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Authors: Peter Handke

BOOK: Crossing the Sierra De Gredos
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And by now she almost envied them for this; or rather, she was jealous of them, just as it was not out of the question to be jealous, as an involved observer, of a game in which one would like to participate. For wasn't the pleasure she had so long taken in ownership pretty well exhausted? Above all, owning land had once given her a very special sense of space, a feeling of having broad shoulders. To buy a piece of land to add to her own, then another: pure joy. (She actually used the word “joy” in the author's presence.) To beat the bounds of one's property with head held high (not to say “ride the bounds”). But by now one tended to beat
the bounds with lowered head or searching gaze: What needed to be done? What tasks were pressing? What had to be repaired? cleaned? replaced?
Free through property? In her case, at least, it was becoming a threat to her freedom. One's perceptions were no longer free. Only parts, and particles, nothing whole anymore. And oneself, as a property owner, no longer whole. Strangely enough, one way out, a form of liberation, was managing money, other people's money, but also her own—as if money, being a moveable asset, had nothing to do with “possessions” and provided an opportunity for free play, like that of the others in the neighborhood. Hadn't this free play turned into something particularly uncontrollable by now, hardly subject to rules anymore, dangerous, threatening, and not only to her?
Some of the new ways of living also had to do with the location of her city. After a period of decline for riverports, they were flourishing again. There had been a time without any shipping at all; the rivers on the entire continent deserted. But now the waterways were serving as the most modern traffic and transportation arteries, and the cities located on them were becoming hubs as never before in history, even during the Roman Empire. And her own city, at the confluence of two rivers, formed something like the hub of hubs. A financial center like Augsburg in the Fuggers' day, especially in the time of the family patriarch, Jakob—but less because of its wealth than because of the sheer volume of wheeling and dealing. A life like this, on and between two world-famous and commercially significant rivers, imbued the inhabitants, and the new arrivals more powerfully than the longtime residents, with a particular sense of place: stamped with self-confidence or even pride, quite different from that of the residents of New York or some other great metropolis by the sea, an inlander's pride, so to speak.
Part of it was that the rivers and their characteristic surroundings were increasingly shaping everyday life, were gradually permeating it almost to the exclusion of everything else. In the market stalls you could still see all the varieties of saltwater fish laid out. But the point was that these were “laid out,” dead or half-dead, whereas the freshwater fish “cavorted” in glass tanks nearby; even if there were not quite so many varieties, each individual exemplar was almost a species unto itself, and not only because it was so palpably alive, leaping about amid the throng of other fishes. For many years out of style, they were now increasingly
prized, purchased, and prepared according to the old recipes, and even more according to new ones, were a component of the daily regional cuisine (“regional” having become no less important than “national”).
Similarly the old orchards and the vegetable gardens or fields or terraces along both rivers, which had long been left fallow, now, wherever they had not been turned into building lots, were experiencing a second spring—summer—fall. The varieties once planted there were being supplemented and enriched by imported varieties or varieties moving on their own into the area as a result of the abrupt warming of the climate all over the continent. Of course exotic fruits, as well as olives, wine grapes, pistachios, and such, continued to be imported into this northwestern region. But in the meantime it had become customary—this, too, part of the new way of living—that once the locally grown crops had been sold, used up, consumed, no substitutes were flown in from another hemisphere. No more fresh cherries or blueberries from Chile in the winter. No more early fall apples from New Zealand in the spring. No more cepes from South Africa with lamb at Eastertime. And in her two-river city, the ripening of the local fruits, rather than being accelerated, was actually held back.
And soon hardly anyone missed such luxuries. Now the very absence of a familiar vegetable, an accustomed fruit, imposed a rhythm on the year; this periodic absence could add a kind of zest. New ways of living? The return or recovery of the old ways? (Though without folk costumes, customs, songs and dances.) What a historian had characterized as the phenomenon of “cultural continuity,” the most reliable rhythmic recurrence in history, indestructible (or was it really, over time)? Be that as it might: how the old varieties of apples, now brought back, stood out from the interlopers, on the trees, in the orchards, but also under the artificial lights of the huge warehouse-style supermarkets. How they gleamed, how fragrant they were, and this was no humbug. Or was she the only one who noticed, with her eyes and nose from childhood, from her Sorbian village?
