Moment of True Feeling

by Peter Handke

  At that point everything had really become a joke! Humpbacked and squinting he entered the PARENTS’ BEDROOM. With malignant sloppiness he dropped his trousers on a chair. Then he sat up in the bed and read the diner’s guides, pencil in hand, drawing circles around stars, crowns, and chef’s hats. The tiniest village at the end of the world was still on the map if it could boast a recommended restaurant. How many escape routes were open to him!—He tried to remember the past day and realized he had forgotten most of it. He began to feel proud that he was still alive. His head drooped and quickly he put out the light. He was asleep before his head touched the pillow.

  He awoke soon afterwards at the edge of a precipice, from a dream in which he was about to be murdered. He woke up because it occurred to him at the last moment that he himself was the murderer. He was the intended victim and he was the murderer, who was just coming into the house from the fog outside. Waking didn’t mend matters—the only difference was that his horror no longer expressed itself in objects and images. He had awoken stretched out, his arms straight at his sides, one foot on the other, sole on instep. His teeth were clenched, and his eyes had opened as quickly as the eyes of an awakening vampire. He lay speechless, incapable of moving, infected with the terror of death. Nothing would ever change. There was no possibility of flight, no salvation of any kind. His heart no longer seemed protected by ribs. It pounded as though it had nothing but skin over it.

  The room was so impenetrably dark that in his thoughts he groaned with hate, disgust, rage—though he didn’t utter a sound. Yet he used to think that here in a foreign country, in a different language, the fits of terror he had had all his life might take on a different meaning, that at least they would not be so utterly abysmal, that, chiefly because thus far he had not learned to speak the foreign language instinctively and in general lived much less instinctively in France than he had in Austria, he would no longer be so helplessly at their mercy as he had been in the land of his birth and childhood … As though these thoughts had given him back his mobility, he began to slap his bed just as in childhood he had slapped some object he had barked his shins on.

  Then he remembered with disgust that before putting out the light he had noticed some dried rings the water glass had left on his bedside table. He’d have to wipe them off first thing in the morning. He also thought of the dirty dishes that were still on the dining-room table. What abominable disorder the whole place was in, what a hopeless mess! That half-full can of corn in the icebox, for instance, that should have been emptied into a bowl. The phonograph records that had not been put back into their sleeves … And in the bathroom, all that hair in the brush! You’d have to be mad to conceive of a future under such conditions!

  He tried to fall asleep. Maybe something new would turn up while he slept. I must become a new man! he repeated, and every muscle in his body tensed. That’s how I used to pray, he thought with surprise; my prayer consisted in silently wishing for something, with tense muscles.—He went to the window and opened the curtains.

  Back in bed, Keuschnig felt that he had finally earned the right to be tired. On one of the upper floors of the house a child coughed, a long cough from deep in the chest. It must have hurt, for the child cried a little, perhaps in its sleep, and panted heavily. Keuschnig pulled up his legs and laid his hands over his face. He had never spoken to anyone in the house except the concierge couple; he didn’t even know the other occupants by sight. The clock of the Auteuil church struck the hour. The child coughed again, then called out several times for its mother. Keuschnig noticed that without meaning to he had been counting all along. He knew how often the child had coughed, what hour the clock in the belfry had struck, how often the child had called out

  Still curious, he fell asleep.

