A Sorrow Beyond Dreams

by Peter Handke

  She went to see a neurologist in the provincial capital. With him she could talk; a doctor was someone she could confide in. She herself was surprised at how much she told him. It was only in speaking that she began really to remember. The doctor nodded at everything she said, recognised every particular as a symptom, and by subsuming them under a name—“nervous breakdown”—organised them into a system. That comforted her. He knew what was wrong with her; at least he had a name for her condition. And she wasn’t the only one; there were others in the waiting room.

  On her next visit, it amused her to observe these people. The doctor advised her to take walks in the open air. He prescribed a medicine that somewhat relieved the pressure on her head. A trip would help, she needed a change. On each visit she paid cash, because the Workers Health Insurance didn’t provide for treatment of this kind. And then she was depressed again, because of the expense.

  Sometimes she searched desperately for a word for something. Usually she knew it, she merely wanted others to share in her thought. She looked back with nostalgia at the brief period when she had recognised no one and understood nothing.

  As it wore off, her illness became an affectation; now she only played at being sick. She pretended that her head was in a muddle as a defense against her thoughts, which had become clear again; for, once her head was perfectly clear, she could only regard herself as an individual case and the consolation of belonging to a group was no longer available to her. She exaggerated her forgetfulness and absent-mindedness in order to be encouraged, when she finally did remember or show that she had understood everything perfectly, with a “You see! You’re much better now!”—as though all the horror had consisted in losing her memory and being unable to join in the conversation.

  You couldn’t joke with her. Teasing about her condition didn’t help her. SHE TOOK EVERYTHING LITERALLY. If anyone started clowning about to cheer her up, she burst into tears.

  In midsummer she went to Yugoslavia for four weeks. At first she only sat in her darkened hotel room, touching and feeling her head. She couldn’t read, her thoughts got in the way. Every few minutes she went to the bathroom and washed her hands and face.

  Then she ventured out and dabbled in the water. This was her first holiday away from home and her first visit to the seashore. She liked the sea; at night there was often a storm, and then she didn’t mind lying awake. She bought a straw hat to shield her from the sun and sold it back the day she left. Every afternoon she went to a café and ordered an espresso. She wrote cards and letters to all her friends in which she spoke only incidentally of herself.

  She recovered her sense of time and awareness of her surroundings. She listened curiously to the conversations at the other tables and tried to figure out the relationships between the people.

  Toward evening when the heat had let up she took walks; she went to villages nearby and looked into the doorless houses. Her amazement was real; she had never seen such dire poverty. Her headaches stopped and so did her thoughts. For a time she was outside the world. She felt pleasantly bored.

  Back home, she was her old talkative self. She had plenty to talk about. She let me go with her on her walks. Now and then we went to the tavern for dinner and she got into the habit of drinking a Campari before her meal. She still clutched at her head, but by then it was little more than a tic. She remembered that a year ago a man had actually spoken to her in a café. “But he was very polite!” Next summer she thought she would go to some northern country where it wasn’t so hot.

  She took it easy, sat in the garden with her friends, smoking and fanning the wasps out of her coffee.

  The weather was sunny and mild. The fir trees on the hills round about were veiled in mist all day, and for a time they were not as dark as usual. She put up fruit and vegetables for the winter, and thought of adopting a child.

  I was already too busy with my own life. In the middle of August, I went back to Germany and left her to her own resources. During the following months I was working on a book. I heard from her occasionally.

  “My head spins a little. Some days are hard to bear.” “It’s cold and cheerless, the fog doesn’t lift until mid-morning. I sleep late, and when I finally crawl out of bed, I have no desire to do anything. And adopting a child is out of the question right now. They won’t give me one because my husband has tuberculosis.”

  “Whenever a pleasant thought crops up, a door closes and I’m alone again with my nightmares. I’d be so glad to write something more cheerful, but there isn’t anything. When I start a conversation, he doesn’t know what I’m talking about, so I prefer to say nothing. Somehow I was looking forward to seeing him again, but when he’s here I can’t bear the sight of him. I know I ought to find some way of making life bearable, I keep thinking about it, but nothing occurs to me. Just read this and forget it as fast as you can, that’s my advice.”

  “I can’t stand it in the house any more, so I’m always gadding about somewhere. I’ve been getting up a little earlier, that’s the hardest time for me; I have to force myself to do something, or I’d just go back to bed. There’s a terrible loneliness inside me, I don’t feel like talking to anyone. I’d often like to drink a little something in the evening, but I mustn’t, because if I did my medicine wouldn’t take effect. Yesterday I went to Klagenfurt, I roamed around all day and caught the last train home.”

  In October she didn’t write. During the fine autumn days someone would meet her walking slowly down the street and prod her to walk a little faster. She was always asking her friends to join her in a cup of coffee at the tavern. People invited her out on Sunday excursions and she was glad to go. She went with friends to the last church fairs of the year. Sometimes she even went to a football game. She would look on indulgently as her friends cheered and whistled, and hardly open her mouth. But when in the course of his re-election campaign the Chancellor stopped in the village and handed out carnations, she pushed boldly through the crowd and asked for one: “Haven’t you got one for me?” “I beg your pardon, madam”.

