground level, he avoided the crowded thoroughfares by means of a detour through the back courtyards, which formed a wide arc around the inner city. One such courtyard, belonging to a school, merged with a second, that of the museum, which in turn debouched into the courtyard of a monastery, from which a passage led to a cemetery that was left unlocked and served exclusively as a park. Since all the buildings were of the same type and the successive courtyards were of roughly the same shape and size, one had the impression that all this was a single compound, cut off from the rest of the world, a city within the city, and that each courtyard led one deeper into a city with no rear exit. For some moments, at the sight of a pump house with a bulbiform wooden roof, the writer thought he was back in Moscow, where he had once spent a whole afternoon in a hidden precinct of this kind, advancing from passage to passage, each more spacious and more open to silence than the last, and then in some far distant place, sitting alone on a long bench watching the children in a sheltered concrete play area, and finally, in the innermost courtyard, a kind of lawn studded with birches, washing his face and hands at an outdoor tap. Surprisingly, it was almost exclusively at times when he was writing that he was able to divest the city he lived in of its limits. Then little became big; names lost their meaning; the light-colored sand in the cracks between cobblestones became the foothills of a dune; a pallid blade of grass became part of a savanna. In one of the schoolrooms a class was still in progress; only the teacher was visible, standing on a platform and waving his arms in front of a shiny blackboard. The base of the museum was decorated with marble reliefs, showing pairs of dolphins swimming toward or away from each other. In the courtyard of the monastery a monk, wearing sandals in spite of the cold, was pruning a cherry tree, and in the cemetery there were not only Latin but Greek inscriptions as well.

  The series of enclosed courtyards widened into a procession of open squares. These, too, merged with one another, each a kind of forecourt to the next and larger one—which was always unpredictable; you turned the corner of a church, a public building, or a mere newspaper stand and there it was. But the last and largest of the squares, despite the colonnade at its entrance, had none of the quality of a main square: it consisted of unpaved, yellow clay and sloped gently toward the center, as evidenced by the radial grooves that the rain had gouged out of the ground. From square to square the writer had slackened his pace, and now he stopped. It seemed to him that he was not going away from his work but that it was accompanying him; that, now far from his desk, he was still at work. But what does "work" mean? Work, he thought, is something in which material is next to nothing, structure almost everything; something that rotates on its axis without the help of a flywheel; something whose elements hold one another in suspense; something open and accessible to all, which cannot be worn out by use.

  At that point, the writer almost broke into a run. Although the square, only a stone's throw from the river, was the lowest point in the city, he crossed it in a long diagonal, as if it had been a high plateau. The ice crackled under the soles of his shoes, a delicate sound, which quickly spread over the entire surface. The ground was covered with the needles of the Christmas trees that had been sold year after year on this square; stamped into the clay, they themselves had long been clay-yellow. Tomorrow, perhaps, the whole square would be filled with one more pseudo-forest of spruce and fir saplings, through which it would be almost impossible to find one's way.

  He couldn't help noticing how shaky he was when he asked for a paper at the newsstand in the arcade leading to the river. He could hardly finish his sentence, and when the change was held out to him he had difficulty taking it. Buying a paper, he said to himself for the hundredth time, had been his first mistake of the day; he resolved that he would just leaf through it, if possible while walking, and then throw it into a trash can. Just glancing at the headlines made him momentarily speechless; in response to the vendor's small talk, the best he could manage was a nod. Seized with a sudden hatred of mankind, he winced when accidentally grazed by a passerby, and looked to one side to avoid speaking to an acquaintance who had recently told him the story of his life; by way of self-justification he "blacked out." As a rule, these blackouts were put on.

  On the river bridge he encountered the wind, and with
it he went on. Here under the great open vault the air was perceptibly colder than in the courtyards and on the squares. Tatters of mist floated over the almost black water, and in his thoughts ice floes crashed together as they had one glacial winter; it had then been so cold on the bridge that he had literally been obliged to take flight. And in much the same way he relived a summer incident: the river had overflowed its banks, and he saw a little boy running back and forth below the river wall; he had thought the child was playing because of the way he hopped while running; the rushing water prevented the writer from hearing the child, but then he saw by the movements of the child's lips that he was shouting for help. He had fallen off the wall. Again the writer's shoulders felt the strain of pulling the child up; and again, looking across at the deserted Winter Promenade, he saw the little figure in short trousers, running away with flying hair beneath the summer foliage.