  His next dream was about his mother, who had been coming more and more alive in his dreams. He danced with her, rather close but side by side, avoiding frontal contact. He woke up mulling over the words “guest bed,” “north German area,” “visiting hours,” “quick trip,” “Austria cellar,” “stomach timetable,” “darling daughter,” “ginkgo tree”—all of which had been spoken that evening. Then, at the recollection of Stefanie asking in a Chinese restaurant “How’s your chop suey?”, he had to turn over on the other side to keep from vomiting. Next a dead crow fell from the winter sky and landed on a bear. Meanwhile, a big pot of jellied calves’ feet was cooking in the kitchen. Then on a steep slope he came across a dead woman, lying unburied, with black clotted blood in her open mouth, and strewed sand over her. Next he was on a stage and couldn’t remember his part, though he himself had written the play. He woke up and saw a satellite blinking in the night-gray sky as it passed the window. It’s all over, he thought, I don’t love anyone any more. Next he was in someone else’s apartment; he had forgotten to pull the chain after taking a shit, and someone else was already on his way to the toilet. Suddenly everyone was against him. All alone he was running across a quiet Alpine plateau traversed by racing cloud shadows, but they hadn’t yet started shooting at him. War had broken out again, and the last bus drove away with him, while his child was left standing in the street. When he woke up, he was drooling with fear. Next he was riding on top of a very fat woman and his pubic hair was stained with her menstrual blood. Unable to go home because he’d been involved in a million-dollar holdup, he was starting a new life with a false passport and altered fingerprints. This dream moved so slowly that he mistook it for reality. With a strange joy he found out that his case wasn’t covered by the statute of limitations and that he would have to go on living without identity for the rest of his life. An important night, he thought in a half sleep. He was good and sick of empty, incoherent awakeness. Please, one last dream, maybe it will be my salvation!—While in the apartment above him the radio was already blaring wake-up music, Keuschnig in a colorful morning dream was walking through a sunny valley, so immense, so paradisaically alive that he ached with delight. All the houses were inns; in front of them stood wooden tables and benches in softly shimmering grass, the air was balmy—at last he had found his element. Then the calves’ feet were overturned in the kitchen. A peal of thunder, and Keuschnig, forsaken by all his dreams, awoke for good under a dark sky, and he was nothing but a small, contemptible evildoer, who had instantly lost the meaning of his dreams.—So began the day on which his wife left him, on which his child was lost, on which he wanted to stop living, and on which some things nevertheless changed in the end.

  Since there was scarcely any interval between the lightning and the thunder, Keuschnig found no time to think about his dreams. For a while the morning storm gave him a feeling of home—a gloomy summer morning in the country. In the back garden of the next-door apartment a man and a woman were talking calmly and with long pauses, as though it were already evening! Or as if they were blind, Keuschnig thought.—All over the house, people were running to close windows they had just opened. Record players and radios were turned off. It began to rain, but the sound didn’t soothe him. The rain wasn’t for him; it was for other people in this foreign country. The sky wasn’t so dark any more, and that sent a disagreeable chill through him. Because he was unable to go on, his disgust, his exasperation suddenly struck him as LAZINESS, and because his laziness made him feel guilty, his nausea became worse than ever, but he was no longer convinced, as he had been, that it was justified. This guilty conscience over my listlessness, he asked himself—does it stem from my ancestry, which says: Work hard, then nothing can go wrong? Or from religion? Enough of that! His brain seemed physically to reject all attempts at explanation.

  THINGS, at least, were comforting that morning: the hot water of the shower on his belly, he wished he could stay under it forever; the soft towel, in which he suddenly smelled the vinegar his hair had been rinsed in years before in another country. He decided not to shave. That was a decision and it relieved him. Then he shaved after all and strode through the apartment, proud of this second decision.

  In
one of the front rooms he found Stefanie, dressed in a gray traveling suit. She was sitting at a marble-topped desk, writing something in block letters. “I’m only waiting for the storm to pass,” she said. “Then I want you to call me a taxi.” She looked at him and said: “It doesn’t really matter—I’m happy, and at the same time I could kill myself, or I could just sit down and listen to records. I only feel sorry because of the child.” Her face, thought Keuschnig, looks as if she’d slept in her misery. And he also thought: She could have washed the dishes first. Horrified by her fixed animal eyes, her enlarged black nostrils, he couldn’t get a word out. “Are you sick?” she asked, as though there were a hope and she would be able to help him if at least he would say he was sick. But Keuschnig was silent. Finding nothing to say, he caught himself thinking: Maybe I should buy her a present; but what? “Call the taxi now,” she said. The phone number was another one of those THINGS he found comforting that day. The same digit—or almost—repeated over and over. Suddenly as he was listening to Eine kleine Nachtmusik and waiting for the taxi company’s switchboard to answer, Stefanie fell down—without putting out her hands to cushion the fall. He bent over her and slapped her face. As far as he was concerned, she might just as well be dead. “In five minutes,” said the operator. He couldn’t help laughing. Stefanie lay still and he, so insensible he could hardly breathe, lifted her up. He didn’t want her to go, though her presence got on his nerves.—As she was getting into the taxi, he wanted to say: I hope you come back. But the wrong words came out, and in the intended tone he said: “I hope you die.”—The sun was shining again. The sky was blue, the street almost dry. Only the tops of the cars coming from the still overcast north glistened with trembling drops of water. A broad luminous rainbow arched over the Bois de Boulogne. At a time like this, he thought, something might begin for someone else.

