Moment of True Feeling

by Peter Handke

  A woman with a full shopping bag walked purposefully across the Carré. Hey you, Keuschnig thought, look at me! Nobody wants to look at me … In a little while, home in her hideous kitchen, she wouldn’t shrink back from pouring nauseatingly golden-yellow oil into a pre-warmed frying pan. That sizzling, so preposterous you want to hold your ears, as she puts a grotesque piece of meat into the pan … And then, as sure as death and taxes, the desolately homelike smell she would send out through the open window at the unoffending passers-by! Keuschnig imagined how, with one hand in a flower-patterned oven glove, she would inevitably go out to her mate, who, aperitif glass in hand, would inevitably be waiting for her in the LIVING ROOM (or LIBRARY), and imperturbably inform him that dinner was ready. (Possibly she would only knock at the door of his STUDY, two shorts, one long.) The husband would get the inevitable corkscrew … And with all that, Keuschnig thought, she was so shamelessly sure of herself, when you’d have expected such concentrated inevitability to make her sink straight into the earth! Suddenly he had a vision of things happening simultaneously all over Paris: in Saint-Germain-des-Près (TOURIST QUARTER) pizzas were being gouged and tugged about and hungry tourists were going from restaurant to restaurant reading menus, unable to make up their minds; in Ménilmontant (WORKING-CLASS QUARTER) workers were drinking their after-work beer at the Rendez-vous des Chauffeurs, an authentic WORKERS’ BISTRO, where today as usual quite a few intellectuals had dropped in; in Belleville (AFRICAN QUARTER) groups of blacks, some in dashikis, all holding beer cans, were standing silent on the sidewalk; in Auteuil (POSH QUARTER) waiters in leather-upholstered PUBS were asking sons and daughters of the upper bourgeoisie whether they wished FRENCH or FOREIGN beer; and all over town idle pinball machines gleamed, while those in use rattled and clicked, the plane trees and chestnut trees on the boulevards murmured, the black coupling pipes between Métro cars wriggled when the train was in motion, lovers looked into each other’s eyes, HAMBURGERS rested on soggy slices of onion in those WIMPY snack bars that were still left—and all that, thought Keuschnig—as he stared with burning eyes into the same forever unchanging light—year in year out with the same inexorability, predictability, mortal tedium, and deadly exclusivity with which this possibly perfectly nice woman, for instance, would now prepare an avocado vinaigrette for dinner.

  He didn’t want to be anywhere, he wanted nothing more. He wanted to abolish everything! “I don’t believe in God!” he said, meaning nothing. (Those words had often popped out of him in the past.)

  Night was falling and at last Keuschnig was alone. He stretched his legs, put both arms over the back of the bench, and thought: How gloriously alone I am! And really bared his teeth. One last thought: I not only have to see everything at once, now I want to. Suddenly the wind grew stronger, and Keuschnig lost himself …

  After a while he noticed that for the first time that day there was perfect silence in his head. It was as though he had been having to talk all day, without stopping for breath. Now he only listened. The grass at the edge of the playground was flattened … He listened. The wind died down. When it rose again and the trees set up a murmur, Keuschnig was aware of a new, calm life feeling. The grass stood erect and trembled. Behind the trees, on the Champs-Elysees, an unbroken procession of cars passed; now and then the sound of a horn, or a rattling and roaring when a motorcycle overtook a car. He had thought himself away, yet he was present.

  Then he had an experience—and while still taking it in, he hoped he would never forget it. In the sand at his feet he saw three things: a chestnut leaf; a piece of a pocket mirror; a child’s barrette. They had been lying there the whole time, but then suddenly they came together and became miraculous objects. “Who said the world has already been discovered?” It had been discovered only in respect to the mystifications some people used to defend their certainties from others, and surely there were no longer any pseudomysteries—such as the mystery of Holy Communion or the mystery of the universe—to blackmail him with. All the sublime mysteries, no differently from the Mystery of the Black Spider or the Mystery of the Chinese Scarf, were man-made, designed to intimidate people. But these wishing objects on the ground in front of him did not intimidate him. They put him in so confident a mood that he couldn’t sit still. He scraped his heels over the ground and laughed … I haven’t discovered a personal mystery in them, addressed to myself; what I’ve discovered is the IDEA of a mystery valid for all! “What names cannot accomplish as CONCEPTS, they do as IDEAS.” Where had he read that? He needed no mysteries, what he needed was the IDEA of a mystery—and if only he had the idea of a mystery, there would be no need to hide his fear of death behind a lot of pseudomysteries! At this thought Keuschnig leaped for joy. Suddenly he felt so free that he didn’t want to be alone any more. He would go up to someone and say: “You needn’t have any secrets from me!” At the encouraging sight of those three miraculous objects in the sand, he felt a helpless affection for everyone, but he had no desire to be cured of it, because it now seemed perfectly sensible. I have a future! he thought triumphantly. The chestnut leaf, the fragment of mirror, and the barrette seemed to move still closer together—and with them all other things came together … until there was nothing else. Magical proximity! “I can change!” he said aloud.—He stamped his foot, but there was no ghost. He looked around, but no longer saw an adversary. Since there was no need to wish anything more from the three objects, he scraped sand over them. He thought of keeping the chestnut leaf. To remember by? There was no need to remember: he threw the leaf away. Then he took a bite of his bread. Now I can let myself be hungry, he thought as he was leaving, because I’ve finally had an IDEA. He felt all-powerful again, but no more powerful than anyone else.

