Across by Peter Handke Read Free Book Online Page A

despite its undeniable urban aspects—benches, blacktop paths, streetlamps—the mountain ridge, once the strollers have gone home, throws one back into the wilderness. Barely a hundred yards below, the city is hidden by fog, while up on the cliff the moon may be shining. The snow that is falling around me at the present moment is rain on the city squares down below a moment later.
    If we consider that this mountain owes its origin to a flow of scree into an arm of the delta, might we not speak of its “beginning” and “end”? Thus, I made my way to the end of the mountain, where a flight of stairs, some consisting of old marble, some of new cement (with steps of such varying height that it’s easy to lose one’s footing on the way down), leads to the Mülln quarter and the Salzach. There on the riverbank is the old people’s home, into which I have several times seen men in braided uniforms carrying coffins. Behind it extends the plain, with the new suburbs of Lehen and Liefering; over the football stadium, birds darted to and fro in the glare of the floodlights. Before coming to the stairs, I
turned around and, for fear of being late, took a side path leading back to the foot of the mountain.
    Already the tightly closed lilac buds showed a bluish shimmer. A big black rag flew into a greening tree: a raven. The rock was traversed by shiny snail tracks, and white downy feathers clung to the clefts where bird food had been strewn. In the midst of bushes and ankle-deep leaves, a rusty garden gate stood solitary; there was no fence to go with it, not even a house behind it; it led to an impassable cliff. Rainwater had gathered in a ring-shaped beech root, as in a cistern. On a root nearby, a gray hare was sitting, barely distinguishable from its resting place; it gave me a friendly look.
    Over long, sloping meadows and hollows, the side path loops back to the ridge road. It starts at the bottom with another, almost hidden stairway, beside which, in one of the numerous recesses in the cliff, stands a house which, though built of stone, looks like a makeshift shack. It is the meeting place of the local shooting club. The shooting range is behind the hut, in the wind-sheltered hollow between the stairs and the cliff, where under other circumstances the garden would have been located. Wednesday is crossbow day (as was indicated by the crossbow emblem flown from the flagpole in front of the shack). A number of cars were parked in the driveway, including some from across the border, bearing the insignia of the Berchtesgaden district. At that moment, a man was removing a dragon-shaped bundle from the trunk of his car. A signboard attached to a pole announced a “His-and-Hers Shooting Match,” a “Solstice
Shooting Match,” and a “Fruitcake Shooting Match.” All that could be seen of the shooting range from the top of the stairs were the targets; the archers were hidden by a wooden canopy that surrounded the entire range. Each of the targets was lit by a lamp of its own, and the holes in them formed a Braille pattern. Each time a bolt struck home—with a toneless thud—the target and the projectile were carried to the archer on overhead wires and then, minus the bolt, back again. An incessant thudding and whirring could be heard from the brightly lit range, though there was never a human to be seen. On an overhanging cliff behind the hut, there was a doghouse, from which a multiracial mongrel answered the impact of every single bolt with a rather pathetic bark. During a pause in the shooting, conversational voices could be heard. One of the speakers seemed to be a stutterer; when he came to a word beginning with “s,” the conversation shifted to the conditional mood—“would have,” “would be”—and took a long time getting back to its point of departure, the Singer sewing machine, fustian, worsted, and mother-of-pearl buttons.
    On