Short Letter, Long Farewell

by Peter Handke

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  The Short Letter

  The Long Farewell

  Also by

  Copyright Page

  “And once when they were strolling outside the town gate on a warm but overcast morning, Iffland said that this would be good weather to go away in—and indeed, the weather seemed made for travel: the sky lay close to the earth and the objects round about were dark, as though to confine the traveler’s attention to the road he was going to travel.”

  Karl Philipp Moritz, Anton Reiser

  The Short Letter

  Jefferson Street is a quiet thoroughfare in Providence. It circles around the business section, changes its name to Norwich Street in the South End, and leads into the old Boston Post Road. Here and there Jefferson Street widens into small squares bordered by beech and maple trees. On one of these, Wayland Square, there is a good-sized building in the style of an English manor house, the Wayland Manor Hotel. When I arrived there at the end of April, the desk clerk took a letter from my pigeonhole and handed it to me along with my key. Before entering the elevator, I tore open the envelope, which, come to think of it, was barely sealed. The letter was short: “I am in New York. Please don’t look for me. It would not be nice for you to find me.”

  As far back as I can remember, I seem to have been born for horror and fear. Before the American bombers came, someone carried me into the house; firewood was scattered all over the yard in the quiet sunlight. Drops of blood glistened on the side steps where hares were butchered on weekends. In a dusk more terrifying than black night, I stumbled, my arms swinging ridiculously, along the edge of the woods sunk in darkness; only the lichen on the outermost tree trunks still shimmered faintly; from time to time I stopped still and cried out in a voice made pathetically feeble by shame; then, when I was too horror-stricken to feel ashamed, I bellowed into the woods from the bottom of my soul, bellowed for someone who had gone into the woods that morning and hadn’t come out; and again the fluffy feathers of fleeing chickens lay scattered all over the yard and the house walls in the sunlight.

  As I entered the elevator, the old Negro operator told me to watch my step, and I stumbled a little over the slightly raised floor of the car. The Negro closed the door and the inner gate and set the elevator in motion with a lever.

  There must have been a service elevator beside the passenger elevator, because, as we slowly rose, a tinkling as of piled cups kept pace with us and continued unchanged all the way up. I raised my eyes from my letter and studied the elevator operator, who stood bent over the lever in the dark corner and did not look at me. His deep-blue uniform made him almost invisible except for his white shirt … Suddenly, as often happens to me when I am in a room with other people and no one has said anything for a while, I was sure that in another second the Negro would go mad and fling himself at me. I took the newspaper I had bought that morning before leaving Boston out of my coat pocket, and, by pointing at the headlines, tried to explain to the elevator operator that because various European currencies had just been revalued I would have to spend all my American money on my trip, since if I changed it back again on my return to Europe I would receive much less for it than I had paid. The elevator operator nodded and pointed at the pile of papers under the seat, on top of which lay the coins he had received for the papers he had already sold; the Providence Journal under the seat carried the same headlines as my Boston Globe.

  Relieved that the elevator operator had communicated with me, I reached into my trouser pocket for a banknote, so as to hand it to him as soon as he opened my room door and put down my suitcase. But once in the room, I saw to my surprise that what I had in my hand was a ten-dollar bill. I shifted it to my other hand and, without taking my wad of bills from my pocket, rummaged for a dollar bill. When I thought I had found one, I transferred it directly from my pocket to the elevator operator. It was a five-dollar bill and instantly the Negro closed his hand over it. “I haven’t been here long enough,” I said aloud when I was alone. Still in my overcoat, I went into the bathroom and looked more at the mirror than at myself. I saw a few hairs on my coat collar and said, “I must have shed these hairs in the bus.” I sat down on the edge of the bathtub, disconcerted because I had started talking to myself for the first time since I was a child. By talking rather loudly to himself, the child had provided himself with a companion. But here, where I had decided for once to observe rather than participate, I was at a loss to see why I was doing it. I began to giggle and finally, in a fit of exuberance, punched myself in the head so hard that I almost toppled into the bathtub.

