PETER HANDKE
587
businessmen, or football players, he wasn't a recognized figure on the
streets and in the few pubs. No one talked about him, recommended him
to others, sang his praises, or made fun of the pharmacist the way they
do in the classic comedies. People who ran into him outdoors, outside his
realm of competence, either ignored him-quite unintentionally-or
failed to recognize him, even if just a few minutes earlier they'd grate–
fully shaken his hand across the "counter" inside.
Part of the reason was that whenever possible the pharmacist didn't
go out in his white lab coat but rather in hat and suit, with a pocket
square, and looked right past the pedestrians, of whom there weren't
many in Taxham, keeping his eyes fixed on treetops, crops, and rain–
drops in the dust, and therefore, according to the childhood supersti–
tion, remaining invisible. And it must also be said that he, too, as soon
as he left his bunker in the evening, never recognized any of the people
outside as his customers, clientele, or patients-at most as Herr or Frau
So-and-so. Unlike a doctor, who remained "the doctor" when he left his
practice, the Taxham pharmacist ceased to be a pharmacist as soon as
he locked up his shop.
Who or what was he then? One time I saw children running toward
him. And although children usually run faster as they approach
strangers, these children slowed down as they came near him and
looked up at him, away from him, up at him.
AT THE TIME when this story takes place, it was summer. The meadows
around the airport and around the hedged-in settlement beyond had
already been hayed once, and by now the grass was high again, easy to
mistake from a distance for the grain that was hardly grown in the
region anymore; unlike the spring grass, it had almost no flowers, and
depending on the wind, its green showed streaks of gray, or the other
way around.
It
was also the time of year with almost no fruit, the cherries having
been harvested already or plundered by the birds, especially the ravens,
and the apples being far from ripe, except for the nearly white-skinned
early apples, though such trees were rarer than ever.
In
Salzburg, to the east, the festival was already under way, but
although even the most distant Alpine valleys, beyond the passes, tun–
nels, gorges, even borders, felt its reverberations, Taxham, right nearby,
remained untouched, and only half of the advertising column out on the
edge of the meadow and hedge had posters on it, like the rest of the
