Free Absence by Peter Handke Page B

the rock which now begins there is none. Here the defile culminates in a natural staircase. After climbing the last steps side by side, the four stop close to the tip of the plane tree’s uphill branch—snake-shaped like its root, thick, long, and with the bulbous head of a diamond-patterned python protruding horizontally into the air. Then, leaving the protection of the fairy-tale tree, they find themselves on the threshold of a vast plateau, at first sight so barren that the seedpod of the plane tree, swinging close to their heads, looks to them like the last token of a living world.
    But for the present it is also a boon to have turned their backs forever on water and the sounds of water that have been with them so long, the roaring of the torrent, the murmur of the river, the bubbling of the spring.

T he plateau slopes gently to form an immense hollow—only in dreams might one expect to see a hollow so vast—which curves upward just as gently at its distant, but clearly outlined, blue edges. The edges, as far as the eye can see, are wavy and dunelike; every single hilltop, gently sloping on the lee side and steeper to the windward, seems to ride behind the next, and all—with no mountain peak, belonging to a region yet to come, behind them—border on the open sky. Thus the plateau, an almost perfect oval extending to the horizon, seems to be a realm apart, distinct from the familiar world, not a mere region, but a country in itself, a separate continent on top of our continent.
    The dominant form of this country is the oval, which spreads everything contained in it out before our eyes; between us and the horizon there seem to be no nooks and crannies, no clefts or hidden far sides of hills. All objects are seen clearly and without distortion. Thanks to the overall form, each is distinct from the others, but all are joined in a community of graceful shapes which within the oval create an illusion of active life, one might even say of frenzied expectation, as though a buoyant, festive mankind had assembled there.
    Yet this country is obviously uninhabited, showing no trace of any recent civilization, such as a settlement, a sentry box, a device for measuring rainfall, or any kind of trigonometric point. The neat rows of vines in the hollow are wild juniper bushes and the great midwestern fields of yellow grain waving in the wind are one vast barren prairie. Into the prairie from all directions, almost in human form, trees
come running, withered, branchless, barkless trees, running through pale grass. The groups of small still-living conifers, rising at intervals from the hollow and forming a jagged line on the upper reaches of the oval, are so bemantled in a gray filigree of dead wood that their greenery looks like islands in it. But what makes the country look utterly dead is its empty sky, beneath which, when contemplated for any length of time, the trees, even the healthy ones, take on the aspect of ruins; for a moment it might seem that this sky is hostile to life, so much so that the tiny bird, hardly bigger than a fingertip, which darts out of a bush, loses no time before squeaking with terror and diving headlong back into its shelter. It is no doubt from such a sky that in a prehistoric era, which in this region is still in progress, the numerous, grotesquely shaped, bone-colored boulders, often as big as houses, rained down, filling the whole prairie, sprinkling the bare woods, and in places running straight ahead like rows of megaliths, a cosmic rockfall capable of recurring at any moment.
    This chimerical country, changing shape every time one looked at it, had a different effect on each of the four walkers. The woman clung to the gambler, so violently as to make him stagger, then looked back over her shoulder in the direction of the river valley, which had long since disappeared from view. In her panic, her face showed its beauty: widened eyes, taut cheekbones, blood-red lips. The gambler,