Moment of True Feeling

by Peter Handke

  From time to time, that day, he felt very cheerful, but never for long. In the moment of breathing easy, his breath caught, and everything became impossible. Even in his bright moments he couldn’t help wondering what would happen next. Always having to think of the future, yet unable to conceive of any future—that added up to hopelessness. Up until then he had seldom felt so cheerful and never so hopeless. And every time he felt cheerful he lost confidence in his feeling; his cheerfulness did not remain present to him, nothing remained present—not even the thought of a dream of life. Like a voluptuary he kept thinking of only one thing, though the one thing was not a woman’s hole but the unimaginable. Could it be that no one saw his obscene face? He couldn’t understand why after a first glance someone didn’t cast another, special sort of glance at him, or why no woman turned away after taking one look at him. Actually, a woman had turned away, averted her face in disgust. Maybe people would know him for what he was if he stood beside a clump of bushes in the park.

  He had a taste of blood in his mouth. The repulsive part of it was not that he had become different during the night but that everything seemed so eternally the same. And there was nothing repulsive about his showing himself as he did; what was repulsive was that the people around him didn’t do likewise. He tried to figure out how old he was, and counted not only the years but also the months and days, until the minute now, in which he was standing on the top of Montmartre. He had already spent so much time! When he considered how just this last hour had weighed on him, it was beyond him that he hadn’t suffocated long ago. But the time must somehow have passed? Yes, somehow the time had passed. Somehow the time passed. Somehow the time would pass: that was the most hideous part of it. When he saw people older than himself, they instantly struck him as obsolete. Why hadn’t they gone out of existence long ago? How was it possible that they had survived and were keeping right on? There had to be some trick—routine alone couldn’t account for it. He admired them a little, but for the most part they disgusted him; he had no curiosity about their tricks. Undoubtedly that Dane over there in the car with the Copenhagen plates deserved to be admired for driving relentlessly across the whole of Europe instead of falling off a cliff on the way, but wouldn’t it have been more honorable of him to drive his car off a bridge before it was too late—on the Autobahn for instance? Because here he was just making a fool of himself with his Danish presence! —Altogether nothing made sense; the world only pretended to be sensible; much too sensible, Keuschnig thought. That a couple who sat down at a café table should still be a couple when they got up again: how very sensible! It was beyond him how when the two of them got up they could still be talking to each other, and in a friendly tone what’s more, as though nothing were wrong.—And it wasn’t true that he had only begun to see himself and others in this light the night before. Little by little it came back to him that even earlier he had been unable to understand how everything could simply flow along and remain as it was. Once he had crossed the whole of Paris on Line 9 of the Métro just to find out exactly what the advertisement for DUBONNET painted at regular intervals on the walls of the dark tunnels between stations represented. The train went so fast that he never saw the whole picture but always the same small segment, and could make no sense of it. He should have got out in midtown, but as it was he continued on to the PORTE DE CHARENTON on the southeast edge of Paris, where the train had to slow down because of men working, and there he finally saw that the vague blobs represented bright-colored clouds and that the sphere in front of them was a kind of sun decorated with the colors of all the countries where DUBONNET was consumed … In those days everything had tended to run too fast, and he had run along, because he wanted to recognize things. Since this last night something had stopped. This something was unrecognizable, and he could only turn away. To be initiated had become absurd, to be taken back into the fold had become unimaginable, to belong had become hell on earth. He saw great lumps of overcooked rice in a pot as big as the world. The swindle had been exposed and he was disenchanted.

  Keuschnig went down the hill, step for step. What affectedly carefree gaits, what inimically serene faces. He felt no desire to emulate them, only a furious impulse to ape them—all these faces so bright and summery that the only way to bear them was to ape them, as sometimes at a café, often involuntarily to be sure, you ape the facial expression of those women who trip past you so mincingly, looking neither to left nor right for fear of losing their semblance of beauty, or as a drunk returning a stare is likely to put on the starer’s expression.

  A woman coming in the opposite direction broke into a smile in the middle of the street and began to run. He was frightened. Had she gone mad? Then he saw someone some distance off, walking toward her—and he too was smiling. Imperturbably smiling, they approached one another, preserving their smiles the whole way despite every obstacle, although the man stumbled over an empty wooden crate and the woman collided with a passer-by. Keuschnig couldn’t bear the sight any longer and, conscious of pressure on his bladder, walked away. Now, he thought, they’ll be putting their preposterous arms around each other, looking into each other’s pitiful eyes, kissing each other’s pathetic cheeks, left and right. And then imperturbably they’ll go their senseless ways. Spooky! He had the feeling of having to lower his bottom jaw to let the accumulated saliva run out. He saw a child standing lost in thought; a bubble came out of its mouth and burst. He passed a man carrying a black attache case. You’d think he’d be ashamed! Keuschnig thought. When I see somebody like that, I could cross myself.—Yet he himself was carrying just such an attaché case, and instead of throwing it into the nearest trash can he heroically went on carrying it. Heroes of everyday life. He couldn’t get rid of the idiotic smile he had put on to ape people, and it was starting to itch. He didn’t scratch with his fingers but tried to relieve the itch by making even worse faces. Even the infants under the parasols, with their mashed-carrot-colored cheeks struck him as fakes. Even they, he thought, are only acting as if. The truth is that they’re absolutely fed up with their preposterous baby existence! When he saw an animal, he was amazed that it wasn’t doing its business at that particular moment. Once he thought: if anybody speaks to me now, I’ll crack his skull for him. If anyone so much as looked at him, Keuschnig said to him in his thoughts: Watch your step! (Nevertheless, he couldn’t see why no one spoke to him. When a Frenchman from the provinces asked him the way to the RUE DE L’ORIENT, he was grateful to be able to direct him, and his next few steps were winged.)

