Vol. 67 No. 4 2000 - page 595

PETER HANDKE
595
ridges of protruding roots, and finally ended here in a veritable field of
angular, sharp beechnuts, a massage from his feet
to
the ends of his hair.
They all ate their midday meal in complete silence, and remained silent
for a good while afterward.
If
they looked in the same direction, each did
so independently of the others. The man from the beech drank from the
clearing's hidden spring under the sycamore in such a way that the oth–
ers could watch him, then went back to his place, while the workmen
had already resumed their cutting and sawing, and read, as he usually did
in summertime, one of the medieval epic tales of knights and magic.
"Weren't those epics actually meant for wintertime-telling of blos–
som freshness and bathing in the lake, while the castles were snowed in
and isolated?"
"But in the summery landscapes they describe I can also recognize the
current summer world, the world of today; it appears more distinctly
before my eyes, and as something that by now has become a fact, no
longer merely a magic and fairy-tale trick."
"For example?"
"See above, see below. Or you fight your way for hours through the
underbrush, and suddenly a door opens automatically in front of you,
and someone takes your bag from you in an air-conditioned hall and
escorts you to the next adventure."
"A so-called adventure?"
"No, a real one.
In
that plantation, the forest-within-the-forest, one
early afternoon, while I was reading, and especially in the intervals of
closing my eyes, whole subterranean hosts were seated there, gray on gray,
but poised for action, ready to show their true colors, and they were sit–
ting in their saddles not over there, under the transparent mountain, the
Untersberg, with Charlemagne, but here beneath the summery plain."
IN THE CENTER
of Salzburg the pharmacist moved around as if wearing
a cap of invisibility. During all those years I saw him face to face only
twice. Although he told me he wasn't close
to
anyone in town, I did
catch him there, though each time by means of a singular visual detour.
One time I was walking along a little-used path on the Monchberg
when I saw the Spanish prime minister coming toward me, casually
dressed, accompanied by a broad-shouldered man in dark clothing,
wearing sunglasses-his bodyguard, no doubt-whom I recognized
only after we had passed each other as the pharmacist of Taxham.
And likewise another time, as I was crossing the Staatsbriicke, I saw, on
a balcony of the "Osterreichischer Hof," an American movie actress
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