Slow Homecoming by Peter Handke Read Free Book Online Page B

washed ashore, in a circle. It occurred to him that the Indians might have made these circles to demarcate themselves from this holiday and what it commemorated, and at that point the whole settlement struck him as a secret magic circle in which he, now initiated, was making his last rounds.
    And true enough, totemic signs had been painted here and there along the military road. The tire marks in the mud might also have been signs in a secret Indian picture script; and the wide-spreading elk antlers at the top of
the wooden privies may have been there to mock the foreign intruders. “Yes, we are open”—on a national holiday this conventional formula on the door of the market had a strangely unconventional meaning. A passing police car (never before had Sorger seen a police car in the area) paraded the closed, anonymous faces of an occupying power, at which the natives merely encouraged their dogs to bark. “Rounds and maunderings,” said Sorger to the cat, who was following him at a distance, stopping now and then.
    The children were in the schoolhouse; he saw them sitting behind tinted glass in the long, low building, but he couldn’t make out their faces, only rows of round, deep-black head tops, which were suddenly very dear to him. Someone played an American Christmas carol on a flute, not practicing, but evidently bungling it on purpose. A child came to the window and popped his bubble gum as Sorger looked up at him. Turning into a town hall, he leafed, as he had often done, through the warrant book chained to the wall. Many of those wanted were used to living in the open and were tattooed with the words: “Born to lose.”
    He turned to the cemetery. Almost all these people had died young. The ground was bumpy with fallen pinecones and spotted with clumps of white mushrooms. He stepped into the wooden church to rest. Leaves had blown between the chairs and even over the lending-library volumes spread out on the table; a book of music lay open on the harmonium; clouds of breakfast bacon blew in from the adjoining room, where the pastor lived. At the next bend in Sorger’s path he caught sight of Indians’ clothes, all dark, hung up to dry. Behind the windows of the huts, he saw the silhouettes of the inhabitants, who were so small that even standing they could be seen
only from the neck up. And so, in going away, he managed to take leave of them.
    The wind was so strong that it unbuttoned his coat as he walked, but warm, interspersed with icy gusts that tasted like snow in his mouth. The cat stopped now and then and the movement of its head followed the shadows inside the houses; when Sorger picked it up, it arched its back and blew cold air in his face; it disliked being carried when out of doors.
    Followed by the animal, he returned to the riverbank, completing his circuit (at the end, his brisk walk had turned to a run). He thought: Today for the first time I’ve seen the yards around the houses and discovered that the village has a circular road around it.
    The water level had fallen so far of late that a number of small ponds had formed between sandbanks, and the water whirled about in them as though churned up by a captive fish: “Here, too, in a circle.” Though there was no one to be seen on the river, echoes of human voices came to him from all sides (along with the cry of a lone sand martin and the empty scraping of unmanned boats against the gravel bank). And Sorger saw the village population, a Great Water Family, gathered, as it were, head to head at the bend of the river. This whole river valley from source to mouth—“nowhere else but here” was a river valley worth mentioning; this, indeed, was “the only place worth mentioning in the whole world”—and that was the message of the lines which the sinking water seemed to have written in the sand (the opposite shore was already “beyond the last frontier”).
    The sounds that