...of namelessness

In a thicket shading from one gray to another, the writer caught sight of a bright-coloured form. At first glance he took if for an overturned advertising dummy, but then, by the bend of the fingers, he knew it was a living person. There lay an old woman, almost hairless, her eyes closed. She was stretched out prone, not on the ground, but on a tangle of branches that sagged under her weight. Only the tips of her shoes touched the ground; her whole body slanted, making the writer think, partly because of the outstretched arms, of an airplane that had made an emergency landing in a treetop. Her stockings were twisted and across her forehead there was a bleeding cut, made no doubt by a thorn. She must have been lying there a long time and might have stayed a lot longer, for pedestrians seldom came that way. The writer was unable to lift the heavy body - which was surprisingly warm - out of the thicket. But his efforts attracted attention, several cars stopped, and without asking questions helpers came running. Someone pushed a coat under the woman’s head, and they all gathered around her on the footpathm waiting for an ambulance. Though no one knew anyone else, they - even the foreigners among them - stood chatting like former neighbours, whom a splendid had brought together after all these years. An inspired namelessness prevailed. Nor did the victim, who was conscious, supply a name. She stared fixedly at the writer out of large, bright eyes. She knew neither her name nor her address, nor how she had got tangled up in these brambles along the highway. She was wearing a nightgown and bedroom slippers under a dressing gown; the people who had gathered conjectured that she came from the old people’s home and had lost her way. She spoke the language of the land without dialect, but with an accent suggesting not some far-off region but childhood, as though her childhood language had come back to her after a long absence. Actually, her speech consisted only of disjointed syllables or sounds, addressed like her glances exclusively to her discoverer. Speaking incoherently but in a clear voice, she was trying to tell him something important, something that he alone would understand - but that he would understand fully and without difficulty. In a few fragments, unintelligible to the others, she told him the whole story of her life, from her childhood years to the present. Already in the care of the ambulance, she was still talking to him, urgently, as though entrusting him with a mission. And indeed, when the helpers had gone and he was alone again, it seemed to him that he knew intuitively all there was to know about the confused old woman. Hadn’t he always learned more from intuition than from objective language? Looking up at the empty hedge, he foresaw that the heavy body with bent fingers would be lying there time and again, forever and ever. “O holy intuitions, stay with me.”

[The Afternoon of a Writer, Handke, P.]