Peter Handke - Absence

Take me under the armpits, silence.

Make me silent, silence;

and make me receptive, silence—

only receptive, silence.

I cry out to you, silence.

You above all, silence.

Silence, source of images.

Silence, great image.

Silence, imagination’s mother.

In the first stage of his wanderings, the old man had seemed to be deliberately leaving a trail, bending branches to the left and right of his path, letting thorns pluck threads from his shirt and fluff from his trousers, and making an oblique scratch on every boulder with his steel comb. But then, falling silent, he not only stopped blazing a trail but at a certain point retraced his steps and erased his last scratch, which thus became a natural crack in the stone.

At first he had followed animal tracks through the prairie grass; now he avoided them. It was through a kind of maquis with increasingly narrow passages between bushes that he twined his way without hesitation.

He kept going until his shoelace came loose. He bent over to tie it and then sat down, as though he had been waiting for just this. He had come to a place where the thicket opened up into an almost circular clearing, a patch of sandy desert in the middle of the high plateau; the more than ankle-deep sand had long ago been blown into hard ridges, but below the surface it was soft and warm from the sun of the day before. The old man took off his shoes and buried his bare feet in it.

This desert, no larger than a children’s playground, was not old; a single plant was growing in it, tall, shaggy, half tree, half bush, threaded with dead plants of various kinds that made it hard to identify. There were signs of fruitfulness in the thornbushes around it — blackberries and thirst-quenching anise stems.

With these the old man rounded out his breakfast — a crust of bread taken from his trouser pocket. In the morning sunlight the tip of the withered tree over his head seemed to have put on fresh green. Deep within the cagelike network of branches, the black silhouette of a bird, also of indeterminate species, motionless, but with head and tail upraised. Nor was the sky entirely empty. A plane was crossing it, so high, so soundless, so slow, and so white that it could be seen literally as an airship.

The old man reached for his notebook, which lay beside him in the sand, hesitated, and said in a voice from which the last assurance, born of his wandering, had vanished: “Heart, now you are alone with me. At least, as I have always wished, this is happening to me in a foreign country. How long is it since someone put his arm over my shoulder and said: You can’t just write all year long; and how long since someone else said about me: Always reading. From the start I have been incapable of applying the great fundamental law that I read in nature to my life and transmitting it to my fellow men — I have succeeded in applying it only to my writing and only when alone. Only when I was alone did things take on meaning for me, and only the signs I discovered when alone have been communicated to others. And now my writing time is over. My longing is dead. I know it, I know its place in my heart; it’s there, but dead. So where can I go now? And where am I? Do places exist no longer? Have I burned up all the light inside me? Can’t I look forward to beauty any longer? Am I then lost? Is it all up with me? Or am I, in my weakness, at my goal?”

He arose from the sand and walked back and forth in the patch of desert; suddenly his legs became short and at each turn his shoulders grew broader. He described wider and wider loops around the dead tree with the almost invisible bird in it. Now and then it gave forth a rustling sound. Otherwise there was no sign of life nearby; even the one ant trail was deserted, and the holes in the ground were empty.

He sat down again with his book, and rested his forehead on it. His eyes narrowed, taking on the shape of two dugout canoes. The silhouette of the bird, still motionless, beak and tail upraised, suggested a fairy tale. Suddenly, as though of its own accord, the familiar sound of the pencil set in, followed by a persistent scraping. The hand with the brownish liver spots wrote in the notebook on the old man’s knees. The writer did not look at the paper but kept his eyes fixed straight ahead. Then the movements of his hand slowed down as though for fear of frightening the bird away, and in the end he seemed to be drawing rather than writing.

The silhouette is gone from the thicket. In place of the bird a cloud of sand blows down, making the dry wood crackle. And of the old man nothing remains but the imprint of his behind. In his absence the blackberries glisten and whitish-yellow umbels blossom at the edge of the desert. The parched soil in which they are rooted shows a polygonal pattern of finger’s-breadth cracks. An airplane in the summer sky sounds as if it were hovering motionless.

When the others awoke, their eyes fell on a spot of sunlight on the gray wall of their cave. In it, the otherwise dull-white sinter shone bottle-green as though dripping wet, and although this small bright spot had no particular shape, the moment we all of us at once opened our eyes, it spoke to us with the authority of a sign: Arise! It is day, everything is here; out with you, into the open; bestir yourselves.

None of us felt the usual grogginess, we came to our senses immediately; we knew where we were and arose light-heartedly from our nightmares, looking forward with rare delight to the morning. The spot on the wall seemed to make us inventive. Without even looking, we found among the numerous puddles on the ground a deep one from which to gather water for washing and making coffee.

We ate breakfast in the grass outside the bunker. The plateau, rising steadily like a ramp as far as the horizon, lay there in the sun as though contemptuous of the four seasons. It seemed hardly imaginable that there could be any life apart from these trees and these few birds. Yet beyond “extensive scree,” “dry ditch,” “stony riverbed,” “bald hill,” our leader’s map noted a “lake” (with “landing”) and near the landing a “log cabin,” from which a hatched-in path led to an “old road” (a line), soon prolonged by a “new road” (two parallel lines) beginning at a nameless “village” and ending at an equally nameless “city.” In view of the actual country confronting us, the old man’s map, with its pedantically delineated cliffs and even individual trees, put us in mind of the early fantastic topographies that represented the most inhospitable terrain as accessible and made it seem likely that a whole continent could be crossed on foot in a single day.

We assumed that the old man had gone on ahead of us, that he had left the map to enable us to follow him, and would be waiting for us somewhere along the way, at the latest that evening in the city. A light, steady breeze blew in our faces from the start — hadn’t that breeze been raised by his steps? Surely it was so fragrant because of the herbs he carried — mixed, concentrated, and warmed — in his trouser pockets. If we had called him, it wouldn’t have been out of worry but out of playfulness — yes, but by what name?

All day we walked with the thirst for knowledge that had taken hold of us in our moment of waking. Though supposedly there was nothing more to investigate or discover on earth, we approached every new landscape with the eagerness of explorers, and circled each object in a collective joy of discovery. Our perception was never purely external; it was always an assimilation, which engraved colors, forms, and relationships indelibly on our minds and strengthened us; we never so much as thought of appropriating, but saw things as values in themselves; their mere presence made us feel that we had recovered from something. We wanted only to embrace them, feel them, measure them, and transmit them; didn’t even the most unassuming blade of grass deserve to be noticed and communicated — at least with faint cry? Our day of discovery brought us news that obviated the need for any conceivable newspaper.