Across by Peter Handke Page A

between two long walls of rock. At one point, the gully thus formed was not “empty,” or so it seemed to me as I ran. My eye fell first on a spray can (the word “bomb” rose to my mind), then on the finger on the button, and last on the figure attached to it. The figure had no contours, but immediately had a name: the name given, in a purportedly faithful Bible translation, to “the evil one”—the Frustator. Time and again, one meets with hostile faces, but the Frustator, the archenemy, is faceless. Up until then, I had often had intimations of his presence, though always in a crowd, in passing: a grotesquely supple thumb joint; the chalk-white interior of a mouth; a bare foot shaped like a crocodile; an eye from which all color seemed to have drained; a neck swollen from blowing into a police whistle. But here at last I saw him as a whole, not in a crowd, but alone.
    The runner became a pursuer and pursuit meant “action.”
No such thought as “I shouldn’t” or “I have no right” entered his head; at the most: “For my own good, I had better …” Perhaps, in spite of everything, I’d have run past him if he hadn’t been standing in the middle of the road. But then the stone was thrown and the enemy lay literally crushed on the ground, as unexpectedly as once in my childhood a rooster which, unintentionally to be sure, I had hit on the head with a pebble thrown from a distance—with the sole difference that the rooster, just as surprisingly, stood up and ran off as if nothing had happened.
    I had not thrown blindly, but with wide-open eyes; I had not seen my surroundings but, strangely enough, larger-than-life, my own face. It looked to me neither grimacing nor calm; it looked more like the face of an unknown person, or rather of a hitherto unknown, close relative, who had now at last turned up.
    Though I did not regard my adversary as an animal, another incident involving an animal comes to mind. Some children were throwing stones at a cat, saying: “If we hit it, we aimed wrong.” I had not aimed wrong. Even as, still running, I pulled back for the throw, I knew my stone would strike home—and kill.
    A wind came up. As so often on this mountain island, the wind was suddenly there, without preceding squalls. It blew in full force, as though its passage through the Bavarian plains had been a buildup and this point on the fringe of the Alps its goal. The sounds of the immediate vicinity, clearly audible only a short moment before, were gone. But the roaring of the wind brought the slightest, most distant noises close. A board fell to
the ground. A horse neighed. Someone stood outside a house and laughed. A hammerblow was followed by the clanking of an oil drum. A bell note came from one of the churches on the edge of the city (or in one of the villages beyond). And perhaps that clapping of hands was far outside the city limits.
    With great groaning wings a swan, white in the darkness, flew over the mountain. The wind was cold and brought with it a mass of clouds that scudded across the sky with the speed of a spring tide. Briefly, the moon peered out of the advancing veil of mist, and then was seen no more. The swaying trees on the ridge made the strings of lights on the plain below flicker and tremble. The treetops roared like a squadron of planes. Above them, there was not a star to be seen; only a blinking satellite flashed for a moment across a last hole in the clouds. The leaf buds seemed to have blown off the trees, leaving a dead forest of swaying crags; the clumps of mistletoe in the branches were abandoned birds’ nests. The mountain was now inaccessible; and yet, wide open to nature’s grandeur, I thought: This is the world! Together with the beaklike shells of the empty beechnuts above me, the lights on the plain below were its capital city.
    I bent over the dying man. He puffed out his cheeks, as though