Peter Handke - Absence

Undoubtedly, if one looked at the country as he spoke, the old man’s words had the power to make things visible by giving them their contours, to raise, as it were, the lifeless hollow from the depths; but though the old man’s voice rose to a quivering psalmody addressed only to the country, our group did not accept his message. The soldier listened absently, as though he knew the text in advance and was actually listening to something else; the gambler stared at the bunch of keys in his fist, from which steel points protruded between his fingers like a knuckle-duster; and the woman looked at herself in a pocket mirror which she held so close that she could only see her eyes.

With impassive features, the leader of the expedition took the mirror and threw it into the thicket; and at almost the same time he disposed of the gambler’s keys and his own freshly cut hazel stick. (As though they had duplicates at home, woman and gambler didn’t seem to mind.) Then he stamped his foot on the ground, bringing forth an unexpected reverberation which roused them all, including the soldier. He then called their attention to a half-buried stone slab, a fragment of a portal of indeterminate age, scraped off the lichen, strewed a handful of fine juniper needles on it, and carefully blew them over the letters, thus distributing the needles in the grooves. In this way he, as though by magic, raised a picture from the stone and, with a sweep of his magician’s cape, presented it to his audience: a weathered, ten-rayed, gnomon-less sundial scratched into the stone and made visible by the shiny brown juniper needles.

With the same air, he tore a blank page from his notebook, ripped it up, put the pieces in his mouth, chewed them in his right and left cheek by turns, took the paper pulp between his fingers, and laid it out in lines, on a second block of stone that seemed to have grown out of the ground. After giving it time to dry, he removed it and showed each one of us the imprint of the letters: DIM, which he elucidated as “Deo Invicto Mithrae” and translated as “To the unconquered sun god.” Thereupon he pointed at the depopulated country before us, and called out his usual: “Let’s get going.”

This uncovering of script was what we needed. It gave us eyes for other signs of life in the wilderness: the vestiges of paving stones in the grass, the prewar milepost leaning against natural stones, the one cultivated cherry tree (in the foliage of which for a time we saw nothing, then the first glowing red fruit, and finally the sparkle and radiance that overshadowed the green of the leaves). Though the pavement soon broke off, the signs in themselves formed a kind of causeway or raised avenue, cutting straight through the wilderness as far as the most distant horizon.

The old man proceeded quickly, with lowered head and crooked shoulders; seen from behind, he gave the impression now of a dying man, now of a schoolboy. The rest of us were seized with euphoria the moment we set foot in the strange country. The woman walked on her hands and did cartwheels; the soldier and the gambler tossed a basketball, which naturally the gambler had in his knapsack, back and forth; at one stopping place they found a concrete court, belonging to an abandoned army camp, camouflaged with creepers and even equipped with a pole and a serviceable basket.

A warm sun shone in our faces. We bounded along as over a mountain meadow; what seemed to be tall prairie grass was the sparse, thin stalks which, without being trodden on, bowed under the air current raised by our steps; underneath it was dense, stubbly meadow grass. We had the feeling that we were still on a road thanks to the woven pattern of the plantains, as reliable a companion as the sparrows flying along with us from bush to bush; every time we looked there were more of them, and as they streaked through the air they took the place of telegraph wires.

Shoulders rolling, eyes fixed on the tips of his shoes, our leader was wholly taken up with his walking; his steps shook his whole body up to the bristly whorl on the crown of his head; in his preoccupation with his walking, he made one think of a blind man going his daily rounds and familiar with every bend and bump and pothole. Now he began to slow down and his shoulders grew broader. When we overtook him, he seemed entirely self-absorbed and yet on the alert, his ears wide open, receptive to the slightest bird sound or stirring of breeze. Apart from our steps there were no others far and wide.

Then his lesson began. Time and again he would stop, gather us together, and with a simple gesture call our attention one after another to the things of war and of peace, sometimes both in one. When he tapped on what looked like a woodpile, making it known to us as a wartime dugout; when he unmasked the line of brushwood zigzagging across the hollow as a trench; when he bent down and picked a handful of raspberries out of the prairie grass; when he picked up a quail’s egg; when with one movement he plucked a whole bundle of herbs — a wave of fragrance, sunny-warm, and so strong that it went straight to our heads; when he pushed aside the curtain of bushes, revealing to the left of us a stone quarry that had only been deserted over the holiday and, to our right, a field of ripe corn as green as a mountain brook, its broad leaves waving in the wind; when with a wave of his arm he disclosed a treetop beheaded by lightning; when he made a golden eagle come sailing out of the empty sky and caused a streaky white cloud to grow out of the pure blue and then disappear — he was merely continuing the process begun when he conjured up the inscription.

Suddenly he broke off, forgot those around him, and pulled out his notebook, the used part of which, blackened and bloated by his entries, was as thick as an imposing volume. The barely audible sound of the CUMBERLAND pencil fell in with the other persistent sounds that intensified the silence; its rhythm was that of a Morse transmitter. The pencil spoke, interfered, argued, asked questions; it was trying to make a point. Though we could not see what was being written — the notebook was half hidden by the writer’s elbow — it must have been verbs which, when we looked up after a time, had acted on the landscape. Every part of it was shot through with a soundless whirring; so that the towering of the cliffs and the lying of the savannah were as much an action as the perching of the birds in the bushes. In the grass at our feet a perpetual greening, in the sky overhead a vibrant bluing, and in between, at eye level, the forest’s constantly renewed marching-across-the-plain and climbing-the-slope, all its trees, even the dead ones, as though on duty, like streetlamps advancing in long rows, their branches swinging vigorously. What was happened again and again in the rhythm of the pencil, and became, time and time again, what it was.

We too were seized with undirected energy. Each for himself, we swarmed out over the barren land and the tilled fields. Actually, we did nothing, we just walked. We walked singly, rapidly, strung out at a distance from one another, seldom looking toward one another, but when we did, we could be sure that our glance would be answered with an immediate wave, even by a figure at the limit of visibility; no need to shout.

The only one of us to act like a harvester was the old man. He had dropped back, as though we had no need of his leadership for the present, and kept bending over, moving back and forth as though following furrows; retracing his steps as though gleaning; spinning around or taking a few steps backward, as though to make sure of missing nothing; or from time to time just standing there, with one hand on his hip and the other shielding his eyes. When he then entered something in his notebook, he leaned into the curve as though pushing a plow around a bend. Whenever we looked in his direction, another figure was moving around the fields, not instead of but behind the one we had seen before, who was still walking there. In the end this one person became a miles-long procession.