Free Slow Homecoming by Peter Handke Page B

had taken the same plane as himself. They had not spoken, but had exchanged looks of silent amusement, and Sorger savored the thought that from then to the end of their days, always by chance, never exchanging a word, they would go the same ways. In approaching the exit, he purposely slowed down in the hope that this man (whoever he might be) would see him and catch up with him.
    He stopped the taxi before the housing development and walked the last bit of the way, sometimes in the glow of the house lights, which shone through the trees on the otherwise dark road. The houses in the woods seemed peaceful, yet festive because of all the lights. He trod the unaccustomed asphalt, at one with his image of himself as a figure resplendent with anonymity among the hosts of world travelers, devoid of origin like himself, hurrying this way and that between the arrival and departure gates. And because for him, coming from a different time zone, it was not yet night (and also because his few hours of flight had been largely in bright light above the clouds), he felt the daylight on his eyes and blinked his way through the darkness as though it were artificial.
    He picked up his mail at the neighbors’, deposited beside the bed the toy sleds he had brought for the children, and, barked at by a dog or two outside, glancing briefly at the sky, amazed that the shape of the waxing moon should be identical here to what it was a few hours before (in the gray of dawn) over another, so distant part
of the world, he retired to his quarters, which were also his place of work.
    There were many letters, containing a good deal of news; most were friendly, some neutral, without threat or hostility. Some saw landscapes in their thoughts of him and wished he were not “so far away.”
    All the curtains in the house were drawn. He sat there in his coat, which was still buttoned. Rock fragments were piled up in a spacious glass case, as though they had slid straight out of nature and stopped behind the glass panes. A bluish fluorescent tube at the top of the cabinet illumined the stones and hummed softly (the only sound in the room). The seat of the chair was still indented where someone had been sitting months before. In the dark adjoining room, the door of which was open, he glimpsed the silhouette of a hydrant-like bedpost; there, for a moment, sat the cat with its pointed ears.
    The glass table was lit from underneath. On it, letters along with the empty envelopes had been tossed in a loose transparent heap; a few stood up like parts of a card house, confronting the addressee (who was no longer serenely musing, but just sitting there in silence) with their shiny folds and the frayed borders of their envelopes. They had seemed to be palpable objects, but there was nothing else near him that he could name; otherwise, there were only curtains, not falling gently, but stiffly stemmed against him.
    Hadn’t a steady blowing stopped suddenly when he opened the door, or perhaps when he turned in from the road? In less than a moment, a breathing quietness had turned to rigidity. Sitting upright, someone had tipped over, but had not fallen to the floor as usual in such cases. Now this someone was sitting motionless, pierced through by the plane of the tipped one.

    Mere warmth without blood, Sorger on that night of his return to the Western world saw himself dreamless, born into a planet without atmosphere (karst and grotesque emptiness), heavy as lead, but not falling; not alone in the world, but alone without a world; and within him—timeless—the stars and nebulae were eyes that did not look at him. He was forsaken not only by speech but by the power to make the least sound; and just as he lay inwardly silent, so he remained outwardly mute. Not a sound; not even a cracking of joints. Only in his imagination was he able to turn toward a rocky wall and, converted into a stone image, nestle in the stones. In reality, his flesh was trembling