On the Death of a Stranger (Excerpt from the novel The Ballad of the Last Guest) — Peter Handke (translated by Krishna Winston)

It must have been a quiet day in late summer or early fall. The person in question was on the way to his childhood home. Setting out a couple of days earlier, he’d taken first one plane, then another, and finally, to reach the land of his birth, a third. For the final stretch, as he’d done as a child to get to school, the man had boarded a bus, though by train he’d have reached the agglomeration, a large, densely built-up area, much sooner.

He was looking forward—and how!—to the days ahead, his week of vacation with his parents and much younger sister. And even more—no, in a different way—to the locale, the locality, the village and the woods, the neighboring villages and the new-growth forests—no, not to all that, but to what was left after several decades of rapid development, left in the town centers and on the outskirts, bits and pieces, various “shards,” no longer visible at first but nonetheless present, and, he was sure, waiting to be tracked down. But for what purpose? No purpose.

From time to time, the bus seemed to be traversing an expanse of open country far from civilization, on a wide road with hardly any curves. As far as the horizons in all directions, sometimes near, sometimes distant, nothing but nature, with not a human in sight; and he realized he was on one of the old cross-country buses on whose flanks was depicted not the trademarked flying greyhound but an antelope, speeding very differently through the air, if not a dolphin.

So—coming home to evening card games with his father, which usually took place in silence, except for the bids? As it should be. And home to being interrogated by his mother, wordlessly, with only her eyes, the interrogations then predictably giving way to animated storytelling, in the kitchen or on the bench in the courtyard, still there in spite of all the new houses, cheek by jowl, that had crowded in on and eventually squeezed out the farmstead—a wall barely an arm’s length from the bench partitioning his family from the neighbors, total strangers but for their voices making their presence felt? His mother’s repertoire of tales? Good for her! And home to his sister’s accounts of involvements with a succession of men and the pain they caused her, accounts with which she would regale her older brother, her confidant through the years, in the toolshed converted into a one-room apartment: sisterly songs of love and sorrow, this time rendered more intense if possible, or so he’d heard, by the interjections coming from a little fellow just learning to stand unsteadily on his own two feet (ah, the shrinking feeling from the beginning, often verging on guilt, at the sight of all the young’uns, still without any recognizable language, being carried and wheeled along streets and across squares, and especially at the sight of all those extra-large eyes)? Why not? Why not face everything head-on, and even, as mentioned, look forward to it, at least now, while he was still alone on the cross-country bus—actually not old by any means but practically brand-new—and reassured by the sonorous roar of the motor, coming as if from far off, an indistinct roar, at some moments also a clanging, from the depths, from deep underground, and he the only passenger sitting way in the back, in the last row, while the others, of whom there weren’t many, were spread out, their heads visible from the rear, here and there? Yes, why not? We shall see. We? Yes, we.

He’d had no woman in his life for a long time, and he also had no children, had been living and working for ages—his own—on another continent, or, as he called it, “part of the world.” (Let every reader imagine on, or in, which part that would be.) And on that other continent, for this week at home, he’d broken off, from one day to the next, the activity for which, and also from which, he’d been living—that, too, for ages—an activity to which he referred in his mind as “my one-man expeditions.” The current expedition had been interrupted just after he’d reached its next-to-last stage and was in the midst of preparations for the last stage. Preparations? Mobilization.

It had seemed to him, while he was still far off beyond the seas, who knows why, that this mobilization would call for a detour once he reached his old stomping grounds. Yet he hadn’t pictured what this detour would entail, had at most momentary inklings, without a single image, however fleeting. Nor did he want any such thing. No images, for heaven’s sake, and above all no distinct ones! And if now and then he caught a whiff of something “image-like” threatening to come flying to him, behind his back, so to speak, he swerved aside, at least inwardly, as if on a dance floor or in an arena, and the image-arrow zoomed past him. And now, way back in the cross-country bus: he had not even an inkling of what might await him on his so-called native turf, let alone what he’d intended to track down or seek out with which to conclude his expedition. There’s nothing more for me at home, nothing at all! he whispered to himself. And that’s exactly what fires you up. Yes, strange but true. Or maybe not. Whatever: I’m looking forward. Don’t spoil it for yourself, playing your own spoilsport, as you often do. Don’t trip yourself up, friend; take it one step at a time! As a passenger, sitting here? Yes, sitting there, a passenger.

