The Afternoon of a Writer

by Peter Handke

  At the edge of the city, he sat down on the bench in a bus shelter. The more erect he sat and the more slowly he breathed, the warmer he felt. The falling snow scraped against the wall of the shelter. Like the bench, it was made of gray weathered wood; the back wall was covered with a thick layer of tattered posters and meaningless scraps of white lettering. Just behind the bus terminus, a road turned off to the Autobahn. In the brightly lit snack bar at the fork, a man with a mustache and a linen chef's hat, which only on closer scrutiny turned out to be paper, was moving about irresolutely amid mist, steam, and tongues of flame in the absence of customers; behind him, beside the tin cans and paper cups, an old-fashioned wall clock with curved hands and Roman numerals. The motordrome for student drivers on the man-made hill beyond the Autobahn was closed for the winter, as was the nearby camping ground. The few poplars farther on, each with the silhouette of a bird in it, were a vestige of a tree-lined avenue. Then came a scraggly meadow, into which jutted the concrete surface of a former military road still bearing the imprint of tank treads. This whole area at the edge of the city, with the concentrated din of traffic coming from all directions, struck him as a place one could live in, comparable to the region on the fringe of dreams, where he would gladly have dwelt forever. He would have liked to live in one of the scattered cottages with a back garden merging directly with the meadow, or over there above the warehouse, where the yellow light of a desk lamp had just come on. Pencils, a table, a chair. Freshness and strength emanated from edges, as in an everlasting age of pioneering.

  Suddenly he felt the need to read something in this particular place. All he had on him was the picture postcard from America. But, despite the harsh street lighting, he was unable to decipher his one-time friend's writing, which seemed more and more to imitate the zigzags of his inexplicable wanderings around the continent—on every card a different postmark. While the pictures continued to show more or less identical samples of untrammeled nature, a canyon or a sierra, the last recognizable letters vanished from the text. Only recently, parallel series of dots, semicircles, and wavy lines had suggested arabesques; now the lines had lost all shape and were so far apart that it was hard to conceive of any connection between them. Only the address and the "As ever" and signature at the end were still written as plainly as before. What the obscure scribble communicated to the addressee was a furious effort, manifested by the pressure of the pen, the split lines, and the blots—as though the writer had repeatedly and vainly assaulted the paper. But this mutilated cuneiform, in which all trace of the human hand had been extinguished, also expressed something else: a threat, an omen of death aimed at the addressee.

  On the' city side of the shelter, a last little side road led to a housing development. His eyesight sharpened by his attempts to decipher the postcard, the writer raised his head. A patch of daytime sky could still be seen in the traffic mirror on the corner, a small bright rectangle in the surrounding darkness. In it the houses of the development, all with steep roofs, seemed greatly reduced in size and at the same time raised, with concave pagoda-like roofs. The street itself, which was straight in reality, seemed to bend and spread out, and where it came to an end in the yard between two houses presented a discernible perspective, as though it led still farther. The mirror image had no season: the snow in the air could have been flying seeds, the snow on the ground could have been fallen blossoms. The rounding of the image gave emptiness a radiance, and gave the objects in this emptiness—the glass-recycling center, the garbage cans, the bicycle stands—a holiday feel, as though in looking at them one emerged into a clearing. The animated beings in this image also seemed transformed. The mirror brought the grown-ups and children outside the grocery store closer together and accentuated the differences in their sizes. Standing there quietly together, they had time; and on the road, instead of a car, a single enormous bird appeared: circling out of the brightness, it flew directly at the beholder (and passed him in the darkness, tiny and twittering). The rectangular playground at the edge of the development was transformed into an oval. At the moment it was not in use, but in the emptiness a swing was still moving; the writer watched it until the aftereffect of the child's motion had dwindled to a mere trembling of ropes in the snowy wind. "Emptiness, my guiding principle. Emptiness, my beloved."

  THOUGH NOTHING much had happened, he felt that he had seen and experienced enough that day—thus securing his tomorrow. For today he required no more, no sight or conversation, and above all nothing new. Just to rest, to close his eyes and ears; just to inhale and exhale would be effort enough.

