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Authors: Peter Handke

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“I have obtained copies of all of your scientific papers, most of them lengthy and seemingly tedious, on topics such as ‘The Form of Dewdrops on Grasses in Contrast to Dew Formations on Stones, Sand, Gravel, and Glass,' ‘Multiplicated Accumulation of Dew on Smooth Granite Surfaces as a Result of Increased Nocturnal Solar Radiation in the Mountains,' ‘The Dew Sphere as Collecting Lens for the Color Spectrum,' ‘Erroneous Flights of Sierra Moths to the Dew Meadows, or Simulation of Mating
Invitations by Dew Glitter,' ‘Varying Dew Phenomena on Oak Leaves, Larch Needles, Bird Feathers—in Particular on Jackdaws, Mountain Cocks, and Peregrine Falcons—and Further on Wild-Boar Bristles, Human Hair, and Animal Pelts, with Particular Attention to So-Called Dew-Licks and Dew-Spirals on Cows, Goats, and Sheepdogs,' ‘The Riddle of Black Dew: An Attempt at an Explanation': but not one of these dew deliriums did not have thrumming in the background your insane notion of achieving fame and fortune by means of this natural resource.
“Without a doubt it will be proved that you are seriously considering establishing a dew mafia and then using typical mafia methods to found a human-rights-flouting despotic state among the universal-rights states that have finally cleaned up their act since the last century. From economic to political power, and from political power to the new religion that you will impose on the rest of the world, as I need not demonstrate because it is the logical outcome.
“By now you already worship dew as your idol. I was not mistaken when I heard each of you singly, but all of you in exactly the same words, intoning veritable dew litanies: ‘O dew of the new moon! O dew of the solstice! O dew on the mountain apple! O dew in my shoes! O dew on my mother's headstone! O dew that I drank from the lips of my beloved! O dew in the night as I lay dying! O dew on the cellophane from the crushed cigarette pack! O dew, my eyebrow pencil and my moisturizer! O dew that in the expressions of lands all over the earth maketh the meat, the vegetables, the wheat kernels, and the fruit soft and tender as only thou canst! O dew, by definition the fruit of the reflected rays of our earth! O dew, atom of truth and beauty! O dew of the night of pain and suffering! O dew of the hour of awakening! O dew on the eyelids of the white angel! O dew in the child's cowlick! O dew on the pencil point! O dew on the blood spot! O puddle of dew, in which the sky with its jet contrails is mirrored! O dew that sprayeth in the colors of the rainbow and turneth a somersault when the ball rolls through the dewy grass! O dark crisscrossing trails in the dew of the savannah where the wild beasts have trod! O drop of dew, measure of measures! O dewdrop, fullness of being and of our brief sojourn in these parts, and not only in the hours of morning!'
“And I will testify that you have developed an entire creation story or cosmogony that has its origin in dew: no big bang or whatever at some point or wherever—rather, the silent multiplication into infinitude of one dewdrop! Already, before you read a book, you first leave it out in the dew,
open to the page you will be reading. And already I can observe how for you people dew literally functions as the measure of measures, as the basic standard. Instead of the basic metric: the basic dew.
“Every second word you utter is ‘dew'! Instead of ‘money,' ‘dollar,' ‘mark,' ‘peseta,' ‘real,' ‘maravedi': dew. Instead of ‘a kilometer from here,' I hear ‘three dew fields from here,' and you also calculate time according to the dew: instead of ‘after a night,' ‘after a dewfall.' Where others write or calculate in the air, you write in the dew—on an outdoor table, on a tree trunk, on a car's fender. Where others sniff gasoline or drugs or other substances, you dew-fools sniff dew. Where elsewhere storms measure eight to eleven and earthquakes measure seven to ten, you measure Dew Strength One Hundred, using the dew gauge. And when I bring up all these things to you dangerous dew-fools, you look at me as though I were the fool.
