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Authors: Peter Handke

BOOK: Crossing the Sierra De Gredos
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But for now he was traveling through the night with the impertinence of a newly released prisoner. It was as if there were no differences or transitions between the airplane ride at the beginning, then the trip in a car with a chauffeur, then walking, then riding again. He seemed to be swept along in a single, expansive, gravity-free movement. As he rode, sitting by the window on the night bus, for instance, where the passengers all became people like him, whatever they might be otherwise, he was also striding along with airborne hundred-yard steps, which ran through his head like a sort of counting song, from one into the thousands. And in walking down the dark roads he was constantly rolling on the balls of his feet. And it could also happen that, as he continued along the shoulder of a nocturnal highway, he might suddenly hop on one leg, as if a game of hopscotch were marked out in chalk on the asphalt.
Even when he walked backward for a stretch—a habit he shared with his sister—it was less for the purpose of flagging down a car than out of high spirits. During his repeated sprints he would also run backward, often for an entire nocturnal mile, with his back to the next border he would have to cross. Borders were his element, just as the night was. The more notorious a border, the more it attracted him. Where most others disguised themselves before reaching the border, cloaked themselves or hid (for example, under a tarpaulin on a truck, as the author had done as a child, or in some other way), he presented himself if possible even more elegantly than usual, and moved with the openness of one who feels at home at borders, and during this first night's journey also with challenging bravado: “Nothing can happen to me. No one will stop me. I have nothing to lose.”
While it was one of the aging author's nightmares to be forced to cross that forbidden and dangerous border of his childhood again, and this time in the middle of the night, on foot and alone, in a suit, shirt, and tie (but
where, for God's sake, are his shoes and socks?—doubly nightmarish!), the newly released prisoner approached such a border like the fulfillment of a wish-dream, and in this dream he then crossed the bridge over the border-marking river like a man without a care in the world, barefoot, his shoes in his hand, and no one stopped him—it was night, after all, and nocturnal borders could only be his accomplices; and besides, he had a passport that was still valid, if just barely, and besides, he had served his time, and besides, he had been convicted in a different country altogether.
Not a soul, also no vehicle, during the first seven nocturnal miles after the border crossing. Moonset. Deepest, most silent night. Sporadic glitter of mica in the tar for a short distance around, accompanying the pedestrian. No sound but that of his still-bare feet; not even that of a night plane high in the sky—no airplane flew over this country, had not for a long time now, not even by day.
Then a cry, of alarm? of joy?: someone was walking along the nocturnal road, ten paces ahead of him, and as he caught up with the figure in a single stride, she turned toward him, her face glowing in the pitch darkness, and he recognized, no, it struck him: a girl, no longer a child, but as young as a person can possibly be, a human being—his sister's child. The cry—if it was a cry at all—had come neither from her nor from him.
“The history of the world is a mess,” he had written to his sister from prison one time, using no code for a change. “The race of man is an evil apparition and deserves to be wiped out.” In this nocturnal moment, however, he saw his own dictum as inoperative, and how. The face before him signified: he would not kill, not yet. A major act of violence was not for him, not yet. First he would sit down with his sister's child, at the “Night-Travelers' Lodge” up ahead.
As she did almost every night, she awoke after a couple of hours of deep sleep. She groped for the light switch, noticing only then that she was not sleeping in her own bed; that she was not at home. The initial discomfiture gave way to astonishment, and the astonishment energized her.
She sat up and fished the Arabic book from the citadel room's uneven floor—fished: that was how high the bed was, and how far below the book. The child on the plane to Valladolid had spoken the truth: the book did not smell of her. It smelled of her vanished daughter. The girl had been reading it, lesson after lesson, example after example, quotation after quotation (the fragments of classical Arabic poetry with which every lesson ended). The book had been systematically studied and mined by her, word for word; traced; copied; glossed; threaded with marginal notes that eventually came to mean as much as, and then clearly more than, the print on the page, and referred only vaguely or not at all, or not obviously, to the text. The book—a mere brochure, actually—looked even from the outside as if it had been carded, kneaded, pulled lengthwise and widthwise and licked, as it were; rained on and snowed on.
And inside the covers things were even more exciting: the impression of an athletic contest continuing page after page, a wrestling match to the bitter end, which also had something joyful about it, not only because of the constantly changing pencil colors and the changing script, from Roman to Arabic, from Greek to shorthand.
And again from the outside, from the side, one could see where the reading had stopped, even before the book's midpoint: the part that had been read or explored was gray—no, not “dirty gray”—, the pages curved, bent, thickened, crisscrossed, and sprinkled with little strokes or dots—traces of the marginal glosses inside, which often wanted to spill over the
edges; then a white borderline, and after that nothing but the unread white layers; the gray next to this white like a different rock stratum; a different one? no, the same material in both layers of the brochure, with one layer simply transformed and corrugated by chemistry and warmth, the chemistry of sweat from the reading finger lingering for hours on a single pair of pages, the warmth of the writing hand.
