Short Letter, Long Farewell

by Peter Handke

  Although the picture otherwise bored me, I did not leave. Comics don’t amuse me any more, I thought; they stopped amusing me long before I came over here. For a time I read a lot of comics. What I should have avoided was comic books. One adventure begins and ends and another starts right in. I remember a bad night I had had after reading Peanuts; each one of my dreams stopped after four frames and was followed by a new dream, which in turn consisted of four frames. I had the feeling that in every fourth frame my feet were pulled out from under me and I fell flat on my face. And then another adventure story started up! The same with the movies. I wouldn’t want to see any more silent comedies, I thought. Their praise of clumsiness would no longer flatter me. The heroes who can’t walk down the street without having their hats blown into the paths of steamrollers, or bow to a lady without pouring coffee on her skirt, had come to strike me more and more as exemplars of an inhuman life that survives only in the minds of children: breathless, floundering, distorted figures who also distort their surroundings, whose only desire is to look up at the world, at things and people. On the one hand, Chaplin’s scornful Schadenfreude, on the other, the way he cuddles up to himself and mothers himself; Harry Langdon’s way of rolling in and attaching himself to people. Only Buster Keaton, with that obstinate alert look of his, searched frantically for a way out, though he would never know what was happening to him. I still liked to look at his face, and it was also nice when Marilyn Monroe combined a frown, a helpless grin, and the candid gaze of Stan Laurel.

  When I came out of the movie theater, it was getting dark. Wondering what to do next, I walked rather slowly. In front of me a tall girl was also walking slowly, as though propelled by her dangling handbag. She had black hair and was wearing blue jeans, but because of her relaxed movements they didn’t look like blue jeans; they neither creased at the buttocks at every step, nor did they, as usual, bag behind the knees. She looked around—and kept on walking, as slowly as before. Suddenly I was overcome with excitement because I knew I was going to speak to her. We walked along almost side by side, then she took the lead, then I overtook her. By the time we reached Broadway, I was so excited that I wanted to topple her over on the street. But when at last I spoke to her, I only asked if she would have a drink with me.

  She said, “Why not?” but then it was over. Both of us still flushed with the excitement of our meeting, we just walked on side by side. If we had speeded up as if we were going somewhere, our hurried movements might have excited us still more and driven us into a doorway; but as it was, we just went on about as slowly as before and had to start in again from the beginning. Nevertheless I tried to take hold of her. She took it as an unintentional collision.

  We went into a cafeteria. When I saw we would have to wait on ourselves, I wanted to leave, but she had already taken her place in line. I too took a tray and put a sandwich on it. We sat down at a table, I ate my sandwich, and she drank coffee. She asked me my name, and without knowing why I was lying I told her it was Wilhelm. That made me feel better and I offered her a bite of my sandwich. She broke off a piece. After a while she stood up, said she had a headache, waved her hand vaguely, and left.

  I got myself a bottle of beer and sat down again. Through the narrow curtained door I looked out at the street. The visible area was so small that the movements I saw in it took on a particular clarity; the people who traversed it seemed to move very slowly, as though displaying themselves; it was as if they were not passing the doorway but strolling back and forth in front of it. Women’s breasts had never seemed so beautiful and so provocative. The sight of these women was almost painful, and yet I was glad that I wanted only to watch them strolling back and forth, so pleased with themselves in the light of the big electric signs. A woman came to a stop in the doorway, apparently looking for something. It was frightening how much I wanted to go out to her, but a moment later I thought, “What could I do with her? It would be irresponsible.” And then I relaxed. It had become so impossible for me to imagine myself caressing a woman that the mere thought of holding out my hand to one made me feel desperately tired.

  Someone had left a newspaper on the next table; I picked it up and began to read. I read what had happened and what was yet to happen, page after page with an increasing sense of well-being. A baby had been born on the Long Island Rail Road; a gas station attendant was walking on his hands from Montgomery, Alabama, to Savannah, Georgia. In the Nevada desert the cactus was already in bloom. Whatever I saw in print aroused a compulsive sympathy in me; I felt drawn to every place or person mentioned; even the judge who had an obstreperous defendant chained to his chair, though I couldn’t approve, left me with an uncanny sense of well-being. I felt a kinship with everyone I read about. A woman columnist wrote that she would hide her head in shame if she had conscientious objectors for sons; looking at her picture, I was unable to ward off a quick feeling of affinity; and when a captain testified in court that looking down on the rice paddy from a helicopter he had seen something that looked like a group of women and children but might equally well have been “a man and two water buffaloes,” the mere reading of the words gave me a pang of regret that I hadn’t been in the captain’s place. Every human being and even more so every place that was still unknown to me became, as I read, so congenial to me that I was stricken with wanderlust. Reading about a telegraph office in Montana and a street in an army camp in Virginia, I instantly wanted to be there and stay awhile; otherwise, I felt, I would be missing something that could never be retrieved.

