Moment of True Feeling

by Peter Handke

  They walked in a primeval heat, in which far and wide there was no more danger, step by step like the girl with the cup, but for the pleasure of it, not because they had to. Keuschnig no longer had to adjust to the child’s slow unthinking gait; now he walked like that of his own accord, and the summer breeze, in which a branch crackled now and then, nothing more, seemed a fulfillment, yet still full of promise. High in the air a plane flew by and for a short moment the light changed, as though the shadow of the plane had passed quickly over the street. He wanted to shout at far distant trees that were gleaming in the sun and tell them to stay just as they were. Why didn’t anyone speak to him?

  In a side street Keuschnig saw the house he had lived in some years before, with a maple tree in front of it that reached just up to the windows of his old apartment. In that moment he was overcome with bitterness at all the wasted time since then and with disappointment with himself. Since then he had experienced nothing, undertaken nothing. Everything was as muddled as ever, and death, from which he had then been safe, was much nearer. I’ve got to do something, he thought in despair, and no sooner had the thought passed through his mind than he said to the child: “I’m going to start working. I’m going to invent something. I need the kind of job that gives me a chance to invent something.” Agnes, who had heard nothing but his voice, responded with a carefree hopping step, and for the first time in ages his feeling toward her was one of friendliness, rather than of absent-minded indifference and anxious love.

  Thinking he’d like to read in the playground, he went to a bookshop and bought a paperback volume of Henry James short stories. Again, as on the morning “when it all began,” he saw a marble plaque in memory of a Resistance fighter who had been shot by the Germans on that spot. This one, too, had a withered fern under it. He told the child what had happened thirty years ago. The man’s first name had been Jacques, and he had been killed at this same season, in late July. And today the Square Carpeaux was as dusty as it had been three years ago, yet as never before.—Keuschnig felt that he was close to discovering the insignificant detail which would bring all other things together.

  The child, at least, seemed to be changing. Only a few days before, she had gone down the Métro stairs haltingly, always advancing the same foot and drawing the other behind it; now her movements as she walked down the steps to the playground were one smooth continuous flow, left foot right foot, left foot right foot. At first she only stood at the edge of the playground, looking on. The streets had been almost deserted, but here on the square there was suddenly a crush of children and grownups; most of the grownups were elderly Frenchwomen and young foreign women. Keuschnig sat down on a bench. Agnes was standing there deep in thought. He touched her gently with his foot, and without looking around at him she smiled, as though she had been waiting for this touch. In her self-sufficiency she radiated a pride so objective that it carried over to him. If only he could perceive with her! That would drive away his surfeit and disgust. Who was he to look down on these tired, discontented women dragging behind them and occasionally slapping their screaming children, who now and then forgot their misery long enough to hop-skip-jump for a moment. One of these women, plagued by a bawling, wriggling child, was covertly getting ready to strike when she noticed that Keuschnig was looking at her. Suddenly she let down her guard, and her eyes revealed all her anger and hopelessness, as though she knew she was being looked at by a kindred spirit, from whom she had no need to hide.

  How much there was to see, and no trace of disgust dismissed the sights as familiar! The tall, tall ash trees and the dark, dark square … So little sun shone through that the women, especially the younger ones, kept moving their chairs into the few sunny spots. Now and then one of them would stand up and toss a plastic shovel into the sand to stimulate her child—who would scarcely take notice—or to reassemble a collection of toys around a child, who had scattered them … Often, when a child misbehaved, the mother would clap her hands menacingly, without getting up from her bench, and at the sound the pigeons, which had been strolling around in the sand among the children, would fly up into the air. One woman, while watching a child, who had just called out to her because he was about to let himself drop from the climbing bars, rocked an occupied baby carriage with one hand, and held the other over her once again swelling belly. Another woman was counting the stitches on her knitting needle, and still another blowing sand out of the eyes of a crying child. Many foreign names were called: TIZIANA! FELICITAS! PRUDENCIA! … Misery and loneliness descended like a last possible harmony on the swarming, dust-veiled square, on the women with their plastic bags beside them, on the park guardian dozing in his octagonal sentry box yet ready to take action at any moment, on the children, who drummed with their heels on the sheet metal before starting down the squeaking slides, while the next in line were impatiently hopping about at the foot of the ladders, on this constantly repeated, spasmodic to-and-fro, in which nothing happened—even the sewer gratings were plugged with dust and sand; on this whole wretched playground that smelled of soap and resounded with the children’s shrill clamor, the women’s cries, the guardian’s police whistle, and the rasping of roller skates on concrete.