And the mother took up the reading where her child had left off. She, however, never added anything to what she read. No underlining. She even opened the book carefully, her fingers moving as if she were wearing gloves. Reading the book from a distance, looking into it as into a remote niche. Anything not to leave traces. Nonetheless, a reading second to none: spelling out, with lips moving silently, bursting out with a word-sound here and there, and then again, and again, pausing, her eyes raised from the book as she mulled over the section she had just read, in its context, the more immediate and the wider one.
And this hour in the depths of the night seemed particularly favorable to her reading. These days one read to get away from the world even less than was perhaps usual; indeed, exactly the opposite was the case. Here stood the chair, with its woodworm holes. Over there the door latch curved downward. Over there was a ladder, leaning as only a ladder can—what an invention, the ladder! On the highway the milk truck loaded with filled milk cans, stacked one on top of the other, clicking as they jostled each other, and among the cans a refugee family, including the author as a child (here sneaking into her book and her story again—but for the last time, please!). Way off, on the farthest horizon, the train rattling by—already in motion for a long, long time, but audible only now as a result of her reading; in one compartment her lover, her missing life companion, without a ticket, without identification, suffering from a high fever, heading in a direction in which he did not want to go, the direction opposite from hers—but at least he was not dead, he was alive, he existed. And impaled on one thick thorn in the acacia avenue outside the window, a very small bird? a cicada? a dragonfly?—The door to the chamber where she lay reading was pushed open, and in streamed human body warmth.
No comfort in her reading-herself-out-into-the-world? Fortunately? Reading to find comfort was not real reading? Another pause at an Arabic word and then the word-sound bursting out: as if precisely these words demanded to be heard. And this explosive voicing of the sound provided additional illumination to the field of vision: each foreign word a sort of
flashbulb that gave whatever was in the field of vision (and beyond it) contours, surging with life; as if with the ex-pression, the chair, the ladder, the latch, the thorn, were instantly created anew.
And the nocturnal reader soon fell asleep again, as if after a great expenditure of energy, and slept deeply, deeply. And after her reading she had an image of the bed on which she was lying as a map of the world. But the thorns now, longer and fatter than swords? They belong to an old wooden statue in the church of the Sorbian village, where they pierce, at all different angles, the bodies of martyrs—in the thigh, belly, thorax, neck. Perhaps her reading of Arabic was a mere backdrop. But sometimes this backdrop meant everything.
While she took a shower the next morning (a long, long one), got dressed (slowly, one article at a time), gazed out the open window on the south side (her eyes moving from her fingertips out over the entire plateau, which grew hilly again as it disappeared in the distance), more and more additional images zoomed into her, or merely brushed past her; no more images of martyrdom and menace. These new images were the kind of which she was convinced that one was sufficient to arm her—and not only her, but everyone (see her sense of mission)—for getting through even the most oppressive day.
And again she contemplated the conditions or laws that allowed such an image to seek a person out. The genesis, the origin, the source of these images must be explored at last; a necessity that made one all the freer; as, indeed, every time she said, “I must,” “one must,” a little smile seemed to float around her. At any rate, to be receptive to images one had to remain focused on the matter at hand, whatever it was (see showering, see gazing out the window). And no special slowing-down or even acceleration of the current activity was needed: whether one moved deliberately or rapidly—the decisive factor was to be fully engaged.
Likewise irrelevant were distance and proximity; only the proper interval yielded, or oscillated, the image, and a proper interval could be that of the thread to the needle, hardly a hand's breadth from the eye: for instance, a bend in the Bidassoa, the river marking the border to the Basque country, appeared—image, a jolt into the world, a jolt, all the more necessary for everyone, into reality.
Another law of sorts that determined the generation of images: they arrived—and again she was sure this was true for everyone—primarily in the morning, in the hour after waking. Though for her, something about
the images had changed of late, in the last few years. The images still came as if without reason, unbidden; primarily at the beginning of the day; and so forth. Yet more and more the images originated in one particular part of the world, and those that flashed in from all over the earth—now a tree root in northern Japan, now a rain puddle from a Spanish enclave in North Africa, now a hole in a frozen Finnish lake—were becoming increasingly rare.
She regretted that. It made her uneasy. For the images she had previously received from the world were all linked, as if obedient to a law, with places where, when she had actually been there, she had experienced unity or harmony—of which she had not been aware at the moment—that, too, such a law? Even if these areas were “beautiful,” “lovely,” or even “picturesque” (that in itself already constituting a sort of image of an area), that did not contribute to their subsequent image-worthiness; rather, they had to have left an imprint on you, without your knowledge, from which later a world at peace, an entire world in a still possible peace, or perhaps precisely that “enclosure of the grander time,” will have taken shape, unexpected and unhoped for.