“And you thereby embody beyond any doubt that divine utterance that hits the fool nail on the fool head, my dear Hondarederos and Hondarederitos and Hondaredians: you see the mote in your neighbor's eye, but the beam in your own eye, as thick as a tree, you do not see, no, no, no!”
Thus the reporter standing on the ledge in the middle of the wilderness continued to speak for a long time. It was as if the dew, or the word, or speaking of the dew in the Hondareda region, had loosened his tongue—or several different tongues at once. His speaking sparkled with enthusiasm, independent of what he was saying. Had he not earlier, in time out of mind, been one of those classic enthusiasts who are supposed to figure prominently in our story?
And now, in this remote locale, far from his observer's routine, in the presence of the woman, the stranger whose identity he had no desire to know, nor where she came from, nor where she was going—it was enough to be standing there with her—his former enthusiasm had caught up with him again, at last. He had flushed cheeks like an adolescent, and now and then he began to stammer, like one who for the first time in his life begins to say what he has long dreamed of saying.
Except that he also jumbled things up quite a bit. Did not enthusiasm have to be accompanied by clarity, the ability to make distinctions, and, if grounded in criticism, in self-criticism above all? On the other hand: didn't such speaking, although this and that might be far-fetched, pulled out of the air, tossed out to test the waters, as people used to say, create a
reality, which, unlike a merely observed and registered reality, simply through the rhythm of the speaking, suggested—narrated—proposed, a possible alternative world?
And the reporter, speaking so heatedly that despite the cold up here in the Sierra his astigmatic's glasses fogged up, was astonished by, amazed at, all the things that enthusiasm made possible in the way of words and sentences, if one just let it have its way, parallel to the facts and the tangibles. And she, the stranger, the adventurer, or whatever she was? She remained silent.
The story tells us that she remained silent long after he had finished speaking and was waiting expectantly for her reply. A troop of chamois, no, a veritable herd, gazelle-like, filed past between the two of them, the younger animals leaping, and trotted down the steepest part of the ledge as if on a level surface tipped up vertically.
Later another member of the observation team passed them, running as always, storming along and stamping straight through the underbrush and around the piles of dead branches that increased in number toward the ridge but did not slow him down: before he came into sight, a squeaking and squawking that was his panting. He must have noticed the two of them, the temporary pair, on the crest, but seemed not to recognize his colleague. And the vagabond of the mountains that this woman was, to judge by the rips in her clothes and her hair blowing in all directions, received the most cursory of glances from the cross-country runner, not merely a greetingless and malevolent glance but a death-dealing one, reinforced further by being tossed over his shoulder. And at the same time he stuck out his tongue—what a thick tongue—and fired through the air at her with both index fingers.
Yes, there were also people like him, whose mind could not be changed by a fairy-tale-like encounter, who, even when they ran into another person up here, far from the usual world with its hostilities, did not promptly forget the unpleasantness that had arisen between them simply by virtue of their being opposite types or genders, but rather, in this third location, face-to-face with the image of an enemy—of which he had at least one to three thousand lurking inside him—found these images confirmed; and if the two of them had spotted each other on Jupiter or Venus, in the remotest corner of the universe, as the only surviving human beings: as far as he was concerned, such a thing would have merely sealed his hatred and his irreconcilability.
And the story goes on to say that the mountain-crossing woman persisted in her silence, although with a constant, ever more lively display of facial expressions, which the observer followed as intently as if he were reading the longed-for words from her lips. She, too, was astonished. She, too, was amazed at what the other person had said.
Yet she was not astonished at the same things as he was. She was astonished, rather, to realize that if she were to speak now, she would have something to say about the mountain basin and its inhabitants that would not merely contradict his observations and explanations but would negate them entirely. This although the man had already been in the high Sierra for a whole year or even far longer, while she had been here only—
And again she was astonished: for it suddenly seemed to her, who had come to the region so recently, as if she had lived in Hondareda a good deal longer than the reporter. “Yes, the time there,” she remarked to the author much later, as if long, long afterward, “seems to me in retrospect like a piece, a thing, an object, a mass of material; something spread out, spatial; spacious.”
