The Ride Across Lake Constance and Other Plays

by Peter Handke

  (There is thunder.)

  HANS

  This time

  I can find no rhyme.

  QUITT

  Good night.

  (HANS leaves. QUITT drums his fists on his chest and emits Tarzan-like screams. Pause. His WIFE comes in and stops in front of him.)

  WIFE

  I have something else to say to you.

  QUITT

  Don’t speak to me. I want to get out of myself now. I am now myself and as such I am on speaking terms only with myself.

  WIFE

  But I would like to say something to you. Please.

  (Pause.)

  QUITT

  (Suddenly very tender) Then tell me. (He takes her around the waist, she moves in his embrace.) Tell me.

  WIFE

  I … where it … because … hm (She clears her throat.) … and you … isn’t it … (She laughs indecisively.) … this and that … and autumn … like a stone … that roaring … the Ammonites … and the mud on the soles of the shoes … (She puts her hand to her face, and the stage becomes dark.)

  END ACT ONE

  Act II

  The silhouette of the city. The punching bag has been replaced by a huge balloon which, almost imperceptibly, is shrinking. A large, slowly melting block of ice with a spot shining on it has replaced the matching sofa and armchairs, a glass trough with dough rising in it somewhere else, also with a spot on it. A piano. A large boulder in the background with phrases slowly and constantly appearing and fading on it: OUR GREATEST SIN—THE IMPATIENCE OF CONCEPTS—THE WORST IS OVER—THE LAST HOPE. Next to them are children’s drawings. The usual stage lighting (which remains the same throughout).

  HANS is lying on an old deck chair, dressed as before, and is asleep. He is mumbling in his sleep and laughs; time passes.

  QUITT walks in from behind the wall, rubbing his hands. He executes a little dance step while walking. He whistles to himself.

  QUITT

  It’s been ages since I’ve whistled! (He hums. The humming makes him want to talk.) Hey, Hans! (HANS leaps up out of his sleep and immediately goes to relieve QUITT of the coat which he isn’t wearing. ) You can’t stop acting the servant even in your sleep, can you? When I was just singing to myself I suddenly couldn’t stand being alone any more. (He regards HANS.) And now you’re already annoying me again. Were you dreaming of me? Oh, forget it, I don’t even want to know. (He whistles again. HANS whistles along.) Stop whistling. It’s no fun if you whistle along.

  HANS

  I dreamed. Really, I was dreaming. The dream was about a pocket calendar with rough and smooth sides. The rough sides were the work days, the smooth ones the days which I have off. I slithered for days on end over calendar pages.

  QUITT

  Dream on, little dreamer, dream—just as long as you don’t interpret your dreams.

  HANS

  But what if the dream interprets itself—as it did just now?

  QUITT

  You are talking about yourself—why is that?

  HANS

  You’ve infected me.

  QUITT

  And how?

  HANS

  By employing your personality—and having success with yourself too. Suddenly I saw that I lacked something. And when I thought about it I realized that I lacked everything. For the first time I didn’t just sort of exist for myself, but existed as someone who is comparable, say, with you. I couldn’t bear the comparing any more, began to dream, evaluated myself. Incidentally, you just interrupted me and it was important. (He sits down and closes his eyes. He shakes his head.) Too bad. It’s over. I felt really connected when I was dreaming. (To QUlTT) I don’t want to have to go on shaking my head much longer.

  QUITT

  It occurs to me I should have gotten you up earlier. Then you wouldn’t get ideas like this. So you want to leave me?

  HANS

  On the contrary, I want to stay forever. I still have much to learn from you.

  QUITT

  Would you like to be like me?

  HANS

  I have to be. Recently I’ve been forcing myself to copy your handwriting. I no longer write with a slant but vertically. That is like standing up after a lifetime of bowing down. But it hurts, too. I also no longer put my hands like this … (Thumbs forward, fingers backward on his hips) on my hips, but like you do … (Fingers forward, thumbs backward) That gives me more self-confidence. Or standing up … (He stands up.) I stand on one leg and play with the other like you. A new sense of leisure. Only when I buy something, say at the butcher’s, I place my legs quite close together and parallel and don’t move from the spot. That makes an upper-class impression, and I always get the best cut and the freshest calf’s liver. (He yawns.) Have you noticed that I no longer yawn as unceremoniously as I used to, but with a pursed mouth, like you?

  QUITT

  The long and short of it: you are still here for me?