  In the middle of the bridge, the writer stopped and leaned against the rail. The flagpole holes were empty. Downstream, the horizon gleamed in the strong light; that church steeple in the distance belonged to one of the villages. The many city bridges, one behind the other, all seemed to be on the same level, and the writer had the impression that the cars on the second bridge and the railroad train on the third were moving over the busy footbridge in the foreground. At the bends in the river the dividing line between land and water seemed accentuated by a shimmering. In the midst of the traffic the evening bells were ringing in the weekend, and the sound hung long in the air; all the vehicles in the city seemed to start up again after stopping for a moment, and the gulls above the bridge resumed their apparently interrupted cries.

  Making his way upstream on the opposite shore, the writer thought he would keep walking for a long time. Wasn't it just habit that made one stop for food or rest? Here at the water's edge, the waves communicated their strength to him. He was seized with a yearning—after all these years, the word still had meaning—to live again in the foreign metropolises where, even when walking about alone, he knew that a few people in the inner and outer districts were concerned, each in his own way, with the same questions, and were pursuing the same aims, as himself; he had not wanted to meet these doubles, he was content to share the ground under their feet, the wind, the weather, daybreak and nightfall with them. Why was it so hard to imagine that there might be such people in the cities of his homeland? Why in this country did he tend to believe the anecdote about the two writers, one of whom had moved out of his apartment solely because the other passed below his windows day after day?

  And now, on the same riverbank as before, he actually ran into the old man who had introduced himself as a "colleague." All he knew about the man was that he had been first a teacher, then a soldier in the war, then again a teacher, and that now in his retirement he wrote poems. As though he had been waiting a long time for this opportunity, the old man began at once, in lieu of greeting, to recite one of them in a loud, almost threatening voice, and when the poem was finished proceeded to talk without changing his rhythm or enunciation. This of course made it impossible for the writer to take in what he was saying. He heard only the words, not their meaning. But he saw the old man's naked eyes, wide open as though blind; the discolored irises, with rings of color only at the edges; and a pulsating in the pouch under one eye. When they separated and the writer looked after his "colleague," words were still pouring from him in a high-pitched, seemingly endless hum which might have meant enthusiasm or might have meant protest.

  The restaurant was by the river; it was almost empty and the writer found a seat with a view of the water: the current seemed swift, as though the river had just burst through the mountains. The writer had the feeling that he was still walking across bridges among the silhouettes of the passersby. Before turning his attention to the newspaper, he took a deep breath and imprinted the most distant horizon on his mind to steady himself. But again it was no use. With the first sentence, he lost all power of thought. He often tried to persuade himself that it was his duty to keep informed by reading newspapers. (During the period of his vow not to read the papers, he had missed the news that some of his heroes and saints had died, and found out when it was too late for reflection.) But actually his thumbing through the papers was an addiction. He seldom read a complete paragraph; at the most he would race through a paper, article after article, in a state of combined frenzy and catalepsy. He kept commanding himself to start all over again and absorb the whole of at least one story. Then, however, it became apparent to him that in merely glancing through it he had taken in the entire content; but, alas, the story did not, like certain poems, "end deep in his soul"—on the contrary, it left him utterly indifferent. At this point the addict—suffering from an addiction that was not even a pleasure—thought longingly of the months in New York, when a long strike had stopped all newspapers from appearing. There was only a thin bulletin, calling itself City News, which in a few lines reported every happening on earth that might have been worth knowing. Every day the writer had studied this City News and when "at last!" as most people gasped, great piles of the "international organ" became available at every subway entrance, he deeply regretted the passing of the modest little bulletin. How superfluous all the opinions and special reports, all the columnists and commentators seemed. They left the reader with a buzzing of wasps in his ears. And worst of all were the writers on "cultural" matters, who seldom opened their mouths without delivering an opinion. Yes, he had recognized now and then that criticism could be an art in its own right, the art of finding the right angle from which to look at a work—one might also speak of it as "vision" and the conscientious elaboration of this vision. But as a rule, such pages were at best filled-in schemas and at worst imposture, in which appreciation has long since given way to easily discernible ulterior motives; where criticism has been crowded out by machination. In the writer's youthful dreams, literature had been the freest of all countries and the thought of it the only possible way of escaping from the vileness and submissions of daily life to a proud equality, and no doubt many had pursued some such dream. But now all of them, as he saw it, were stuck in the most despotic of all petty principalities, either clustered in unthinking cronyism or dispersed by deadly enmities; even the most obstreperous among them had quickly degenerated into diplomats and let themselves be governed by undiscriminating commissars in whom the lust for power had taken the place of taste. Once the writer was at the deathbed of a fellow writer. What interested his dying colleague more than anything else was what was being said in the cultural section of the newspapers. Did these battles of opinion take his mind off his illness by infuriating him or making him laugh? Did they put him in mind of an eternal repetition, preferable after all to what was in store for him? There was more to it than that. Even in his hopeless situation, far-removed as he was from the editorial offices, he was their prisoner; more than his nearest and dearest, the critics and editors were the object of his dreams; and in the intervals when he was free from pain, he would ask, since by then he was incapable of reading, what one publication or another had said about some new book. The intrigues, and the almost pleasurable fury they aroused in the sufferer—who saw through them—brought a kind of world, a certain permanence into the sickroom, and the man at his bedside understood his vituperating or silently nodding friend as well as if it had been his own self lying there. But later, when the end was near and the dying man still insisted on having opinions read out to him from the latest batch of newspapers, the witness vowed that he would never let things come to such a pass with him as they had with his image and likeness. Never again would he involve himself in this circuit of classifications and judgments, the substance of which was almost exclusively the playing off of one writer or school against another. Over the years since then, he had derived pride and satisfaction from staying on the outside and carrying on by his own strength rather than at the expense of rivals. The mere thought of returning to the circuit or to any of the persistently warring cliques
made him feel physically ill. Of course, he would never get entirely away from them, for even today, so long after his vow, he suddenly caught sight of a word that he at first mistook for his name. But today at least he was glad—as he would not have been years ago—to have been mistaken. Lulled in security, he leafed through the local section and succeeded in giving his mind to every single news item.

