Slow Homecoming by Peter Handke Page A

foreseen every reaction. He no longer experienced the momentary shifts between strength and weakness that ordinarily gave him a feeling of endurance; he just roamed unsteadily, accompanied by a clinking of coins, through this city, where autumn leaves figured as permanent decorations in shop displays. He was glad to have stopped passing himself off as a scientist, glad that, though he worked every day at his science, it had lost its professional character; that at last he was going through the motions of his life, as he wished, with the uncommunicative, somnambulistic gravity of a layman; averted from all, sharing his time with no one, he sometimes felt surrounded by a magical beauty.

    Detached from the nation and indifferent to the self-confident world religions, the West Coast city was a festival of sects, a ballet of cryptic symbols. Here no one seemed related to anyone—but persons who chanced to be like-minded for a short time would get together and hastily hide in meeting halls. Thus one evening Sorger found himself moving down the street in a long line. Then he was standing in a spacious, darkened auditorium surrounded by “the masses,” who like him were waiting for the singer, who had been a hero of their youth.
    He had no great desire to go there; rather, he was fulfilling a self-evident, rather burdensome duty. Not for years had he been able to let someone else think, feel, and act for him. Now he required the guidance of forms which, unlike the final measures of songs, gave him the idea of a perpetual new beginning, something on the order of the first age-old, poetically appealing rather than coldly demonstrative literature of his science, or the formal investigations of painters, in which he could lose himself as in the music of this singer, but at the same time find himself again, strengthened by his own resources.
    The singer was a short, broad-shouldered man; he seemed excessively strong and totally absent. He came out on the stage, stared at the light, and immediately began to sing. At the very first measure, the entire auditorium imitated the twining cord of the microphone, which the singer held in his hand. His voice was powerful but never loud. It didn’t come from inside his chest but existed independently of him, firm yet impossible to localize. What that voice produced was not song but rather the sounds made by someone who after long, intolerable brooding suddenly lets loose. Only as a whole did each
of his numbers have a tone; its elements were quick, strident, bitter, menacing, sometimes stuttering and repetitive cries of pain (never, in any case, of relief).
    He never smiled. Once, with his heavy body, he jumped high into the air. Staring vacantly, he was able, with a voice which he took from outside and drove deep into himself, to tell about the people he had inside him—what he wanted most of all was to have nothing in common with anyone. He didn’t sing with feeling but searched frantically for a feeling which was as puzzling to him as to anyone else.
    For a long while, partly because he was accompanied only by rhythm instruments, he seemed lifeless, damned by his own machinery; but little by little the steady mechanical beat gave his voice the vibrant undertone with which, toward the end of his performance, though inwardly raging, storing up his almost vindictive disdain of the world, he broke through to a hymn that embraced his entire audience. Along with everyone else, Sorger learned what a “hymn” can be and saw this ungainly man, who resembled no one else, as a reluctant freedom singer. In earlier years he had revered him, though strictly speaking he had no right to; but now, as no more than an interested listener, he felt upraised to the singer’s level. Going out into the crowded but quiet street, he wondered why he had forgotten almost all the heroes of his youth, and was glad that, body to body in the slowly moving crowd, he could still hear the