Free Absence by Peter Handke Page A

hurry and apparently wanted to be alone, so that even at the start of the climb we walked in single file. A little later the woman passed him with a cocky side glance, signifying that she no longer needed a leader, and vanished around a bend, only
to reappear much later on an open stretch, silhouetted against the sky, high above her companions. Not once did she look around. Even on the shortcuts, she moved with swinging arms and head aloft, on steep hills as on level stretches. The gambler and the soldier with their knapsacks brought up the rear, walking slowly. The soldier came last, so as not to leave the gambler alone, for he was not accustomed to climbing and his knees kept buckling.
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    Only a short time has passed since they left the plain, and yet the very first S-curve has carried them far away: the plain’s details and movements stand out clearly all the way to the snow-covered mountains on one side and the luminous mist on the other which, along with the dark ships that sail it, is called the “sea.” At the same time, almost all its sounds have been swallowed up, and those few that are still audible transformed: the clanking of trains into a soft knocking, as though from behind a glass wall; and the crowing of cocks, also as from behind a glass wall, into incessant call signs. The clear, varied, quiet design is that of medieval panels, in which for the first time pure landscape became subject matter, and taken together, sea, tilled plain, and high mountains represent the whole world. The car flashing somewhere in the distance is also a part of this silent world, and despite their many different colors the houses of a settlement plunked down in a niche in the mountainside give off the same sienna tone of earth shooting up at the sky. So sharpened is the hearing by the silence here that not even the grazing of butterfly wings against the sand of the path goes unheard.
    As the S-curves narrow and become more and more
overgrown with brambles, they seem to be leading nowhere, and there is reason to fear that after the next bend the path may end in an abandoned quarry and prove to be the wrong one. The boat by the roadside halfway up the slope, as thick-walled as a dugout canoe, seems to have been washed up here in prehistoric times when this upland was still covered by the sea.
    After the bend, however, a first goal comes in sight: a military cemetery, as wide and deep as two or three quarries, laid out in gently rising rows—one for each letter of the alphabet. Larger than man-size marble slabs; affixed to each one a bronze tablet incised with columns of names, and over each column—unlike the names, legible even at a distance—the same word: PRESENT, in black letters which shimmer throughout this enormous field of the fallen and seem to shout from soundless throats.
    The soldier takes an interest in the cemetery and examines the inscriptions, while the others regard the place as a mere way station. They take a different attitude toward the field where the dead of the defeated power lie buried. No larger than a village graveyard, it is equally overgrown with grass. Few of the wooden crosses are marked with anything but numbers; most of the names are incomplete, followed by question marks or so garbled as to suggest nicknames. Here we stop, wait for one another, drink from a water spigot, and get ready to proceed together. Next we enter a steep defile through a vault of overhanging bushes that leave the clay floor in half darkness. It is a short climb, but numerous changes occur. At first audibly gurgling, the rivulet alongside narrows after a few steps, and at the same time the muddy ground gives way to bare rock; the dividing
line is reinforced by a tree root shaped like a snake. This borderline tree between brown, bricklike earth and smooth, light-colored stone is a huge, wide-branching, solitary plane tree; it shades the path, and its roots draw the last available water from the ground; in