  Such feelings were not new to me; even as a child, I would suddenly, in the middle of an argument or fight, be taken with a feeling that everything was all right; I would stop arguing or let myself be thrown; or when running away from someone, screaming for all I was worth, I would stop running and perhaps even sit down, looking at my pursuer so innocently that he usually passed me by as if he had actually been chasing someone else. If I was bawling someone out, I could seldom keep it up very long; just to be talking put me in a friendly mood, I stopped, and we made up. In the early years when Judith and I started shouting at each other, our quarrel soon became, for me at least, a quotation about a quarrel, not because I found the bone of contention trivial, but because the fact of talking or shouting gave me a sudden sense of the ridiculous. Later on, I continued to feel in the midst of our hostilities that I might just as well burst out laughing the next moment, and sometimes I actually couldn’t help laughing, but by then we were getting on each other’s nerves so badly that any unilateral interruption of a quarrel, even a conciliatory laugh, could only have been taken as an insult by the other. It frightened me that here in New York, while reading the paper, I should again, after so long a time, feel so strangely attracted to everything and everybody; but at the moment I didn’t want to worry about it. Besides, the feeling didn’t last; when I began to think about it, it was gone and forgotten. Once out in the street, I was alone again.

  I wandered about aimlessly but full of curiosity. On Times Square I looked at some albums of nude photographs; the latest news was spelled out for me in electric lights on the Allied Chemical Building. I looked at the clock and set my watch. The square was so bright that I was blind for a moment when I turned into one of the dark side streets. I had read in the paper that a restaurant in Central Park had just reopened after being destroyed by fire, and that some of the charred beams had been used in the new interior. While I was walking along looking for a cab to take me there, someone offered me a ticket for a musical. I was going to ignore him, but then it occurred to me that the cast included Lauren Bacall, who many years ago, playing the part of a strong young woman in Howard Hawks’s picture To Have and Have Not, had leaned over the piano-player’s shoulder in a waterfront dive and sung a song in a deep, husky voice. I gave the man twenty dollars and, ticket in hand, hurried to the theater.

  My seat was in the front row, right over the booming orchestra. Like everyone else I had my coat in my lap. Lauren Bacall was the oldest on the stage,
even the men looked younger. She no longer lounged or slunk as she had in the waterfront dive, but was very sprightly in her movements. In one number, she and a group of young, rather long-haired men, with chains around their necks, danced on tables. Even while sinking with weariness, she had, in mid-collapse, to jump up again and do something different. To keep the attention of the audience from flagging, each of her movements had to be canceled out by the next movement. While telephoning, she had to slip into her shoes, so as to be able to run off the moment she hung up, and after every sentence she spoke she changed her posture, or at least shifted her legs. She had rather large eyes, and her eyeballs went along with each one of her gestures. In each new scene she appeared in an entirely different outfit, though she could hardly have had time to change. I only felt good about her once—when she was doing nothing but holding out a whiskey glass with her long arm. The rest of the time I had the impression that, with her movie career behind her, it no longer amused her to make a living with gestures that were not her own. It was like watching a man who is doing work that is beneath him and who is sure to feel offended at being watched. I thought of Judith: her routine movements were composed of the many little poses that Lauren Bacall’s body was running through like a machine. In a dress shop, I thought, she quite unintentionally adopted the gestures of a lady of fashion: she would stop in the entrance and look around but not at anyone; only when the salesgirl approached her did she focus her eyes, as though startled at her presence. But on the stage she was transformed: the simplicity of her movements was not the unthinking negligence with which simple people saunter about even on the stage; rather, they expressed relief that on the stage it became possible for her to be serious. Everywhere else she might act up and put on airs, but on the stage she calmed down, became selflessly attentive to others, and played her part so naturally that afterward one almost forgot her.

  A police car outside the theater drove through my thoughts with its wailing siren that the orchestra made almost inaudible. A page from somebody’s program floated very slowly down from the balcony, and the fluttering paper made me feel certain that at that very moment Judith was sitting carefree in a restaurant, eating but already lifting her little finger to order something else, and that she was too engrossed in what she was doing to think of other things. From time to time the conductor bobbed up in the orchestra pit! The actors’ trousers were so beautifully pressed! And the way Lauren’s rival picked the olive out of her martini and licked it before popping it into her mouth! Nothing could possibly have happened to her. It was inconceivable that she should not be enjoying herself somewhere. On my money! I was getting hungry; I left in the intermission and took a cab to the restaurant in Central Park.

