The Ballad of the Last Guest, page 13
The last rain of summer, the last couple of drops glistening on the asphalt and already dried up. The time I couldn’t decipher my own handwriting anymore. The mayflies dancing by day in the grass, and toward midnight continuing to dance indoors. The former ski slope greening in the middle of the New Town, the stretch of country road on which I used to walk to school barefoot now also in the middle of the New Town. My true face: laid bare.
Roaming aimlessly, yes, but by my own choice. The place where I wanted to hurl myself into stinging nettles, but there were none. Never shake my head again at others, only at myself. No heaven left but the heaven of language, with a word in the right place as precious as an object in its right place? (No questions allowed in a ballad?) Nefertiti, “The beauty has arrived”—will she ever come again? (No questions allowed?) Horoscope: “What great form today!” / “Oligo deficiency.”
Contrails in the form of snakes, and snakelike ribbons of tar on asphalt. From the dark interior of the streetcar, faces illuminated by the sun, especially Black faces. In my native region, “simple” used to mean “shallow,” “cheap,” “easy to obtain.” There were still some people who cracked their knuckles. How good to be out of the line of fire! After the nightmare in which I couldn’t utter a word, the sensation of my tongue’s being stuck to the roof of my mouth.
The time I threw up by all the seductive entrances to the forest. Instead of sticking feathers into my hat band as I used to, now I chose lichen. A delicately inviting neon garland over the entrance to a restaurant. Well-meaning faces: they existed. That I never notice pregnant women’s bellies till I take a second look. “Hey there, next row! You’re up!” A bird sound: “Yes, that’s one way to say it.” Children talking at a distance, not just when they shouted, could be heard word for word, unlike adults talking.
Loudspeaker announcement on a long-distance train for those getting off: “Check your surroundings again to make sure you have all your belongings!” No real work done all week, but exhausted every evening. Godfather and godson: accomplices for a moment. An elderberry umbel, a blackberry cane blooming in mid-autumn. The time when I embodied a motley crew all by myself. And somebody lost the sole of his shoe while walking but didn’t notice. Lizards in the fall: nothing but the tips of their tails here and there.
A girl with freckles for the first time in years, and right after that a whole caravan of them. The trams down in Tram Valley forming a mobile village of bungalows. The cracked seats on the bus looking as if overgrown with lichen. Last guests: our future clientele. The remains of a dugout in the prehistoric pond. Sign posted in an auto-repair shop: THE MECHANICS OF EMOTION. One of the first long lines of wild geese wavering back and forth across the autumn sky: “So you’re lost, too?”
Pleading, pleading! Where’s our pleading gone? The time I heard myself stomping through the woods and covered my ears. The time I wished for a helicopter to airlift me out of the woods. YOU WILL GO AND RETURN NOT DIE IN THE WAR. Blessed is he who can reply to “Did you get home safely?” with “Why, of course!” Walking backward like the referee on a football pitch, and not only in a game. The time the sounds my brother babbled before his first words suddenly came back to me, sounds we made part of the family vocabulary.
People who get on the streetcar in the evening and sink into the last free seats: their sighs of relief. I set out with this thought in mind: another summer tale—but then … “Get out!” as a blessing. Dreaming, during my night in the church, that someone was sketching me. The proprietor who kicked a toothpick out of the restaurant while I was sitting there, the last guest. My brother long ago as a goalie, sucking on a lemon.
Ah, all the things that sheltered me during those seven days. No whirlwind in the woods, but instead whirlwind zones, lots of them, in the New Town, where the empty beverage cans rolled toward one another, clashed, rolled apart again, and so on and so forth, for afternoons on end. Among the cracks in the bus seats, the intimation of an eternal pattern. The long accounts in the Odyssey, especially of the evenings, as if what was at stake was postponing something again and again—for what purpose?—nothing specific, “plain and simple” one postponement after the other—storytelling à la Scheherazade.
At certain moments still wanting to run headlong into a knife—but none was there. Or “May a stray bullet strike me”—but none came. Or “To be crushed in a truck’s blind spot”—but for that one week all the blind spots were eliminated. The increasing numbers of treasure hunters since last year, not only digging in the woods, but even seeking treasure between the streetcar tracks. Many of the newly built houses lacking mailboxes—but those of the abandoned houses overflowing. All the raptor feathers, always just single ones, that I gathered the previous year, including in the middle of town—and this time? Not one, even in the woods.
Every time during those seven days when I thought I’d seen enough, the seeing refused to stop. Not to be forgotten, in spite of everything: the burst of energy that emanated, and still does, from the leaves and branches that brushed or jostled me in the woods and elsewhere. Yes, come hither, Age of Keeping Secrets, you’re needed—yet there were some things that didn’t want to be kept secret. The time I tied a kerchief over my eyes and practiced walking that way.
What kind of tree has a crown that towers above all the other branches and is shaped like the wings of a windmill, and also spins that way, especially in a high wind? Right: the weeping willow. The stone lion at the foot of the baptismal font opened its mouth and roared silently, “Hurrah!” On the path familiar to me ever since childhood, one morning I took one step to the right and one step to the left, and exclaimed: “I’ve never been here before!” Let the thousand and one kinds of lichen bloom.
