Across (11 page)

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Authors: Peter Handke

Tags: #Fiction, #General

BOOK: Across
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Leaves blown in from outside showed that the tunnel was nearing its end. The section of landscape which came into view at the exit seemed suffused with a sort of transcontinental light. Here the Staufen is seen from a new angle; the accustomed pyramidal top breaks down into three broad humps, which draw the eye into the distance, and the gas stations, the warehouses, and the hangar begin to look like some sort of overseas settlement—in Tierra del Fuego or Montana.
The airport is correspondingly small, as if it were not part of the city but some sort of colonial branch office. The birches outside the terminal building were snow-white, and the luminous green of the young shoots of a larch tree seemed to fill the tree with tiny exotic birds. The stone rocket in the forecourt was replicated in the grass plot below it by a similarly shaped unopened crocus, whose dark violet emerged, ready for takeoff, from its silver-gray involucre.
Now it was midday and warm. Even the short wings of the ubiquitous sparrows sparkled in the sunlight whenever they flew up out of the hedges. From the fields adjoining the airport came waves of manure smell, and cows and pigs bellowed in the former Roman settlement of Loig, a little farther on. The straight line to the horizon drawn by the yellow laburnum bushes on either side of the highway was accentuated by the yellow of a gas station. As usual, I misread a “long-term parking” sign as “long-term farting.”
The air terminal building has two stories, surmounted by an observation deck. The second floor is occupied by a restaurant and a so-called hotel. This hotel consists of
a short corridor with a few rooms on either side, so narrow that the two beds in it have to be placed end-to-end. In most of the rooms, the windows look out on the nearby control tower and the runways. Except in summer, the hotel is almost always empty; occasionally, a group will arrange for a banquet in the restaurant and book rooms in the hotel as well. There are no night flights.
The reception desk, behind a glass door that is always open, was, as usual, untended. I got the key from a waiter, whom I found in the terrace café. All the rooms were vacant, he informed me, and they were all the same. I wrote two names in the register: Andreas Loser and Tilia Levis. At least the waiter regarded the latter as a name, for he asked me: “Isn't that an actress?” He had a bushy black mustache and said, without waiting for my answer: “Or an aviator? Or a foreigner? I'm from Kurdistan.”
It was cold and dark in the room; under the curtain rods and in the shower stall, the hum of fluorescent light. But when the window was open, warm spring air and quiet sunlight filled the room. The airfield didn't seem to function at midday; there was only a helicopter flying back and forth, close to the ground as though looking for something, like a rescue craft over the ocean. Up in the glassed-in control tower, a man was sitting at the radar screen; he had his headphones on and he was reading the paper.
In the restaurant, I chose a table by the window, with a view of the western villages and mountains. In the middle of a fenced-in grass plot, a feathery brown spruce
tree glimmered beside a chapel-blue fire hydrant. I ate light-colored lamb and drank burgundy, which in the bottle was as black as belladonna and in the glass barberry red—they brought out the colors of the landscape.
I spent the afternoon in the village of Loig, at the excavation site (which had been partly filled in). In the pits that were still open, children were looking for mosaic stones that might have been overlooked, and an elderly gentleman with chunks of clay clinging to the soles of his shoes—he had no doubt walked across the fields—was sketching the ancient water conduits in a notebook. A fruit tree, all pink-and-white blossoms, stood by itself in a muddy enclosure; a plump hen and a titmouse were perched on two branches, one above the other—living proof that such diversity of forms and species cannot be mere chance.
Later on, in the air terminal building, where the sun had begun to turn orange and the unoccupied ticket windows seemed extraordinarily massive, an early passenger or greeter was sitting alone in the waiting room, which suggested a bus terminal more than an airport. Later the room filled up. The people standing there had long shadows. The windows were manned, the baggage conveyor belts running. And in the Rent-a-Car stalls—those of one company red, of the other yellow—the mascaraed lashes, the bleached hair, and the hands with lacquered fingernails resumed their places. A uniformed guard with a submachine gun crossed the room, his head tilted slightly back, his eyes half closed, as pale and stiff as a corpse.
