The Second Sword by Peter Handke

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

MY DAY IN THE OTHER LAND

A TALE OF DEMONS

ἐγὼ δὲ ἴδιος ἐν κοινῷ σταλείς

I, the idiot [Gk. = a private person], setting sail on my own course for the common good

—Pindar, Olympian XIII, line 49

1

In my life there’s a story that I’ve never told a soul. And now that I’m putting it out into the world, very late in the day, I must mention that neither the words nor the images I’m about to share at the beginning originate with me, though I myself am the main character and the only active figure. This story: I lived its first part in flesh and blood, more viscerally than almost all the other stories in my life. But my knowledge of it comes entirely from hearsay—from the accounts of others: my family, and, more intensely and extensively, third parties, the people of my village, if not, more influentially today, total strangers from surrounding towns and far beyond. It’s not simply that I have no recollection of that time, not a trace in my memory, not the “faintest inkling”; at the time in question, as I heard later, some people thought I was in an unconscious state, others that I was out of my mind. “Unconscious” was the family version, harking back to tales of quite a few of our ancestors who had apparently been given to a kind of sleepwalking—with the wrinkle in my case that it also took place by day. But in the eyes of all those not in the family, I was “out of my mind.”

Outside of our four walls it was considered a fact that I was possessed, possessed by not just one but by several, many, even innumerable demons. “Outside of our four walls”: that included the information, imparted to me later, that I’d eventually broken out of our property and—believe it or not—pitched my tent, a very small one, on the outskirts of the village, in a graveyard, not the current one but the “old one,” the former one, where most of the graves from the two previous centuries were abandoned or overgrown.

I was also told that while I was in the grip of madness my work as a fruit farmer—my main occupation from early on—was handled by my only sister. When I mentioned “the family” earlier, I was actually referring only to my sister; my father and mother were long gone, and in the house and the surrounding area the two of us were the only ones left; and long before my sleepwalking, or taking leave of my senses, my sister had been lending me a hand in the many, diversified orchards around what had been our parental home. She was the one who would visit me, I learned, if not daily at least once or twice a week, in my remote corner of the old cemetery to provide me with what was most needful. Needful? According to my sister, during my life as a sleepwalker I needed hardly anything other than our own apples,

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