A bush packed with sparrows, chattering from morning to night, and not a single sparrow that let itself be seen during the day. “The last guest to leave gets something to take with him!” On the streetcar, a young Black woman was reading an old book, and what I at first took for her shaking her head turned out to be her rocking her head in time to a song. Daydream of a “shade tree for the whole family,” ours: the tree all by itself, not yet full grown but casting enough of a shadow: “Not too large!” For “all of us.” Another daydream: in the woods, and not only there, an “unlearning trail.”
When, in the course of those seven days, I heard the rustling and crackling of a clochard, not just from what I was carrying around but also from myself as a whole. All the tables set for supper in private houses with curtainless windows: whatever you do, don’t go in; get away from there, go somewhere else! And the time I passed some children, and the whole bunch of them, no joke, respectfully gave me a thumbs-up. And women still had runs in their stockings, or was that the latest fashion?
The girl jumping rope on a balcony—and the whirring and whistling of the rope, but only the rope could be heard, no jumping—when seen from below had the face of an old lady. The bar where at midnight a voice boomed from the television: “And now the final question!” In the lead-up to autumn, the leaves tossed by the night wind always falling singly, if at all, even when the wind was powerful, and in the middle of falling rising again: those leaves were saving energy, “like us, like the whole world.”
Be the last guest in broad daylight? No, and again no! When I heaped abuse on the child, my godchild, lying there in his crib, it seems to me now that he chortled with glee at every insult. And the time my mother and sister, to celebrate my homecoming, began to croon “Melancholy in September,” and I stopped them. The one patch of stinging nettles as tall as trees: “That’s what I call a forest!” The passerby who said, “I’d like to point out where you can find particularly fine water.”
And the way the old priest found his way back to officiating during the baptism—how wonderfully priestly he became, and at the very end his “Amen” with the longest-drawn-out “A.” The woman in the newsstand to me: “It’s obvious you haven’t bought a paper in a long time.” I stood before the spot where the mirror used to hang in my parents’ house much longer than I’d done the previous year. The sparrows in the bush on the side of the road: an invisible parliament. My dream during the night in the vestry of the deconsecrated church: a blanket of stinging nettles. And the moment of the first autumn leaf pile, still small, and the child standing there, small like the leaf pile.
Yes, my godson would be a good thrower—if not the champion of the Werfer bloodline, in honor of his surname! To be a guest among others, from dusk on: that, too, part of “The Ballad of the Last Guest”? “Sheila says she loves me”: quite different from “Be embracéd, O you millions”! To the other passengers in the bus station’s waiting room, the two of us, my sister and I, mourning on the windowsill, were two of the beatified. Our orchard newly in bloom—but that was in a different land—and besides, that was another dream. Our dead brother’s guild mark in the asphalt of the former country road, now the street of lost gloves, the street of windblown newspapers.
Yes, the echo of a good throw—even without an echo. The morning on which I intentionally walked around with my shoelaces trailing. The right woman would reveal herself—and the woman who stopped me was an ancient one who scolded me for letting myself go. The patch of lichen repeatedly stepped on, and how it bounced back every time, springing up. And how I looked out of the bus one last time and wanted to promise something to our windowsill, now unoccupied. Seek and you shall find: no, that wasn’t it—how many places I’ve spoiled for myself by wanting to seek and find. The child skipping in the autumn thunderstorm.
All the beautiful women with acne. Lichen as edelweiss. My sister’s exclamation on the windowsill, “Poor us!” The heartwarming voice of a blind man. On the map of the New Town, the name of the former rural area: THE VILLAGES. Ah, how, during the baptismal feast, I suddenly saw myself clamping my godson in my armpit and carrying him from the North Pole to the South Pole. The secret that all those on earth were created equal—O noble anarchy! When my brother with snow on his hat joined the rest of us in the rain, and how, along with the drawing of his house, he had a three-dimensional model of it in his other hand. A hedgehog as a Seeing Eye dog. In the rotting woodpile in front of an abandoned house, pieces of a broken jump ski. Just as there were “garden escapes,” there are also “forest escapes”—raspberries, for instance. From the New Town stadium, the voices of children, clearer in the distance than close up: “Bye!” “See you tomorrow!”
Brother, unsung—as yet. True: as a young man, I slept in cornfields many times, in the furrows—but sleeping in a trolley barn was new for me. Every year, when I came home from afar, I brought presents, and this time, too—except that I threw them away on the last stretch, dumped them, and for the first time in my life came home empty-handed. The abandoned church amid the high-rise buildings as small as a doghouse—but the tower, tiny though it was, a real rocket! And how hastily the football players, in the middle of the game, tied their loose shoelaces. And—day in, night out—the lichens forming “the other network.”