  He wished it was bedtime. Enough of being in the light and out of doors; he wanted to be in the dark, in the house, in his room. But he had also had enough of being alone; he felt, as time passed, that he was experiencing every variety of madness and that his head was bursting. He recalled how, years ago, when it had been his habit to take afternoon walks on lonely bypaths, a strange uneasiness had taken possession of him, leading him to believe that he had dissolved into the air and ceased to exist. Thus, wishing on the one hand to have no further experience that day, and on the other hand to make sure that, far from being out of his mind, he was, as he had discovered time and again in company, one of the few more or less sane individuals at large, he went to a bar at the edge of town which he privately thought of as the "gin mill." It was a place he frequented now and then during his working months. He even had his place there, in a niche near the jukebox, offering a view of an intersection and the used-car lot behind it. But today, when he had pushed through the crowd, he found that his niche had been bricked over. For a moment he thought he had come to the wrong place, but then he recognized, one after another, the faces that could be associated only with this particular room, with this smoke and artificial light. (If he had met them individually by day in the city, he would not have known where to place them.) As he made room for himself and looked around, he recalled certain particulars concerning each one of them. Not a few had told him the whole story of their lives, most of which he had forgotten by the next day. What he remembered were certain turns of phrase, exclamations, gestures, intonations. The first had once blurted out: "When I'm right, I get excited; when I'm wrong, I lie"; the second went to Mass every Sunday because it always gave him the cold shivers; the third, a woman, referred to each of her rapidly changing lovers as her "fiancé"; the fourth, spraying his listeners with saliva, had cried out: "I'm lost!"; the fifth was in the habit of saying that he had achieved all his aims in life—what the writer particularly remembered about him was that he had once touched the writer's wrist, a kind of nudge one might have called it, with a tenderness possible only for a man on the brink of despair. This group of people was as nondescript as the bar itself. In one of the two rooms, stag's antlers side by side with a color photo of a Chinese junk; in the other, a stucco ceiling fit for a villa over a slightly raised rustic dance floor. The usual stolid-looking habitués' table in one corner was always occupied by the same people, but they had nothing in common: the salesman in the silk suit sat next to the former owner in felt slippers, who now lived in a room on the upper floor; his neighbor was a veteran of the Foreign Legion who had changed into the uniform of a security guard; and his opposite was an unemployed ship's steward, invariably clad in a tracksuit, accompanied by his fiancée, a nurse (under her chair, a motorcycle helmet). Everyone else in the two rooms might just as well have been sitting at that table. The one thing they probably had in common was that every one of them had thought of writing a book of at least a thousand pages about his life, "beginning at birth!" But if asked about the content, they would refer as a rule to some trifling incident, to something they had seen from the window, a hut burning in the night, rivers of mud in the roadway after a rainfall, but often with deep feeling, as though these trifles stood for a whole long life.

