Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

Here and there creatures new to the forest had moved into the small ponds formed by groundwater that had pooled in the many root craters: tiny fish and frogs now beginning to stir under the visibly melting ice — how ever had they got in there? For instance the osprey, missing the part of a wing that she saw lying next to one of the craters, it having fallen out of the bird’s beak as the osprey was tossed by the hurricane into the wooded hills from the river valley and, less flying than flipping over and over, crashed into one of the trees? (She stuck the piece of wing into her belt.) Also strangers here were the moles, which had long since become a rarity in the gardens down below — but here in these in-between zones formed entire new peoples, having emigrated underground from all parts of the city upon hearing of the storm, finding the resulting spandrels of safety, and above all the loosened earth, easy to excavate for tunnels and more tunnels: note the mole hills, tent-city-like, between the downed trees, and one mole or another would burrow fearlessly, like the rabbits, right up to the surface. A damned shame that she had to leave just now!

Many trees, too, instead of knocking down the tree next to them, had been caught by the more robust younger tree. Often the uprooted giants hung with their crowns tangled in the branches of the still upright neighboring tree, usually actually two such upright trees, one on the right and one on the left, suggesting the inescapable image of a warrior fallen to his knees in a Homeric — or at least not present-day — battle.

Added to this the sounds, as a gentle wind sprang up, of the living and dead limbs scraping against each other overhead: a whispering and chirping. This sound, however, drowned out more and more by a splitting and crashing clear across the forest: as the subsoil thawed with lightning rapidity, many of the trees lost their last foothold, one after the other, trees that the hurricane had battered down to their very roots but which until now had been merely cracked. Although the wind now came only in mild gusts, there began, all around, out of the clear blue sky, a paroxysm of falling, sometimes gradual, sometimes sudden, but cumulatively massive. One giant began to tip, almost gently, a jerk at a time, until all that remained, without any sound of its hitting the ground, was the space where it had stood, with a shimmering phantom image of its branches; on another tree the heavy crown suddenly split off; a third had the ground pulled out from under it in an instant; and amid all the bursting and crashing sounds, seeming to answer each other from every corner of the forest, suddenly complete stillness would set in; not even a whisper from the wind. She did not stir from the spot. Was she so sure of being out of danger? Or might a single step of hers trigger a succession of falls around her?

Then, as the wind picked up, the falling suddenly ceased; not a single tree coming down. A glance at the sky: the majority of the trees that had not fallen were leaning steeply, and almost at an identical angle, which made it look as though those still more or less standing upright, clearly the minority, were leaning. Was one leaning oneself, about to tip out of the picture? And again: Was this now? And wasn’t it something other than, and more than, today’s date?

A glance at the ground: in the thawing mud, and all the more distinct, the marks of paws, hooves, bird feet, shoe treads, crowded together, as if on a path, imprinted there as if from long ago; and someone with bare feet had also joined this procession; is joining it; will have joined it. And now, at forehead level in the more than merely thinned-out forest, at sunrise, the glow of the luxuriant wild rhododendrons typical of the northwest, hardly any solitary bushes, but dense colonies girdling the hill, as tall as a full-grown man, picked out of the gloom and barrenness, at the moment of the wind’s breaking through and of the first rays of sun, as the only bright spot in the battered forest, a swaying radiance emanating from these earth-hugging creatures; from head to foot and, from the vanguard to the rear guard, a violent yet also even, small-caliber blinking, gleaming, flashing from the rhododendrons’ evergreen foliage, in the same sunlit moment representing a sort of procession, caravan, or, most persistently, work detail or squad, marching in place and at the same time advancing and passing by, lingering while also constantly setting out, and the glinting comes from belt buckles, from headbands, from the braid on sleeves, but above all from the tools they are carrying, pocket calculators as well as sonar devices, hand telephones with a screen as well as the apparently long since obsolete handsaws, masons’ spatulas (in a strange, streamlined form), kerosene lanterns. Involuntarily she broke into a run, unaccustomed though she was from her native village and in general to running: an obstacle course, which seemed most appropriate for her.

No, it was now after all; with the wind in the branches, it was the present, though with an admixture of other time periods; the present as it had always been. In the thumping of trains over the railroad ties could also be heard the booming of cannon firing a hundred years earlier and the creaking and screeching of wheels as horse-drawn conveyances mounted the steepest stretch of road through the forest, where they always slid back a bit, a backsliding that occurred despite the extra team hitched on at the relay station at the base of the hill. And the root craters from the hurricane would soon merge with the nearby bomb craters from the previous century, in this very forest.

This grander present, this grander time: “Behind the hubbub of the storm, behind the trunks and limbs fallen helter-skelter and lying on top of one another,” she told the author, “one glimpsed the present, the unadulterated present, as a park? as a garden? — as a clearing — as an enclosure. What just a moment ago had been a hurricane-blasted forest now revealed itself as an enclosure, and so these words came to mind: The enclosure of the grander time, and one thought: When will this kind of time finally prevail? When will it finally determine everything else?”

The author’s response: Was this thought part of her mission, like her belief in images? Her only reply: “No questions!” and she went on speaking as though she had not heard him. “What a delight time can be. No, what a delicacy it is. One would like to bite into it and eat it, nourish oneself with it. And it is nourishing in a way. When my daughter was a child, she would express her sense of time like this: ‘It has been a long time since I have eaten an apple!’ And now, when I came out of the forest, it occurred to me that I, who am famous for having time—‘She has so much time, and in a position like hers!’—had to set out at once.”

To stay here. To stay here? Now she clearly heard a cuckoo calling, in the middle of January, an echo from a dream. Did she jingle the change in her pocket? She hardly ever carried cash, and certainly not coins. Yet shortly before her departure she gave herself permission to be superstitious. Clinging to her hiking shoes was a mountain thistle, a kind that did not grow anywhere in the woods here. She ran into a neighbor whose obituary had been posted for days in all the local shops. So he was alive? And who had died in his stead? Long ago, in the Sorbian village, more than one person had greeted her grandfather, when he came into town after a longish absence, with the question, “What, you’re not dead? Everyone was saying you died the day before yesterday!”

The enclosure of the grander time: what powerful gusts! And what phantom gusts now. At last she was sure about her journey. One way or the other she would learn something from it. And she would find a treasure, though not the kind one could seize possession of. Yes, was she a treasure-seeker, then? She had always been seeking a treasure, and always for others.