Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

Next she looked in on the litter-bearers, or whatever they were just then, of the abdicated emperor, or whatever he was just then, the four of them sleeping in the same tent-room, one in a child’s bed, one on the floor. They were all lying on their backs, probably because they were so exhausted from hauling their burden for days. And they were all sleeping in their clothes. Although they seemed to be wearing costumes from a bygone century, their faces, all pointing toward the roof, were thoroughly of the present time, part of this night; as only human faces, and particularly faces plunged so deeply and soundly into sleep, could be of the current time, the present, the embodied, tangible present.

Laila , night; bil-lail , at night; tonight, hadjihil-laila ; present, hadjir ; now, al-aana ; face, wadj . Each of these words, spoken out loud, was a breath that brought the four sleepers closer to her and confirmed their presence. Now! — and she leaned over each one in turn and stroked their faces, swollen from exhaustion — not merely the lips, nose, and eyes beneath the visibly heavy lids swollen, but also their temples and their ears, even the earlobes. She kneaded the swellings without waking even one of the four. One bearer had a checkered skin, almost a chessboard pattern. A second had had a nosebleed before falling asleep — his nostrils darkly encrusted — and a handkerchief lay next to him, white, with the blood spots inscribed on it, little blackish-red, slightly indented circles evenly distributed over the cloth (where he had stuck one corner after the other into his bleeding nostril), the circles forming a pattern on the white surface like those on a die.

She stood then, and stood and stood, lost in contemplation of the die pattern. It reminded her of nothing and of everything. At this sight she felt her guilt, now free, however, of a guilty conscience, not as a burden, weighing on her, but rather as something unavoidable, and at the same time the state of being guilty as justified. There must be guilt! “Must”—and she laughed, or so it seemed to her. And it also seemed to her as if the nosebleed pattern were her own. And she considered stealing that handkerchief from the sleeper.

As a child, even as an adolescent in her Sorbian or Oriental village, she had been a chronic thief, though only of fruit — other thefts repelled her — and only of apples and pears. She had raided all her neighbors’ land, from the first moment of ripening. And even later, wherever she happened to be in the world, she could never pass a tree without stealing at least one piece of fruit. That would remain the case all her life! and she then in all seriousness suggested to the author that a possible title for their book might be The Fruit Thief.

Handkerchief theft: it did not go beyond the thought. Her hand, already reaching for the item, stopped a span before it (“span”: hadn’t that word gone out of use long ago?). She stared and stared at the reddish-black dots, more than just six, more than twice as many. Instead, as the story goes, another hand now approached her hesitating one, that of the sleeper, who was perhaps only feigning sleep?

Yet this stranger’s hand likewise stopped halfway: two hands, motionless in the air, without the hint of a tremor, in the glow of a flashlight. She, the fruit thief, was untouchable. She, too, an untouchable? Yes. Except that it was she who projected the sense that no one could touch her, no one anymore, no one yet. Her untouchableness was active. She made herself this way. It was like the film in which she had played the heroine: she herself did not fight, but whenever someone came storming at her, she held out a lance, a sword, or a stick in front of her, and that alone stopped or felled the other person, kept anyone who was not the right person at bay.

And if the right one happened to come along (that was how it should be in a film), the long-lost man? Obviously. But his appearing, his merely showing himself, and their standing opposite one another, face-to-face, that had already been the final scene in the film: “All my longing”—that was the final sentence she had to speak in her role—“had only one object: to have you there in front of me again and to see you again at long last.”

The story goes that during that night in Pedrada the last tent she entered was that of the abdicated world ruler, “over whose empire (thanks to the addition of the empires of the exterminated American Indians) the sun never set,” and so on. The emperor or king, or her business partner or accomplice, or the one on the prowl for what had once been history, was lying in his ermine, stretched out on a bed as if on a bier, and seemed to be dead, more dead than any living being can appear, dead as only a dead person can seem.

The tent bed was the broadest imaginable, and she lay down beside him; stretched out like him. Except that although she lay there as still as he did, completely still, she did not seem dead at all. No greater contrast than between these two bodies, stretched out side by side, a hairsbreadth apart, yet not touching anywhere.

To the degree that the man had become emaciated, presenting an image of progressive wasting, the woman at his side now blossomed. As his cheeks shrank to the last shreds of skin still attached to his facial bones, sunken like those of a mummy, the woman’s cheeks swelled and took on the sheen of a freshly plucked apple, polished with a cloth. All of her forms expanded, grew taut, stretched. Altogether she acquired volume, grew larger and firmer, and at the same time became heavy and heavier — warmly heavy, beautifully heavy. While his forehead shriveled, acquiring creases and cracks “like the varnish on an old painting,” his eyes sucked in by their sockets, his lips drawn back over his teeth (which would never bite again), his legs transformed into cold sticks, she experienced, right there beside him, a generalized swelling, one which “in contrast to the four sleeping vassals had nothing at all to do with any kind of exhaustion.”

Her thighs, next to the wretched male quasi-skeleton, rose, curved, and filled out, as did her breasts; her mouth, the reverse of the man’s cadaver-like one, stood slightly open, showing the tip of her tongue, “the smile of the flesh and the woman victorious”; and above them the woman’s eyes now opened as wide as possible, with a gleam despite their blackness “that represented the triumph of life and survival, the triumph heightened by the man lying there next to her on the tent bed, so waxy and wan, from head to toe, body and soul, in his ermine. And how in that moment, during the night, this night, her hair gleamed, came loose, fell over the head of the bed, spread over the pillow and the bolsters, snaking toward the bald, deader-than-dead skull of her neighbor, of that witness to her aliveness, all the sweeter now, in this night!” In a film one would have seen the two of them from above, from the dome of the tent chamber, first in a long shot, then in a close-up.

In the course of her life she had become a ruler, for better or worse. “And this sort of ruler,” she then told the author, “is something I do not want to be anymore.” But the realm in which she had always been eager to reign was that of the sleepers, with her as the only one still awake, as during that night in Pedrada. From early childhood on, she had had the notion that sleepers were not bad people. Even evildoers and unkind people, she had thought as a child, and still thought, were harmless and peaceable when they slept, and not only for the moment, but for the entire period of sleep; by making use of their sleep, and in consideration of their sleep, one could certainly discover them as peace-loving, well-intentioned, indeed childlike folk.