PETER HANDKE
599
pharmacy building at the kraal's center. Their orientation was completely
at odds with the pharmacy's, even though it had been the first, the orig–
inal structure in the village; they were set on an axis noticeably opposed
to the pharmacy's, as if to show disdain for the little structure in the
middle, or as if it didn't exist at all.
And then, in driving away, if you looked over your shoulder, the
squat cube there on the remnant of steppe seemed to be turning its back
on the surrounding area, not even belonging to the soil around it, a sort
of random boulder. No child awake at this hour. Not a bird in the sky.
Yet there was a cloud overhead, a large, grayish-white cumulus cloud,
its upper edge crumpled in many places, drifting slowly eastward, as if
on pilgrimage; as if it were pilgrimaging.
It
might also have been mov–
ing westward, and it might also have been morning.
THE PHARMACIST HAD the habit of taking his evening meal at a restau–
rant, and still out toward the airport. Except that his new eating place
was located outside all the concourses, constantly being added or
expanded, also past the parking lots and even past a field of vegetables.
The building had grown out of a root cellar, or been built onto it, and
the small, low-ceilinged dining room was half underground, so to speak,
as if from time immemorial. How nice to go down the few steps from
the hardly traveled road, which still suggested the wagon road it had
once been, especially nice now, with the light fading, when you could
look back up the stairs and see nothing, nothing at all.
Unlike previously, the pharmacist now sat down alone to his evening
meal, had already been alone for a long time, without a mistress, and
his wife had joined him here only a few times in the beginning, until
those fat-bellied mushrooms that turned blue as you sliced into them,
then shaded into olive green, those mushrooms he'd collected and
brought so the chef could prepare them, took on for her, when she was
forced to eat them, "the taste of human flesh."
Outside, when he raised his head, dusk was falling over the fields,
and the last plane was landing; there were no night flights.
The one other table that was usually occupied stood in the opposite
corner, but because the place remained fairly quiet, in spite of the open
door, the conversation there, between a couple and a man who turned
out to be a priest in mufti, could be easily overheard, even though none
of them were raising their voices. The couple's only child had run away
and disappeared, years before. And in the course of the evening it came
out that they had in fact thrown the child out, locked him out, then