by Peter Handke
I didn’t want to see the city. As though it had disappointed me in advance and I already had enough of it, I looked at the floor while Claire was asking for two rooms at the Holiday Inn, right behind the Speedway. In the room I immediately drew the curtain and phoned the hotel in Providence. Someone had called the day before, they had given him my addresses in New York and Philadelphia. “Him?” “No, it was a lady,” said the operator. I phoned the Algonquin, then the Barclay in Philadelphia; Judith had called the Barclay and asked if I was still there, but had left no message. I gave them my address in Indianapolis and said I would call again next day and give them my address in St. Louis. I had hardly hung up when the phone rang. It was Claire. There was no connecting door between our rooms, so she had phoned to ask if I was all right and if I wanted to go down to the restaurant for dinner.
I wasn’t hungry. I suggested a walk after the child was asleep. She agreed. While hanging up, I heard a bell ring briefly behind the wall as she too rang off. I opened the curtain and looked out but saw nothing in particular. An even rhythm outside the window lulled me and at the same time sharpened my perception. Some distance away there was a cypress on a little hill. Its branches looked almost bare in the evening light. It swayed gently back and forth in a movement that resembled my own breathing. I forgot the cypress, I also forgot myself and stared into space. But then the cypress, still gently swaying, moved closer with every breath and finally penetrated my chest. I stood motionless, the pulse in my temples stopped beating, my heart stopped. I ceased to breathe, my skin died away, and with a sense of will-less well-being I felt that the movement of the cypress was taking over the function of my respiratory center, making me sway with it, and freeing itself from me. At length, feeling that I no longer offered resistance, that I was superfluous, I detached myself from its gentle motion. Then my murderous calm left me and I fell on the bed, weak and pleasantly sluggish. It no longer mattered to me where I was or when I could be somewhere else; the time passed quickly. Already it was night, and already Claire was knocking at my door.
We were sitting in Warren Park in Indianapolis; one of the chambermaids at the Holiday Inn had promised to look in on the child from time to time. It was only then that the full moon rose; the benches and bushes stood white around us, like phantoms. The globe of one of the street lamps was broken, a moth fluttered about inside and caught fire. The moonlight was very bright, but not bright enough to make you think you were bursting. My heart pounded painfully and now and then, when I took a breath, I sighed. Along the paths there were flowers with long stems, their white petals were wide open in the moonlight, totally motionless in a paroxysm of madness, and I no longer had strength enough to set them in motion; from time to time a bud popped. There was a rustling in one of the trash baskets, and then again silence. The grass was gray, as though scorched, the short shadows of the trees looked like burns, and though the air was rather cool, I felt hot inside. Behind the palms and tulip trees glittered the arrow and five-pronged star of the Holiday Inn.
“Since coming to America,” I said, “I’ve been having the same experiences as in childhood. Fears and longings that I thought I’d forgotten have been cropping up again. I have the same feeling as when I was little that the world around me might suddenly burst and turn into something entirely different, a monster’s maw, for instance. In the car today I longed to have seven-league boots, so it wouldn’t take any time to cover distances. When I was little, I couldn’t bear to think there was another place that I couldn’t get to in a flash. Today it’s the same, except that then the thought sent me into a frenzy whereas now I talk about it, draw comparisons, and learn. Any attempt to interpret these enigmas would strike me as absurd; I speak of them only because it makes me feel less isolated than I did then. I’ve thrown off my embarrassment, I talk a lot, I laugh a lot, I wish I were fat enough to move a revolving door with my belly, and I’m glad to say that I’ve almost stopped noticing myself.”
“Green Heinrich didn’t want to interpret things either,” said Claire. “All he wanted was to be as detached as possible; he looked on as one experience interpreted the last, and so on down through the chain of experiences. He let experience pass before his eyes and never got involved; the people he knew just danced by him. He neither challenged them nor withdrew from the dance. He made no attempt to decipher anything; one event would simply follow from another. You’re the same way, I think; you just let the world dance past you. As if life were taking place on a stage and there were no need for you to get mixed up in it. As if the world were a big bundle of Christmas presents, all for you. You watch while it’s being unpacked; to help would be rude. You just let the world unfold, and if something happens to you, you take it with surprise, you marvel at its enigmatic aspects and compare it with past enigmas.” I thought of Judith; I was aghast and so ashamed that I broke out in sweat; I had to stand up and walk about in the moonlight.
“That’s true,” I said, carefree again, as untouched as if I were playing a game. “When I see something and it enters into my experience, I think, ‘Yes, this is it. This is the new experience I needed!’ I check it off, so to speak. The moment I begin to get involved in something, I extricate myself by formulating it; instead of going through with the experience, I let it pass me by. ‘So that was it,’ I think, and wait to see what will come next.”