Something drew me to all these people, even though
the air inside was close and smelled like fermented stale bread.
The sun went down. In the parking lot, which had been deserted all afternoon, long lines of cabs were now waiting with their roof lights on. A movement ran through the leafy plants that twine through the whole lobby, as though in accompaniment to the song pouring from the transistor radio that a young fellow in the shell chair beside me was holding up to his ear. A dog barked and the glassed-in lobby transformed the sound into the wailing of a pinball machine. The plane that was just landing would fly on immediately to another country. It was the end of the holiday; an unusually large number of passengers got out or pressed toward the entrance on the other side. Newly arrived passengers, waiting for their luggage, were unrecognizable shadows behind a frosted-glass door, while friends and relatives crowded around a narrow opening to wave or to signal in some other way. A traveler emerged from the automatic double doors, walked over to one of the Rent-a-Car stalls, where the girl in charge, leaning over the counter like a seller of lottery tickets, held out a finger with car keys on it; he grabbed them in his mouth and at the same time snapped at her finger, which the girl did not pull back but thrust in a little deeper. While the man rushed out to his car, the girl unfolded a piece of paper he had tossed to her, and slipped it under the telephone.
I sat bolt-upright, my legs close together and my hands on my knees. Outside, over the road to the city, a strange new signal shone amid the usual traffic lights, billboards, and cranes: the rising, fiery-red full
moon. Inside, between the wings of the door, a young woman appeared. Half hidden by the people in front of her and darkened by those behind her, she was visible as a line from neck to hip. I stood up and took off my hat. In disengaging herself from the crowd, the woman stumbled and described a semicircle. Then, standing to one side, she turned away from the exit, as though wishing in that way to attract someone's attention.
No one came. The last cab drove away. The plane took off. As it rose into the air, the din it had just made in speeding over the runway bounced back from the Untersberg. The whole rocky mass was still rumbling and roaring, while the plane was already far in the distance, no bigger than a dragonfly. Had the woman's back, along with the triangle of her scarf, come closer in the meantime, or had they receded? The lobby was almost empty when at last she turned around. Her face revealed a thoughtful beauty; of all beauties, the most thoughtful.
First, she looked out at the fields through the plate-glass front; then at the hat in my hand, as though this were a prearranged sign of recognition; and, last, into my eyes. It was a two-way glance that nothing could cancel out, though after it we blinked into empty space as if something terrifying had happened. She said something in an indeterminate accent, but the accent may have been only momentary. I went over to her and took her in my arms. I was overwhelmed by the one word that was spoken between us: “
Du.
”
We went slowly up to the second floor; or possibly we ran. I took the key from the untended reception desk. The short corridor seemed to have widened into a suite
of rooms. The spotlights in the ceiling cast a procession of circles on the carpet. There was no sound but the soft whirring of the lamps.
She jostled me with her hip, intentionally or perhaps not. She laughed at the room, but the look in my eyes made her grave. She stumbled, or pretended to stumble, across the threshold, which was only a strip of grooved hard rubber.
Seen in the slanted windowpanes of the control tower, the headlights of the cars driving straight on the road below were moving in curves. On the abandoned tables of the workers' cafeteria stood glass sugar bowls, their lids all casting identical round shadows on the white crystals underneath. In a dark room to one side, an electric iron and a baby's bottle were discernible on the windowsill.
Through the dark hotel room, whose only light came from the airfield—a multicolored dotted pattern on the walls—ran a shudder, followed by stillness. Does an individual, doubled up in dying, circling around himself, not sometimes feign to be two hostile beings locked in a life-and-death struggle? Here, for once, the reverse was true: two beings quietly side by side, not dying. Far enough apart to bring them close. Someone asked: “Do you remember?” as though there were a memory in common. Someone said: “Then ‘weakness' is another word for ‘being in the right.'” No one said: “Save me”; at the very most, “Help me.”
The room was cramped, yet the two bodies made space for themselves. We fitted nicely into one of the beds, at the foot of which lay a white, towel-size mat. Looking
