Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

“And turn your face to me now: Yes, she is the one. Yes, you are the one. And that man there in the ermine cloak, representing the abdicated king and emperor on the way to his final resting place on the southern flank of the Gredos, I greet as my grandfather from the village back home. He was a singer, but — if you want to know — not a singer of folk songs. Just like that old singer, you hold your head very high and will sing us something in a few minutes, with your high-pitched voice, as effortlessly and uninsistently as only an old singer can, nothing but pure voice, with at most a quarter of an eye on us. And just as with that singer in the last days of his life, together with your ermine and your gold-braided waistcoat, a strong odor emanates from you, almost a stench.”

“Do you walk in your sleep?” (Here a question interjected by the former feature-article author.) — She: “I always have. And I see the itinerant stonemason there, or whatever he represents, as my brother, on the verge of killing a person for the first time. At the moment it is still just a ghost of a notion in him. But as soon as he speaks it out loud, he will, willy-nilly, be held to it and veritably obliged to do the deed. It was already the same with your violence toward objects, which landed you in the penitentiary: for a long time destruction was only one of your thoughts among many — but as soon as you had put it in words to one person, then another, then everyone you knew, it had to happen someday; you had no choice; no sooner said than done; having said it meant having to do it.”

The stonemason, now revealing his feelings: “Never fear, sister. I will not say it, not tonight. But it is true: time and again I have been close to speaking the words, especially lately. Just a slip of the tongue, and the word would have been out there, with all the guards listening. And you, sister, made no small contribution to my destructive rage. Of course it is also true that in our village days you exercised forethought for me, foresaw for me, kindly forestalled things for me, forecast the coming day and the coming year, with my interests at heart.

“And it is also true that you never wanted anything for yourself, or at least not for yourself only. Everything you undertook was undertaken for the sake of someone else, also several someone elses, but primarily for the sake of me, the parentless child, the orphan. And although you were also an orphan, you did not see yourself as one, not once; as a child you were already self-sufficient, independent, the child of no one, the descendant of no ancestors, from the outset a person without any frame of reference: as little a villager as a person defined by the Slavic minority or the German nation, and then not someone from the economics department, either, or a person whose manner gave the slightest hint that she was a tycoon, just as you never behaved in a sisterly fashion, or as a lover — but that is something of which neither I nor anyone else has any knowledge, perhaps least of all your lover himself, if he in fact exists. You defied definition; you stood, moved, and acted solely and exclusively somewhere outside/on the periphery.

“Everything you did, as you conceived it, had to be done for someone else’s sake, and at the time this someone was above all me, the orphan. It was impossible for you simply to do, look for, collect something without the thought that it was for me. But that did not stem from goodness, or from any intention to be helpful and useful — you just were, and are, that way; that is your nature, and perhaps, I often thought, your need to do things for others, and the way you become incapable of lifting a finger when you lose the image of a person, or persons, is even a sort of defect — your own personal sickness. Even in the old days, whenever you had to buy something, it could not be for you, even if you needed the item; and not until the idea of buying something or other came to you in connection with me could you set out to make the purchase.

“To pick an apple hanging just outside your window and eat it was out of the question, out of the realm of possibility: but to scramble up to the most precarious treetop for some fruit or other, so long as it was for me — no hesitation! And out in the woods you never popped the wild strawberries, or whatever you were picking there, straight into your mouth, not a single one: no matter how luscious you found all the little fruits of the field, no matter how avid you always were for the fruit and berries — you were capable of picking, hunting, and gathering only when thinking of someone other than yourself. And how dispirited and unmotivated you became when it was a question of harvesting only for yourself! That is sick, sister.

“And just as it is said of some people that they ‘do not know how to share,’ you, with this sickness of yours, sister, had the opposite compulsion — to share all the time. You no sooner got something in your hand, somehow or other, than you were already offering it to me or someone else — everyone in your vicinity — so as to share it. This gesture was completely involuntary; you could not help yourself — you had to share. Sometimes I experienced your gesture of sharing as aggression — you pushed the thing to be shared in my face, thrusting your arm at me violently. It was as if you had to crush me, and, later, various other people, against your ribs—

“One time you told me how you pictured yourself dying: while saving someone else’s life. Ah, my poor sick sister. And you crushed me against your ribs in an entirely different way, too: by standing in for the father, not ours but one from the Old Testament. Just as the Old Testament fathers were ordered to beat their sons preemptively, again and again, so that evil would have no chance to take root in them, or would be nipped in the bud, you beat me in those days even before I did anything wrong, prophylactically.

“And I, and I, and I? How little I can say about myself, and then almost only what I am not. I am not like you — if for no other reason than that from the beginning I saw myself in relation to others, measured myself against others, compared myself with others, defined myself with reference to others. I was a villager if ever there was one. I was a Slav, or simply what was considered Slavic. I became a servant of God if ever an orphaned Slavic villager became one. And then, always a child of my time, or not of my time, and continuing to understand myself almost exclusively in relation to my contemporaries and in reaction to the spirit of the times, I became a destroyer.”

The stonemason or wanderer fell silent for a while, took a deep breath, and then resumed speaking: “For a very long time in my life I hardly lived from within myself. Whatever I did or failed to do, wherever I was: I was dependent on someone or something else. A few dependencies actually helped me stand on my own two feet and enriched me. These were more like safety nets, signposts, lifelines, reference points. But the majority of my dependencies did not strengthen me but diminished me. That was especially true of my dependency on people.

“I do not know why, when I found myself in the company of others, and perhaps not even reluctantly, I would instantly feel like their slave, or at least like a subordinate. In the twinkling of an eye I would be transformed into an appendage or accessory; did not exist on my own; just flailed at the end of the more or less imaginary leash that tied me to the other person, or was transfixed, in a bad sense, under the person’s spell, paralyzed.

“And each time this flailing or paralysis also made itself evident, too. Even when I was with strangers, on streets, in subways, in stadiums, I no longer acted but only reacted, magnetically attracted to the others, slavish, unfree. Even my way of walking, looking, standing, sitting, was determined entirely by my reaction to the walking, looking, standing, and so on of my fellow pedestrians, fellow onlookers, fellow travelers. Either I imitated them slavishly or I did the exact opposite, another form of slavish behavior: when they ran, I walked with exaggerated slowness; when they all looked into the arena, I pointedly looked away, at the sky or their faces, and so forth.