Short Letter, Long Farewell

by Peter Handke

  I had fallen asleep without turning out the lights and in my dream the sun shone in my face. I was waiting at a crossroads; a car stopped beside me; I went over and moved the windshield wiper to the middle of the windshield. A woman sitting beside the driver leaned out and pulled it down again. She pointed at the sky and I saw the sun was shining. I laughed; the driver, a Frenchman, joined in my laughter, and yet, as though my dream had been a nightmare, I woke up with an erection but no excitement. I turned out the lights. Toward morning someone clapped his hands violently. I shouted, “Yes!” and jumped out of bed. It was only a pigeon that had fluttered past my window.

  Phoenixville is a small town with a population of about fifteen thousand, some twenty miles from Philadelphia. I settled the price with a cab driver and started after breakfast. On the way we made one stop; I bought a harmonica for the child and some film packs for the Polaroid camera in a discount store, where they only cost half as much as at airports. A present for Claire would only have embarrassed her. I couldn’t think of anything that would have been right for her, and I couldn’t visualize her with something in her hands; it would have looked incongruous.

  Nevertheless, she was carrying a suitcase out to the car when my cab drew up to her house on Greenleaf Street. The car was an Oldsmobile, the trunk was open. The child was toddling awkwardly up and down in front of Claire, carrying a little draw-string bag. The house door was open, a few suitcases were standing beside it, the front lawn was still sparkling with dew.

  I got out of the cab and took my bag over to the car. We exchanged greetings and I put my bag in the trunk. Then I brought the other bags over from the doorway and passed them to her. She stowed them away. The child screamed at her to close the trunk. The child was a girl, about two years old; she had been born in New Orleans and her name was Delta Benedictine. Claire closed the trunk and explained, “I can’t leave anything open in front of Benedictine. It frightens her. Yesterday she began to scream and wouldn’t stop; finally I found out what the trouble was: a button was open on my blouse.” She picked up the child, who refused to walk in my presence, and we went inside.

  “You’ve changed,” said Claire. “You look more carefree. It doesn’t bother you any more to be wearing a dirty shirt. Three years ago you always came to see me in a white shirt, a new one each time, I could still see the creases on the chest. And here you are in the same old coat, it’s been darned with nylon thread.”

  “I’ve lost interest in buying clothes,” I said. “I hardly look at shop windows any more. In the past I wanted to wear something different every day, now I wear the same thing for months. As for my shirt, there was no laundry service at the hotel yesterday.”

  “What have you got in your bag?” Claire asked.

  “Underwear and books,” I said.

  “What are you reading now?”

  “Green Heinrich by Gottfried Keller.”

  She hadn’t read it and I said I’d read parts of it to her. “Maybe tonight, before we go to bed,” she said.

  “Where will that be?” I asked.

  “In Donora, south of Pittsburgh,” she said. “I know a motel there, it’s off the road, it will be quieter for the child. I hope we get that far, it’s almost three hundred miles and the Allegheny Mountains are in between. Have you learned to drive in the meantime?”

  “No,” I said. “Never again will I let anybody examine me. The thought of someone asking me questions and making something depend on my answers has become intolerable to me. In the past, say ten years ago, it would have disgusted me and made me furious, but I’d have let them examine me. Now I won’t.”

  “You keep talking about ‘the past’ and ‘now,’” said Claire.

  “It’s because I can’t wait to be older,” I said, and couldn’t help laughing.

  “How old are you?” Claire asked.

  “In three days I’ll be thirty,” I said.

  “In St. Louis,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “And I can’t wait.”

  “To get to St. Louis or to be thirty?”

  “To be thirty and in St. Louis,” I said.

  She fed the child while I went into the bathroom and washed my hair. She had packed the dryer, so I sat down on the front lawn with my wet hair. It struck me as quite extraordinary that the sun should be shining that day.

  When I came back in, she was undressing the child, and I watched her. She zipped her into a sleeping bag and put her to bed in another room. I heard her drawing the curtains. Then she came out; for lunch we had roast beef and dumplings with beer.

  “Do you like Austria any better now?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “I was glad to be there. I realized that I had gone so far as to imagine that they had different sets of symbols from the rest of the world. But now I saw the same traffic signs, the same bottle shapes, the same screw threads as everywhere else. In all seriousness I was surprised to find hotels, department stores, paved roads, all perfectly available. Maybe I was so surprised because this was the country of my childhood and because as a child I didn’t see those things and what I did see wasn’t available to me. Little by little, I’m even beginning to see nature, which used to make me nervous and miserable, with new eyes.” There I stopped. I had meant to say something else.