  It gave him real pain to expel his breath after looking for so long. Suddenly the child fell heavily against him and almost knocked him over; her cheeks were soft and she was crying over something unconscionably heartbreaking—what? a trembling toy pinscher being carried past in somebody’s bag. “That’s nothing to cry about,” he said. Where the tears stopped, the light was refracted on her cheek and made the skin lighter … A butterfly hovered around his fingertips and refused to go away; as though its clinging to him would stop him from killing it. He caught sight of a black-clad Portuguese woman with a knitted vest over her arm. A white petticoat showed below her skirt. She attended absently to everything, and nothing seemed beyond her reach. Radiating the charm of an idiot, she seemed infinitely untouched, and oh, how infinitely sheltered were the movements of the child in her care! She smiled at a wish another child had expressed to its mother, but here again as though caught up in some serene memory, which—since the child’s wish was immediately satisfied—may have been quite unrelated to the scene before her eyes and in any event was totally free from envy. The knitted vest and the showing petticoat turned Keuschnig’s thought to the poor peasants among whom he had grown up, and he recalled how, as a rule, they were fond of their kin despite all their peculiarities, but were repelled by the same oddities in others, and how he himself had been no different!

  He sat in the square for a long while, one among many, with no thought of the future. He expected nothing; just once he had a vision of all these people taking on a strange look and beginning to sob heartbreakingly, but all the while excusing themselves on the grounds that they hadn’t slept the night before, that the sun didn’t agree with them, and that their stomachs were empty. Who could possibly tell them they had nothing to be ashamed of?—When for once he turned away from himself and looked up, he was at a loss to understand why everything hadn’t changed in the meantime. —At last Agnes, now comforted, spoke to him as if she trusted him. She told him a little about herself, and he saw how many SECRETS she already had. She has secrets! he thought, with a glow of happiness. All at once, out of friendliness, she began to use some of his words and phrases. And in everything, in clouds, in the shadows of the trees, in puddles, she saw SHAPES—which he had stopped seeing long ago …

  While she was running about with the other children, he was contentedly reading one of Henry James’s frequent descriptions of women’s dress. At last something that wasn’t a newspaper article. “She was dressed in white muslin, with a hundred frills and flounces, and knots of pale-colored ribbon. She was bare-headed; but she balanced in her hand a large parasol, with a deep border of embroidery; and she was strikingly, admirably pretty.” He read on and on, and while reading he looked forward to buying something for the first time in ever so long. He thought of himself walki
ng across a square in a new, light-colored summer suit. With all the new things that were happening to him and the old things that he mustn’t forget, he was sure to have a most extraordinary experience.

  When Keuschnig looked up, the child was gone. And the other children were playing quite naturally, as though Agnes hadn’t been there for a long time and they had arranged their game differently without her. He jumped up but sat right back down again, and even read a few lines in his book, unable to skip a single word. He must paint his face —this minute! And cut off all his hair! The trees set up a rustling, and he experienced that moment when suddenly, in the middle of the summer, one shudders at the thought of darkest, coldest winter. He held his breath and tried to stop thinking, as though that would stop the course of events. Frantically he tried to make ready for what was to come. A woman looked at him as though she knew something he did not. Who would be the first to tell him? The women screeching behind him weren’t laughing; they were prognosticating doom. Up until then everything had been flimflam and foolishness. This was the real thing. In that moment Keuschnig resolved, as though everything humanly possible had been tried, that he would not go on living.

  He searched the whole square, peered into every car that drove up, but only as a matter of form. The unthinkable, because it was unthinkable, was all the more frightfully real. He wanted to go mad immediately; that seemed the only escape. Only in madness could everything be undone; then THE DEAD WOULD COME BACK TO LIFE! Then one could be with them forever, with no thought of death … But powerless to transform himself into a madman, he could only imagine what it would be like. He remained hideously awake. Automatically, with a pleasure he had never known, his hands passed over the bones of his face. Calmly and deliberately, as the guardian would testify later on, he gave him his addresses, said he was going to notify the police, and started eastward through the city streets.

  All at once Keuschnig began to feel with the people he saw; his long indifference turned to a sweet sympathy. Those people riding in cars—what torture it must be for them to be always on the move, always fighting their way from place to place in those tin cans; in short, what misery for them to go on living! What despair in the howling of the trucks’ power brakes! For a short moment it struck him that politics, seen as the worldwide defense of concrete local interests and not as inanity masked by bustle and violence, might be possible and worth bothering with. His eyes opened to every detail, but he saw none separate from the rest. A woman taxi driver with a woman passenger; a little boy with a toy tommy gun, bawling as he ran after his mother … He felt he had grown powerful, capable of speaking to everyone and bringing happiness to all. Once in passing he informed a man that his shoelace had come undone, and with no show of surprise the man thanked him. He saw a man in a ten-gallon hat and as though doing him a kindness asked him where he was from. Nothing struck him as ridiculous any longer. At the sight of a woman with a red scarf on her head, climbing the steps to an elevated Métro station, he was at a loss to understand how he could ever have thought of himself. Overwhelmed with regret at having to die now, he took care in crossing the street to avoid every single car.

