Absence by Peter Handke

sound. The chief cities are calm, and there have been no reports from any part of the country of power or telephone failures. There is no food shortage and no threat of epidemics. The steps taken have proved effective. Since a recurrence is unlikely for the present, no special measures are under consideration. There has been a marked improvement in the weather …”
    From then on the wind, which was still blowing against the cave dwelling, and the dripping from the limestone roof were a part of the silence. From out of this silence the voice of our host in a tone of rising amazement: “How far we have come today! We have traveled halfway around the world: this morning a bone-chilling showerbath under the waterfall; in the noonday heat the crackling bronze tablets of the war cemetery; this afternoon battling the desert rain,
without stopping for breath, attacked from behind by the Tibetan north wind; at last, toward evening, this cave behind a cave, this kitchen-bedroom-living room around the corner from a bunker … How many days have elapsed for me in this one day! It took me a whole day to watch you playing cards; a second to go down the river; a third to climb up to the high plateau; a fourth to get my bearings there; then a whole week to decipher the road markings, to lead you through rain and wind to my stalactite grotto, and to make it seem as bright and hospitable to you as a mountain villa.”
    After a long pause, the gambler spoke: “My parents have long been dead. But each imprinted an unmistakable image on my memory. Though I probably saw them many a time afterward, I feel as though those images were their last. I see my mother weighed down with shopping bags, climbing a steep hill on her way home. She is alone—there’s no one in sight far and wide—dragging herself laboriously up the hill, and it’s not just because of her bags. She doesn’t notice me at first; her face is strange, a man’s face. For the first time I see her as she is. As she is? Forsaken, cast out of the human community, aching with loneliness; before her eyes, unblinking in spite of the sun, death. And her expression.doesn’t change when she sees me; she shows neither surprise nor pleasure; she doesn’t want to dissemble now, that’s her strength. With the strength of her despair, she aims a short contemptuous glance at the person who, for all she cares, can come to meet her until the end of time but still won’t be her child. Already she has passed him without a word. My father is sitting in a small clearing, deep in the woods, where the two of us have gone to pick
blueberries. He is sitting in the grass at the junction of several paths, leaning with outstretched legs against a wooden cross. Though he is a practiced walker and still relatively young, he is suddenly too tired to go on. He doesn’t want me to stay with him, he tells me to go picking alone. Lying there with his hands on his belly, he really seems to be pleading when he says: Please go; and the look in his eyes expresses not only pain but acquittal and release. I may be dead tired—but never mind, leave me, my boy; I, your father, will stay here awhile and wait for you. In these two images, my parents are still alive for me. Whenever I come to that steep path, in reality or in my thoughts, my mother comes plodding along, looking through me in her saintly despair, and whenever I pass that grass triangle in the middle of the woods, I see my exhausted father watching me over his shoulder. But today I need neither that particular path nor that particular clearing; wherever I’ve been, my mother or my father has been there, too. Detaching themselves from those two memories, they come to me in the air, figments of light, consisting solely of glances. In today’s desert world, more than ever before, I have felt myself seen and observed by my parents. And the glances did not come only from my parents—all my