Not merely one phenomenon or another: from the outset, to her, the very rhythm in the Hondareda basin that carried, connected, and indeed first generated the phenomena and allowed them to appear was fundamentally contrary to that of the red-cheeked, red-haired man. And this rhythm had established itself, after the climb from Pedrada, when she first caught sight of the amazingly deep mountain basin, and of this settlement at the bottom and on the slopes that was entirely new to her, and it had provided the beat for the next phase in her one-woman expedition.
Precisely because of the depth of the cavity at her feet and the massive dimensions and extent of the granite depression, which quietly exploded all usual expectations, the individual features, both near and far, appeared as if through a lens that sharpened them and lent particular emphasis to their contours; and furthermore the contours thus emphasized revealed themselves to be in harmony with one another: in fact part and parcel of the special prevailing rhythm that manifested itself in a flash.
The scattered boulders, the dwellings, the hayricks, the lake (laguna), its outflow, the herds, the people, the entire high-altitude lowland instantaneously took on the appearance of a script, complete with links connecting the individual features or letters, and likewise spaces, paragraphs, or punctuation marks, but in a clearly organized and, at least to her, lovely regularity (see rhythm, above).
And also worth mentioning: that to her the writing looked Arabic, with the identical squiggles of the dwarf bushes everywhere, the repeated and often parallel loose ends, splits, similar curved fissures in cliff after cliff, the dots, points, waves, accents, breathing marks of lichens and mosses on the rock, an Arabic script that she also, involuntarily, “read” from right to left.
And the rhythm of the phenomena in the sprawl of Hondareda went approximately as follows: A swarm of wild doves rattled. A family of grouse ran, hustled, flitted. A snowflake fell. The sky was blue. A rock was a dinosaur egg. A gust of wind hissed. A cloud of dust was yellow. An old man had freckles. The pattern in the dried mud was pentagonal or hexagonal. My grandfather sang in the distance. A flint gave off a singed smell. In the conifer forest the light-colored cones glowed and were cone-shaped, and the raven that flew by was raven-black.
And continuing in the Hondareda rhythm: In the sheltered spots behind the hawthorns the sun shone summery-warm as in summer, and in the leafless rowan trees no birds were sitting, and the bunches of berries were shriveled, and in the middle of winter or fall or May the crickets began to chirp, and I let them wind up my heart anew, and the grass quivered, and a stick was snakeskin gray.
And in the glacial lagoon the water smoked where it was free of ice, and reflected, and the dark part in this reflection was the steep peak of the Almanzor, so steep that precisely this highest peak among the peaks of the Sierra was the only one without snow, and
al-mansûr
, yes, clear as day now, means “the place” in Arabic, and
kathib
means “dune,” and behind a stone fortification actually appeared, as if conjured up by the word, a dune, sand from weathered rock that had been blown there, yellow like the feet of bees, and another man was red-haired, and on a mountain acacia the thorns were pointed like sharks' fins, and all joys and sorrows of the world were gathered in one place, and there was a grove of chestnut trees the size of a small orchard, distributed over two terraces, and a single leaf there was whistling, and a few burst fruit husks hung there, empty and showing off their spines, and I leaped over the stone wall and snatched the forgotten chestnuts from the ground, and from an overhanging ledge hung icicles.
And the smoke in the settlement smelled like the smoke in Tiflis, in Stavanger, and in Montana, and next to the Almanzor the mountain water now mirrored the façade of my office building at the confluence of the two rivers in my riverport city, and farther to the left there was a clattering in an oak gall, and in the black broom pods the seeds rattled, yes, rattled, and way over to the left, down at the end of the lines, stood
bint
, Arabic for “girl,” and another word for daughter was
ibna
, and someone actually was standing there, and everything was all right again, and nothing was all right again, and everything and nothing was again as it had
been, and in a dormer window a candle was burning, and my brother tossed a hand grenade, and one was filled with bliss, with a desire to help, with helplessness, and with a general lostness and neediness, as never before and as always, and the flock of wild doves rustled, and the phoenix rose flaming from its ashes, and one was swept across the first threshold one happened upon, in the first house one happened upon on the floor of the basin.
