Across (6 page)

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Authors: Peter Handke

Tags: #Fiction, #General

BOOK: Across
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In running, I felt an unaccustomed impersonal strength, which, however, did not emanate from the stone in my hand. The very teeth in my mouth became a weapon. On the narrowest part of the mountain, where it tapers down to little more than a crest, a woman in a fur coat was standing by the rail at the edge of the cliff. The streets of the Old City down below were recognizable only by the narrow, reddish trails of light between the dark, almost deserted buildings. In the darkness, the illumined twin steeples of the Kollegienkirche, which, with the rings of light-colored stone figures on their flat roofs, resemble castles on a chessboard by day, became grimacing Indian idols; the clocks became eye sockets, the window ledges bulging foreheads, and the rings of statues flaming hair. The most tranquil and at the same time the most powerful lights in the city were the rows of reddish-yellow lamps on the railroad-station platforms. Reflected in the water, the cars on the river bridges became vastly magnified shadow caravans without beginning or end. Two crossed overhead bus wires hissed like a whiplash through the deserted city squares.
Nothing escaped my notice as I ran. In passing, I kicked a paper carton with some French-fried potatoes left in it off the path (a McDonald's has recently opened on Getreidegasse, the Old City Commission has commended its façade for blending harmoniously with the
neighboring buildings; a lot of the young people, including my children, meet there). A hedgehog, dark legs, black snout, shining little eyes, dug itself out of a pile of leaves—no doubt it had just awakened from its winter sleep—and then swam seal-like through the mass of foliage, heading for the woods. In places, especially noticeable to the runner, the mountaintop was immersed in exhaust fumes from the ventilation shafts of the garages built into the rock below. On a dwarf tree, a mere pole split down the middle, sat an enormous owl, within reach of the road; it did not take flight at my approach, but fluffed up its feathers, turned its head toward me, and followed me with its round eyes.
At its apex, the road passes between two long walls of rock. At one point, the gully thus formed was not “empty,” or so it seemed to me as I ran. My eye fell first on a spray can (the word “bomb” rose to my mind), then on the finger on the button, and last on the figure attached to it. The figure had no contours, but immediately had a name: the name given, in a purportedly faithful Bible translation, to “the evil one”—the Frustator. Time and again, one meets with hostile faces, but the Frustator, the archenemy, is faceless. Up until then, I had often had intimations of his presence, though always in a crowd, in passing: a grotesquely supple thumb joint; the chalk-white interior of a mouth; a bare foot shaped like a crocodile; an eye from which all color seemed to have drained; a neck swollen from blowing into a police whistle. But here at last I saw him as a whole, not in a crowd, but alone.
The runner became a pursuer and pursuit meant “action.”
No such thought as “I shouldn't” or “I have no right” entered his head; at the most: “For my own good, I had better …” Perhaps, in spite of everything, I'd have run past him if he hadn't been standing in the middle of the road. But then the stone was thrown and the enemy lay literally crushed on the ground, as unexpectedly as once in my childhood a rooster which, unintentionally to be sure, I had hit on the head with a pebble thrown from a distance—with the sole difference that the rooster, just as surprisingly, stood up and ran off as if nothing had happened.
I had not thrown blindly, but with wide-open eyes; I had not seen my surroundings but, strangely enough, larger-than-life, my own face. It looked to me neither grimacing nor calm; it looked more like the face of an unknown person, or rather of a hitherto unknown, close relative, who had now at last turned up.
Though I did not regard my adversary as an animal, another incident involving an animal comes to mind. Some children were throwing stones at a cat, saying: “If we hit it, we aimed wrong.” I had not aimed wrong. Even as, still running, I pulled back for the throw, I knew my stone would strike home—and kill.
A wind came up. As so often on this mountain island, the wind was suddenly there, without preceding squalls. It blew in full force, as though its passage through the Bavarian plains had been a buildup and this point on the fringe of the Alps its goal. The sounds of the immediate vicinity, clearly audible only a short moment before, were gone. But the roaring of the wind brought the slightest, most distant noises close. A board fell to
the ground. A horse neighed. Someone stood outside a house and laughed. A hammerblow was followed by the clanking of an oil drum. A bell note came from one of the churches on the edge of the city (or in one of the villages beyond). And perhaps that clapping of hands was far outside the city limits.