Us “on the razor’s edge”? And this cutting edge is inside us, in the heart of our heart? All those who’ve vanished from the “villages” since last year. The steamed-up windows of the last eatery still open at midnight—yet for a good while I’d already been the only guest: how could that be? And how I left my coat with my sister for the winter. And how the news of our brother’s death, as we were sitting on the windowsill, caused her acne, which had disappeared long ago, to break out on both cheeks, and how I saw constellations in the outbreak, which made her even more beautiful. Oh, fullness of sorrow, fullness of fullness.
After fleeing the forest, fleeing nature, I could do nothing but rush down into the New Town, where I walked along the “avenues” and “boulevards” as I’d once walked along the shoulder of the country road, more present to me there than ever. How the old paths, now gone, were still there inside me, as stretches, as units of measure: the path to the roadside cross commemorating partisans murdered by the Nazis; the path to the bomb crater with the skeleton of the unknown soldier; the path to the cow pasture; the path to fetch milk … And if, during my home leave the previous year, at most every tenth passenger who got on the streetcar or the Metro looked around for a seat—this time, the year in question, it was every second passenger, no, almost every one. And the previous year, especially around midnight, the rats scurrying back and forth between the rails—but no trace of them this year—and how I wished I could see them this time.
During my week at home, it became clear to me that thinking of myself as a chronicler was a complete sham, a misrepresentation of myself. Ah, community of last guests, community of communities. Was the girl playing football by herself in the empty New Town stadium aware she was playing for the whole world? And is she still that humanitarian lone player? Hey, how my godson at the baptismal feast crawled to another small child at the next table and untied his shoelaces! And the way all little children sit, their posture and their expression looking as if they’re in the starting blocks. Instead of throwing, simply winding up, forever and ever! On the windowsill, a sign—NO SITTING!—but the two of us tolerated without a word.
And something else during that week at home: looking in from a distance at a garden party, a woman among the dancers wrapped from head to toe in gold plastic sheeting. Yes, Brother, when you, the Foreign Legionnaire, were asked one time by me how you “made out” in that respect, you just gazed up silently at the sky, until I heard a sigh from you such as I’d never heard from a human being. And although we’d met in a third location, one that couldn’t have been more peaceful, every time we were out on the street or elsewhere, after a couple of steps you ducked.
And how, when I returned this time to my home on the other continent, when the house came into view, I’d thought: “I’ll never make it to the door”? And how I promptly felt myself striding toward it—a stride to be proud of. And how I wished nonetheless that out of the darkness someone would hurtle toward me, brandishing a knife, and how at the same time I was sure I would stop him in his tracks.
Yes, she who turned into my adversary, into evil Mother Nature, if not a mortal enemy—how in the course of events she showed signs of turning up again here and there. But what signs those were!: The one who’d just been evil through and through was working and whirling parallel to me, and I was parallel to her. The time when I, with my brother’s image before me, felt strong enough for a moment to call him back to life. The priest’s “Amen”: “in a stentorian voice” (from Homer’s Stentor). And the time I was swimming in the morning in the prehistoric pond and experienced the water striders as the forerunners of humankind, and the silvery snail trails on my hat and garment after the night in the bomb crater.
The time I yelled “You little spit-up devil” at the baby, and he promptly spat up, playing along. How, on the New Town’s one short Metro stretch, the passengers underground, in direct contrast to the people up above on the street, all presented faces, of one kind or another, all of which told stories, like this or like that yet also one and the same story—accompanied again and again, in my memory, by the rats scurrying between the rails down there the year before: “Yes, those were the days.”
A child, forgotten in the evening on his merry-go-round horse. In one of the no-man’s-land-patches in the New Town, the gravestone, without a cemetery anywhere to be seen, the grave of a sailor, far from the sea, and scratched into the stone the sailor’s silhouette, with his duffel bag. And the time I sat as the last guest at a wobbly table, and made it wobble even more, and all the fingerprints on the wineglass in front of me—the more different the better. And the schoolboy dawdling on the way home, shifting his school satchel from one shoulder to both as he walked.
September–November 2022
ALSO BY PETER HANDKE
The Second Sword and My Day in the Other Land
Quiet Places: Collected Essays
The Fruit Thief
The Moravian Night
Don Juan
Crossing the Sierra de Gredos
On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House
My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay
Once Again for Thucydides
The Jukebox and Other Essays on Storytelling
Kaspar and Other Plays
Absence
The Afternoon of a Writer
Repetition
Across
Slow Homecoming
The Weight of the World
The Left-Handed Woman
A Moment of True Feeling
The Ride Across Lake Constance and Other Plays
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams
Short Letter, Long Farewell
The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick
A Note About the Author
Peter Handke was born in Griffen, Austria, in 1942. His many novels include The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay, and Crossing the Sierra de Gredos. Handke’s dramatic works include Kaspar and the screenplay for Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire. In 2019, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience.” You can sign up for email updates here.
A Note About the Translator
Krishna Winston is the Marcus L. Taft Professor of German Language and Literature, Emerita, at Wesleyan University. She has translated more than thirty books, including previous works by Peter Handke and works by Goethe, Werner Herzog, Günter Grass, and Christoph Hein.
