Short Letter, Long Farewell

by Peter Handke

  They were so engrossed in each other that the most trifling objects that had accumulated in the course of their life together became as precious to them as the parts of their own bodies. They hoarded household utensils and furniture, as though it were only in the midst of these objects that they could be sure of remaining themselves. Once when the child broke a glass, we could see how aghast and hurt they were. In silence one of them swept up the pieces, while the other looked on disconsolately. When they spoke of people who had come to see them, it was usually in reference to the damage they had done: one had leaned against the wall and left the imprint of his heel, another had torn the label off a towel, a third had left a fingerprint on a painting that was not yet dry, a fourth had borrowed a book and failed to return it. They would point to the gap in the bookshelf, and then suddenly I saw that their mysterious, injured expressions actually did reflect their states of mind and their attitude toward a hostile outside world. With a sinking feeling I watched them as the pieces of glass dropped in the garbage pail and they exchanged looks of sadness at this new disappointment. They made no explicit complaint; their way of reproaching you was to shut you out by exaggerating their preoccupation with each other.

  They were friendly to everyone, and in their lust for new disappointments that would throw them back on each other, they kept taking in guests. The moment you came near an object, they warned you by telling you the part it had played in their life, or, anticipating your movements, they gave you a demonstration of the best way to handle it. One feature of the way they coddled their possessions was that they owned nothing in common; each object belonged strictly to one of them. And each object had the additional protection of having been specially dedicated to one of them. This was true not only of napkin rings, monogrammed towels and sheets, but of every book, phonograph record, and sofa pillow. Every corner of the house belonged to one or the other, never to both in common. Of course, they would make exchanges and trespass on each other’s territory, but the very thought that one was using objects dedicated to the other seemed time and again to renew the bond between them. These arrangements provided them with a kind of constitution that enabled them to imitate the legendary El Dorado, that outwardly inaccessible, inwardly self-sufficient state.

  They took their daily routine so seriously that it became a ritual. At every step one became a servant to the other. When the painter undertook a department-store painting, his wife did all the preparatory work: she stretched the canvas, lined up the tubes of paint, set out the brushes, and opened the curtains, while the husband paced the floor with folded arms. When the wife undertook to cook a meal, the husband arranged her equipment so efficiently that in cooking she had only to make a few majestic gestures. But once they embarked on their main activity, they disliked being helped. When it came to painting the house, for instance, they only let me set up the ladders or mix the paint; anything more seemed to offend them.

  Their ingrown tenderness oppressed me. It seemed to reproach me with being alone and leaving Claire alone. I would have to look at Claire to remind myself how inconceivable it would be to see her otherwise than alone. We were often together; even when we weren’t, we didn’t become strangers, but we made no claims on each other. For me a different relationship was no longer possible, and as for Claire, she didn’t even seem to suspect the existence of any such possibility. She regarded the lovers’ life as a strain, as the kind of thing that could never happen to her. Watching the two of them, we felt free, and I saw that she often smiled.

  Our calm merged into desire and our desire into calm. We hardly noticed what was going on; as in a dream, one movement led to the next. We seldom touched one another and never kissed; our way of caressing was to lie side by side, breathing in and breathing out. I expressed my tenderness by talking a lot, Claire hers by listening to me and saying something from time to time.

  I also talked a good deal to the child; every day I took her picture and studied the pictures to see if she had changed. Of course, they all made fun of me, but I no longer minded; lining up the photographs, I showed them that merely because her picture was being taken, she assumed different attitudes from day to day. I also thought my daily photography would provide the child with pictures to remember by later on, and I imagined that the pictures would give me a place in the child’s memories. With the same purpose in mind, I took her out; once we went to St. Louis on the bus and stood for a long time on the bank of the Mississippi; perhaps the smell of the water would help her memory. When we were together and the child kept asking me the names of things, I realized how concerned I had always been with myself, to the exclusion of almost everything else, because I often didn’t know what the things we saw were. For the first time it occurred to me that I had no words for some of the most common movements about me. Gradually I learned to observe certain happenings from beginning to end, instead of just gaping and saying “Aha!” In particular, I seldom knew what to call sounds; sometimes even the shorthand of the comic strips failed me, and when I had no answer, the child took fright and began to scream. If I spoke to her while she was playing, she seldom reacted; she was too busy with her own world; but if I said a word that was new to her, she perked up. Once in the late afternoon it grew cold; I couldn’t persuade the child to let me put her jacket on, but when I said that without it she would get goose flesh, she listened and let me put the jacket on.

  To my surprise, Benedictine took little notice of nature; to her the artificial signs and objects of civilization had become nature. She was much more likely to ask questions about television antennas, the stripes on the pedestrian crosswalks, and police sirens than about forests and fields. The presence of traffic lights and electric signs seemed to soothe her and at the same time to make her more lively. She took letters and numbers for granted and felt no need to decipher them; they stood for themselves. And then I noticed that I too grew bored after a while when there was nothing but nature around me and I couldn’t discover anything to read in it.