  After lunch I cleared the table and got myself a bottle of beer out of the refrigerator. Claire explained that she was going to visit friends in St. Louis during the college vacation. “They’re lovers,” she said. And another reason for going to St. Louis was that a German dramatic group was at the university there, doing some classical plays she had never seen performed.

  I wanted to help with the dishes, but since my last visit she had acquired a dishwasher. She showed me how it worked. “A few things still have to be washed by hand,” she explained. “Silver, for instance, and pots and pans that are too big for the machine. I haven’t got any silver, but I have to use big pots because I often cook for weeks ahead. I keep the stuff in the deep freeze.” She showed me the frozen soup in the deep freeze. “I’ll be able to eat it when I get back in the fall,” she said, and I had a feeling that nothing could possibly go wrong before the fall came and she would thaw out the soup.

  When the dishwasher had shut itself off, we put the dishes away. If anyone had asked me, I wouldn’t have known, but once I set to work I remembered where everything belonged. I tossed the beer bottles into the garbage disposal, then I turned on the record player without looking to see what record was on it. With a glance at the door behind which the child was sleeping, Claire turned down the volume a little. The record was called She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and consisted of some tunes from John Ford’s movies played on the jew’s-harp. “In Providence I heard a regimental band playing those things,” I exclaimed, and repeated the sentence very softly, as though Claire couldn’t have understood it when I said it in a loud voice.

  She went about barefoot, collecting little things for the trip, needles, medicines the child might need, a fever thermometer, the child’s inoculation certificate, a straw hat to shade her from the sun. Then she brewed fennel tea in soda water for the road. It was a pleasure to watch her: all so wonderfully innocent.

  She disappeared into one of the rooms, and when she came out of another, I looked up and didn’t know her. She was wearing a different dress, but that had nothing to do with it. We went outside and she lay down in a hammock; I sat in a rocking chair and told her about my life during the last three years.

  Then we heard the child calling and Claire went in and dressed her, while I sat rocking. I noticed that some articles of the child’s clothing were still hanging on the clothesline. Without telling Claire, I stuffed them into the bag she had used for the other odds and ends. I was infected with the serenity of my surroundings. With the child in the back seat, we drove out of Phoenixville.

  On the way to Interstate 76, she remembered the clothes on the line, and I pointed to the bag where I had put them. “I also unplugged the record player and
the hot water heater,” I told her.

  Interstate 76 from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh is known as the Pennsylvania Turnpike and is more than three hundred miles long. We entered it from State Route 100, near Downingtown, after the eighth toll station. On the seat beside her Claire had a box full of coins; at each toll station she would toss a few of them out the window into the hopper without coming to a full stop. From there to Donora we passed another fifteen toll stations. In the course of the day Claire tossed more than five dollars into hoppers.

  We didn’t talk much, and then only to the child, who asked questions about various things in the landscape. The sky was cloudless, the hops and wheat had begun to sprout. Smoke rose from towns tucked away behind the hills. Although every inch of ground looked as if it had just been cultivated, there wasn’t a living soul in the fields, which were impersonating unspoiled nature. And nowhere on the road, which seemed new, were there men at work; the asphalt glittered peacefully; the cars drove slowly, no one did more than seventy. Once an air force plane flew over very low, casting so big a shadow I thought it was going to crash. There seemed to be less wind in the distance than in the bushes nearby. A flock of white birds changed direction suddenly and turned black. The air was pure and clear; only rarely was an insect dashed against the windshield. From time to time I saw animals that had been run over; the dogs and cats had been moved to the side of the road, the hedgehogs had been left in the middle. Claire told the child there was water in the big aluminum globes on top of the farmhouses.

  I felt like using the camera, though there wasn’t much to be seen, and in quick succession took several pictures that were almost all alike. Then I took one of the child standing on the back seat, looking out. Last, I snapped Claire, moving away from her as far as possible because the camera was no good for close-ups. I had used up the last film pack by the time we passed Harrisburg. I lined up the pictures on the windshield and looked back and forth between them and the countryside.

  “You’ve changed too,” I said to Claire, surprised that there was something to be said of her, and pointed at one of the photographs. “You look as if you are always thinking of what your next thought will be. You used to go off into absences, half the time you were hardly awake, now you look so businesslike and somehow troubled.”

  “Somehow?”

