Across (9 page)

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Authors: Peter Handke

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BOOK: Across
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We had stopped at the end of the Mozart Footbridge across the Salzach. At that point the painter asked me my name, which, he said, he hadn't caught when we were introduced. Then a strange thing happened; without a moment's hesitation, I said my name was Hurler, and even added: “No, I'm not joking, that's my real name—Hurler.”
The painter answered in a tone of friendly mockery: “Judging by what you've just been saying, it ought to be Spite.” Thereupon he set foot on the wooden bridge. As I remained on the bank below, his eyes were now level with mine. His way of taking leave was to observe that my face reminded him of the boisterous idiots whose forays through the city he would so gladly have joined: “They were my family.” Then he vanished across the bridge. Once, from halfway across, he called back that he wished for my sake that this night's snow would turn to salt. Reclusive as I was, I then learned something: to look back—the backward glance, as it were.
The footbridge remained deserted. Just once, a couple appeared, the woman wearing a long evening dress under
her fur coat, followed by a little girl with braces on her teeth, pushing a bicycle. Under her footsteps, the bridge swayed like a gangplank. The entrance to the bridge with its crossbars looked like a gangway that would be lifted as soon as these people had passed; then no one would be able to board the ship.
The squat, mottled trunks of plane trees came into sight on the opposite bank, lighting up that whole part of the city. On the hither side, brownish slush was splattered by cars, in whose dark interior a white shirt collar could now and then be seen. Accentuated by the swarms of snowflakes, the headlight beams of cars moving bumper to bumper looked like towropes. Here by the side of the shore road, the victim of a traffic accident had once lain, whimpering, clutching his legs to his belly, foaming at the mouth, his teeth chattering; mistaken at first for a “victim” in a first-aid exercise. The swollen but almost soundless river carried whole green bushes along with it. Not a single bell was ringing. In an isolated house on the slope of the Kapuzinerberg, the lights went out one by one. An alarm clock ticked; an ink pad dried. It came to my mind that the name of the road I was standing on was masculine and that of the one on the opposite shore feminine: Rudolfskai and Giselakai. The deserted footbridge was framed on both sides by an iron structure which crossed the river in three arches, hop skip jump. The entrance to the bridge was an arcade, decorated with a climbing plant that made me think of Virgil's “smiling” acanthus. Here, however, nothing smiled. The bridge gave off the wrong emptiness, not the kind I
wanted. For a while, I inwardly kept up my conversation with the painter, at first so intensely that I accompanied it with gestures; then my arms hung motionless and my silent monologue died away. A whiff of perfume came to me from the arcade—from the woman in the evening dress?—and the melting snow dripped and gurgled in the drains. I had had epaulettes of snow, which now quickly vanished.
 
Though there was plenty of room in the last bus—known as “the drunks' special”—I stood on the moving disk between the two sections, which turned slightly on the curves. The floor of the long, tunnel-like vehicle rose, fell, and tilted this way and that; an empty beer bottle kept rolling under one of the seats and then out again. The two arms gripping the overhead wires not only conveyed the needed current but seemed also to save the bus and its passengers from sinking into the earth; following their example, I clutched the hanging straps above me with both hands.
It was a short ride; at that late hour, the bus went no farther than the cemetery. By then, I was the only passenger. I didn't get out until asked to, and then I took elaborate leave of the driver, becoming more verbose from step to step. “Good night, Mr. Chinaman,” said the driver, and started round the circle on his way back to the city.
My housing development was still a long way off; for me, it couldn't be far enough. For a moment, the bus wires against the open sky veered off in the direction of
a suburb in Japan. Shining in the lamplight, the gilt letters on the cemetery gate were an illegible script, or all the scripts in the world combined.
Something drew me westward, across the meadows to the canal. But at the moment that didn't seem to be my place. I stayed on the main road, which is bordered on the left by the cemetery wall, and as I walked I looked at the distant embankment—on my side of it the Canal Tavern, dark except for a single light in the upper story. The building, another symbol, looked to me like a lock-house.
For a time I was alone on the road and imagined that Loner—like Loser, Hurler, and Spite—was a name. After a while, a man with hobnailed boots came along in the opposite direction and said in a malignant tone: “I know who you are, but you don't know who I am.” As far as the end of the cemetery wall, I ran. The crematory amid the pines was lit up like some “sight” in the Old City. A yellow glove hung from a branch near the sidewalk. Above the road, the bus wires seemed to be woven into a steel net that wouldn't move before dawn.
