Moment of True Feeling

by Peter Handke

  He drank his usual tea at a café on the Boulevard Latour-Maubourg. As he looked out at the street, it occurred to him that he couldn’t have said anything to anyone. He often heard people saying: “If I had something to say …”—and now he thought: If I had something to say, I’d cross it all out. At the top of a garbage can on the sidewalk he saw a heap of coffee grounds and filter paper; as he looked at it, it reminded him of a lawn freshly fertilized with human manure: there had been toilet paper all over the young grass. He went to the men’s room and pissed gloomily down into the hole. The smell of urine revived him. He thought of tomorrow and the day after and tugged at his fingers in disgust; he opened his mouth wide, at the same time looking around to make sure no one was watching him.

  On the way back to the embassy, Keuschnig had a sudden impulse to bare his teeth. Without prospect for the future, he had risen from the protective café chair. Compressing his lips, he nodded to a colleague who was coming toward him. At the sight of this colleague he thought of sleeve protectors, although he hadn’t seen anyone in sleeve protectors for ages. Why couldn’t the other man disregard him? Why did he have to COME TOWARD HIM? Brownish-yellow scraps of scum on milk that had been boiled days ago. True, he was still more or less alive, he was running around loose, but soon it would be all up with him. He wanted to beat everyone to a pulp! Everything, even the sense of well-being his first sip of tea had given him, now seemed RELATIVE. My life line has broken off, Keuschnig thought, as though still trying to cheer himself up a little. A baby carriage with a plastic cover was standing in a doorway, an image of panic terror; as he hurried past, it completed the dream he hadn’t finished dreaming that night. He forced himself to go back and examine the baby carriage in every detail.

  He saw two blacks walking ahead of him, both with their hands deep in their pockets, so that the slits of their jackets gaped wide and their behinds stuck out—both had the same gaping slits and the same behinds! A woman was wearing two different shoes, one with a platform much higher than the other. Another woman was carrying a cocker spaniel in her arms and crying. He felt like a prisoner in Disneyland.

  On the sidewalk he read, written in chalk: “Oh la belle vie,” and underneath: “I am like you,” with a phone number. Whoever it was had BENT DOWN to write about the GOOD LIFE, he thought, and made a note of the phone number.

  In the office he read the newspapers that had just arrived. He was struck by the frequency of the words “more and more” in the headlines of a single page: “More and more babies are overfed,” “More and more child suicides.” In reading Time he was struck, on many pages, by the sentence: “I dig my life.” “I dig my life,” said a basketball star. “We are a happy family,” said a war veteran. “I am very glad,” said a country singer. “Now I dig my life,” said a man who was using a new fixative for his dentures. Keuschnig wanted to howl long enough for everyone in the building to hear him. Then he looked up at the ceiling, cautiously, as though even that might give him away.

  He had the sidewalk telephone number in front of him, but first he dialed several other numbers. He wanted to be alone as little as possible in the days to come, and cast about for friends and acquaintances to take up his time. Before each call, for fear some slip of the tongue would give him away or that he would suddenly be unable to go on, he wrote down word for word what he intended to say. In the end he had made an appointment for every evening and his date book was full to the end of the month. I’ll lose myself in my work, he thought. Then he called the sidewalk number. A woman answered. She said she couldn’t remember writing anything on the pavement, she must have been drunk. Keuschnig, who had only wanted to needle her, said: “You were not drunk. I shall be at the Café de la Paix, the one across from the Opera, at nine tomorrow evening. Will you come?” “Perhaps,” said the woman, and then: “Yes, I’ll come. But let’s not arrange any signs. I’d like us to just recognize each other. I’ll be there.”

  At twelve o’clock Keuschnig took the rue Saint-Dominique to the stop of the 68 bus, as usual on his way to see a girl friend in Montmartre. For a while he drifted into side streets, following a girl with CHICAGO CITY written on the seat of her jeans. He wanted to see her face. Then he noticed he had forgotten her. In the bus he saw he was all alone, and for a moment that made him very happy. A shudder ran through him, it gave him a sense of power, directed against no one. At the next stop he looked up, and already there were several heads in front of him.