  The trees in the park rustled softly, as though it were going to rain soon. In the restaurant even the menus had artificially charred corners, and on the cloakroom desk there was a guest book with print as luminous as that of half-burned newspapers. Outside, a police siren was wailing again. One of the waiters drew the curtain over the window where he was standing, another went to the door and stood with folded arms looking out. The siren was very shrill, and for a moment the ice cubes trembled in the glass of water that had been put on my table as soon as I sat down. Only a few people were still at the tables and their faces were half in shadow. The room was almost empty and so large that while the siren faded away in the distance I began to feel very tired. As I sat motionless, something began to move back and forth in my head in a rhythm resembling that of my wanderings about New York that day. Once it stopped, then for a long while it ran straight ahead, then it zigzagged, then it circled awhile and subsided. It was neither an image nor a sound, only a rhythm that now and then pretended to be one or the other. It was only then that I saw inside me the city that up until then I had almost overlooked.

  A city, which during the day I had merely passed by, caught up with me. Rows of houses and streets took form from the vibrations, the sudden stops, the jolts and crisscrossings it had left in me. Then the vibrations became sounds, the surge and roar of a torrent sweeping over a quiet flooded plain. The heavily curtained windows were no barrier to the sounds and images, because they were in my head; now and then they paled into mere vibrations and rhythms, but soon my head so speeded their pace that they sounded and flared up again: the streets became longer, the buildings taller than ever, and horizons moved spasmodically farther and farther into the distance. Nevertheless, it was pleasant: the pattern of New York spread out peacefully inside me and didn’t oppress me. I sat there relaxed yet alive with curiosity, ate the roast lamb to which I had treated myself, drank California red wine that made me thirstier with every swallow, and the compressed, still-rumbling city became for me a gentle panorama of nature. Everything that I had hitherto seen close up, plate glass, stop signs, flagpoles, electric signs, now expanded, because for hours I had been unable to look into the distance, into a landscape that was open as far as the eye could see. I wanted to lie down in it and read a book.

  When I had finished eating, I kept looking through the menu and read the names of dishes as insatiably as I had once read the lives of saints in my prayer book. A steak Alamo, a Louisiana pullet, a bear hock à la Daniel Boone, a cutlet à la Uncle Tom. The few diners were still there and were now talking in loud voices. A newsboy came in and threw a few papers on the cloakroom desk. A heavily made-up old woman went from table to table with flowers. A waiter deftly poured cognac over a souffle at the table of a corpulent couple, the lady struck a match for him, he took it with a bow, and held it over the frying pan. The souffle flared up and the couple clapped their hands. The waiter smiled, transferred the souffle to a plate, and served it to the lady. Then with his napkin he took a bottle of white wine out of the ice bucket and poured it, holding his free arm behind his back. A pianist turned up from somewhere and began to play softly. A cook stuck his head through the kitchen window and listened. I ordered another carafe of red wine and drank it up, but made no move to leave.

  A waiter went into the kitchen and came back chewing. The cloakroom attendant laid out a game of solitaire. She had a pin in her mouth and, while playing, stirred a cup of coffee that was perched on the rail. Then she put the spoon down, let the pin drop out of her mouth, and drank her coffee at one gulp. She swirled the cup to dissolve the residue of sugar, tipped it into her mouth, and went on with her solitaire. Two women came in from outside, one waved a long glove at the waiters, the other sat down at the piano. The pianist changed over to another tune, and she sang:

  “In the days of old, in the days of gold,

  In the days of forty-nine.”

  Long after midnight I walked back to the hotel, where I sat down in the Blue Bar and drank Kentucky whiskey. I drank slowly and didn’t get drunk. I found some picture postcards of the hotel on a table and wrote to a lot of people, including some I had never written to before. I got airmail stamps out of the vending machine in the lobby and dropped my cards in the hotel mailbox. I went back to the bar, sat down in a big leather swivel armchair, and held my glass in front of me on the palm of my hand. From time to time I bent over and took a sip. The bartender came over and put an ash tray on a table at which an old woman was sitting. From time to time she giggled; after each giggle she took a notebook out of her quilted bag and wrote something with a little silver ballpoint pen. Finally, for the second time that night, I felt tired, took another picture postcard from the pile, and went up to my room. On my way I addressed the card and dropped it into the mail slot on my landing. On the way down it rattled once or twice.

  When I got to my room there was a sheet of white paper on the floor. Thinking it was a message for me, I picked it up. But it was only the hotel manager’s card, which had been on top of the fruit bowl. I called the desk again and asked them to turn the air conditioning back on. Then I went to bed without washing and opened Green Heinrich.

  I read how at school Heinrich Lee acquired his first enemy. A schoolmate encouraged him to bet on everything that st
irred in nature: what fence post a bird would sit on, how low a tree would bend in the wind, whether every fifth or every sixth wave in the lake would be a big one. Heinrich developed betting fever; he lost and couldn’t pay up. The two friends, now enemies, met for the last time on a narrow mountain path. Neither said a word; they just flung themselves on each other and fought bitterly. With deadly calm Heinrich clutched his enemy and punched him rhythmically in the face. But every time he punched him he felt a furious pain; never in all his life was he to suffer more deeply. Soon he had to leave school and move to the country. There for the first time he found freedom in nature and began to sketch it with a pleasure he had never before experienced.