  Keuschnig went to the desk and read the note Stefanie had written: “Don’t expect me to supply you with the meaning of your life.”—With a sense of humiliation he thought: She beat me to it. Now I can’t say that to her.—All at once he felt like a character in a story told long ago. “That morning he woke up earlier than usual. Even the twittering of the birds still had a sleepy sound to it. A hot day was in the offing …” That was how stories about last days began. The rainbow was still there, but now he wished it away. He went down the long corridor to the child’s room with the ridiculous feeling that his handkerchief was in the wrong pocket, the left instead of the right. How stolidly he continued to exist!

  Helplessly he watched the sleeping child. He sniffed at her. She turned over. Finally she woke up with a sigh, but didn’t notice him. She only cried out: “I want a coconut,” and dropped off to sleep again. She woke up with a WISH ! he thought. She opened her eyes again, and with her first glance looked far out the window. He made himself noticeable and she looked at him without surprise. “A snow-white cloud has just flown by,” she said. He looked with dismay at the chocolate smudges on her sheet—would he have to change her bedding on top of everything else? Unthinkable. When she wanted to say something, he bent over expressly to show he was paying attention, but that only made him more inattentive than ever. Absently he held her close. “Don’t forget me,” he said senselessly. “Sometimes I forget you,” she replied. In leaving the room he looked at himself in the mirror.

  Before lighting the gas in the kitchen to warm the milk, he had one of his idées fixes: they were in the desert, and the match he was now striking was the last. Would it burn? When the match caught fire, he was very much relieved. Then another hallucination: Martial law had been declared, it would be impossible to go shopping in the foreseeable future. Anxiously he looked into the icebox, which was almost empty. He phoned the ambassador and said he couldn’t go to work because the child was sick. That’s asking for bad luck, he thought, and corrected himself: No, not really sick, he just had to take her to the dispensary for her inoculations.—What if she comes down with something because of my lie? he thought after hanging up, and looked her over. She lay in bed yawning, and he took that as a good sign. On the other hand, the overturned toy pail in her room was a warning. He carefully set it straight. Then, rummaging in his trouser pocket, he found two month-old tickets to the marionette theater in the Luxembourg Gardens, and for a few moments felt perfectly safe. A little later he caught himself folding a white sheet in the doorway of the child’s room. Alarmed, he took the sheet somewhere else … The air had gone out of a balloon during the night! He quickly blew it up again. And surely it was no accident that the sausage the child was eating in bed was called mortadella! He took it away from her and gave her a piece of garlic sausage instead … He himself ate a pear, core, stem, and all, as only a carefree man could have done—that restored the balance, didn’t it? And to counter the next bad sign in advance, he picked up a book from the floor and placed it accurately in the bookcase.—Later, when he squeezed a toothpaste tube he had thought empty and something came out, he was moved to see how THINGS were coming to his help.

  He sat down in the garden, which was now sunny again, and began to shine all the shoes he could lay his hands on. If only he would never run out of shoes! The child looked on in silence, and he managed not to think of anything. When he did think of something, his thoughts were like a soothing half sleep … The sun had warmed the insides of his shoes, and he felt a spurt of happiness when he stepped into them. But what if his sense of security were only a passing mood? The thought jolted him and spoiled his good humor.