  When Keuschnig looked out of the bus window, his field of vision swarmed with transparent pockmarks, and when he closed his eyes and opened them again, there were still more of them. After getting out he decided to stand still for a moment and look patiently at something, the sky for instance. And then he stood there, feeling nothing. “C’est normal,” said a passer-by. Yes, everything was wretchedly normal, elendig normal. He thought of an Austrian country shrine called Maria Elend.

  He behaved as innocently as possible: for the first time he bought flowers for his girl friend. An observer’s suspicions would be overcome if he saw him going into this florist’s shop. He was only one among many, someone concerned with everyday matters, carefree enough to buy flowers. He decided to be pedantic. In the cool shop, seeing himself as a man having gladioli wrapped, he felt so secure that he would have liked to help the salesgirl tie the bow. The atmosphere, the smell of water, the puddles on the floor, did him good. The beautiful, slow meticulousness with which she set down the gladioli side by side on the paper! Up until now, when asked whether flowers should be gift wrapped, he would automatically have said no and contented himself with the usual wrapping; today he looked on with interest as the girl stuck the pins into the paper. During the whole operation—cutting the stems, removing the faded petals, wrapping, and finally handing him the wrapped flowers—she had not made one superfluous movement, and today this struck him as beautiful. In the shop he felt sheltered. He was able to smile, though his lips tautened, and she smiled too. Her purely professional friendliness made him feel that she was treating him as a human being, and that touched him.

  Just like anyone else he climbed the slope of Montmartre with his bouquet. Amid the smells of the rue Lepic, changing from one market stall to the next—fish, cheese, the flannel smell of suits hanging in the sun—he lost all identity … Then suddenly the smell of bread from the open door of a bakery drew him into memory, not his own, but a new, amplified, and improved memory, in which the flat scene before him took on a third dimension. Here no one seemed irresolute, weighed down by himself; among these people, whom he would never know, he felt secure. Outside his girl friend’s door, he wiped his shoes with exaggerated care, meanwhile laughing maliciously—at whom?—But when he heard steps approaching from within, he was seized with desperate embarrassment at the thought that their meeting would be the same as usual, shameless, that they would smile at each other in recognition. There was still time, he could still climb another flight of stairs. Keuschnig stood motionless, one foot beside the other, until the door opened—as usual, except that now the absurdity almost killed him.

  He didn’t show that anything was wrong. For a moment it had upset him that Beatrice recognized him right away. Suddenly he was afraid that he wouldn’t recognize her the next time, and tried to imprint her features, or some distinguishing mark, on his memory.—Beatrice worked part-time as a translator at UNESCO headquarters in the 15th arrondissement. Her husband had been killed when his motorcycle had collided with a trailer truck. She lived alone with two children, who were out at the moment. Keuschnig had first met her at a reception at the embassy. She had come up to him and asked: “What shall we do now?”—He came to see her often. He liked to watch her going about her domestic routines. She told a good many stories, and it gave him a strong tranquil pleasure to listen to her. “I’m never afraid of doing anything wrong in front of you,” she said. They saw no harm in being together. “Maybe our seeing no harm in it is a good sign,” said Beatrice. She took everything that came her way as
a sign. But even where others saw a harbinger of calamity, she found confirmation of her belief that things would get better and better. Unpleasant happenings irritated her, but she took them too as favorable signs. Consequently she lived confidently from day to day, and when Keuschnig was with her, the moment when everything would cease to count seemed to him, sometimes at least, infinitely remote.

  But now, without warning, everything in sight became a sign of death. He didn’t want to look at anything; and because, even with his eyes open, he saw nothing to which he could hold fast, the oppression in his chest rose to his throat. He thought of the baby carriage with the plastic cover in the doorway and the crumbled plaster on the cover, and turned away without meaning to when as usual Beatrice started to help him out of his jacket. But it was he who was suddenly afraid of saying something wrong, or doing something wrong; it was he who suddenly couldn’t help seeing some harm in everything, in cutting meat, in an embrace, even in breathing. The acts that should be performed naturally—drawing-the-cork-out-of-the-bottle, spreading-the-napkin-on-his-knees—he now performed as ceremonial functions and was afraid of being untrue to his role. In mortal terror, he suddenly called up his home. “Is all well?” he asked, deliberately using the stilted phrase to hide his anxiety. Back at the table, he was determined to do everything by himself, though as a rule he had liked Beatrice to peel an apple for him, for instance, at the end of the meal.

