PETER HANDKE
591
And then the pharmacist chose to continue in an easterly direction,
riding into the sun: In that way he avoided having his shadow in front of
him, a sight he'd always found upsetting. From the grass, as earlier from
the river and then from the grooves in the stone, rose the smell of the last
few weeks' drought (the stories you heard about Salzburg and all its rain
were often wrong). As he reached the camouflage-spot-colored barracks
of the Siezenheim army base, a city bus drove by, painted and decorated
for the festival as if it, too, were part of these camouflage-colored
facades; an airplane's shadow swooped over the ground like the blink of
an eyelid.
As HE TURNED off into the hedged-in settlement, or, as he secretly called
it, the "Lost Island," someone said hello to him-a rarity here-then a
few others, between Lindbergh Promenade and Lilienthal Avenue, the
greeting followed each time by embarrassment-until finally the phar–
macist realized that the greetings were directed toward the familiar
clunky prewar bicycle, usually associated with his wife, the "lady phar–
macist" (which, in fact, she was, as almost everyone in the family was a
pharmacist, in both the older and the younger generations, with the
exception of his son).
His two employees, an older woman and a young man, still almost a
child-the woman was his mother, for here, too, pharmacy work was a
family tradition-were already waiting on the grassy plot at the center
of the village, lounging, overpunctual as always, outside the barred
entrance to the bunker, with a good-weather cloud high overhead.
They'd come from the south years ago, fleeing the civil war, and had
brought with them a curse commonly hurled at enemies there: "May
your only inn become the pharmacy!"
THE PHARMACIST also had a daughter, who'd been working with him
lately, since completing her studies, but for the summer she'd left the
Lost Island for another, together with her boyfriend, he, too, a pharma–
cist, but also-a novelty in the family!-a physicist.
At her departure he'd had the impression that she was reluctant to go
and for the first time, curiously, was worried about him. Yet it seemed–
as it always had, incidentally-that precisely her absence, or the absence
of all those close to him, protected him, or so he thought at least, just
as this absence also compelled him to do everything, or to live in such a
way, that the other person could stay away for as long as originally
