Slow Homecoming by Peter Handke Page B

singer’s voice in its sounds, even in the scraping of his own shoes on the pavement.
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    In the end, something changed after all: the city split into two parts, both of which became steadily stranger (and Sorger with them).

    Beyond the flat, narrow coastal strip and the pine woods where Sorger’s house was situated, the land rose gently to a densely populated, woodless hill and then sank to the level of the narrow bay that delimited the university campus. The road leading there crossed the hill in a barely perceptible trough, which daily use had transformed into a “pass.” The campus was not far from the Pacific (Sorger often walked there), and yet in time he came to feel that in crossing the little pass he was moving in and out of a mysterious gateway that held some vague meaning for him. On reaching this “summit,” he would involuntarily stop still or at least cast a brief glance over his shoulder. Though lined with the usual bungalows, identical on both slopes, this pass was to Sorger an important place where a “decision” would be made (though the only striking thing about it was the fog bank which in late afternoon rolled over it like a slow-moving avalanche and descended to the center of the city).
    Sometimes, when Sorger thought about the city, he saw the pass rising from it, unreal, uninhabited, and even without vegetation, sunk in the somber-gray granite of a stony mountain range; and toward the end of his stay his own person became just as unreal to him. Talking to no one, he had finally stopped talking to himself. For a time, long and short breaths had conveyed secret code messages, and he was almost relieved at the thought that he could manage without speech; it gave him a sense of perfection. Then he sensed a danger in his inner muteness—as though he were an inert object whose sound had died away forever—and he longed to have back the suffering of speech. Unreality meant that anything could happen, but he was no longer able to do anything about it. Wasn’t he resisting an overwhelming power? Sorger
feared the decision, because he would have no part in it. He had lost his image of himself (which ordinarily enabled him to take action); and there was no one—though he often looked around for the women from Earthquake Park—to set limits for him by touching him. He consistently did his work (preliminary notes for his projected paper), without side glances at anything else, without stopping, in a state of frenzied concentration. And the city moved away from him, as though, little by little, all the windows had been closed to him. Yet “being forgotten” had once been a pleasant thought, and “arranging to be forgotten,” an art.
    Far from creation, unapproachable in his pride, always running off without saying goodbye, he awaited his “punishment”; and meanwhile one of the singer’s hymns ran through his head. “The day of my greatness is at hand.”
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    The days were still warm. Like most such rooms, his workroom on the campus could also serve as living quarters. He sometimes spent the night in the lab and slept on a cot. (His house was up for sale, people were already going in and out.) Next to the microscope there was a shaving brush, and next to that a coffee maker. The lab was situated in an unusually long, one-story glass building, which in the architect’s intention may have suggested a great skyscraper lying flat on a lawn. Sorger’s window looked out on the aluminum wall of a shed where research animals were kept (for another science), and right behind it lay the rippling, almost always calm water of the bay.
    The institute was divided lengthwise by a corridor; across from Sorger were the lecture halls, connected by double doors, which were always open when the halls were not in use, so that the eye could look from end to
end of the long row of halls. To one side of Sorger was the windowless