  He didn’t let her undress him. If she were to touch him, he would crush her with his fist. The actions of laying-his-trousers-over-the-back-of-a-chair, of lying-down-in-bed-together, of inserting-the-penis-in-the-vagina. When she stroked his member with her fingernail, he felt she was infecting him with some loathsome skin disease. Intermittently, under the light pressure of her vagina, he felt protected, but at the orgasm, in place of something hot, a cold shiver came out of him and instantly spread over his whole body. He wished he were washed and dressed that minute, sitting opposite her, at some distance. When she looked at him, he passed his thumb over her lids as though in a caress, to make her close her eyes and stop seeing him. A moment later she opened them again. Those open eyes seemed to be laughing; this time he forcibly held them shut. Beatrice turned her head away from his hand and went on looking at him, more amused than alarmed. Thereupon he closed his own eyes.—He kept them closed until he felt safe again. Then it became unbearable not to see anything. When he opened his eyes, his lids popped obscenely, as though they had been pasted and an effort had been needed to tear them open, first one, then the other. Beatrice was still looking at him, or rather, she had begun to watch him—as though something were wrong. Though her mouth was closed, her lips were slightly parted at one corner, revealing a bit of glinting canine. He thought of a dead pig, but only to avoid feeling inferior to her. The longer they looked at each other, the more concerned she became and the more he lost interest. Merely because he hadn’t a thought in his head, he grimaced—no, his face turned into a grimace without his stirring a muscle. He simulated a yawn, so as to be able to close his eyes again. Then he took hold of Beatrice’s hair and forced her head down to his belly; she took his member into her mouth and pushed it out with her tongue; if her face had been on a level with his, he might have thought she was sticking out her tongue at him. Filled with warmth, he had a feeling that he and Beatrice briefly belonged together, and that if he could only start talking, he would come to understand her completely.

  In the kitchen they drank coffee. He watched her taking the crême caramel out of the icebox, so it wouldn’t be too cold when the children came home. Then she did indeed sit down across from him, out of reach, just as he had wished, and carefully sharpened pencils, lead pencils for the older child and colored pencils for the younger one, who still went to the école maternelle. As he looked at her, he succeeded little by little in immersing himself in his vision. He heard the water flowing in the gutter of the silent street outside the open window. It gurgled over an occasional jutting stone, and the longer he listened the more his vision expanded; the flowing water turned into a brook, whose gurgling flow related to an almost forgotten event. The pencils, which Beatrice kept turning in her pencil sharpener, RASPED—and suddenly Keuschnig couldn’t remember his own name. He was out of danger as long as so much unfinished business was left on the kitchen table. Kitchen table: those words meant something now. A certainty. He could get up and leave it, yet always come back to this place—where there were red floor tiles and Beatrice, attentively turning pencils but then suddenly holding a pencil still and turning the sharpener, as though a mere fancy in her head had become an embodied wish, as though an impersonal idea had become a personal contradiction or a long-outgrown memory a present emotion. The apartment around him now seemed to be on ground level, yet bright and airy as if it were somewhere high in the sky.—Ecstatically Keuschnig closed his eyes to keep from crying, but also to relish his tears the more.

  He saw everything as though for the last time. While still looking at Beatrice, he no longer belonged to her, he could only—indeed, he had to—behave as if he did. There was a crackling inside him, then everything went to pieces. A complicated fracture of the mind, he thought. A few splinters of emotion had worked their way through the outer covering, and he had gone rigid forever. Can one, in speaking of the body, speak of ugly suffering? The body has ugly wounds, the soul has ugly suffering. And some bodily wounds have been beautiful, so much so that one has been sorry to see them heal, but in the mind there is only suffering, and that is ugly.—“I think I’ve eaten too much,” he said to Beatrice, who looked at him from time to time with interest, but without alarm. Outside the window a seed capsule floated past. Good Lord! Keuschnig had a feeling that the shit in his bowels had turned the wrong way. In another second he would be sending a loud fart into the room.

