PETER HANDKE
583
open-minded and especially the most broad-minded, said, when ques–
tioned about Taxham, "No, " or merely shrugged.
Perhaps the only strangers who went there more than once were my
friend Andreas Loser, teacher of classical languages and self-nominated
limnologist, and 1. The first time I visited Taxham, I found myself on the
main thoroughfare, called "Klessheim Avenue" (no trace of castle or
avenue), and stopped in a little shack of a bar, where a man railed for
hours about how he'd been itching to kill someone: "No help for it!"
And it was Andreas Loser who, one winter evening in the almost empty
restaurant at the Salzburg airport (in those days almost larger than the
arrival hall), whispered to me, "Look, that's the pharmacist of Taxham
sitting over there!"
Since then my friend Loser has gone who knows where. And I left
Salzburg long ago. And at the time when this story takes place, the phar–
macist of Taxham, with whom we got together quite often after that,
hadn't been heard from in almost as long-whether that was like him
or not.
SOMETHING THAT'S HAPPENING to all sorts of places these days was
characteristic of Taxham from the beginning, namely being cut off or at
least made hard to get to from the surrounding area and neighboring
towns by all sorts of transportation lines-especially long-distance
ones-impossible to cross on foot or by bicycle. In contrast to towns
now, which get squeezed only little by little into such a spandrel world,
isolated and hemmed in by the expressways proliferating on all sides,
Taxham had come into being with such barriers already in place.
Although it lay in a broad river valley and on the threshold of a city, it
rather resembled a military camp, and in fact, its immediate vicinity,
with the German border very near, actually had three military bases, one
of them within the township itself. The rail line leading to Munich and
beyond, one of Taxham's barriers, had been there far longer than the vil–
lage, and the highway, too, had been built even before the Second World
War, as the Reich autobahn (decades later the Reich eagle, carved, along
with the date of construction, at the entrance to the tunnel-like under–
pass, still had the swastika clutched in its talons), and similarly the air–
port, built during the first Austrian republic, made it hard to reach the
site of the future village.
Built into this transportation-corridor triangle, reachable almost only
by circuitous, inconvenient routes and through underpasses, Taxham
appeared as an enclave, and not only at first sight.