With great groaning wings a swan, white in the darkness, flew over the mountain. The wind was cold and brought with it a mass of clouds that scudded across the sky with the speed of a spring tide. Briefly, the moon peered out of the advancing veil of mist, and then was seen no more. The swaying trees on the ridge made the strings of lights on the plain below flicker and tremble. The treetops roared like a squadron of planes. Above them, there was not a star to be seen; only a blinking satellite flashed for a moment across a last hole in the clouds. The leaf buds seemed to have blown off the trees, leaving a dead forest of swaying crags; the clumps of mistletoe in the branches were abandoned birds' nests. The mountain was now inaccessible; and yet, wide open to nature's grandeur, I thought: This is the world! Together with the beaklike shells of the empty beechnuts above me, the lights on the plain below were its capital city.
I bent over the dying man. He puffed out his cheeks, as though gill-breathing had set in. From his breast pocket emerged, scarcely audible, music from a tiny transistor radio. The man was wearing checked knee socks, and his coat had light-colored patches at the elbows, which reminded me of certain armbands. He seemed elderly; his hair was white. Or could it be that
he was really young and had only now, by a speed-up process as in time-lapse photography, become white-haired and wrinkled? I experienced a strange disgust—a kind of sympathy with this man's disgust at having to die; at having lost his Christian name and being reduced to some sort of “dead Otto” or “dead Erwin.” Then the white-haired man actually made a grimace of extreme revulsion, which spread to me as I bent over him.
With this grimace still on my face, I quickly dragged the body out of the road and up the embankment. At this point the edge of the cliff is near, and I let the dead man fall. I was pulled after him, and for a moment I fell with him.
Sometimes the suicides who jump off this mountain fall through the roofs of houses down below or tear the overhead wires of the bus line. But this side of the mountain did not overlook the city; it surmounted seldom frequented terraces and obscure patches of woods. This incident—I knew while the body was falling—would never be cleared up. My freedom was not threatened. The body would quietly rot. And nevertheless, since I had thrown that stone (of this, too, I was certain), action against me was underway—not a legal proceeding, not an inquest; not a demand for extradition; but—at last I found the word which restored my lucidity—a “challenge.”
Back in the gully, I picked up my projectile, which was still lying there, and with it scraped the unfinished rune off the rock. The stone grew hot in my hand from the friction and smelled like a flint just before the sparks fly. I sat down on a tree root protruding, at the height
of a folding chair, from the opposite wall, close to the scene of the crime. At this point, there is a double bend in the road; this gave me a view of a separate section of the rock face, shaped like a truncated pyramid and topped like a ruin with grass and saplings. Here for the moment lay the ruins of a temple in the jungles of Central America. Then in the lamplight the cliff took on the gray coloration of a wasp's nest, riddled with black cells which seemed abandoned yet alive. The layer of foliage at the foot of the cliff blew back and forth in the storm wind, with eddies, waterspouts, and breakers, and the nest with its black holes changed into a chalk-white oyster bed (the oysters being the shell-shaped stones protruding from the cliff). At the center of the oyster bed, the symbol I had scraped away marked an empty space which, as I saw it, belonged to the cranes, the gulls, and the kingfishers of the silent world. And I experienced a sense of triumph at having killed. I even smacked my lips aloud. This is my history now, I thought. My history will sustain me. Justice had been done, and I belonged to the nation of criminals; no nation is more dispersed and isolated.
It was a big mountain. No blood would flow from the city fountains. No animal would talk. “Everybody off this mountain!” (I shouted that.) Only then did it come to me that I had cursed the dying man in his last moment and hurled the same curse after the corpse as it fell off the cliff. And my obituary was as follows: “At last, you have lost your right to exist!”
At the far end of the gully, a female jogger appeared, not detracting from the emptiness but enhancing it. She
was embodied beauty, with blond hair and a jogging suit that glowed fire-hydrant blue in the darkness. In hurrying past, she smiled at the figure sitting on the tree root, and I smiled back. “Marvelous evening, isn't it?” “Yes, today this gully is eternal.” As she ran, she played with the fingers of her striped gloves as with puppets. Punch and Judy teetered, jumped up, collapsed, flailed out at each other, and hugged, keeping up a dialogue all the while. A spotted cat came running after the jogger, pursued by a single tiny beech leaf scurrying over the ground.
When I stood up, I was so unexpectedly tired that I could hardly move. It wasn't far to my card game (wasn't I hours late already?), but I'd never get there. Something drew me off the road, into a nook to sleep in. When at last I moved, it was blindly, with my eyes shut. I didn't even look when something came panting up behind me (a group of joggers). Blindly I groped my way over the meandering road, as though following the canal down below. When my eyes finally opened, what they saw, looking extraordinarily substantial, were a street sweeper's twig broom leaning against a gravel box and, as though lit by the brightest sun, the white, granular wall with its lighted windows. “Here I am.” Who said that to whom?
 
