Across by Peter Handke

Author:Peter Handke [Handke, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General
ISBN: 9780374527648
Google: GprzPaXmU1sC
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 190831
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 1983-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Though there was plenty of room in the last bus—known as “the drunks’ special”—I stood on the moving disk between the two sections, which turned slightly on the curves. The floor of the long, tunnel-like vehicle rose, fell, and tilted this way and that; an empty beer bottle kept rolling under one of the seats and then out again. The two arms gripping the overhead wires not only conveyed the needed current but seemed also to save the bus and its passengers from sinking into the earth; following their example, I clutched the hanging straps above me with both hands.

It was a short ride; at that late hour, the bus went no farther than the cemetery. By then, I was the only passenger. I didn’t get out until asked to, and then I took elaborate leave of the driver, becoming more verbose from step to step. “Good night, Mr. Chinaman,” said the driver, and started round the circle on his way back to the city.

My housing development was still a long way off; for me, it couldn’t be far enough. For a moment, the bus wires against the open sky veered off in the direction of a suburb in Japan. Shining in the lamplight, the gilt letters on the cemetery gate were an illegible script, or all the scripts in the world combined.

Something drew me westward, across the meadows to the canal. But at the moment that didn’t seem to be my place. I stayed on the main road, which is bordered on the left by the cemetery wall, and as I walked I looked at the distant embankment—on my side of it the Canal Tavern, dark except for a single light in the upper story. The building, another symbol, looked to me like a lock-house.

For a time I was alone on the road and imagined that Loner—like Loser, Hurler, and Spite—was a name. After a while, a man with hobnailed boots came along in the opposite direction and said in a malignant tone: “I know who you are, but you don’t know who I am.” As far as the end of the cemetery wall, I ran. The crematory amid the pines was lit up like some “sight” in the Old City. A yellow glove hung from a branch near the sidewalk. Above the road, the bus wires seemed to be woven into a steel net that wouldn’t move before dawn.

The short stretch where the road rises—the Salzach, which has now been diverted eastward, used to flow here—gave me a chance to breathe deeply and I savored it. Though the former river terrace was not very high, the plain it led to—where the village of Gneis is situated—was definitely a plateau, and here the air was perceptibly colder. There was still snow in the fields, and where the earth showed through, it revealed a pattern resembling bird tracks. The mistletoe balls in the trees had white caps on. Icicles cut through the April foliage and reflected the night light with the clarity of glass.

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