  What a strange day it was! He couldn’t walk, he was running again. He should have been home at nine. He wouldn’t make it on time, ahead of the Austrian writer, unless he took a cab. But then he thought: I’ve got to experience something more, and stopped in front of the chestnut tree, suddenly taking a great liking to this tree with the still-bright strip of sky behind it. I’ve earned the right to look at it, he thought, and cast a long look at its flapping leaves.—He would experience more in a bus than in a cab. So he went over to the Avenue Gabriel and took the 52 bus, which runs from the Opera to the Porte d’Auteuil.

  On the bus he thought: Maybe, if I feel as though I hadn’t experienced anything in a long time, not until last night at least, it’s because I had decided in advance what an experience is. As in a travel prospectus, a mere object stood for experience. According to the prospectus, “the campfire will be an experience”—and to my mind the water flowing in the gutter, the soft-smooth surface of the shoe polish in a new can, a freshly made bed, an elderly person who had preserved his curiosity represented experience.—I must get over needing guarantees of experience, he thought.

  In the bus he was alone with a North African worker. The North African was drunk. The bus was going fast, because there was no one waiting at most of the stops. When the driver took the sharp turn into the Avenue Friedland without slowing down, the man vomited in the aisle. The driver pulled up at the curb and without a word opened the door. The drunk spoke loudly in his own language, but without turning toward the driver. Keuschnig pretended to be looking out of the window. Not one of the three in the bus looked at either of the others. The North African began to shout. The driver turned off the motor. It’s too late to say anything now, Keuschnig thought. Suddenly he noticed that the drunk was looking at him and speaking to him. He looked back blandly at him as if nothing were wrong. The North African fell silent and got out. The bus drove on. The driver didn’t say a word, he seemed to need no backing up. When Keuschnig looked at the splattered vomit on the floor, glistening in the harsh white overhead light, he felt it was meant for him.—At the next stop he left the bus, long before Auteuil. In getting out, he said to the driver: “Monsieur, vous n’êtes pas gentil,” but the words didn’t come out right.

  The drunk had vani
shed. By then Keuschnig only felt sorry for him; before, he had also regarded him as a nuisance. If he hadn’t been abusive, I’d have helped him, he thought. But because he was angry and stood up for himself, I stopped feeling sorry for him. How could I be so unreasonable? Was I only sorry for myself as I used to be—did I, at the sight of that humiliated man, remember the child who let himself be humiliated without a murmur?—He had witnessed a humiliation; as a witness he felt that he himself had been surprised in a humiliating situation. Keuschnig fled. He ran down the steps of the nearest Métro station, changed at TROCADÉRO, and then at last, bound for home on good old Line 9, he felt free from persecution.

  Without expressly thinking of it, he felt the varying distances between stations in his whole body. As usual, the distance between RUE DE LA POMPE and MUETTE seemed so long that he was surprised at MUETTE not to be a station farther on; and today as usual, between JASMIN and MICHEL-ANGE-AUTEUIL, he automatically went to the door too soon, though the train was only slowing down for a curve.—When at last the letters MICHEL-ANGE-AUTEUIL appeared white on blue, they struck him as the goal of a long arduous journey.—A good many things were as usual. But he wasn’t thinking of that any more, he only sensed it in a remote compartment of his mind. As though something depended on it, he tried, in throwing away his used ticket, to make sure it fell into the waste bin. It missed … Already at the gate, he retraced his steps, picked up the ticket, and kept tossing it until it landed in the bin.