  To everything that crossed his path he wanted to say: Don’t show yourself again! And instantly whatever it was did show itself again, in another form but with the same loathsome substance. He didn’t catch sight of things; they showed themselves. He walked quickly for fear that someone would notice his ruthlessness. Yet when a woman with a conspicuously low-cut dress came toward him, he stared brazenly in an attempt to spy her nipples.—Everything seemed taken care of, as though in a game of puss-in-the-corner the last player had found a place and there was no further need for a supernumerary to be standing around. How boring he seemed to himself; how alone!

  The sweet familiar after-feeling in his member, which ordinarily stayed with him long after he had been with Beatrice, had soon left him. Now he looked only at the ground. A peach stone that someone had just thrown away lay damp on the sidewalk; looking at it, Keuschnig suddenly realized that it was summer, and this became strangely important. A good omen, he thought, and after that he was able to walk more slowly. Perhaps there would be more such signs. The plate-glass windows of a café that had closed for the summer were whitened on the inside … The wheels of a bicycle on top of a passing car flashed as they turned. The smell of shellfish came to him from the market stalls that had closed in the meantime, and he breathed deeply, as though that smell had power to heal.

  When at the foot of the hill he stepped out into the Place Blanche, there was suddenly so much space around him that he stopped still. “San D
iego.” Had he heard that or only thought it?—In either case, no sooner had SAN DIEGO entered his head than he clenched his fists and thought: Who said the world has already been discovered?

  In the next moment, while standing motionless on the Place Blanche, he wanted to leave Paris immediately. But then he realized that though a journey might at one time have made some difference, it wouldn’t any more. From this thing that had hit him, there was no possibility of flight. Besides, it hadn’t hit him—it had just happened. It had long been due. San Diego and his fist clenching—both meant he would stay in Paris and not give himself up for lost. I’ll show you yet! he thought.—Even so, the sound of a typewriter coming out of a travel bureau filled him with envy and yearning; the keys were being struck hesitantly—now one letter, now another—as though someone were typing the difficult name of some city beyond the sea. And then the click of a calculator—as though the waiting customer’s bill for the plane fare and his stay in the faraway city were being made out.

  A couple were standing on the sidewalk, both decrepit with age. The man rested his trembling head on the woman’s shoulder, not as a momentary gesture but because he couldn’t hold it up. With one hand the woman pressed his head against her shoulder, and thus inseparable they slowly crossed the square. Like man and wife, Keuschnig thought contemptuously, and yet for a moment he was mollified by an intimation of something else. “You’re not the world,” he said to himself, feeling strangely proud of the couple.—But when he stepped into a cab a moment later the usual dog in the seat beside the driver barked at him as if he shouldn’t have been allowed to get in, and at the old familiar sound of the diesel engine he experienced a murderous rage. Oh yes, now he was the world, and all at once his attempts to hush up the fact appeared to him in the form of an image: he had an apple out of which a bite had been taken, and kept trying to put it into a basket with others in such a way as to conceal the damage, but the apple kept rolling to one side, and the bitten part always ended on top. And that was the truth of it: already the driver was cranking down his window and shouting “Salaud!” at the traffic, already he was talking to him over his shoulder as to an accomplice. From now on, thought Keuschnig, I won’t answer anyone—I’ll only SPEAK SIDEWAYS. Whimper sideways. All at once he sympathized with the dog for letting his tongue dangle from the side of his mouth. What massive nausea—beyond the help of smelling salts! A minute of silence! he thought, just one minute of silence, please, in this eternal hubbub of absurdity! A tumult had sprung up on a street corner, and now everything around him was one great tumult; no end in sight—but the one thought in his head was the thought of an end.

  Suddenly he saw his face in the rear-view mirror. It was so distorted that at first he refused to recognize it. He wasn’t looking for comparisons, but several animals came to mind. No one with that face could express thoughts or feelings. He looked at himself again, but since he was now prepared, as he had been in the morning outside the bakery, he couldn’t find the same face, not even when he grimaced while searching for it. But it had happened: with that one unplanned glance he had lost his acceptance of his own appearance. What self-control Beatrice must have needed! Women are said to be less squeamish than men. In any case, he thought, a person with a face like that should keep quiet. With such a mug you’ve got to have your nerve with you even to carry on conversations with yourself. Inconceivable that he would ever again say amiably to himself: “Come on, old fellow.” On the other hand—and at this thought he sat up straight —with such a face I can afford to have feelings which up until now have come to me only in dreams!—and instantly he remembered the brand-new pleasure it had given him to pee on a woman in a dream. He had been upset when he woke up. That wasn’t me, he had thought. But such pleasure went with his newly discovered face; far from being unlike him, it was his very own self. He now understood that with this unmasked face nothing, nothing whatsoever, could be unlike him. “Not like me” had lost its validity as an argument. But by the same token he could now dispense with remorse. With such a face no excuses were possible. Keuschnig thought himself capable of anything, even a sex murder. At last he owned to himself that killing the old woman in his dream had been a sex murder.—Suddenly the cab driver’s dog began to growl at him, and Keuschnig was afraid of himself. Time to get back to work, he thought. Good old office.

