Moment of True Feeling

by Peter Handke

  He washed the night’s dishes, ironed a few handkerchiefs, and sewed a snap on one of Agnes’s dresses. He was very pleased with himself when he had finished, and kept going back to look at his handiwork. He thought of Stefanie, who had spent most of her life either at home with her parents or at a girls’ boarding school, and how grateful she had been when they went to a restaurant together and she didn’t have to eat everything on her plate. The way she’d looked at him—on the verge of tears …

  He played cheerful, whistling and humming for fear that too much quiet would upset Agnes in the next room. “Stop it!” she cried. What could he do to amuse her? Once, when he bumped into something, he exaggerated the pain and shrieked, in the hope of relieving the monotony. Then he asked “Do you want an apple?” in a tone suggesting that the apple was THE IDEA. Before washing the apple, he made an extra trip to show it to her. That was a way of communicating with her, he couldn’t think of any other. “Look how red it is!” he cried, affecting surprise in the hope that she would be surprised. The redness of the apple was bound to teach her something that he himself could not. He was terrified that she would ask him: “What should I do now?”—because he would have nothing whatever to suggest.

  He decided to go to the kitchen. On the way, it suddenly seemed important to look up a certain restaurant. But instead he searched the guides in vain for another restaurant, on the seaside, where he had once been served a pâté maison with sand in it. He resumed his trek to the kitchen, but turned back because there was still an ash tray that needed emptying in the dining room. Then he remembered all the unmade beds and, still holding the full ash tray, went to make them. But first he wanted to put out the light in the bathroom. On the way he saw a newspaper and stopped to read it … Then at last he went to the kitchen and turned on the water without knowing why; after a while he turned it off again.

  In his benumbed state of mind he hoped for a sign, and when he threw the apple core into an empty tin pail and hit the inner wall, there was indeed something menacing in the sound. Quickly he threw the core again, making sure it hit the bottom of the pail, which did not resound. A shirt was slowly slipping off a clothes hanger, and he couldn’t stop it in time! To compensate, he quickly smoothed out the creases in one of the child’s drawings and straightened a pair of shoes, one of which had been resting alarmingly on the other. The door to the storeroom was open a crack; he ran and closed it, thinking: I’ll laugh about this later on.—He went out into the garden and the soft summer breeze soon relieved his oppression. Then a child screamed pitifully on one of the upper floors, and at the same time the clock in the church steeple struck—and again irresistible terror assailed his ears. A chill ran through him. He rushed into the house and phoned Beatrice. “I’m coming over right away.” “As you like,” she answered, and waited before hanging up, almost as though expecting him to ask: Is it all right with you?—But already he was ruthlessly on the way to the door with Agnes.

  He locked all three locks from outside, each time turning the key twice, as though to gain time in opening them again when he came home. In the shade of a plane tree beside the railroad cut the concierge and his wife, who had little to do in the house during the summer months when most of the tenants were away, were sitting on a bench that had been painted a light color. They were very old. The husband had his arm around his wife, who was knitting. A ball of wool lay beside her on the bench, and at his feet there was a bird cage with quite a few canaries hopping around in it. They’ll be able to testify that they saw me here in the late forenoon of such and such a day, thought Keuschnig involuntarily, and called out a greeting to them from across the boulevard—as though he would soon need witnesses in his favor. And with the child, he also struck himself as less conspicuous. Oh, to achieve blissful innocence with her help! he thought suddenly.—In the corner restaurant the tables were already spread with white tablecloths and set for lunch, and out in front the patron was walking up and down with his dog. Him, too, Keuschnig greeted distinctly; if the worst came to the worst, the man would testify in his favor. On the restaurant window he caught sight of a handwritten sign he hadn’t seen the night before, to the effect that “the house” no longer accepted checks. He had never paid with a check at this restaurant and now for the first time he felt a bond with the patron, for he was an honest customer and not “one of those.” I need witnesses, he thought, and wanted to be with Beatrice right away. At last the flashing, swift-flowing water in the gutter was having its old effect.

  A taxi-ride in pleasant inattentiveness; no other feeling than that of being driven through deserted summery streets. Absently backing into the elevator with the child, who was speechless with curiosity; guilelessly tugging the bellpull, without a thought of preparing his face; then standing with his back to the opening door like a constant visitor, as though it couldn’t possibly be anyone else.

