Short Letter, Long Farewell

by Peter Handke

  “I say goodbye to Colorado” and

  “It’s so nice to walk in California.”

  Next to the barbershop in the basement of the hotel there was a bar; I sat at a table in the dark, eating potato chips and drinking tequila; from time to time the waitress brought a fresh bag of potato chips and emptied it into my plate. Two men were sitting at the next table; I listened to their conversation long enough to find out that they were businessmen from the nearby city of Fall River. The waitress sat down with them and I watched the three of them attentively but without curiosity. Their table was rather too small for three; in between the whiskey glasses, which the waitress perhaps intentionally neglected to remove, they were playing poker dice. Except for them it was almost silent in the room—only a small ventilator over the bar was purring gently—and I could hear the clicking when the dice struck the glasses; now and then the tape that was being rewound behind the bar made a flapping sound. I noticed that little by little I was beginning to take in the surroundings without any sense of strain.

  The waitress signaled me to move to their table, but I didn’t accept the invitation until one of the businessmen drew up another chair and pointed to it. At first I only watched; then I joined in the game, but soon stopped because one of my dice kept falling on the floor. I ordered another tequila. The waitress brought the bottle from the bar and turned on the tape recorder. Back at the table she sprinkled salt over the back of her hand, licked it off, spilling a few grains on the table, and took a sip of tequila from my glass. On the bottle there was a picture of an agave in the middle of a desert with glittering yellow sand. From the tape recorder came Western music: a male chorus sang the song of the U.S. Cavalry, then came a postlude without voices, in which the trumpets dropped out little by little until in the end only a harmonica was playing softly. The waitress told me her son was in the army, and I said I’d like to join in the dice game again.

  Then something strange happened to me: I needed a particular number; when I tipped the cup, all the dice except one came instantly to rest; while this one was rolling between the glasses, the number I needed flashed up at me and vanished; when the die stopped rolling, another number was on top. But the brief appearance of my number had made such a strong impression that I felt as if my number had really come up—not now but AT SOME OTHER TIME.

  This other time was not the future or the past, it was in essence a time OTHER than the time in which I ordinarily lived and thought forward and backward. I was filled with a sense of ANOTHER time, in which there must be places different from any present place, in which everything must have a different meaning than in my present consciousness, in which feelings were different from present feelings, so that I myself at that very moment was in the same state as the lifeless earth on the day when, for the first time after thousands of years of rain, a raindrop fell that did not instantly evaporate. Quickly as it passed, this feeling was so penetrating and painful that it was echoed in a brief, unthinking glance from the waitress, which I at once recognized to be unblinking though not rigid, infinitely wide-eyed, infinitely awake, and at the same time infinitely spent, a glance so full of longing as to tear the retina and provoke a faint cry, the glance of ANOTHER woman at that OTHER TIME. There had to be something more than the life I had been living up until now! I looked at my watch, paid my check, and went up to my room.

  I slept a sound dreamless sleep, but all night my whole body was suffused with a feeling of expectant happiness, which left me only toward morning. Then I began to dream and awoke feeling ill at ease. My socks were laid out on the radiator and there was an irregular gap at one side of the window curtain, which was imprinted with scenes from American history: jiggling in the breeze, Sir Walter Raleigh was smoking a cigar in his Virginia colony; the Pilgrim Fathers, tight-packed aboard the Mayflower, were landing in Massachusetts; George Washington was listening, while Benjamin Franklin read the Constitution; on their way from the Missouri to the mouth of the Columbia River, Captains Lewis and Clark were shooting Blackfoot Indians (one of the Indians, on a hill far in the distance, was still holding his arm half upraised in the direction of the rifle barrel); and to one side of the battlefield at Appomattox, Abraham Lincoln, leaning slightly backward, was holding out his hand to a Negro.