  By then he was almost home. He took a detour across the Place Jean-Lorrain, where a market was held three days a week. The square was deserted. In the middle there was a small fountain, from the top of which a jet of water flowed into a little basin. The jet was so round, so clear, that Keuschnig put his hand in to break its flow. The leaves of plane trees lay on the asphalt and around their edges the otherwise dry ground was still moist. It was getting dark. The sky, which had kept some of its light, was reflected only in the oily water that had settled in the holes from which the market stanchions had been removed. A cyclist with purring generator turned into a side street. Keuschnig saw the greatly enlarged shadows of coats on the curtain of a restaurant window. The water in the gutter had flowed off, and here and there a sparrow was drinking from the little puddles that remained. Suddenly Keuschnig remembered a bird which had been flying back and forth in a Métro entrance earlier that day. He raised his eyes and saw the searchlights from the far-off Arc de Triomphe playing through the now dark sky. Then with downcast eyes he walked past the house fronts which concierges had scrubbed almost white but which more dogs would piss on, day in day out.

  Keuschnig stopped at the door to his house, feeling sick to his stomach because he didn’t know how to act or in what order he should do things. It was beyond him how he had found his way home every day, why he hadn’t ever vanished on the way. Why today, while still in the Métro, had he held his door key in anticipation? Before going in, he thought, I must mentally rehearse the things I’ll have to do. First, in any event, deposit his attaché case in the hallway. Then it was to be hoped (rather than feared as in the fairy tale) that the child would be first to cross his path and that he’d be able to stay with her awhile as a pretext. If the child didn’t appear (because she had already gone to bed) he would quickly put on an appropriate face and, avoiding superfluous motion—like the flower girl—go in to the people.—He had no feeling of anticipation, he wasn’t looking forward to seeing any of them. The closer he came, the less he felt in common with them. While turning the key, at first purposely in the wrong direction, and clearing his throat, he felt as if he were approaching a stone wall incised with ancient and now illegible hieroglyphics. In a moment he would hear the question: “How are you?” and wouldn’t even be entitled to punch the asker. He moved his chin from side to side, relaxed his muscles, and put on an anticipatory smile, in order to seem, if only deceptively, like himself.

  The distances in the apartment were so great that before he got to the salon he fell out of his role. His face went blank, and he had to work up a smile again. When he tried to shake hands with the writer’s girl friend, he missed his aim and caught only her little finger, which he shook. He missed again when his wife proffered first one cheek, then the other, as she had seen Frenchwomen do. Why was she wearing that blouse with a necktie of the same material again? Why was she wearing that skirt with the slit on the side? Simultaneously with these thoughts, he asked: “Where’s Agnes?” “She wanted to wait for you,” said Stefanie. “But she got so tired waiting …” “I know,” said Keuschnig, who couldn’t bear to hear her finish a sentence when he knew the end in advance. Involuntarily, he turned the loaf of bread in his hand, revealing the place where he had bitten into it. The writer took out a notebook, wrote something, and smirked. Why was Stefanie sitting in her hostess attitude, hand to cheek, and elbow resting on the palm of her other hand? “I’ll go and see if she’s still awake,” said Keuschnig, eager to turn his telltale face away from the writer. “But don’t wake her if she …” He interrupted Stefanie by bending down over her blouse as if he had seen a thread on it. Why was she always talking needlessly?

  The child was still singing in her room. Keuschnig managed to go in without her noticing. What am I doing here? he thought absently. By going to the child’s room he was asserting something that had ceased to be true. I’ve got to think about her, so as to feel something about her again. —Agnes’s singing grew louder, she was beginning to shout. Then she stopped singing and only experimented with lip noises. So much peace spread through the dark room from the bed that Keuschnig was able to crouch down. Once or twice the child kicked. Then at last she fell asleep, but it was only after a long sigh that her deep sleep began. Keuschnig stood up, conscious of being permeated by a sadness he had never before experienced. His sadness dispelled his fear of the people outside and he looked forward to being with them again. He would sit there and pay attention and be able to look into their faces. “She fell asleep so peacefully she’s sure to sleep until morning,” he said, delighted to be saying something superfluous himself. It was like after a patched-up quarrel, when the quarrelers confine themselves almost entirely to saying the most obvious things, wishing only to show that they’re on speaking terms again. “What a wind that was today!” he said with conviction, and when the writer’s girl friend replied: “It demolished my hairdo,” universal trust seemed to have been re-established. He didn’t mind spreading his napkin over his knees, and he was touched when Stefanie asked: “Something aperitivish?” To respond with “So do I” to everything that was said—that was harmony.—Meanwhile, the writer was still taking notes. “Are you from the police?” Keuschnig asked.

