Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

And so on, turning from one of these locutions to the others and back again, back and forth, back and forth. Was this really possible? Could it be done? Yes, it could be done. And as time passed, the dictating came to resemble the murmured reading, as if all the banking formulas and stock-market clichés were part of the desert tales from bygone times. “The earnings potential of the traditional blue-chip stocks when I disappeared amid the stirring tamarisk branches close by the main tent before the ascent into the mountains, where we tugged at the camels’ nose rings in the shadow of the world financial markets and trade deficits.” Her professional language eventually interwoven with the other language and recited by her in the same soft incantatory tone, yet also with a peculiar urgency, as if she were using it here and in the present hour for the last time, for now or for good.

And then in the booklet a word in Arabic script, which, without any effort on her part, spelled itself out, deciphered itself, illuminated itself — read itself, lent itself to reading; the first word she recognized without needing to focus on it or follow it with her eyes from right to left. It was no longer “she” reading the foreign script; “it” read, and this “it read” surpassed for that one word-moment all the previous instances of “she (or I) read.” Such reading-recognition was accompanied by something different from the writing on the wall by an invisible hand that prophesied my, the despot’s, demise, the handwriting that could not be deciphered by me and would be interpreted only by one versed in such things, a third party.

And although the unexpectedly legible word — and then another, and then a few more — might simply mean “wood,” chasch(a)b , or “hornet,” zunbur , “mustard,” chardal , a window now opened up, or a prospect. To the reader, curled up in her narrow sleeping berth with the book resting on her raised knees, the characters began to resemble monumental writing outdoors in a landscape, painted on a mountainside or formed of stones. Except that they did not express anything monumental, anything resembling propaganda or advertising. Rather the signs inched along like a small, exceptionally delicate caravan on the most distant horizon, beneath a sky that they rendered material and tangible; to the sound of an inaudible music, snatches of which she sang along with, with the recurring word she knew by heart, murranim , singer.

And she drew back the compartment’s fleece-thick curtain, just a crack; but that was enough to allow the postmidnight air to waft in, and with it a cry issuing from one of the dozens of other sleeping berths in this hostel of the dispersed, a hollow gurgling from the bottom of a well shaft going way down into the bowels of the earth. From the neighboring berth the clicking of chess pieces battling each other.

It had not been the first time that her daughter, her child, vanished. As an adolescent she had already left the house several years earlier; also the riverport city; also the country. And even then she had gone without news of her child. Now, with the book meanwhile laid aside, she began to talk to herself. (Author’s observation: that at the time of this story, more and more people, especially the most beautiful women, carried on conversations with themselves.) A person standing outside would not have believed that the speaker was alone: she must be sitting or lying there with someone else; a man or a woman who kept as still as a mouse, all ears, as the woman’s soft yet clearly audible voice addressed itself to him or her, calmly, quietly, with many a pause, borne on the nocturnal stillness.

She spoke of herself there and then in the third person; almost in the tone of a chronicle. At intervals she addressed a “you”; and that, too, gave the impression that she had company. And the adventurer could be heard saying the following: “You know, her love for her child expressed itself from the beginning in her always wanting to rescue her. Merely to be there and to protect her was not enough. The mother had to be prepared at any moment to provide first aid and rescue. And thus the lives of the two women, with the father absent, teetered constantly on the edge of drama. And listen, she often rescued her child when there was hardly a need for rescue. She jumped forward and snatched her out of the path of a car that had long since turned off in another direction. She pulled her back from an abyss that was either miles away or only two feet deep.” If this were a film, her daughter would have got hooked on drugs, and she, the mother, would have been jealous of her youth. But this was no film plot.

“And let me tell you: at the school gate, this mother knocked a man to the ground who was actually another girl’s father, not a kidnapper. And time and again she rescued her child from bad company, male and female. And one day she pried her out of the embrace of a boy she had never seen before. And then one day the adolescent girl disappeared without a trace.

“And the mother promptly set out to find her child and rescue her, to fetch her home from hell, or from the land behind the looking glass, or from the bottom of an enchanted lake. For months and months she searched, from country to country, continent to continent, from new moon to full moon to new moon. And when she found her child at last, it was indeed not in a hellhole, but behind an invisible looking glass or in a second reality at the bottom of a lake. I tell you: after four or five months she came upon her vanished daughter on an island in the southern Atlantic — you need not know its name, let’s say beyond Lanzarote. The girl was living on the western coast in a shepherd’s hut — with nothing but ocean between there and Brazil — several miles from a town whose name I do want to mention to you, Los Llanos de Aridane (not Ariadne).

“This time the mother undertook the rescue operation differently from the previous times. She did not rush to the spot and come storming into the situation, but sneaked up on the rescuee, crept on all fours across rocky pastureland toward the cliff with the hut, crawling from bush to bush. From afar she then saw the girl with her back turned toward her, standing tall — she was no longer half-grown — in the flower border she had planted herself. The woman sneaked around her child in an arc; she did not want to call out to her, not from behind. Having reached the bluff, she had to scramble down the cliff a bit and work her way back up in a zigzag. And look: when she was only a few steps away from her lost daughter, she stood up straight behind the last shrubbery before the Atlantic Ocean, one of those briar bushes that send clouds of loose seedpods rolling in balls across the high plateaus.

“Can you explain to me why I seem to recall that all this happened at Eastertime? Because of the white cloths hung up to dry in the sun in front of the stone hut? Because of the little garden so glowingly, so intensely green in the rolling landscape? Because of the barefootedness, those very white feet of hers (they, too, seemed to have grown in the meantime)? And would you believe it: even though her daughter again had no need of being rescued — mother and child were both overjoyed to see each other; and this one time, an exception in their relationship, they were happy in each other’s presence at the same moment. And as they then celebrated this moment, without any special extras, you can really speak of a festive occasion. And the woman subsequently stayed on the island for a while, in the hut, close to the town. (During the first night the daughter put her mother to bed, in her own bed, and exhausted though the woman was from the search, when she awoke, she had recovered completely.) And in the end mother and daughter did not leave the island together; the girl did not rejoin the mother in the northwestern riverport city until a month later.