Free Slow Homecoming by Peter Handke

had become angular. The door was locked, and he sat down on the wooden steps in front of it. A falling leaf touched the back of his head like a paw, but the cat was inside the house, strolling about the deserted rooms, now and then making a play movement, wholly absorbed in its own reflexes, which helped it to pass the time, whereas the man on the steps outside was humiliated by his forced idleness. The boot scraper at his feet—which reminded him of the floorboards in a bathhouse—and the basketball lying beside it seemed to add insult to injury.
    The assault had humiliated rather than hurt him; more than violence, it had been an expression of contempt for his person and belongings, as though a voice had shouted: “You and your photographs! You and your drawings! You and your scientific papers!” Only then did Sorger hit back—with his fist in the air. There was no more Far North, only the weather, which was cold and gray, as it had always been for an idler who, in the space under the huts, saw not Lauffer’s “small static earth forms” but only rusting junk; while in the meantime his work, whose secret, he had thought, was known to him alone, was being done by some anybody, effortlessly, with one among many simultaneous manipulations. For a moment, when that creature lifted his chain to strike, Sorger had been dead; now he was alive again, but the formlessness was still there; the next moment of formlessness was already pulsating in the immensity of time; as in dire pain, he felt at once minute and limitless, an intolerably heavy dot and an intolerably weightless immensity. Once again the Indian woman was the “other race,” and whatever might happen in the interim, she was sure in the end to plan his destruction. “And you, Lauffer, if you lie to
other people”—said Sorger, grown abusive in his formlessness—“it’s because their company, whoever they may be, makes you miserable—but on the other hand you don’t want them to know it, because you’re an amiable, kindhearted, compassionate sort, yet basically morose.”
    At this point the angry orator, becoming aware of himself as a formless creature with, somewhere, too small a breathing hole, looked up and saw the surface of the water, as though it were gazing at him. This level ground was much too quiet; Sorger expected an eruption; he felt the need to see a mountain coming into being that minute, or at the very least a boulder breaking off from a cliff. He jumped up and kicked the ball against the wall of the house, so violently that, in rebounding, it whistled in his ear; then he went on playing without catching his breath until the pebbles before his eyes sparkled like flowers and he felt creepy, playing by himself.
    When he stopped, he saw the rows of low clouds behind him over the water. They were pale-bright and motionless, not flat underneath as usual, but rounded. A gust of wind blew from deep within the landscape, and suddenly great snowflakes were falling, whirling darkly on the horizon like a swarm of locusts, not from all the clouds at once, but from one after another at short intervals, breaking loose from the clouds and rushing downward like a series of avalanches, until at length a brief but powerful squall descended with a dry crackling sound on the house and the man standing in front of it, while not a single flake was falling on the great fluvial plain.
    Just then, under the uniformly gray sky, a dense, windless, slow snowfall set in which tickled the lips and turned the surroundings of the house into a fairyland. Radiant joy! Delicious sweat! Unable to breathe only a moment before, Sorger ran into the recaptured air; a bundle of
life, he ran several times around the house, shouting as in eternal childhood. Soon his dear colleague (visible at a distance in the flat tundra) turned up and was not a little surprised. So the hours passed in a new, sad, and formally perfect