...of nuns

One last time I ran along the beach, further and further. The spidery crabs danced over the sand, the sun shone, the sand glowed. I saw a giant tortoise lying at the water’s edge, stinking, and I saw loads of dead fish.
A dark silent mass was approaching the tideline, and I recognised the nuns from St Paul’s Hospital, and they got undressed to bathe in private. I was astonished, because I had always thought nuns only consisted of wimples and robes.

[Child of All Nations, Keun, I.]

...of a spell

My mother sat bolt upright; I could only see her back, which was like a wall of pink silk. Sometimes a little light flickered into our room, the telephone kept purring next door. Down on the street, a man was whistling a tune. My mother trembled: ‘Did you hear that? Did you hear hat whistling? That was the Horst Wessel Song that someone was whistling in the street - here in Amsterdam.’
I don’t know the song she means, but I wonder why it would make my mother so frightened and sad. I couldn’t find her face any more, it was so far away. Then in my mind I changed my mother into a tree, because a tree is calm, a tree is unafraid. A tree doesn’t get hungry, or cry. It doesn’t laugh, it doesn’t talk. I turned her into a tree so that she would stop trembling. After that, I was able to sleep.

[Child of All Nations, Keun, I.]

…of émigrés

‘There,’ says my father. He locks us into the room. ‘Now either she’ll bring masses of food, or else she’ll be back with the police.’
Then we stand there in silence and look at each other. All of a sudden my father looks terribly pale and tired. He sits my mother down on the bed, and then he falls down. His head is on her knees. My mother lays both her hands on his hair.
There is silence. The room is small, cold, ugly, with no carpet. On the brown floor are some squeezed-out tubes of paint - blue, green, red. On a tiny wobbly table is a bunch of roses, and everything smells of dust and cellars. Under the roses there are seven little booklets. Hey, those are passports; we’ve got seven passports!

[Child of All Nations, Keun, I.]

...of imagination

Later, when, glancing over his shoulder, he sees the cave dwelling as nothing more than a rock among many others, the old man begins to sing. He has long since changed direction - what started out as an open plateau has acquired steep walls on all sides. Now he is roaming through a jungle almost all of whose trees are dead - roaming happily, as though triumphing every time he stumbles. He has kept on writing, but now he does it while walking, no longer in his book but in the air, drawing big letters. In a hoarse falsetto voice he sings:

Into the silence.
Alone into the silence.
Silence alone.
Where are you, silence?

You’ve always been good to me, silence.
I’ve always been happy in you, silence.
Time and again, I’ve become a child with you, silence;
through you I came into the world, silence;
in you I learned to hear, silence;
from you I acquired a soul, silence;
by you alone have I let myself be taught, silence;
from you alone have I gone as a man among men, silence.

Be to me again what you were, silence.
Embrace me, silence.
Take me under the armpits, silence.
Make me silent, silence;
and make me receptive, silence -
only receptive, silence.
I cry out to you, silence.
You above all, silence.

Silence, source of images.
Silence, great image.
Silence, imagination’s mother.

[Absence, Handke, P.]

...of writing

Suddenly he broke off, forgot those around him, and pulled out his notebook, the used part of which, blackened and bloated by his entries, was as thick as an imposing volume. The barely audible sound of the CUMBERLAND pencil fell in with other persistent sounds that intensified the silence; its rhythm was that of a Morse transmitter. The pencil spoke, interfered, argued, asked questions; it was trying to make a point. Though we could not see what was being written - the notebook was half hidden by the writer’s elbow - it must have been verbs which, when we looked up after a time, had acted on the landscape. Every part of it was shot through with a soundless whirring; so that the towering of the cliffs and the lying of the savannah were as much an action as the perching of the birds in the bushes. In the grass at our feet a perpetual greening, in the sky overhead a vibrant bluing, and in between, at eye-level, the forest’s constantly renewed marching-across-the-plain and climbing-the-slope, all its trees, even the dead ones, as though on duty, like streetlamps advancing in long rows, their branches swinging vigorously. What was happened again and again in the rhythm of the pencil, and became, time and time again, what it was.

[Absence, Handke, P.]

...of a picture

Only a short time has passed since they left the plain, and yet the very first S-curve has carried them far away: the plain’s details and movements stand out clearly all the way to the snow-covered mountains on one side and the luminous mist on the other which, along with the dark ships that sail it, is called the “sea.” At the same time, almost all its sounds have been swallowed up, and those few that are still audible transformed: the clanking of trains into a soft knocking, as though from behind a glass wall; and the crowing of cocks, also from behind a glass wall, into incessant call signs. The clear, varied, quiet design is that of medieval panels, in which for the first time pure landscape became subject matter, and taken together, sea, tilled plain, and high mountains represent the whole world. The car flashing somewhere in the distance is also part of this silent world, and despite their many different colors the houses of a settlement plunked down in a niche in the mountainside give off the same sienna tone of earth shooting up at the sky. So sharpened is the hearing by the silence here that not even the grazing of butterfly wings against the sand of the path goes unheard.

[Absence, Handke, P.]

...within

His days work is evidently done. The old man sits down on the camp bed; wearing a loose-fitting suit and a fully buttoned shirt, he sits erect with his hands on his knees. The window is open and the roar of the Sunday-evening traffic pours in from the expressways, punctuated now and then by a backfire. Then comes a loud screech, followed at once by a crash. A brief silence is broken by screams of pain, fear, and horror, cries for help; finally a general shouting and bellowing, accompanied in the background by a mindless blowing of horns. The old man’s window offers a good view of the goings-on. But he remains seated, apparently unmoved. Then by chance, in the midst of the sobbing and wailing from the scene of the accident, the institution’s funeral bell starts to ring for an entirely different person. Though the clamor outside continues, now intermingled with the howling of sirens, and though the old man in his cell has raised his head to listen, he shuts his ears more resolutely to all that. What gradually becomes audible, drowning out the tumult, are bird calls and the flow of water in the little irrigation ditch, merging with the rustling of the trees in the park, ocean breakers, the chirping of birds, the cry of gulls. The old man on the folding bed begins to rock back and forth from the waist and to tap his thighs with his fingers in the same rhythm. He leans his head back and opens his mouth, but no sound emerges. With his dilated nostrils and protuberant eyes he resembles an old, old singer, long fallen silent, whose singing today comes only from his hearing and seeing.

[Absence, Handke, P.]