In the meantime now, the images, specifically those morning-fresh ones, were increasingly limited to an area, which, every time she was there, had shown her a peaceful face for only brief moments, but more usually a hostile, menacing one, yes, more than once a cannibalistic face, the face of death.
And this region was the Sierra de Gredos. On some days she reminded herself that she was a survivor; that if she belonged to any people or tribe, it was the tribe of survivors; and that the awareness of having survived, and of surviving along with one unknown survivor or another, far off or nearby, had to be the thought that forged the strongest bonds. And she had become this kind of survivor through her crossings of the Sierra de Gredos.
When she made a point of calling the Sierra to mind, the massif presented primarily memories of adversities, major ones or merely small ones, such as the absence of air in the dense, light-blocking conifer forests, and the wood-roads, where one had felt cheerful only moments earlier, narrowing over the course of a few steps into impassable mud slides. In the images, in the unsummoned image, however: the Sierra de Gredos and peace, or peaceableness, were one and the same; and it could be no other way with these images, this kind of image—a fundamental law of
the image: make peace, and hop to it! Take action. Become active. But how? As the image dictates!
“Doesn't that deserve a serious research project?” she challenged the author. “To find out why, in recent times, most of the images, and not only mine but also everyone else's, originate in regions where in reality one has experienced hardly anything good but rather the very worst; and, with me as the experimental subject, to study as well why the images from the Sierra de Gredos keep nudging one almost constantly, as insistently and as gently as the wooly heads of a thousand times a thousand sheep, ever since it has been rumored that war is about to break out there?”
The shadows of water-skaters on a riverbed: Where was that?—By a stone bridge, known as the “Roman” bridge, over the río Tormes, which rises in the Sierra and, although in some stretches as wide as a river, remains a rushing brook all the way to the end of the central massif in Barco de Ávila, overflowing into innumerable still pools.—A fawn, separated from its mother, its coat soaked in a downpour, standing a hand's breadth from her, likewise drenched, the animal too weak to flee, or merely curious: Where was that?—On a stone-paved road. A stone-paved road; in the mountains? yes, right below Puerto del Pico, the main pass through the Sierra de Gredos; the flagstones cracked in many places, some missing, truly the only remnant in the Sierra of the Roman colonial era, a Roman road winding down the southern flank in lasso-like S-curves, the
“calzada romana,
” and, unlike the modern road over the pass, clearly part of the mountain range even two thousand years ago, less built there than simply laid along the slopes, following what was already present, sketched out beforehand by nature.—On a wall above an outdoor sink, a broken mirror, reflecting the crowns of the fir trees in the sun, and behind them, multiplied by the cracks, the pyramid-shaped summit of Pico de Almanzor: Where was that?—Back by the main river of the Sierra de Gredos, the río Tormes, at a children's summer camp, deserted long since when she hiked past it, or closed down, and not only because it is autumn (no, it is not “autumn”; no specific season ever appears in the images), the faucets either unscrewed or without water, the mirror shards opposite her at hip level, so that she must bend over (“I must”—she smiles), to look at herself; above her head the Almanzor forming a tricorn hat.
Hop to it! Do something. Help. Reach out. Serve. Serve? Yes, serve. Do good? No, be good. Lend a hand. Mediate? No, we know about you mediators and intermediaries rushing blindly to serve as go-betweens and
thereby merely hastening a truly disastrous disaster. For heaven's sake, do not mediate! Participate and be there—and in this way mediate after all, or rather facilitate something, even if only with your eyes, what? The image? No, that is not possible: not the image but an intuition of it; that is sufficient.
And thus, for instance, the financial powerhouse, the adventurer, the former film actress, or whatever she is, sews on a button early that morning near Tordesillas, or wherever, for the toy manufacturer, or whatever he is, in the citadel, or dive. And the man takes it for granted and does not even object, sitting next to her again at the same small table by the window hardly the size of a loophole. And she also darns a glove for him: for it is bitter cold on the southern plateau, colder than in the northwestern riverport city, according to the radio. And for their departure she then fetches his suitcase from his room. And the suitcase weighs her down, even her, this inconspicuously strong woman with the large hands; that is how heavy toys are these days. A toy market in the vicinity of an impending war?
With that the woman has finished serving him. From now on he must make his way alone, and if perhaps not alone, then at least without her. With the help of her images she has given him a push, and that must be sufficient. But why does he look at her in the hostel courtyard as if he still lacked something?
And so the two of them fall into another dialogue like the one they conducted the previous night in the car. She: “Did you find the light switch in your room?”—He: “Yes.”—She: “Was the bed wide enough?”—He: “Yes.”—She: “Did you see the lightning after midnight?”—He: “Yes.”—She: “Will you stay in Tordesillas?”—He: “No. Today I am heading west already, along the río Duero. And without the suitcase.”—She: “On the old pilgrims' route, to Santiago de Compostela?”—He: “Heaven forbid. Not on any pilgrims' route, and certainly not an old one.”

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