Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

And the conversation ended more or less this way — The station owner: “Your husband back safe and sound from Africa?”—She: “Without a scratch on him.”—The station owner: “Your mother released from the hospital?”—She: “A week ago, still looking very pale.”—The station owner: “Your children still doing well in school?”—She: “The boy’s been slacking off a bit lately.”—The station owner: “I remember how much I enjoyed watching you dance, Mahabba. And then your voice. No one in the whole area sang like you. You should not have given up your singing. Why did you give all that up after your wedding? stop dancing? stop singing? The softer the song, the more your voice went through and through me.”—She: “I will take it up again, perhaps not the dancing but the singing. What I need is a new song. I can feel it coming on. All that’s there now are a few notes, a few words. What’s missing is something to pull it together. Perhaps on the other side of the Sierra?”

She wished the station owner would go on speaking to her as this woman for whom he obviously mistook her. Or was he merely pretending to be confused? — All the better: she would drive off feeling easier in her mind. To let him go on and on about her in the role of that stranger; and if adding anything, doing so without asking questions of her own, or asking why, with no intention other than to get him to digress, again and again, every digression having as its focus the unknown woman, who in the meantime could equally well be her. As she left the filling station, the owner or farmer suddenly took her hand and kissed it. The benefit of an interlude, in which one allegedly wasted only one’s own time, and time in general, and gained so much time. A rich interval. Bright trumpet blasts across the entire barren meseta .

Then nothing at all happened, and for a considerable length of time, once she was alone again with the road and the tableland. That for a while nothing at all happened: what an event these days — what a special circumstance. Nothing but repeated flashing of lightning. The flashes did not come out of the consistently clear blue sky; they came out of or lit up inside her. A flashing of images began inside her such as had never before erupted in such variety and such quick succession; like meteor showers, coming so thick and fast, yet often at distant points in a firmament which for that very reason seems impossible to encompass; the eye cannot keep up, yet does not want to let a single falling star go unnoticed. And again a curious phenomenon: that these image flashes were generated by patience, and almost happiness — yet always pointed instead to something disheartening or even grievously sad.

In front of the car a whirl of chopped cornstalks, long since withered, blew along the carretera , whipped together by a wind spout into a sort of leafy column that spun past a few feet above the asphalt; and at the same time she, the driver, felt the brook flash through her, the brook called Satkula that circled the Sorbian village, more than a thousand miles away, in a great arc.

She put her finger to her forehead, which meant: be mindful. The image of the brook, the glittering of the water oppressive? First of all because she viewed any recollection of her childhood and its setting as over and done with. And then, that village signified to her falling prey to death. In her memory, the villagers there had been obsessed with death, day in, day out, including the children, or perhaps them above all, the children? Yes, the children’s awareness, above all, at least there and at that time, had been riddled with village tales of people’s dying, almost always gruesome, never peaceful, never? no, never. A neighbor had been tied up and his head stuck in an anthill, where the ants had eaten him alive (although it happened during the war, before her time, she had experienced it, as a child, as happening in the present). Another man broke his neck simply by falling to the ground while picking apples, and not even from high up on a ladder but simply from a chair (that could happen to them, the children, just as well). A neighbor woman choked to death simply because a horse whose smell she could not stand passed by. Another woman, so one heard, young and healthy, simply did not wake up one morning, and died, according to the priest at her open grave, in a state of sin, unmarried, with an unborn child in her womb. The miller — for a couple of years there was such a person there — lost the third and last of his children when the little one drowned in the brook, which was especially rapid below the dam, where the millrace joined it.

Perhaps it was less these accumulated deaths themselves than the tales of them circulating from dawn till dusk that populated the entire village for her, even in broad daylight, with terrifying ghosts; for all that was left of her own parents, of whose accidental death the villagers did not speak, at least not to her, the child, was trails of light, primarily due, no doubt, to her grandparents, who dwelt exclusively and insistently on stages of the parents’ lives — and wasn’t that characteristic of old folks? And any death in the village that she witnessed with her own eyes affected her very differently from one described by a third party or, worse still, overheard in passing: the person, the neighbor, whose death, even the most wretched one, she experienced with her own eyes, present until the final breath, would never crouch on her chest at night or pluck out her heart and then jump out at her the next morning as she was on her way to school or in the afternoon as she drove the cows to pasture — for a while this was still done in the village, by some little girl or other, outfitted with a whip and rubber boots — from behind a barn, from the slippery rocks where one forded the brook, from an empty root cellar stinking of rotting turnips.

Yes, the innumerable tales of death and dying, or, more precisely, anecdotes, at times made her village seem toxic. Never again a village, or at least not that one. And in retrospect it seemed to her as if it had been chiefly that sense of being pursued by the villagers’ obsession with corpses that had awakened her interest in money, when she was still a child. In money, simply the concept of it, she saw something that suggested an escape from the grim cycle of cadaver-worship, the hereafter, and apparitions. Money circulated toward life, embodied the living world, and meant now! (and now, and now …). And in the beginning it was just a healthy distraction. The thought of money gradually banished all the ghoulish stories.

And even then her urge to deal with money, to handle it on behalf of others, was far more powerful than the urge to have it for herself, to possess it; even then she had the idea (yes) not so much to multiply money as to let it be fruitful; to manage it — which then became the focus of her university studies — to use money to open new avenues, and still more new avenues, consistent with one of her later guiding principles: “He who steps into the same river has ever different waters flowing past him.” Setting things in motion with money: thus she became the first person from her death-obsessed village to go into the money business. (That she was a woman doing this was no longer particularly remarkable even then.)

And now she said, talking to herself sotto voce, as usual: “‘Thou shalt manage money!’ is a commandment like ‘Thou shalt not steal!’; its positive counterpart, like ‘Thou shalt make it be fruitful and multiply!’ And who knows, perhaps I accomplished as much as I did in this business because the thought of money enabled me to shake off those village death-and-doom stories? That thought gave me the energy to immerse myself completely, to my own and everyone’s benefit, in the world of the here-and-now, of life? But why are the village images coming to me now? Flow on without me, village brook!”