The bus had long since turned off the highway into the agglomeration. Without warning it kept turning, turn after turn. Yet it seemed as if after every third turn the street was heading out into the countryside again, toward the distant horizons, or, on the contrary, approaching something resembling the center, or one of the centers. Nothing of the sort, however: instead, each time, it ended up on a periphery, never the same one, but also not an off-putting or even hostile one, but rather, perhaps also because of the quite gentle turns, an (almost) friendly one, at least at first glance, an (almost) welcoming one. And it was striking that each of the many high-rise buildings stood all by itself, as did the next one, a lance-throw away, in the “middle ground” by reference to the one in the foreground—in accord (almost) with the rhythm of all the high-rises in the agglomeration—high-rises that at first sight stood “out in the open,” to paraphrase the expression used by a poet to describe a far less tall building from a previous century. It made sense that in this New Town, which spread across the landscape rather than completely filling it, the horizontal lines that crossed one another and headed off in different directions, at least those in the background, seemed to be welcoming him, the stranger, or the one who’d become a stranger here, in the form of mobile tangents—local trains, streetcars, even Metro cars as they traversed their aboveground stretches on elevated tracks, all speeding along inaudibly yet uninterruptedly, to connect the most distant housing clusters to civilization. Looking more closely, he recognized here and there the tower of one of the not many but also not few village churches, their towers now at the feet of high-rises and so much smaller than he remembered them from before, as if they’d shrunk. And that, too, was as it should be: that these church towers scattered across the land were no longer so prominent and imperious, pointing toward heaven, if not invoking heaven as a threat. The way they stand there today, hardly noticeable, almost like toys, they seem more, and better, suited to the place. Toys? Yes, for a serious game. Good New Town: You mean? Something like that.

The bus station, so long and wide that it took up the entire block, in no way suggested a center either, forming instead yet another in the series of peripheries. Waiting in the aisle to get off, as the very last passenger, he noticed that one of the boots worn by the woman in front of him had come unlaced. The woman seemed to be in a hurry, as if any minute now, when the bus’s door opened, she would break into a run. He imagined her tripping on the lace and falling on her back, and he approached her, tapped her arm, and pointed out the danger. Was it really a danger? At any rate, she took him seriously and thanked him, both in words and with a look, as if he, the stranger, had just saved her from something terrible that would have been impossible to make right. In that moment he realized that only now, when he’d reached his destination, did he have a face before him, for the first time in his days-long journey. What kind of face? A face. The experience of a face! And the woman, bending over to tie the lace (he was tempted to help, but how?), laughed up at him, the laugh conveying first surprise, then amusement, as she pointed at the man’s shoe: a loose lace there, too, though one considerably shorter than hers, posing no danger of tripping, but who knows? What does a stranger like this know? Or what, in this situation and others, did such a woman know? And in his imagination, he saw the woman, since she was already bent over, tying his lace, too, after her own. That didn’t happen. But either way, both of them had something to laugh about. That wasn’t nothing, and once off the bus and facing the bus bay, empty once the bus had pulled out, he felt he’d arrived in the place of his birth in an entirely new way.

At the same time, he felt his usual reluctance to head straight home. Should he go in the opposite direction, in opposite directions? No, stay near the bus station, sit down somewhere, preferably out in the open, on a bench or the protruding base of a building, with nothing in mind but to perch there for a while. With the passage of time, to be sure: enough emptiness, out-ofthe-way-ness, retreating into corners. Back to the hustle and bustle. Which he put into action. Seeing and being seen! And, oddly, less seeing than being seen! Yes, he longed, even yearned, to be seen, and more than merely seen: to be recognized. Recognized by this person and that from the former villages, by a former classmate with whom he’d played football or interacted in some other way? By them, yes, and also by one of the few individuals he’d met later on, during his brief annual visits home, acquaintanceships that because of the time constraints had become friendships more meaningful than all those of earlier years. Being seen and recognized was what he wished for now, on the occasion of this particular arrival, especially by strangers, no, by just one person. Recognized as who or what? Recognized. Also recognized in a bad sense: “I’m on to you”? That, too.

But no one recognized him—in either way. Not a glance that brushed him, let alone a passerby who stopped suddenly or stared at him wide-eyed: “Is that really you?” And then: “Yes, it is you, it really is!” On the other hand, he didn’t see a single familiar face in the crowd, either one from more recent times or one he’d known forever, so to speak, who’d turned up in his dreams, if once in a blue moon. Instead, certain features—a forehead, a nose, lips, a gaze, a hairline— reminded him of people he’d known decades ago, people who seemed familiar, who recapitulated, almost to a T, features of those who’d lived around here. Their descendants? Sons and daughters? And an amazing number of children going by, the spitting images of long-ago playmates: the villagers’ grandchildren?

