Jukebox and Other Writings by Peter Handke Read Free Book Online

in without a cause, but always after a hardship, a difficulty needed to be surmounted. And now let us rise and go out into
the streets, among people, to see whether a little shared tiredness may not be waiting for us and what it may have to tell us?
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    But does real tiredness, or real asking for that matter, imply standing rather than sitting? Remember that gnarled old woman, harassed as usual by her son, who was always in a rush in spite of his gray hair, and how she pleaded: “Oh, let’s just sit here a little longer.”
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    Yes, let’s sit, but not here in this lonely place, amid the rustling eucalyptus leaves, but on the edge of the boulevards, the avenidas, looking on, perhaps with a jukebox within reach.
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    You won’t find a jukebox in all Spain.
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    There’s one right here in Linares, a very strange one.
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    Tell me about it.
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    No. Another time. In an Essay on the Jukebox. Perhaps.
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    But before we go out into the street, one last image of tiredness.
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    All right. It is also my last image of mankind, reconciled in its very last moments, in cosmic tiredness.

    Postscript
    Those little bird cages in the savanna were not put there to attract eagles. In answer to my question, a man sitting at some distance from one of these rectangles told me he moved them out into the rubble field because he wanted to hear the little birds singing; and the olive branches thrust into the ground beside the cages were not intended to lure the eagles out of the sky, but to make the siskins sing .
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    Second postscript
    Or do the siskins hop for the eagle up there in the sky —which the people would like to see swooping down for a change?
    Linares, Andalusia
March 1989

ESSAY ON THE JUKEBOX
    Translated by Krishna Winston
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    Dar tiempo al tiempo.
    â€”—SPANISH SAYING
    And I saw her standing there.
    â€”—LENNON / MCCARTNEY
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    Intending to make a start at last on a long-planned essay on the jukebox, he bought a ticket to Soria at the bus station in Burgos. The departure gates were in a roofed inner courtyard; that morning, when several buses were leaving at the same time for Madrid, Barcelona, and Bilbao, they had been thronged; now, in early afternoon, only the bus for Soria was parked there in the semicircle with a couple of passengers, presumably traveling alone, its baggage compartment open and almost empty. When he turned over his suitcase to the driver—or was it the conductor?—standing outside, the man said “Soria!” and touched him lightly on the shoulder. The traveler wanted to take in a bit more of the locale, and walked back and forth on the platform until the engine was started. The woman selling lottery tickets, who that morning had been working the crowd like a gypsy, was no longer to be seen in the deserted station. He pictured her having a meal somewhere near the indoor market of Burgos, on the table a glass of dark-red wine and the bundle of tickets for the Christmas lottery. On the asphalt of the platform was a large sooty spot; the tailpipe of a since vanished bus must have puffed exhaust there for a long time, so thick was the black layer crisscrossed by the prints of
many different shoe soles and suitcase wheels. He, too, now crossed this spot, for the specific purpose of adding his own shoe prints to the others, as if by so doing he could produce a good omen for his proposed undertaking. The strange thing was that on the one hand he was trying to convince himself that this “Essay on the Jukebox” was something inconsequential or casual, while on the other hand he was feeling the usual apprehension that overcame him before writing, and involuntarily sought refuge in favorable signs and portents—even though he did not trust them for a moment, but rather, as now, promptly forbade himself to do so, reminding himself of a comment on superstition in the Characters of Theophrastus, which he was reading on this trip: