Peter Handke - Repetition

So friendly was the room into which I now looked down, and such power rose up from it that even the Big Bang, so it seemed to me, would be powerless to harm this dolina; both blast and radiation would pass over it. And looking ahead, I saw the people at work in that fertile bowl at my feet as the remnant of mankind after the catastrophe, starting to farm again. Yes, this place tucked away in the dead desert struck me as a self-sufficient farm where the earth still fed its inhabitants. And no thing in the world had been lost; true, abundance was a thing of the past, but there was at least one viable exemplar of every basic substance and of every basic form. And since every necessity was both on hand and a rarity, it showed the beauty of the beginning. And precious was not only what was at hand but also everything that could be seen, the grain in the fields as well as the shadow on the stone — and in this imagining I was reinforced by the people of the Karst, for, living in want and menaced by the void since time immemorial, had they not a hundred names for a corncob, an ear of wheat, a bunch of grapes, and just as many for every one of their few birds, all sounding like nicknames (though neither “throttler” nor “mockingbird,” neither “wolf’s milk” nor “kitchen bell” [4] “Throttler” = shrike; “wolf’s milk” = spurge; “kitchen bell” = pasqueflower. [Trans.] was among them), as though the many names were intended to fence the thing in and preserve it. The image of this plantation sunk into the Karst earth, protected from any enemy incursion, secure from atom bombs, under the open sky, as a goal to strive for is still with me, nor have I forgotten the tootling of the transistor in the stone hut — its prize song. Image? Chimera? Fata morgana? No, image, because it is still in force.

Although my time in the Karst was entirely made up of walking, stopping, and going on, I never had my usual guilty conscience about being a good-for-nothing idler. My sense of freedom every time I arrived somewhere was not the consequence of a release. I had no feeling of detachment; on the contrary, I knew that I had at last become attached. Didn’t I secretly say to myself immediately after crossing the threshold of the plateau: “Now we are here!”; didn’t I see my solitary self in the plural? Just as my father’s daily chores, plugging a hole, unwinding a rope, chopping kindling, were for a time rituals designed to make my mother get well, so I imagined that by investigating the Karst I was serving a cause, and not only a good cause but a great and glorious one. Many motives were at work together: to prove myself in my own way worthy of my forebears and to save what they stood for; the desire to be the disciple — his only one, no doubt — my teacher so longed for; an irresistible feint in my duel — a strange obsession — with my enemy; to earn the love of the most lovable of women precisely by going into the desert and enduring all manner of hardships — but transcending all this there was something that I call the desire or appetite for an orgy. What sort of orgy? I have always believed in dreams, so I shall answer with the story of a dream. In a glass cage, intercity bus and funicular in one, the same passengers kept meeting time and time again for a group trip to the Empire of the Karst. Not a single word was spoken. The crossing was marked by a shimmering, towering Indian mountain, which any child could have climbed, under the bluest of skies. This was the last stopping place. Our group was now complete. From here on, nothing could be seen of the country; there was only the vehicle, moving as quietly as if it were standing still, and with it the passengers all at a distance from one another, no two together. True, this one and that one were known to me from the street; the man at the ticket window, “my shoemaker,” a shopgirl; ordinarily we greeted one another, but once we boarded this vehicle, none of us gave any sign of recognition. Instead of exchanging glances, we sat motionless, united in expectation. The more often we set out on this trip, always from a busy station accessible to all, the more festive became the light in the cage. Rapture awaited us at the end of our journey, in the heart of the Empire, the greatest joy a human being could know; the bliss of being gathered into nothingness. Of course it never happened, we never even came near it. On the last journey, however, one of my traveling companions smiled at me, so giving himself to be recognized and at the same time recognizing me. An orgy of recognition: instead of rapture and confluence, shock and oneness, with the verb corresponding to “orgy” translated as “to yearn steadfastly,” and the place name Orgas as “Land of Demeter” or “Meadow” or “Fruitland.”

In reality, the Karst is a land of want and the crossing is not marked by a strange Indian mountain. It’s long after the border before you notice, to your surprise, that you are climbing and that something has changed. First the wind, then the flowing brooks are gone, there’s not even a trickle of water; dark pines have replaced light-colored deciduous trees; conversely, the brown clay and gray-black stone, so long the companions of your journey, have abruptly given way to a massive chalk-white, covered by only the scantest of sod; stubbly pasture has taken the place of succulent meadows. Though the plain down below is still near, the towns and rivers still clearly visible — you can even see an airfield with a steeply rising jet plane and a drill ground with hopping soldiers — the plateau is as quiet as if you were far out on the open sea. At first you had sparrows flying ahead of you; now it’s butterflies. It’s so still that you hear the sound when a butterfly chasing a falling leaf grazes the ground with its wings. You hear last year’s dry pinecones crackling, one high overhead, the next at eye level, and so on, a graduated sequence, a constant chirping until sunset, while from this year’s fresh pinecones the resin drips steadily — dark spots in the dust of the path, getting larger and larger.

Stick to the path; even so, you won’t meet anyone; the dark men escorting you to the left and right, fanning out now and then into the pale savanna, are juniper bushes. Hours, days, years later, you will be standing at the foot of a white-flowering wild cherry tree, with a honeybee in one blossom, a bumblebee in another, in the third a fly, in the fourth a beetle, in the sixth a butterfly. What glitters like a water hole on the path up ahead is a silvery snakeskin. You pass long rows of woodpiles, which on closer scrutiny prove to be camouflaged ammunition dumps; you pass round heaps of stones, which turn out to be the entrances to underground storehouses; if you touch them with your foot, the rock is cardboard. At every step, grasshoppers will squirt up at you from the middle strip of grass. A dead black-and-yellow salamander moves almost imperceptibly along the wagon rut. When you bend over, you discover that it’s being carried by a procession of dung beetles. After all these tiny creatures, the first animal of any size, a white-faced fox, a dormouse wrapped around a branch, will look to you like a brother. That breeze in the solitary tree over there — a moment later you feel it on your face. Your resting place is a cave; to explore it you won’t need a lamp, because daylight shines in from the far end and through a few holes in the roof. Water will drip on your overheated forehead, and in a niche there are quail’s eggs, not bullets but stone balls, rounder and lighter in color than in any mountain stream. As you go your way, you shake them in your hand, and their smell, quite unlike the stinking heaps of bat’s dung, will bring the widely ramified clay chambers of the Karst caves into your room as long as you live.