Short Letter, Long Farewell

by Peter Handke

“I seldom think of my own death,” I said.

  Before Pittsburgh, where the turnpike continues northwestward, we turned off to the southwest onto Interstate 70, where there were no more toll stations, and reached Donora soon after sunset. In the lobby of the motel a movie was showing on TV; Henry Fonda in the role of a police officer had just found out that his daughter was taking drugs. Next to the TV set a canary was pecking at a cuttlebone in its cage. We took two adjoining rooms.

  Crossing the parking place to the car, I saw a narrow little cloud that was still lit up by the sun, which had vanished behind a hill. The hill had been transformed into a flat surface, and above it the cloud shimmered so white that at first I saw a cuttlebone in the sky. All at once I understood how illusions and mistaken identities give rise to metaphors. The quarter of sky where the sun had just gone down was more dazzling than the direct rays had been before. When I looked at the ground, glowworms were hopping up and down, and even in my room I groped for a moment in darkness. “My whole being hearkens in silence”: that was how people used to feel in the presence of natural phenomena; but what nature gave me at such moments was a clear sense of myself.

  I opened the door to the other room and watched while Claire changed the child’s dress for a pair of pants and a sweater. The sight of these human activities comforted me. Then we crossed the highway on the overpass and went to the Yellow Ribbon, in front of which there was a luminous statue of a pioneer woman with a yellow neckerchief. The waitresses also wore yellow neckerchiefs whose ends hung down over their shoulders. The child had milk and corn flakes; now and then Claire gave her a bite of the trout she and I were eating. The sky outside the big windows grew darker, and again the hills brightened. Then the hills too grew dark and when I looked out, all I could see was some of myself in the windowpanes. The child became very talkative, her pupils dilated, she left the table and ran out into the middle of the room. Claire said the child was tired; she let her run about for a little while, then picked her up and carried her to the motel after promising to come back as soon as the child was asleep.

  After a while she reappeared, smiling. In the meantime I had ordered some wine and filled our glasses. “Benedictine wanted to know why your fingernails are so dirty,” said Claire. “She fell asleep right away.”

  I began to explain my dirty fingernails; then I stopped talking about myself and we talked about America.

  “I haven’t got an America I can go away to like you,” said Claire. “It’s as if you’d come over on a time machine, not for the change of place but for a glimpse of the future. Over here we’ve lost all sense of where we’re going. If we draw any comparisons, it’s with the past. And we’ve given up wanting anything, except perhaps to be children again. We’re always talking about the first years, our own first years and the first years of our history; not to repudiate them, but with a kind of longing to be little again. You’ll see that most of our mental cases don’t rave, they just relapse into childhood. You look at them on the street, and suddenly they have the faces of children. They start singing lullabies or reciting historical dates, and they keep it up till their dying day. Most European madmen talk in religious formulas; even when American madmen are talking about food, they have to stop now and then and reel off lists of our nation’s victorious battles.”

  “The first time I was over here,” I said, “I was only interested in images: gas stations, yellow taxis, drive-in movies, advertising posters, highways, a Greyhound bus, a bus-stop sign on the highway, the Santa Fe Railway, the desert. There were no people in my consciousness and I felt good about it. Now I’m sick of all these images, I want to be something different but I don’t feel good as often, because people are still too new to me.” “But you feel good right now?” Claire asked. “Yes,” I said.

  I saw I’d been talking about myself again and asked if I could take her back to the motel and read her a few pages of Green Heinrich. We took the overpass again. The stars had come out and the moon was so bright that the cars had big shadows when they swung around the curve up the road. When they came closer, in the lights of the motel and the restaurant, they lost their shadows and shrank. We looked down for a while, then we crossed the long court, where the stillness increased at every step, to our rooms.

