...of Germany

It was by pure chance that I also went to see my father that year. We hadn’t heard from him in a long time, and I was surprised when he answered the phone. He was living in a small town in northern Germany. As we had done on our few previous meetings, we made elaborate arrangements to meet, missed each other as usual, and spent the whole evening trying to figure out why. Since the death of his wife, he lived alone in the house; he didn’t even have a dog anymore. He saw his likewise widowed woman friend only on weekends; in between, one called the other’s number each evening and let the phone ring briefly as a sign that he was still alive. (but here neither house nor man will be identified in the usual way.) In his eyes I saw the fear of death and suspected a belated sense of responsibility. Here, it seemed to me, was someone’s son. Halfhearted inquiry was swept away by the spirit of questioning, and I was able (wanting to was enough) to ask about what had long been kept silent. And he answered me, partly for his own sake. Casually, he told me that mornings, when he looked at himself in the mirror, he felt like “smashing his face,” and then for the first time I discovered in him the forlornness, bitterness, and rebelliousness of a hero. When late that night he took me to the train, a poster fastened to a tree outside the station was ablaze; some unemployed taxi drivers had set it on fire.
Once after that, I caught sight of another Germany, not the Federal Republic and its Lander, nor yet again the ghoulish Reich, nor the half-timbering of the petty principalities. It was earth-brown and wet with rain, and it was on a hilltop; it was windows; it was urban, devoid of people, and festive; I saw it from a train; it was the house on the other side of the river, it was humorously quiet and was called Mittelsinn; it was “the silent life of regular forms of silence”; it was the enigma; it was the recurrent and real. The man who saw it had a crafty feeling like Lieutenant Columbo after solving a case; yet knew there could never be lasting relief.

[The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire, from Slow Homecoming, Handke, P.]

...of a stand-off

I remembered how once, when I was out walking with my grandfather, he showed me how to keep dogs at a distance; even when no stone was available, he would bend down as if to pick one up, and the beasts would shrink back every time. Once he even threw earth into a dog’s mouth; the dog swallowed it and let us pass.
I attempted something of the kind with mastiff of Puyloubier, but he simply roared at me out of a vastly magnified mouth. As I bent down, a yellow Paris Metro Ticket, cancelled and covered with my jottings, fell out of my pocket; in a moment of exuberance I tossed it through the fence. Instantly, the dog turned himself into a marten (a marten, as everyone knows, will eat anything) and bolted my paper: greed, but also revulsion incarnate.
In my fancy, the worms inside him that lived on him flung themselves in dark turmoil on the ticket - and, lo and behold, the dog excreted an inverted little tower, as pointed as its dagger ears. It was only then that I noticed that he had staked out his official territory on the concrete with comparable dried and bleached formations (a grandiosely scribbled hieroglyphic).
Gentle suasion (or speech of any kind) would have been inconceivable in the face of such unreasoning animosity. I therefore crouched resolutely down, and the Legionary mastiff fell silent. (Actually, he was only startled for the moment.) Then our faces moved so close to each other that they vanished as in a cloud. The dog’s eyes lost their glimmer, and the dark head turned blacker than crepe. Our eyes met - or rather one eye met another; one-eyed, I looked into his one eye. Then we both knew who the other was, from then on we could only be mortal enemies forever; at the same time, it dawned on me that the beast had long been mad.

[The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire, from Slow Homecoming, Handke, P.]

...of a portrait

The Cezannes that I saw at an exhibition in the spring of 1978 struck me as such things of the beginning, and I was overcome with a desire to study such as had hitherto been inspired only by Flaubert’s prose style. These were works of his last decade, when he came so close to his aim of “realising” his subject that the colours and forms alone sufficed to do it honour. (“By relaity and completeness I mean one and the same thing,” said the philosopher.) And yet these paintings show no added light. The feted subjects owe their effect to their own colours, and sometimes the overall effect of the lighter landscapes is one of darkening. The nameless Provencal peasants of the late nineteenth century, the heroes of the portraits, loom large in the foreground; with no particular insignia of royalty, they dominate an earth-coloured ground, which is there land, their country.
Darkness, lines, composition, reinforcement, darkening eyes; yes, I was shaken. And after two years of “study,” an appropriate sentence fits itself together: the silence of these pictures seemed so complete because the dark lines of a composition reinforced an overall tension which (as the poet put it) I could attain by “darkening over” to it, that is, by a leap, in which two pairs of eyes, separate in time, met on a painted surface.
“The picture has begun to tremble,” I jotted down at the time. “What freedom, to be able to sing someone’s praises.”
One portrait in particular moved me, because it pictured the hero of the story I had yet to write. It was titled The Man with the Folded Arms: a man, whose picture would never bear a proper name (but who was not no one or just anyone), seen in the corner of a rather empty room defined only by its wainscoting; sitting there in the darkness of the earth tones that also modulate the man himself; a man, it seemed to me, at “an ideal age: already substantial, but still capable of yearning.” (True, when I studied his posture, I was put off by the hand tucked back under the arm, and it took an effort of will to unbend it.) The man’s eyes looked obliquely upward, without expectancy. One corner of the mouth was slightly distorted by a thicker shadow line: “humble sorrow.” His open white shirt was bright, as was his large rounded forehead under his deep-black hair - vulnerable in its nakedness. I did not see this man in my own image, or as a brother; I saw him, rather, as an accomplice, who, now that I have finished his story, is once again the inviolate Man with the Crossed Arms, radiating a silent little smile.

