A Sorrow Beyond Dreams

by Peter Handke

  No machines in the house; everything was still done by hand. Objects out of a past century, now generally transfigured with nostalgia: not only the coffee mill, which you had actually come to love as a toy—also the GOOD OLD ironing-board, the COSY hearth, the often-mended cooking pots, the DANGEROUS poker, the STURDY wheelbarrow, the ENTERPRISING weed cutter, the SHINING BRIGHT knives, which over the years had been ground to a vanishing narrowness by BURLY scissor-grinders, the FIENDISH thimble, the STUPID darning egg, the CLUMSY OLD flat-iron, which provided variety by having to be put back on the stove every so often, and finally the PRIZE PIECE, the foot- and hand-operated Singer sewing-machine. But the golden haze is all in the manner of listing.

  Another way of listing would be equally idyllic: your aching back; your hands scalded in the wash boiler, then frozen red while hanging up the clothes (how the frozen washing crackled as you folded it up!); an occasional nosebleed when you straightened up after hours of bending over; being in such a hurry to get through with the day’s work that you went marketing with that tell-tale blood spot on the back of your skirt; the eternal moaning about little aches and pains, because after all you were only a woman. Women among themselves: not “How are you feeling?” but “Are you feeling better?”

  All that is known. It proves nothing; its demonstrative value is destroyed by the habit of thinking in terms of advantages and disadvantages, the most evil of all ways of looking at life. “Everything has its advantages and disadvantages.” Once that is said, the unbearable becomes bearable—a mere disadvantage, and what after all is a disadvantage but a necessary adjunct of every advantage?

  An advantage, as a rule, was merely the absence of a disadvantage: no noise, no responsibility, not working for strangers, not having to leave your house and children every day. The disadvantages that were absent made up for those that were present. So it wasn’t really so bad; you could do it with one hand tied behind your back. Except that no end was in sight.

  Today was yesterday, yesterday was always. Another day behind you, another week gone, and Happy New Year. What will we have to eat tomorrow? Has the post come? What have you been doing around the house all day?

  Setting the table, clearing the table: “Has everybody been served?” Open the curtains, draw the curtains; turn the light on, turn the light out; “Why do you always leave the light on in the bathroom?”; folding, unfolding; emptying, filling; plugging in, unplugging. “Well, that does it for today.”

  The first electrical appliance: an iron, a marvel she had “always longed for”. Embarrassment, as though she had been unworthy of it: “What have I done to deserve it? From now on I’ll always look forward to ironing! Maybe I’ll have a little more time for myself.”

  The mixer, the electric stove, the refrigerator, the washing machine: more and more time for herself. But she only stood there stiff with terror, dizzy after her long years as the good household fairy. But she had also had to husband her feelings so much that she expressed them only in slips of the tongue, and then did her best to gloss over them. The animal spirits that had once filled her whole body now showed themselves only seldom; one finger of her heavy, listless hand would quiver, and instantly this hand would be covered by the other.

  But my mother had not been crushed for good. She began to assert herself. No longer obliged to work her fingers to the bone, she gradually became herself again. She got over her skittishness. She showed people the face with which she felt more or less at ease.

  She read newspapers, but preferred books with stories that she could compare with her own life. She read the books I was reading, first Fallada, Knut Hamsun, Dostoevsky, Maxim Gorky, then Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner. What she said about books could not have been put into print; she merely told me what had particularly caught her attention. “I’m not like that”, she sometimes said, as though the author had written about her. To her, every book was an account of her own life, and in reading she came to life; for the first time, she came out of her shell; she learned to talk about herself; and with each book she had more ideas on the subject. Little by little, I learned something about her.

  Up until then she had got on her own nerves, her own presence had made her uncomfortable; now she lost herself in reading and conversation, and emerged with a new feeling about herself. “It’s making me young again.”

  True, books to her were only stories out of the past, never dreams of the future; in them she found everything she had missed and would never make good. Early in life she had dismissed all thought of a future. Thus, her second spring was merely a transfiguration of her past experience.

  Literature didn’t teach her to start thinking of herself but showed her it was too late for that. She COULD HAVE made something of herself. Now, at the most, she gave SOME thought to herself, and now and then after shopping she would treat herself to a cup of coffee at the tavern and worry a LITTLE LESS about what people might think.

  She became indulgent toward her husband; when he started talking, she let him finish; she no longer stopped him after the first sentence with a nod so violent that it made him swallow his words. She felt sorry for him; often her pity left her defenceless when he wasn’t suffering at all and she merely thought of him in connection with some object which to her mind stood for her own past despair: a wash basin with cracked enamel, a tiny electric hot plate, blackened by boiled-over milk.

  When a member of the family was absent, she surrounded him with images of loneliness; if he wasn’t at home with her, he was sure to be alone. Cold, hunger, unfriendly people: and it was all her fault. She included her despised husband in these guilt feelings and worried about him when he had to manage without her; even during her frequent stays at the hospital, once on suspicion of cancer, her conscience tormented her: her poor husband at home wasn’t getting anything hot to eat.