  She looked in on the child, then came into my room. She sat down on the bed and leaned back. Now and then a car whished softly by. I sat in a big armchair with my legs over one arm and read how when Heinrich Lee embraced a girl for the first time an icy coldness came over him and he and the girl suddenly felt like enemies. They went home together and Heinrich fed the horse while the girl stood at the open window, undoing her hair and watching him. “The slow movements of our hands in the silence that lay over the yard filled us with a profound and, all in all, happy peace; we would have been glad to go on like that for years; from time to time I bit into a piece of bread before giving it to the horse, whereupon Anna took some bread out of the cupboard and ate it at the window. That made us laugh, and just as dry bread tasted so good after the festive, noisy meal, so the way we were now living together seemed to be the right channel; we had put into it after our little storm, and that was where we should stay.” I also read about another girl whom Heinrich loved because the look on her face told him that she longed to be thinking whatever he happened to be thinking.

  I saw that Claire had closed her eyes and was almost asleep. We sat silent for a while; then she said, “It’s late. All that driving has made me tired.” A little dizzily she went to her room.

  That night the time passed too slowly, even when I was sleeping. The bed was so big; I kept moving from side to side, and that made the night longer. But here for the first time in months I dreamed of being with a woman and wanting to make love to her. During the last six months with Judith, when the mere sight of each other made us dry in the mouth with hatred, I hadn’t even dreamed of touching a woman. I don’t mean that the thought disgusted me, I mean that I wasn’t even capable of such a thought. Of course, I remembered that these things were possible, but I wasn’t even tempted to visualize them. I cultivated my condition, and little by little it developed into a frozen detachment that frightened me. Now at least I had dreamed about being with a woman; that filled my long night with excitement and I woke up in a state of impatience. I wanted to tell Claire about my dreams, but then it seemed better to wait until they recurred.

  When I heard the child talking in the other room, I dressed and went in. I helped Claire to pack up, we ate breakfast and drove off. We wanted to be in Columbus, Ohio, before noon, and it was more than two hundred miles. That, we reckoned, would take about five hours, because in Ohio we would have to drive through several cities and we could count on being held up at intersections. We planned to eat lunch in Columbus; then the child would take her nap in the car. Our goal for the day was Indianapolis, something under four hundred miles in all.

  Again the day was cloudless; the sun, which had just risen, shone into the car through the rear window. I put the straw hat on the child; she was frantic because I hadn’t put it on straight and began to scream. No sooner had she calmed down than a car passed us with its trunk partly open because of some sacks inside. She started screaming again, but we managed to make her understand that the trunk had to be open because of the sacks.

  After leaving Pennsylvania, we drove a few miles through the northern tip of West Virginia. I remembered a sentence I had once read in an adventure story: “What is a Virginia meadow compared to a Texas prairie?”

  We crossed the Ohio River into Ohio. It was hot in the car. The child sat quietly, looking out with interest. There were beads of sweat on her upper lip, though we had opened the windows a little. Then she grew restless and kept standing up and sitting down again. I tried to pass her the bottle of tea but she wouldn’t take it. She looked terrified. Claire suggested that maybe I was holding the bottle “in the wrong hand.” I shifted it to the other hand. Then she took it and drank with a long sigh. After putting the bottle a
way, I spoke to her, calling her by her two names. “Better stick to one name,” said Claire. “It was a mistake to give her two names. I used to switch back and forth between them, and when I felt especially affectionate, I even made up new ones. It got her all mixed up. She wanted to be called by one name, any change upset her.

  “I made a lot of mistakes with the child,” said Claire. “I’ve mentioned one: calling her by different names. But that wasn’t all: when I felt especially loving, I would use pet names for familiar objects, and that confused her even more. I finally understood that she attached herself to the first name I called a thing by; any other drove her crazy. Sometimes she’d be playing quietly with something or other, and I’d be watching her. After a while it was more than I could bear to be with her and not talk to her. When I began to talk, it wrenched her out of her continuity and I’d have to comfort her. Another big mistake was not wanting to give her an American upbringing. I didn’t want her to act as if the world belonged to her or to regard what belonged to her as the world. I thought an American upbringing encouraged possessiveness and I didn’t want that. I never bought her toys; I’d only let her play with things intended for other purposes, such as toothbrushes, shoe-polish cans, and household utensils. She played with them and then when she saw them put to their proper use, she didn’t mind. But if somebody else wanted to play with them, she wouldn’t stand for it, she was just like other children with their toys. She’s getting possessive after all, I thought, and tried to persuade her to share with the other child. But she’d cling to whatever it was, and then I’d take it away, because I still interpreted her behavior as possessiveness. Later on I came to understand that what made her cling to things was fear, and now I feel sure that when children can’t part with some object, the trouble isn’t possessiveness but fear. A panic comes over them when suddenly something that belonged to them a moment ago is somewhere else and the place it occupied is empty, and the reason is that when that happens they don’t know where they themselves belong. But I was so blinded by my determination to be rational that instead of seeing the child I saw only her behavior patterns, which I automatically interpreted.”