  I opened the curtain but did not look out. The sun shone in on the floor and warmed my bare feet. When I saw the Bible on the bedside table, I thought of the story about Judith cutting Holofernes’ head off. “She has always stepped, or rather stumbled, on my feet,” I said. “In fact, she was always stumbling over something. She hopped and danced along, and then she stumbled. Then she would start hopping again and bump into someone who was coming toward her, and a little later she would slip and jab herself with the knitting needle she always carried around, though she seldom finished knitting anything and always had to unravel it.

  “And yet she’s efficient,” I went on while taking my bath, while shaving, while dressing and packing: “she could drive nails without ever bending one, lay carpets, paper walls, cut clothes, make wooden benches, hammer out bumps in the car, but when engaged in these activities she kept slipping, stumbling and trampling on other things, until I couldn’t bear to look. And her gestures! Once she came into the room and wanted me to turn off the record player: standing rigidly in the doorway, she jerked her head slightly in the direction of the record player. Another time the doorbell rang: she got there before I did and saw a letter lying on the doormat. She left the door ajar; when I arrived she opened it again so as to let me pick up the letter. She did it without thinking, but my hand slipped. I slapped her in the face. Luckily my aim was bad, it was only a glancing blow, and we soon made up.”

  I paid the hotel bill with a traveler’s check and hailed a taxi, which here in Providence was not yet yellow but black as in England, and drove to the Greyhound bus terminal.

  During the ride through New England I had time for … for what? I thought. I soon got sick of looking out, because the color of the Greyhound bus windows gave the landscape a somber look. From time to time we stopped at a toll station and the driver handed a few coins out the window to a toll-taker. When I opened the window to get a better view, someone told me an open window upset the air-cooling system and I closed it again. The closer we came to New York, the more written advertisements gave way to pictures: gigantic overflowing beer mugs, a catchup bottle as big as a lighthouse, a life-size picture of a jet plane flying above the clouds. Beside me, peanuts were eaten and cigarettes smoked, and though drinking was prohibited, beer cans were passed secretly from mouth to mouth. Since I seldom looked up, I saw no faces, only activities. On the floor lay walnut and peanut shells, some wrapped in chewing-gum paper. I began to read Gottfried Keller’s Green Heinrich.

  Heinrich Lee’s father had died when he was five years old. All he remembered about his father was how one day the man had pulled up a potato plant and shown him the tubers. Because the boy was always dressed in green, he soon came to be known as Green Heinrich.

  The bus took the Bruckner Expressway through the Bronx, turned off to the right, and crossed the Harlem River to Manhattan. As it made its way slowly, but as fast as possible, down Fifth Avenue through Harlem, the people in the bus brought their Kodaks and movie cameras into play. It was Saturday, the black inhabitants of Harlem were taking the air on sidewalks bordered by wrecked cars and tumble-down tenements, only the ground floors of which were still inhabited. Some were reading the paper, boys were playing baseball and girls badminton in the street. The usual signs such as HAMBURGERS and PIZZA seemed strangely out of place. The bus drove on past Central Park and finally turned into a dark bus terminal on Forty-first Street. There I took a cab, which was now yellow, and drove to the Hotel Algonquin.

  The Algonquin was a narrow, not very tall building with small rooms; when I closed the door to my room, an intervening crack remained, as if the door had often been tugged at. As I passed, I saw signs of scratching on some of the locks. This time I succeeded in givin
g the Japanese who carried my suitcase a dollar bill without incident.

  The room was on a court; so, apparently, was the kitchen, for I saw steam rising from the ventilators and heard the rattling of dishes and cutlery. It was very cool in the room, the air conditioning roared, and because I had been conveyed all day with no effort on my part, I began to shiver while sitting on the bed to calm myself. I tried to turn off the air conditioning but couldn’t find a switch. I called the desk and they shut it off from down below. The roaring stopped. In the silence the room seemed to get bigger. I lay down on the bed and ate the grapes out of the fruit bowl that I found on the bedside table.