  He had no sensation of his body and hovered weightless in the midst of people dragging themselves painfully along. He was sorry, for the others’ sake!, not to have a bit of a toothache. On a bench by a bus stop a man was sitting with his hands in his lap and his head bowed, as though waiting for his pursuers. Keuschnig was sure the man would tell him everything if only he tapped him on the shoulder. He actually did sit down beside him for a moment and asked him what kind of work he did, but the man looked back as though such a question humiliated him!

  At one of those little fountains one finds all over Paris, he washed his face in the clear, soundless jet of water, as though he had actually painted it before. How warm the water flowed on this warm day! The closer Keuschnig came to the Buttes-Chaumont, the richer the Paris scene seemed to him. He saw a girl kick away the prop of a motorcycle with her heel and drive off; a big black woman carrying a full plastic shopping bag on her head; a tractor driving down a busy city street, strewing hay behind it; a bakery girl going from café to café with a basket of long loaves, as bakery girls had done since time out of mind; a fat man sitting on a bench in his suspenders; far away, for a few moments, the gilded tips of a park fence … There was nothing his gaze could not take in. In his eyes a woman wedging her handbag under her chin and holding parcels between her knees as she unlocked a house door and pushed it open with one foot stood for moments in a possible life which was being revealed to him now that it was too late. He saw the glittering metal disks at the pedestrian crossings, the treetops moving with a motion of their own as though wishing at every moment to transform themselves into something else; he heard the soft tittering sound of a flock of pigeons flying into the wind; passing a movie house, he heard shots, screams, and the end of a film—soft music and the calm, friendly voices of a man and a woman—smelled freshly polished shoes through the open door of a shoemaker’s shop, saw thick clumps of hair on the floor of a barbershop, saw an ice-cream scoop in dirty water outside a refreshment stand, saw a tailless cat run straight from a doorway to a parked car and sit down under it, heard the whir of a sausage slicer in a horse butcher’s shop, heard the crackle of drying plaster from every floor of an almost finished building, saw the patronne, bouquet in hand, unlocking the door of her restaurant, which she was reopening to make ready for dinner—and said aloud: “What a lot of things there are!” The first grapes of the year, and on them the first wasps; in a wooden crate the first hazelnuts, still in their rufflike carpels; on the sidewalks the outlines of the first fallen leaves, which by then had blown away … The markets were much smaller in the summertime. The coat racks in the cafés—all empty! The post offices freshly painted, the sidewalks dug up for new telephone lines, and the workers down in the ditch grinning as they watched a child wobbling along on plastic roller skates. At a movie house they were running an animated cartoon starring Popeye the Sailorman, who had only to down a can of spinach and he could take on the whole world. How disgustingly squeamish Keuschnig seemed to himself! He felt sure he had overlooked something, missed something that could never be retrieved. He stopped still and looked through all his pockets. A woman wouldn’t dare to stop like that in the middle of the sidewalk, he thought. At last he felt unobserved. Almost contentedly he smelled his own sweat. The incessant roar of the traffic made his head feel better and he let out an animal cry. I don’t have to see any more signs of death, he thought, because there’s no one left to love. Someone dropped a bunch of keys. A well-dressed woman slipped and fell on her behind; but, instead of looking away as usual, he watched her pick herself up with an embarrassed smile. He walked with his hands behind his back like a headwaiter with nothing to do. The cranes moved against the drifting clouds and he moved beneath them, with the calm of eternity.

  Keuschnig wanted nothing more for himself. The usual sights took on a magical sparkle—and every one of them showed him inexhaustible riches. He himself had ceased to count, for he had merged with all those others who were moving this way and that with selfless energy, and he fully expected the jolt he created by transferring the happiness he had no use for to these people, to make them change their step. He was still in a certain sense alive—with them. His state was no longer a momentary mood; it was a conviction (to which all his momentary moods had contributed!), a conviction it would be possible to work with. Now the idea that had come to him on seeing those three things in the sand of the Carré Marigny seemed usable. In becoming mysterious to him, the world opened itself and could be reconquered. While crossing an overpass near the Gare de l’Est, he saw an old black umbrella lying beside the railroad tracks down below: this was no longer a pointer to something else; it was a thing in its own right, beautiful or ugly in its own right, and ugly and beautiful in common with all other things. Whichever way he looked, there was something to see, just as in dreams of finding gold one sees its gl
itter every time one bends down. Particulars remote from one another—a spoon yellowed by egg yolk lying in the street, the swallows high in the air—vibrated with a kinship and harmony for which he required no further memory or dream, and left him with a feeling that one could return home on foot from any point whatsoever.