Crossing the Sierra De Gredos (25 page)

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Authors: Peter Handke

BOOK: Crossing the Sierra De Gredos
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“The mother, on the other hand, now no longer saw the grown woman as a child or even as her own daughter, her flesh and blood, but only as a family member, and that even in her dreams; as one who, despite their life together, was increasingly pulling away. That fundamental lack of synchrony, which, except for that moment of reunion on the Atlantic island, had always existed between mother and child, persisted between the woman and her grown daughter, but now with the signs reversed.
“Imagine, the woman would never have guessed that her big, beautiful, strong, self-reliant housemate would seriously have expected; needed; wanted anything of her. And imagine: whatever the daughter undertook or chose not to undertake during those last years was done with complete seriousness in reference to her mother: What will my mother say to that?
What will she think? And whatever is wrong with her? Why is she not there for me anymore? Why does she not help me? Why does she not rescue me? Why does my mother not love me anymore? Why is suggesting games the only thing that ever occurs to her to do with me (although she still does not know how to play)?
“And you should know that one day the daughter, the child, the woman, let out a whimper in the middle of a conversation between the two adults; a whimper as if coming from all the lost children in the universe at once; the leap between the down-to-earth discussion and the misery that suddenly broke through was again a reversal of the earlier state of affairs, when the little child, if she had a bad fall or was hit by another child, would sob so hard that she could not say a word, even to her own mother—and then suddenly, after drawing a deep breath, would begin to speak in a perfectly calm voice, picking up where she had left off. And do you believe me when I say that on one of the following days this child again disappeared from her mother's house, and has remained gone to this very night?”
Finally pain; pain: finally! And while she cowered in the berth, her shoulders slightly hunched beneath the low ceiling, she was swept out into the open by it, this final and seemingly infinite pain. And at last she could fall silent, stop talking to herself; no longer had to open her mouth to tell her story: the story continued on without her; with the help of pain, her story moved forward, beneath a not only open but also vast sky. Before that only one last little question: “What happened between her and her child: Was it connected somehow with her ‘secret guilt,' or what she herself referred to as her ‘delicious secret, guilt only if it came to light'?” And the answer was?: “No.”
And now, as if a weight were being lifted from all those sleeping and more or less suffering nightmares in those berths extending to the edges of the hostel's roof, there and there, and down there and up there, the oppressed sighs and near-death cries gradually fell silent, also the simple coughing and sneezing, until suddenly complete silence descended, not only over the
venta
but far beyond it as well, disembodied, overflowing, rushing in through every opening and pore—transforming the bodies themselves into openings and pores—pushing into the distant refuges of the nocturnal animals and the woodworms' last holes, and filling these, too, with silence; that entire part of the world a bowl filled with silence, followed, accompanied, and undercoated by expectation. Preceding this,
two or three final sounds: in her berth the switching-off of the wall light; in the neighboring berth the falling-down or rather laying-down of a fairly heavy chess piece, the king: checkmate; and finally, from outside, a single owl's hoot, unexpectedly not repeated—how so? in the middle of the settlement of Nuevo Bazar? yes—, and precisely the same blowing into cupped hands as—when had that been?—back home in the riverport city.
She threw off the blanket. Despite the curtain's being open a crack to the winter sky, it had become almost hot in her niche. The wood panels, surrounding her on all sides in the short, narrow bed, felt sun-warm. And her skin adapted to this solar collector and expanded. In contrast to the Spartan decor of the hostel, the bedclothes were of a luxurious splendor. The linens were not merely old but from a rich and glorious time, and had acquired their splendid sheen only as they aged. “Luxurious” referred not to the number of pieces, colors, or layers, but to their weight. The two top sheets, pure white like the bottom sheet, lay heavily upon her, more heavily than the rather ordinary cotton blanket earlier, and yet, unlike the latter, did not weigh her down in the slightest. And although they were tucked in up to her neck and hardly left a hand's breadth of space between themselves and her body anywhere, as she lay there the woman did not feel at all confined by the sheets. She would sleep lightly under them as seldom before.