  At first I thought it was the grapes that were bloating me so. My torso swelled up, while my head and limbs shrank into animal appendages, a bird’s skull and a fish’s fins. In the middle I was crushed by the heat, at the extremities I was freezing. There ought to be some way of pushing back these excrescences! A vein in my hand quivered furiously; my nose began to burn, as though it had collided violently with something, and it was only then that I realized that my fear of death had taken body again now that I had been set down after a long trip, not fear of my own death but an almost insane fear of other people’s sudden death. My nose suddenly cooled off, the quivering vein in my hand relaxed, and before me I saw the image of a dark, breathlessly still deep-sea valley without a living soul in it.

  I called the hotel in Providence and asked if there was a message for me; there wasn’t. I gave them the address of my hotel in New York. Then, wishing to provide another forwarding address, I leafed through the Philadelphia section of my guidebook and chose at random the Barclay Hotel on Rittenhouse Square. I called the desk again and asked the clerk to book me a train ticket to Philadelphia. Then I rang Delmonico’s Hotel and asked if my wife had picked up her camera in the meantime; she hadn’t. I said I would be there myself in an hour. I waited a few minutes, dialed zero, and said I wished to make a call to Europe. The hotel operator connected me with the overseas operator, and I gave him my mother’s phone number in Austria. Was it a person-to-person call or would I speak to anyone who answered? The latter, the operator informed me, would cost much less. “I don’t care who answers,” I said. It was a relief to be playing the part of an unknown interlocutor: in such a role you could lose yourself completely. The operator asked me for my number and, when I had read it off the phone, told me to hang up.

  I sat still, looking at the empty clothes hangers in the closet that I had opened on coming in. Now I could hear loud voices from the kitchen. By then it must have been early afternoon. From time to time phones rang in other rooms. Then mine rang loudly; the overseas operator told me to hold on. The telephone crackled; I spoke into it but received no answer. For a long time I heard only a buzzing and a soft hissing sound. Then some more crackling, followed by the same sounds as before, but not quite the same, and, sure enough, a moment later came a long-drawn-out signal that was repeated several times. I held on. The Vienna operator answered, and I heard the overseas operator giving her my number. I heard the number being dialed in Vienna; again there was a ringing, and I heard a woman on another line laughing and saying in Austrian dialect, “I know!” And then another woman: “You don’t know a thing.” The ringing broke off, and as though disguising his voice the boy next door shouted his name into the phone. I tried to tell him who and where I was, but he was so confused, as if awakened out of a sound sleep, that he could only repeat, “She’s taking the last bus! She’s taking the last bus!” Quickly but for no particular reason, very quietly, I hung up. Then I saw another image: by the side of a forest path stood a hunter’s blind and beside the blind a cross, and in front of the cross marsh grass was slowly springing up.

  “I’ll never get used to the telephone,” I said. “It wasn’t till I went to the university that I made my first call from a phone booth. I started doing a good many things when I was too old to take them for granted. That’s why there are so many things I can’t get used to. When once in a blue moon I’d get to the point of feeling unreflectingly at ease with somebody, I always had to start all over again the next day. Today life with a woman sometimes strikes me as an artificial state of affairs, as absurd as a filmed novel. I feel that I’m overdoing it when I order something for her in a restaurant. Often when I’m walking beside her or sitting beside her, I feel as though a mime were doing it and I were only pretending.”

  The phone rang again; the receiver was still moist because I had held it so long while waiting. The hotel operator told me what my conversation had cost and asked me whether to put the seven dollars on my hotel bill. I was delighted: that made seven dollars less. I asked where in the neighborhood I could get out-of-town newspapers. Only then did it occur to me that in Europe it was already night. The operator suggested Times Square, and I went out.

  I walked east on Forty-fourth Street. “No, west!” I turned around and went in the opposite direction, thinking I would come to Broadway. I had crossed Fifth and Madison Avenues before I realized that I had not really turned around. I must only have imagined that I had turned around and gone in the opposite direction. However, because I felt turned around, I stood still and thought it over until my head was spinning. Then I went down Madison Avenue to Forty-second Street. There I turned, proceeded slowly, and actually reached Broadway at Times Square.