  The bottom of the tub was covered with crisscrossing, light-colored strips of something that looked like adhesive tape; they were supposed to prevent the bather from slipping. Between the sight of the adhesive tape and the thought of my conversation with myself I instantly saw a correspondence which was so incomprehensible that I stopped giggling and went back into the room.

  In front of the window, which faced a rural-looking area with a sprinkling of small houses, there were tall birch trees. The leaves on the trees were still tiny and the sun shone through. I opened the window, pulled up an easy chair, and sat down; I put my feet on the radiator, which must have been hot early in the morning and was still slightly warm. The easy chair had casters; I rolled back and forth and looked at the envelope. It was a light-blue hotel envelope; on the back was printed “Delmonico’s, Park Avenue at Fifty-ninth Street, New York.” But the postmark said “PHILADELPHIA, PA.”; the letter had been mailed there five days before. I saw the letters p.m. in the postmark, and said aloud, “In the afternoon.”

  “Where did she get the money for the trip?” I asked. “She must have a lot of money, I’m sure a room in that place costs thirty dollars.” Delmonico’s was known to me chiefly from musicals: country people danced in from the street and dined with rustic awkwardness in separated stalls. “On the other hand, she has no idea of money, not the usual idea in any case. Children always go in for swapping and she’s never got over it, to her money is just something to be swapped. She loves everything that can be easily used up or at least easily exchanged, and money gives her both possibilities in one.” I looked out as far as I could and saw a church that was obscured by the haze rising from a textile mill; according to my map, it must have been the Baptist church. “Her letter took a long time to get here,” I said. “Could she have died in the meantime?” Once toward evening I had climbed a rocky hill to look for my mother. She had spells of melancholy, and I thought she must have jumped off it, or perhaps just let herself fall. I stood on the hilltop and looked down at the village in the early dusk. I saw nothing in particular, but a group of women, who had put down their shopping bags as if something frightening had happened and were soon joined by someone else, gave me the idea of looking for scraps of clothing on the ledges below me. I was unable to open my mouth, the air hurt me; everything in me had shriveled with fear. Then the lights went on in the village below, and a few cars went by with their headlights on. Up on the cliff it grew very still, only the crickets were still chirping. I felt heavier and heavier. The lamps went on in the gas station at the end of the village. But it was still light! The people in the street began to walk faster. While taking short steps back and forth on the hilltop, I saw someone moving very slowly among them and recognized my mother, who had recently taken to doing everything very slowly. And when she crossed the street, it was not directly, as usual, but in a long diagonal.

  I rolled my chair to the bedside table and called Delmonico’s Hotel in New York. It wasn’t until I gave Judith’s maiden name that they found her in the register. She had checked out five days before, without leaving a forwarding address;
and, oh yes, she had forgotten a camera in her room: should they send it to her address in Europe? I said I would be in New York next day and pick it up myself. “Yes,” I repeated after hanging up, “I am her husband.” To avoid giggling again, I rolled back to the window.

  Without getting up, I took off my coat and leafed through the traveler’s checks which, having heard a good deal about all the mugging in America, I had procured before leaving Austria. The bank clerk, to be sure, had promised to take the checks back at the same rate, but now that the revaluation had been announced, he could hardly be held to his promise. “How can I spend all of three thousand dollars over here?” I asked. It had been pure caprice to exchange so much. Then and there I decided to spend the money living as lazily and frivolously as possible. I called Delmonico’s again to reserve a room for the next day. When they told me none was available, I asked them to reserve one at the Waldorf Astoria, the first place that entered my head, but then I changed my mind and, thinking of F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose books I was reading at the time, switched to the Algonquin on Forty-fourth Street, where he had often stayed. At the Algonquin there was still a room to be had.

  Then, as I was running water for a bath, it occurred to me that Judith must have drawn what money was left in my account. “I shouldn’t have given her that power of attorney,” I said, though I didn’t really mind; actually I was amused and curious to know what would happen next, but only for a moment, because the last time I had seen her, stretched out on her bed one afternoon, she had become inaccessible and had looked at me in such a way that I stopped still on my way to her, knowing that I could no longer help her.