And at the same time she, or a part of her, no, something that went beyond the usual, everyday, mundane “she,” remained awake. Under these bedclothes there was a sense that weight and floating, warmth and cooling, were in equilibrium; and she felt as though she could taste that. Hadn't she once reached out her hand to someone under just such sheets? Or, on the contrary, hadn't someone reached out to her? Pain and desire? Desire and pain?
And had that actually been her? Or hadn't it rather been the young woman from the Middle Ages whom she had portrayed long ago in her first and only film? The story goes that in that scene in the film, which has been lost in the meantime (not a single copy to be found?), she was covered with the same white linen up to her shoulders, first seen from the front in a full shot, the camera high above the bed; then a torso shot, again from the front, with the camera closer; and then finally a long shot, but this time with her profile in sharp focus, her facial expression unchanged, with an additional turning-away at the end to what is allegedly known in technical terms (author's research) as a “lost profile” shot.
And the story goes that in that final long shot, her face, which in any case was already very white, along with her shoulders, which were also already very white, became whiter and whiter, and imperceptibly dissolved into the white of the bed linens. And the story goes furthermore that during this night in the hostel berth, without a camera present, without opening of the shutter or any other cinematographic tricks, this blending into the white of the bedding was repeated, for heaven's—or hell's—sake. In the Australian desert the hot wind swept from one solitary bush to the next, a few dunes away. On the planet Mars an avalanche of ice came cascading down the sky-high mountain there, the Olympus Rex? In Nuevo Bazar, in the middle of the smoothly paved diagonal artery, a rock ledge broke through. Hazelnuts and chestnuts bounced off the belly of a woman, a different one? (Which suitor said that? Or wanted that? Or wanted to imagine that?)
That same night her brother, released from prison, crossed the last of several borders since his departure from the country of his imprisonment and arrived in the country he had chosen as his new home. It was snowing there, as almost always in wintertime. By now he was driving a car, lent to him by the woman with whom he had stayed all day until an hour after the early nightfall. At a signal from him, she would follow him to a place yet to be determined. There was no woman who would not have done everything for her brother, after spending at most an hour with this almost silent man, who alternated constantly between monumental weariness and flashes of alertness.
It is said that even to her, his sister or somewhat older sibling, the brother meant more than any man, suitor, wooer, especially in their early youth. Yet that supposedly had nothing to do with their personal relationship, also not with the fact that they were orphaned early, but was a tradition with this Slavic Sorbian or half-Arab population, small and becoming smaller with each day that passed—the last villages almost completely absorbed into the German ones around them, and these long since incorporated into cities—: the love between brother and sister, as the author's research discovered, had remained a prime characteristic of this people (see also cultural continuity); “the attitude peculiarly characteristic of all the women there consists in the exceptionally lively friendship they bring to their brothers; the latter sometimes seem to have greater worth in their eyes than their husbands. Their most sacred oath invokes the name of their brothers. And one of the most common formulas goes thus: ‘By the
life of my brother!'” (historian from a previous century). And on each of the rare occasions when she, the sister, had seen her brother again, the terrorist and enemy of mankind, after she had kissed him on both cheeks she had also kissed him on his brow and shoulder, that, too, part of this tradition—or did she merely think she had done so, in retrospect?
Yet her brother despised his Slavic people. (He refused to believe in any Arab ancestors.) He despised them because they had not merely affiliated themselves with the infinitely larger, all-powerful state majority, for the sake of money, positions, the right to participate in decisions and live under the flag of a world power, but had also sold out to this people, body and soul, heart and mind, language and “customs” (?, yes!). Her brother hated his people because they had given up their identity as a people, without war, without mounting even the slightest resistance.