The short stretch where the road rises—the Salzach, which has now been diverted eastward, used to flow here—gave me a chance to breathe deeply and I savored it. Though the former river terrace was not very high, the plain it led to—where the village of Gneis is situated—was definitely a plateau, and here the air was perceptibly colder. There was still snow in the fields, and where the earth showed through, it revealed a pattern resembling bird tracks. The mistletoe balls in the trees had white caps on. Icicles cut through the April foliage and reflected
the night light with the clarity of glass. Birds chirped from tree to tree, as though eager to know whether their friends had lived through the storm.
I bent down and washed my eyes and temples in wet snow. I wished it would start snowing again. My lips and forehead thirsted for snow, as though I hadn't had my full share of winter yet.
In the suburb of Gneis, there was little light except for the streetlamps. An old old woman was standing at the window of a dark ground-floor room. The curtains were open and her face was close to the pane, but half concealed by her misted breath on the glass; no one would now have stood up to the look in her eyes.
Near the center of the village, the outlines of two children were painted on the roadway. The boy, who was a head taller, held his arm protectively around the girl. Both carried schoolbags. The sister was characterized by a pigtail, the brother by the prominence of his occiput. Under the layer of snow, the pair recurred several times in almost, but not quite, identical versions. The snow around them had melted, and the luminous paint glistened, though blackened from head to foot with tire marks.
I stood for a long time in the street, deep in contemplation of the schematic figures. Contemplation? In any event, there was nothing contemplative about the look I gave the driver of the oncoming car (who braked just in time), because he quickly closed the window he had already half opened and drove off without a word. Maybe he had only wanted to ask for directions—would the woman beside him otherwise have said: “Forget it,
can't you see he's a stranger here himself?” And I called out after the car: “I'm only fit company for enemies now. Only my enemy is my friend.” Since this enemy no longer existed, all that remained was an aimless “Wipe him out!” (But at the same time I thought: Lucky none of my pupils' parents was in that car.) Only then did I notice how many plays had been going on inside me, plays upon plays only a few hours before—and now not a single play was left. Or rather: I had run out of lines.
In the wooded section before the Colony, a mist arose. Only a few jutting branches could be made out clearly; trunks and treetops had almost disappeared. I dove into the mist as into a familiar element, one that suited me. The amount of space seemed infinite, and all for me. Suddenly on a tree trunk my shadow came to meet me.
I was almost disappointed when houses came into view; the gray of night was plenty of light for me. But in Oak Tree Colony I was—important to get this straight at such an hour—at home. The asphalt under my feet was home ground; this was in every sense my territory. Hadn't I once wanted to shout at a noisy group of foreigners in the Old City: “Quiet—this is Austria!”? My country: an enamel sign in a provincial railroad station showed a pointing hand, with the words: “To the well.” My country, indeed. A man's own country meant refuge, he could defend himself.
“But would you also defend this country of yours?” “Perhaps not the parliament building” would be my answer to such a question, “but this barn and that
vintner's hut, definitely.” For I can say of myself: “I am sick with my country.”
Now in the dense mist of the plain there was nothing but the Colony; no mountains, no sky; the desolation was almost complete. Some of the new houses were still unoccupied, and here and there the streets still smelled of fresh paint. The curtains of the foreign workers' houses were of various dark colors, and even on the fully laden clotheslines there was seldom anything white to be seen. A barn glowed with inner light, shadows of animal bodies and human heads moved about and intermingled, as though a mare or a cow were being delivered. By the football field, a landfill far out on the heath, the dark tavern was being guarded by a dog named Nadir du Mistral with glass eyes and ears that resembled horns. A short, fierce, peacock-like screech issued from the Home for Retarded Children; a fluorescent light flickered; the windows were open at the top and the blinds hung down at a slant. A car had just driven into the garage; the top was covered with snow mixed with greenery; the driver, his hands on the wheel, was listening to the news on the radio; the only light in the villa that went with the garage was in the aquarium, where ornamental fish slowly swam back and forth.
I sat down by the canal, on a bench next to the phone booth, facing the apartment house where I lived. From time to time, the wind whistled through a solitary spruce by the water. I shut my eyes. Behind me, the Alm, almost silent over the rest of its course, roared like rapids—at this point, it drops steeply. Had I slept? When I
opened my eyes, there was the half-moon with the face of a decrepit old man; a spruce branch was waving like a bird's plume in front of it. In the moment of my awakening, the whole tree darkened and became my shadow.
