Slow Homecoming (2 page)

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Authors: Peter Handke

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary

BOOK: Slow Homecoming
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The familiarity between these two friends expressed itself not in chumminess but in a politeness that was almost diffident. Subject as they were to moods, the outburst of moodiness that might occasionally have done them good was not possible. Though they were obliged to share their workroom, it was only at first that they felt in each other's way; in the bedroom as well—the house consisted only of those two rooms—each had his place without need of planning. A certain neighborliness was taken for granted, yet it seemed accidental when they did anything together; each went about his own affairs and even in the house each had his own itineraries. They didn't really eat together; one might be eating a regular meal; the other would sit down with him, and the first would issue an invitation: “Won't you have a glass of wine with me?” If one wanted music, the other wouldn't leave the room; he would stay, showing no express interest and gradually perhaps begin to listen, or even ask to have a piece repeated.
Lauffer was a liar; Sorger, for all his impenetrable calm, was unstable to the point of indifference or even disloyalty. Both suspected, or tacitly recognized, what was bad in the other (sensing it perhaps more uncannily than the person against whom it was directed), both were shrewdly aware that they were capable at any time of behaving
like scoundrels to someone else, but—so precious had their companionship become to them over the years—never to each other. Each with his friend thought of himself as kindly, never as wicked.
They were not “a couple,” not even by contrast; but in the course of time, even when separated, they had become partners, a team, though not unconditional allies; each remained capable of friendship with the other's enemies.
True, Lauffer, the liar, had no enemies; his lying was noticed only by occasional women, who then, however, as though privy to a tragic secret, would ally themselves with him to the death, claiming him exclusively for themselves and excluding all others from their relationship.
Everyone liked him, though he made no effort to ingratiate himself; everyone called him by his first name even in his absence, and not only here on the American continent, where this was customary. True, his friends ran him down, but always in the tone of one deploring the shortcomings of one's hero; they would never have allowed an outsider to attack him. Despite his physical bounciness—when he forced himself to sit still in the presence of Sorger, who was often deep in thought, he gave the impression of a jumping jack on its good behavior—his massive bulk, which struck one as more jocosely fraternal than athletic, suggested a happy unity, a restlessly mobile center in which others were eager to participate; liar or not, there was something reliable about him: people were always relieved, or perhaps just glad to see him, even when he looked in only for a moment.
He didn't lie to please himself; lying was his response to the hopes of his well-wishers—everyone wished him well—who expected him to draw them into his center,
hopes which of course he could not fulfill for long but could not bring himself to disappoint. In this situation he would lie shamelessly, obscenely. The fact is that, without meaning to, Lauffer collected misfits and for that reason found himself condemned to a blandness in which he did not recognize himself. He was not sexless and not without passion, but in secret—a hero to himself in an entirely different way than to those who called themselves his friends—he pursued the dream or delusion of greatness.
“I would like to be dangerous like you,” he said, while sitting in the house with Sorger, at an evening meal which as usual had come about by chance.
The table stood by the screenless window, at the center of which, traversed by river and the evening sky, was a rectangle with long, dark stripes; above and below, a deepening black (cloud bank and dry land). Now and then, a mosquito would come in, reeling rather than flying. But the mosquitoes had stopped biting; they would just settle on the back of your hand and stay there.
The meal consisted of light-brown mushrooms gathered “in the field” (they had absorbed some of the dampness of the soil, and tasted rather like Chinese mushrooms); whitish chunks of salmon bought from the Indians; and the last oversized potatoes from the somewhat disorderly garden on the east, lee side of the house. They drank a wine bought at the Trading Post, as the settlement market called itself, so cold that its sweetness, in conjunction with the bitter mushrooms and the fish, was pleasant for a time.
This was one of the first days of autumn in a house whose absence of mystery, the practical anonymity of its furnishings and utensils, made for an easy, homelike feeling. It was only when looking out, even absently, into
the open that one was likely to know the exalting yet terrifying sensation of flight into the Great North; and even without looking out, as you sat eating and drinking, a strange light might fall on the corners of one's eyes and play unceasingly on the objects roundabout, yet their intrinsic glow was manifested only by the incredible inner jolt you felt when it came to you that you were “far, far away,” on another continent.
The black-and-white spotted cat that came with the house settled on the table after eating the leftover fish—the wooden walls were too thin to allow of a window seat—and looked out at the bushes on the riverbank, which were blowing furiously in the evening wind; now and then, its otherwise motionless head or paw would follow a contrary movement in the bushes.
The surface of the water was still yellow. The wind was blowing upstream, stirring up ripples that moved eastward as if the river were flowing in that direction; only at the edges of the picture was the real current visible in great, compact, night-black swirls, which looked as if someone had thrown a mess of tripe into the water. Far below in the west, now half in the shadow of the bank, a dark shape rose up from the surface of the water, rose and fell with a rhythmic, creaking sound that invaded the house and filled the entire countryside. The water level was falling, and this was one of the last days on which the Indians could operate their big wooden fish wheels, which, driven by the current, filled with salmon overnight.
Beyond the wheel, where the river pursued its northward meander, a jagged line of stunted virgin pines seemed to form the arc of a lagoon. Since the tops of the few taller trees towered above the long, flat horizon, one had the impression, when looking into the distance beyond
the lagoon formed by the river islands, of seeing the spires of Venice against a cloudless sky. In this fully darkened city, the details of which could be seen only in the reflection of the light-colored river water, rifle shots would sometimes ring out, or a lost dog might bark. But perhaps these were mere echoes, carrying village sounds back to the village, where the dogs, for the most part kept in packs, barked until late into the night.
A boat, in which no one could be seen because the occupants were kneeling or crouching, glided from the darkness of the lagoon into what remained of the light, trailing an inky-blue wake. A rifle shot fired across the water, as though from ambush, grazed but barely ruffled the smooth surface, then ricocheted into an island thicket, flushing a few crows.
 