And he hated them even more because they nonetheless continued to call themselves a “people,” or rather allowed themselves to be characterized as a “minority”; while in reality they had long since been reduced to appearing as a merely tolerated folkloric ensemble, one of twenty or thirty song-and-dance numbers trotted out for a festival produced by the national tourism office or in a promotional video, and beyond that?—nothing, nothing at all. Did this imply that her brother, in contrast to her, the sister, still believed in something like a people? Yes. And such a thing was even a necessity to him.
“I am lost without a people,” he had told her once, close to tears (and at the same time had jabbed a knife into the table). And since he was convinced that his maternal and paternal people was now no more than a “national propaganda lie,” and was “worth nothing and good for nothing” as a people, a minority, a population, or whatever, he had chosen another people for himself, “the only one far and wide,” as he was also convinced, “that still deserves the name”; whereas his sister was careful, and not only lately, not to take sides for or against anything, or even to get worked up over a sports team, for or against it—if for no other reason than that the few times when she had committed herself to a cause, a movement, or a group, after a very short while that same cause, movement, or group had dissolved, fallen apart, with such regularity that she had come to believe that this had occurred precisely because of her advocacy and support, as that soccer team she had rooted for as a girl whenever it played, merely on account of a certain player or even just the appealing sound of
its name, had promptly begun to slide farther and farther down in the standings.
And now her brother was driving on this snowy night through his chosen country, with the window open, heading for his chosen people, which was at war with almost all the neighboring states, out-and-out war (not merely an undeclared or rumored one like the war in the nearby Sierra). And among other things, his chosen country and his chosen people would be saved, thanks to him; would emerge victorious; and would show the world. Thanks to knights errant such as him, a new era would dawn, or an old one, the forgotten one, the legendary one that still existed only as an object of ridicule, would be reinstated as never before. But wasn't the country of his choice hopelessly lost? A defeated people, defeated once and for all, which had long since given up on itself and yet behaved as though life went on—precisely the sign of being defeated? And wouldn't heroes like him actually help administer the coup de grâce?
And now, in the depths of night, in a heavy snowfall, he took the secret route through the mountains with which he had long been familiar. All the roads across the valley were blocked off. The country was blacked out. He drove without headlights, no faster than a walk, except when he accelerated as the road climbed. A woman was sitting next to him; not the one from earlier in the day. A little light came from the trees laden with snow, enough to make the shadows, or rather shapeless specters, of the snowflakes outside dart across the faces of the two people in the car. The knight Feirefiz, Parsifal's half brother, had had just such a body with dark and light speckles. “Feirefiz”—that would have been a good name for her brother.
Somewhere halfway into the mountains he had come upon the young woman standing by the road, with a basket on her arm. Her brother had started: a seemingly congenital jumpiness, which had nothing to do with fear—constituted, as he had always appeared to be, of fearlessness, sheer courage, and excessive, ridiculous jumpiness; sensitivity to anything abrupt, whether a sound or something visual—and yet he himself was an abrupt person, given to sudden anger, sudden friendliness, sudden displays of goodness, sudden violent impulses (although directed only toward things, for the time being).
Driving at the speed of a walk up the mountainside, the new pair will now consume their middle-of-the-night meal. Until now they have
not exchanged a single word, and from one rotation of the wheels to the next, they are more and more in agreement that until they touch each other for the first time, and altogether until the end, they will remain wordless like this; leaving it to their bodies to act, stretching toward, tensing against, arching over each other; or merely leaving it to the snow, sporadically blowing into the car, or to the spruce branches, likewise sporadically brushing against the sides of the car.
They will have helped themselves from the basket between them to slices of cold leg of lamb and corn bread. But while the young woman drinks wine diluted with water, the brother will drink milk—not that he always has, but as he has done since the time when he came to believe that he could rinse away all the darkness, blackness, blind rage inside him by drinking that white liquid. And again there were not a few people who, seeing him constantly drinking milk, sniffed his glass for disguised whiskey or vodka.

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