Across by Peter Handke Page A

pyramidal summit; and when again I looked westward, the whole mountain had collapsed into a rubble heap only half its height. (In reality, the main peak was hidden by rain clouds, so only the much smaller front peak could be seen.) And what did “west” mean? The cardinal points had become meaningless, as they do for one cast adrift on the open sea; in the place of direction, confusion reigned. When once I made an attempt to dress, I missed all the openings and stood there like a twisted malefactor (funny, I have to admit). I heard sounds as when the Föhn is blowing; they seemed to come not from my field of vision but from around the corner, so to speak, from behind my back, taking me unawares, without the corresponding visual images. The everyday cries of the jackdaws rang out like bursts of gunfire; I suddenly heard the clip-clop of a horse’s hoofs as though a stopped clock had started (it would stop again in an instant); cocks crowed as though sounding the alarm, or taps. And
whenever the bus wires struck together in the woods outside, a crashing and a crackling were heard as when a big building is on fire.
    Often there was something to laugh about: once, some horses actually turned up at the bus terminus, hitched to cabs that seemed to have come to this wilderness by mistake. Inside them sat exotic tourists, aiming their cameras without conviction at the Colony. But I didn’t laugh.
    Yet I didn’t think there was anything wrong with me. In fact, I felt a strange satisfaction at “exposing” myself, just as there can be a certain satisfaction in exposing oneself to total darkness or a glacial wind—in laying oneself open to the worst sort of adversity. Satisfaction? No, pleasure. Pleasure? No, determination. Determination? No, acquiescence in the conditions of existence.
    In all those days, I never once felt anything akin to guilt. What I felt was something worse. I had thrust a long knitting needle so accurately into someone’s heart that there was not so much as a cut to be seen in the outer skin, and everybody was congratulating me over it. But I saw myself from then on as living in—the word cannot be avoided—perdition. (And there were no hands with which to cover the face of him who had seen it; if anyone had shouted “Hands up!” I’d have left them dangling at my side, and not out of contempt for death.) When people come home from work in the evening, don’t they sometimes sigh while settling into a chair: “How good it feels to finally be able to sit down!” But, with me, sitting had the opposite effect. Nothing made me feel good. Only perhaps I should avoid the word “perdition”
and say instead: “The bouncing bird, the cat washing itself, were lacking in the center of my field of vision.” In the center there was nothing, neither a playing dog nor a swaying daddy longlegs (or, if there was, it fled instantly). Or there was something in the center, but nothing pleasant. Once a freshly shot pair of chamois were hanging in the open garage of a villa, still dripping blood, hanging by their horns from two hooks, face to face. Even a bird and a cat appeared, but they were corpses drifting in the canal. Or the center was a place of staggering illusions: the light-colored logs lying crosswise at the end of the meadow looked like a dead ox; a seesawing brimstone butterfly appeared to me repeatedly as a scrap of yellowish paper. Or the center was a place of disillusionment; when I looked for it, it was hidden by billboards or by exotic shrubs with their unreal colors. Or the center itself was falsified: the house next door, raised by an artificially filled-in terrace, had a bell tower on the ridge of its roof in the manner of old farmhouses—but the area below the terrace seemed eroded, the shrine over the door of the house meant only: “You are not welcome here”—and the little bell tower, taken as a center, framed a