PETER HANDKE
From
On a Dark Night I Left
My
Silent
House
A
T THE TIME
when this story takes place, Taxham was almost for–
gotten. Most residents of nearby Salzburg couldn't have told you
where it was located. To many of them, even the name sounded
foreign . Taxham? Birmingham? Nottingham? And in fact the first foot–
ball club after the war was called "Taxham Forest," until it climbed out
of the lowest category and received a new name, then, over the years,
worked its way up in the standings and even became "FC Salzburg" (by
now it may have backslid to an earlier original name). Although in the
center of town people often saw buses with TAXHAM on their destina–
tion sign drive by, neither more full nor more empty than the rest of the
buses, hardly a single townsperson had ever sat in one of them.
Unlike the old villages in Salzburg's orbit, Taxham, founded after the
war, never became a tourist attraction. There was no cozy inn, nothing
to see-not even anything off-putting. Despite having Klessheim Castle,
the gambling casino, and the official reception mansion just beyond the
meadows, Taxham-neither a section of town, nor a suburb, nor farm–
land-had been spared all visitors, from nearby or from any distant
parts whatsoever-in contrast to all the other villages in the region.
No one came by, even briefly, let a lone spent the night. For there was
never a hotel in Taxham-again in contrast to Salzburg, both the town
and the province-and its "tourist rooms" consisted of niches, refuges,
hideaways of last resort, available when everywhere else the signs read
"No Vacancy." Not even TAXHAM, the name that formed a ghostly
trail of light on the front of the buses circling unti l late at night through
the now darker, more silent center of Salzburg, seemed ever to have
lured anyone out there. No matter whom you asked, including the most
Editor's Note: Excerpted from
On a Dark Night I Left
My
Silent House
by
Peter Handke, translated by Krishna Winston. Copyright ©
I997
by
Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt Am Main. To be published by Farrar, Straus
and Giroux in November
2000.
All rights reserved.