  “How is it now?” I asked.

  “Sometimes I’m at my wits’ end,” said Claire. “Especially when she’s away from home for any time, she gets upset, because when things keep changing around her she can’t get her bearings. I’m glad you’ve come along, that gives her two fixed points to revolve around.”

  I was going to say something to the child but stopped myself, because she had just calmed down.

  “Once somebody stole a wrist watch from me,” I said. “The watch didn’t mean anything to me, I’d stopped noticing it, but all the same it was a long time before I could look at the empty place on my wrist without feeling frightened.”

  There was a row of poles in a field and one of them slanted. Again the child began to scream. We stopped outside a shopping center and Claire took the child for a little stroll. Then she put her on a toy elephant that rocked when you inserted a dime. The rocking seemed to relax her. Then suddenly she clamored to be taken off; apparently she had seen the black dog stains on the elephant’s base. She looked at various objects but quickly turned away, as though stricken with horror. Claire tried to point out a buzzard that was circling slowly over the building, but the child struck down her mother’s hand. Claire laid her down in the back seat of the car. She made no move to get up, but ordered us to rearrange the photographs on the windshield. Claire went into the shopping center for some orange juice, and I got to work on the photographs. I tried every possible combination; none seemed to suit her, but she wouldn’t let me put them away. As I was shifting one of the pictures, the child bellowed with panic, her voice was almost that of a grownup. She must have set her mind on some secret pattern. In each of my helpless attempts I seemed to begin right and then go wrong. When Claire came back, the child was frantic. I halted in my manipulations and instantly she was quiet, though I couldn’t make out any particular order in the pictures. Claire filled the bottle with orange juice and gave it to the child to drink. None of us spoke. The child’s eyes widened, she blinked more and more infrequently, then she fell asleep. We bought some sandwiches and fruit and drove on.

  “All of a sudden I was in the child’s place,” I said after a time. “The first thing I remember in my life is the scream I let out when I was being bathed in the washbasin and suddenly the stopper was pulled out and the water gurgled away under me.”

  “Sometimes I forget her completely,” said Claire. “That’s when I feel most carefree. I don’t even notice her, she runs around me like a dog or a cat. Then I notice her again and it comes to me how I love her. And the greater my love is, the greater becomes my fear of death. Sometimes when I’ve been looking at the child for a long time, I can’t distinguish between my love and my fear of death. Once when I felt that way I took a piece of candy out of her mouth, because I thought I saw her choking.” Claire spoke calmly, as though surprised at herself. She checked the green signs over the highway to be sure of taking the detour around Columbus. For some time now the road had been almost straight, there had hardly been a curve in the last hour. That made it easier for the child to sleep. Here the hills were smaller, the fields a denser green, and the wheat higher than in Pennsylvania. After Columbus Claire pointed at the rearview mirror and I saw the child was waking up; the hair on her temples was wet, her face was flushed. For a time she lay still with her eyes open; then she saw she was being watched and grinned. She said nothing, just looked quietly around. It was a game, each of us was waiting for someone else to say the first word or make the first move. In the end I lost by shifting my position; the child began to talk.

  We turned off the highway, stopped on a back road, and walked a short way into a pasture. The breeze ruffled our hair. I saw that the child’s temples were still wet; we bent over her and saw that down there at the child’s level the air was almost motionless. Claire picked her up and her hair soon dried. We sat down at the edge of a pond. The grass was as hard as marsh grass, there were little white mushrooms in the cows’ footprints. Here and there mounds of mud rose above the surface of the water; frog spawn and bits of cow dung clustered around them. Now and then a dancing gnat sent a ripple over the water; foam gathered around a half-sunken log, the air over the pond was hazy.