  For a moment Beatrice averted her eyes, but then looked at him again. She wants to help me, he thought, in such a rage that he might almost have struck her in the face; his forearm, resting on the table, had gone tense. He withdrew it discreetly, and she blew the shavings out of her pencil sharpener. Above all, no special treatment! Covertly he checked to make sure the position of his legs under the table was the same as usual. One leg stretched out, the other bent—right. What Keuschnig feared most was that someone might show understanding, or actually understand him. If someone were to say knowingly: “We all have such days. I’ve had them myself”—it would sicken him; but if someone were to understand him silently, then he would feel disgraced. And Beatrice had turned away, as though to avoid seeing through him. But perhaps she had no desire to see through him. That was it, she simply had no desire to. Which meant that she didn’t take him seriously, which was just as well. Cheerfully he stood up, bent over the table, and touched her; she gave her shoulders a big shrug, failing to understand his gesture, but accepting it because it was his. Things would never again be the same as before, thought Keuschnig nor did he want them to be. Actually they never had been. How fragmented his former life seemed to him, how … he couldn’t even say. And for the second time he became curious. “Your eyes have suddenly contracted so,” said Beatrice. “Are you thinking of an adventure?” “What about you?” “Always,” she said. “Just at the most ecstatic moment, I always think the real thing is still to come.”

  They left the apartment together. She took the elevator, he went down the stairs. On the street they met again, but parted at once, Beatrice with a serious but untroubled countenance, wordlessly, as though all necessary arrangements had been made. So long, see you tomorrow. But what about today? He would go back to work; at six he would attend a press conference at the Elysée Palace, devoted to the program of the new government; at nine he would dine at home with an Austrian writer who happened to be living in Paris (an instance of the seated entertainment provided for in his budget); and after that he would presumably be tired enough to fall into a dreamless sleep. A full program, he thought gratefully; not a free moment, every move mapped out until midnight or later, whe
n he would switch off his bedside lamp. For today at least every minute was taken up; no room for any dangerous extra motion; the bliss of a crowded timetable.—And indeed, when he thought about it, he felt blissfully hedged about. He was able to lift his eyes untroubled; the world lay before him as though it had been waiting for him the whole time.

  The air was so clear that from the hill one was able to look out on all sides beyond the edge of Paris, where the land was green again. This was a vista that precluded all thought of confusion; every detail, however recalcitrant, was subordinated to the overall picture. That suited him at present, because he didn’t want to be reminded of anything. In the presence of this panorama, which even after the first glance presented no salient features, he was able to exhale himself until nothing troublesome remained.—Suddenly he caught sight of a tourist in an army jacket standing next to him. A toothbrush protruded from his breast pocket. Before actually noticing this toothbrush, Keuschnig remembered with a jolt, as though he had suddenly become his own double, that such a toothbrush had occurred in his dream the night before and had been connected with him in his role of fugitive murderer. Thus far he had been able, while standing on the hillside, to see his dream in its proper place, so to speak, to see it as a dream. And what now? How absurd that a panoramic view of this kind should correct the dimensions of things. What then were the right dimensions? My dream was true, he thought, and now I’ve betrayed it to this harmony that was drummed into me. Panoramic coward with the eyes of a glider pilot. That dream must have been the first sign of life in me since God knows when. I should have taken it as a warning. It came to me because I’d been looking in the wrong direction, it wanted to turn me around. To wake me up and make me forget my somnambulistic certainties. It has always been easy for me to forget dreams. It will be difficult to drop my certainties, because they will cross my path day after day—though in reality others have merely dreamed them for me. The certainty, for instance, of my vision as I look on swarming humanity from this hill, merely perpetuates someone else’s dream of life. What, thought Keuschnig, is my dream of life? I will forget my certainty by losing myself in a dream of life. Let us suppose that last night’s dream was my dream of life.—Keuschnig had an impulse to follow the stream that was flowing down the gutter and would soon merge with another stream—to follow it across the whole city.