I went into the house and without turning the light on anywhere, either at the entrance or in my apartment, went straight to bed. I lay with my eyes shut and began to feel warm. The mountain that goes by my name appeared to me. (It's known to me only from a picture.) Mount Loser stood detached under a spacious sky, as though in a sphere of its own; and yet it seemed only a few steps away. From a rounded hilltop, which formed the pedestal, rose the naked cliffs of its gigantic upper story. Its flat roof was covered by a deep layer of snow, overarched by transparent gray air. The snow lay in wavelike dunes, and on the side of the mountain a white fountain surged into the gray air—a sign that a storm was raging up there. It must have been a severe storm, because the snow cloud was long and almost horizontal; indeed, it had a slight upward tilt. At the same time, the scene, beheld from a distance, seemed perfectly still; even the white of the fountain was motionless. In the sheer wall below it, there were dark spots, almost like gates or niches. Open, O gate in the rock. Take palpable form, 0 Aeolian Mount Loser.
Yet no peace came. Something was missing, something without which any appeal to any object whatsoever was premature. And premature meant pointless. The object ceased to be a thing of this world. “Something is missing” meant: there was room within me, but it remained empty. I did not expect the missing thing, I
couldn't—I had no reason to expect it. There was simply an unfilled space within me—and its emptiness was sorrow.
“But what is this thing that is not to be expected? The rustling of a tree that becomes a voice? A fountain rising from a cliff? A burning bush? Why not admit for once that what you lack is love!”
At this point, I finally lost my temper. “What kind of love are you people driving at? Love between the sexes? Love for another person? Love of nature? Love for what one has created? I, in any case, am homesick just now for a body, and not for its sex, but for beloved shoulders, a beloved cheek, a beloved glance, a beloved presence. Love? Incapacity for love? Lover's sorrow? The sorrow is present only now that I am without love. You have only invented ‘incapacity' as a pretext for your loveless argument. And when love sets in, I won't have to appeal to the distant mountain anymore; of its own accord, it will move into our sphere, a salt dome, confirmation of thy, my presence. With the onset of love, I shall be safe. Or it will not have been love.”
I
n the days that followed, I didn't leave the house. Most of the time I lay prone on my bed, my head in the crook of my arm. This arm was a kind of bulwark, behind which I felt sheltered. Now and then I'd pick up a daddy longlegs and let it run about in the palm of my hand, which tickled pleasantly. Occasionally I'd lie on my back, looking at the wall, where a flashlight and a shoehorn were hanging on a hook.
Outside the window, two thick ropes hung down; the housefront was being renovated and they served to pull a basket filled with mortar up and to lower one that had been emptied. In the dawning light, the ropes seemed strikingly massive and dark. At night, they made themselves noticed now and then by slapping against the windowpanes. In the moonlight, they glistened like glass; the melting snow had run over them during the day and then frozen.
The phone rang fairly often; but it was only someone who had dialed a wrong number—as if Salzburg were the city not only of disorderly pedestrians but also of disorderly telephoners. Finally, after calls for the “parish office,” for a man called Siegfried, for the “customs office for overseas shipments” and Part-Time, Inc., I shouted into the phone: “Shut up!” After that, I stopped answering.
In the morning, my mail fell through the door slot: advertisements, and one solitary letter, consisting of a printed form titled “News Flash,” with a check mark in the margin.
During the day, the sounds from the supermarket provided distraction. When it was closed for lunch hour,
I waited almost impatiently for the beep of the cash registers to resume.
Of course, all this could be told in a different way. When I looked in the mirror, there were no eyes. I felt as if I had no body left; that is, I no longer had any share in the light and wind, in the cold or heat; and this was a privation. As I lay there without dignity, I was a painful husk; a husk with nothing inside. In the absence of a viewer, there was nothing left to view. Once, in the dusk, I confused the gigantic Untersberg with a wooded knoll. Another time, I saw a cliff as a flashing guillotine. A volcano had erupted in the Staufen; great gray-violet clouds of smoke drifted from its pyramidal summit; and when again I looked westward, the whole mountain had collapsed into a rubble heap only half its height. (In reality, the main peak was hidden by rain clouds, so only the much smaller front peak could be seen.) And what did “west” mean? The cardinal points had become meaningless, as they do for one cast adrift on the open sea; in the place of direction, confusion reigned. When once I made an attempt to dress, I missed all the openings and stood there like a twisted malefactor (funny, I have to admit). I heard sounds as when the Föhn is blowing; they seemed to come not from my field of vision but from around the corner, so to speak, from behind my back, taking me unawares, without the corresponding visual images. The everyday cries of the jackdaws rang out like bursts of gunfire; I suddenly heard the clip-clop of a horse's hoofs as though a stopped clock had started (it would stop again in an instant); cocks crowed as though sounding the alarm, or taps. And
whenever the bus wires struck together in the woods outside, a crashing and a crackling were heard as when a big building is on fire.