  The afternoon had been going on and on, and now time became acute, like an organ one doesn’t notice until it stops functioning. All at once there was so much of it that, instead of just passing, it took on an existence of its own. Everybody was affected; now no one could take refuge in activity; and almost with a sense of liberation Keuschnig reflected that at last he wasn’t alone in this predicament. What had previously been a mere organ of universal unity became independent, became something more than its functioning, and from then on nothing functioned. The day seemed to have grown too long, time was now a hostile element that threatened a somnolent civilization with catastrophe. It was as though everyday time were no longer in force, and as though this condensed, hostile time were meant for a human being only in the sense that a trap is “meant” for someone, and as though even an animal would be unable to smell it out. All at once time began to pass amid the buildings as though governed by an extra-human system, in a dimension different from the course of the streets or the riverbank parapet or the motion of construction cranes, different from the whirling of pigeon feathers falling from the roofs or of the seed capsules gliding between motorcars. It seemed to Keuschnig that this merciless, elemental time crawling along under the tall luminous sky had expelled all life from the world, that every manifestation of human beings had become a meaningless interlude. Some children were hopping about on a dance floor that had been knocked together for some long-past fete, and a few ridiculous leaflets that no longer meant anything to anyone were skittering this way and that. As though the sky now partook of an alien system, it became too high for the high towers of civilization in the foreground of the picture, and against the compact, menacing background the human landscape degenerated into a junkyard. The deep blue with which a time grown plethoric weighed on the world was the essential—the scattered leaflets down below, in which only fear of life or death could beguile him (or anyone else!) to find the slightest meaning, were a secondary, minor factor. Keuschnig saw the sky arching over the Place de la Concorde as something incongruous and hostile, plunging its edges down at the Place. The street lamps on the Pont des Invalides glowed black before his eyes, as after long staring at the cloudless heavens—a memory of a past fete. Unable to confront the great open square—no, not now!—he left the cab before it reached the Esplanade des Invalides and ran—to what safety? Suddenly, as he ran, a warm raindrop fell from the clear, dark sky and landed on the back of his hand … When, in the rue Fabert, Keuschnig saw the brass plate inscribed “Austrian EMBASSY,” he was able to “laugh again,” and back in his office, the moment a sheet of clean white paper emerged from the black roller of his typewriter, he had the feeling that things were back to normal … Only once did he cower and hold his ears, his heart pounding deep in his body, as though outside, beyond the sheltering walls, something had erupted, against which the best decorated embassy was powerless. Heaven help those who are now defenseless, he thought, yet at the same time he hoped that this state of affairs would go on, because in his present, apocalyptic mood he had no personal feeling of himself, or at any rate so little as to believe he shared it with all others. But what if he were mistaken?—That, Keuschnig thought, would be the end of a possibility, even if the apparently universal situation outside me were only my personal situation.

  For some days Keuschnig had been working on a report for the Foreign Ministry, entitled “The Image of Austria in French Television,” and subtitled “Austria, a Studio Film.” Some television films based on stories by Arthur Schnitzler had given him the idea. The characters in these films had appeared only in bare interiors; the closest thing to the outside world was the inside of a hansom cab.
Keuschnig started his article by saying that the image of Austria put forward by these films was expressed in their sets. By this, he didn’t mean that typically Austrian objects figured in the sets; no, he meant that their very bareness seemed to express a view of Austria, that the characters moved in a setting that could have been anywhere. Austria was represented as a historyless no man’s land peopled by historyless Everymans, and to judge by these films, just that was specifically Austrian. When a character entered in a state of excitement, his exciting experience hadn’t occurred in any particular country but in the vestibule. Keuschnig now set out to prove that because the country never played a part and because the action was never inflected by so much as a passing glance at the landscape the characters seemed to RECITE their experiences (possibly after memorizing them in the vestibule)—MEMO-RIZ E D embraces, the MEMORIZED expressions of two lovers looking into each other’s eyes; MEMORIZED kisses—and that the films themselves … (now what exactly did he want to say?), that because the characters in these films .. (was it possible that he too wrote memorized sentences?) … were not really alive (what did that mean?), but … had only MEMORIZED WAYS OF SIMULATING LIFE … because, wrote Keuschnig, nothing can be experienced in or through a country whose only special characteristic is that it consists of a bare set … that consequently these films picture Austria as a country in which the only stories people could possibly tell were SERIALS, which they represented as the story of their own lives! (but in what country or under what system did people not tell each other mere serial stories as though relating their own experiences?)—and that therefore these films …