Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

And now something squishy beneath the hiker’s sole, a sinking into something soft: a piece of a garment? an entire garment? a garment shrouding a decomposing corpse, stretched out there on the forest floor, already half transformed into a cadaver, gelatinized?

No, the softness came only from the fabric and the thick moss growing all over it. And the fabric? Was, and is, that shawl or stole we had lost during the previous crossing of the Sierra de Gredos, a year or five years ago, and had been determined to find this time. Is such a thing possible? Yes, it is possible. “And we will not lose you a second time, my shawl!” she said, as she involuntarily traced the word “shawl” in Arabic letters in the night air (it was the same word).

She walked. We played. And our playscapes extended far beyond the four walls of your nursery, farther and farther beyond. At every step a playground, a playing field, a play space, and one followed the other; followed on its heels; went hand in hand with it.

And this succession of spaces also presented itself as a succession of settings — for what? what was set there? what happened there?: where the spaces themselves were the happening, the game, the spectacle. And the places through which she was walking alone now formed trails and fords and passageways and walkways and tunnels to the locales, the same ones or others, of once-upon-a-time: where we two — did Arabic, like the Slavic languages, have a dual form, between singular and plural? — had been at one time, or had passed through: every few steps, these places in the Sierra turned out to be augmented by settings from her childhood village, from her school and university towns, from megalo- and metropolises, but more often by settings off the beaten track, remote places where she had once been with another person, or with several people who had become close friends, and at the same time will have been — this is how clearly the places, sites, and spots of the past that were played into her hand presented themselves.

And each of these once and future settings, here and there (she demanded that the author avoid the term “place images” or even “image” for this stage of their joint story and use it only at the end, if at all), revealed a pivot and a hinge, a connecting element that allowed it to pass into the following setting, to continue turning the stage and the page to the next.

Wasn’t this whirl of settings, from her own life and others’, contemporary ones and ones from hundreds of years ago, predestined for this section of her route and as if planned in advance for her book? Perhaps; but if so, not such a rapid whirl: with time less whirling than swirling like a meteorite and crossing its own path. And remarkable, too, that it happened as she was walking downhill, instead of uphill, as had been her previous experience, and at night instead of in the morning.

A setting that came flying to her was the kitchen where her half-grown daughter, after they had located each other again (before she lost the child for the second time), was playing hostess, serving her (that had never happened before between mother and daughter and would never happen again in this way?) in that house by the Atlantic cliff near the small island town with the name “Los Llanos de Aridane”: yes, each setting and everything in the series passed before her, together with the terms for it, as the-signified-and-its-signifier.

And almost with the same step there came flying to her the edge of a square in another small town (“Where, when, in the ring-around-the-rosy of places, names from now on are unimportant for our story,” she told the author), where the two of them again, the woman and child, had eaten at the end of a market day, and all that had happened was that they had sat there together in the otherwise emptied-out marketplace and that a strong wind will have been blowing, making the empty fruit and vegetable crates left behind from the market skitter all over the square, and that scraps of paper and plastic will have swirled around their heads, and that the sky above the square was, and is, and will have been pale gray.

And with the next step, the two of them — in the dual, mi dva or some such — are driving home in the car on a rainy night, and all that happened was that during the entire trip tools, hammers, axes, pliers, together with apples or whatever, rolled back and forth on the floor of the car, and knocked against each other, and that the shadows of the raindrops on the windshield, whenever they were struck by the headlights of an oncoming car, dart across their clothes and faces in the form of dark, round spots, and that it is warm inside the vehicle.

And a building that had once been a schoolhouse had a triangular gable with a relief in the middle representing an empty circle. And from a harvested cornfield far from the Sorbian-Arab village, a waterspout (an archaic term?) swept the chaff up above eye level and across the abandoned field in a column. And a caisson pulled far ahead of us along a cemetery’s main avenue, and the autumn leaves drift down around it. And on the railroad embankment the tall grass appeared and then was gone and out of sight, as it blew in the direction we and the train were traveling. And the hedgehog appears, the one that got stuck in the fence and that we will have freed. And now that swing appears on a certain playground in the dusk, still swinging without the swinger, who has disappeared, and then it will have continued to be pushed by nothing but the wind.

And with yet another step she saw in a flash the mouth of one of the rivers where it meets the other in the riverport city, with its sandbanks and the northern sky mirrored white in the water, one of the rivers black like the río Negro, the other blue and yellow like the Amazon, and the waterfowl from all the world’s rivers swarming there at the mouth. And with the following step she saw in a flash the shriveled onions sending out green shoots in the cellar of the bombed-out house. And with the following step there flew to her the neatly set table at the foot of the cliff. And with the following step, the fire seen through the little mica window in the door of the stove. And with the following, the sobbing from the telephone (which thus also became a setting).

At last she reached a patch of woods where it was no longer merely dark but in fact pitch-dark. No, “pitch-dark” was not the word either, or “pitch-black,” for even with the juniper branch, which she held out in front of her like a blind person and tapped on the ground, she could not make any headway. Yet the moonless starry sky remained just as clear as before. The trees simply formed such a dense canopy between her and the sky that although a faint sparkle penetrated, it did not light her way even a thumb’s length ahead. What was that expression from the Sorbian-Arab village? — “a darkness you can hang an ax on.”

One could not see one’s hand before one’s face? That was how it was. True, it would not have prevented her from pressing on. So why did she finally stop in her tracks? Because she no longer knew whether she would still have solid ground beneath her feet; because not another step was possible. To feel her way forward with her hands was still possible; but impossible to do that at the same time with her toes and soles. Another village expression came to mind: “no farther than a hen’s step.”

For a while she tried shuffling along, without raising a foot. And could one make headway like this? Each step covered hardly half a span, and in the end perhaps just barely a toenail’s length. On this night there would be no finding her way out of this forest. And where she now stopped, total darkness reigned, without a glimmer, without any outlines, a darkness such as she had encountered only underground and in a tunnel. Since this was the case, and nothing to be done, she sat down to wait for morning.