Peter Handke - Absence

Were we on the wrong road? Had we in our half blindness overlooked a turnoff? We were immensely relieved when on a last curve, after which the road opened out into a plain that might have been the very roof of the high plateau, we suddenly saw a human form far ahead of us. We broke into a run; our shadows on the crevice in the rocks quivered like torches. The figure ahead of us, clothed in bright colors, swinging not only his roundish head and his shoulders but his whole body, could only be our old man. We would have shouted if thirst hadn’t extinguished our voices. We had to get closer before we realized that he was not coming toward us as we had thought at first but moving in the same direction as ourselves; and closer still before it became clear to us that the supposed old man was a child with a schoolbag on his back. But we had not yet caught up with him when a large, shiny, new bus that we hadn’t heard coming emerged from a side road, picked up the child, and after a short straight stretch on the highway turned off into another side road with a loud blowing of its horn, as though gathering up children dispersed in this wild country. The next person we saw really was an old man, and even from fairly close up we took him for ours. Almost invisible behind the standing grain, he lay sleeping on the roots of a lone tree a short way from the road.

For the first time that day we halted for a short moment. Our instant image of our old man was composed from the hand on the ear, the blissfully idiotic dreamer’s face, and in particular the hazel stick leaning against the tree trunk — but even before one of us shook him awake, that image had succumbed to the reality of a sleeping farm worker in an apron, with a straw hat on the back of his head, and blackened, cracked-claw-like arthritic fingers, which could no longer have wielded a sickle, let alone a pencil.

The sleeper’s place of work seemed to be a garden, fenced off from the prairie, all by itself without a house. There must have been a water spigot somewhere, for a hose came snaking through the tall grass and ended among the garden beds. The crops — the tomatoes and currants, for instance — had been harvested or else were of such a variety that the mere sight of them only added to our thirst: onions, garlic, and artichokes that might have been mistaken for thistles. Following the hose, we came to a long stone wall, beyond which the colorless prairie changed without transition to a light-green field of short grass; and the rock in the middle of it proved to be the work of human hands, in other words, a house. Presenting a sweeping curve along the road, its untrimmed stone and few porthole-like windows caused it to resemble a small fort, in any case a military installation of some sort; from a number of fires in the grass, all abandoned, smoke rose into the sky, so dense, straight, and sharply outlined that we really thought: pillars. The voices that came out to us also fitted in with the notion of a military installation, as though the rooms were enormous and almost empty. But when we approached the long wall, it proved to be the street front of the “village” marked on the map. It consisted of a single wide façade without demarcations between the houses. Of these there were more than a dozen, but this we found out only by looking through one window after another. Behind each window there were apartments with separate entrances and — on the far side — windows through which we saw arbors, flower gardens, and, lined up in depth, the back yards of inns. Here, each of us at a window, we were given water, each in a different kind of pitcher or jug — only the lemon we were each handed was the same. We drank and drank and drank; not until it came time to take our leave were we capable of speaking. None of us had ever exchanged such natural greetings, and for the time it took to say those few words, it seemed conceivable that the human language had originated in the need for such greetings and the pleasure they conferred.

Our thirst slaked, we had new eyes for distances. As we went on, we saw the ridge of the plateau’s roof; it seemed weighed down and crowned by a mass of gigantic cube-shaped boulders. Toward evening a fluorescent brilliance flared up in one of the boulders and immediately afterward — there! there! there! — another and another, until the cliffs on the horizon proved to be a city. When we stopped on the road, we were overtaken by a slow-moving patrol car, barely large enough for a single policeman, who lowered his window and looked us over. Was it the special sort of look the young soldier gave him in return that made the policeman just nod and accelerate — a look that disarmed by placing a peaceful image between itself and the world and infusing light even into repellent ugliness?

And again, as though in response to the soldier’s look, a bus stopped on the open road and let us get in. Was it the same bus as before, which had by then completed its circuits in the backcountry? If so, it had let the child off somewhere and picked up no other passengers. But were we “passengers”? We were alone in the bus, in seats high above the road; behind us there were small cars, none of which passed us. Little by little we became a convoy. Apparently we were being escorted to the city with a police car in the lead. And sitting erect with our hands on our knees, looking straight ahead, we found this perfectly natural.

The city had no suburbs. A moment before in the paling light we had been passing country walls that gave the effect not only of being dilapidated but of having suddenly caved in. Already the road was ending and we were outside the railroad station. Was the whole city just an extension of the station? What other buildings were there apart from the offices of the railroad administration? In any case, only their façades were floodlit, and otherwise there was no street lighting. The revolving sign that flickered above the roofs in the twilight turned out to be moving trains. Proceeding on foot, we found other hallmarks of a city, such as a park and a movie house. There was no fountain in the park — a ring of palm trees around a cedar — and the movie house, like the country walls, had been reduced to a ruin, this obviously with great suddenness — clean cracks such as the passage of time alone does not produce; the ticket office had collapsed, and the clock on top of it, dial, glass, and mechanism, was a total wreck. The earthquake must have taken place a long time ago, the faces on the once-colored posters were all beyond recognition. The houses that followed were new, built of thick, undressed concrete. Suddenly the dark city seemed full of life, because the passersby were a mixture of all races, and there was no way of knowing whether these constantly moving people, foreigners like ourselves, none with eyes for anyone else, were fugitives or whether, each for himself, they were on their way to some feast.

Standing in the middle of the sidewalkless street, a doorman motioned us into his hotel with a sweeping gesture. As with the bus driver before him, we took him for an agent of our old man. The lobby was resplendent, as though brand-new; we were the only guests. The one and only attendant let us pick our own rooms, which were in every way alike, all decorated with pictures of the city before the catastrophe and the day after it.

Bathed and changed, we repaired to the dining room, which, like the whole hotel, was empty and brightly lit. A man’s voice, chanting in a cracked singsong to the accompaniment of a harpsichord, was issuing from the loudspeaker. Listening in the doorway, we assumed it to be the voice of our old man, and when seated we looked for him under the disguise of the waiter, previously the receptionist. Wasn’t his hair dyed? Hadn’t the liver spots on the backs of his hands been burned off? Weren’t the lenses of his glasses mere window glass? In the end we asked him for some information just to see his pencil and his handwriting. Dissemble if you will, your monogram imprinted in the sand of the cigarette urn in the entrance is trace enough for us.