Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

Her brother traveled only by night, and that had always been the case, not merely since he had become a fugitive, or, as now, a deportee. They said it was because the accident involving his parents and the other brother had occurred in broad daylight. But what didn’t “they” say. After a few weeks, he had run away from the boarding school (in those days they still kept the pupils locked in) to which his grandparents had taken him, hardly more than a child — at his own request, for he wanted to become a priest — after nightfall, and had set out, only ten years old, on the nocturnal pilgrimage, yes, pilgrimage, along country roads and across fields, back to the Sorbian village, more than thirty miles away; before sunrise he was suddenly standing beside his sister, who had been awakened by an unusual weight on her bed: an armful of early apples that her brother had picked in the orchard behind the house (it was the end of September). And this child who had returned home promptly named the different varieties: “Shepherd’s Apples, found in the woods by a French shepherd. — Alexander Lukas, found in the woods around the year 1870 by a certain Alexander Lukas. — Princess of Angoulême, an old French variety, named after the daughter of Louis the Sixteenth, the king who was guillotined. — Dear Louise of Avranches. — Cox Orange: bred in 1830 by an Englishman named Cox. — Ontario: bred in 1887 on Lake Ontario in Canada.”

This time, too, her brother was traveling by night, through the long winter night, almost without stopping. Even his intermittent pauses were part of his traveling: waiting for a train connection; waiting for a car that finally stopped; waiting in a hiding place for guards and patrols to pass.

Cold, and hardly anything to eat: and yet he did not mind in the slightest traveling by night. So long as it was night: he did not need much more. Unlike her, he was in his element moving around at night. If she was not already asleep, she had to be at her destination by midnight at the latest, in a house, close to a bed. He, on the other hand, even when he was not traveling, made his rounds in the dark, between dusk and dawn. During his years in prison, when he was not pacing or dancing around his cell at night, he lay on his cot, drawing spirals in the air, and if he happened to fall asleep for a bit, he felt even more imprisoned during such nocturnal sleep than he already was. The nights for him were made for sniffing out, tracking down, rummaging around. As a fifteen-year-old he had written poems, all of which had night as their subject. She still knew two lines from one of his night poems by heart: “Snakes on the prowl rummage through the stillness, / Night — and only the will lives!” Since that time she referred to her brother as “the night-rummager.” And now for all these years he had not been able to rummage through a single night. And waiting to be set free had had nothing in common with the waiting during his nocturnal journeys.

Sometimes her brother struck her as uncanny. At such moments she was afraid for him. And this fear was usually connected with fear for others, not merely for this person or that but several, many, a great many. True, he had not killed anyone yet; he had been sent to jail only for “violence against objects”—though destructive and repeated violence. Yet it was her fear, gaining strength with the years of his incarceration, that in the meantime he had set his heart on killing, or at least striking, massively.

Yet as a child, and also for a long time afterward, he had been completely incapable of hurting anyone; he simply could not defend himself or hit back; and even in the penitentiary, where he was stronger than most, on several occasions when he got into a scuffle, he let himself be beaten up without resisting — at most he cried out, in helplessness and rage, rage directed more at himself for having no talent for violence against people, against his own kind, for being absolutely incapable of violating the taboo zone — the other’s stomach, chest, face; for not even being able to bring himself to trip the other man up or grab him by the nose or ear or put him in a headlock.

Fear for her brother: for in the end he had taken to signing his letters to her with an expression that had been popular long ago, used to brand history’s notorious evildoers: “an enemy of mankind.” And since the contents of these letters seemed to fit this expression more and more — though in a sort of code; the two of them had had a secret language since childhood — his sister finally could not help believing it, not completely, but almost: yes, her brother, the one with the litany of apple varieties, the one who had sat next to her for years in the dark of night, had really and truly become an enemy of mankind. And he would not be satisfied to leave it at that colorful epithet. Yes, wasn’t her brother aware that, at the time of this book, fighting against anything or for anything was no longer possible? And that if he died in such a fight, his death would move no one — except her: as a man without parents, he was no victim, was a desperado from the outset; the death of a man without parents held no significance and did not count.

But for now he was traveling through the night with the impertinence of a newly released prisoner. It was as if there were no differences or transitions between the airplane ride at the beginning, then the trip in a car with a chauffeur, then walking, then riding again. He seemed to be swept along in a single, expansive, gravity-free movement. As he rode, sitting by the window on the night bus, for instance, where the passengers all became people like him, whatever they might be otherwise, he was also striding along with airborne hundred-yard steps, which ran through his head like a sort of counting song, from one into the thousands. And in walking down the dark roads he was constantly rolling on the balls of his feet. And it could also happen that, as he continued along the shoulder of a nocturnal highway, he might suddenly hop on one leg, as if a game of hopscotch were marked out in chalk on the asphalt.

Even when he walked backward for a stretch — a habit he shared with his sister — it was less for the purpose of flagging down a car than out of high spirits. During his repeated sprints he would also run backward, often for an entire nocturnal mile, with his back to the next border he would have to cross. Borders were his element, just as the night was. The more notorious a border, the more it attracted him. Where most others disguised themselves before reaching the border, cloaked themselves or hid (for example, under a tarpaulin on a truck, as the author had done as a child, or in some other way), he presented himself if possible even more elegantly than usual, and moved with the openness of one who feels at home at borders, and during this first night’s journey also with challenging bravado: “Nothing can happen to me. No one will stop me. I have nothing to lose.”

While it was one of the aging author’s nightmares to be forced to cross that forbidden and dangerous border of his childhood again, and this time in the middle of the night, on foot and alone, in a suit, shirt, and tie (but where, for God’s sake, are his shoes and socks? — doubly nightmarish!), the newly released prisoner approached such a border like the fulfillment of a wish-dream, and in this dream he then crossed the bridge over the border-marking river like a man without a care in the world, barefoot, his shoes in his hand, and no one stopped him — it was night, after all, and nocturnal borders could only be his accomplices; and besides, he had a passport that was still valid, if just barely, and besides, he had served his time, and besides, he had been convicted in a different country altogether.

Not a soul, also no vehicle, during the first seven nocturnal miles after the border crossing. Moonset. Deepest, most silent night. Sporadic glitter of mica in the tar for a short distance around, accompanying the pedestrian. No sound but that of his still-bare feet; not even that of a night plane high in the sky — no airplane flew over this country, had not for a long time now, not even by day.