“And yet,” said Claire playfully, “Green Heinrich is lovable, even if he does make you want to push his nose into things. Because when he sidesteps an experience, it’s not out of cowardice or faintheartedness, but because he’s afraid that it’s not meant for him, and that if he gets involved he’ll only be rebuffed as he was always rebuffed as a child.”
“But isn’t that cowardice?” I said. Claire stood up and I stepped aside. She smoothed her dress and sat down, and I sat down beside her. Talking so much had broken our resistance. We didn’t embrace yet, we didn’t even touch each other, but we sensed that our mere closeness to each other was an exchange of affection. I knew she had rebuked me but felt as self-assured as if I had been flattered. I was afraid that Claire had been right, but in the next moment glad she hadn’t been. That was often my reaction when someone spoke to me of my character; he had hit the mark, but at the same time what he said was a bare-faced lie. When I went into someone else’s character, I didn’t lie, but I felt like a show-off. “And now,” I said to Claire, “the story of Green Heinrich is at an end.”
As though in agreement she took a breath, and as she breathed it was as though her body slowly expanded and touched me. She didn’t actually touch me, my imagination had merely anticipated what I was looking forward to so eagerly yet uneasily. I thought of the man who had urinated in front of us, but his image no longer troubled me. I began to tremble for fear of giving myself away. I stood up, eager but still without impatience. I touched Claire’s arm, outwardly a signal that we should go back to the motel, and at the same time tried to hold back from her. Before standing up, Claire stretched. Again I stepped up to her and in a brief pantomime helped her up but without touching her. “My neck aches from looking straight ahead all day,” Claire said, and it gave me a start to hear her mention a part of her body, as though she had now given herself away. I walked faster so as not to show my excitement, and Claire followed me slowly, dazzled by the moonlight.
The sound of her steps behind me made me think of an old John Ford picture, The Iron Horse; it was about the building of the transcontinental railroad from Missouri to California between 1861 and 1869. Beginning at the opposite ends, two railroad companies were laying tracks toward the middle, the Central Pacific from the west, the Union Pacific from the east. Years before, a man had dreamed of this railroad and gone west with his son to look for a passage through the Rocky Mountains. While he took leave of his neighbor, his little son awkwardly kissed the neighbor’s still littler daughter goodbye. The father was killed, but later on, now a grown man, the son found the passage. The neighbor became the president of the Union Pacific. Afte
r long years, which were painfully long in the picture as well, for the construction work was shown in great detail, the two lines met at Promontory Point, Utah, and the president drove a golden spike into the last tie. Whereupon the dreamer’s son and the president’s daughter kissed for the first time since their parting as children. Though I didn’t know why, I had felt wretched throughout the picture—shooting pains in my chest, compulsive swallowing, internal soreness, itching, chills—but the moment the spike was driven in and the two fell into each other’s arms, I felt their embrace inside me and I stretched inwardly with a sense of infinite relief: my whole body had hungered for the two of them to come together.
I let Claire catch up with me and side by side we went back to the Holiday Inn. The chambermaid told us the child was sleeping peacefully. I noticed that I was hungry. I ate something or other and, leaning back with her hands in her lap, Claire watched me. She blinked seldom and hesitantly, as though her eyes were closing. I looked back attentively. All at once we saw the time we had made love, and now we understood. The feeling for Claire that came over me was so strong that I had to look away. That OTHER TIME, which I had experienced in Providence when the right number had briefly flashed up on the die, now lay stretched out before me like another world that I had only to enter to be rid at last of my fear-ridden nature and its limitations. But then I took fright; it occurred to me how empty and unbeing, how without life of my own, I should be in that other world; overcome by a feeling of universal bliss, free from fear and tension, I myself, as in the play of the cypress, ceased to exist, and for a moment I was so horrified at that empty world that I experienced the child’s boundless dread at suddenly seeing nothing in a place where only a moment before it had seen something. In that moment I lost forever my longing to be rid of myself; the thought of my often childish fears, of my reluctance to become really involved with other people, my spells of obtuseness, filled me with sudden pride, followed by a sense of well-being that seemed almost self-evident. I knew that I would never again want to be rid of all those limitations, and that from then on only one thing would be important: to fit them all into an order and mode of life that would do me justice and enable others to do me justice. And as though all this had merely been a test, I caught myself thinking, “This is it! This is serious!”
I sensed that Claire was still looking at me. “The poor thing!” I said to myself, but the thought was no barrier between us. Often in the past I had been overcome by confusion and disgust at the thought that someone was different from myself, but in these moments I calmly let the thought think itself out and instead of egotistical disgust I felt a profound pity for Claire, because she couldn’t be in my place and couldn’t experience what I was experiencing—how tedious it must be for her to be Claire!—and then again I felt envious because conversely I couldn’t be in her place. But these thoughts no longer took on an existence of their own, they were only brief entrances and exits in a long episode, rich in vicissitudes, that revolved around something entirely different. I told Claire about seeing John Ford’s Iron Horse and my feelings at the time.
