Crossing the Sierra De Gredos (3 page)

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Authors: Peter Handke

BOOK: Crossing the Sierra De Gredos
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In point of fact, even though this was not the source of her specific guilt, she had already fooled many people by letting images play a part in her everyday and professional dealings. It was hardly ever done on purpose. The images never came on demand; if they came at all, it was involuntary. But whenever one of her images shot through her, as long as it was with her, she emitted a special radiance that instantly filled the room. Those present when this happened could not help referring this radiance to themselves. In business situations they promptly felt as though she could see right through them, whereupon they surrendered all their ulterior motives and became putty in her hands; they followed wherever she led, essentially doing her bidding.
That almost never redounded to their disadvantage: usually both parties benefited. The effect of the images was no illusion! On those rare occasions when things went badly, again both parties suffered. Thinking himself betrayed, the other party might then try to attack her physically (in her business dealings she was never perceived as “a woman”); when this occurred, the images would intervene in perhaps the most remarkable way of all: in the face of a threat—and more than once when a weapon was involved—an image would turn up, as unexpectedly as consistently, and each time only one, which, however, was so powerful that it projected a radiant shield between her and the attacker. Poof! a deserted sandy playground by a canal in Ghent, and the enemy was an enemy no longer. Poof! the diminutive library along the city wall of Ávila, with a
view from its windows of the foothills of the Sierra de Gredos, and the woman became untouchable to her attacker.
But in private life, according to the stories that made the rounds, the images inflicted quite a bit of harm, even destruction and devastation. In that realm the images could be mighty deceiving, so people said. The radiance or glow emanating from her, the woman, when they were in her, could be interpreted by the person who happened to be present only as benevolence—no, as commitment, compliance, surrender. Nothing brighter, more open, more naked than the face of this stranger, this woman who unexpectedly turned to me with this radiance brighter than any ordinary woman's smile. Desire, love, compassion: all wrapped up in one. And then the recoil. Yet the radiance persisted. And that was what turned us deluded lovers into madmen or wimps, or both. And since violence was out of the question with her, that woman! our only recourse was to curse and abuse her. “You did not keep your promise.”—“You betrayed me.”—“You lead everyone down the primrose path.”—“She is the epitome of coldness and heartlessness.”—“A sphinx who watches with eyes aglow as we tumble into the abyss.”
But perhaps she really did love no one and no thing? Was in love with or passionate about only the mystery of that one image floating in from the void, each time filling her to the brim with presentness, crowning her once and for all—wasn't this what she wanted to be—the queen of the present moment? And could one blame those people, male or female, who, when at such moments she touched their hand, stroked their head, seized them by the forelock, nudged them with her hip, or even blew on them (not merely breathed on them), when she acted so loving toward them, embodying promise, and then an instant later turned away or pushed them away, charged her with unfaithfulness and even worse? Love: that was something she did not want to hear about. Likewise friendship. And that was how it had always been?
On the other hand she wished and wanted her story and ours to be set in a transitional period—a transitional period when there were still, and once again, surprises. “As you know, in the earthshaking periods, those in which this story is
not
to take place,” she explained, “there are no more lovely surprises.”
Now, as the book's time frame opened, a sound reverberated through the predawn garden in the wooded hills of the northwestern port city, at once moonlit and all the darker in some spots. (There were nights, especially in winter, that seemed endless; never again would day come on earth.) The sound had been that of a sigh, almost identical to the sigh that had escaped the aging author at the meeting in her office.
What, a sigh? reverberated? A sigh that reverberated? Yes. And it had come from her. And it had resembled a sound in Arabic, borne on the gusts of air, mimicking and amplifying them, consisting of nothing but
a
,
v
,
u
,
h
; and now it became clear to her why the sound brought such thoughts to the surface: in the Arabic text that her daughter had left behind when she disappeared, or fled the house, and which she was now studying every day, the introduction made particular mention of this sound as an example of how in Arabic often a simple aspiration, or a small exclamation, or a vibration of the larynx, or even the simple articulating of a word through transcription could become the basis or origin of a sound. And
avuh
was just such a self-descriptive word. According to the commentary, it was the most innate human sound.
Had the sound really come from her, this person here? Never had such a sigh been wrested from her. And now something like a response issued from the darkness. It came from one of the trees onto which the early ravens had already descended. Up to this moment, they had done nothing but caw and chatter. But now they fell silent for a while. And out of the silence one of them uttered a wondrous cry of yearning. Or was it all the ravens together? This yearning represented such a break with the ravens' usual shrieks that she almost laughed out loud. This yearning was
so tender that she, who was never afraid of anything, almost took fright. And she called out a name. No, she almost shouted it. She did not even know whether such a name or such a word existed, and what or whom it described. But describe it did! From the hill came an echo, and in the house a shadow stirred. Another predawn bird, always quiet, became part of the pattern in the garden gate.
