Peter Handke: Absence

It is a different procession that impels the soldier to start off. He is far out in a suburb, as though in the vicinity of a borderline, guarding an imperiled war memorial. In front of him an expressway, beyond it a wide river, easy to cross at this point, made up of several swift watercourses separated by strips of rubble. Wearing mottled combat fatigues and a steel helmet, he is carrying a rifle with mounted bayonet; at his feet a crackling radiotelephone. His eyes are hidden by the shadow of his helmet.

For a long time there are no passersby, only the roaring of the cars, many trucks among them. Then some children pass on their way home from school. One of the boys stations himself under the soldier’s nose, the tips of his shoes touching the tips of the soldier’s boots, and stays there until the soldier’s fingers suddenly start drumming on his belt buckle; a moment later, the sentry is alone again. Next, at an intersection within his field of vision, a small group of pedestrians appears, whose festive dress radiates an eerie splendor in this workaday landscape. This because of the dark colors — the black of the men’s suits and the uniform violet of the women’s attire, even of their hats and handbags. This group is only the advance guard; more and more of the holidaymakers follow, in pairs, in clusters, and finally in a swarm that overflows the footpath and takes up part of the road. It is in no sense a parade that passes the war memorial; these people don’t even seem to notice it or the soldier. Far from marching, they seem to be strolling, taking the air, as it were. Their self-absorption, their easy chatter, their unconstrained gestures, the glow of contentment in the eyes even of the children show that their festival, though drawing to a close, is not yet over. It is not a wedding or a baptism but a public religious festival, the just-experienced ritual of which continues to hold them together as they talk about purely secular concerns far from their place of worship. It is a great festival observed only by this particular group, an offshoot of a foreign race. Of this there are no outward indications, but only their sense of time, which is radically different from that of the figures in the cars speeding by. It is most apparent in the young women, who are all wearing high-heeled boots and costumes with short, tight skirts, which shimmer as they pass; for them this is in part a festival of the flesh. As soon as they get home, each one of them, the giantess as well as the midget, will give herself to her companion, and in their rooms the language of union will prevail until nightfall. Moving slowly along the road, glassy-eyed in the light, they are making ready for the man who will become their husband in the darkened tent.

The soldier is no longer standing by the memorial. Only his rifle is leaning against the pedestal. The radiotelephone is silent. His steel helmet is lying on the riverbank, half buried in sand, full of egg-shaped pebbles and pinecones. The murmur of the water, the thundering of a train, and the clattering of a helicopter are caught in it.

With rippling hair, the soldier runs through an underpass, which is so long that for a time the end of it is hidden from sight. He passes young soldiers like himself coming from the opposite direction, all carrying identical plastic bags, on their way back to the barracks from the supermarket; though few are engaged in conversation, none notices him. Two girls, walking arm in arm as though for protection, also look through him, as if they had eyes only for the exit. He stops once, takes the dagger from his felt boot, and scrapes away a tiny inscription, almost obscured by the grooves in the concrete, from the wall of the tunnel; after that, no longer in a hurry, he takes his book from his hip pocket and, now striding straight ahead, immerses himself in it.

Emerging from the underpass, the soldier is in a different part of the world. The hedges by the roadside have evergreen, cup-shaped leaves, gleaming far and wide in the light of a southern sun, and the cone of rubble on the horizon is traversed by a dried-out, petrified riverbed. As he walks, the soldier puts on dark glasses and undoes the zipper of his jacket; behind him, far far away, hardly distinguishable from the clouds, there is a northern, snow-covered mountain.

Her back to the window, whose drawn curtain captures the sun, the young woman is sitting on a suitcase in the attitude she had taken as a child when sitting on the linen chest in her bedroom. Just as silent, hands folded in her lap, her legs crossed, she stares into space, blind to her surroundings. Instead of being worn in a pigtail, her hair hangs loose, and instead of a dress with enormous buttons, she is wearing a tailored suit. Silent, yes, but with frequent interruptions. As though at predetermined intervals, she honors the outside world with an outburst which may be serious and may be playacting: “You people! Always telling me to change. But I don’t want to change … But I don’t want to work. Work would only destroy me. Work makes people stupid. And you, too … But I don’t want to know anything. I don’t want to go to museums, and I don’t want to learn a foreign language. I like to see pictures by chance, without planning to, no matter where, and I can only be myself and act like myself in my own language. I can’t love in a foreign language. Knowledge would destroy me the same as work, it would make me cold and stupid. When I was a child, the moment you people started lecturing me I stopped my ears. One reason why I was never able to read your books of knowledge was the way the sentences are constructed; all I could get out of them was the droning of the lecturer. You lecturers are sucking my blood. Your knowledge shouldn’t be allowed. Your knowledge is taboo. Admittance to knowledge should be prohibited. You clever people should keep quiet about your knowledge and come out with it only in cases of urgency, and then in the form of poems or songs … But I don’t want to go out. What should I do out of doors? I need my ambience and it’s here that I can have it. Walk, run, ride, travel. With the words ‘walk’ and ‘out of doors,’ you’ve always driven me into the farthermost corner of the room, behind the folding screen. Every time I went on a trip with my parents I fell asleep the moment I sat down in the car, and I don’t remember one thing about any trip except an Eskimo pie somewhere or a seatless toilet in some gas station. Trains stink even if they’re called Loreley; and even if airplanes are called Trans World and fly across the international dateline, all they can do is take me to a concrete runway, where the skyline of the identical city will only make me homesick. I have no desire whatever to see your Tristan da Cunha or your Antarctic or your river What’s-its-name, where Plato is supposed to have taken a walk. I don’t believe in foreign wonders. All your sacred springs and grottoes and trees should be turned into playgrounds with paper boats and flashlights shining into every oracle cleft. And don’t bother me with the grandeur of nature. Even the words—‘linden,’ ‘rose,’ ‘fleecy clouds’—stick in my craw, for one thing because they were done to death in the rubbish we used to write in our poetry albums … Only for love would I leave here; only for love would I travel day and night, climb mountains, ride horseback, swim, always in a straight line, straight ahead, without any of your detours …”

The last part of her declaration is addressed to a fly on the back of her hand. She jumps up and lets the fly out the window. In so doing, she catches sight of a taxi in front of the building. It seems to have been waiting there for some time; the driver, standing beside it smoking, reaches through the open window and blows the horn emphatically. The woman runs into the living room, where she consults the video horoscope for the day: “This is your day of decision. Don’t miss the favorable moment. Make up your own mind. Accept help only in the event of a crisis. A crisis is more than a bind that you can get out of unaided. You will know it’s a crisis when you try as usual to get help from the first person who happens to be around and find that you can’t.” She goes to the mirror and runs her hand over her cheek; her eyes are dilated, her shoulders are crooked. She clings to the frame of the mirror with both hands, as though fearing to be dragged out of her four walls to the ends of the earth.