  The writer was very fat and a little older than Keuschnig. Though not really clumsy, he seemed to wreck everything he touched. In lighting a match, for instance, he would crush the whole matchbox … Apparently thinking he deserved compensation for putting his notebook away, he began to talk about himself: “I haven’t anything in particular to tell you,” he said. “I’ve lost my curiosity about people. I used to be so curious that if someone said to me: ‘You’re a writer, aren’t you? Could you write about me?’ I’d think: ‘Why not?’ Today if someone even says: ‘My mother played the piano … ’ it turns my stomach. The more I realize how much I have in common with everyone, the less solidarity I feel with anyone. When I hear someone singing the praises of solidarity, I stick my fingers down my throat. Once on the stairs leading to the toilets a woman started telling me about herself. I wanted to ask her: How with that little face of yours can you presume to speak in the first person singular? On the street, when I look at the people coming in the opposite direction, I think: What a lot of biographies—and all equally boring! Sometimes I feel like asking the woman at the newspaper stand about her background—but only in derision. Once at the bar of a café a woman was telephoning in rather a loud voice. I held my hands over my ears because I wanted no part in her story. Or think of the fun we used to have listening to con
versations at the tables around us. Oh, how sick I am of eavesdropping now! I see a column of cars and I think: Never again will these people interest me. Yesterday I was in Neuilly, at the house of an industrialist. His wife said: ‘I love to observe people, their hands for instance.’ And then after a while she said: ‘My little Portuguese pearl chooses to be in a bad humor today. I feel I’m entitled to harmony in my surroundings; after all, I don’t let people see how I’m feeling.’—I could hardly bear it. Good Lord, I thought, now she’s going to let her hair down. This morning I saw a death notice; it was somebody I didn’t even know, but instantly I thought: Ha, dead at last, the swine. Once when I was visiting someone, he said: ‘It’s so dusty here.’ It flashed through my mind that my place was a lot dustier, but I didn’t mention it, because I didn’t want to comfort him.” (He interrupted himself and said on a note of surprise: “I enjoyed that tomato.”) “I never want to observe anyone again,” he went on. “Not long ago, when I was looking at the people on the street, I said to myself: Maybe I should see them at work or at home in their apartments. But then I realized that there they would be even more predictable than on the street … Someone came to see me. He wanted to tell me his troubles, but I said I’d rather watch the football game on TV. I met a beautiful woman—another one of those, I thought. When I nevertheless catch myself observing somebody out of old habit, I suddenly think: But what about myself? I have a horror of looking to right or left; there’s always something waiting to be looked at: somebody else with a sweater tied around his neck, charcoal smoke pouring out of somebody else’s front garden. Once I had an appointment with somebody and decided to give him my full attention—but then when I had him in front of me, I thought: What for? And I stood there looking disgustedly at his tiresome face … I keep wondering how people can see images in the stars. I am incapable of grouping stars into constellations. The same with phenomena. I have no idea how to CONSTELLATE them, how to group them and find meaning in them. Have you ever noticed how often certain philosophers use the word ‘reconcile,’ ‘secure,’ ‘rescue’? CONCEPTS are RECONCILED, PHENOMENA are RESCUED. And what are they rescued by? By CONCEPTS. And ultimately the phenomena that have been rescued by concepts are secured in IDEAS. I admit that I have some acquaintance with ideas, but I don’t feel secure in them. I don’t despise ideas, but I do despise the people who feel secure in them—mostly because they are safe from me. Do you feel the same way, Gregor? Do you ever wake up and find you’ve lost the connection?” “No,” said Keuschnig instantly. “Every single day I’m happy to be alive, and more curious than ever. I’d have been glad to say ‘Yes, I feel the same way,’ because I know you depend on it. But I cannot afford to look on what I am doing as absurd.” “It’s a funny thing,” said the writer, pouring his glass so full that the red wine ran down over the tablecloth. “My feelings are really hurt when someone doesn’t feel exactly the same as I do. I feel kinship only with people who see no real meaning in what they are doing. I’ve met a good many people like that recently and supported them in their attitude. I had hopes for you when I included you in my survey. Isn’t there any way I can get at you?” “I almost fell for your game,” said Keuschnig, “but then I noticed that while you were complaining so exhaustively you were watching me closely, I might even say slyly. I know all about that from the child: she can be crying for all she’s worth and at the same time observe every detail of my face without batting an eyelash. Besides, how can you expect me to believe you’re not curious when you take notes as you were doing just now?” “I didn’t put down anything about you,” said the writer. “It just happened to cross my mind that my only experience today was the con-sommé madrilène I had for lunch. For the moment you can feel safe from me.” “Maybe I’ll change places with you sometime,” said Keuschnig. “It must give you a sense of triumph to be able to complain the way you do in the presence of others.” “Mostly it makes the others feel better,” said the writer.—At that moment Stefanie asked him: “What sign are you?” and everyone burst out laughing except Françoise, the woman who had come with the writer. .—The writer laughed so hard the snot popped out of his nose.