Read Online Slow Homecoming by Peter Handke - Free Book Online Page B

loved one with its color: “Black-and-white.”
    In a dream, Sorger’s brain became a map of the world, and when he woke up, he was a mound of earth with a lot of stones in it. In the gray of dawn, Lauffer was lying in the supposedly empty room, a malignant grimace with closed eyes. Hauling his suitcase, Sorger passed the absently
staring cat, which now gave no sign of knowing him. He left many possessions in the house. “Let’s get out of here!”
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    At sunrise in the mail plane (he was sitting in back with some Indians who had already dozed off) Sorger saw the yellow foliage of a lone birch smiling out of the endless virgin pine forest, thought of the Indian woman (“There’s a sweet woman down there”), and sat up straight with directionless curiosity, which soon changed to a feeling of hunger, not for anything tangible, but for whatever might be coming. Without images, he anticipated “the future.” In the midst of his imageless fantasy, he saw the pilot turn around and read from his lips the words: “We have to turn back.”
    The reason for turning back was the first snowstorm of the winter on the high plateau beyond the southern mountain ranges, where the larger settlement (formerly a gold-mining center), where one could change to a jet, was situated. Even as the pilot was looping back, the landscape changed its face. A round swampy lake became a hypnotic stare; meandering little rivers took on so dense a covering of aquatic plants that a sparkling of water could be seen only here and there, and the long gullies on the hillsides, long, straight stripes etched into the rubble by the spring thaw, curved in all directions. The plane would not be able to leave again until the following morning.
    After landing, Sorger stood motionless at the edge of the little airstrip. There he and his suitcase loomed as in a fun-house mirror, with short fat legs and a great long neck. He hadn’t been gone very long, just time enough for a short plane ride, but the whole village seemed to have turned into “premises” closed to the public. Sitting
down on his suitcase, he turned “village” and laughed at himself, Sorger. Never had he come home to such unreality. How was he to avoid being seen? He stood up, started walking, and, shrugging his shoulders, changed direction. Play was no longer possible: the phony colors of the empty housefronts, the disenchanted water of the phony river—and through this utterly threadbare world, with an affectation of hail-fellow-well-met-ness, zigzagged not a face but the grin of a simpleminded dupe.
    Not knowing where to go, he became dangerous—not as an aggressor, but as a potential victim.
    A man of no particular age was walking ahead of the irresolute Sorger on the narrow path; moving as slowly as Sorger, he was not deep in thought, but neither was he looking at anything, and as a result the slowness of his walk gradually took on an air of viciousness. He didn’t look around, but from time to time showed a bit of eyeless profile, as dogs sometimes do in running past. At length he stepped to one side, pulled a tire chain out of his pocket, and, clutching the heavy thing in his fist, came straight at “me!”
    Just as he had no age, the man seemed to belong to no race. Bright eyes without a center. Whenever his knees threatened to crumple, he twisted his lips, but did not smile. When he (“actually”) hauled off with the chain, neither of the two had a face left; in that moment the whole world contracted and became tragicomically faceless.
    â€œDear brother.” The drunk brought the chain down on the suitcase, which burst open, and fell on top of it, dead to the world.
    Sorger pushed the inert body away and, taking his belongings under his arm, went straight to the gabled house, which greeted him with its earthly beauty. By
then he was so furious and hated everybody so intensely that all his movements