Across by Peter Handke Read Free Book Online

window, shared in the colors and symbols of the card country. The
police siren outside was drawn in, as was the singing of the crazy man in the gateway of the cemetery. During the first card game I was allowed to take part in, a funeral procession came down the street. The feebleminded woman, who had sometimes let us youngsters look under her skirt, had died. The coffin was draped in white, in token of virginity. It was a day in early January; rain was falling; the trees were black-brown; molehills looked out from the yellowish snow. Yes, to me a card game means that country where I, in accordance with my ideal, can show my colors and pledge allegiance to them; above all, where I can be laconic. It needn’t absolutely be tarok; just that tarok is probably the most varied, or, as someone once said in the days when it was played more frequently, “the most beautiful of games.”
    Summer time had been in force for some days. Though the sun was still shining, the supermarket on the ground floor of the apartment house was already closed. The slanting reddish light made the shelves look more spacious. The plastic milk pall—which the old woman, as usual, was carrying on her way to the Moos farm—ordinarily a familiar signal in the dusk, shimmered strangely in the daylight. The houses of the Colony were still half in sunlight, yet the shutters had already been rolled down. Shading his dazzled eyes with one hand, a child appeared at the terrace door in his nightshirt and called out into the garden, where his parents were sitting in strangely premature end-of-the-working-day poses: “I can’t sleep.” Great flocks of sparrows had taken over the deserted streets and the invitingly vacant bridge. The sun’s rays, falling through the slits in the
shutters, covered the newscaster on a television screen with slanting stripes.
    It was too early when I got to the Mönchsberg; the game was not to begin until nightfall. I might in the meantime have gone down to the city and read newspapers in a café. I have often wondered since then why I didn’t give in to my old habit. Be that as it may, I turned off before reaching the house, and climbed up the road which, with occasional rises and falls, follows the long mountain ridge. I didn’t turn off as a result of any decision, yet I thought: “This decides it.” All the same, I insist: I have never questioned the accidental nature of what I did; I acknowledge it.
    With the coming of dusk, the road, which only a short while before had been intermittently crowded, emptied. On all sides, what a moment before might have been a man-made park became a primeval mass of rock.
    The ridge of the Mönchsberg is not straight, but recapitulates the meanders of the Salzach below. The mountain consists of the delta rubble deposited by the river as it emptied into the great lake that was there thousands of years ago. The rubble was deposited evenly and rhythmically in layers that can still be discerned in the slightly tilted striped pattern which runs along the whole length of the mountain, and is accentuated in winter by the blown snow in the grooved stripes and by the serried rows of icicles. The rubble—ranging in content from small pebbles to fist-sized stones—is held together by a light-gray block of limestone which with its abrupt promontories, needles, sharp edges, and cracks gives the Mönchsberg its jagged, craglike character.
Where the pebbles have fallen out of the limestone, innumerable craters seem to darken the rock. The layer of humus at the top is thin, and the roots of the trees (for the most part, beeches and oaks) grow right through the often porous shelf of rock below it. In some of the hollows off the main road, there is enough soil for a vegetable garden; but there are also swampy patches that are almost inaccessible. Altogether, the mountain, though wholly surrounded by the city, is not at all a “city mountain”;