Short Letter, Long Farewell

by Peter Handke

  “We didn’t separate, because neither of us was willing to give up. When we reproached each other, the important thing was not to be right. More important—and this is what we were always on the lookout for—was that after being reproached the other should put himself in the wrong. The one who had done the reproaching would observe the other’s movements, waiting for him to convict himself. The worst of it was that we no longer accused each other, but silently brought about situations in which the other would feel guilty of his own accord. We had stopped scolding, we only wanted to shame each other. One of us, for instance, would wash dishes that the other had just finished washing, clear the table the moment the other had finished eating, secretly do some chore that was normally done by the other, or move some object the other had put in the wrong place. Judith would lug heavy things from room to room and take out the garbage before I had time to help her. ‘It’s been done,’ she would say. We never rested, we were too frantically busy looking for something more we could do, trying to get the jump on each other. Our conflicts were never settled by discussion but by the duel of activities that started up after our arguments. And the outcome of our duels was decided not by what we did but by how we did it. A halting rhythm, a superfluous motion, a moment’s hesitation between one activity and the next would instantly put the guilty party in the wrong. The winner was the one who without stopping to think hit on the quickest way of doing what he had chosen to do. We would flit past and around each other, our choreography became more and more studied and graceful, and when, as sometimes happened, both of us had executed our movements perfectly, we treated each other for a time as equals.

  “Like our lovers here,” I said, “we began attributing the objects around us to each other. Not out of affection, no, out of hostility; we transferred our hostility to our possessions. For instance, we’d make remarks like, ‘Your chair squeaks,’ or ‘Someone’s been taking bites out of your apples,’ though obviously we weren’t telling each other anything new.

  “Sometimes we’d discuss our behavior. That frightened us and made us both feel ridiculous. When we were away from each other, it all seemed unreal. But by then we were defenseless against our nerves. We tried to think about other things, but it was no longer possible.

  “There were moments of accidental reconciliation: some encumbrance would bring our paths together and before we knew it we had our arms around each other. Or she would bend over me to take something off the table, and suddenly, without even wanting to, I had pulled her down to me. For a while we would hold each other close, feeling emptier all the while; then finally, in exasperation, we’d break apart. Those reconciliations were as accidental as your child’s whims: once when the car was going around a curve, she was thrown slightly off balance and that made her feel like lying down. And she did lie down, but she got right up again because she wasn’t tired. It was the same with us: we had no real need to be reconciled.

  “With it all, I felt more and more free, and I thought she felt the same way. I was relieved to see that the old intimacies, which had often taken the form of alliance against others, were no longer possible, that we no longer felt the need to tease each other, that we had stopped excluding other people from our conversations by speaking the secret language of married couples and dropping allusions that no one else could understand. We hardly spoke to each other, yet I felt that I was being perfectly frank and open. When we were not alone, but playing roles—the role of hosts at a restaurant, of travelers at the airport, of movie-goers or guests—when other people treated us as the embodiments of these roles, we got along, because then we too saw ourselves as actors and were almost proud of having slipped into our roles so easily. At such times, of course, we were careful not to come too close to each other, at the most we would give each other a little poke in passing. After an incredibly beastly scene, when all we could do was stand there pale and trembling, a feeling of tenderness for Judith would come over me. That happened more and more often as time went on, and my feeling of tenderness was stronger than my love had been. Then I would busy myself with something else and little by little my hysteria would dissolve into soothing pain.

  “I could have gone on living like that. It was a deliciously sweet alienation: in moments of hatred I thought of Judith as a thing, then, when I relaxed, as a being. I thought Judith felt the same way, but then I saw that she had merely grown indifferent. She started when I spoke to her. She played games requiring several players all by herself. She told me she was gratifying herself; but I didn’t tell her that I too had begun to masturbate. The thought that we were lying in different rooms and possibly masturbating at the same time struck me as ridiculous, yet made me feel wretched. But I couldn’t help her; hatred and meanness had squeezed me dry and I could only lie there benumbed. I even stopped dreaming of being with a woman. I couldn’t imagine a woman when I was masturbating: I had to keep my eyes open and look at a nude photograph.

  “By then we rarely exchanged pinpricks. Judith would often avert her face, but she no longer burst into tears. She spent her money as soon as she got it, she bought all sorts of things, a polar bear rug, a hand-wind phonograph, a flute that caught her fancy only because there was a spider web in the mouthpiece. For our meals she stopped buying anything but delicacies. Sometimes she came home empty-handed, furious with the stupid salesgirls because nothing had looked exactly as she had imagined. I lost patience, but I still worried about her. When she leaned out the window, I stood behind her, as though I too wanted to look out. I kept seeing her stumbling and bumping into walls. Once when I looked at a bookcase she had made years before, it gave me a real fright to see that the bookcase was still intact and still standing in its old place, and at that moment I suddenly realized that I had already given up Judith for lost. Her face became more and more thoughtful, but I couldn’t bear to see that thoughtful look any more. Now you know why I’m here.”