On the other hand, it was not she who created the demand, and with it the return of the continuity phenomenon, but rather her odd, evasive neighborhood. And equally odd her sense of being at home there. She knew, after all (had experienced), that it took only a tiny jolt, a phrase picked up in passing, and one would tip from presumed continuity into an isolated moment, not historical in the slightest but torn out of any temporal sequence, into a unique instant of complete isolation.
She had many enemies. And she had made almost all her enemies through her work. And they were far away. But one enemy was stirring things up in her vicinity; nearby. It had begun as love. At least this was the word the man used, the moment they met, or the second moment. They ran into each other in a clearing deep in the woods. She entered the clearing on a corduroy road whose logs were already half-rotted. Without warning, the image of a deserted beer garden, shaded by chestnut trees, in the hills above Trieste on a midsummer morning came to her, and she spread her arms. Just then the man slipped out of the dense underbrush on the edge of the clearing and was right next to her. She did not start. Perhaps she would have jumped under any other circumstances, but with the image present nothing could harm her. It was out of the question that anything should affect her. So she stood there, arms still spread, and even smiled at the stranger. It was a spring evening, long before dark.
It was the man who uttered the word. Was he a foreigner? For he spoke the word with an accent. The majority of those living in the area were foreigners. Or did his excitement act as an accent-generator and tongue-twister? His outfit resembled that of an escaped prisoner, not because of the fabric or the cut, but because of all the rips (along with his disheveled hair), probably from his running through the woods. And he did not say, “I love you,” and so on, but rather, “You must love me. You are going to love me.” And continued at once, stammering, “You need me. You have been waiting a long time for me. Without me, you are done for. I will save you. You will not have loved me in vain.”
She kept silent. Only her eyes gleamed, thanks to the persisting image, which it was up to her to intensify. In the center of the chestnut-shaded garden stood a limestone column, damp from the night's rain, a
stalagmite. Water spewed from an iron pipe. An espresso machine hissed. And in the darkening clearing a gentle wind now sprang up. The man resumed: “Listen to me! Listen, I say. In the end, God, too, for whom the prophet Elijah, or which prophet was it? waited so long in the desert, did not come either in lightning or thunder or in the whirlwind, but in the softest, barely audible rustling.” He advanced a step toward her, but then, on the recoil, dove back into the bushes. His nose had been bleeding, and the white handkerchief he had dropped in the grass of the clearing revealed a red, many-eyed, checkered pattern.
Next to that tavern in the hills—not a single guest—the Paris–Moscow express stood waiting; the place was a border-crossing point. The windows of the sleeping car were open; empty berths; through the windows on the other side the bare white limestone cliffs were visible. Didn't the stranger know that the god who had made himself heard in the rustling breeze was an Old Testament god? That his voice in that gentle whirring was not whispering about love but was filled with wrath? That that god wanted vengeance, vengeance, and more vengeance?
After such a beginning, it came as no surprise that the man soon found out where she lived; and that his voice was heard over the intercom around midnight: “In all these years here I never set foot in that clearing—and then to find you there. It was a sign: you love me. And although I had never met you in the flesh, I recognized you instantly. If that isn't a sign, what is? And the third sign: whenever I come to an unfamiliar place, I look straight ahead and pass through it without looking to right or left—but this time I looked to the side at once, to where you were standing, waiting for me. Unlock the door. You must let me in.”
She did not unlock the door. For all the doors were already unlocked. But he did not press a single latch, did not turn a single knob; just rang and rang outside the garden gate, all night long. Eventually she turned off all the lights and lay down on a sofa in the dark parlor, her sword, a relic from one of her earlier lives, at her side. The ringing went on and on. But in time that was precisely what calmed her and finally caused her to doze off. And the next morning, after an almost restful sleep on the sofa, the bloody-nose handkerchief again, on the driveway, like a playing card.