Today was not the first time she had noticed, but now, before her departure, it became strikingly clear how much the spacious, plantation-like grounds had changed during her time here. The ground especially, the form and consistency of the subsoil, had been greatly reshaped in these years, not so very many after all. (The trees, on the other hand, had remained largely the same.) The grounds had already had some slope to them. But when she moved in, they had still presented a level surface, intentionally leveled. Now, however, this plain appeared transformed into a veritable miniature landscape of mountains and valleys. The thick white coating of hoarfrost on the grass brought out with particular distinctness the rhythmic pattern of hillocks and hollows. A new, young earthscape, formed in only a few years, primarily by the rain and the winds from the west. On the crest of some of the hillocks there already stood, seeded by the wind and no taller than a thumb, a bristly little conifer. The hollows deepened “abruptly,” and some of them had little swampy patches at their bottom, with the vegetation to match. There were even stretches of moor, also tiny natural ponds (with frogs and dragonflies in warm weather). The water in them could come up over one's ankles. Except that now it was frozen solid. No heel could break this ice. Not only on the ice but also on the leaves and needles of the trees the hoarfrost took the form of small, raised, prickly rings.
The only trees that had joined the others during her time there: a mulberry and a quince. The mulberry was grafted; a trunk without limbs—the dense branches grew straight out of the top of the trunk and curved uniformly downward and inward, layer upon layer, so that now, with the leaves gone, the tree looked something like an outsized beehive. At the same time, the trunk was pitted, with deep, branching cavities that served as a refuge for bats. At the moment they were hibernating there.
Now something darted out and fluttered on a zigzag course across the sky. So one of the creatures had slept its fill for the time being? Did that mean that the freeze was breaking? She, however, was wishing for more
days of frost—the frost-clear air was one of the things that made her not want to leave. Or did this bat's flapping, closer and closer to her ear, mean: Run along, we'll keep an eye on things!?
Strange, the way she always picked up signs and portents before a departure. But she had never actually turned her head this way to follow the signs. Stepping a few paces to one side, she gained an overview of the bat's flight pattern, so confused and erratic from close up but consistent and marked by regular repetition as a whole. And then it became clear that one figure in this pattern pertained specifically to her. As the bat flew back and forth, up and down, it was tracing with great precision the silhouette of the mistress of this property, in the very spot where she had been standing a few minutes earlier.
All her life she had been surrounded by animals this way. Especially those generally considered timid came up to her; used her as a zone of refuge or repose. The story went that as a young girl she had traveled home from Africa with a snake under her shirt, crossing several borders and traveling on ships and buses. She herself preferred to tell anecdotes about less ticklish contacts and encounters—for instance about the muskrat that came so close in a large forest, advancing and retreating in a rapid rhythm, all the while snuffling, and staring at her out of little black eyes, eventually coming so close that its whiskers and pelt brushed her toes: at times she could still feel a bit of that sensation on her skin. Or the dragonfly above the miniature puddle here the previous summer: she, the large human being, stood there, had been standing there motionless for some time, and then the small flying creature, the dragonfly, was hovering there in the air, directly opposite her, quite high up for a dragonfly, an insect that usually stayed close to the water's surface, both pairs of wings whirring so rapidly that they remained invisible and it looked as though only the spindly body were floating there, with the oversized head in front, blue-black, a yellow circle in the middle, filling the dragonfly face, and eyeing her, the human being, even though this yellow did not actually mark its eyes: deep yellow, coming closer to her from minute to minute and ultimately drawing her into the dragonfly planet with this alien gaze. So was this something to fear? No.
She would suggest to the author in his village in La Mancha that the stories linking her with various animals also had something to do with receptivity to images. The most timid animals were precisely the ones that recognized (yes, “recognized”) when someone was “in the picture,”
got the picture, registered the image. With such a person they forgot their timidity, and not only that. They pulled the person into their own existence, even if only for a moment, but what a moment! It was not only that they had no fear of the person; they all wished the person well, each in its own way.
Unlike the grafted mulberry, the quince tree in the former orchard on the outskirts of the riverport city was like all the quinces, or
kwite
, she remembered from her Sorbian village. Today as long ago, here as there, the trunk of the national tree in her former village grew slim and straight, branching at stepladder-height into a tangle of limbs, and in the crown, always low, the chaos of branches twisted without trunk or limbs, and here as there one could count on a few blackened fruit, from last year and previous years, to hang on through the winter. And the blackbird's profile had also formed part of the image forever and ever, as had the third traditional element, again in close proximity, the empty, ragged nest. Around the nest now, piercing laments from the father and mother bird, robbed of their young, while in the grass below the marauding cat trotted off, twitching feathers in his mouth. No, that had been the previous summer, or several summers ago. And it will happen again next summer.