Who did seem to recognize him, at least at first, was a dog, roaming free and probably a stray. Upon catching sight of him, the dog stopped in his tracks and then came toward him, weaving past pedestrians’ legs, and, without jumping up on him, trotted along beside him, looking up at him the whole time, until he stopped averting his eyes after every couple of steps and kept them fixed on the dog’s, whereupon the dog, large to begin with, suddenly larger than life, did jump up on the man, though without biting, instead letting out a howl, almost a cry, of a sort not to be expected from canine lungs—and suddenly the animal was gone— fleeing? disappointed? disgusted? recognizing that he’d mistaken the man for someone else?

Before the traveler finally headed home, he wanted to check the message on the screen of his pocket telephone. He’d received an alert while on the bus but hadn’t looked at it because he wasn’t expecting any news, and also, toward the end of his long journey, he was leery of any “notification” or “update.”

The message read as follows: His brother, the youngest of the three siblings, was dead. After years in a division of the Foreign Legion that was currently fighting in the tropics, he’d been struck in the head by an “enemy bullet.” Killed instantly. “Your brother didn’t suffer.” He’d been buried that same day—because of the tropical heat. An additional factor was that Foreign Legionnaires, unlike regular soldiers who fell in battle, had no right to have their bodies escorted back to their homeland in coffins draped with their national flag. Attached to the brief message was a snapshot of the freshly dug grave. Prepared with care, veritably staged, the mound with the cross—carved out of palm branches?—and his brother’s name, spelled perfectly, inked onto the wood, like the name of a star in the credits of a CinemaScope movie. Huge exotic flowers—What kind? Never mind, picture them for yourself—were heaped on the mound (which looked as if it consisted only of the mass of blossoms, the earth underneath hastily smoothed out), and that was the only patch of color in the photo, but what color! Otherwise, far and wide, the land was flat all the way to a dim horizon, nothing but dull gray, against which only the grave stood out; not a bush, not a tree, not another grave in sight, and also no trace of a settlement, not so much as a bird’s silhouette. Without those gloriously color-rich flowers, it would have looked as though his brother’s grave wasn’t somewhere near the equator but in the Far North, in a tundra landscape, sufficiently thawed in the brief Arctic summer for digging a grave, but about to freeze solid again.

For a moment, he saw his brother as a small child, in the one-wheeled wheelbarrow that served in those days as a baby carriage, or more likely as a vehicle in a game that involved circling the courtyard of their parents’ farm, with him, the big brother, as the barrow pusher, visible in his memory only from behind. Yes, and then the moment when the little cart, going faster and faster each time it rounded the courtyard, got away from him (known later for his one-man expeditions), gets away from him, and the pusher-less barrow, having reached the edge of the courtyard where it drops off sharply, now lurches down a fairly steep and almost bottomless embankment with the baby aboard and tips into a belt of stinging nettles, almost a forest but fortunately so dense that the fall didn’t prove fatal. No trace now of the little brother, vanished into the nettle thicket, and also not a sound. Who can it have been who finally, lying prone, hauled the child, unhurt except for a few burn-blisters on his hands, his face untouched, up into the daylight? He pictured both parents off working in the fields. His sister? Impossible: she wasn’t old enough yet to go to school. Or could she have been the one? A neighbor, summoned by my cries for help? Did I even cry for help? And if so, wouldn’t that have been the first and up to now last time in my life? Was it a random passerby, a stranger, who immediately pinned the accident on me, standing there silent? Yes, that’s how it was, Brother: a stranger rescued you, rescued both of us. But what I’m not imagining but rather am completely sure of, Brother: it wasn’t me; I wasn’t the one who came to your aid that day, no and again no, in neither word nor deed. A pillar of nettle salt, that was me!

After reading the death notification he’d come to a complete stop, but hardly a moment later set out again for home, taking the route familiar from long ago, resuming his previous pace and rhythm, as though something both inside and outside of him deluded him into thinking that if he kept going, at least for a short stretch, he could undo what had happened, reduce it to a bad joke. He reinforced the original rhythm, making it into a kind of march, stomping along as if he were part of a column or company, taking large strides. But what joined in, or chimed in, as marching songs, seemingly to punish him, were various sayings, repeated silently and all the more viciously, such as: “Today’s the most beautiful day of my life!” and “Man and woman, woman and man, together touch heaven, hand in hand!” and “In dulci jubilo, I sing with joy and cro-o-ow!” And meanwhile, in front of, next to, behind, and at the feet and head of the marcher, there was nothing but quivering—not merely quivering of leaves and grasses but also quivering of whole trees, whole clouds and expanses of cloud in the sky, quivering of more and more spiderwebs—but why was one of them utterly motionless? Time to set, quivering sun, get out of my sight! But the sun simply refused to set, as if up there in excelsis it were being held back on purpose, not for the benefit of the marcher down below, so he could triumph in a battle of nations or god knows what other world event, but rather, against, and in spite of, him, in order for—in order for what?

