by Peter Handke
My painful memory of her daily motions, especially in the kitchen.
When she was angry, she didn’t beat the children; at the most, she would wipe their noses violently.
Fear of death when I wake up at night and the light is on in the hallway.
Some years ago I had the idea of making an adventure film with all the members of my family; it would have had nothing to do with me personally.
As a child, she was moonstruck.
She died on a Friday, and during the first few weeks it was on Fridays that her death agony was most present to me. Every Friday the dawn was painful and dark. The yellow streetlights in the night mist; dirty snow and sewer smell; folded arms in the television chair; the last toilet flushing, twice.
Often while at work on my story I felt that writing music would be more in keeping with its incidents. Sweet New England. …
“Perhaps there are new, unsuspected kinds of despair that are unknown to us,” said a village schoolmaster in a crime-thriller series. The Commissar.
All the jukeboxes in the region had a record called WORLD-WEARY POLKA.
The first signs of spring—mud puddles, warm wind, and snowless trees. Far away, far beyond my typewriter.
“She took her secret with her to the grave.”
In one dream she had a second face, but it too was rather worn.
She was kindly.
Then again, something cheerful: in a dream I saw all sorts of things that were intolerably painful to look at. Suddenly someone came along and in a twinkling took the painful quality out of all these things. LIKE TAKING DOWN AN OUT-OF-DATE POSTER. The metaphor was part of my dream.
One summer day I was in my grandfather’s room, looking out the window. There wasn’t much to be seen: a street led uphill through the village to a building that was painted dark “Schönbrunn” yellow, an old-time inn; there it turned off to one side. It was a SUNDAY AFTERNOON, the street was DESERTED. All at once, I had a bitter-tasting feeling for the man who lived in that room; I felt that he would soon die. But this feeling was softened by the knowledge that his death would be a natural one.
Horror is something perfectly natural: the mind’s emptiness. A thought is taking shape, then suddenly it notices that there is nothing more to think. Whereupon it crashes to the ground like a figure in a comic strip who suddenly realizes that he has been walking on air.
Someday I shall write about all this in greater detail.
Written January—February 1972.
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Copyright
Copyright © 1972 by Residenz Verlag, Salzburg and Vienna
Translation copyright © 1974 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.
Published by arrangement with Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.
All rights reserved
This edition first published in 2001 by
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data:
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 782270 30 0
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Photograph by Jerry Bauer
Quotation from “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” by Bob Dylan © 1965 M. Witmark & Sons. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Warner Bros. Music
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