Free Across by Peter Handke Page B

I stood. Standing outside a closed door as a child, I would shout ‘Stupid pup!’ instead of ‘Open up!’
And similarly, at the threshold of the forest, I’d shout ‘Stupid pup!’ before going in. Bird tracks on the snow-covered threshold. What is the opposite of threshold phobia? Fringe benefit.”
    The others turned to the questioner. Had he wanted to “test” us? He replied: “No, not test, just make you tell stories. You see, I’ve noticed that there’s no better way of getting people to tell stories than to ask them about thresholds.” In the enthusiasm of our storytelling, we even interrupted the son of the house, who was still on the telephone, to ask him what he thought a threshold was. He answered succinctly: “A nuisance!” and sank back into his telephone corner.
    One after another fell silent. But this was not the usual lull in the conversation before a group breaks up. The storytelling seemed, rather, to continue in the silence, and thus to become more eloquent than ever. Each of us delved deeper into himself and there met his neighbor, with whom he now, without trying, had everything in common. “Once upon a time there was we.” (How is it that I can say “we”? After all, we were not very many. And I trusted this “we.” Once upon a time there was a fact.) One burst out laughing, seemingly out of a clear sky, and another nodded; or one drew a line through a ring of wine on the table, and his neighbor added to it.
    We had stopped drinking; our host forgot to pour more wine and the guests forgot to empty their glasses. Cigars went out and so did pipes. A smell of quinces drifted in; and, from outside, puffs of snowy air. Our
host stopped being a host; from then on, he was merely one of the several persons who had met “somewhere.”
    We all sat straight in our chairs, as though backrests were no longer needed. Were we waiting for something? No, the event—the story—had already happened. In the embers of the dying fire, our collective eye discerned a glittering nocturnal metropolis filled with roaring, flashing, and crashing, with relays of light and shadow running from end to end; sometimes sparks shot across it like ambulances. Strange how the gaze sinks into fire, whereas it usually bounces back from flowing water.
    We were not waiting; yet someone was still missing. We didn’t know it until the lady of the house, just back from somewhere, appeared in a festive midnight-blue coat and boots shaped like birds’ beaks, and sat down nonchalantly in our midst. She completed the circle. Beside her the men looked unshaven, and beside them the woman’s face, shaded by a broad-brimmed hat, betrayed a fatigue that was a kind of happiness. Something had moved her (a musical phrase? the snowy night?). Quite naturally, she took part in the silent, all-disentangling exchange of stories. In the midst of the warm room, her coat gave off cold; the snow crystals on it, interlocking at first, softened visibly into drops of water. A daddy longlegs ran into our field of vision, its little round body duplicated by the shadow under it. Outside the window, a screech owl, so close it might have been perched on the windowsill, let out a catlike screech. The house next door became visible, a yellow wall covered
by a wisteria vine, its arm-thick stem coiled and tangled like a display of sailor’s knots. A birch stood white in the darkness, its hanging switches moved only by the falling snow, only one branch vibrating in the void; a bird must have just landed on it. A yew tree grew star-shaped out of the ground, its star-shaped needles pointing like a road sign to the arch in the hollow, which framed the sparse but brightly twinkling lights on the plain below.
    We separated outside the house, where the road branches off in different directions. The snow along the edges (it had melted everywhere else, except in the