  I stretched out in the tub and read the end of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. It is a love story about a man who buys a house on a bay for the sole purpose of seeing the lights go on every evening in a house on the other side of the bay, where the woman he loves is living with another man. For the great Gatsby’s delicacy, his sense of shame, was as great as his obsession with his love, while the woman grew more cowardly as her love grew more desperate and shameless.

  “Yes,” I said, “on the one hand I have a strong sense of shame; on the other hand, where my feelings for Judith are concerned, I am cowardly. In my dealings with her I have always been afraid to come out of my shell. I see now that my sense of shame, which I have clung to because I thought it preserved me from putting up with everything, is a kind of cowardice. The great Gatsby’s delicacy applied only to the formal aspect of the love that possessed him. He was polite. I would like to be as polite and ruthless as he was, if it’s not too late.”

  I opened the stopper while still sitting in the bath. I closed my eyes and leaned back as the water slowly flowed out, and it seemed to me as though with the leisurely ebbing of the water I myself were growing smaller, until finally I dissolved altogether. It was not until I felt cold because I was lying in the waterless tub that I became aware of myself again and stood up. I took hold of my member, first with the towel, then with my bare hand, and began to masturbate. It took a long time; now and then I opened my eyes and looked at the frosted-glass bathroom window on which the shadows of birch leaves were moving up and down. When the sperm finally came, my knees buckled. Then I washed myself, sprayed out the bathtub, and dressed.

  I lay on the bed awhile, unable to think of anything. For a moment this was painful, then I found it pleasant. I wasn’t sleepy, only unthinking. From time to time I heard, at some distance from the window, a sound like a combined thud and crash, followed by the cries of the students who were playing baseball on the Brown University campus.

  I stood up, washed a pair of socks with the hotel soap, and went down the stairs to the lobby. The elevator operator was sitting on a stool beside the elevator, with his head propped on his hands. I went out; it was late afternoon; the cab drivers on the square, who were chatting as they sat in their drivers’ seats waiting, called out to me as I passed. When I had gone some distance, I noticed that my reluctance to answer them with so much as a gesture had cheered me up.

  “This is my second day in America,” I said, stepping off the sidewalk into the roadway and then back onto the sidewalk. “I wonder if I’ve already changed.” Involuntarily I cast a glance over my shoulder as I walked, then looked at my wrist watch impatiently. As happens occasionally when something I’ve read makes me want to have the same experiences for myself, the great Gatsby now commanded me to transform myself instantly. Suddenly the impulse to become different from what I was became a physical need. How, I wondered, could I show the feelings the great Gatsby had made possible in me, and act on them in my environment? They were feelings of warmth, attentiveness, serenity, and happiness, and I sensed that I had to banish forever my predisposition to fear and panic. My new feelings could be acted upon: never again would I be parched with terror! But where was the environment in which I would finally show that I’m capable of being different? For the present I had left my old environment behind me; in my new environment I was still incapable of being anything more than a someone who made use of public conveniences, walked on streets, rode on buses, lived in hotels, and sat on bar stools. Nor did I wish to be anything more, because to do so I should have had to show off. I believed that I had finally rid myself of the need to get attention by showing off. Nevertheless, determined to be alert and open to my surroundings, I quickly looked away from everyone who approached me on the sidewalk, soured by the sight of another face, disgusted as usual with everything that was not myself. Once, as I proceeded down Jefferson Street, I caught myself thinking of Judith and chased her away in the time it took to expel my breath and take a few steps; otherwise my mind was empty of human inhabitants, and my whole body was filled with a hot anger that became almost murderous because I could direct it neither at myself nor at anything else.

