Absence by Peter Handke Page A

you alone, barren, devastated, inexhaustible land of pathways.”
    Undoubtedly, if one looked at the country as he spoke, the old man’s words had the power to make things visible by giving them their contours, to raise, as it were, the lifeless hollow from the depths; but though the old man’s voice rose to a quivering psalmody addressed only to the country, our group did not accept his message. The soldier listened absently, as though he knew the text in advance and was actually listening to something else; the gambler stared at the bunch of keys in his fist, from which steel points protruded between his fingers like a knuckle-duster; and the woman looked at herself in a pocket mirror which she held so close that she could only see her eyes.
    With impassive features, the leader of the expedition took the mirror and threw it into the thicket; and at almost the same time he disposed of the gambler’s keys and his own freshly cut hazel stick. (As though they had duplicates at home, woman and gambler didn’t seem to mind.) Then he stamped his foot on the ground, bringing forth an unexpected reverberation which roused them all, including the soldier. He then called their attention to a half-buried stone slab, a fragment of a portal of indeterminate age, scraped off the lichen, strewed a handful of fine juniper needles on it, and carefully blew them over the letters, thus distributing the needles in the grooves. In this way he, as though by magic, raised a picture from the stone and, with a sweep of his magician’s cape, presented it to his audience:
a weathered, ten-rayed, gnomon-less sundial scratched into the stone and made visible by the shiny brown juniper needles.
    With the same air, he tore a blank page from his notebook, ripped it up, put the pieces in his mouth, chewed them in his right and left cheek by turns, took the paper pulp between his fingers, and laid it out in lines, on a second block of stone that seemed to have grown out of the ground. After giving it time to dry, he removed it and showed each one of us the imprint of the letters: DIM, which he elucidated as “Deo Invicto Mithrae” and translated as “To the unconquered sun god.” Thereupon he pointed at the depopulated country before us, and called out his usual: “Let’s get going.”
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    This uncovering of script was what we needed. It gave us eyes for other signs of life in the wilderness: the vestiges of paving stones in the grass, the prewar milepost leaning against natural stones, the one cultivated cherry tree (in the foliage of which for a time we saw nothing, then the first glowing red fruit, and finally the sparkle and radiance that overshadowed the green of the leaves). Though the pavement soon broke off, the signs in themselves formed a kind of causeway or raised avenue, cutting straight through the wilderness as far as the most distant horizon.
    The old man proceeded quickly, with lowered head and crooked shoulders; seen from behind, he gave the impression now of a dying man, now of a schoolboy. The rest of us were seized with euphoria the moment we set foot in the strange country. The woman walked on her hands and did cartwheels; the soldier and the gambler tossed a basketball, which naturally the gambler had in his knapsack,
back and forth; at one stopping place they found a concrete court, belonging to an abandoned army camp, camouflaged with creepers and even equipped with a pole and a serviceable basket.
    A warm sun shone in our faces. We bounded along as over a mountain meadow; what seemed to be tall prairie grass was the sparse, thin stalks which, without being trodden on, bowed under the air current raised by our steps; underneath it was dense, stubbly meadow grass. We had the feeling that we were still on a road thanks to the woven pattern of the plantains, as reliable a companion as the sparrows flying along with us from bush to bush; every time we looked there were more of them, and