  Immediately after our arrival I had phoned the hotel in Philadelphia and given my address and telephone number in St. Louis. Then, while speaking of Judith, I gradually forgot her and the thought that she might be nearby passed out of my mind. It seemed to me that I had shaken the whole thing off. One evening we were sitting on the veranda; the child was already in bed and was talking aloud to herself; we listened to her and occasionally said something to each other in an undertone; the lovers were sitting on a love seat with a shawl over their shoulders; Claire was reading Green Heinrich, and I was watching her, when the phone rang in the house. The woman went in; I stopped my rocking chair, I already knew it was for me. The woman came to the door, looked in my direction, and pointed silently at the phone. I was already half out of my chair. I tiptoed into the house as though I were doing something wrong. In hardly more than a whisper I said my name, but there was no answer. I repeated my name; it didn’t occur to me to ask who it was. I heard nothing, only once the sound of a truck going by very fast, then a bell that made me think instantly of a gas pump. I said nothing more and quietly hung up. And I didn’t ask the woman who had asked for me.

  Two days later I received a printed birthday card. Between the words “Happy” and “Birthday” the word “last” had been inserted by hand; though it resembled Judith’s, the writing was quite strange; but then she had always written with a fountain pen, never with a ballpoint. On the other side, next to the address, an indistinct Polaroid photograph of a revolver had been pasted. One cartridge protruded from the cylinder. It dawned on me only gradually that the card was meant as a threat; then I knew that Judith wanted to kill me. I didn’t actually believe she would do it, but the mere intention made me almost proud of myself. Now, at least, I thought, nothing else could happen to me; the threat was a kind of insurance against other dangers and accidents. Nothing more can happen to me now,” I thought and went so far as to convert all my traveler’s checks into cash.

  It also became clear to me that Judith had followed me in my travels with this purpose in mind. We had several times threatened to kill ea
ch other, not because we wanted to see each other dead, but because we wanted to obliterate and destroy each other. It would have been a kind of sadistic murder, in which one tortured and humiliated the victim in order to make him feel at long last how insignificant he was. But how terrified either of us would have been if the other had suddenly demanded to be murdered! To have written and mailed this card was typical of Judith’s way of striking poses even in despair: her face in profile, she was sitting beside a half-drawn curtain in the twilight of a hotel room; she was twisting her rings and the revolver lay in her lap. Once in a half dream I had lived my own death: some people were standing in front of me; now and then they would stand up on their tiptoes; little by little, each one found his place and stopped moving; a few more people arrived, and stopped a little farther away; far in the background a child came running, jiggled for a moment, then stood still, and I was dead. Just as since that time I had never thought of my own death but at the most had felt uneasy now and again, so now my image of Judith beside the half-drawn curtain was for me a farewell image, and I knew that from then on we no longer belonged together. I no longer even dreamed of her and my own murderous feelings were forgotten. Sometimes I felt watched, but I didn’t look around. Formerly, when we hadn’t seen each other for some time, we would occasionally write: “I’m curious about you.” I was no longer curious.

  We often went to the movies; the painter was given free tickets to the pictures he had done posters for. Most of them made me long to be somewhere else; it was a relief when they were over. There were things that strained my eyes and mind; the rhythm of the images hemmed me in and gave me a pain in the chest. I lost myself only once, when Claire had taken the child to the amusement park at the 1904 World’s Fair ground and I went to see John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln; then I dreamed as I watched. Looking at the images of the past, scenes from the early life of Abraham Lincoln, I dreamed of my own future; the people on the screen prefigured the people I would meet. The longer I watched, the more eager I became to meet only people like those in the picture; then I would never again have to pretend; like them I would be fully present in body and mind, an equal moving among equals, carried along by their motion, yet free to be myself while respecting the freedom of others. As a child I had tried to imitate everything, gestures, attitudes, even handwritings, but now I took these figures who had made the best of themselves as examples: I didn’t want to become like them, I wanted to make the best of myself. Only a short while before, I might have tried to imitate their backwoods accent, their manner of speaking as if their only purpose was to remind each other gently of something, or the inimitably warm smile—never put on for his own benefit but always selflessly addressed to others—of the young Henry Fonda, who more than thirty years before had played the role of the young lawyer Abraham Lincoln. Now I was done with the longings of affectation, and in looking up at the screen it was as though I were only greeting old friends.