  HANS

  Because I am compelled to be as free as you are. You have everything, live only for yourself, don’t have to make any comparisons any more. Your life is poetic, Mr. Quitt, and poetry, as we know, produces a sense of power that oppresses no one—but rather dances the dance of freedom for us, the oppressed. At one time I felt caught in the act even when someone watched me licking stamps. Now I don’t bat an eyelash when someone calls me a lackey; carry the garbage can out onto the sidewalk in my tails absolutely unfazed; walk self-confidently arm in arm with the ugliest woman; do work, willy-nilly, which isn’t mine to do—that is my freedom, which I have learned from you. In the past I used to be envious of what you could afford to do. I didn’t feel treated like a man but like a mannequin—notice my new freedom, I’m already playing with words!—cursed you under my breath as a bloodsucker, did not see the human being in you, but only the corporation mogul. That’s how unfree I was. Now, as soon as I imagine you, I see the self-assured curve that your watch chain describes over your belly and already I am moved.

  QUITT

  This sounds familiar. (HANS laughs.) So you’re just making fun of me. I should have known that someone with your history would never change. But you’re not the one who matters. It’s the others that count.

  HANS

  Do you actually despise yourself, Mr. Quitt?—Now that you’ve screwed them all?

  QUITT

  Myself? No. But I might despise someone like me. (Long pause.) Why don’t you react? Just now when you weren’t answering me, what I said began to crawl back into me and wanted to make itself unsaid, and me too, by shriveling me deep inside. (Pause.) You’re making fun of my language. I would much prefer to express myself inarticulately like the little people in the play recently, do you remember? Then you would finally pity me. This way I suffer my articulateness as part of my suffering. The only ones that you and your kind pity are those who can’t speak about their suffering.

  HANS

  How do you want to be pitied? Even if you became speechless with suffering your money would speak for you, and the money is a fact and you—you’re nothing but a consciousness.

  QUITT

  (Derisively) Pity only occurred to me because the characters in the play moved me so—not that they were speechless, but that despite their seemingly dehumanized demeanor they wanted really to be as kind to each other as we spectators who all live in more human surroundings are already with each other. They, too, wanted tenderness, a life together, et cetera—they just can’t express it, and that is why they rape and murder each other. Those who live in inhuman conditions represent the last humans on stage. I like that paradox. I like to see human beings on the stage, not monsters. Human beings, gnarled with suffering, unsche-matic, drenched with pain and joy. The animalistic attracts me, the defenseless, the abused and insulted. Simple people, do you understand? Real people whom I can feel and taste, living people. Do you know what I mean? People! Simply … people! Do you know what I mean? Not fakes but … (He thinks for quite a while.) people. You understand: people. I hop
e you know what I mean.

  HANS

  I can’t take your jokes so soon after waking up. But let’s suppose you’re being serious. There must be another possibility which makes your dichotomy—here fakes, there human beings—look ridiculous.

  QUITT

  Which?

  HANS

  I don’t know.

  QUITT

  Why not?

  HANS

  That I don’t know is the very thing that lends me hope. Besides, as one of those whom you have in mind: I can say it: every time when the curtain rises I become discouraged at the prospect that things will be human again up there any moment now. Let’s further assume that you mean what you say: perhaps the people on stage moved you—not because they were people, but because everything was shown as it is. For example, if you recognize a portrait as true to life, you frequently develop a peculiar sympathy for the person in the portrait without necessarily having any feeling for the real person. Couldn’t the same thing have happened to you when you saw the play? That you empathized with the inarticulate people represented there on the stage and think, therefore, that you have done with the real ones? And why do you want to see real characters on stage at all, who belong in the past and are alien to you?

  QUITT

  Because I like to think back to the days when I was poor too, and couldn’t express myself, and primarily because the painted grimaces from my own class sit in the audience anyway. On stage I want to see the other class, as crude and as unadorned as possible. After all, I go to the theater to relax.

  HANS

  (Laughs.) So, you are being derisive.

  QUITT

  I meant that seriously. (He laughs. Both of them laugh.)

  (WIFE enters.)

  HANS

  Here comes one of your real people.

  WIFE

  Are you laughing at me?

  QUITT

  Who else?

  WIFE

  And what were you saying about me?

  HANS

  Nothing. We were only laughing about you.

  ( WIFE laughs too; she slaps QUITT on the shoulder, nudges him in the ribs.)

  QUITT

  We’re all merry for once, right?

  HANS

  Since business is so good, Mr. Quitt—why don’t you cross my palm with silver?

  QUITT

  You’re welcome.

  (He wants to put the coin into HANS’s outstretched hand but HANS pulls back the hand and stretches out the other. Now QUITT wants to put the coin into that hand, but HANS, so as to adjust to QUITT, has already stretched out his first hand again. When he notices that QUITT … he stretches out his second hand again. But QUITT tries to put the coin into HANS’s first hand again and in the meantime, etc. Until QUITT puts the coin away again, walks to the piano, and plays a boogie. WIFE takes HANS and dances with him … Then QUITT suddenly plays a slow, sad blues and sings along with it.)