  “Oh, it’s you,” said Beatrice. She was very friendly to Agnes and took her to play with her own two children in their room. As though to show that he had changed and was willing to have things done for him, he asked her to get him a drink. “You know where the bottles are,” she said. Still exhilarated by the sensation of riding, he went to the kitchen, and on the table saw the cup Beatrice had drunk her tea out of that morning. She sat there alone, he thought, and all at once it seemed to him that he understood her bitterness. He hurried back to her, threw his arms around her, and said sanctimoniously: “I love you.” She looked at him in surprise and said: “Go and wash. You look so dirty.” He went whistling to the bathroom and washed his face. He wouldn’t let anything discourage him. But at the sight of all the tubes, the hand cream, the foot cream, the toothpaste, so neatly squeezed from the bottom up, he was struck with the certainty that he was now irrevocably excluded. Far, far away the three children were imitating the voices of the birds outside.

  He sat down across from Beatrice. For a long while she looked at him, but asked no questions. Soon she would begin to think of something entirely different, and it would be all over between them. Suddenly everything hung in the balance; one more wordless moment and he would be an importunate stranger for her. Already a long breath escaped her in the silence and she started looking at something else … He tried hurriedly to talk, to tell her about a restaurant under mulberry trees on the Yugoslavian coast … Up until then she had turned all his stories into projects for the future: “Someday I’ll go to that restaurant with you; next time we’ll visit that coast together!” Now she responded with silence. He tried memories they had in common, but again there was no answer. Today the teasing remarks that had always made her laugh left her cold. She wanted no part in their tacitly agreed-on games. But perhaps that meant she expected more of him. He sat down beside her. It wasn’t until he had thought for a moment of the child in the next room that he found it natural to put his arm around her—though he wasn’t thinking of her. While stroking her breasts he succeeded in making a slight contact, and at the same time the strange thought came to him that at this moment he was discovering a village far far away, deep in New England, for himself and only for himself. Wasn’t she feeling the same thing? Oh yes, she was looking at him longingly, but with a longing that concerned all her past and future lovers, all except him. Harmony was gone and they both turned their faces away.

  Lovelessly but anxiously he made love to her. She didn’t dissemble, she looked at him so unforbearingly that he wasn’t even able to close his eyes. In the next room the children had been laughing loudly for some time, for no reason. He tried in vain to think of another woman; there wasn’t any. Beatrice hadn’t been joining in his movements for some time and they had become all the more violent. He was hopelessly trapped, she had seen through him. His scrotum grew colder and colder. His tongue rattled in his wide-open mouth. He stroked the withered skin of her elbow and wanted to howl with hopelessness. A pile of newspapers under his arm began to slide … Beatrice rested her hand on his shoulder and slipped out from under him. Sitting up, she combed a
nd fluffed her hair. He lay there forlorn, and she covered him up before leaving the room. A window swung open, the city roared; the world seemed to have reduced itself to a few terrifying sounds and otherwise to be empty. Outside something terrible had happened, and he was the victim. Why couldn’t he hear the children any more? Children’s voices would have brought him some relief.

  He found Beatrice in the kitchen, where she was shelling peas into a bowl. She was singing—and once, when she got stuck in her song, she stopped shelling until she finally remembered the words. She knew all about him—and he no longer knew anything about her. “I feel so full of longing today,” she said, and paced the floor in front of him. She spoke as carefully to him as if she had been on the phone. “This morning I saw a rainbow and I was ready for almost anything. I need to experience something!” Yes, she was right: with him she had “experienced everything”—but nothing that mattered any more.—He took Agnes and left the singing Beatrice; he slunk away. The elevator was still at the same floor: so few people were there in the summer. Down below, the stone floor of the doorway had just been hosed down, and suddenly Keuschnig smelled the dark church of his native village. In the same street there was a restaurant mentioned in the guides, but it was closed—FERMETURE ANNUELLE; the windows were whitened on the inside and he couldn’t even look in.