At some point he noticed that he was lost. In the course of his life, he’d gotten lost time and again, starting in childhood. At first he hadn’t realized what was happening; usually, it was others who’d pointed out that he’d gone astray, which seldom upset him, let alone caused him anxiety or fear: he was so confident that a family member or a person responsible for him in some way was nearby, and as soon as he approached that person he’d be on course for home, even if the path didn’t lead directly there, meaning to the house. He preferred taking one detour after another with his escort and getting home as late as possible, either arriving when it was almost dark, or not going inside at all, even when the house was lit up invitingly.

Later, after years of annoyance, his own and others’, at his “poor sense of direction,” when a sense of direction had manifested itself after all, more reliable than that of almost anyone around him, the man wished he could lose his way again from time to time, and anew. He even made that happen, losing his way on purpose, paradoxical though that may sound, as part of a plan. The blind alleys he sought out, which had him sometimes crawling on his stomach, on all fours, or, as in child’s play, rolling down a scary slope, grounded and structured his one-man undertakings, and subsequently, enhanced with photos and drawings, determined the form his chronicle of each misadventure took. Being a chronicler of the adventures of one gone astray, whose voluntary and systematic lostness was again not paradoxical, being that kind of chronicler, sharing these experiences, yes, but purely as a chronicler: that was what he viewed as his calling. Narrating, shaping, reshaping, transforming: all that was out of the question for him. “Nothing but authoring chronicles, my own. But for heaven’s sake, that shouldn’t imply any claim to superior insight!”

Yet it had happened, especially during his expeditions of the last few years, that the chaos into which his insistence on going astray had not so much led as pushed and shoved him, had at the same time become inseparable from him, accompanied by “anxiety and terror, fear and trembling,” at least in the latest or next-to-latest episode.

But on the day in question, the man found himself lost there—Where was that? What did “there” mean?—on his way home. That had never happened before, not even the first time he got drunk as a teenager, a ghastly experience, which, in his few moments of lucidity, was incomprehensible to him at the time. (Strange, by the bye, the way people who were drunk out of their minds usually found their way straight home somehow or other.)

He wasn’t drunk this time, though at the bus station he’d yearned for a glass—no, a whole bottle. Now, however, thrown off his march rhythm, he staggered along like a drunk, someone falling-down drunk. Never would he find his way to the house, the house where he’d been born, the house where he’d lived and worked till he went overseas: never again. To the end of his days, which might come as soon as the following night, he’d be forced to stumble through the strangest of all strange lands, weaving back and forth. But hasn’t the route to your home from the station remained much the same over the last half century, just as you experienced it the last time you made your annual trip home, even though almost every inch of the former region of many villages has been built up?

This admonition did nothing to dispel his confusion. Wasn’t there an expression, “hopelessly lost”? “That’s how it is: I’m hopelessly lost. Just as, in the past, I’ve remained inwardly perfectly calm, the very essence of calm, in the midst of external chaos such as a hurricane, now, with the outer world seemingly perfectly quiet, shrouded in nocturnal peace, almost dead, inside me everything is in utter chaos.” And see the lost man flailing and floundering on the spot, taking a half step forward, another step back, a quarter step to the right, another to the left, and so on?

No, friend, this can’t go on. To tell the truth, if you, the lost one, had left footprints on the ground, in mud, let’s say—but there wasn’t any—or in snow—but how could that be, in summer?—those marks would’ve resembled a wagon wheel, though a hopelessly broken one—again, hopeless?—or an entirely different kind of spoke-work, such as the rose window in the façade of a medieval cathedral, a rose window in fragments, apparently impossible to reconstruct, shattered by grapeshot or a bomb. With the passage of time, however, in your flailing and floundering, you developed something like consistency—miraculously? Yes, by some miracle. And the prints of my shoes in the mud or the snow yielded the image of a wagon wheel, repaired, and . . . ?

That’s how it was, more or less, almost. And instead of “developed something like consistency,” maybe say “found a rhythm,” one diametrically opposite to the previous one, the march rhythm, opposite in every respect, a good rhythm, not catchy, one that suited the situation: a rhythm that, instead of footprints left behind, suggested a trail leading onward.

