Read Online Across by Peter Handke - Free Book Online Page B

dustpan
and brush. Where others were panicked or hesitant, he was in his element. At present, to be sure, his determination that every moment should demonstrate his leadership, energy, and competence only made matters worse. He spoke and moved as though trying to take charge in an overcrowded lifeboat: with an enormous display of muscle, he tries to start the dead engine, and succeeds only in flooding it, while at the same time belaboring the faces and bellies of those to the right and left of him with his elbows, until, with all the fumbling and floundering, the boat threatens to capsize. To reconcile the players, he looked for resemblances. For instance, he found a resemblance in the way the master of the house and the painter put their glasses down after every sip; he discovered that the eyeglasses of the priest and of the master of the house were the same strength; and I, “the teacher,” had in common with him, the politician, if not his political party, at least the habit of pounding my cards with my fist instead of picking them up.
    But the politician himself was lost, and more visibly than the rest of us, with eyes agape and beads of sweat on his hairline. The worst of it was that he refused to acknowledge his inability to cope with the situation, and kept on trying. Yet it was just this that brought the others together! While, a moment before, they had been staring into space, they now exchanged covert glances and even smiles, and stretched out their legs under the table in relief. Nothing was lacking but the one word that would have saved the day. But then, quite inexplicably, salvation came, brought by someone’s casual remark about the coming of Easter: “In three days, the bells
will ring again.” That was the turning point. With a sense of release, we played a last hand and went downstairs to the dining room for dinner.
    After the meal, the master of the house suggested making a fire in the fireplace, and each of the card players wanted to light it. The almost white beech logs lay in a disorderly pile in the wide entrance hall. One player after another carried a few of them in and put them down near the fireplace. All this time, a teenager, the son of our host, was standing outside at the hall telephone, with his back to the wood carriers, pressing the phone to his ear without so much as a glance at all the disturbance. (“It’s been going on like this since the beginning of his vacation,” said the boy’s father.)
    The table had been cleared, the door was closed, the fire was burning, the card players sat drinking wine, the predicted snow (“the last snow,” someone said) came flying out of the darkness and beat against the windowpanes, which crackled at first, then were silent, as though a tension in the glass had been relieved; the son in the hallway kept mumbling into the telephone. Each one of the downward-swarming snowflakes was a symbol, undefined and undefinable.
    I tapped my temples with my fingertips, as though to relieve some pressure or pain, pushed back my chair, and turned to the priest: “Do thresholds occur in the religious tradition?” I asked him.—“Literally or figuratively?” —“Both.”
    While the priest pondered, the others said whatever came into their heads.
    The master of the house: “Our cat here never runs
thoughtlessly over a threshold. It always stops first and carefully sniffs the ground. Sometimes it avoids contact with the threshold and jumps. It’s only when escaping from a dog, for instance, that it loses no time in crossing a threshold; all it wants is to be inside. Then of course it’s the pursuer that hesitates.”
    The politician: “I have two sorts of recurrent dreams about thresholds. In the first, I’m in my stocking feet; I slide off the threshold because, regardless of whether it’s wood or stone, it’s exceedingly smooth and rounded at the edges. But I always get