  Only a plan can help me now, he thought. Whatever I do from now on must be figured out in advance, as if it were business. UNE NOUVELLE FORMULE—that was a slogan used to advertise a restaurant that had only one menu to offer, with no choice. Before a business went bankrupt, you thought up a new formula. Why shouldn’t he do the same for himself? Reinvent himself!—First he would patiently observe other people; that seemed necessary if he was to recompose himself.

  He took the child to a restaurant on the Place Clichy for lunch; there were cloth napkins, and today he found it soothing to unfold them. (A good many restaurants used paper napkins during the summer months when they were patronized chiefly by tourists.) He stretched out his legs and looked expectantly at the people around him. The immediate future seemed taken care of. Agnes was noisily guzzling her soup. When he poured water into her glass, he felt his heart going out to her with the stream. There she sat, alone and self-sufficient. She needed him only insofar as he enabled her to attend to herself without being afraid. With the taste of wine in his mouth, Keuschnig longed to find the beautiful strange land where death would no longer be a bodily presence. At last the day is rising, he thought, and felt that his eyes were opening of their own accord, with no effort on his part.

  At the next table there was a couple, who talked from the moment they sat down to the moment they got up, without the slightest pause. They’ve found the formula, he thought. At first he admired them; then he had the impression that their faces had been lifted. Every time the husband finished saying something, the wife, as though to reward him, said: “Oh, I love you!” Both had bad colds and it gave them great pleasure to talk in their deep rheumy voices. Once the wife kissed the husband on the cheek and he went right on picking his nose. At another table they were taking a child’s picture, but waiting to snap it until a genuinely childlike smile appeared on its face. They spoke in sentences with the last word missing, and the child had to supply it, so everything they said to the child took the form of a question. “We put our napkin on our … ?” “Lap,” said the child.—“The Seine flows into the … ?” “Sea,” said the child.—“Bravo! Bravo!” Two men eating alone had the following conversation: “I’ve been having a run of luck with the ladies,” said one. “I’ve got something nice; had her for three weeks now,” said the other. The patron was standing beside another table, telling a joke. After he had left them the people at the table spoke very softly. A fat man had a table to himself; all the waiters stopped to shake hands with him. Before making out a check, he stretched his arm and his coat sleeve slid far up his wrist. As he signed, his tongue protruded from his mouth, and then he looked around, apparently wondering where else he could sign. Another couple were talking about poetry. The husband would make a long pause in midsentence, as though reflecting; then he would say just what anyone would have expected him to say. When someone at the next table asked him for the salt, he started as though interrupted in a reverie. “I’ve always been a romantic,” he said to his wife. Another man spent a whole hour reading a single page of France Soir—the daily installment of the serialized novel; the page he had folded back carried the results of a public-opinion poll, according to which more Frenchmen were satisfied with their lives than according to last month’s poll. The woman at the cashier’s desk was bent over a sheet of paper with a concentration known only to persons checking accounts. In the kitchen a waiter in black was bending the ear of a waiter in white. A handsome man came sauntering in with his lips slightly parted, as though he knew every language in the world; one eyebrow upraised, nostrils perfectly plucked, he was biting his lower lip. He was followed by a not quite so handsome woman, who kept her face rigid for fear of spoiling her not so very great beauty. How shamelessly they displayed themselves—as though everything had already been said about them and they had nothing more to fear. All their worries are behind them, thought Keuschnig. As he looked at those two who were after all so much like him, Keuschnig couldn’t conceive of wanting to be anything but dead.

  The food went dry in his mouth. He pushed his plate away and looked at Agnes, who was dipping bread in her sauce. Bent over the table, wholly taken up with eating, she smiled. The most commonplace things make her smile, he thought. At that moment he felt no nostalgia for that condition, but took pleasure in the thought that she might never know such disgust, such hate, such horror as his.