  When the child saw a representation of nature, one of the painter’s pictures, for example, she never thought of asking whether there really was such a scene, and if so where, because the copy had replaced the original forever. I remembered that, unlike her, I myself as a child had always wanted to know where the object represented actually was. In our house, for instance, there was an oil painting of a glacier landscape with a mountain hut at the lower edge. I had always been convinced that this landscape and this hut existed in nature; I even thought I knew where the painter must have stood, and when someone told me the picture was pure imagination I couldn’t believe it. For a long time I could hardly breathe when it came to me that the picture was alone and that I could find nothing to go with it. It was very much the same when I learned to read: I couldn’t see how it was possible to describe something that didn’t exist. The village described in my primer was a real village, not my own of course, but another not far away. I even knew which village. And because the first books I read on my own were told in the first person, I was horrified when for the first time I opened a book in which there was no “I” narrator. These forms of perception had so powerful an influence on my other experience that now in retrospect it seemed to me that the shock of discovering they were not valid had been a turning point of my life. I felt almost jealous of this child, who from the first looked on symbols and representations as having an existence of their own.

  The painter was also unable, as I discovered, to conceive of sketching anything that did not exist: his landscapes had to be exact imitations of real landscapes, the people in them had to have really lived, and they had to have done what they were doing in the pictures. Accordingly, he painted only historical moments in historical landscapes, the first wagon to cross the Mississippi bridge at St. Louis or Abraham Lincoln being shot at the theater; at the most, he would embellish a little on the reality: to paint in any other way struck him as fraudulent. “That’s why I don’t like to paint the battle of the Little Bighorn,”
he explained. “The Indians didn’t leave a single American survivor, and there were no eye-witness accounts.” It crossed my mind that none of the pictures I had seen so far in America had been fantasies; they had all represented something, for the most part scenes in American history.

  I asked the painter if he would paint different subjects if he were working not for a specific clientele but for himself. He said that he couldn’t conceive of a picture standing for itself, and his wife went on, “We all of us here learned to see in terms of historical pictures. A landscape had meaning only if something historical had happened in it. A giant oak tree in itself wasn’t a picture: it became a picture only in association with something else, for instance, if the Mormons had camped under it on their way to the Great Salt Lake. Everything we’ve seen since we were children had stories connected with it, and all those stories were heroic. So what we see in the landscape isn’t nature, but the deeds of the men who took possession of America, and at the same time a call to be worthy of such deeds. We were brought up to look at nature with a moral awe. Every view of a canyon might just as well have a sentence from the Constitution under it.” “We’ve often said that there’s nothing left to love about this country,” said the husband. “And still we can’t help seeing the Constitution in our landscape. Every bird becomes a national bird, every flower a national emblem.” “Whenever I see a Cherokee rose,” said the wife, “I’m moved in spite of myself. Not because I was born in Georgia, but because the Cherokee rose is the Georgia state flower.” Claire spoke up: “And you’re just as moved by your own possessions, not because you spent so much for them, but because they’re symbols of your life together.” The lovers laughed, and, infected by their laughter, the child broke into a perplexed guffaw. “In time,” said the lovers, “even our household utensils will become symbols of the United States in our dreams. Then we’ll at last be able to dream the same thing.”

  During this conversation we were sitting on the top deck of the riverboat Mark Twain, waiting for it to put out into the Mississippi. The tourists around us, all Americans, were also waiting. They didn’t talk much. Holding beer cans, Coca-Cola bottles, and bags of popcorn, they looked at the cables that were just being removed from the bollards on the pier, then at the ship’s two tall black smokestacks, then again at the cables. The ship backed into the current and came to a stop, rocking gently; steam hissed from the safety valves and thick black smoke poured from the smokestacks, darkening the sky. Then the steam whistle blew a signal that none of us, not even Claire, was able to describe to the child, who had instantly hidden her head down among our legs: it was as though a whole nation had set its lips to a giant flute—a long-drawn-out screech so bestial and brutal, but at the same time, what with the billowing clouds of black smoke and the vastness of the Mississippi, so proud, so grandiose, that, embarrassed and yet bodily shaken, I could only look off to one side. So overpowering was that signal that, splintered by fear, I lived a dream of America that up until then I had only heard about. It was a moment of expertly organized resurrection, in which the things around me ceased to be unrelated, and people and landscape, the living and the dead, took their places in a single painful and theatrical revelation of history. Theatrically flowed the Mississippi, theatrically the tourists moved from deck to deck, while an old man’s deep, far-carrying voice told the story of the great riverboats over the loudspeaker: the new era of travel and commerce they had initiated, steamboat races, black slaves loading firewood by the light of the moon, boiler explosions; and finally, how the railroads had taken the place of the riverboats. Sick as I was of loudspeaker voices on tours, I could have listened to that dramatic voice forever.