She had seen the picture at her college film club and remembered that whenever the Irish workers were shown laying ties they had sung the same song at the top of their lungs. “But that picture was a silent!” she exclaimed suddenly. Between the two of us we remembered that a bar of music had always appeared over the heads of the singing workers. We went on talking, but not about ourselves; we told stories, more and more of them, neither of us wanted to let the other have the last word, though not to be in the bedroom yet was almost unbearable. Finally, while I with pounding heart was telling a story about a pig and a coach, Claire grew so grave that I wouldn’t have known her. At one time I might have thought she was going mad, but that night, taking an almost forgotten pleasure in past solemnities, I experienced this moment as the moment of a truth that made my own madness, my fear that someone might go mad in my presence, forever ridiculous.
We made love almost sleepily, scarcely moving, then holding our breath. In the middle of the night, I thought of the child lying in the other room and felt so sorry for her that I said we ought to go and take a look at her. “The thought that Benedictine is alone,” I said, “makes me miserably lonely for her. Not because we’re together here, but because when I think that there’s no one with her I experience her not-yet-consciousness as a state of cruel boredom. I feel I ought to wake the child up, talk to her, and drive away her boredom. I sense that the monotony of her sleeping and dreaming makes her suffer, and I want to lie down beside her, to comfort her and help her through her long loneliness. It’s intolerable that when someone is born into the world, he can’t automatically come to consciousness. Now I understand all those stories about somebody trying to save somebody.” I told Claire about the soldier in Philadelphia and how he had been in need of being saved.
We went to the other room and I watched as the child lay sleeping.
While Claire was in the bathroom, I secretly woke her up. She opened her eyes and talked confusedly in her dream. She yawned a long yawn, I looked into her pink mouth, her tongue quivered, she was asleep again. Claire came back, we lay side by side; then she too fell asleep and snored softly, exhausted by the trip. I looked at the darkly shimmering television screen; the arrow and five-pronged star of the Holiday Inn were reflected on it in miniature. While falling asleep, I took a last look at my wrist watch; it was long after midnight and it came to me that I was now thirty years old.
I slept uneasily, I stuck a knife into an overcooked chicken, which instantly fell apart, a fat woman and a thin woman stood side by side, the thin one melted into the fat one, they burst, a governess with a child walked on a knife blade into the open door of a subway car, there were special delivery letters, signs in the sand which a stupid gardener watered like flowers, plants that formed words, secret messages written on gingerbread hearts at a church fair, an AUSTRIAN hotel room with four beds, only one of which was made up. I awoke from my nightmares with an erection, penetrated the sleeping Claire, went limp, and fell asleep again.
“Is it then so surprising that a change of place should contribute so much to making us forget what we don’t like to think of as real, as though it were a dream?”
Karl Philipp Moritz, Anton Reiser
The Long Farewell
At noon that day we arrived in St. Louis. In the days that followed I was always with Claire and the child. We stayed at the house of Claire’s friends, whom she had called “lovers,” in Rock Hill, a suburb to the west of St. Louis, and seldom went out. It was a wooden house, the “lovers” were painting it, and we helped them. I never found out what their real names were, they addressed each other only by pet names and were always thinking up new ones. When I first saw them, I thought about the desire to shrink that Claire had told me about; at the second glance, I forgot all possible generalizations, and from then on I just watched them, curious to see what their mode of life might tell me. The woman was always looking mysterious, the man disappointed and injured, but after I had been with them for a while, I saw that the woman had no secret and that the man was perfectly happy and contented. But every morning I had to find out all over again that their mysterious and disappointed expressions meant nothing at all. The man painted movie posters in St. Louis, the woman helped him with the backgrounds. He also painted episodes in the settlement of the West, landscapes with covered wagons and riverboats, and sold them to the department stores. Their affection for each other was so violent that it kept shifting into irritation. They would feel the irritation coming on and start mollifying each other, which only made them more irritable. In trying to calm down, they wouldn’t stop talking and leave each other alone, but would cling together, caressing, embracing, and as their exasperation increased, still trying to mollify each other with pet names—even when they were arguing about something, they always referred to it by pet names. Then, little by little, they relaxed and were able to move apart. Those were the only moments w
hen they had a kind of vacation from each other. They had been living like this for ten years, never letting each other out of their sight.
And they still didn’t know how to deal with each other. If one of them had done some chore, it didn’t mean that he would do it the next time, but it also didn’t mean that the other would do it. Every activity had to be renegotiated whenever it came up; since both wanted to do it, it took them forever to settle on either one of them. Neither had found his role: if something one of them had done, whether it was painting, cooking, saying something, or merely making some motion, met with the other’s approval, it didn’t mean that he would paint, cook, or say something similar again, or try to repeat his movement; nor did he do the opposite; everything in their dealings with each other had to be started all over again from scratch. But if one of them had done something to displease the other, he didn’t simply avoid doing it again; he first tried to show that this particular action was inherent in his way of life.
