Jukebox and Other Writings by Peter Handke

would have expected.
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    Later the plateau was punctuated by sparse oak groves, the trees small like shrubs, the withered leaves trembling grayish in the branches, and, after an almost unnoticeable pass—in Spanish the word was the same as for harbor, as the traveler learned from his pocket dictionary—which formed the border between the provinces of Burgos and Soria, came plantations of gleaming brown pines rooted atop cliffs, many of the trees also torn from their bit of soil and split, as after a storm, whereupon this closeness on either side of the road immediately gave way again to the prevailing barren landscape. At intervals the road was crossed by the rusted tracks of the abandoned rail line between the two cities, in many places tarred over, the ties overgrown or completely invisible. In one of the villages, out of sight of the road beyond rocky outcroppings—which the bus turned onto and from which, now even emptier, it had to return to the road—a loose street sign banged against the wall of a house; through the
window of the village bar, the only thing visible, the hands of cardplayers.
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    In Soria it was cold, even colder than in Burgos, and bitter cold in comparison to San Sebastián down there by the sea, where he had come into Spain the previous day. But the snow he had been hoping for as a sort of companion to his undertaking did not fall; there was drizzle instead. In the drafty bus station he immediately noted down the times of departure for Madrid, or at least Zaragoza. Outside, on the main road at the edge of the town, between smaller tumbledown houses, shells of high-rises, and the rock-strewn steppe (which otherwise appealed to him), tractor-trailer trucks that seemed coupled together, all with Spanish license plates, thundered past, their wheels splattering a film of mud. When he caught sight of an English marker among them, and then the slogan on the canvas cover that he could understand at a glance, without having to translate it first, he felt for a moment almost at home. Similarly, during a longish stay in just such a foreign Spanish town, where no one knew any other language and there were no foreign newspapers, he had sometimes taken refuge in the only Chinese restaurant, where he actually understood even less of the language but felt safe from all that concentrated Spanish.
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    It was beginning to get dark, and outlines were blurring. The only highway signs pointed to distant capitals such as Barcelona and Valladolid. So he set out down the street with his heavy suitcase—he had been traveling a long
time and had intended to stay in Soria into the New Year. He had found several times that the centers of these Spanish towns, which at first glance seemed almost invisible, were somewhere down below, beyond steppe-like stretches without houses, hidden in the valleys of dried-up rivers. He would stay here at least for the night; this once—he actually felt it as a sort of obligation—he had to get to know the place, now that he was here, and also do it justice (although at the moment, shifting his suitcase from one hand to the other every few steps and trying to avoid bumping into the natives, just beginning their evening ritual of strutting along, straight ahead, he did not succeed), and besides, as far as his “Essay on the Jukebox” was concerned, and in general, he had time, as he told himself now, as often before, in this instance using a verb from the Greek, borrowed from his reading of Theophrastus: s-cholazo, s-cholazo.
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    Yet all he could think of was running away. For his project, one friend or another had offered him, who for some years now had been roaming about without a home, his second apartment or third house, standing empty as winter came on, with silence all around, at the same time in a familiar culture, above all with the language of his childhood, which stimulated (and at the same time soothed) him right there on the horizon, to