And at that a clear vision of the way home came to him, showing every landmark, turnoff, and alley along the route, and stayed with him all the way to the house. At the same time, the idea, or something similar, occurred to him that in his next chronicle he’d report on the rhythm discovered thanks to “going astray” (or the like). How so: aren’t you ashamed of using the news of your beloved younger brother’s death as the trigger (or whatever) for that insight (or whatever it was), not to say exploiting it for your projects? No, he wasn’t ashamed, not in the slightest, but was actually delighted by his idea, was proud of it. The only question was how to put it into practice, and, most important, make it concrete, factual, in the language of a chronicle, his language, the language of a chronicler who could leap over the borders of all countries and their manners of speaking.

Before taking the first step, he realized that he’d been standing on one leg for a while, maybe since the moment when the confusion reached its peak and freed him to continue on his way. He executed that first step as a dance step; though it didn’t look like one, he felt it as such. At that same moment, the sun finally set, as if on command, as if hastily. And in that connection a line from an old pop song came to him: “When the sun goes down behind the roofs, I’m left alone with my longing . . .” His mother and sister had belted the song out for him in a duet, over and over, to annoy him, make fun of him, because he hated that line, especially the word “longing,” which the two singers always screeched two octaves higher.

Taking the shortest route to the house. Night had already fallen, without any transition—“as in the tropics,” he thought involuntarily. (Pointless to try to forbid himself such thoughts.) The former farm was reached by one of the alleys maintained by the town, alleys that had once been village, field, or cow-pasture paths, and now had municipal streetlights, if not big-city lighting. Upon reaching his destination, he saw that on the front wall of the house, rather than above the front door, and contrasting with the streetlights, the old courtyard light still glowed, though now without its courtyard, in his eyes a relic of a bygone time: a naked bulb protruding from a white-painted tin plate that served as its neck ruff, splattered—or did he only imagine that?—as always with bird droppings. And another light source—in addition to the house, whose every window was festively lit—directly over the house, against the otherwise pitchblack sky—as black as in the old days—strange!—the first star. For him, as was appropriate for early fall— right?—it represented the Dog Star, the star of ripening pears and apples. And a person like this claimed to be nothing but a chronicler?

Standing in front of the house, or already at the front door, under the archway, on the sandstone doorstep with its fossils of prehistoric ammonites, he hesitated again. Was that a child bawling far inside the house, the sound rendered faint by the thick walls, or was he hearing it in his memory as he stood outside the door? And now the willow-branch broom on the wall, illuminated, seemingly on purpose, by the courtyard light. With just such a broom, his brother had swept the courtyard before dawn to signal his return from his apprenticeship, as he did again when he came back later, by then a journeyman builder—after each absence lasting for days or nights, or, as his father described them, his bouts of gallivanting in the area and beyond its borders. This sweeping outside the house was the first, and remained the only, sound he made after his periodic disappearances, which, in his mother’s eyes, and not hers alone, over the years came closer and closer to his vanishing for good. And in idle speculation—again something that came over him against his will—the older brother now saw himself sweeping the alley, as a sign of his arrival. Begone, frivolous fantasies! Get serious, and stay serious!

But how to remain serious at the sight of the welcoming garland above the arched doorway that only now caught his eye, after he’d taken a step toward the broom and then a step back? The garland consisted of a semicircle of spruce branches interwoven with wildflowers, immediately recognizable as the handiwork of his sister, so high-spirited when she happened not to be in mourning over someone or something. (Or thus: even while showing her special brand of high spirits, she had tears in the corners of her eyes, her tearfulness mingled with barely contained rage.) And the height of her high spirits on display here: in an allusion to one of the numerous family legends, crisscrossing the garland’s spruce branches and wildflowers were fans of nettle leaves on stems as thick as fingers and as long as an adult was tall, covered from the roots to the pale-yellow umbels with stinging hairs.

The time had come to go in. All he had to do was press the old latch—not a knob, such as the houses next door had, and certainly not a lock with a keypad for a code, if not two or three. Or was the door at least chained on the inside, like a proper city door? No, it wasn’t locked; it was just like doors in the old days, if only in the hundreds of villages.

How was the long-awaited visitor greeted? Let only this be mentioned: a shriek, a single one, but what a shriek. It came from his sister, holding the chubby baby, who, startled awake, joined in just as loudly. As a youth, her brother had covered his ears when his sister, barely able to walk, let out shrieks that he felt certain could be heard in the neighboring villages, one shriek after another. But on the evening of his arrival, that one shriek did him good.