[The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire, from Slow Homecoming, Handke, P.]

…of synaesthesia

It was then that I first looked seriously at the paintings of Gustave Courbet, many of which portray the life of peasants in the mid-nineteenth century, and was moved by the lofty silence of these pictures, especially one entitled The Peasants of Flagey (Doubs), Returning Home from Market. And then I knew: these are the right pictures - and not only for me.
Courbet, as his precisely localised titles show, regarded the subjects of genre paintings, these scenes of everyday life, as the true events of history. And so it is that to the sympathetic mind his peasants - as they sift grain, stand at a graveside, prepare a dead woman for burial, or return home from market at dusk (and those as well who only sit and rest, sleep and dream) - form a self-contained procession, which includes “my” genre painting of an old woman, who on a warm sunny day much later walked down a back street in West Berlin with her shopping bag and, during a brief silence that made her everyday reality more profound, revealed to me the housefronts as our shared and still happily enduring peace procession.

[The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire, from Slow Homecoming, Handke, P.]

...of tearfulness

Yet this woman was the first person by whom I felt appreciated as well as recognised. In the eyes of my parents, I was always “too serious” (my mother) or “too dreamy” (my father); my sister, it is true, regarded me as the secret ally of her craziness; my girlfriend’s gaze when we met was often rigid with an embarassment that melted only when at last - and I didn’t always succeed - I smiled at her from deep inside me; and even my teacher, who understood everything, once said - when in the course of a class excursion I had suddenly run off across the fields and into a thicket, just to get away! to be alone! - well, when I came back, he said with an undertone of irrevocable judgement: “Filip, you’re not right in the head.” The squaw of the Karst, on the other hand, gave me, heartwarmingly, the trust at first sight which, after a few days in her house, became an expectation, a wordless refutation of my constant self-disparagement (“I’ll never amount to anything”); an acquittal as surprising as it was reasonable; encouraging and protective; and so it has remained. And it was she who, before I had even opened my mouth, gave me credit for a sense of humour. At home I had often forbidden my mother to laug, because her laugh reminded me of the way women guffawed when men were telling dirty jokes, and my school friends thought I was a killjoy, because when someone was telling a joke I’d point out a scratch in the tabletop or a loose button on his jacket just as he was coming up to the punch line. Only my girlfriend, when we had been alone for a while, would sometimes manage - addressing me in the third person as in eighteenth-century dialogues - to cry out in astonishment: “Why, he is an amusing fellow!” But whereas she had reacted to some little random remark of mine, my way of looking and listening was enough for my present hostess, and whatever she showed me or told me, she did it with the joyful gusto that an actor absorbs from an alert audience - so perhaps the so-called sense of humour is nothing other than a happy alertness. Though once, toward the end of my stay - the two of us were sitting at the kitchen table and I was just looking silently out into the yard - she said something different. Something contradictory? Or complementary? She said that I had inside me a great, silent, passionate tearfulness; it wasn’t just there, it was raging to get out, and that was my strength. She went on to tell me that once in Lipa, when it was almost dark in the church, a man had stood there alone and erect, and sung the Psalms in a firm yet delicate voice. What had struck her most was that he had held his eyes shut with the fingers of one hand. She stood up to act out the scene for me, and we both burst into tears over that absent man.

[Repetition, Handke, P.]

...of a karst

But could the objects in a countryside and the works of its inhabitants be relied on for any length of time? What of those windless days which occurred in the Karst at every time of year, wordless days without sun or cloud formation, without contour or sound or shimmering colour on this disk of earth, when all life seemed to have died out overnight and I myself was the last creature that still breathed; and this forlornness was not as in other places confined to the moment of waking, was not dispelled by the crowing of cocks or the bells of high noon, all equally tinny, converging from the hundred sectors of the city (the television sets blaring in abandoned houses, the empty roaring buses, black rattletraps with drivers looking as if they’d been burned to a crisp long ago and we held together only by their uniforms). No dead satellite could be more lifeless on such days than a Karst that seemed covered by bone ash, the so-called karren fields where innumerable knife-sharp bones protruded and wouldn’t allow you to tread on them. But that, too, taught me something which only a metropolis can teach a visitor; namely, a way of walking.

[Repetition, Handke, P.]

...of vagueness

The vagueness was underlined by a blind window, to which my gaze was now drawn as to the centre of the world. It was fairly high up the slope on the sunny side of a large house, which I fancied to be the manor belonging to the porter’s lodge across the border. It stood by itself; in front of it there was only a single spruce, whose fur-brown bark brought out the massiveness of the yellow facade. A steep stone stairway led across a strip of meadow to the entrance. A child was on the stairway with his back to me; one foot a step lower than the other, he seemed hesitant; the steps were too big for a child. The slope was hatched, so to speak, with grass, whose fine shadow pattern was repeated in the oblique grooves of the facade. This made the house behind the spruce look more like a yellow rock than like a building. It seemed uninhabited. The child on the steps was in the entrance not to a house but to a playground.
The blind window was, far and wide, the only one of its kind. It owed its effect to the absence of something ordinarily present: to its opacity. Thanks to its extreme vagueness, it reflected my gaze; and the muddle of languages, the confusion of voices within me fell silent: my whole being fell silent, and read.

[Repetition, Handke, P.]