Absence by Peter Handke

ordinarily at ease under any conditions, raised his hand to his nose—something he had done now and then before throwing the dice or playing a card—as though to restore his self-confidence by sniffling (he had never gambled in such a country). As for the soldier, he marveled in
silence at the unknown place, delighted not to know where he was, in much the same situation as a man who wakes up far from home, not knowing where, rid of his name yet certain that he is at last present —for the morning, the light, the step out of doors, the raindrops in the dust, the eyes of the first person to come along, the words of the old book.
    But the soldier’s delight did not infect the others; for a time each of them, including the old man, the leader, remained shut up in himself; he who had been in such a hurry to reach the plateau stopped on its threshold, and the gesture with which he at first pointed out his kingdom was transformed by his lowered eyelids into an attitude of awe, discernible also in his voice, which did not find its level and was either too low or too high, too loud or too soft, as though he were constantly listening to it, as though he had never spoken an audible word in this country except possibly to himself—though obviously he had been there any number of times over the years and was thoroughly familiar with it.
    â€œThis is the place. We are there. Now we have time. This is our day, and tomorrow will be like today. Just now you are afraid, and rightly so. Here it is winter in the summertime. The clarity of this country is an optical illusion; nowhere can this wilderness be framed, ordered, and tamed by a hotel window, nowhere is there flowing water; on all sides only silence, no creature who looks at you, no one who will speak to you, no mirror image that will reassure you; under every stone there may be a viper. Here you have no opponent who will let you think out your moves, no enemy into whose eyes you can look. In this country, unlike all other places, you will not find the right moment for
anything, neither for drawing a knife nor for opening a book. Here it will not be a case of now or never, but of always and always! or never and never! In this country your knife will never cut into living flesh, and here you will always be able to read—in your books or in their commentary known as NATURE. I threaten you and I promise you. I promise you not only that here you will neither hunger nor thirst, that you will have a roof over your heads and a place to sleep, that you will return home from here—I also promise you beauty. We shall see things in a different light; as long as we breathe the air here, we shall perceive coherent, living signs in all that is lifeless and confused; after the first few steps, as long as we keep starting out in the morning and walking in the light of this country, our inner images will appear to us in space, in the form of a word, a rhythm, a song, in the shaping of a story. You are new here, but not strangers. Each of you has been here before! In the period when you were wandering around aimlessly, you wanted to return here, you traced the paths leading to this country on the watermarks of your banknotes; when a book didn’t speak to you of this country in the daytime, your dreams spoke of it at night. Desolate land, which for thousands of years has served the nations only as a place of transit or a battlefield, time and again ravaged and destroyed, disparaged by the poets who passed through, termed ‘insignificant’ by one who barely turned to look and ‘sea of stones’ by the next—‘as though God had stood here when he cursed the earth after the fall of man.’ Without treasure vaults or pomegranate trees, you, in your ever and ever regenerated emptiness, have always been the land of glory for our kind of
people. All my life I have been disloyal because of my accursed notebook, my tormentor here; I have been faithful to