Often there was something to laugh about: once, some horses actually turned up at the bus terminus, hitched to cabs that seemed to have come to this wilderness by mistake. Inside them sat exotic tourists, aiming their cameras without conviction at the Colony. But I didn't laugh.
Yet I didn't think there was anything wrong with me. In fact, I felt a strange satisfaction at “exposing” myself, just as there can be a certain satisfaction in exposing oneself to total darkness or a glacial wind—in laying oneself open to the worst sort of adversity. Satisfaction? No, pleasure. Pleasure? No, determination. Determination? No, acquiescence in the conditions of existence.
In all those days, I never once felt anything akin to guilt. What I felt was something worse. I had thrust a long knitting needle so accurately into someone's heart that there was not so much as a cut to be seen in the outer skin, and everybody was congratulating me over it. But I saw myself from then on as living in—the word cannot be avoided—perdition. (And there were no hands with which to cover the face of him who had seen it; if anyone had shouted “Hands up!” I'd have left them dangling at my side, and not out of contempt for death.) When people come home from work in the evening, don't they sometimes sigh while settling into a chair: “How good it feels to finally be able to sit down!” But, with me, sitting had the opposite effect. Nothing made me feel good. Only perhaps I should avoid the word “perdition”
and say instead: “The bouncing bird, the cat washing itself, were lacking in the center of my field of vision.” In the center there was nothing, neither a playing dog nor a swaying daddy longlegs (or, if there was, it fled instantly). Or there was something in the center, but nothing pleasant. Once a freshly shot pair of chamois were hanging in the open garage of a villa, still dripping blood, hanging by their horns from two hooks, face to face. Even a bird and a cat appeared, but they were corpses drifting in the canal. Or the center was a place of staggering illusions: the light-colored logs lying crosswise at the end of the meadow looked like a dead ox; a seesawing brimstone butterfly appeared to me repeatedly as a scrap of yellowish paper. Or the center was a place of disillusionment; when I looked for it, it was hidden by billboards or by exotic shrubs with their unreal colors. Or the center itself was falsified: the house next door, raised by an artificially filled-in terrace, had a bell tower on the ridge of its roof in the manner of old farmhouses—but the area below the terrace seemed eroded, the shrine over the door of the house meant only: “You are not welcome here”—and the little bell tower, taken as a center, framed a mere hole: because the bell belonging to it, or the clapper, or the bellpull, was missing. By day, this hole often suggested a whirl of clotted milk, and by night, at best, an artificial satellite broadcasting the latest news of wars and disasters. The worst of these falsifications in those days were the so-called natural centers, occupied by the church towers, at least one of which “naturally” catches the eye at every turn of the head. Not only did these steeples, whether bulbiform,
conical, or cylindrical, strike me as pretentious; I also regarded them as petrified delusions, making a mockery of our—all men's—forlornness. Nobody needed them, but they set themselves up as friends in need. Even in misery, didn't the horizon sometimes send us light and air, which wanted to be let in and seen? And these steeples cut off the view.
What I missed this particular Holy Week was the usual ringing of the bells. I hungered for it. It seemed inconceivable to me that a thinker some decades ago should have praised the big cities of the Communist world on the ground that the “deadly sad Western ringing of bells had been done away with.” The bells were silent. I was not content with the whistling of the wind. Nor with the roaring of the canal down at the rapids. Nor with the monotonously musical electrical purring of the approaching buses. I was reminded of a passage in a writer ,of the last century who praised the Roman poet Lucretius, saying that for him the “black pit was infinity itself,” and that his era, extending from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, represented a moment unique in history, “when the gods were dead and Christ had not yet been born, when man alone existed.” During the days when the bells were silent and the wind whistled and the buses purred, or so at least it seemed to me later on, I relived that era.
Yet my experience was rather different from that of the poet Lucretius, allegedly so heroic in his godlessness. It seemed to me as obvious as it was unthinkable that I alone, a human being with death as his goal, existed. Something was lacking, but not Christ and not the
gods, and not the immortal soul, but something physical: a sensory organ, the crucial one, without which the whistling of the wind and the purring of the buses remain incomplete.