  Abraham Lincoln had taken the case of two brothers, strangers to the region, who were accused of murdering a deputy sheriff. J. Palmer Cass, the other deputy sheriff, claimed to have seen the elder brother stab the man in the moonlight, whereupon the younger brother took the blame on himself. Sitting in her covered wagon, their mother had witnessed the fight, but she refused to say which of her sons was the murderer. Some drunks tried to lynch the brothers, but Lincoln stopped them by softly reminding them of themselves, of what they were, what they could be, and what they had forgotten. This scene—Lincoln on the wooden steps of the jailhouse, with his hand on the mob’s battering ram —embodied every possibility of human behavior. In the end not only the drunks, but also the actors playing the drunks, were listening intently to Lincoln, and when he had finished they dispersed, changed forever. All around me in the theater I felt the audience breathing differently and coming to life again. Later on at the trial, Lincoln proved that Cass could not have seen the murderer because there had been a new moon that night. From then on he addressed him not as J. Palmer Cass but as John P. Cass and proceeded to charge this John P. Cass with the murder of his fellow deputy, who had only been hurt in his brawl with the two brothers. Leaning out of the covered wagon as the family prepared to continue their journey westward, the mother handed Abraham Lincoln a pouch containing his fee. “Take it, it’s all I have!” And Lincoln took it! “Thank you, ma‘am!” Then he left the settlers and went up on a hill alone. At one point in the picture, he and an old trapper were riding through the spring landscape on a donkey. Lincoln was wearing a top hat, his feet were almost dragging on the ground, and he was playing a jew’s-harp. “What kind of an instrument is that?” the trapper asked. “A jew’s-harp,” said Lincoln. “Funny people making that kind of music,” said the trapper. “But it sounds real purty.” The one strumming the jew’sharp, the other wagging his head in time, they were long seen riding through the countryside.

  “I’m going to visit John Ford,” I said to Claire when we called for them at the fairground. “I’m going to ask him about his memories of the picture, and whether he still sees Henry Fonda, who’s doing soap operas on TV now. I’m going to tell him that I learned about America from that picture, that it taught me to understand history by seeing people in nature, and that it made me happy. I’m going to ask him to tell me what he used to be like and how America has changed since he stopped making pictures.”

  After that we strolled awhile, the child ran on ahead, the street lamps glittered in the setting sun as if they had already been lit. I felt like throwing something away and tossed a piece of chewing gum through the bars of an animal’s cage. We passed some people coming away from the roller coaster all bleary-eyed, so then we all sat down in one of the cars, and while we were riding the sun sank behind the big billboards, but shimmered through a little; we saw it again when our car was at the top of a grade; the next time it had set behind the Missouri plains.

  As night fell, we were standing in the garden; deep in thought, we were almost motionless, at the most shifting our weight from one foot to the other now and then. From time to time, one of us took a sip of wine from a glass that seemed forgotten the moment he picked it up. We were so drained of sensation that sometimes we were afraid of dropping our glasses. The birds had stopped singing and were only hopping about in the bushes. A few doors away some people got out of their car and went into their house. On the street no one was moving; now and then a faint breeze sent a ripple over the fallen magnolia blossoms that the first wind after sunset had blown out onto the sidewalks from under the bushes. In the window of a house nearby I saw a play of colors that changed every few seconds: the color TV had been switched on in a dark room. A window was open on the ground floor of our house; the light was on; all I could see was the brightly lighted back wall and Claire, who was putting the child to bed, passing in front of it, once with the naked child in her arms, then from the other direction alone with a bottle of tea; then the wall was bare except for faint shadows of Claire bending over the child somewhere in the room, and in the end there was only the bare wall, which, as the darkness deepened round about, shone more and more brightly, with an even, deep-yellow light, which the wall seemed to generate rather than reflect. “You’ll only find that kind of yellow light in the Western paintings of the last century,” said the painter. “That light doesn’t come from somewhere else, the sky for instance, it’s given off by the ground itself. In Catlin’s or Remington’s paintings the sky is always pale, smoky, and colorless, you never see the sun, but a strangely deep yellow shines from the ground and lights up the faces from below. In all those pictures yellow is the dominant color: wagon wheels, powder smoke rising from rifles, the teeth of dying horses, railroad tracks—everything shimmers yellow from within; it makes every single object stand out as in a coat of arms. Nowadays you see imitations of that yellow wherever you go: the signs on parking lots, the markings on highways, the arches of the McDonald’s restaurants, traffic lights, U.S.A. T shirts.” “The yellow arrow of the Holiday Inn,” I said.
The painter and his wife showed me the palms of their hands. The woman’s—she painted only the skies—could hardly be seen, but the man’s hands shone yellow in the colorless darkness. “It’s a color that makes you remember,” the man said. “And the longer you look at it, the further back you remember, till you reach a point where you can’t go any further. At that point you can only stand there and dream.” “In the years of gold,” said the woman suddenly. The light in the room went out; whichever way I looked, there was a blinding afterimage. Claire came out of the house, munching a piece of bread left over from the child’s supper. Then we sat on the veranda and the lovers played old records, reminding each other of things they had done when the records were new. I Want to Hold Your Hand: “We were in that Mexican restaurant outside Los Angeles, drinking out of iced beer mugs.” Satisfaction: “Remember the way the air mattresses skittered across the sand in the storm?” Summer in the City: “That was when we got our last money from home.” Wild Thing: “We lived like gypsies in those days!” The House of the Rising Sun … They were getting more and more excited, and suddenly Claire put in, “You’ve got hymns enough for a lifetime. You’ll never have to mind anything that happens to you. Whatever it is will be a great experience when you come to look back on it.” I said that memory hadn’t transfigured the events of my own life but only made them more repugnant. “A long hike only gets longer, a slap in the face stings twice as much. I can hardly bear to think of the things I’ve lived through.”