  “Yes, somehow,” I said. “I can’t quite put my finger on it. You walk faster, you move more briskly, you’re more determined, you talk louder, you make more noise. As if you were trying to distract attention from yourself.”

  She answered by blowing the horn, but said nothing. After a while the child, who had been listening, ordered us to go on talking.

  “I’m more forgetful than before,” said Claire. “No, it’s not that, it’s just that I remember less. Sometimes somebody tells me about something we did together a few days ago, but I just don’t want to remember.”

  “Since I’ve been in America, I remember more and more,” I said when she stopped talking. “I only have to take an escalator and I remember how scared I was the first time I stepped onto an escalator. If I walk into a blind alley, all the forgotten blind alleys I’ve ever strayed into come back to me. Most of all, I’ve come to understand since I’ve been here why the only memory I ever developed was for frightening things. I never had anything with which to compare the things I saw every day. All my impressions were repetitions of impressions that were already known to me. It wasn’t just that I didn’t get around much, but also that I didn’t see many people whose circumstances were different from mine. Since we were poor, nearly all the people I knew were poor. We saw so few things that there was very little to talk about and we had the same conversation almost every day. In those surroundings anyone who was more talkative was a character if he was funny and amused people; if he only spun fantasies like me, he was a dreamer; because I had no desire to be a character. In the world I lived in, my dreams were really fantasies, because they had no connection with anything in that world, there was nothing comparable that would have made them possible. As a result, I never became fully conscious of the world around me or of my dreams, and that’s why I never remember them. All I remember is moments of terror, because at such moments my world and my dreams, which at other times were unrelated, suddenly became one and the same thing. My world provoked my dream, and my dream made me see the world, which otherwise I had simply ignored in my fantasies. So states of fear were for me ways to knowledge; it was only when I was afraid that I paid attention to my surroundings, looking for a sign to tell me whether things would get better or still worse, and later on I remembered those moments of fear. But that kind of memory was something that happened to me from outside, I never learned to cultivate it. If I had moments of hope in those days, I’ve forgotten them.”

  We had been climbing steadily, though there were no big mountains to be seen. The sun was halfway down the sky and now and then a sparkling went up from the hillsides. The child wanted to hear us talking again. Claire told her we’d be talking a good deal later on. I gave her a cup of fennel tea to drink. She held the cup in both hands and gave it back when it was empty. After New Baltimore, there was a tunnel and Claire put the child beside her on the front seat. When we got out of the tunnel, she asked me to move the child back again. Now there were dark shadows between the hills and I could see the moon through the back window.

  “If we get to Donora before seven,” said Claire, “the child can come to dinner with us. There’s a restaurant across from the motel. The Yellow Ribbon, it’s called.”

  We stopped at a gas station. While the tank was filling up, Claire took the child to the back to do her business. While waiting, I got a can of soda out of the vending machine. It was late in the day, the machine must have been almost empty, because my can tumbled down from a considerable height and foamed over when I opened it. The red, white, and blue oval AMERICAN sign over the gas station rotated slowly, and the child talked about it when she came back with Claire. As we drove off, the child suddenly let out a yell; we turned around and saw that the lights had gone on in the gas station. “But it wasn’t dark yet!” Suddenly it seemed to me that the country we had been driving through was country that one could also arrive in. I began to talk and was relieved to find that I had stopped hearing my own voice.

  “I think I’m developing something that looks like an active memory,” I said. “Up until now I had only a passive memory. But in this active remembering I don’t try to repeat complete experiences; all I want is to prevent the first little hopes I felt in connection with those experiences from relapsing into fantasies. As a child, for instance, I used to bury things, hoping that when I dug them up they’d have turned into treasure. I don’t regard this as a childish game any more, I’m no longer ashamed of it as I used to be; today I remember such things on purpose in order to assure myself that if I was unable to change the things around me or see them in a different light, my nature was not to blame, but only momentary dullness or bad humor. I see this even more clearly when I remember how often I pretended to be a magician. What I wanted was not so much to make something out of nothing or change one thing into another as to enchant myself. I twisted a ring or pulled a blanket over me and said it would spirit me away. Of course it was ridiculous when somebody pulled the blanket away and I was still there, but what was more important for memory was the brief moment when I really thought I wasn’t there any more. Today I interpret that feeling not as a desire to vanish from the face of the earth, but as joyful anticipation of a future when I would cease to be the person I was at the moment. It’s very much the same now when every day I tell myself that I’m one more day older and that it must show. It’s got so I really want the time to pass and make me older.”

  “And die,” said Claire.