Peter Handke - Repetition

Again I attempted a shortcut, supposedly a straight line, where the workings of the water made a straight line impossible. I had started out cautiously, but now I rushed headlong through underbrush and over rocky debris. At the tree line, the bare crest seemed to be coming closer, and the grass, which up until then had been knee-high, became short and stubbly. Suddenly I saw ahead of me an utterly motionless cloud, and at the same moment the first flash of lightning darted out of it. I was not untroubled; to tell the truth, I was terrified — only the day before, there had been talk at the hotel about someone being killed by lightning. Yet I kept on climbing. Since then, I have often run straight into danger as though hypnotized by it, not the least bit cheerful, let alone happy about it, panic-stricken in fact, humming some hit song or counting out numbers. That day, I was so terrified that I even heard the flapping of my trousers as thunder. What from a distance I had taken for a stone hut on the summit turned out, when I got there, to be the remains of a fort; the windows proved to be embrasures. Even so, the ruin provided shelter. A jolt, and equanimity took over; calmly, I looked down on a distant field that was white with hailstones when everywhere else it was raining. So great was my exhaustion that my eyes forgot their perspective and saw the white patch as a sheet spread out to bleach. Sitting there, I toppled over. In a letter written after a forced march, my brother speaks of a faint as “involuntary sleep.”

Night was falling when I came to; most of the embrasures were aimed at the southern valley, and looking out, I saw the lights of a few houses. I walked up and down in the rain outside and then decided to stay; in the dying day the honeycomb cells of the fort seemed positively inviting, like small hotel rooms. The mists coming up over the ridge were clouds — I had never been in a cloud before. When I looked down at the grass, the little mountain flowers would vanish in the mist and reappear a moment later; the motionless wings of a falcon drifting with the clouds looked frayed. Inside the fort, reclining on a bed of old newspapers, I ate some of the food I had brought with me. Nothing more could happen to me, not that day at least; I thought of the story about the goblin who, safe in his rocky niche, stuck out his tongue at the elements; but then, his attention diverted by a malignant human, he was struck by lightning.

Night was long in coming; the twilight outlines of things merely dissolved into a more and more formless brightness, the only contour in it being my blue sea bag. “Sea bag on the mountain ridge,” I caught myself mumbling as I was falling asleep. Then I swam for hours in the Arctic Ocean, which froze solid around me. Suddenly I felt fingertips on my face, no contact could have been warmer or more real, and a familiar voice said to me: “My dearest!” But when I opened my eyes in the darkness, no one was there; only a crackling that grew louder and louder, closer and closer; then a crash, but the wild beast proved to be my sea bag, which had tipped over.

I got up before first light and made my way along the ridge, step by step. That’s how I wanted it; I wanted at last, like the barefoot child on the path beside my father at the border between night and day, to pick out every detail signifying the start of day and everything else besides; I wanted at last to repeat the adventure of “existence.” But it didn’t work. In my childhood, the primordial world had imprinted itself on my mind along with the separate drops of early-morning rain, which dug tiny craters in the dust of the path; but now everything was the primordial world — the rain gushing out of the dark sky as it had been falling since the world began, the smoke rising from the black earth as though from clefts in lava, the gray-on-gray of the wet, cold rock, the creepers catching at my feet, the absent wind — thus, nothing could take the form of that pattern in the dust. Perhaps the hand-in-hand-with-my-father was lacking or the closeness to the ground, something the present narrator can sense but not so the child’s successor up there on the mountain ridge; in that case, might it not be possible to renew an experience not so much by imitating or aping it as by retracing and actively reliving it? Instead of the glow rising from the dust craters, as though the sun itself were rising right here on the planet, I perceived nothing on my solitary march but a dismal dawning in which all shapes, even those of the night, dissolved, and no feeling of a sun, however distant, was born; and now, stumbling over rocks and roots in the gray of dawn, freezing and sweating at once, soaked to the skin, my wet, lumpy sea bag growing heavier and heavier on my back, I found myself repeating, not my childhood walks with my father, but my soldier-brother’s plodding through a wasteland into a battle that was lost in advance; instead of a path through fields, a military highway. Though I was sure of going westward, I thought with anger that I was being sent to the east like my brother years ago, and though I was heading exactly for my desired destination, I was plagued by the thought that every step was carrying me farther away from the place that was my one and all. Was the first warning cry of the marmot addressed not to its fellows but to me? Wasn’t the albino-pale mountain hare, darting out of the clouds and passing me by with a squeak, a symbol of catastrophic flight?

Such were my angry, oppressive thoughts, yet nothing could deflect me from my path. At daybreak the rain let up and I started the descent into the still-hidden Isonzo Valley. There was no discernible trail, but I would make one. And, to be sure, I discovered in myself the light-footedness of my father’s speech on the mountain crest, a quick, steady leaping from boulder to boulder, without halt or hesitation. It even gave me pleasure, a pleasure which increased in one place where a bit of rock climbing became necessary. There, Father, I was on all fours, but erect; I felt a simultaneous pull in my fingertips and the balls of my feet, as I never did in the physical labors you gave me to do. I reached the foot of the little wall alive, and plunged into the light of the sun, which actually appeared at that moment.

That brought me to the southern tree line. I still had a long, but easy, hike ahead of me. As I went on, I was overcome with something different from fear of lightning or wild beasts or falling. In telling me about his solitary expeditions as a young geographer, my teacher said that he hadn’t felt free until he left “the last signs of hunters” behind him. I, on the contrary, far from any settlement, in a spot where I could be almost certain that no one else would turn up (and no one knew I was there), fell a prey to anxiety, to fear of a monster — and I myself was the monster. Vanished was every contact with a world; instead, a pallid light, through which, harried by the bloodhound that had suddenly erupted within me, the monster named Alone wandered blindly. And then another jolt, which was at the same time recollection. Had I given myself that jolt, or did it just happen? It happened, and it was I who gave it to my wandering self. Sometimes, as a boy, I had encountered myself in that way, usually on waking, and always at times when I felt threatened. My anxiety turned to terror, as if the end had come, and my terror into a dread with which, reduced to a tumor, I waited — unable to stir a muscle — for the tumor to be removed. But it wasn’t. Instead, an utter stranger appeared and that stranger was I. It was “I,” written with a capital letter, because it wasn’t just anybody; gigantic and space-filling it stood over me, paralyzing my tongue and my limbs; it was my written name. My dread became amazement (to which for once the word “boundless” applied), the evil spirit became a good one, the tumor became a creature, toward which in my imagination, instead of the ominous one finger, a whole kindly hand pointed — and with the appearance of this “I,” it was as though I had just been created: wide-open eyes, ears that were pure listening. (Today, alas, my wonderment at that incomprehensible “total I” refuses to reappear; it seems to have departed from me forever, and this may have something to do with the guilt which has become a part of me at the age of forty-five, and leaves me alone with my often depressing reason, whereas I see my twenty-year-old “I” in a state of grace, in the madness of innocence. Madness? There in the wilderness it was madness that cured me of my fear.)