  Her sympathy for him when he was absent prevented her from ever feeling lonely; only a brief moment of forsakenness when she had him on her hands again; the irrepressible distaste inspired by his wobbly knees and the drooping seat of his trousers. “If only I had a man I could look up to”; it was no good having to despise someone all the time.

  This visible disgust in her very first gesture, attenuated over the years into a patient, polite looking-up from whatever she happened to be doing, only crushed him the more. She had always thought him WEAK-KNEED. He often made the mistake of asking her why she couldn’t bear him. Invariably she answered: “What makes you think that?” He persisted: was he really so repulsive? She comforted him, and all the while her loathing grew. They were growing old together; the thought didn’t move her, but on the surface it made life easier, because he got out of the habit of beating her and bullying her.

  Exhausted by the daily labours that got him nowhere, he became sickly and gentle. He woke from his maunderings into a real loneliness, to which she could respond only in his absence.

  They hadn’t grown apart; they had never been really together. A sentence from a letter: “My husband has calmed down.” And she lived more calmly beside him, drawing satisfaction from the thought that she had always been and always would be a mystery to him.

  She began to take an interest in politics; she no longer voted like her husband, for his employer’s and her brother’s party. Now she voted Socialist; and after a while her husband, who felt an increasing need to lean on her, did so too. But she never believed that politics could be of any help to her personally. She cast her ballot as a gift, never expecting anything in return. “The Socialists do more for the workers”—but she didn’t feel herself to be a worker.

  The preoccupations that meant more and more to her, as housekeeping took up less of her time, had no place in what she knew of the Socialist system. She remained alone with her sexual disgust, repressed till it found an outlet only in dreams, with the fog-dampened bedclothes and the low ceiling over her head. The things that really mattered to her were not political. Of course there was a flaw in her reasoning—but what was it? And what polit
ician could explain it to her? And in what words?

  Politicians lived in another world. When you asked them a question, they didn’t answer; they merely stated their positions. “You can’t talk about most things anyway.” Politics was concerned only with the things that could be talked about; you had to handle the rest for yourself, or leave it to God. And besides, if a politician were to take an interest in you personally, you’d bolt. That would be getting too intimate.

  She was gradually becoming an individual.

  Away from the house, she took on an air of dignity; sitting beside me as I drove the secondhand car I had bought her, she looked unsmilingly straight ahead. At home she no longer bellowed when she sneezed, and she didn’t laugh as loudly as before.

  (At her funeral, her youngest son was to remember how on his way home in those days he had heard her, while still a long way off, screaming with laughter.)

  When shopping, she dispensed token greetings to the right and left; she went to the hairdresser’s more often and had her nails manicured. This was no longer the assumed dignity with which she had run the gauntlet in the days of postwar misery—today no one could destroy her composure with a glance.

  But sometimes at home, while her husband, his back turned to her, his shirt-tails hanging out, his hands thrust deep into his pockets, silent except for an occasional suppressed cough, gazed down into the valley and her youngest son sat snot-nosed on the kitchen sofa reading a Mickey Mouse comic book, she would sit at the table in her new, erect posture, angrily rapping her knuckles on the table edge, and then suddenly raise her hand to her cheek. At this her husband, as often as not, would leave the house, stand outside the door for a while clearing his throat, and come in again. She sat there with her hand on her cheek until her son asked for a slice of bread with something on it. To stand up she had to prop herself on both hands.

  Another son wrecked the car and was thrown in jail for driving without a licence. Like his father, he drank, and again she went from tavern to tavern. What a brood! He paid no attention to her reproofs, she always said the same thing, she lacked the vocabulary that might have had some effect on him. “Aren’t you ashamed?”—“I know”, he said—“You could at least get yourself a room somewhere else.”—“I know.” He went on living at home, duplicated her husband, and even damaged the next car. She packed his bag and put it outside the house; he left the country. She dreamed the worst about him, wrote him a letter signed “Your unhappy mother”, and he came right back. And so on. She felt that she was to blame. She took it hard.

  And then the always identical objects all about her, in always the same places! She tried to be untidy, but her daily puttings-away had become too automatic. If only she could die! But she was afraid of death. Besides, she was too curious. “I’ve always had to be strong; I’d much rather have been weak.”

  She had no hobbies; she didn’t collect anything or swap anything. She had stopped doing crossword puzzles. She had given up pasting photographs in albums; she just put them away somewhere.

  She took no part in public life; once a year she gave blood and wore the blood donor’s badge on her coat. One day she was introduced on the radio as the hundred thousandth donor of the year and rewarded with a gift basket. Sometimes she went bowling at the new automatic bowling alley. She giggled with her mouth closed when the tenpins all toppled over and the bell rang.

  Once, on the Heart’s Desire radio programme, relatives in East Berlin sent the whole family greetings, followed by Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus.