for her in the dark, I sensed her presence all the more deeply. No, no need to look for her. She was there. Moved to the core by her body's being there, I hesitated —and by my hesitation she knew me. Yes, it was the woman who recognized the man; and it was she who with a resolute, majestic gesture united with him.
In passion, our bodies did not diverge but remained together. They consummated the act, which was not a frenzied struggle but a mighty game, the “game of games.” In that night of love, another time reckoning and another sense of place took over. Now it's raining (the wet concrete runway is a quiet lake). Now the full moon is shining on a little gondola-shaped cloud with two lovers in it. Now the shower of sparks from the intersecting bus wires is in your body. Now your shoulder is your face again. Now the eastern sky is a Spanish-lilac color. Now for a moment the woman's speaking becomes a singing. She means nothing by it; she is only singing her beauty.
Dreams came. I stepped out of the story, walked down a sloping meadow by night; the brook at the foot of it shimmered in the morning sun; there were human silhouettes on the bank. Was it another dream when, head tilted back, I looked into a woman's womb as into the inner recesses of a cupola tapering from turn to turn? When I wanted to convince myself, the eyes of a beautiful stranger rested on me. It must have been a dream in any case that, one with each other, we became a native of the world's center.
The strange face with the closed eyelids and lips made me think of a primeval stone figure, expressing—it is uncertain
which—bliss, mischief, or danger; in the next moment, it might smile at me or spit at me or both at once. Instead, it opened its eyes and looked at me; and a woman's voice—anonymous no longer—said: “I must leave you now. It's late.”
Outside, a procession of small cars with blinking lights on top drove along the runway. During the night, the moon had waned a little. A baggage truck rattled; a gate opened in the parking area. Smoke rose from the farmhouse at the end of the runway; in the courtyard, a slowly striding male figure on his way to the barn.
When I asked her when I would be seeing her again, she replied: “Once upon a time there were.” Did that mean that wishes were in order? “Not wishes, but questions.” So I asked her how she saw me. I was in need of being described a little. “Give me a portrait of myself. It can be false if you like.”
Then she replied: “You don't seem to be wholly present; you breathe discontent. You're kind of run-down. I desire you but I don't trust you. You have something on your conscience; not theft, or you'd be on the run. It's plain that you are outside ordinary law, and it makes you suffer in a way. I don't trust you, and I do. You are like the man in the doorway. Though very ill, he went to see a good friend. In leaving, he stopped at length in the doorway and tried to smile; his tensed eyes became slits, framed in their sockets as by sharply ground lenses. ‘Goodbye, my suffering Chinaman,' said his friend.”
“Did they ever see each other again?”
The portraitist said nothing more. Already in the doorway, her only reply was an immensely friendly
laugh. I shut my eyes and heard a sort of answer after all: “In the end, the friend said to the friend, ‘At last a Chinese—at last a Chinese face among so many native faces.'”
 
That morning, I cut across the fields and visited my mother in Wals. She lives in an old people's home on the large, almost always deserted village square. We sat together in the garden, on a wooden bench under a pear tree with pink-and-white blossoms.
At first she mistook me for the postman, and later she addressed me by various other names. From time to time she recognized me, and then she giggled, keeping her mouth closed to hide the stumps of her teeth. Her eyes were very bright, her face as small as a child's, her head no bigger than a headhunter's shrunken trophy. She was eating an Easter egg, more scraping than biting, and the painted shells fell into her lap; she gulped the whole yolk down at once. She studied me at length and then said: “Aren't these cruel times we're living in? Even before you went away to the army, I was always sorry for you.” She asked me how my “business,” as she called it, was getting along. “You and your business,” a traditional turn of phrase, which was not meant to be disparaging, but betokened a sort of respectful awe. And then another strange word fell: “If it weren't for you, I'd be discomfited now.” Whom did she think she was talking to? Once, when she said: “When you were little, I often hit you with the cooking spoon,” she meant me. And later on, she again meant me when she said: “Your father and you are weavy people. You're always
weaving back and forth between home and somewhere else, and you don't find your place either here or there.”

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