  How could he have supposed that he would feel safe in a restaurant? There was no longer any place where he could be outside the world; in his situation nothing could be relied on. The longer he looked at people, the more unimaginative he became. They—and he too—were all characters in a film, the story of which was obvious after the very first frame. (Hadn’t the waiter known in advance what he was planning to order? So naturally he had ordered something else.) Maybe he had been observing them in the wrong way, in the wrong place, with the wrong attitude—in any event, regardless of how he put his perceptions together, they arranged themselves, independently of him, into the traditional well-bred nonsense. The imposture of napkins on laps! The perfume of the women brought up memories he didn’t want, and the pommes frites, which until very recently he had thought of as “good old pommes frites,” only gave him a headache. Long long ago Keuschnig had imagined people he disliked asleep, so as to like them better; now they continued to revolt him even when he thought of them with their knees drawn up in eternal sleep. And the “charming sights,” which had once meant so much to him, or so he thought—the sight, for instance, of the child wearing a dress that was too big for her, accompanied by the strange conviction, the CERTAINTY, that she would GROW INTO it—were of shorter and shorter duration; worst of all, they had lost their afterglow. It was easy for that woman outside, passing the open door, to smile at him; they were safe from one another. The woman inside, on the other hand, sitting alone at a table, had taken one look at him and instantly compressed her parted lips, repelled by the chaos in his face. She hadn’t even wanted to change her place, for fear he might misinterpret the least move as a kind of complicity, if not as sexual provocation. Yet, before catching sight of him, she had been sitting there red-nosed, quietly weeping.—You’re boring, he wanted to say to her, as boring as the world. I need a daydream, he thought, or I’ll start howling like an animal; but to set my mind free, I’d have to be able to stop looking at those people. He did indeed look away, but only as a reflex —when somebody dropped a knife … How steadfastly they go through with it! he thought: and then they go out into the street so nonchalantly, with their palms turned outward. The one link between us is that more and more dandruff falls on our coat collars as we eat. It was still early afternoon, and already everything se
emed hopeless again.

  Outside on the square a half-naked drunk was bellowing; at the sight of him a mood of smug complicity enveloped many of the diners, who were not only clothed but also more or less sober. A few began talking from table to table, even to Keuschnig. He looked down at his trousers. That’s their kind of solidarity, he thought—though only a short while ago he had thought of solidarity first as the illusion of being taken back into the fold after being cleared of a grave suspicion, and second as a last moment of belonging before one is isolated forever. The innocence of the child, who, while all the others were smirking at each other, was merely frightened by the bellowing! For the first time he was glad to be alone with her.

  North of the Place Clichy, after crossing the Montmartre Cemetery on the raised rue Caulaincourt and turning left into the somewhat quieter rue Joseph-de-Maistre, you come to a dusty, grassless park with a children’s playground in one corner. Keuschnig had lived in the neighborhood some years before and sometimes on Sunday mornings he had put the child, who could barely stand at the time, in the sandbox. Since this park was not far from the Place Clichy, he now headed for it, but took a more roundabout route by way of the Avenue de Saint-Ouen. He saw few SIGNS on the way, and even those seemed to tease rather than threaten him: a single boot in a supermarket cart that someone had left standing in the street; a bus ticket which fell from his hand and blew away every time he stooped to pick it up … The beggar who twittered like various kinds of birds was still standing on his old corner, to which the ladies of the neighborhood were dragged by their leashed dogs, which proceeded to piss right next to him, so that their owners felt obliged to give him a pittance to compensate for the humiliation … It gave Keuschnig a sense of well-being to walk slowly through the bright, hot streets with the child hop-skip-jumping beside him. He hadn’t wanted to go to the movies because to judge by the pictures at the Place Clichy the films seemed to take place entirely indoors. What a lot of automatic machines are still out of order around here, he thought in passing, almost cheerfully: washing machines, stamp vending machines, and now this photostating machine outside the stationery store, which even in those days had an EN PANNE sign on it. The air was so hot that vapor formed in cellophane packages of crepes outside a bakery. A thin bony man overtook Keuschnig; of all the people on the street, he was the only one who seemed to be in a hurry; his prominent shoulder blades jiggled under his tight-fitting summer jacket. Here and there North African workers, apparently grown accustomed to the lack of space, were sitting on doorsteps, waiting for the end of the lunch hour. A pale counter girl, with a name tag on the collar of her apron, stepped out of a pastry shop, closed her eyes, sighed and bent back her head so as to get the sun in her face. Another girl, carrying a cup of coffee, crossed the street very very slowly, step by step, for fear of spilling the coffee. Keuschnig stopped still and without a word from him Agnes stopped too—because it was so hot, just plain hot. The street trembled as the Métro passed inaudibly underneath. Keuschnig felt the tremor. This is it! he thought. Yes, this is it!—an experience that he had given up expecting.