  In those days, for the first time, my enjoyment of life was sustained, rather than feverish and spasmodic; I sat there, we ate and drank, and I was at peace with myself. I was no more active than before; if anything, I grew lazier; I scarcely moved, I paid no attention to myself, but neither did I concentrate on others as I had done before; my observations just happened, they flowed effortlessly from my life-feeling. When the others danced, I only watched; I was entirely with them, but felt no need to join in. Why in the past had I let myself be blackmailed by other modes of life? I had never been happy while dancing; you started, you stopped, you had to wait till it was time to start again. What was beautiful in life was a simple movement that just happened in the course of your daily comings and goings, a gesture of farewell made at exactly the right place and time, a facial expression that dispensed with an explicit answer, yet expressed sympathy and consideration, and even the graceful gesture with which you told the waiter to keep the change; such movements made me feel happy, almost weightless, as others probably felt while dancing.

  I drank a good deal but didn’t get drunk. I neglected my appearance but moved with self-assurance. When we went out, we sat at a long table and ate festively, and it was the child, sitting between us with her smudged face, that made our banquet joyful and complete. Sometimes she told us afterward, in complete sentences, what we had done: “We were at the restaurant, we ate and drank, we talked and laughed.” But even as she described these actions in complete sentences, yet left everything unsaid, I was once again taken aback and overcome with pity; so different were our reactions to the same experience that it seemed to me as if she hadn’t been there at all: true and sensible as they were, her words, precisely because they were said in a reasonable tone, gave an impression of muddled, solitary babbling. I remembered how for many years I myself had learned the names for experiences (if only negatively by being told what was forbidden), but had no possibility of conceiving the actual content of any experience, let alone putting my conception into practice. The boarding schools I grew up in were almost completely cut off from the outside world, and yet, precisely because so many things were forbidden, I became acquainted with many more possibilities of experience than I could have in a normal environment in the outside world. And my imagination babbled until I was half crazy. Nevertheless—and this thought made me wretched again—because the prohibitions formed a system, they enabled me later on, when experience was open to me, to experience them systematically, to classify my experiences, to know which experiences were still lacking, not to mistake one for another, in short, to avoid going mad. It also helped me to fight off the thought of suicide, though on the other hand it increased my fear that others, who hadn’t my system to sustain them, might commit suicide.

  I had stopped talking to myself; I looked forward to the day as I had formerly to the night; my fingernails and hair grew faster.

  But I still had nightmares; I would wake with a start and lie there for a long while unaware that I was awake. My nightmares woke me “like a postilion’s horn from the remotest depths of my own heart” (Green Heinrich). Once I dreamed that my mouth was open; I woke up and it was closed tight.

  It was in St. Louis that I told Claire about Judith. My fears for her had left me, and now at last, as if after trying several times in vain to unscrew a screw I suddenly knew that my next try would succeed, I was able to speak without difficulty. “I was afraid I’d murder her,” I said. “I’m still afraid. Once we clutched at each other’s throats on the street; then I went into the house and automatically washed my hands. Another time we met after a separation; at first we were friends again, but after a few minutes, after a few questions, I felt as if a toilet with hardly any water in the tank had been flushed inside me. We were still living together, but our relations were so wretched that when we went to the beach together, for instance, each of us rubbed sun lotion on his own back. We held up best while walking along side by side. But in spite of everything, we hardly ever left each other alone; at the most, one of us would go out on the balcony after a scene, but in a little while he’d come back. We still worried about each other. Once after I had hit her in the dark, I came back a few minutes later, put my arms around her, and asked her if she was still alive.

  “When I try to explain to myself how it all happened, the even
ts lose their body and become mere signs and symptoms. Then it seems to me that I’m being unfair to Judith, because the game of causes I’m playing is rigged and all events have lost their reality by having been interpreted in advance. Our feelings of hatred were so real that, even though we tried at first to explain them, our explanations struck us both as ridiculous, as an insult to our misery. Once I told Judith that the religious fanaticism that made her convert every bit of information about the environment, in fact everything she saw in print, into universal wisdom, and try to change her whole mode of life accordingly—her air pollution mania, her diet fads—was due to her faulty education; for lack of sound information, she tended to make a magical idol out of every trifle. At the end of my harangue, I bit my lips and was forced to agree when Judith said that my way of interpreting things was itself a form of idolatry, with which I tried to distract attention from myself. At first, when I noticed the changes in Judith only occasionally and hadn’t begun to take them seriously, the explanations just poured out of me; to tell the truth, I was proud of them and Judith understood them; only one thing surprised me—they had no effect on her behavior. Then I saw that she was beginning to hate my explanations and was sick of listening to them, not because she thought they were wrong but because they were explanations. ‘You’re stupid,’ she said, and suddenly I felt stupid. This feeling of stupidity grew in me, I cajoled myself with it, it actually made me feel good. At that point we definitely became enemies; I stopped explaining and only scolded; it was obvious that we wouldn’t be able to stand it much longer and that we wanted to hurt each other physically. Now and then, though I was almost choking with rage, I was cheered by the thought that I had become as vicious as other people; because up until then what had horrified me more than anything else was that people who had been my friends until then should suddenly get vicious. ‘How is it possible!’ I would say. Now it had happened to me, I couldn’t help it, we had both turned into monsters.