Slow Homecoming by Peter Handke

ocean, to a nightclub. True, he never lost his sense of direction, but it made him wander instead of keeping him awake as usual. Wherever he ended up, he had got there without a decision; it was only afterwards that he thought to himself: Oh well, now I’m here.
    The two cardinal points which had always meant something to Sorger were north and west. But at present the words West Coast seemed to apply not to the whole length of the continent but only to a small zone distinct from everything else, not to a vast expanse but, like the term West End, to a mere part of a city. Here too, to be sure, Sorger found the polygons of dried mud known to him from the northern bank of the river (in the networks of asphalt cracked by earthquakes or in the sun-resistant coating of certain shop windows, which in peeling seemed to form deliberate patterns); but their similarities struck him as fortuitous, derisive. This world was not “old” like the river landscape of the Far North
(which went on aging visibly, and the viewer with it), but remained unsuspectingly young, thrusting Sorger back into a time when, as he now recognized, he had been no better than an obstinately frivolous consumer. “Who is the king of this town?” he heard himself asking.
    Often in the Far North, and particularly in the wilds, it had pleased him, in contemplating the vastness of the country, to know that he was in a nation. But this city on the coast remained a place apart. There was no particular character in its look, no unity in its confusion. Once upon a time, even the traffic noises had spoken to the inhabitants, saying: “See what we can do together”—that at least is what the trains rattling along the coast had once seemed to say—whereas now, even if the city seemed to offer itself in the sunshine, there was no other sound than the tooting of foghorns in the still-opaque bend of the bay. Of course there were houses and cars, resplendent as only luxury items can be, but there was nothing to carry the gaze farther, over land or sea, to similar people in a larger world. In the North, the distances to other points on the earth’s surface had been fairy-tale numbers (in the tiniest settlement, signposts with bundles of arrows pointing in all directions indicated the distance in miles to all the world capitals), but Sorger had never felt as remote from all connection with anything as he did here. Thinking back later, he had difficulty visualizing an airplane rising above the houses or landing, but he could always see the colored paper tails of kites twisting and turning beyond the rooftops.
    And yet, in passing, he often felt that someone was waiting for his sympathetic glance. When he turned away, he seemed to turn a second time as though to see into a distance which often enough was not there at all, his
true purpose being to prevent people from noticing him; at other times, he would sit alone, grave and attentive, in a dark striptease joint, wishlessly daydreaming—“the man with the wineglass”—to the rhythmic movements of naked bodies. Or he would sit with other unknowns in a porno movie—“the man with the folded arms”—and recognize himself as one of the performers on the screen. He withheld all personal communication, not by lying, but by corroborating—always with a secret feeling of triumph—the many misstatements he heard people make. He kept appointments with strangers, determined to forget their faces before he had finished looking at them, and he, too, in leaving, was often asked: “What was the name again?”
    Rediscovering the “thundering interior of the jukebox,” Sorger converted himself into a player. Thus he became many-sided and discovered that he could be different—entirely different—anything and everything. Later, it seemed to him that all through these weeks he had understood no one but that with a gambler’s instinct he had