  Early in November she wrote: “I’m not logical enough to think things through to the end, and my head aches. Sometimes it buzzes and whistles so that I can’t bear any outside noise.

  “I talk to myself, because I can’t say anything to other people any more. Sometimes I feel like a machine. I’d like to go away somewhere, but when it gets dark I’m afraid of not finding the way home again. In the morning there’s a dense fog and then everything is so quiet. Every day I do the same work, and every morning the place is a mess again. There’s never any end to it. I really wish I were dead. When I’m out in the street and I see a car coming, I want to fall in front of it. But how can I be sure it would work?

  “Yesterday I saw Dostoevsky’s ‘The Gentle Spirit’ on TV; all night long I saw the most gruesome things, I wasn’t dreaming, I really saw them, some men were going around naked and instead of genitals they had intestines hanging out. My husband is coming home on 1 December. I keep feeling more and more uneasy. I can’t see how it will be possible to live with him. We each look in a different direction and the loneliness only gets worse. I’m cold now, I think I’ll take a walk.”

  She often shut herself up in the house. When people started telling her their troubles, she stopped them short. She treated them all very harshly, silenced them with a wave of her hand or with her sudden laugh. Other people were irritating children; at best she felt slightly sorry for them. She was often cross. There was something about her way of finding fault that often made people feel like hypocrites.

  When her picture was taken, she was no longer able to compose her face. She puckered her forehead and raised her cheeks in a smile, but there was an incurable sadness in her eyes; her pupils were out of kilter, displaced from the centre of her irises.

  Mere existence had become a torture to her.

  But at the same time she had a horror of death.

  “Take walks in the woods!” (The neurologist.)

 
; “But it’s dark in the woods!” the local veterinarian, her occasional confidant, said contemptuously after her death.

  Day and night the fog hung on. At noon she tried putting the light out and immediately turned it on again. What should she look at? Cross her arms and put her hands on her shoulders. From time to time, an invisible buzz saw, a cockerel who thought all day that the day was just dawning and crowed until late afternoon; and then at closing time the factory whistles.

  At night the fog pressed against the window-panes. At irregular intervals she could hear a drop of water running down the glass outside. She kept the heating pad on all night in her bed. Every morning the fire was out in the kitchen stove. “I don’t want to pull myself together any more.” She was no longer able to close her eyes. There had been a GREAT FALL (Franz Grillparzer) in her consciousness.

  (From this point on, I shall have to be careful to keep my story from telling itself.)

  She wrote letters of farewell to everyone in her family. She not only knew what she was doing, she also knew why she could no longer do anything else. “You won’t understand”, she wrote to her husband. “But it’s unthinkable that I should go on living.” To me she wrote a registered special-delivery letter, enclosing a copy of her will. “I have begun to write several times, but it’s no comfort, no help to me.” All her letters were headed not only with the date as usual but also with the day of the week: “Thursday, 18 November, 1971”.

  The next day she took the local train to the district capital and had the prescription our family doctor had given her refilled: a hundred sleeping pills. Though it was not raining, she also bought a red umbrella with a handsome, slightly curved, wooden handle.

  Late that afternoon she took the train back. As a rule this train is almost empty. She was seen by one or two people. She went home and ate dinner at the house next door, where her daughter was living. Everything as usual: “We even told jokes”.

  Then, in her own house, she watched television with her youngest son. A movie from the “Father and Son” series was being shown.

  She sent the child to bed; the television was still playing. She had been to the hairdresser’s the day before and had had her nails done. She turned off the television, went to her bedroom, and hung up her brown dress in the wardrobe. She took all the sleeping pills and all her anti-depression pills. She put on menstrual pants, stuffed nappies inside, put on two more pairs of pants and an ankle-length nightgown, tied a scarf under her chin, and lay down on the bed. She did not turn on the heating pad. She stretched out and laid one hand on the other. At the end of her letter to me, which otherwise contained only instructions for her funeral, she wrote that she was perfectly calm, glad at last to be falling asleep in peace. But I’m sure that wasn’t true.

  The following afternoon, on receiving the news of her death, I flew to Austria. The plane was half empty; it was a steady, quiet flight, the air clear and cloudless, the lights of changing cities far below. Reading the paper, drinking beer, looking out the window, I gradually sank into a tired, impersonal sense of well-being. Yes, I thought over and over again, carefully enunciating my thoughts to myself: THAT DOES IT. THAT DOES IT. THAT DOES IT. GOOD. GOOD. GOOD. And throughout the flight I was beside myself with pride that she had committed suicide. Then the plane prepared to land and the lights grew larger and larger. Dissolved in a boneless euphoria against which I was powerless, I moved through the almost deserted airport building. In the train the next morning, I listened to a woman who was one of the Vienna Choirboys’ singing teachers. Even when they grew up, she was telling her companion, the Choirboys were unable to stand on their own feet. She had a son who was one of them. On a tour in South America, he was the only one who had managed on his pocket money. He had even brought some of it back. She had reason to hope that he, at least, would have some sense when he grew up. I couldn’t stop listening.

