The Moravian Night by Peter Handke

Author:Peter Handke
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

6

IF ON THE previous leg of his tour the former writer had given himself time in not merely princely but positively regal fashion, as he now set out for the country of his birth he suddenly felt in a hurry. He was drawn less to Austria than to what lay beyond, his home, yes, his home in the Balkans, to that boat on the Morava. He felt? thought? no, knew he was bound to the river and to the town of Porodin, knew he had an obligation to the place, even if almost no one there gave a damn about him, let alone needed him. With Austria, however, nothing in his thoughts linked him now, and that had been the case for so long that occasionally it struck him as almost sinister. His brother, to whom he felt somewhat close without their being in contact, and likewise Gregor Keuschnig, who had recently fled home from the no-man’s-bay, and Filip Kobal: these two did not constitute Austria for him, any more than did a couple of other acquaintances in that country. His native land—to which he had once been attached, which then, in a transitional period, had become his enemy, and to which he had once more become attached, and ready to defend it like a true patriot, if it happened to be attacked again, tooth and nail, from the outside, though in a way different from past attacks—this homeland had slipped out of his consciousness, for better or worse, and he did not feel altogether good about that. Not even in his dreams did his native land turn up.

On the other hand, when he thought back to the period, mercifully short, when as a young writer he had been assigned the role of representing his country and had accordingly sometimes acted in that capacity, even today he was flooded with embarrassment, and at least it had given him a sense of freedom when he had subsequently ceased once and for all to be the spokesman for anyone or anything. Oh, not to be a public figure, not even of the sort he had sometimes been in those earlier days, more in jest than in earnest, and certainly not as a “national author.” He had escaped from all that not only by moving to the Balkans, a region under a cloud, and not only by renouncing any form of publishing. He still thought he had incurred guilt by playing along, if only halfheartedly, with the idea of being a national writer—lasting guilt. And why had he played along? Perhaps because at the time he had actually believed for a short while in something like another kind of nation, in fundamentally different nations, and had thought he could help to embody them. Fool. Village idiot. Housepost. (“Let me explain, for you houseposts,” the boatmaster interrupted his nocturnal narrative, “housepost is the Austrian expression for the feebleminded or hopelessly retarded person on a farm, someone who in every sense will never get beyond the house and barnyard but simply remain just that, a housepost.

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