Long ago, during her first time in the Sierra de Gredos, with the child in her womb, when the child's father, her one and only, had disappeared on the way into the mountains (a disappearing that was characteristic of his tribe?), and when the world before her, at her feet, had suddenly turned upside down, had been stood on its head and acted insane, she herself, in the face of that spectacle, had gone insane, not just almost, but from top to toe.
For years she had denied it, she finally admitted, almost inaudibly, to the author, had denied it energetically and determinedly, and this energy had then been partly responsible for her “worldwide success”—a criminal energy, so to speak (no, not so to speak).
“Everyone has his own madness inside him,” she dictated later, when she had recovered her voice, to the author, “and this madness has already come to the surface once, or several times. Except that we all behave, or most of us do, as if nothing had been wrong.”
Now, however, at the sight of the depression of Hondareda, with its unexpected new settlement, which upon one's approach looked positively urban, indeed metropolitan, head-down in the glacier-clear valley, a city as if under a glass bell, or altogether as if in a different, as yet unexplored and even undiscovered element, a scene replayed itself in her mind, one of the last before the somewhat happy ending of that film whose heroine she had portrayed long ago: fleeing from her mortal enemies, she found herself in an utterly dead landscape with nothing but volcanic ash, some of it still smoldering, at the edge of the world—as everywhere, such ends, edges, and precipices of the world could occur practically cheek by jowl with the apparent middles and centers—and she wandered, abandoned, half-blind, empty-handed, pleading to the invisible heavens, calling for her parents, her brothers and sisters, her homeland, cursing her fate and human existence altogether, through the scree and fallen rock, stumbled, fell, struggled to her feet, fell again, and finally remained lying facedown
on the ground. The camera showed her in close-up, prostrate. Sparks of what looked like lava shot nightward past the figure lying stretched out there, in a coma or dead. A temporal leap. A change of lighting, with the close-up unaltered. The searchlights of the pursuers? No, daylight. The end of night. During the temporal leap, day had broken. Her head still in the smoking volcanic ash and basalt. Over? The end?
Yet gradually some movement, or is it merely the wind in the hair of the corpse? Slowly her head rises and is bathed in light, morning light. Her skin, also her brow, and especially her temples seem made for this light. (Of course the lighting man has done his part, with additional spots and reflectors on the sides and especially on the ground.)
The eyes opening: black, which at the beginning of the shot looks just as dull and veiled as the cratered landscape all around, but then begins to glow, and now, as the camera slowly pulls back, almost imperceptibly, from a close-up to a full shot, here and there the glassy humps of basalt also begin to glow, the fiery cataracts of all the long-ago volcanic eruptions now chilled, hardened like crystal, and heaped up in the wasteland of petrified ash.
It is a rather dark glow, almost scornful, or even, with all the hopelessness concentrated in her gaze, full of quiet rage, unlike her futile fleeing of the previous night, with hands and feet groping and tapping pointlessly in every direction. Then—although the camera remains focused for a full shot, I seem to recall seeing as a moviegoer a shot of only her mouth, just for a moment: the lips parting. Astonishment. Yes, astonishment. Not to be forgotten: her film was set in the Middle Ages, and the occasional astonishment expressed by the characters was not merely believable but was a basic trait. This astonishment of hers, however, exceeded the customary medieval astonishment, was an astonishment at nothing, nothing at all, and it was decisive.
For it saved her life. More than that: it gave her the strength to start a new life. That decisive astonishment in the moment of awakening after a night of despair enabled her to shake off her old story once and for all, and made room for a new scenario, one that was not merely a thousand times but infinitely more beautiful and true, and this story was now about to begin. (Except that the film did not show what happened next.)