Next a letter: “How easy it was to penetrate you. Your cunt was panting for me. Your sex instruments drummed on me, plucked me and rubbed me, danced around me. Your vaginal membranes rattled and fluttered, swelled and swirled, sailing from firm land over an ink-dark sea as
a storm raged. No doubt about it, I was made for you. And I promise never to leave you!”
Now the time had come to sit down with the man, in broad daylight, for a sober hour in late morning. But where? Even the choice of a meeting place was critical. It was out of the question to meet in one of the many little eateries in her area: she had never been seen there with a man, and that was how it was to remain. The bars on the outskirts were also out of the question. The patrons there almost always stood or sat alone (she, too, was sometimes there among the guests, so briefly that she seemed like an apparition). And when people happened to come in as a twosome, it was to be assumed they belonged together, and in a slightly unsavory way; these couples usually spoke in lowered voices and huddled far from the others, in the darkest corner, behind a screen, if possible, where, one sensed, one of them would reach for the other's hand now and then. And she? She was clearly without a lover. And yet looked as though she were constantly and intensely loved, glowing from being loved, from having been loved, just moments earlier.
She chose a playground near the main rail line. In accordance with an odd principle, here, as throughout the river city, two benches stood facing each other, as if for two pairs of knees. An even crazier principle governed the chairs placed around the benches, each at a different angle, as if they had been shoved together or apart, like furniture in an outdoor display—yet when one wanted to straighten them: the chairs refused to budge, cemented in, bolted down, anchored.
So one day, before noon, they turned up, on two such chairs, almost close enough to touch each other, and yet, because the chairs' axes were askew, at an unbridgeable distance, while to the left and right of them the playground equipment creaked under the hordes of children, and the express trains roared by, with shreds of paper and white river gulls in their wake, their flight quite different from that behind the keels of ships.
She began, unconsciously imitating him, with “You listen to me!” and then said something like this: “It is not that I am against you. But for a long time I have had a sweetheart, a partner, someone who belongs to me. And the man I love is infinitely handsomer than you. You are nothing by comparison with my man. I will never abandon him. Only in his arms do I feel arms. His hips are the only ones for me. Only his arousal arouses me. His smell is the only one for me. And he is not merely my lover, but also my co-conspirator and squire. He is my up-hill and down-dale companion,
my rope, steppe, and desert partner. He is my bodyguard, as I am his. He is my slave, as I am his. He is my judge—unfortunately not strict enough. He is my attorney, who wins all my cases. But above all this man is my chef. He is a chef such as you will find nowhere else on earth. Not a swindler like the others, not one of those phony magicians, conjuring up an illusion of ultramodernity with their overly clever dishes, a tart seemingly straight out of the oven, fish on the platter as if just reeled in, colors and forms as if shaken out of their sleeves just that minute—creating the illusion of a present that in reality almost always originated yesterday, the night before, or even the previous week, and thus tasting of anything possible, or rather of anything unreal, anything but the current moment, the present. My beloved, on the other hand, cooks mainly with leftovers. He neither throws leftovers away nor tries to disguise them in the dishes he serves me. He has a masterful way of combining leftovers with fresh ingredients, and the leftovers are the main part of what he prepares for us. On our plates it is the leftovers that create a full sense of the present. Combining what was there earlier with what we have now is his and our secret. You are the wrong man for me. And you are not the only wrong man.”
“What was your man's name?” the unknown neighbor asked after a while.—“Labbayka,” she responded after a while. “That is Arabic, and it means something like ‘I am here for you.' But why do you say, ‘What was his name?' instead of, ‘What is his name?'?”—The unknown neighbor: “I ask, ‘What was his name?' because I think your lover must have disappeared long ago, or is dead, or is imaginary. And if none of those, his name is something else entirely. And I think you, too, actually have a different name. You are living under an assumed name. You have changed your name several times in your life. I know all your fake names. I am on to you. I can smell your guilt. When that comes out, it will be the end of you. Look at the red dress of that girl on the swing!”—She: “The child in the red dress went home ages ago, and besides, her dress was not red.” —The unknown neighbor: “Do you want to know my name?”—She, already getting up to leave: “No.”
