Absence Read online

  Suddenly the hall was full of diners; additional waiters hurried in from all directions; evidently people kept late dinner hours in this town; and though we had seen only foreigners in the streets, all these late diners seemed as casual as only natives can be.

  Each time we looked up in vain, our hope waned a little; each time we mistook someone for the Awaited One, our memory of the man himself grew dimmer. Did he really exist? Weren’t he, his pencil, and his notebook mere delusions? And who were we—the woman with the pursed lips, the young fellow with the dirty fingernails, the unknown man with the pimp’s bracelet and the corresponding bundle of banknotes?

  When did the thought come to us, all of us at once, that the missing man had vanished forever? It happened suddenly in the dining room that was once again empty—the waiters had left long ago; the festive illumination and harpsichord music were unchanged, but the singing voice was gone. A thought without an image, accompanied by a nausea that made us speechless, incapable of so much as an outcry. Each for himself, without a parting word, by separate itineraries—elevator, stairs, service entrance—we went to our separate rooms, followed by the music, which resounded through the corridors, that music of which the poet said that heard in the distance it filled all those with horror who knew that they would never return home.

  All night long the city seemed to be one vast railroad station: in all the rooms shunting sounds were heard, interspersed with loudspeaker voices calling out strings of place-names such as “Venice-Milan-Ventimiglia-Lyon-Paris,” or “Istanbul-Salonika-Belgrade-Zagreb-Munich-Ostend,” and it seemed to us that these resonant litanies intensified the effect of the music. The only other sounds were strangely tinny bells and an occasional whimpering and howling nearby, so wild that one of us thought of a madhouse, one of a prison, and one of a zoo. But never a barking, not even in the distance, as though, perhaps since the earthquake, there was not a single dog in the whole city.

  But to make up for it, the cocks started crowing in the early darkness, so many in so many different places that we thought we were out of doors and that hotel and city were an illusion. Our only certainty was that something had happened to the old man, and that certainty, instead of calming us, made us see ghosts. Didn’t people who had just died—especially those who had been dear to one in life—become terrifying revenants if one hadn’t taken leave of them properly?

  So then the old man went into the phase of evil absence. And it persisted. He lurked in the darkest corners of the room and attacked us in our instant-long insomniac dreams; and in the morning sun he was still there, ready to pounce. At the very same moment, one of us screamed because he had seen the old man’s cape on a clothes hanger, one recoiled from the glove on the balcony railing, while one pulled his knife and spun around because he had mistaken his own hair, hanging down over his face, for a marauder. The “dead man” had become a multitude of dead men, and all had banded together against us forlorn survivors.

  Breakfast was served us on the terrace overlooking the hotel park. Though seated at the same table, we were not in any sense “together.” We were strangers to one another, more so than the night before. Shoulder to shoulder, we seemed to have partitions between us. Had we ever had anything in common? Stupid mishap, falling in with these particular people! Stupid illusion of kinship that has sent me and these people to this weird place.

  Worse than estrangement, there was hostility between us. None of us found the strength to go his separate way or to content himself with staying there, looking around him and playing with his thoughts. Glued to the spot, unable to take an interest in anything, we were enemies and would soon come to blows. The woman kept crumpling slips of paper and setting fire to them, as though burning us in effigy. The gambler shivered in the balmy air and at intervals exploded in suicidal laughter, as though about to run amok. Even the mild-mannered soldier, staring at always the same line in his book, incapable of reading, red in the face, bared his teeth from time to time. Losing each other’s contours, we were no longer face to face; we did what we had never done before—we judged, deprecated, and in the end hated one another.

  It was a clear, cloudless day in the early fall, with a breeze such as one might imagine on an atoll in the South Seas. The whole plateau unfolded before us; in our normal state of mind every rise and fall in our journey would have come alive for us; with a sense of being young that we would never have had without our journey, we would have seen ourselves as human clouds, advancing from station to station, resting, sleeping, indestructible. We would have delighted in the glittering streak of mist at the foot of the pedestal—or was it a field with a sheet of plastic over it? No, it was actually the sea. The one giant cedar tree in the garden, deep-dark, bushy, covered with candle-shaped cones, was the façade of a grave-countenanced cathedral which, had it been offered us at eye level without our having to look up, would have impressed us as the natural goal of our journey.

