Short Letter, Long Farewell

by Peter Handke

  “My father was a drinker,” I said in a tone that made it sound like a variation on “My father was a gambling man” in “The House of the Rising Sun.” “Lying in bed at night, I’d hear him pouring liquor into his glass: whenever the memory of that glug-glug comes back to me, I want to cut off his head with a flail; all I wanted then was to fall asleep. The feelings aroused by my memories have never been pleasant ones; it’s only when I hear other people reminiscing that I sometimes feel free from my own memory and long for a past. Once, for instance, I overheard a woman saying, ‘That was when I was putting up all those vegetables …’ It almost made me cry. And I once heard another woman, whom I never really looked at because I never saw her except in her butcher shop, with chains of slippery sausages over her arms, saying, ‘When my children had whooping cough and I had to take them on plane rides …’ I envied her memory and hankered after the days when I myself had whooping cough, and whenever I read about people taking plane rides I feel as if I’d missed something that can never be retrieved. And then things that I ordinarily detest take on a weird sort of attraction for me.”

  “But when you talk about Green Heinrich,” said Claire, “you seem to think you can retrieve his adventures. You think that with the help of a man who lived in other times you can repeat those times and pile up experiences, until at the very end of the story you’re perfect and complete.”

  “I know it’s no longer possible to live by easy stages like Green Heinrich,” I answered. “When I read about him, I feel pretty much as he did when, ‘lying in a quiet forest glade, he passionately relived the pastoral delights of a past century’; in reading his story, I too relive the ideas of another age, when people still believed that a man can be remade by easy stages and that the world is open to each one of us. To tell you the truth, it has seemed to me in the last few days that the world really is open to me and that every time I open my eyes I experience something new. And as long as this pleasure, even if it does belong to the last century, is within my reach, I mean to take it seriously and examine it.”

  “Until you run out of money,” said Claire. I was thinking the same thing at the moment and I showed her the packet of dollars I had obtained in exchange for my traveler’s checks. The lovers smiled at our conversation; we stopped talking and listened to the records and the stories the lovers told each other about them, occasionally disagreeing about details, until the night grew brighter and the dew started falling. Then, when the lovers thought the dew might be bad for their records, we all went to bed.

  The following afternoon, as Claire, the child, and I were about to leave the lovers and go to see Don Carlos, the first performance of the German theater group, a special delivery package came for me. It was a small, neatly wrapped box, addressed in block letters that looked as if they had been written with the left hand. I went behind the house, cut it open with the garden shears, and carefully removed the wrapping paper. Around the box was a wire, its ends covered by a red seal. When I broke open the seal, my hand contracted; I touched the wire again, and again my hand contracted. I realized that I was getting mild electric shocks. I put on a pair of rubber gloves that had been put down in the fork of a tree, slipped the wire off the box, and saw it was connected with something inside. When I tugged at it, the cover fell off but nothing else happened. Inside the box there was a small battery, to which the ends of the wire were attached. I knew that Judith was clever enough to make something much more dangerous, but I couldn’t laugh. Suddenly I heard the tiny little blow she had struck me as a high, soft whimper, and almost turned toward it. Now I was hurting myself. What was the matter? What was all this about? Why was I unhappy? Wasn’t it all over? I didn’t want to think about it just then, but I knew I would have to leave soon. The grass around me grew very bright, then darkened; again lizards were darting about in the corners of my eyes, the objects around me twined themselves into hieroglyphics, I ducked to avoid an insect, but it was only a motorcycle droning in the distance. There was a frightened rustling in the bushes. I threw the box in the incinerator and went back to Claire, who was already sitting in the car. When I reached for the door handle, I noticed that I still had the rubber gloves on. “Aren’t they a lovely yellow?” I said while taking them off. Claire wasn’t curious. As I slammed the door, my fingers contracted again around the metal.

  The theater was a colonial-style building. Inside, mural paintings gave the illusion of other, adjoining rooms; in the vestibule, you picked up your foot to climb steps that were only painted, stepped on painted bases of columns, reached out to feel a relief whose elevations receded when you touched them. The theater itself was rather small, but around it and above it there were many loges where already I could see the glint of opera glasses in the darkness. Before the performance began, two men stepped in front of the curtain: the dean of the university welcomed the dramaturge of the German theater group. Something about the dramaturge caught my attention; I looked again and recognized a friend, a man I had enjoyed talking to in former days. When they withdrew, out came a costumed group, representing the German community of St. Louis. First in choral song, then in a series of tableaux, they told the story of how their ancestors had come to America and settled. Before emigrating, they had lived in the petty principalities of pre-1848 Germany. Both in work and in pleasure, they had hampered each other’s movements, and the restrictions imposed by the craft guilds had prevented them from using their tools; in the American tableaux, the group broke apart, individuals were born, and, as a sign that they were now free to do what work they chose, they exchanged tools. And now there was room also for pleasure. In the last tableau they danced, the men waved beribboned hats over their heads and raised their knees to chest height; only one stood still with legs outspread and hands on hips; the women pivoted on tiptoe, each stretching out one hand to her partner while the other hand gracefully held up the hem of her skirt; only the partner of the man who was standing still looked him straight in the eye, brazenly holding up the hem of her skirt in both hands. All stood motionless in front of the curtain, swaying a little from time to time; the sweat poured from the men’s hair, the women trembled on their tiptoes. Then suddenly they let out a cry of joy, a peculiarly American hoot, and began to dance in earnest. Again they waved their hats. Below them in the orchestra three musicians popped up; two with thick veins in their necks were playing violins, while the third, who had a thoughtful look, ponderously stroked a bull fiddle. At the last stroke of their bows, the musicians sank into the chairs, the dancers bowed and ran dancing and jostling into the wings, and the curtain opened on the slow entrance of Don Carlos and a monk.

