Absence by Peter Handke Page B

you, I’ll miss you until I die: I miss you because you despised my suffering; I miss you as my authority, my storyteller, my withholder; I miss you
as a home, as the hand on my head in dreams, as a smell, as my soul; I miss you to the point of blindness, enough to make me pull a knife, to make me scream. Father, appear!”
    This last word had been shouted. Knife in hand, the soldier jumped up from the bench. But instead of throwing the knife, he threw pebbles, which rained down on the rock. Outside, the upland stars flickered as though twisted by the wind. A wild boar was a motionless hump in the underbrush; some smaller humps lay beside it. A cornfield with its glittering, waving leaves counterfeited the moving surface of a lake; the handcart alongside it played the part of a boat. The curving glow over the undulating, always identically distant horizon rose from the big seaport at the foot of the plateau; it was as though the soldier’s shout had landed there and the glow was its echo.
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    Much later, as we were all lying on our bed of foliage, the woman spoke. The oil lamp had been turned low, and the room lay in half darkness. As we were lying prone, our heads to one side and our hands over our eyes, it was impossible to tell who was awake and who was asleep. Only the woman was visible, lying with her eyes closed and her face framed and half buried in her pillow of foliage, as children sometimes do in their autumn games. And so clear was her toneless voice that, again as with children, it would have been hard to say whether she was talking in her sleep or pretending. On her couch, which was somewhat higher than the others, she lay as on a royal bed, and with her under it the army blanket lost its military look. This is what she said: “You’re a liar. You’ve deceived me from the first. You’ve never meant what you said. You’re a cheat, a con
man, a swindler. You lured me into a trap. If I go to the dogs, you’re to blame and you should be punished for it. DIM is not an unconquered sun god, it’s a brand of pantyhose. You’re a rotten reader. You say: I like to be disturbed; the truth is, you can only be alone, and not just with yourself, no, you’ve got to be alone with your books, your gold pencils, and your stones. Your supposed sundial wasn’t scratched on the rock centuries ago by some great man, but only yesterday by a child at play, and it’s not a sundial, it’s just a scribble. You’re a phony scholar. There’s no inspiration at the bottom of your reading, deciphering, and interpreting—they’re just a quirk; you invented the voice that said to you: Take this and read; ever since you’ve been able to see, you’ve been obsessed with your written word, your letters, your signs. Your Roman milepost was a prop left here by some filmmakers. Same with your oldest inscriptions, they came from a movie set. Tap your bronze —it sounds hollow; run your fingernail over your runes—the cardboard will squeak. Your Egyptian scarab was manufactured last year in Murano, and the flower on your fragment of a Cretan vase was etched in Hong Kong. And even if they are authentic, what they have to say is old stuff and signifies nothing today. Their meaning is lost, their relevance forgotten, their context broken off. Far from recapturing the thread, we can’t even get an inkling of it. Only your words on your false and authentic stones remain, and they have been drowned out not only by the thunder of war machines but by the fall of the very first empire. Never again will your Euphrates and your Tigris flow from Paradise. Never again will your child carried across the sea by a dolphin serve as a symbol of solace on the graves of
those who die young. In none of your books will there be another Odysseus, another Queen of Sheba, another Marcellus. You yourself no longer believe in the fords you’ve shown me. Your springs mean no more to