  But here where we had arrived we felt we had gone astray. The light was too much for us and its beauties were not only meaningless but offensive. The pillar-framed view from our arbor seemed a mockery. The vines blowing from shadow to sunlight wounded the soul. Never would we have dreamed that the birds of heaven-except, perhaps, for crows—could have become repugnant to us; but now we heard the same mocking screams from each of the many varieties in the cedar bower, and when the wood pigeons fluttered in place as though about to land on empty air, their slender throats had swollen to bull necks.

  There was also our sense of guilt. Everywhere people were doing something, working or studying—here in the park, for instance, the gardeners with their apprentices; and down in the city those masons who had been working for years, faithfully rebuilding the cathedral with the original stones. What better occupation could there be in this day and age? And weren’t those men, without being in a hurry, more than usually absorbed in their work? The lamb on the façade was already looking over its shoulder into space. The relief of the dove faced the morning sun with falcon’s eyes. The three stone kings in their niches, all deep in blissful sleep, were once again following the star in their dream. Only the tip of the steeple still lay where it had been hurled, far away, in the midst of a thicket that had grown up around it. To us idle onlookers on the terrace, who had only to turn our heads to be served like kings, the repeated piping of the cash register in the background sounded like the distress signal of a rudderless space capsule that was carrying us away from our earth. So this was what came of trying to get rid of history, individual as well as universal, and escaping into so-called geography?

  We were terribly at odds, and there was nothing to pull us together again. If the old man had reappeared and made a proposal to all of us, we would have laughed, not only at his proposal, but at his person as well.

  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, a
nd 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.”

  A jolt passed through all of us at once when we remembered how in childhood we had often hidden from others because we wanted them to look for us. A wind arose as though from within us, and permeated all things: the wind of poetry, the wind of fantasy, the wind of arrival in a very different absence. The park smelled of new-mown hay, and the birds in the cedar tree called as though from field furrows. The bell in the cathedral tower, a motionless black silhouette, hung. The straight stone staircases mounted. The sunshades arched. The chambermaid leaned. We sat. The gardeners stood. The walls stood. The branches of the cedar tree crisscrossed. The roots extended. The magma blazed. The sea surged. The cosmos whirred. The birds in the sky glided wing to wing. The leaves greened. The tree trunk grew rounder. The smoke gave signals.

  I could write a whole book about our quest. But first we were granted a brief respite. The soldier stretched his legs; the gambler divided up his money; the woman put on makeup and smiled at someone around the corner. In the end we put our arms around one another’s shoulders. And for a little while all three of us just sat there showing ourselves.

  A horse of the kingdom-his qualities are complete. Now he looks anxious, now to be losing the way, now to be forgetting himself. Such a horse prances along, or pushes on, spurning the dust and now knowing where he is.

  CHUANG TZU

  Also by Peter Handke

  Kaspar and Other Plays

  The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

  Short Letter, Long Farewell

  A Sorrow Beyond Dreams

  The Ride Across Lake Constance and Other Plays

  A Moment of True Feeling

  The Left-Handed Woman

  The Weight of the World

  Slow Homecoming

  Across

  Repetition


  The Afternoon of a Writer

  Man’s life between heaven and earth is like a white colt dropping into a crevasse and suddenly disappearing … Suppose we try to roam about in the palace of Nowhere, where all things are one.

  CHUANG TZU

  Translation copyright © 1990 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc.

  All rights reserved

  Originally published in German under the title Die Abwesenheit,

  © Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1987

  Published simultaneously in Canada by Harper & Collins, Toronto

  Portions of this book were previously published

  in Antaeus and Fiction

  Designed by Cynthia Krupat

  eISBN 9781466807754

  First eBook Edition : December 2011

  First edition, 1990

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Handke, Peter.

  [Abwesenheit. English]

  Absence l Peter Handke; translated by Ralph Manheim.—1st ed.

  Translation of: Die Abwesenheit.

  I. Title.

  PT2668.A5A6413 1990 833’.914—dc20 89-77504