  When at last he raised his eyes from his paper, he experienced a violent feeling of loss. The waitress's little boy had been sitting all the while over his homework at the table beside the kitchen door. Instead of looking at the child for any length of time, he had intermittently registered its presence. And now the place at the table was empty. On the chair where the child had sat, tracing letters in his copy-book that he would show to his mother from time to time when she passed, there was only his bright-colored schoolbag. The writer's newspaper reading seemed to have destroyed his field of vision; the edge of the neighboring table no longer presented a line. With a jolt he thrust his paper aside. Then, seeing that in spite of himself he kept squinting at it out of the comers of his eyes, he covered it with the menu. Finally, catching himself blindly reading the menu, he removed both newspaper and menu from his line of sight by putting them on a chair seat under the table.

  He thought of leaving but remained sitting, alone with a glass of wine, from which he took a sip at intervals. He didn't want to go out in that condition, with dulled senses that made him incapable of perceiving or thinking about anything. More and more people came in, but he saw only legs and torsos, not a single face. Luckily he was unobserved. The waitress had probably known his name at one time, but had long since forgotten it. For a moment the river outside sparkled—no, the sparkling was only a little spot in the water; then a flock of sparrows flew into a tree on the bank, their many outspread wings joined to form a cloud that vanished at once from the sky. A moment later the tiny birds sat motionless in the branches; motionless, too, were the crows in the crown of the neighboring tree and even the normally restless gulls on the railings of the bridge. Though there was not a flake in sight, snow seemed to be falling on them. And through this living picture—the barely perceptible movement of wings, the barely open beaks, the twinkle of tiny eyes—the summer landscape in which he had set the story he was writing at the time opened up to him. White flowers no larger than shirt buttons rained down from the elder bushes, the fruit pods of the walnut trees were beginning to fill out. The jet of the fountain met the cumulus cloud overhead. In a wheat field near which sheep were grazing, the ears of grain crackled in the heat; the city streets were covered with poplar fluff so light and airy that one could see through to the asphalt; and over the grass in the park there passed a droning which became a humming when the bumblebee that went with it vanished into a flower. The swimmer in the river plunged his head into the water for the first time that year and once again the air and the sun and the feel of his nostrils gave the writer a sense of temporary reprieve. Once it had been the other way around: one summer, while daydreaming a winter story, he had reached into the tall grass for a snowball, wanting to throw it playfully at the cat.