  I turned into a side street. The street lamps had come on and the sky was very blue. The sun had set and the grass under the trees sparkled in the afterglow. A slow rain of blossoms fell from the bushes of the front gardens. Not far away, the door of a big American car slammed. I went back to Jefferson Street and had a ginger ale in a snack bar that didn’t serve alcoholic beverages. When the ginger ale was gone, I waited until the two lumps of ice in my glass had melted, then drank the water; it tasted bitter, but pleasantly so after the sweet ginger ale. On the wall beside every table there was a box with which one could operate the jukebox without getting up. I put in a quarter and selected Otis Redding’s “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay.” I thought of the great Gatsby and became more self-assured than ever before in my life: to the point that I lost all awareness of myself. I would do many things differently. I would become unrecognizable! I ordered a hamburger and a Coca-Cola. I felt tired and yawned. In the middle of my yawn, I felt a hollow inside me; instantly it filled with the image of a deep black forest, and once again, like a recurrence of fever, the thought that Judith was dead came over me. The image of the forest grew still darker when I looked into the gathering darkness outside the snack bar, and my horror became so great that I suddenly turned back into an inert object. I couldn’t eat any more, I could only drink in short sips. I ordered another Coca-Cola and sat there with pounding heart.

  My sense of horror and the need to change as quickly as possible and get rid of it made me impatient. The time passed so slowly that I looked at my wrist watch again. My old hysterical time sense took hold of me. Years before, I had once seen a fat woman bathing in the sea; every ten minutes I turned to look at her, because I seriously thought she must have grown thinner in the meantime. And now in the snack bar I kept looking at a man with a scab on his forehead, eager to know if the scab had finally gone away.

  Judith had no sense of time, I thought. True, she never forgot an appointment, but she was always late, like the women in jokes. Her feeling simply didn’t tell her that the time had come. She seldom knew what day it was. If anyone told her the time, it frightened her; whereas I went to the phone almost every hour to find out what time it was. She always c
ried out, “Oh, it’s so late!” She never said, “Oh, it’s so early!” She was incapable of thinking that it could ever be time to do this or that. I said to her, “Maybe it’s because you’ve moved so often ever since you were a child, because you’ve lived in so many places. You always know where you were before, but never when you were there. And the fact is that your sense of direction is much better than mine; I often get lost. Or maybe it’s because you had a job with fixed working hours much too soon. But to tell you the honest truth, I’m certain that if you have no feeling for time it’s simply because you have no feeling for other people.” She answered, “No, that’s not true, it’s only for myself that I have no feeling.” “In addition,” I said, “you have no money sense.” She agreed: “No, I have no head for figures.” “And even your sense of direction makes me dizzy,” I went on. “When you go up to a house, you always say you’re going down; long after we’ve stepped out of the house, you say the car is outside; and when you drive downtown, you say it’s uptown, because the street goes north.”

  On the other hand, I now thought, it’s my exaggerated sense of time, meaning perhaps my exaggerated feeling for myself, that prevents me from achieving the attentive detachment I’m aiming at.

  I stood up, this reminiscence was too silly. I took my check to the cashier and stupidly, without a word, put down a banknote; that was the way I felt at the moment, and I was glad that this gesture required little change in my attitude. As I was leaving, an at first angry, then euphoric revulsion toward all the concepts, definitions, and abstractions in terms of which I had just been thinking made me stop still for a moment. I tried to belch; the Coca-Cola helped. Outside, a chubby-cheeked crew-cut student wearing sneakers and Bermuda shorts that revealed his fat thighs came toward me; I looked at him in horror, aghast at the thought that someone might still dare to make a general statement about this individual figure, that someone might classify him and set him down as a representative of something else. Involuntarily I said hello and looked at him without embarrassment. He too said hello. He was an image that had suddenly come to life, and now I knew why for some time I had been able to read only stories about individuals. Take the cashier at the snack bar! Her hair was bleached, the black roots peeped out, and beside her she had a small upright American flag. What of it? Nothing at all. In retrospect her face actually began to gleam and took on the obstinate look of a saint. I turned back to the fat student. A likeness of Al Wilson, the singer in the Canned Heat Show, was printed on the back of his shirt. Wilson was short and stocky. He had pimples that you could see clearly on TV, and wore glasses. A few months before, he had been found dead in his sleeping bag outside his house in Laurel Canyon near Los Angeles. In a delicate high voice he had sung “On the Road Again” and “Going up the Country.” I felt differently about him than about Jimi Hendrix or Janis Joplin, who, like rock music in general, were beginning to leave me cold; I still ached with his death, and his short life, which I then thought I understood, often came back to me in painful half-waking thoughts. On my way back to the hotel two lines I had often put together occurred to me: