Short Letter, Long Farewell

by Peter Handke

  I had grown up in the country and it was hard for me to imagine that nature could free anyone from anything. It had only oppressed me; at any rate, it had been distasteful to me. I detested stubble fields, fruit trees, and pastures, there was something repulsive about them. I saw them from too close at hand: in the stubble fields I ran barefoot; when I climbed trees, the bark scraped my skin; in the pastures I went about in rubber boots, chasing pissing cows in the rain. Only now did it dawn on me that I had been so keenly aware of these little annoyances because I had never been able to move about freely in nature: the fruit trees belonged to other people that I had to run away from, across the fields, and my only reward for tending the cows was rubber boots that I needed only for tending the cows. Because I was driven into nature as a child, because nature was my place of work, I never developed an eye for it; at the most, I was curious about crevices, hollow trees, holes in the ground, anything I could disappear into, especially underground caves. I was also attracted by underbrush, corn fields, hazelnut thickets, sunken lanes, and gullies. But to nature I preferred houses and streets, where there were more forbidden things to be done. When the wind ruffled a wheat field, it only annoyed me by blowing my hair in my face. Later on, to be sure, I often thought of wheat fields waving in the wind to persuade myself that nature hadn’t really been so distasteful to me, and to tell the truth, it was distasteful to me only because in my nature days I could never do as I pleased.

  I put the book down and lay in the dark. The air conditioning purred softly, and I watched myself gradually falling asleep. The bathroom door turned into a white house on a hill. Someone was trying to breathe through his nose, and at the foot of a cliff far below me a dog whimpered in answer. I turned over on the other side and immediately rolled down a slope. I fell into the dry bed of a brook—it was full of clothes hangers and chopped-up rubber boots—and curled up to sleep. The rain was pouring down, a flash flood was approaching with an uproar, but never got to me. “I’ve forgotten to sign the register!”

  Next morning, shortly before noon, I went to Pennsylvania Station and took a Penn Central train to Philadelphia.

  Thinking back, I can’t understand it; that day passed as quickly for me as the days in horror films. You stepped into a subterranean station, escalators carried you farther and farther down; pushed forward by the last step of the escalator, you passed through an open door, and it was only after you had sat down and were moving that you knew for sure you were on a train. For a few minutes it was dark outside the windows, while the train was passing through the tunnel under the Hudson River; when it rose to the surface in New Jersey, you were in a twilight landscape and the gloom was deepened by the tinted windows. In the car it was bright, the pages of your book almost glittered when you turned them; but each time you looked out, the clouds seemed darker than ever and the land below them emptier: garbage heaps instead of houses, yellow smoke on the horizon but no chimneys, a car without tires lying upside down in a fallow field, scraggly woods in which trees uprooted by the wind hung withering on the leafy green branches of their neighbors, here and there on the sand hills, scraps of parachute silk—sea gulls that had flown inland by mistake. The railroad line had recently gone into bankruptcy, and many of the way stations had been closed down. You passed through cities that seemed depopulated because the houses faced away from the tracks. After two hours, rows of soot-covered houses with boarded-up windows on which skulls and crossbones had been painted closed in on the right of way and it became so dark in the car that you didn’t notice it when the train entered the tunnel leading to the subterranean Philadelphia station.

  More escalators; a large square you could step right out into without going down any steps. I looked to see if anyone had come to meet me. I said, “There’s no need for you to hide. You were watching me from behind one of those pillars in the station, weren’t you? I have no desire to find you.” “Don’t blackmail me with myself,” I said. “I don’t scare easily, not any more at least. I’m no longer defenseless against fear.” Two Quakers in long black coats and flat broad-brimmed hats crossed the square to an open car beside which a young Negro chauffeur, with a small radio in his shirt pocket, was standing. A marine, whom I had seen on the train, came running after the Quakers and showed them something. They only smiled; one of them made a negative gesture, while the other got into the car. Then he got out again and pointed at me. I was frightened. They motioned to me and I went slowly toward them. The marine raised his arm and brandished my camera; I had left it in the train.