  QUITT

  Sometimes I wake up at night

  and everything I want to do next day

  suddenly seems silly,

  how silly to button your shirt,

  how silly to look in your eyes,

  how silly the foam on the glass of beer,

  how silly to be loved by you.

  Sometimes I lie awake

  and everything I imagine

  makes everything that much more inconceivable—

  inconceivable the pleasure of standing at a hot-dog stand,

  inconceivable New Zealand,

  inconceivable thinking of sooner or later,

  inconceivable to be alive or dead

  I want to hate you and hate plastic,

  you want to hate me and hate the fog.

  I want to love you and love hilly countrysides,

  you would like to love me

  and have a lovely city, a lovely color, a lovely animal.

  Everyone stay away from me,

  it is the time after my death

  and what I just imagined, with a sigh, as my life

  are only blisters on my body

  which sigh when they burst

  (He stops singing.) But things are going well for us right now, aren’t they? I saw a woman walking in the sun with a full shopping bag and I knew at once: Nothing more can happen to me now! I hear an old lady say: “Parsley on the stalk? I’ve never eaten that.” And then she says: “Well, and I don’t think I’ll indulge in it now.” Nothing can happen to me any more! Nothing can happen to me any more! (He continues to sing.)

  No dream

  could make anything seem stranger

  than what I’ve already experienced

  and there’s no cure

  for the peace and quiet

  (He speaks again.) … with which every morning I let the dingaling out from behind my fly to fidget in the peep show to relieve the pressure which I could no longer imagine during the sleepless night. ( VON WULLNOW, KOERBER-KENT, and LUTZ appear silently. WIFE wants to leave.) Stay here. (She leaves. HANS leaves too. Pause.) So you still exist. (Pause.) Why don’t we make ourselves comfortable? (Pause.) What can I offer you? Schnapps? Cognac?

  KOERBER-KENT

  No, thank you. It’s still too early for that.

  QUITT

  Or juice, freshly squeezed.

  KOERBER-KENT

  That doesn’t agree with my stomach. Hyperacidity.

  QUITT

  Then a few breadsticks. Or would you prefer some other snack?

  LUTZ

  Thank you, we really don’t want anything. Seriously, don’t go to any trouble.

  QUITT

  You’ve got a frog in your throat. Hans will make you a camomile tea. (LUTZ shakes his head.) Camomile which we picked ourselves at the Mediterranean. The blossoms are intact!

  LUTZ

  (Clears his throat.) I’m over it already. I don’t need anything.

  QUITT

  And you, Monsignore? Perhaps you’d like a mint lozenge? One hundred percent pure peppermint.

  KOERBER-KENT

  I’m perfectly happy too.

  QUITT

  I’d put it on your tongue myself.

  KOERBER-KENT

  I usually enjoy sucking on mint lozenges, but not today.

  QUITT

  Why not today? It isn’t Friday, is it?

  KOERBER-KENT

  I simply don’t want to. That’s all.

  QUITT

  You want to jilt me?

  KOERBER-KENT

  If that’s how you take it.

  QUITT

  I’m offended.

  (He walks out. KOERBER-KENT wants to make a gesture to stop him but VON WULLNOW makes a sign not to.)

  VON WULLNOW

  I know. I could cut off his head with one slash of the whip and let the decapitated chicken slap on the table before you. I was grinding my teeth so fiercely just now, some must have cracked. (He shows his teeth.) There! You traitor, you upstart, you Polack! (Raving) My hand even trembled briefly, which almost never happens to me. In the meantime, of course, it has become completely steady again. Look! (He holds out his hand.) But we have to be rational now, in the most economic sense of the word: at first as rational as necessary and then, when he no longer has any need for our reason, as irrational as possible. I’m already looking forward to my irrationality. (He makes a pantomime of trampling, torturing, and throttling.)

  LUTZ

  (Interrupts him.) Yes, that’s it; we have to let ourselves go for a moment. Like you just now. Perhaps that’ll teach us what to do next. Let’s say or do whatever comes to mind. That will determine our method. After all, that’s the way he does it. So let’s dream. (Pause. They concentrate. Pause.) Nothing is happening. I only see myself cutting a steak against the grain or playing tennis in such short pants that my testicles are hanging out on one side. (Pause. They concentrate.) Do you know what I’m most afraid of about myself? (They regard him expectantly.) That one day I will get up in a restaurant so lost in thought that
I forget to pay the check.