PETER HANDKE
543
suddenly find yourself standing smack in front of a castle, its bat–
tlements and ramparts still unplastered, walls of precast concrete
blocks: over there, the owner, architect and master builder. He has
almost no time to work on it except in the winter when we are laid
off, and he can't wait to retire so that he can then complete the build–
ing. Ignatius [he points] wears a truss; when dragging cement blocks
his gut often sticks out. At night he is feverish and imitates the jungle
cries in his sleep. His castle stands next to a small farmhouse and is
scarcely larger; behind it lies a cabbage and beet patch , and on it a
shed with a straw sack, a bench and sawdust oven. That fellow you
see before you, soft-kneed from a day in mud and grit, snot-sniv–
e1ing, coughing phlegm, is admired in his village. At the inn, they've
mounted a piggy bank by the card table wall for him and his
building: that's where people put small change, which really adds up
in a month! The castle looks odd: it tapers off sharply towards the
top and on a full moon belongs to the high pyramid mountain in
back, as its small clone in the village region. And he built his castle
solely for his image; otherwise there's nothing doing with him .
In
the
barracks [he points], however, he pins up new naked girls on the bed
wall every Monday, and in the canteen he is the first to sit down for
lunch and the last to leave, and in the evening after the TV is off and
lights out when a big chug-a-Iug speaks somewhere in the dark here
[he points], that then is certainly the castle lord, saint and man from
overseas, drinking his cactus brew and saying with that: "Construc–
tion site, valley, land, earth below, listen, it's me." But let us toast
the tellers of tall tales even if they only act as if: because today is our
last evening here. Let's toast the savages even if they are only ghosts:
because tomorrow we'll be sitting home in our kitchen winding
alarm clocks faithfully again. [He takes Ignatius and turns around
with him once.] Great spirit of the universe come down upon us once
today, unfold thyself in the wide space of air, let us hover a touch
above the floor and lift-leap as a parachute tip the inside of our chest.
Other existence, unfold to us time and again and not too rarely
above rigid antennas, behind the wavering tree tops, amidst the
greening underbrush down in the glass bottoms of the eyes of pas–
sersby, between the cracks of clouds moving high above, your
magnificently colored face. Leave us not alone with the artifice vi–
brations of our short-lived machines - or else the pomposity of the
electrical will soon envelop the whole earthly realm in darkness . Do
not remove our good dear lasting things into the dream but show
them to us in daylight, put them in sunlight at our heads, as far as