  He wandered around the apartment, picked things up with the intention of putting them away and after a while put them back where he had found them. He would take a few steps, stop, and turn about, and it suddenly occurred to him that in his perplexity and disgruntlement he was doing a kind of dance.—He couldn’t pass a mirror without looking at himself. He would turn away from one mirror in disgust and look at himself in another. I’m really dancing! he thought. This idea, at least, made it possible for him to move through the somber rooms from end to end of the apartment.

  He wanted to watch the train as it passed the house on its way to the Gare Saint-Lazare, where you could change and be at the seaside in two hours … He waited at an open window, and at length a train left the Auteuil station. The light bulbs in the cars flickered as the train passed over the switches. He saw the broad yellow stripes on the cars and the blue sparks under the wheels as something very personal, something exclusively meant for him … The passengers sat propped on their elbows, their faces benignly calm and relaxed, as though they couldn’t conceivably think any evil, not at least for the first hundred yards after the train left the station …

  He wanted to go out. But Agnes wanted to stay home. He tried to dress her. When she resisted, he came very close to forcing her into her clothes. He punched his head so hard the tears came to his eyes. Then he left the room and tore up paper. He felt as if he were going to bash his head against the wall—without conviction!

  Again he started wandering around. Agnes sat painting watercolors, at the same time eating a piece of cake and smacking her lips. Suddenly he saw himself throw a knife at her. He hurried over and touched her. She pushed him away, not out of hostility, but because he was interfering with what she was doing. He wanted to throw the dirty paint water in her face. If at least he could tell her his story about yesterday, how he had had only to speak and the world obeyed. He tried, but he was so far away, so hopelessly absent, that he garbled every sentence. She laughed at his mistakes and corrected him. “Go away!” she said. Suddenly he was afraid of killing her with a blow of his fist. He went away, far away, and made faces at himself. It seemed to him that with the mere thought of striking Agnes he had forever forfeited the right to be with her for so much as a second. The mortar on the walls looked oozy; in another minute it would fall to the floor in cakes. Even in the toilet, where he always had felt blessed relief the moment he had pushed the bolt, he didn’t feel safe any more. He sat there awhile, too apathetic to squeeze out the sh
it; then he went somewhere else and stood around, at a loss for anything to do. He thought of what Stefanie had once said when he had asked her if she wouldn’t like to go to London for a few days: “I have no desire to SIT in London all by myself.” And here I sit, he thought, like a woman SITTING in a hotel room in a strange city. The child prevents me from thinking!—But maybe, through the child, I could learn a different way of thinking.—He felt alone in a disagreeable way. In a suddenly remembered image, he saw a furrow that had just been plowed and the writhing parts of a white grub that the plow had cut in two. For a little while he walked in a circle with his head bowed, round and round. The child had such reasonable wishes: that he should make her a paper airplane—that he should simply PLAY with her. But it was impossible for him to play now, to satisfy her reasonable wishes. She was taking everything he had thrown into the trash basket out again … He phoned for the time and heard the revoltingly brutal voice of a man, whom he pictured fat and misanthropic in an armchair, announcing the hour. Again he walked in a circle, his heart growing heavier and heavier. From time to time he shouted at the child to leave him alone. If he could only kick someone! But who? He walked, saw, breathed, heard—the worst of it was that he also lived!

  While roaming from place to place he absently read the print on some circular that was lying around. When at the end of it he sighted the words “Yours very truly,” he felt they were addressed to him personally, and that encouraged him. Avidly he reread the whole circular. “We congratulate you—you have made a good purchase.” He found a picture postcard he had received from a vacationing woman friend: “I dreamed of you last night and I am thinking of you now.” He read all the letters that had come in the last few days. How tender they were, how wistful—as though people not only slept longer and had sweeter dreams during their summer vacations but took their dreams more seriously.—Still, it depressed him to recognize the handwriting on an envelope. He longed for a letter from someone he didn’t know.