  We ate our sandwiches; the sun was getting too hot, so we stood up and headed for a clump of trees. The child let me carry her, and I picked my way through oaks and elms. Claire lagged behind and after a while stopped altogether. There must have been a railroad line nearby, because after the child had torn some leaves off the trees, her hands were covered with soot, though the leaves had hardly opened. We came to a clearing beside a brook that was almost hidden by swamp growth. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a big animal; I swung around, but it was only a water rat. It crawled away under the leaves and stopped still; its tail was still sticking out. I bent down, looking for a stone to throw at it, but there weren’t any. When I straightened up, I saw we had sunk into the mud a little; water had gathered around our shoes. I took a long step to one side and my leg sank to the knee in the warm mud. Though I heard nothing, I felt rotten branches cracking under my foot, deep down in the mud.

  I stood motionless with my legs wide apart but sank no deeper. The water rat’s tail had disappeared. The child clung to me; she was breathing heavily. I called out for Claire, making my voice as calm as I could. “Don’t shout!” said the child. I tugged at my leg. Before it was quite free, I jumped back to the trees and my shoe stayed in the mud. I thought the child was screaming with fear, but she was laughing at the way I was hopping. Claire sat leaning against a tree trunk, asleep. I sat down near her; the child found some acorns among the fallen leaves and lined them up beside me. After a while, Claire opened her eyes as though she had only been pretending to be asleep; instantly she saw that I was missing a shoe and that my trousers were coated with mud. As though describing a dream, she told
me what had happened to me and I confirmed her story. “Were you afraid?” “Not exactly,” I said. “More angry than afraid.”

  We went back across the pasture. Swallows were flying high overhead; as a rule it’s only in big cities that they fly so high. “In America,” Claire said, “hardly anybody goes walking. They drive around in cars or they sit outside the house in rocking chairs. If you go walking in the country, people look at you.” She pointed to a man in a checkered shirt who was running toward us across the field; he was carrying a big club. When we stood still, he stopped running; then, apparently noticing that we had a child with us, he too stood still, dropped his club, and tossed a cake of cow dung on it. He waited. As we were slowly starting off, he pulled out his penis and urinated in our direction, moving slowly back and forth as in sexual intercourse and splattering his trousers and shoes; in the end, he lost his balance and fell over backward.

  Still walking very slowly, we watched him. Claire said nothing. In the car, before starting the motor, she broke into a soundless laugh. She laughed so hard she had to hold her head in her hands.

  Those were the only shoes I had. We stopped at the next shopping center and bought another pair. When we were moving again, I looked at the mud on my trousers; it hadn’t dried yet, and that made me irritable and impatient. I kept looking to see if it was dry, and finally transferred my impatience to the country we were driving through. I looked from the mud that refused to dry to the landscape that refused to change, and our motion seemed so futile that I couldn’t conceive of our ever getting to Indianapolis. I had a disagreeable feeling that we had come to a stop with the motor running, and at the same time I wished we would really stop. I kept looking to see when the Ohio license plates would give way to Indiana plates, when instead of THE BUCKEYE STATE the plates on the cars we passed would say something else. Then there began to be more and more cars from THE HOOSIER STATE. Once we were in Indiana, the dry mud began to flake off my trousers, but still my impatience grew; I counted the milestones that still separated us from Indianapolis, because they were the only sign of change in the unchanging landscape. My breathing took on the rhythm of the intervals between them and my head began to ache. I was sick of having to put distances behind me when I wanted to be somewhere else, and the pressure of Claire’s foot on the accelerator struck me as absurd, even useless. At the same time I wanted her to step on it and was tempted to prod her foot with the heel of my new shoe; my impatience grew so great that I could have murdered someone in my exasperation. Though the sun was setting, the light was as bright as ever, there was no darkening, and later on, as we drove into Indianapolis in the dusk and I glanced at Claire’s profile, the imperturbable, disembodied calm that came over me felt like the calm of a murderer.