At the time, several interpretations were put forward to explain that “decisive astonishment” on the part of the heroine: a dream, a predawn
dream, of the sort that sometimes plays out in heavenly colors and tones? the light of morning shortly before sunrise, and the sky, again very medieval, as the domed firmament, and the lava earth, on which the woman lay outstretched, as the surface over which it arched? Or a prematitudinal dream of Paradise and the light and the air currents of the real or waking world intermingling with it?
For my part, I believe that the fresh astonishment of that persecuted and despairing woman there was actually unfounded, or stemmed from almost nothing—just as I, too, from early on and to this day, though less often, and less and less frequently, in my often damnably askew and sometimes accursedly worthless life, occasionally see, newly astonished and astonished anew, an immense, powerful, unshakably peaceful world flash by, which I cannot be dissuaded from considering the actual one—more will be said here later about the rather despised word “actual”—and such a world never appears to me in the form of the sun or of pure light, but only in rather dim, flickering, twilight-gray flashes resembling distant heat lightning, as the most inconspicuous of the inconspicuous: for instance as a rusted nail seen years earlier on a dusty road in the place of my birth; as a curb seen one time on the Peloponnesus; as the shadow of a child in Oklahoma; as the boat gangplanks in Cappadocia. And I, too—and with me my “actual world”—are threatened with the loss of images, or has it already taken place, irreversibly? And since it is a question of my life, and not of a film plot, my astonishment was also never able to play a decisive role.
Her first experience of the surprisingly populated mountain depression matched to a T the way her eyes had been opened to the world in the scene she had played at the end of her film. The world one experienced in Hondareda was virginal and bridal, yet equally, as one sensed the first time one gazed down into that camp in the hollow, a lost cause, or perhaps not? (For this sentence she again insisted on “one,” and when the author, who had long since left his father- and motherland for his village in La Mancha, hesitantly asked whether “bridal” and “virginal” were terms still used in German and suitable, she told him that what mattered was the adjectives' relationship to the nouns, and in this case: yes!)
By the way, she said, her story would have to return later to that upside-down hour, with the outbreak of insanity, that had occurred during her first journey through the Sierra de Gredos; for that had also become the hour of her guilt, and the fact that now, on this last, or perhaps not last? crossing, she had made up her mind, and, in the worst moments, intensely
imagined, that she would speak of it at long last, had kept her from giving up and just letting herself fall, or perhaps not?
On her previous adventurous journeys, she had encountered that virginal world not so infrequently—and again she interrupted the author and ordered him occasionally to replace “adventure” and “journey” with “roaming.” Almost every time it manifested itself, it had been when the roamer, or, in Spanish,
la andariega
or
andarina
, from
andar,
“to walk,” had stretched out somewhere in the open and fallen asleep, just as had happened in the film with the heroine she had played.
Unlike in the film, she slept there, on the bank of a brook, in the steppe grass, under an overhanging cliff, only very briefly, usually for just a few breaths. And the falling asleep occurred in broad daylight. And it was never preceded by sorrow or despair, at most by a certain weariness from walking, a listlessness.
Awakening from such a slumber, always accompanied by the rushing of water, the whistling of wind, and several times the more or less distant roar of a highway: not an easy awakening: as if poked by the forehead of an animal watching over her or some friendly creature. And also each time a scenery that, although unchanged, now seemed thoroughly unfamiliar and above all incomprehensible, without north and south, noon and afternoon—if any time, then morning, if any land, a land in the Orient.
What freshness wafted toward one from this indecipherable setting. Except that it soon gave way to the tried-and-true familiar, and already the rejuvenation and the brideliness were wilted and dissipated. But in her Hondareda period this was not the case. She had never experienced anything similar.
But then something comparable did come to mind. As a young woman she had often taken the train from her university town home to see her grandparents and her brother, still quite little, in the Sorbian-Arab village. Although the village lay in an almost flat landscape, before arriving at the railroad station, located a short distance from the village, the train went through a real tunnel. That got one's attention, and not only the first time but every time, and even more remarkable was the length of the tunnel. Each time it seemed as though it would never end. What a long journey, with darkness to right and left, and in a tunnel on almost level terrain, too!
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