  The writer's evening in the gin mill began well for him. The others pretended not to notice him, but at the same time they perceptibly made room for him, w
herever he happened to be. They had come to realize that he came here, not to observe them or to "collect material," but most likely because his existence was as marginal as theirs. As he pressed the buttons of the jukebox after a day spent looking for words, he felt relieved to be operating with mere numbers. Even before the song started—what he wanted now was a song sung by a woman's voice—the machine communicated its buzzing and vibration to him. Although he heard very little of the music through the noise, he occasionally recognized a 'particular interval, and that was enough. One of the cardplayers kept looking up at the invisible heavens, while the others, firmly gripping their cards, kept him in the corners of their eyes. The commuters at the table by the door were waiting for the last bus back to their villages. The one unoccupied table had a RESERVED sign on it; it was even set in anticipation of guests who evidently had something to celebrate, for the owner's daughter, who had learned the trade in a very different establishment, conjured up large napkins which opened like fans as she set them down. The cat, which was sleeping between the potted plants on the windowsill, was so much like his own that for a moment the writer thought it had come here ahead of him. Through the opening between the window curtains he could watch the steady flow of evening buses, jam-packed with seated and standing passengers. And through the misted panes he was able for an instant to see each individual face in its diversity, and in that same instant he remembered how once, looking up from his paper after long immersion, he had seen every single leaf of the tree outside his window and at the same time all the leaves together, leaf for leaf, shape for shape. A summer of joyful work, and now in his imagining he unfolded a slow procession of images: from the stone stairway flanked by fern fronds, all unrolled except for one with the coiled shape of a crosier, to the high plateau with the cloud shadows, where the buzzing of bees in a tree suggested the unisonal humming of a human chorus, from there to a road where a cyclist, blinded by the fly in his eye, braked abruptly, and past the junction of the three paths, down to the lake, black and deserted before the storm, on the shore of which an old man in a straw hat was sitting with his barefoot grandson in the shelter of a kiosk when a wind squall sent a great icicle crashing at their feet, and in the end a glowworm circled through the night-black garden and flew into the dark, open house, lighting up the comers . . . in one of which a grasshopper was sitting. Did such imagining in processions of forms take him out of present reality? Or did it, on the contrary, disentangle and clarify the present, form connections between isolated particulars, and set his imprint on them all, the dripping beer tap and the steadily flowing water faucet behind the bar, the unknown figures in the room and the silhouettes outside? Yes, when he gave himself over to these fantasies, the things and people present appeared to him all at once with no need to be counted, and like the leaves in that summer tree joined to form a large number. But now, face to face with this present, he realized what it lacked: the entrance of beauty in the form of a woman—not specifically to meet him (for since his time on the frontiers of language it was almost as though he had left his body there), but to join everyone in the room. Once such an apparition had actually stood in the doorway. Looking for a telephone? Wanting to buy cigarettes? To ask the way into town? At the sight of her the whole dreary gin-mill community had come to life. Without lowering their voices or explicitly looking in her direction, each one had tried, while beauty was there, to show his best and noblest side, if only to his immediate neighbor. Even after she had gone—though not a word was said about her—those left behind remained united in a kind of awe; time and again, with a rare unanimity, their eyes lit up. That was a long time ago, but even now he—he alone—cast an occasional glance at the door, in the hope that the unknown woman would reappear. She never did, and today his grief at her staying away almost swelled to indignation. The door remained closed. Instead, a drunk made his way from the bar through clouds of smoke which occasionally hid him from view. Arrived at the table, he stared from high above, as though he had only one eye, first at the writer's notebook, then at the writer himself, pushed into the seat beside him, and immediately started talking. As he spoke, his face came so close as to lose its contours; only his violently twitching eyelids, the dotted bow tie under his chin, and a cut on his forehead that must have bled recently remained distinct. He stank prodigiously and not only of sweat; he seemed to have accumulated all the foul smells in the world from carrion to sulfur. Not a single word of what he was saying came through to the writer, not even when he held his ear close to the speaker's mouth. Yet, to judge by the movements of his lips and tongue, he was not speaking a foreign language. Not even the sibilants accentuated in whispering were audible. Now and then the speaker would stroke his own cheek and from time to time he would stop talking and catch his breath, producing a long-drawn-out sound resembling that of a wind instrument being tuned. When asked to speak more loudly, he would seem to perk up—give a lift to his shoulders and stretch his neck—after which the flow of words would go on, as voicelessly as before. Though he neither looked at the writer nor assailed him with gestures, it was obvious that what he had to say was addressed exclusively to him. He was trying to tell him something important. For a time the listener actually felt that he understood what was being said to him; he would nod, apparently at the right places (for the other smiled as though in receipt of corroboration). And then suddenly—for once this word, often so thoughtlessly used, is peculiarly apt—suddenly the writer lost the secret thread, known only to the two of them, and at the same time, just as suddenly and inexplicably, he lost the nexus with his next morning's writing, which he thought he had secured that afternoon and without which he would be unable to carry on with his work. He had thought out every single sentence down to the last, all that remained was to put them in the right order—and now suddenly all these words had lost their validity; indeed, it seemed to him, thinking back, that everything he had done since the summer, everything that had given strength to his shoulders during the last hours, had instantly been pronounced null and void. At first he put the blame on the smoke in the gin mill—it impeded not only his breathing but also his imagining—and went to the toilet, hoping that the coolness, the tiles, and the running water would restore his composure. But there, too, he remained inwardly mute. It was as though his work, an airy castle only a short while before, had never been, and when he looked in the mirror he saw his enemy. Reluctantly, he went back to the table, a prisoner of the inaudible man who, having waited sitting up straight, his chest thrown out imperiously, instantly resumed his obscure flow, as though he had been interrupted in midsentence. The writer, who at that point only appeared to be listening, suffered from a frequent nightmare, a dream that came to him only at times when he was writing. Nothing happened in it, its only content was a judgment repeated all through the night: What he had written that day was irrelevant and meaningless; he should never have written it, for to write was criminal; to produce a work of art, a book, was presumption, more damnable than any other sin. Now, in the midst of the "gin-mill people," he had the same feeling of unpardonable guilt, the feeling that he had been banished from the world for all time. But now he was able to question himself systematically—as he could not in his dreams—about his problem, the problem of writing, describing, storytelling. What was his business, the business of a writer? Was there any such business in this century? Was there anyone, for example, whose deeds and sufferings cried out not only to be recorded, catalogued, and publicized in history books but also to be handed down in the form of an epic or perhaps only of a little song? To what god was it still possible to intone a hymn of praise? (And who could still summon up the strength to lament the absence of a god?) Where was the long-reigning sovereign whose rule demanded to be celebrated by something more than gun salutes? Where was his successor, whose accession deserved to be greeted by something more than flashbulbs? Where were the Olympic victors whose homecoming warranted something more than cheers, flag waving, and a flourish of drums? What mass murderers of
this century, instead of rising from the pit with each new justification, might be sent back to their hell forever with a single tercet? And how, on the other hand, since the end of the world is no mere fancy but a distinct possibility at any moment, can one just praise the beloved objects of this planet with a stanza or a paragraph about a tree, a countryside, a season? Where, today, was one to look for the "aspect of eternity"? And in view of all this, who could claim to be an artist and to have made a place for himself in the world? In reply to all these questions, the answer came: By isolating myself (how many years ago?) in order to write, I acknowledged my defeat as a social being; I excluded myself from society once and for all. Even if I sit here among the people to