The other card players were a priest, a young politician, a painter, and the master of the house. They were sitting in the library, a room almost bare except for books. The knotholes in the wide floorboards seemed at first sight to move in the cigar smoke. The legs of the
light maplewood table, as the priest explained in the pause produced by my arrival, formed a St. Andrew's cross, so called after the apostle Andrew, who had suffered martyrdom on an X-shaped cross. The name Andreas—which happens to be mine—aroused laughter and led quite naturally to my joining in the game. As if I hadn't been late at all, I sat at the table, fanning out my cards.
Before that, I had stood a while on the threshold of the house. This threshold consisted of round stakes of varying thicknesses, each with its specific annual rings, pounded up to their heads into the ground, the whole giving the impression of interlocking wheels, or rather, because of the radial cracks in the wood, of juxtaposed sun disks, framed on the right and left by the dark green lanceolate tips of oleander bushes. Threshold and oleander were lit by a spotlight affixed to the lintel, as an indication that this was the scene of the card game. “Threshold, play on,” read the old-fashioned writing on the door. And: “Card game, lead us.”
A few of the painter's pictures hung on the window-side wall, where there were no books. Unframed and unglassed, they seemed to be emanations of the wall itself. A rust-brown, a saltpeter-gray, a mold-silver, a brick-red, a resin-yellow. Unlike other pictures, they did not draw the eye to a point but merely reflected colors. These, said the painter, “should be as luminous as the colors in a stained-glass window; that is my ideal.” Though he had lived in the city a long time, he was the stranger to the group. His eyes were invisible, so deeply embedded that their sockets rather resembled the eye-holes
in a mask. Sometimes his voice was like that of a child, soft and matter-of-fact; and he never had to clear his throat before starting to speak. He kept holding up the game by discovering in each card dealt him a certain color providing the basis for a lengthy discussion. (Or he would bend down to the carpet and appear to be rubbing its wine red and cobalt blue into his face as a kind of war paint.) He was so short that his head barely rose above the edge of the table. He always stood up to deal. His tricks had to be pushed over to him.
The stairwell had smelled of apples, as strongly as a fruit cellar. The aroma was lost in the room where we were playing but became all the more pungent if one stepped outside. At times, moreover, one caught a whiff, though through a barrier of baffling admixtures, of spices from the food simmering in the kitchen below, to which our host turned his attention whenever he was out of the game: thyme? savory? cinnamon? Once, when the window was opened for a moment, someone was heard to say: “You can smell the snow he predicted.” “He” was the weather broadcaster.
The house was not quiet. Time and again, steps were heard on the winding stairs which led not only to the library but also to the various bedrooms; among them a swift, light scurrying as of an animal's paws. Then there was a scratching at the outside door, and someone admitted a cat, which lay under the table during the rest of the game. It had a dark head, with yellow eyes; when the eyes were closed, the whole head was black.

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