Absence by Peter Handke Page A

forebears were there, watching me as I passed through the empty country; a whole far-flung clan, totally unknown to me before, has been looking at me. I too have the feeling that in this one day I have experienced several different days, so varied have been their looks, looks of horror turning to amazement, turning to indulgence, turning to approval, turning to understanding, turning to solidarity—until at the end of the long day the glance of my forebears was one with
mine and fused into something else, a voice which at last has made it possible for me to mourn my father and mother, and also, for the first time in the fifty years of my life, bade me welcome on earth, while at the same time calling out to me, bidding me think about someone else, care for him, do something for him, do everything for him, this minute. Now! I would like to be on the move like this as long as I live.”
    While the gambler was speaking, the soldier had picked up a handful of alabaster-white stones no larger than peas, which in times gone by had been pebbles at the bottom of a brook and in other bygone times had fallen from aerial tree roots. He passed them rhythmically from hand to hand; the sound was now as of marbles, now as of a distant hailstorm, now as of shots, and now as of old coins. Though he hadn’t said a word all day, he had no need to clear his throat before speaking: “When I was a child, I could see a plain from our window. It was a large plain, all fields and meadows. I wished it were full of houses all the way to the horizon, white, modern houses with flat roofs. I wanted our village to become a big city. Day after day, I looked out impatiently, to see if they hadn’t started building somewhere; the few wooden farm shacks didn’t count. When at last would the name of our village be known throughout the world like Buenos Aires or Hokkaido or Vladivostok or Santa Fe? My wish has almost come true. The village has not become a city, but the plain is covered with housing developments named after the former owners of the land, and all look equally suburban. ‘North,’ ‘South,’ ‘East,’ or ‘West’ has been added to the name of the village and that makes the scattered developments sound like sections of a
city; there’s even a peripheral highway and a feeder road leading to the expressway, where the traffic roars just as it did in my childhood visions. A toolshed has become a telephone booth, still roofed over by the same arching elder bush. Beside the roadside shrine stands the kiosk I longed for, with stationery, newspapers, and even a few books for sale. Only in the pictures my father paints is the plain as empty as in my childhood. He says he works from nature; every morning he sets up his easel in front of some new building, but what appears on his canvas is always the empty landscape. He says all he needs is a little space here and there between the houses; in those small gaps the old open spaces burgeon, and he has only to transfer them to his canvas; he says the paint he uses is like that bacillus which dissolves otherwise indestructible things into air. Which reminds me of another, very different idea I had in my childhood: when I walked across country in those days, I was convinced that the stones in the fields were growing just like the grass and the grain, and that in time they’d get to be as big as houses. I didn’t think of them as having roots; I endowed them with an inner force and regarded them, unlike the plants, as living beings. I was sure that if I measured them, they would become appreciably larger from measurement to measurement. All day today I’ve been thinking through my father’s pictures, step by step and degree by degree, as in a circle: the cliffs in this country have taken the place of my big-city houses. It’s only my father that I miss. I’ve never missed him as much as here. Father, I miss you. I’ve always missed