For a long time after that the suitor kept his distance. Nonetheless she constantly sensed his alien presence. She felt not only observed and spied-on but also recorded and registered. With her special perceptiveness, which in an instant could capture everything between the tips of her toes and the most distant horizon, she searched the surrounding area,
without her stalker's ever showing up—or only as in a puzzle picture, where body parts belonging to the person you are supposed to find might be inscribed in the foliage of a tree, or in the pattern formed by cracked stucco on a house.
At the same time, it seemed as though she were holding him at bay with this capacity for perception. He apparently did not dare to venture closer, not yet. But then she began to catch sight of him with increasing frequency, always from behind: when she stopped at a traffic light, he would suddenly be there in one of the cars up ahead, or he would be on the overpass above the highway leading out of the city, visible from head to foot, but again only from the rear.
At last one morning, as she stepped out through the gate, there he stood in the flesh (she actually thought: “At last!”) facing her, so close that he looked as if he were cut out of cardboard or plywood, a figure in a tunnel of horrors. What preoccupied her later was less the fact that he drew back to strike her than that he had both hands full of flowers that he had pulled up, roots and all, from the border along the drive, and that the unknown neighbor was dressed up, wearing a tuxedo that called to mind, as she later told the author, a dance on the upper deck of a luxury liner, complete with brass band and the Southern Cross. “Did he throw himself at you?” (the author).—“Do not ask! I cannot tell the story if I am asked questions” (she). Besides, the author should know by now that so long as she was under the protection of one of her images no one could harm her.
A path through the Montana Rockies wedged itself between her and the attacker, leaving the latter flailing his arms behind the spruces over yonder, scraping his knuckles raw on their Rocky bark. Unripe cranberries growing along the edge of the path formed little whitish ovals, with the occasional riper ones among them looking all the more red. Were those bear droppings beside them? Wasn't what she said next expressed in an Indian language, meaning in translation “Out of my way, stranger. This is my territory”? And in fact he did beat a retreat, backing away slowly, as she, too, slowly walked backward, he taking one step, then she taking one, until they were out of each other's sight. Never again would the nameless neighbor raise a hand against her. Finally, before their reciprocal disappearance, they even laughed. As she told it, she had also laughed earlier, from inside the image.
Instead he tried to get at her with words again, both spoken and written. And she let him try. And since the oral modality suited them both better, she also agreed to a meeting occasionally; by now it did not matter to her where—so long as it was not in her house—sometimes for dinner, and also at her office.
At such times she was the one who ordered food or picked up the tab (he accepted it as a matter of course). And that was not the only factor that would have led an observer to conclude that their relationship must be based on some collaborative project, with her making all the decisions and him merely taking orders from her. Some thought they were witnessing a medical consultation, or saw the man, sitting there with the woman, as her research subject. At such moments, the idiot of the outskirts—at the time of this story the idiots lived on the outskirts, where they belonged—would be crouching nearby, as her protector, and indeed everyone's, listening in silence, eyes wide open, and thus assisting her.
Only the suitor spoke. And onlookers would never have guessed that every time he spoke exclusively of her. Viewed from the street or from the kitchen pass-through, he sat there looking like someone who was revealing his innermost feelings to a chance acquaintance. And she seemed to be all ears, saying nothing, as could hardly be otherwise in such a case. His many gestures, flowing one into the other, seemed to refer only to him. They underlined what he was saying. Would the woman listening have followed them so attentively otherwise, even the smallest of them, her attentiveness concentrated in the corners of her eyes, as she read his words from his lips?
From the outside, a passerby one time could see him talking and talking at her, making an expansive gesture, pointing outward and upward to the outdoors. He swung his arm so vigorously that his sleeve slipped back. And she followed his index finger without specifically focusing on it, simply by widening her eyes and face somewhat. And in fact there was something to see in the direction in which he was pointing: it was summer, a thunderstorm broke out, from one minute to the next, and over there, on the far side of the plaza outside the restaurant, a mighty old cedar suddenly toppled over, coming to rest at an angle, then a jerk, and another; and then, as its roots were ripped from the ground, it came crashing down on the plaza, just missing a family running to take cover; the two children laughed out loud at the fallen tree, while the parents …

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