  I crossed the square with the marine. Neither of us knew where he was going, each was following the other. In front of a statue of William Penn I took his picture and he put it in his pocket when it was dry. In return, he took out a newspaper clipping and unfolded it, holding it firmly by the edges like an important document. It was a story about his return to his home town of Red Wing, Minnesota. He had been welcomed by the American Legion and had made a speech which, according to the clipping, had been simple but had won all hearts with its easy good humor. “Actually,” said the marine, “I only talked about the time Bob Hope and his girls entertained us, and I told a few of his jokes. But everybody was in a good humor and nobody asked any questions.” And he went on, “Then later on I showed Red Wing how to rock. First I practiced at home with my girl, then one night I picked ‘Jailhouse Rock’ on the jukebox; we began to dance as if it was a waltz and then all of a sudden I threw her over my shoulder.” “I admire Elvis Presley,” said the marine. “He spent more than two years in the army and now he’s back in business again. I’m not crazy about being a marine, but it’s my job. One time I saw a reed growing in shallow water. There were a few other reeds nearby, but they all moved. This one reed didn’t move. We had to kill somebody now and then or we’d have been killed ourselves.” The marine had a round face with large nostrils. He wore glasses, and dandruff had fallen on them from his eyebrows. His lips were very pale; he had a gold tooth and spoke softly. At the end of every sentence he went into a singsong and his voice went up, as though he needed a nod to go on. He took off his cap and showed me his long hair. As he did so, his glasses slid down over his nose and there was a blind, indifferent friendliness in his eyes, which didn’t see me at all. It came to me that this was the first time in months that I’d been able to look at someone close up without strain. It was as if someone else were looking at the marine. At the same time I felt offended that he had picked me to tell his story to. Why was it that people always told me their stories? One look at me must have told them I wouldn’t like it. But that didn’t prevent them from telling me the stupidest stories with perfect calm, as if they took it for granted that I’d listen with the ears of an accomplice.

  “Do I still have to act myself out to be seen as I am?” I asked myself when I had left the marine on the pretense of having to make a phone call. “Is it only when I talk and contradict that people can see what I’m like and want to be like? Can’t they tell from the way I move, from the way I hold my head and look around?” “Or,” I asked myself in the cab on the way to my hotel, “do I still have the same gestures as before? Do I still have to think up a new attitude at every step? Can people see that among many gestures I always have to choose one? And does that make them think I’m ready to accept every possible opinion?”

  “Or are they only trying to frighten me?” I thought in the doorway of the hotel, while watching the cab driver hand my suitcase to the hotel porter. “Maybe people can see at a glance that I’m the kind that puts up with anything, that the usual precautions people take when getting acquainted are pointless, that they can be friendly from the start, because we like everything and everybody so much that anything goes and there’s nothing to fear.”

  Without thinking, I tilted my head back as if I had had a nosebleed: the clouds glittered bright; I was afraid that would make the night fall sooner. In the morning I had taken a short train ride; then I had strolled around the square with the marine for a little while, and
already it was late afternoon: the shadows were long when the sun came out for a moment just to show that it would soon be dark and everything would mean something different. With a feeling that the foot I was putting forward was too light and the one that stayed behind too heavy, I followed the porter deep into the hotel to the registration desk. I quickly signed my name in the book and waited in the elevator only long enough for someone to be pushed in in a wheel chair; but by the time I got to my room the sun was setting. When I stepped out of the bathroom, it was dusk; and after I hung my coat in the closet, perhaps a little more carefully than usual, it was dark.

  “You beast!” I said. “I’ll beat you to a pulp, I’ll beat you to a pulp. Please don’t let me find you, you monster. It wouldn’t be nice for you if I found you.”

  Someone was thrashing about, they carried him out of the house, I ran out and watched him gasping and choking—“from pollen!”; someone who was holding him slipped and fell, I helped to carry the dead man into the house, then I slowly slipped away; I was barefoot, I stepped on a sharp stone and an intense pain electrified me from the soles of my feet to the top of my head. Some women behind me whispered that he was dead, but very softly and considerately; they didn’t even whisper, only their dresses rustled, two toad’s eyes looked out of a swamp, a door handle moved slowly up and down—con—siderately? I stretched my bare legs and they went into a clump of nettles. A lizard darted by at the edge of my field of vision; but it was only the hotel emblem on my door key, which was swinging back and forth in the lock. “I don’t want to be alone any more,” I said.

