Absence by Peter Handke Read Free Book Online Page B

together, more slowly than the few other people, all of whom are at home here. But even the newcomers are sure of the way. On leaving
the ticket hall through a swinging door, they turn without hesitation in the direction indicated by the gambler, who has taken the lead. After crossing an area of bare ground and sparse, stubbly grass, suggesting an abandoned cattle pen or circus ground, they find themselves at the edge of a large forest. The trees in its dark depths seem at first sight to be covered with snow; in reality they are white birches. Here the four hesitate before crossing a kind of border, the dividing line between the yellowish clay of the open field and the black, undulating, springy peat soil. The peat bog and the forest rooted in it are also several feet higher than the field. Instead of a path cut through the earth wall there are several small wooden ladders, to one of which the gambler directs his followers with an easy gesture, showing that this is a man who gets his bearings without difficulty wherever he goes. He climbs up last, and once on top resumes leadership. Strolling through the woods—there is no underbrush between the birches—all four turn around in the direction of the station, toward which passengers are converging from all sides, all goose-stepping in a single file, though there is plenty of room in the field. Seen through the white trees, the shacklike structure seems to be somewhere in the taiga.
    The forest is bright with birch light. The trees stand in beds of moss, as a rule several in a circle, as though growing from a common root. As one passes, they revolve in a circle dance that soon makes one dizzy. Over a footpath that suddenly makes its appearance—white stones sprinkled over the black ground—the four emerge at length into a wide clearing, announced some time earlier by the substitution of berry bushes for moss and by the widening middle
strip of grass in the path. By now the path has become so wide that the four are able to walk abreast. On the threshold of the clearing, each of the four, on his own impulse, pauses for a moment; the woman has taken the arm of the old man, who nods his assent. Now they are fanning out in different directions, as though no longer needing a leader.
    The clearing is rather hilly, shaped like a moraine spit thrust into the peat bog, and so large that the herd of deer at the other end goes right on grazing though the arrival of the newcomers has been far from soundless. Only the stag has raised his light-brown head like a chieftain. For a moment, his widely scattered herd looks like a tribe of Indians. In the middle of the clearing there is a small lake, which at first seems artificial but then—with its islands of rushes and black muddy banks, marked with all manner of animal tracks—proves to be a bog pool. Only at one point, at the tip of the moraine, so to speak, can the pool be reached dry-shod over gravel outcrops, and here its water, instead of presenting an opaque, reflecting surface, is perfectly transparent. The bright pebbles at the bottom stand out all the more clearly thanks to the glassy streaks in the water of the spring which emerges underground from the moraine and can be followed as it twines its way through the gravel to the lake which it feeds. This is also the place for a hut built of weathered, light-gray boards, shot through with amber-yellow or reddish-brown trails of resin, and for a strangely curved uphill-and-downhill boat dock that juts out over the water like a roller coaster.
    Here, one by one, they all gather. The woman, the old man, and the soldier look on as the gambler fishes an enormous bunch of keys out of his coat pocket, unlocks the
padlock on the hut, throws the door wide open, unlocks the glass-and-metal compartment inside it, and, after turning a last key, drives out in a car that gets longer and longer: a camper. Birch branches—camouflage and ornament in one—slide off the