On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House by Peter Handke

Author:Peter Handke
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781466895393
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

THREE

The person who told me this story stayed in that country long after the festival there. During this time he let two of his employees, mother and son, run the business in Taxham; these refugees from the civil war knew all about the various medications, those for physical ills and more particularly those for what went beyond; and when it came to dosages, they also knew the right proportions; and besides, in the presence of these two and what they had so obviously gone through, some customers were promptly cured of what ailed them.

For the time being he stayed on at the inn in the lower town. The street, as became apparent with the first light of day, led directly to a sandy and rocky steppe, which apparently wasn’t cultivated. Seen from the window of his inn, this steppe looked not completely flat but hilly in places, alternating perfectly level surfaces with gently rising ones, and extending into the vast and empty distance, to all the horizons except the one at his back, which was blocked by the random clusters of houses, large and small, in the lower town and the stern line of the upper town stretched far along its cliff. The entire town, surrounded by wasteland as far as the eye could see, seemed sealed off from the rest of the continent, the latter hardly accessible.

Yet trains still traversed the steppe twice a day, or at least at the time when this story takes place, or did the tooting perhaps come from a tractor trailer instead? And even though there was no airport, all day long the sky remained populated, and not only by birds: A flight path must have crossed the area, not a heavily used one, to be sure—only two or three jet trails per day—but at least they suggested you weren’t completely cut off from the rest of the world. These jet trails were always very high up, or rather deep up, deep into the consistently blue sky, or even beyond it, and when the plane belonging to a trail actually came into view for a change, with a momentary flash, or for a second could even be heard—a delicate hum in the remotest part of the atmosphere—those who found themselves beneath it received the unmistakable impression that the plane already had thousands of such flight miles behind it, had taken off long ago in an entirely different country, and would remain out there for a long time at the same altitude.

* * *

The inn also served as the bar for the steppe street, and was managed by the young girl, the queen for the few days of the festival. Her mother, the actual owner, remained absent during the entire time, and my storyteller also told me that if one reader or another really needed some sort of explanation I could add that maybe she had set out to find her former lover and surprise him, and was just then roaming around his part of the world, as the poet was roaming around hers; they’d just missed each other.

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