  I had written a woman in Phoenixville, a small town west of Philadelphia, to say that I might go and see her. Her name was Claire Madison. Three years before, on my previous visit to America, we had made love just once. We hardly knew each other; because of the way I had precipitated matters, I often thought about it.

  I looked her up in the phone book and called her. “Where are you?” she asked. “In Philadelphia,” I said. “I’m leaving for St. Louis tomorrow with my child,” she said. “Would you like to come along?” We arranged that I should go to Phoenixville for lunch next day; we would start out after the child’s afternoon nap.

  Then she hung up and I remained by the telephone. There was a small electric clock on the bedside table. Its dial cast a somber glow deep into the room. Each minute the number changed with a soft click. I pulled out the clock plug and the room was in total darkness. Claire had been about thirty when we met for the first time. She was a big girl, with wide lips that didn’t open but only narrowed slightly when she smiled. Her face was big too, not the kind of face it seemed appropriate to stroke. Altogether it was impossible to caress her. She never talked about herself, and it never occurred to me that there could be anything to say about her. She was always so physically present that there was nothing to be said. So I talked about myself or about things outside the window; there was no other way to show affection. Anything else would have required a skipping of steps that would have put a strain on us both. The last time I went to see her, she called out to me to come in, that the door was open: the open door and the way, when I went in, that she was leaning against the door leading to another room, arranged themselves, as in a dream, into a signal to take her in my arms and thrust my leg between her legs. Recalling the scene, I stood up, sat down again, and closed my eyes so hard that it hurt. And then the prolonged murmurs while she was taking her clothes off! We stood looking to one side, speaking with unnatural voices; then we turned and gazed at each other long and silently with feverish yet empty eyes and caressed each other until our desire made us cough aloud. Bewildered, we would break apart and look up from each other’s loins till our eyes met. Then we would have to turn away again, and again one of us would murmur in that unnatural voice, until the other interrupted with mannered caresses. Actually the door she was leaning against was only the door of a large American refrigerator. Suddenly, in the course of our half-hearted caresses, I was inside her. I wanted to murmur her name but couldn’t. She was a German instructor at some college. Her father had been stationed in Heidelberg after the war, and instead of sending for her, he had only written her letters telling her to learn German. She had been married for a time. Her child was not by me.

  Deep night. My room was on the top floor, too high for the street lamps to shine in; the buildings across the street were office buildings and the cleaning women had gone. Once a glare swept across my walls, when a plane flew over with blinking lights. I phoned a few hotels in Philadelphia that were expensive enough for Judith to stop at: the Sheraton, the Warwick, the Adelphia, the Normandie. Then it crossed my mind that she might be right here at the Barclay, and I called the desk. Yes, she had stayed here, but had checked out two days before. She had left nothing in her room and had paid her bill in cash.

  I was furious; then my anger passed and my horror became so great that the objects in the room seemed to flutter like bats’ wings. Then the horror passed too, giving way to an enormous feeling of disgust, because I was still my same old helpless self. I called room service and ordered some toast and French red wine and put on all the lights, producing an effect ordinarily seen only in photos advertising hotel rooms. I also turned the light on in the bathroom. After the waiter had wheeled in his cart with its ludicrous still life of toast and wine, I switched on the color TV. I ate and drank, casting an occasional glance at the screen when a woman screamed or when there was a long silence. Once when for some time there had been no sound but the hum of the television set, I looked up and saw a row of deserted German middle-class houses in the background: in the foreground, so close that I could only see his head, a monster whished by. Intermittently, a man in a chef’s hat praised the qualities of a five-course dinner in a cellophane bag, that one had only to immerse in boiling water for a few minutes; the chef also showed how to cut the bag open with scissors and then, in close-up, plopped the steaming dishes down on paper plates. Later, still drinking my wine, I switched to another channel and watched an animated cartoon in which a cat blows a wad of bubblegum so big that it bursts and the cat chokes to death. It was the first time I had ever seen anyone die in an animated cartoon.