Early in the night, Sorger drove Lauffer's jeep along the rocky shore on his way to see the Indian woman, who never expected him but ministered to him, sometimes with good-natured irony, and sometimes even with a certain dignified satisfaction. Ahead of him in the potholes lay a row of no longer sparkling but still pale-bright puddles, which seemed to merge with the likewise pale-bright surface of the river. And this surface itself, broken here and there by sandbanks, was not self-contained but melted without perceptible dividing line into the luminous strip of sky which covered the whole distant horizon as though to symbolize the Arctic Circle. The thin black ribbon of cloud in it might equally well have been the farthermost islands in the fluvial plain, and the last stretches of bright sky framing the clouds might have been the westward-flowing river.
Sorger stopped; he wanted to capture this event in space and hold it fast. But already there was no more
space before him, only a gently rising openness without foreground or background, not empty but ardently material. Alive to the pitch-black night sky above and behind him and to the deep-black earth beside and below him, thoroughly aroused, Sorger tried to prevent this natural phenomenon and the self-forgetfulness it engendered from passing, by frantically thinking the contradictory details out of the picture—until perspective, vanishing points, and a pitiful loneliness set in. For a moment he had felt the strength to propel his whole self into the bright horizon and there dissolve forever into the undifferentiated unity of sky and earth. Driving on, he sat stiff, dissociating his body from the mechanism of the car, and barely touched the top of the wheel, as if it had nothing to do with him.
Roads without names led past huts without numbers. Some of the windows were already covered with sheepskins for the winter. The elk antlers over the front steps looked enormous and very white in the beam of the headlights. In the dark space under the huts, which were raised on wooden blocks, moved the shadows of the miscellaneous objects stored there. The airstrip along the edge of the forest, a rocky field that narrowed in the headlight beam, lay deserted, edged on both sides by short-stemmed red marker lights. A stray dog raised gleaming eyes from a hole in the ground. In this lost outpost, which could not be reached by road—or by ship for that matter, but only by plane——there were nevertheless any number of roads that went a little way into the forest and broke off when they came to the swamps. At least one car went with every house, even for the shortest distances the inhabitants used their cars, zigzagging in and out of the bushes at top speed, hurling great blobs of mud from
the roads, which never dried out, against the trees and the walls of the huts. In this country, which though flat derived each day a rough, bony, cutting quality from all its objects, plants, animals, and people, the Indian woman (as Sorger always called her in his thoughts, even when he was with her) took on for him an inviting, coolly-bright smoothness. “Smoothness” might have been his pet name for her.
In the season when there was virtually no dark night, they had met in the bar attached to the market and she had asked him to dance. At first, as she showed him the movements, her wide, unexpectedly delicate body (he didn't know where to put his hands) had troubled him and aroused him in a way he himself had not wanted; she, on the other hand, found everything about him normal. In any case she accepted him; her smoothness was alluring, her indulgence contagious.
She was determined to keep her relations with the outsider secret from the members of her tribe—actually, there were hardly any tribes left, only relics drinking beer and listening to cassette music in the huts, and in the woods behind them the great grave mounds of the old cemeteries. As a Health Department nurse, in sole charge of the settlement's supplies of medicine, she would otherwise have lost the confidence of her people; she would “get body odor,” “frogs would jump out of her cheeks” and infect the village with mysterious diseases, and if that happened, they'd have to kill her “with stone scissors.” Her husband, a nonswimmer like so many inhabitants of these latitudes, had been drowned while fishing in the river; time and again she dreamed of pulling a feathered mask out of the water.
Outside her house stood a totem pole, bright with color in the beam of the headlights: her two children's bicycle
was leaning against it. Through the curtainless window he first saw her round forehead, which he interpreted as so intimate a greeting and welcome that without waiting for her signal he went right in, sure that the children were already asleep.
The one child, sexless in its deep slumber, had gently closed its mouth on the crook of the other sleeping child's elbow, and the large, half-darkened but not somber room seemed separate from the rest of the house, a place accessible only to them. The shadows of the waving bushes outside moved over the walls. And nevertheless—watching her, giving in, resolutely transforming himself into her fantastic machine (as she did into his), and, more than “making her happy,” sharing in her durable pride—he did not regard himself as a deceiver, but saw the deception as an ineluctable phenomenon for which he was in no way responsible.
It was not only that with her he had to speak a foreign language (foreign also to her), in which he had another voice than his own. More fundamental than this particularity, which perhaps concerned them alone, was the discrepancy between inactive desire—here he knew himself and his partner to be in a state of perfection—and its physical accomplishment, which had to end one way or another, with the anticipation of a triumph that always failed to materialize. Each time it seemed to be the one thing that counted, and then it counted for so little. The anticipated union did not prevent desire, but reduced it to an abrupt, unstable instantaneity, and through its very weakness made for a guilty conscience, followed by a total lapse of conscience. In other words, he did not love her; he knew that he shouldn't have come to see her, and when he was with her his indecision made him act
brusquely. How was it that he could not see himself embracing anyone, but always alone?
He would have liked to love her in his language and through his language, but instead he merely stared at her menacingly, until after the first surprise—and not just to please him—she felt afraid. He toyed with the thought of killing her; or at least of stealing or breaking something; after all, no one knew he was there. “I hate this century,” he said finally, and she answered slowly, as though reading his future: “Yes, you are healthy and perhaps you are doomed.”

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