Crossing the Sierra De Gredos by Peter Handke

unexpectedly found herself walking along the Spree—which she remembered from her childhood in the Sorbian village as a rivulet, unprepossessing yet deep—almost close enough for dipping one’s hand into and at the same time fast-moving, winding, meandering, alternating between river-breadth and brook-narrowness, then, before the branching-off of the West Harbor Canal, even coming up with a real island, the water pulsing westward in wide, rhythmic curves, following the drainage bed of the ancient river valley, with a hint of long ago in the wind currents and the shimmering at the bends, which detracted not at all from its presentness. And onward, then as now, turning north, away from the Spree, on the shoulder of the city autobahn, with the Jungfernheide on the left and Plötzensee on the right—was she still in Berlin?—scrambling half-illegally through allotment gardens and over fences, pinching fruit from the trees, slipping under barbed wire, dodging ferocious dogs (although after their first, feigned lunging they backed off even faster, into the farthest corner), shouting at fleeing rabbits, whereupon these halted just before their bramble bush and pricked up their ears, and a few moments later came the automatic doors of the terminal,
with its monitors and loudspeaker announcements like “Moscow,” “Teneriffe,” “Faro,” “Antalya,” “Baghdad” (as she was still crawling through the brambles onto the tarmac, the destinations were being called out, sounding as though they were coming from the airplane engines just being started above her head).
    Later she almost preferred walking home after a landing in her area, often hiking from the runway over hill and dale straight to her house. And in this practice, too, she was not alone. By now quite a few people made their way home in this fashion, especially after long trips; hiked the last stretch, which could sometimes take longer than the whole flight. Besides, when going in this direction one had no need to fear arriving in a crowd, as could happen at the airport: initially one might be more or less accompanied by others, in a fairly large (though usually rather small) group, but then one person after another would peel off, and one would reach one’s destination alone.
    Now homecomers of this sort could also be recognized even at a distance by their (deceptively) light luggage, which nonetheless was clearly luggage, well traveled (without stickers), and by a certain self-assurance, almost arrogance, in their gait that allowed them to walk along the shoulder without wasting so much as a sideways glance at the vehicles rushing by them, often passing perilously close on purpose and honking senselessly. Among themselves, too, they acknowledged each other at most with a once-over out of the corner of the eye: such an acknowledgment providing a sort of sustenance to keep them going.
    Nevertheless she then wanted to persuade the author of her story to come up with a different beginning for her journey: hadn’t too much been revealed already, less about her—she perhaps had something entirely different to reveal—than about the circumstances prevailing at the time, which, as previously mentioned, were supposed to be portrayed more “ex negativo,” through things that did not make up the foreground? The author: “But isn’t that what has just been described?”—She: “Why not let me take a boat down the river? or: ‘She walked to the large new bus station on the very edge of the city, where buses depart several times a week for all the other riverport cities on the continent: for Belgrade, for Vienna, for Düsseldorf, for Budapest, for Saragossa, for Seville, and across to Tangiers by ferry, each of these modern buses more fantastical or dreamlike than the one before, hardly recognizable as buses anymore,
interplanetary transport modules—only the clock in the bus