Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

It is said that even to her, his sister or somewhat older sibling, the brother meant more than any man, suitor, wooer, especially in their early youth. Yet that supposedly had nothing to do with their personal relationship, also not with the fact that they were orphaned early, but was a tradition with this Slavic Sorbian or half-Arab population, small and becoming smaller with each day that passed — the last villages almost completely absorbed into the German ones around them, and these long since incorporated into cities—: the love between brother and sister, as the author’s research discovered, had remained a prime characteristic of this people (see also cultural continuity); “the attitude peculiarly characteristic of all the women there consists in the exceptionally lively friendship they bring to their brothers; the latter sometimes seem to have greater worth in their eyes than their husbands. Their most sacred oath invokes the name of their brothers. And one of the most common formulas goes thus: ‘By the life of my brother!’” (historian from a previous century). And on each of the rare occasions when she, the sister, had seen her brother again, the terrorist and enemy of mankind, after she had kissed him on both cheeks she had also kissed him on his brow and shoulder, that, too, part of this tradition — or did she merely think she had done so, in retrospect?

Yet her brother despised his Slavic people. (He refused to believe in any Arab ancestors.) He despised them because they had not merely affiliated themselves with the infinitely larger, all-powerful state majority, for the sake of money, positions, the right to participate in decisions and live under the flag of a world power, but had also sold out to this people, body and soul, heart and mind, language and “customs” (? yes!). Her brother hated his people because they had given up their identity as a people, without war, without mounting even the slightest resistance.

And he hated them even more because they nonetheless continued to call themselves a “people,” or rather allowed themselves to be characterized as a “minority”; while in reality they had long since been reduced to appearing as a merely tolerated folkloric ensemble, one of twenty or thirty song-and-dance numbers trotted out for a festival produced by the national tourism office or in a promotional video, and beyond that? — nothing, nothing at all. Did this imply that her brother, in contrast to her, the sister, still believed in something like a people? Yes. And such a thing was even a necessity to him.

“I am lost without a people,” he had told her once, close to tears (and at the same time had jabbed a knife into the table). And since he was convinced that his maternal and paternal people was now no more than a “national propaganda lie,” and was “worth nothing and good for nothing” as a people, a minority, a population, or whatever, he had chosen another people for himself, “the only one far and wide,” as he was also convinced, “that still deserves the name”; whereas his sister was careful, and not only lately, not to take sides for or against anything, or even to get worked up over a sports team, for or against it — if for no other reason than that the few times when she had committed herself to a cause, a movement, or a group, after a very short while that same cause, movement, or group had dissolved, fallen apart, with such regularity that she had come to believe that this had occurred precisely because of her advocacy and support, as that soccer team she had rooted for as a girl whenever it played, merely on account of a certain player or even just the appealing sound of its name, had promptly begun to slide farther and farther down in the standings.

And now her brother was driving on this snowy night through his chosen country, with the window open, heading for his chosen people, which was at war with almost all the neighboring states, out-and-out war (not merely an undeclared or rumored one like the war in the nearby Sierra). And among other things, his chosen country and his chosen people would be saved, thanks to him; would emerge victorious; and would show the world. Thanks to knights errant such as him, a new era would dawn, or an old one, the forgotten one, the legendary one that still existed only as an object of ridicule, would be reinstated as never before. But wasn’t the country of his choice hopelessly lost? A defeated people, defeated once and for all, which had long since given up on itself and yet behaved as though life went on — precisely the sign of being defeated? And wouldn’t heroes like him actually help administer the coup de grâce?

And now, in the depths of night, in a heavy snowfall, he took the secret route through the mountains with which he had long been familiar. All the roads across the valley were blocked off. The country was blacked out. He drove without headlights, no faster than a walk, except when he accelerated as the road climbed. A woman was sitting next to him; not the one from earlier in the day. A little light came from the trees laden with snow, enough to make the shadows, or rather shapeless specters, of the snowflakes outside dart across the faces of the two people in the car. The knight Feirefiz, Parsifal’s half brother, had had just such a body with dark and light speckles. “Feirefiz”—that would have been a good name for her brother.

Somewhere halfway into the mountains he had come upon the young woman standing by the road, with a basket on her arm. Her brother had started: a seemingly congenital jumpiness, which had nothing to do with fear — constituted, as he had always appeared to be, of fearlessness, sheer courage, and excessive, ridiculous jumpiness; sensitivity to anything abrupt, whether a sound or something visual — and yet he himself was an abrupt person, given to sudden anger, sudden friendliness, sudden displays of goodness, sudden violent impulses (although directed only toward things, for the time being).

Driving at the speed of a walk up the mountainside, the new pair will now consume their middle-of-the-night meal. Until now they have not exchanged a single word, and from one rotation of the wheels to the next, they are more and more in agreement that until they touch each other for the first time, and altogether until the end, they will remain wordless like this; leaving it to their bodies to act, stretching toward, tensing against, arching over each other; or merely leaving it to the snow, sporadically blowing into the car, or to the spruce branches, likewise sporadically brushing against the sides of the car.

They will have helped themselves from the basket between them to slices of cold leg of lamb and corn bread. But while the young woman drinks wine diluted with water, the brother will drink milk — not that he always has, but as he has done since the time when he came to believe that he could rinse away all the darkness, blackness, blind rage inside him by drinking that white liquid. And again there were not a few people who, seeing him constantly drinking milk, sniffed his glass for disguised whiskey or vodka.

And in the most silent hour of the night, the one before the predawn graying of the sky, still at the speed of a walk, the two of them will have neared, by way of the secret route, the crossing point, recognizable only to her brother, devoted to even the smallest feature in his elective country, and thus to the alpine-hut-like shelter of his new lover. In the meantime, that moment when the brother will have become aware that he has just shaken off the last breath or scent of the years in prison, the mustiness swept away and out of the world by a clump of stones under a snow tire: a powerful push from deep, deep inside, which is followed as a matter of course by his free hand’s groping for the hip of the strange woman.