Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

The moment in which the woman stood there handcuffed, waiting to be taken away (the image instantly appearing live on all the television screens): the essence of gentle beauty, as if transfigured. Next to her, in place of her husband, who had been taken away even faster, in a different way, sawdust strewn on the ground. And only now can one see: she is dressed like a woman wayfarer from a much earlier century, riding in a coach to one of the kings of the time, Charles the Fifth, Philip the Second, with a shipment of money to deliver, and she, the donor of the money, is equal in station to the queen. And aren’t the other guests also in costume? A midnight costume ball at the Lone Star Café in the center of Nuevo Bazar on the mesa? An incident or scenario that was actually a sort of placeholder for a prologue, such as she had in mind for her book?

Television off. Music off. Lights out, not only in the bar but also in the entire settlement. No more artificial day: a pitch-dark postmidnight hour; then the night light gradually creeping in, the night sky arching overhead. Everyone leaving, including her. And, now, in the night, no problem finding her way home to the hostel. With the flood heaters in the air over Nuevo Bazar turned off, the cold of the wintry steppe streaming in from all directions. A rushing in one’s ears, as if in the barrenness high overhead, in the pitch darkness, the crowns of trees were stirring. A return of the sense of taste, tasting of the air and the icy wind.

Not another person out and about, from one minute to the next, as was almost the rule in this southern part of Europe (although the region had nothing southerly about it). Only an idiot, astonishingly old, by the way, almost a graybeard, with a harelip, making his nocturnal rounds, seemingly as always, with a flashlight, shining it first on her, then on himself, and doffing his knitted cap as he passed: “Buenas noches, señora andante!; Buenas noches, señora de mi alma!” (Good night, lady out walking … lady of my soul!).

Back at the hostel, with the help of a tiny light attached to the front-door key, she lit her way up to her compartment in the gallery off the interior courtyard. The curtains to all the sleeping compartments were drawn and hooked from the inside. If there was a light on in any compartment, it did not show.

On the other hand, at considerable intervals, and each time from farapart sections of the patio, came a variety of noises and sounds; yet hardly the usual, more-or-less regular sounds made by sleepers; rather almost inaudible ones here, more distinct ones there, and in particular sudden sounds that ceased abruptly, like voices responding to each other, or like certain voices involuntarily led by others, amid the all-the-more-powerful silence that enveloped the hostel from top to bottom; a silence as physical as only the deep sleep of a very disparate crowd can generate; a crowd in which each person is not at home in this place, having found his way there from quite distant parts, by difficult, if not life-threatening, paths, and, in his sleeping compartment at last, and safe for this night at least, has tossed and turned for hours before finally falling asleep; but then from sleeping berth to sleeping berth; and one person right after the other, the first as a sort of sleep-leader among maybe a hundred, drawing the rest along into the now general deep sleep; and as if this sleep had come only with the arrival of the woman, the last guest to turn in.

Yes, not until their numbers were complete was it permissible for this little band of lost, dispersed, and asylum-seeking folks, united by nothing but their restlessness, to give themselves up to rest (a palpably only temporary rest). A great breath of relief sweeping through the venta , now in the form of a soft whimpering, now in the form of a sighing that expressed itself only in the moment of falling asleep; here as a giggling, a release from the earlier daylong stress, even a burst of laughter, such as the man or woman in question could never have uttered while awake; then over there as a cry, so brief that one cannot believe one’s ears and thinks one must have been mistaken, but on the other hand so piercing that one still recalls it decades later and wonders whether it was not a death cry — so shrill and at the same time broken off in the middle: that could not have been a cry of sexual pleasure, or at least not only that? Or: a cry of pleasure, long held back, welling up, and at the same time a death cry? And thus she made her way to her own sleeping berth — now and then jingling her key on the stairs and in the gallery, as if to provide additional reassurance to those who had had such a hard time finding rest.

The curtain to the compartment drawn back. But the space was not unoccupied. In the glow of the lamp affixed to the wall sat a lovely young girl with an overly serious mien, playing chess with herself in her nightgown. Glancing up, she said only, “Too early—,” and pulled the curtain to. The chess pieces had been of transparent rock crystal, powerful, almost lumpy shapes, such as once upon a time the caliphs, and in particular King Almanzor in Andalusia, had taken along to pass the time during their campaigns against the Christendoms.

The next compartment over was the right one (her mistake). Here she now sat, like the girl next door, with her back to the walnut partition, as thin as it was solid. “For those of our tribe, it is more fitting to keep watch than to sleep.” Calling to mind the few people who were the point of her story. But for that she had to read first. Immerse herself in the Arabic booklet belonging to her faraway daughter. “Time to read!” Upon her opening the book, a sound as if of lips parting, very soft and gentle.

She pronounced the individual words and phrases over and over under her breath. The Arabic script looked to her like the tracks of wild animals running through a field of grain: loops, leaps, circles, and, at the end, in the middle of the wheat field, a large rest-circle. Intermittently she switched on her hand telephone and spoke to the answering machine in the office of her temporary replacement, back home in the banking citadel in the riverport city; made suggestions, gave instructions; analyzed and predicted. In one breath she recited an ancient Arabic sentence from the fifth or the sixth, the Christian eleventh or twelfth, century, in the translation written in the margin by her daughter. “I departed from the paved ground, away from the teeming throng, and strolled in the sand.” And in the next breath she murmured into the speaking device that fit into the palm of her hand phrases like “clear strategy,” “aggressively implement the new technologies,” “warning on profits,” “additional earnings impetus,” “stagnant employment picture,” “remain on the road to growth,” “bull market.” And turning in the twinkling of an eye back to the book, she deciphered and spelled out, “I turned my cheek to the dust and felt nothing more than affection.” And then, again switching on the telephone nestled in her fist: “The inflation horizon will certainly brighten soon,” “gratifying market trends,” “a very attractive investment — shows imagination!” “In the coming months the growth rate could explode in a war of ‘fundamentals versus growth,’ and certain fundamentals will have to be given a timely burial.” And continuing in the other text: “Love possessed me in such a fashion that I neglected myself as well as my beloved … my innermost heart was burning to know what path he took through the mountains … when in the year 532 I stood on the inland dune outside Fez … said the bird on the edge of the desert, the lovers spoke a language used otherwise only by madmen … the word for ‘tears’ had the same root as the word for ‘to cross’ … and the breath of mercy came from Yemen (or from ‘the right’—‘Yemen’ was the word for ‘right’) …”