Peter Handke - Absence

Finally, after an hour or a month of silence, the youngest among us, hardly more than a child — the soldier — began to speak. Before he had even uttered the first word, his Adam’s apple gave a violent jerk, the veins in his throat and forehead swelled, and he pressed his fist against his mouth. When he took it away, the whole lower half of his face was darkened as by a birthmark. When at last he began to speak, we saw no lip movements and might almost have looked around in bafflement, as if he had been a ventriloquist. His muscles tensed with exertion, literally making wrinkles in his clothes. He spoke softly but clearly, bent over his book as though reading from it, with the deliberateness of a stutterer who cannot be stopped once he has started speaking fluently. Like everything he did, his speaking was involuntary and unpremeditated; also quite casual, a kind of soliloquy, halfway between speech and silence. Was he, alone of us three, in command of that calm impersonal voice with which, even amid the confusion of innumerable other voices, a man can encourage himself? And yet under his crew-cut hair there glowered a darkness as of some suffering that demanded to erupt. All the time he was talking he passed what was left of the cave stones, along with the buttons he had ripped off during our journey, from hand to hand, and kept jumping up from his seat.

“Maybe my departed made false promises to the world. He entered into a pact and didn’t abide by it. He called himself a suitor, but found no words in which to press his suit. He lifted me out of my depths and dropped me all the lower. He promised me a great country, and here I am alone in it among enemies. He made me think that the barren wilderness would be my fruitful orchard just because he had given it form. He was a false prince; he lured me away from home, from the barracks, from my people, to a country where there is not a breath of air, except perhaps for him. He was not a prince of a world empire for all; he was an illusionist; he made me betray my native village, he turned me into a deserter. My supposed prince turned my head, tore me out of my natural surroundings, brought me face to face with the void. And even as my scout, he deceived me. He had seen all sorts of places, but hadn’t stayed in any of them. He was not a geographer, because he hadn’t enough patience to bear witness as a historian. All he cared about was reading traces here and there, instead of writing the story of a famine, for instance, or of the building of a motor highway or merely some railroad worker’s lopsided garden. As a result, he didn’t guide me straight into the distance but led me around in a circle with his magic signs, deeper and deeper into a labyrinth. And just as he was a false prince in the open, he was a false scout in the labyrinth; for as a scout he should have been surefooted, should have found his way in country where he had never been before; with his steps alone he should have been the trailblazer.

“But last night I had these dreams: the first was about this book. It was ten times bigger and thicker than in reality, a folio volume. And I had a child that I carried around with me, hidden in the hollowed-out folio. But when I came to a safe corner and looked, the child wasn’t there anymore; it had disappeared along with its cave, my thick India-paper folio. After that I only dreamed words and spelled them out at the same time: ‘How quick you have been to betray your childhood. That old man was not wicked, he was only an eternal child. The substance of childhood must not be misused.’ My last dream concerned the future, and the sentences that went with it were in the future tense: We shall look for the man who has vanished. The search will take a whole year, and we shall search separately. You, woman, will remain here and wait; you, gambler, will drive your car from city to city, each day a different city — and I, soldier, starting from here, shall walk in wider and wider circles through the open country. We shall communicate every evening by phoning the hotel. Because the searching and waiting will slow us down and sharpen our senses, they will have a quality of always imminent finding. In the late spring, in drizzling rain, you will discover the old man’s footprints on a dirty pedestrian crossing. At the summer solstice you on your terrace will see wheels of fire crisscrossing over the highlands all night long. After an autumn storm has died away I, in a dream, shall literally pluck the one scrub oak still growing on a heath and bring it to you as evidence. At the onset of winter, we shall meet in the seaport town at the end of a railroad track; the buffer will be the last hurdle before a dune and the sea. The station platform will be surfaced with tar, and stamped into it we shall find tickets, matches, and newspaper clippings, forming a trail leading to the dune. There in the tall grass beside a chain-link fence, the old man’s notebook will be lying open, visible from a distance, seemingly unharmed. But the entries will have been bleached and blurred by the year under the open sky, and the pencil will be weather-worn. Nevertheless, it will write and we shall be able to trace the lines that have been printed on the paper. Even if only individual, disconnected words and outlines with no great significance come to light, the deciphering in itself, our bending over the notebook together, will be the most exciting, most magnificent adventure of the present era; and when at last we look up, the dune — I’m quoting my dream word for word — will be our brother’s tomb, glittering far and wide . I refuse to be talked out of my old man. We must not let ourselves be talked out of our old man. His rediscovered writing has flowered in my dream.”

At the end the soldier spun around in a circle like a hammer thrower, but then he sat down again as though nothing had happened. He covered his eyes with his hands. Bent forward, the woman thrust her hands between her knees. The gambler picked the pebbles out of the grooves in the soles of his shoes. Without looking at one another’s faces, we were conscious of cheek lines and eye colors, and the three of us formed three couples. Around us all manner of sounds were swallowed up by the dead silence, as though the din of the earthquake were still at work a dozen years later. We sat on the terrace as at the scene of an air crash, each looking in a different direction and into a different space. In the middle of the lawn a stalk of prairie grass trembled when grazed by a bird. At the edge of the bower an ivy leaf beckoned … As we sat there motionless, a waiter put up a sunshade over us; leaves rained from its folds and some of them here and there sprang open on the ground. The drops on the glasses began for a moment to run. Wasn’t the brimstone butterfly that suddenly flew past us a harbinger of spring? But the lone apple tree was bowed down with autumn fruit, which in time, under the influence of our heartbeat, began to swing like the seedpods of a plane tree.

A plane tree actually appeared — felled, cut up, and stacked into a long, splotchy woodpile. Had our water-drawing fairy-tale tree been chopped up? Had its twining branches been sawed into short, straight logs? The soldier spun one of his cave pebbles on the stone table; there was a notch in it which in spinning became a spiral, and when motionless was a crack.

Now at least we were something; at least we were unhappy.

In our grief we acquired the eyes of all human races. As though that gave us a kind of energy, the stump of the plane tree, which the gardener had left in the ground for the time being, emerged from still another direction. The uncovered roots seemed at one point to have grown together to form a hollow, full to the brim with rain or sprinkler water, whose surface quivered slightly. It was shaped like a human ear, and instead of swallowing up sounds it intensified them. The distant thunder of squadrons of airplanes and the howling of serried racing cars — and, intermittently, clear and penetrating, a child’s voice counting slowly and concluding with the words: “I’m coming.”