  At that point I had had enough of my room. Leaving the TV running and the lights on, I rode down in the elevator. It being Sunday, the bar was closed, so I went out. In Philadelphia the streets run parallel or at right angles to each other. I went straight ahead, turned into Chestnut Street, which is one of the main thoroughfares, and then again went straight ahead. The streets were all very quiet. I dropped into what looked like a nightclub and caught sight of the marine; he seemed to be drunk, though no liquor was being served. He was leaning against the wall watching the dancers, who were all very young. No longer in uniform, he was wearing a leather jacket; his glasses were in the breast pocket. I nodded to him. He waved but didn’t seem to recognize me. I sat down at a table with a dark-colored drink that tasted burned and was called root beer. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

  The band had withdrawn, only one of the singers stayed on. He picked up a steel guitar and sat down on a stool by the mike. He began to sing a talking blues. The people, who had stopped dancing, gathered around the singer and listened. His story was about a feeble-minded girl, who had been raped by a farmer she was working for and given birth to a child. “And I was that child!” said the singer, striking a chord, which echoed on while he continued his story. “She had the child while she was going out to the well for water; she wrapped it in her apron and carried it into the house, and the farmer and his wife raised me as their own child. And one day I climbed up a fence and got stuck. The feeble-minded woman, who couldn’t even talk, came running and helped the child down. And the child said to the farmer’s wife, ‘Hey, Ma, why are the idiot girl’s hands so soft?’ And that idiot girl was my mother!” the singer screamed. Then he took the guitar and played a series of long, tremulous chords.

  Suddenly, as the music became more incisive and impatient, the marine
came to life. He raised his arms as though to stretch. He was pushing something upward but, arrived at head height, it would go no farther, and, frustrated, his hands clenched into trembling fists. He closed his eyes so tight that his eyeballs began to tremble. Fighting against insuperable resistance, he bent his head to one side, then jerked one shoulder, trying to hit his ear with it. His lips opened, he ground his teeth. Every movement he attempted was blocked by an equal countermovement. His face was twisted and his head bent far back. Over and over, he struggled to lift a weight; each time his arms fought their way to shoulder level, began to shake, lost height, thrashed about for a moment, and steadied themselves with a last muscular exertion; even letting his arms fall seemed to demand a painful effort. He raised one knee, forced his head down, and rubbed his forehead against his knee. The sweat poured from his long sideburns, his gums were bright with saliva, yet I watched him with respect and affection. His ecstasy was not artificial and imitative like the movements of the other people, who had meanwhile resumed their dancing; it had taken him by surprise and he didn’t know what to do with it. No longer able to speak or even to stammer, he tried to free himself by acting as if some primeval monster were dying inside him. Then suddenly he was still and there was a knife in his hand. Someone who had been watching him struck him on the forearm and the knife fell to the floor. Only a few people were looking on as the marine was led away.

  I went back to the hotel and read about Green Heinrich, how he began to sketch from nature but looked only for what was grotesque and mysterious in nature. He tried to go nature one better, to make himself interesting as an observer by imagining blasted willow trunks and cliff-ghosts. He invented fantastically grimacing trees and rocks and peopled his landscape with weird ragged figures, because he knew so little about himself that nature as he found it still meant nothing to him. Then a cousin, who had always lived in the country, showed him that all the trees he drew looked alike, and that none looked like a real tree. “These boulders couldn’t be piled up like that for a second without collapsing!” His cousin gave him an assignment: to sketch his property. And though his cousin spoke as a proprietor, Heinrich was now obliged for the first time to look at things. Now the simplest objects, even the tiles on the roof, gave him more trouble than he would ever have thought possible. It occurred to me that for a long time my own vision of the world around me had been twisted: when I tried to describe something, I never knew what it looked like; I remembered only its anomalies, and if there weren’t any, I made them up. All the people I described were giants with birthmarks and falsetto voices. Most often they were escaped convicts, who sat for hours on tree trunks in the woods, telling their stories to the wind. I was quick to see cripples, blind men, and idiots, but even these I could not have described in detail. I was more interested in ruins than houses. I liked to spend my time in graveyards and always counted the suicides’ graves along the wall. I could be with someone for hours and then, if he went away and came back, fail to recognize him; at the most I might remember that he had a pimple or lisped. Only abnormalities and bad habits held my attention; after the first glance I stopped looking at everything else and had to invent things if anyone asked me to tell what I had seen. Since at that time my imagination also knew nothing, I lied, throwing in distinguishing marks as though making out a warrant, and these distinguishing marks would take the place of whole landscapes, situations, and biographies. It was only when I met Judith, and for the first time really experienced something, that I began to see the world with something more than a malignant first glance. I became more patient and stopped collecting distinguishing marks.