Peter Handke: Absence

The old man moves. He starts walking back and forth between his window and the lectern. Each time he comes to the lectern he takes the pencil and, apparently holding his breath, adds a new sign at the foot of a column; back at the window, his lookout, he exhales slowly; that seems to bring out the last colors in the grass outside, in the oblique grooves on the porter’s lodge, and in a folded wheelchair. The signs in the notebook, however, are unrelated to what is going on outside; at the most they might stand for a feathered arrow, the forked end of a branch, or the whirls of a bird plunging through the air. The old man walks back and forth without his stick — it is leaning against the wall; his gait is not a shuffling but a sauntering, a negligent thrust forward of one leg after the other, which, oddly enough in so small a space, sometimes becomes a striding. A column of words is finally added to the signs: “participate”; “occasion?”; “gather”; “separate?”

His day’s work is evidently done. The old man sits down on the camp bed; wearing a loose-fitting suit and a fully buttoned shirt, he sits erect with his hands on his knees. The window is open and the roar of the Sunday-evening traffic pours in from the expressways, punctuated now and then by a backfire. Then comes a loud screech, followed at once by a crash. A brief silence is broken by screams of pain, fear, and horror, cries for help; finally a general shouting and bellowing, accompanied in the background by a mindless blowing of horns. The old man’s window offers a good view of the goings-on. But he remains seated, apparently unmoved. Then by chance, in the midst of the sobbing and wailing from the scene of the accident, the institution’s funeral bell starts to ring for an entirely different person. Though the clamor outside continues, now intermingled with the howling of sirens, and though the old man in his cell has raised his head to listen, he shuts his ears more and more resolutely to all that. What gradually becomes audible, drowning out the tumult, are bird calls and the flow of water in the little irrigation ditch, merging with the rustling of the trees in the park, ocean breakers, the chirping of birds, the cry of gulls. The old man on the folding bed begins to rock back and forth from the waist and to tap his thighs with his fingers in the same rhythm. He leans his head back and opens his mouth, but no sound emerges. With his dilated nostrils and protuberant eyes he resembles an old, old singer, long fallen silent, whose singing today comes only from his hearing and seeing.

The pencil lies diagonally across the book, in the small circle of light. Its upper surface is imprinted, in block letters: CUMBERLAND. The writing beneath the pencil suggests several trains waiting on parallel tracks, the words being cars and the signs locomotives. A whistle, as though to signal the trains’ departure, is actually blown in the distance, prolonged by a whistle-blowing that fills the whole building.

The whistling is repeated close at hand. The window past which the lighted train rolls over a bridge is not the one in the old people’s home. It, too, is open, but it is rectangular, wider than it is high, and has no sill. The walls of the room are covered with photographs of all sizes, some in frames — not mere metal strips, but carved mahogany. The pictures are all of the same person: as a shapeless infant, as a sturdy toddler, as the youthful queen of a costume ball, and finally, in a variety of poses and with different sorts of lighting, as a beauty. In almost all the pictures she is alone and — whether as infant or as young woman — always displays the same look of imperiousness and of knowing herself to be the center of attention. All the pictures betray an indomitable self-confidence, with two exceptions. In the few photos that show her resting her head on a man’s shoulder, her expression is naive or artificial; and in the one picture of a little girl with a pigtail and white stockings, sitting on a wicker chest beside a bunk bed in a nursery suggestive of a stage set — the slumped figure with her legs crossed, her hands folded in her lap, and the for-once-perplexed eyes (which appear to be looking only at a wooden penguin about the same size as herself, holding a clothes hanger in its beak and bearing the legend: CLOTHES VALET) — she seems vulnerable and forsaken.

On one wall the photographs frame a mirror showing from behind the woman as she is now, with a bend in the part of her hair. Her hair seems wet. Clad in a white dressing gown, she is sitting at a desk, bent low over a copybook the size of a ledger. Seen from the front, her real face, as opposed to the one in the photographs, seems sullen, almost hard. With lowered eyes and pursed lips, she is wielding a thick fountain pen, blind to the last yellow glow in the sky outside the window, to the basket of fruit in the dining nook, to the bunch of flowers at the head of the enormous bed in the seemingly illuminated bedroom. In spite of the block letters, her writing is almost illegible; the few characters with anything approaching a shape have the sweep of Chinese calligraphy. However, she speaks in an undertone as she writes. Her fingers covered with ink spots, an extraordinarily large lump on her middle finger, she delivers herself, more or less, of the following: “He said I was always demanding love, though I myself was totally incapable of giving love. He said that I’ve never been anyone’s wife and never will be. He said I was restlessness personified and whoever I was with I’d never give him anything but trouble. Sooner or later I’d inspire the gentlest person in the world with a destructive urge, in the form either of homicidal frenzy or of a death wish, and convince him that this trait was his true character. He says the childlike creature who casts her spell on anyone she pleases turns out, once I’ve lured my victim into my child’s lair, to be a monster from whose clutches there is no escape; he says I’m the witch Circe, who transformed every one of Odysseus’ companions into a pig, and Odysseus himself as well. Living with me, he says, made him homesick for the fresh air of solitude and made him resolve, no, swear, never again to go near a woman. He says I brought him to the point that if the most glorious apparition made eyes at him, his only thought would be: Get lost! He asks why in all this time he has never learned to love me, why he has come to regard himself as hopelessly unlovable, and why he can’t help hating himself as much as me for it. He cursed my father and mother. He cursed the place of my birth. He cursed my entire generation, calling us aimless, prematurely corrupt, profane, incapable of yearning. He said I had no interest in anything outside the two of us, no interest in work, nature, history, that I was obsessed with love, with twosomeness, and failed to understand that two people can attain happiness only with the help of something outside themselves. He says I have no ambition to achieve anything, that I lack the thirst for knowledge — which might have enabled me to understand myself through my forebears — or any longing for the unknown; he says I’ve been living in my apartment for ten years and still don’t know the name of the mountain on the horizon, or of the river outside my window, or where the trains on the bridge out there are coming from and where they are going; he says the only place-name known to me in this city is that of the street I live on; he says the points of the compass are all the same to me, that the word ‘south’ means nothing to me but sea and sunshine, that if anyone mentions north or west I crinkle my nose and look bored. He says my reaction to any form of knowledge is to panic, as if someone were threatening to push me into a hostile element. He says I have no time for any person or thing other than myself, that however beautiful a thing may be, I barely take note of it and never look at it, and that as a result my conception of beauty or ugliness is unforgivably superficial; he thinks it outrageous that I find nothing worth looking at or listening to. And from this follows the worst thing of all, that with me no stability is possible — and without stability there’s no everyday life. Nevertheless, he says, he has discovered that some part of me is good and great. But it shows itself only on the fringes, and I give it neither time nor space. So, he says, I should finally forget my dream of becoming part of a couple, and in that connection he quotes Parzifal and King Lear to me: ‘A person of breeding does not speak of love.’ And ‘Love, and be silent.’”