  I bought the Philadelphia Inquirer and looked through it at the newsstand. There was no mention of Judith. Since I hadn’t expected to find anything, I put my paper back on the pile, bought some German papers, and read them while drinking American beer at a bar. I soon noticed that I had already read them on the plane to Boston. I had only glanced through them, but I must have absorbed them, because I now remembered every detail.

  I walked east on Forty-second Street and turned north at Park Avenue. I felt as I had for a period in the past when in telling someone what I had just been doing I compulsively described all the partial actions of which the total action was composed. If I went into a house, I never said, “I went into the house,” but, “I wiped my shoes, turned the door handle, pushed the door, went in, and closed the door behind me”; or if I had written someone a letter, I always (instead of saying, “I wrote him a letter”) said, “I took out a clean sheet of paper, removed the cap from my fountain pen, wrote the letter, folded it, put it in an envelope, addressed the envelope, affixed a stamp, and dropped my letter in the mailbox.” In unfamiliar surroundings, as I am now, I tried to deceive my own sense of ignorance and inexperience by dissecting the few activities within my reach as though speaking of momentous undertakings. And now in very much the same way I crossed Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue, walked up and over to Park Avenue and up Park to Fifty-ninth Street, stepped under a marquee, pushed a revolving door, and entered Delmonico’s.

  The desk clerk had the camera ready for me. He handed it to me without looking at my passport. It was the large Polaroid camera I had once bought at an airport, where it cost much more than it would have anywhere else. By the number on the paper tab sticking out of one side, I saw that Judith had taken a few pictures. So she had seen something she wanted to remember. That struck me as so auspicious an omen that on leaving the hotel I felt utterly carefree.

  It was a bright day and the wind made it seem even brighter; the clouds were racing across the sky. Out on the street I stopped and looked around. Two girls were standing in a phone booth outside the hotel. One was talking into the phone; from time to time the other leaned over and took up the conversation, meanwhile pushing her hair back behind one ear. At first the sight of them merely arrested my attention, then it cheered me, and I took genuine pleasure in watching the two of them in the tiny booth, as one or the other kept pushing the door open with her foot, as they laughed, passed the receiver back and forth, exchanged whispers, inserted another coin, and continued to take turns in bending over the phone, while outside the booth the steam from the sewer poured out of the street gratings and drifted off across the asphalt. The sight relieved me of
all burdens. I watched them in a paradisiacal state of lightness, a state in which one has no desire but to see, and in which to see is to know. Then I went back down Park Avenue until it changed its name to Park Avenue South, and on to Eighteenth Street.

  I went into the Elgin Theatre, where one of Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan pictures was playing. From the start I had a feeling that I was seeing something forbidden, but something I could visualize in advance. A small airplane was flying low over the jungle. An interior view of the plane disclosed a man, a woman, and a baby. The plane roared and jiggled strangely as a real plane would never do. Suddenly the jiggling sparked a memory of the bench on which I had seen this same film as a child. “They’re on their way to Nairobi,” I said aloud. But the name of the city was not mentioned. “And now they’re going to crash!” The parents held each other in an embrace; then the plane was seen from outside, whirling downward and vanishing among the trees. It fell with a crash, and no, not smoke but air bubbles rose from a twilight landscape, which later, when that part of the picture came along, I recognized as the pond beneath whose surface Tarzan, with a knife between his teeth, and the orphaned baby, who had grown in the meantime to be a boy, were breathing out air bubbles at long intervals while slowly swimming about as though lost in a dream. Immediately after the plane crash, my memory, which subsequently hardened into a firm image, began, by a mysterious process of anticipation, to move in the rhythm of the air bubbles which, later, released by the two swimmers, rose to the surface of the water.