And—what was this now?—the hedgehog running toward her from the underbrush (which surrounded her garden),
qunfuth!
as she involuntarily called to it, “hedgehog,” in Arabic. Was this the baby born the previous fall? It was. And it had not only survived the intervening months, orphaned, all alone, but also, sleeping under the warm, fermenting leaf mold, had grown large, was almost a giant hedgehog. Upon being spoken to, it paused, then trotted toward her even faster, singlemindedly, poked her with its hard, rather cold, blackish rubbery nose, and said, “Don't go away. The grounds are so desolate without you. I like hearing your footsteps in my sleep.” The hedgehog had roused itself just to give her that message, and now promptly burrowed into its leaf pile again.
The previous summer, during an entire week, its mother, or was it the father? had done something odd for a hedgehog: it had circled the entire property in broad daylight, without showing fear, at first merely squeaking softly but on the last day whistling more and more shrilly. In the end the hedgehog had halted its rounds at a flagstone path. The animal lay down on this spot, warmed by the July sun, but instead of falling silent whistled even more insistently, its head poking far out of its prickly armor. The whistling became trilling, more piercing than any alarm or police siren.
The trilling became blaring. The hedgehog's pointed mouth as wide open as it would go, and despite her, the woman's, hand on its face, no hint of a retreat. The blaring escalated to the wail of an air-raid siren—from such a small body, such a tiny face! Finally the screaming animal's leap into the air, with all four legs more than a hand's breadth above the ground, and now another leap, diagonally into the air, at least as high again. Then the hedgehog's stretching out on the sun-warmed flagstones as if to sleep. Its legs extended backward, its nose pointing forward on the stone. And hardly a moment later the prickly oval studded with iridescent blue flies, of which a few had been buzzing around the twitching nose earlier; in this sudden death the spines no longer in neat rows but pointing every which way, all in a jumble. And at almost the same instant the baby hedgehog groping its way out of the underbrush, hardly as big as an apple, briefly sniffing at its dead father or mother, and then already gone in the tall grass. And now that screaming of the father or mother also said to her, “Don't go away. Protect my young one.”
During her travels in Asia, she had repeatedly come upon images of the death of the Buddha. Almost invariably he had been surrounded by animals. And in the images each of these animals represented a particular species; in the crowd around the corpse there was almost always only a single exemplar of a given kind: one horse, one cock, one water buffalo. Almost innumerable individual animals of this sort wept for the dead Buddha, who in each case was their own deceased, their relative, their dearest beloved. And they mourned him, as one could sense from the depiction, out loud, each with its mouth, its snout, its beak open, according to its kind. And all the animals there, the elephant, the tiger, the hyena, the goat, the ox, the crow, the wolf, wept real tears. Their lamentations could not merely be sensed; they also became audible, and not merely to the so-called inner ear. And those most audible were precisely the animals otherwise thought to be mute. The rain worm wailed its sorrow. The fish stuck its head out of the nearby Pacific and/or Indian Ocean and roared. A sobbing as if from a deep chasm issued from the wild pigeon, usually hardly capable of even a peep. And she, the observer, was in the picture. She was deciphering the images.
As for her neighbors, on the other hand, was there nothing to decipher? Did she even have neighbors? Yes, but their houses were so far from hers, originally a stagecoach relay station and inn, later surrounded by one of the large orchards once numerous on the slopes above the river, so
that the inhabitants at most glimpsed its outlines through the trees now and then, on the far side of the road leading out of town. As time went by, she had worked at home more and more. Only now even fewer of her neighbors showed their faces than before.
And that was not her fault. She inhabited not only her own house and grounds, but also the immediate surrounding area. At night especially she roamed the densely settled outlying area, combed through the wooded hills. And increasingly she found herself drawn to places where people were. Yet she hardly ever caught sight of them, and not merely in the dark of night. Although she had the ability, without really disguising herself, to be disguised to the point of inconspicuousness or even invisibility, did her population avoid her? No, they closed themselves off from the outset, from one another as well. Every house formed a multiply gated and buffered precinct. Those who had recently moved there (of whom there were more and more), at first loud and uninhibited, with their windows open—having escaped at last from rented apartments, now living within their own four walls—soon hushed their voices and their noisy machines, until by now hardly anyone far and wide let out a peep. Only the idiot of the outskirts, differing from the traditional village idiot in that he was brash and tactless, shouted, sang, and whistled on the streets, which were almost deserted, and not only at night.
It was only in the past few years that it had become so quiet in these parts (except for one hour in the morning and one at the end of the day during the work week). Sometimes the silence resembled the calm just before or after a war. But usually the silent yet well-lit landscape of the outskirts radiated a breath of peace. Credit was due to various longtime inhabitants. Often they were tradesmen, and often they were still practicing their trades long past retirement age—a shoemaker of seventy, a mason of seventy-five, a gardener of eighty. Younger, more up-to-date practitioners of these trades advertised in all the papers. But because their companies were almost always located elsewhere, the old folks just kept on working here, especially on small jobs. They also did better work, and they were more reliable—not because they were older and more experienced but because they had their shops and houses here in the area, one street away or around the corner from the job or the client; they could not allow themselves to mess up or do shoddy work.

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