PETER HANDKE
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retailers and restaurant owners came only during the day, to run their
businesses. Even one of the priests' assigned to the settlement, a man I
knew well, came there only to celebrate Mass, and actually lived in
Salzburg, where he wandered around aimlessly (I've heard meanwhile
that he gave up his post long ago).
THE PHARMACIST ALSO had his house outside of Taxham, near one of
the farm villages close to the border-marking Saalach River, just before
it flows into the Salzach, in the natural spandrel or "point" there.
Yet he was fond of the place where he worked. His life unfolded in
the triangle between his house by the river embankment, the pharmacy,
and the airport, where in the period when we first met-his story takes
place during another time altogether-he regularly ate his evening meal,
sometimes with his wife, sometimes with his mistress.
The pharmacy, founded by his much older brother, had been the first
business after the war in the new or temporary settlement of Taxham,
indeed the first public institution open to all-before the school, the two
churches, even before any shops. Not even a bakery preceded it (initially
bread could be purchased at the original farm). For quite a while the
pharmacy was the only place providing "services to the public," the
postwar new arrivals . According to my acquaintance, people at first
made disparaging jokes about this medicine hut in the no-man's-land,
but gradually it became the provisional community center.
Even decades later you could still feel some of this: Although by now
every trace of agriculture had disappeared and the pharmacy no longer
stood alone but was flanked by church towers and supermarkets, it still
let you imagine-more than see-a center of town.
Yet this impression certainly didn't come from the building itself.
From the outside it looked like a tobacco shop or newsstand. And inside
it had neither the dark, cleverly laid out, almost museum-like elegance
of many older pharmacies nor the light, bright variety-where am I? in
a solarium? a perfumery? a beach stall?-of so many new or recent
pharmacies.
It
was almost alarmingly devoid of color or decoration,
with not a single item, whether medicine or toothpaste, specially dis–
played, and the entire stock kept at a distance behind rather massive and
ungainly barriers and glass-fronted cabinets, as if the items weren't
wares for sale but an arsenal off limits to the unauthorized, monitored
by two or three white-clad guards.
It
didn't even have that special
threshold at the entrance, which, according to Andreas Loser, was so
characteristic of pharmacies almost the world over-here you had no