  She dreaded the winter, when they all spent their days in one room; no one came to see her; when she heard a sound and looked up, it was always her husband again: “Oh, it’s you”.

  She began having bad headaches. She couldn’t keep pills down; at first suppositories helped, but not for long. Her head throbbed so that she could only touch it, ever so gently, with her fingertips. Each week the doctor gave her an injection that eased the pain for a while. But soon the injections became ineffectual. The doctor told her to keep her head warm, and she went about with a scarf on her head. She took sleeping pills but usually woke up soon after midnight; then she would cover her face with her pillow. She lay awake trembling until it was light, and the trembling lasted all day. The pain made her see ghosts.

  In the meantime her husband had been sent to a sanatorium with tuberculosis; he wrote affectionate letters, he begged her to let him lie beside her again. Her answers were friendly.

  The doctor didn’t know what was wrong with her; the usual female trouble? Change of life?

  She was so weak that often when she reached out for something, she missed her aim; her hands hung down limp at her sides. After washing the lunch dishes, she lay down awhile on the kitchen sofa; it was too cold in the bedroom. Sometimes her headache was so bad that she didn’t recognise anyone. Nothing interested her. When her head was throbbing, we had to raise our voices to talk to her. She lost all sense of balance and orientation, bumped into the corners of things, and fell down stairs. It hurt her to laugh, she only grimaced now and then. The doctor said it was probably a strangulated nerve. She hardly spoke above a whisper, she was even too miserable to complain. She let her head droop, first on one side, then on the other, but the pain followed her.

  “I’m not human any more.”

  Once, when staying with her the summer before last, I found her lying on her bed with so wretched a look on her face that I didn’t dare go near her. A picture of animal misery, as in a zoo. It was a torment to see how shamelessly she had turned herself inside out; everything about her was dislocated, split, open, inflamed, a tangle of entrails. And she looked at me from far away as if I were her BROKEN HEART, as Karl Rossmann was for the humiliated stoker in Kafka’s novel. BROKEN HEART. Frightened and exasperated, I left the room.

  Only since then have I been fully aware of my mother. Before that, I kept forgetting her, at the most feeling an occasional pang when I thought about the idiocy of her life. Now she imposed herself on me, took on body and reality, and her condition was so palpable that at some moments it became a part of me.

  The people in the neighbourhood also began to see her with other eyes; as though she had been chosen to bring their own lives home to them. They still asked why and wherefore, but only on the surface; they understood her without asking.

  She became insensible, she couldn’t remember anything or recognise even the most familiar objects. More and more often, when her youngest son came home from school, he found a note on the table saying she had gone out, he should make himself some sandwiches or go next door to eat. These notes, torn from an account book, piled up in the drawer.

  She was no longer able to play the housewife. Her whole body was sore when she woke up in the morning. She dropped everything she picked up, and would gladly have followed it in its fall.

  Doors got in her way; the mould seemed to rain from the walls as she passed.

  She watched television but couldn’t follow. She moved her hands this way and that to keep from falling asleep.

  Sometimes in her walks she forgot herself. She sat at the edge of the woods, as far as possible from the houses, or beside the brook below an abandoned sawmill. Looking at the grain fields or the water didn’t take away her pain but deadened it intermittently. Her feelings dovetailed with the things she looked at; every sight was a torment; she would turn to another, and that too would torment her. But in between there were dead points, when the whirligig world left her a moment’s peace. At such moments, she was merely tired; thoughtlessly immersed in the water, she rested from the turmoil.

  Then again everything in her clashed with the world around her; panic-stricken, she struggled to keep her balance, but the feeling was too strong and her peace was gone. She had to stand up and move on.

  She had to walk very slowly because, as she told me, the horror strangled her.

  She walked and walked until she was so tired she had to sit down again. But soon she had to stand up and go on.

&nbs
p; So the time passed, and often she failed to notice that it was getting dark. She was night-blind and had difficulty in finding her way home. Outside the house, she stopped and sat down on a bench, afraid to go in.

  Then, after a long while, the door opened very slowly and my mother stood there with vacant eyes, like a ghost. But in the house as well she wandered about, mistaking doors and directions. Often she had no idea how she had come to be where she was or how the time had passed. She had lost all sense of time and place.

  She lost all desire to see anyone; at the most she would sit in the tavern, among the people from the tourist buses, who were in too much of a hurry to look her in the face. She couldn’t dissemble any more; she had put all that behind her. One look at her and anyone was bound to see what was wrong.

  She was afraid of losing her mind. Quickly, for fear it would be too late, she wrote a few letters of farewell.

  Her letters were full of urgency, as if she had tried to etch herself into the paper. In that period of her life, writing had ceased to be an extraneous effort, as it is for most people in her circumstances; it had become a reflex, independent of her will. Yet there was hardly anything one could talk to her about; every word reminded her of some horror and threw her off balance. “I can’t talk. Don’t torture me.” She turned away, turned again, turned further away. Then she had to close her eyes, and silent tears ran uselessly down her averted face.