  I was met at the station and driven home in the car. Snow had fallen during the night; now it was cloudless, the sun was shining, it was cold, the air sparkled with frost. What a contradiction to be driving through a serenely civilized countryside—in weather that made this countryside so much a part of the unchanging deep-blue space above it that no further change seemed thinkable—to a house of mourning and a corpse that might already have begun to rot! During the drive I was unable to get my bearings or form a picture of what was to come, and the dead body in the cold bedroom found me utterly unprepared.

  Chairs had been set up in a row and women sat drinking the wine that had been served them. I sensed that little by little, as they looked at the dead woman, they began to think of themselves.

  The morning before the funeral I was alone in the room with the body for a long while. At first my feelings were at one with the custom of the wake. Even her dead body seemed cruelly forsaken and in need of love. Then I began to be bored and looked at the clock. I had decided to spend at least an hour with her. The skin under her eyes was shrivelled, and here and there on her face there were still drops of holy water. Her belly was somewhat bloated from the effect of the pills. I compared the hands on her bosom with a fixed point at the end of the room to make sure she was not breathing after all. The furrow between her nose and upper lip was gone. Sometimes, after looking at her for a while, I didn’t know what to think. At such moments my boredom was at its height and I could only stand distraught beside the corpse. When the hour was over, I didn’t want to leave; I stayed in the room beyond the time I had set myself.

  Then she was photographed. From which side did she look best? “The sugar-side of the dead.”

  The burial ritual depersonalised her once and for all, and relieved everyone. It was snowing hard as we followed her mortal remains. Only her name had to be inserted in the religious formulas. “Our beloved sister.” On our coats candle wax, which was later ironed out.

  It was snowing so hard that you couldn’t get used to it; you kept looking at the sky to see if it was letting up. One by one, the candles went out and were not lit again. How often, it passed through my mind, I had read of someone catching a fatal illness while attending a funeral.

  The woods began right outside the graveyard wall. Fir woods on a rather steep hill. The trees were so close together that you could see only the tops of even the second row, and from then on treetops after treetops. The people left the grave quickly. Standing beside it, I looked up at the motionless trees: for the first time it seemed to me that nature was really merciless. So these were the facts! The forest spoke for itself. Apart from these countless treetops nothing counted; in the foreground, an episodic jumble of shapes, which gradually receded from the picture. I felt mocked and helpless. All at once, in my impotent rage, I felt the need of writing something about my mother.

  In the house that evening I climbed the stairs. Suddenly I took several steps at one bound, giggling in an unfamiliar voice, as if I had become a ventriloquist. I ran up the last few steps. Once upstairs I thumped my chest lustily and hugged myself. Then slowly, with a sense of self-importance, as though I were the holder of a unique secret, I went back down the stairs.

  It is not true that writing has helped me. In my weeks of preoccupation with the story, the story has not ceased to preoccupy me. Writing has not, as I at first supposed, been a remembering of a concluded period in my life, but merely a constant pretence at remembering, in the form of sentences that only lay claim to detachment. Even now I sometimes wake up with a start, as though in response to some inward prodding, and, breathless with horror, feel that I am literally rotting away from second to second. The air in the darkness is so still that, losing their balance, torn from their moorings, the things of my world fly soundlessly about: in another minute they will come crashing down from all directions and smother me. In these tempests of dread, I become magnetic like a decaying animal and, quite otherwise than in undirected pleasure, where all my feelings play together freely, I am attacked by an undirected, objective horror.

  Obviously narration is only an act of memory
; on the other hand, it holds nothing in reserve for future use; it merely derives a little pleasure from states of dread by trying to formulate them as aptly as possible; from enjoyment of horror it produces enjoyment of memory.

  Often during the day I have a sense of being watched. I open doors and look out. Every sound seems to be an attempt on my life.

  Sometimes, of course, as I worked on my story, my frankness and honesty weighed on me and I longed to write something that would allow me to lie and dissemble a bit, a play, for instance.

  Once, when I was slicing bread, my knife slipped; instantly, I remembered how in the morning she used to cut thin slices of bread and pour warm milk on them for the children.

  Often, as she passed by, she would quickly wipe out the children’s ears and nostrils with her saliva. I always shrank back from the saliva smell.

  Once, while mountain climbing with a group of friends, she started off to one side to relieve herself. I was ashamed of her and started to bawl, so she held it in.

  In the hospital she was always in a big ward with a lot of other people. Yes, those things still exist! Once in such a hospital ward she pressed my hand for a long while.

  When everyone had been served and had finished eating, she would daintily pop the remaining scraps into her mouth.

  (These, of course, are anecdotes. But in this context scientific inferences would be just as anecdotal. All words and phrases are too mild.)

  The eggnog bottle in the sideboard!