Slow Homecoming by Peter Handke Page A

would work together that day; or rather, one formally invited the other to participate in his activity, and in the end they agreed to take aerial photographs together.
    The rented single-engine plane flew so low over the river valley that even the outlines of the dark little ice lentils under the surface vegetation were visible. Though Sorger had often observed the region from the air, it took on a special form for him now that he was about to leave it. He saw the essentially shapeless plain as a body with many limbs and a unique, unmistakable face that was now turned toward him. This face seemed rich, eerie, and surprising—rich not only because its forms were so varied but also because they seemed inexhaustible; eerie because innumerable forms, which always reminded him strangely of (or foreshadowed) a human world and seemed to cry out for names, were in large part nameless; and surprising because every time he looked at it, there was the rolling stream; every pre-vision was a mistake; the wideness of the river was always a new event, even if one had looked away for barely an instant; it was truly unthinkable.
    What made Sorger, who soon forgot about photography, regard the river as a feature in a face was the palpable gratitude and even admiration he felt toward the territory that had been his place of work for the last few months. Horseshoe lakes, saucepan springs, trough-shaped valleys, lava cakes, or glacier milk from glacier gardens—looking down on “his” landscape, he understood these conventional terms, which had often struck him as unreasonably childish. If he saw a face here, why
shouldn’t other observers, in other parts of the world, see dream edifices with columns, gates, stairways, pulpits, and steeples, furnished with bowls, basins, ladles, sacrificial vessels, situated—why not?—in a trumpet-shaped valley and edged about with flocks of hills; and at the moment he felt like adding friendly epithets to the scientific names of all these formations, for the few names on the map were derived either from the region’s brief history as a gold miner’s mecca (Phantom Gulch, Hard Luck Lake, Chilblains Hill, Half-Dollar Creek, Four-flusher’s Island) or they were mere numbers (Six-Mile Lake, Nine-Mile Lake, Eighty-Mile Swamp). The few Indian names had an archetypal ring: The Great Crazy Mountains to the north of the Little Crazy Mountains, or the Great Unknown Brook that ran through Little Windy Gulch and ended in a nameless swamp.
    Although the river was forbiddingly cold even in summer, Sorger suddenly had an image of himself happily bathing in it, swimming and diving under. Hadn’t rivers been embodiments of the gods in olden times? “Beautiful Water,” he said, and realized that he had given the river a name. (Down below him, the truncated meander arms danced like garlands.)
    He would never have expected to love this landscape, or landscape in general—and along with his surprising affection for the river he felt his own story, felt that it was not ended, as his nightmares and even opinions might have led him to suppose, but was going on as patiently as the flowing water. As he gazed at the richness of this landscape, the realization that he himself was immeasurably rich awakened him like a cannon shot, and urged him to give of his riches now and forever, for if he didn’t, he would suffocate.
    His next thought was that he would now be able to
handle his long-planned dissertation “On Spatial Configurations,” and he said to Lauffer, who had explained his aerial photography camera to the pilot and to whom the pilot was explaining his flight instruments: “I’m going to treat you to a telephone call to Europe when we land.”
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    The public telephone was in a windowless log cabin built in one corner of a sheet-metal hangar on the side of the airfield. As though meant to be lived in, the cabin was furnished with a table, a reading