Often in the past, glancing at a distant mountain ridge, I had seen a procession of climbers without beginning or end, and thought in spite of myself of the famous trek to the gold fields; and in this procession, I, the viewer, was a dark, heavily laden figure among others. However often I looked, that gently rising line, broken by the tops of spruce trees, was uninhabited, orphaned. The lines up and down the pass yielded no human pyramid. How can I give a more accurate picture of the sense that I lacked? Perhaps only Greek has a verb expressing that fusion of perception and imagination (which is essential). On the surface, this verb means only “to notice”; but it carries overtones of “white,” “bright,” “radiance,” “glitter,” “shimmer.” Within me there was an outright longing for this radiance, which is more than any sort of viewing. I shall always long for that kind of seeing, which in Greek is called
leukein
.
While I waited for the big bells to come back, I conceived an incredible hatred of animals—not so much of birds as of all four- or more-legged animals. The birds with their soaring flight seemed to draw invisible communication lines through the air. But I despised all earthbound animals because, as far as I could see, they gave no thought to any kind of resurrection. They merely huddled, crept, crawled, scurried about, lurked, rutted, or dozed. I almost sympathized with the cruelty of children who kill cats and pull the legs off daddy longlegs.
Yet at the same time it seemed to me that I was reliving the origin of certain Easter rites—when, for instance, I glimpsed the fresh, fleshy white of a horseradish root, dug from deep in the ground; taken together with the lumps of earth clinging to it, that white struck me as a plausible color for life.
 
All through the weekend I lay stretched out on my bed, incapable of the slightest movement, clenching my teeth and fists, if you can call that lying. Early in the morning, a woman down in the street, who evidently worked in a pastry shop, said: “We're having a heavy run on Easter eggs.” At noon, the shutters of the supermarket were pulled down for three days. For a long while, in the afternoon, a little bird fluttered up and down outside my window.
With a package tour from somewhere, I landed on the airfield of the moon. From the lobby of the air terminal building, a stairway led down to a restaurant that was jam-packed with Chinese. It was a sinister den, dimly lit and low-ceilinged. In the middle there was a platform—this was the place of slaughter. Naked men with long, curved, two-handed swords flung themselves on other naked but unarmed men. There was no struggle. Nor did the unarmed men run away. They buckled like apes overtaken by a pursuing lion, bared their teeth, and hissed (or rather squeaked) their last cries of terror at the butchers. The soles of the victims' feet seemed also to buckle and formed high, loudly creaking arches on the platform. A moment later, the whole body was gone. Not only had it been cut into little pieces, but
almost simultaneously it had been devoured by the people in the room below. What an instant before had been part of a gesticulating human being was now a chunk of meat vanishing into someone's gullet. The mouths with these unceasingly active gullets marked, as it were, the innermost core of the Chinese quarter, which at one time had been the hub of all world happening. The slaughter would never end. Time and again, new loads of arms and shoulders were brought in, and in the place of these arms and shoulders there would once again be nothing. We travelers were separated by ropes from the place of slaughter. Bags in hand, we quickly left the airport. The moon was not our final destination; we now went to an elevator at the edge of the airfield, which was to take us back to earth. On the way, we walked under the open sky. Tall acacias rustled in a pale light such as foreshadows a cloudburst. It was not, as one might have expected, easy to walk in the lunar atmosphere—we didn't hover. From step to step, our limbs grew heavier. I had no difficulty breathing, but felt that I soon would have. It was still a long way to the elevator stop, a windowless, sheet-metal shack, which was ringed by people waiting with suitcases. The only hope was to wake up. But I couldn't manage to.
At length, the bundle on the bed opened its eyes and sat up. There was a color in the room. It came from the hibiscus plant growing in a large flowerpot next to the wall; a single blossom had opened, carmine against a purple, almost black ground. The pale pink pistil in the middle gleamed like the glass core of a lightbulb, and at
the tip were the erect orange-yellow stamens. The flower was within reaching distance, and I held out my hand toward it. I had tried to feel it the day before, but all sense of touch had gone out of my fingers, and I had thought that the still-unfolding flower, as so often with hibiscus flowers, had already shriveled. Now I held a living weight, which cooled my hand and regulated my pulse.
What in the morning had been adulterated by the stench of tomcats now resolved itself into the fragrance of the apples spread out on the shelf. It must have been late afternoon, for the open door of the west room no longer admitted sunshine, but only a deep-yellow glow, in which the hibiscus plant cast on the wall a cloudy shape and within it a few clearly delineated stem shadows. “Late afternoon” reminds me that my son once said it was depressing to keep reading in stories: “At dusk”—it would be better, he thought, to say: “In the late afternoon.” “They arrived in the late afternoon.”
I stood up and looked around; I had never seen a more beautiful room. I bent over the hibiscus blossom. A daddy longlegs was groping its way over the wall, and I addressed it roughly as follows: “Oh. So that's it. Aha. Hmm. Very well. Good. Why not?”

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