  Afterward I said to the dramaturge, “Like everybody else, I first looked to see if the curtain would fold back evenly on both sides—because the dancers had been moving so mechanically. And it upset me that when the two actors came in they didn’t put their feet down at the same time. They entered as though stepping into a no man’s land. And then their acting was anxious and hurried, as if they had no right to be playing here. The stage wasn’t a mere stage, it was foreign territory.”

  “That’s why they kept stumbling,” said the dramaturge. “They sensed that their movements weren’t right. All of a sudden while crossing the stage they’d decide to change their walk, as if they thought the audience must be getting sick of the way they were walking. Instead of striding, they’d begin to hop. Or they’d muff their lines because they thought it was time to sing something. They knew the rhythm of the audience was different from what they were used to, but they weren’t able to fall into this audience’s rhythm.”

  “And they kept regrouping,” I said, “because when they were grouped in the usual way, the audience didn’t listen.”

  “Over here,” said Claire, “we’re used to seeing historical figures in stationary tableaux. Instead of letting them play their parts, we pose them, and always with their officially known gestures. We’d think it was silly if we saw them doing anything else but their traditional deeds. For
us they haven’t any biography, they’re trademarks for what they did or what was done in their day, we’re not interested in their lives. We remember them as they appear in monuments and postage stamps. In parades they’re not represented by living men but by silent puppets. Only the movies show something of their lives, but even then they usually appear as marginal figures. The one exception is Abraham Lincoln; his story really interests us, because it’s potentially our own. Even so, we could hardly conceive of seeing him in a stage play, making laborious entrances and exits like King Philip. One reason why we don’t think of our Presidents as heroes is that they were elected by us and we never had to approach them with fear and trembling. Our heroes are our early settlers and pioneers, men in their own right, who had adventures.”

  “Don Carlos,” said the dramaturge, “is a European adventure story. Schiller isn’t portraying historical figures but himself; under their names, he acts out the adventures into which they themselves put so little charm and dignity. He shows us how much more faithful he would have been to himself and his role. In Schiller’s Europe only princes could be historical figures, and only historical figures could play roles and have adventures. In writing for princes, Schiller provided examples to show them how they should behave in their adventures.”

  Claire’s lips narrowed slightly and she smiled. “The American audience’s heroes are pioneers. That’s why they regard only physical action as adventure. They don’t want to see roles, they want action; as they see it, a role isn’t an adventure, because in our country everyone can play a role. When they see a hand on a sword hilt and nothing happens but talk and more talk, they lose patience. All they want in character portrayal is a hint or two, but they want to see actions carried through from start to finish. They’re disappointed when the shot at Marquis Posa is fired offstage. When Don Carlos finally draws his sword, they want to get up and cheer. An adventure! But since we are unable to act out such adventures, much less the adventures of the pioneers, and since we’re not interested in your historical figures, we tend in our own theater to imitate ourselves, seen for the most part as people who no longer have adventures but only dream of having them.”

  “But why, if there are no adventures in your own plays, does Don Carlos make the people restless?” the dramaturge asked.

  Claire said, “Because that hand on the sword hilt promises something that can’t happen on the stage.” She pointed to a print on the wall of the French café where she had taken us after the performance; it showed Sheriff Garrett shooting Billy the Kid. Night. A large room with a fireplace and a chest of drawers. The two men stood facing each other with leveled revolvers; in his other hand Billy the Kid held a knife; no flame came from his gun, but the broad flame from the sheriff’s gun had almost reached him. The full moon shone in through the barred window; in the moonlight three dogs could be seen running between the two men. The sheriff wore gleaming black boots, Billy the Kid was barefoot.

  “Where’s Judith?” the dramaturge asked me while taking a pill from his pocket medical kit. “I saw her in Washington. She came backstage and asked if she could join the troupe. I was delighted; one of our actresses wants to go back to Europe anyway. We arranged to meet in St. Louis. We were going to rehearse here, and then the day after tomorrow in Kansas City she was going to play Princess Eboli. Today I received a telegram saying she’s not coming.”

  “Where was it sent from?” Claire asked.

  “Some place I never heard of,” said the dramaturge. “It’s called Rock Hill.”

  Rock Hill was the suburb of St. Louis where I had been living the last few days.

  “I don’t know where Judith is,” I said. “We’ve separated.”

  The dramaturge took another small pill, which, he explained, had to be taken along with the first to counteract its side effects, and asked if I had done any more work on my play.

  “It’s hard for me,” I said, “to write roles. When I characterize somebody, it seems to me that I’m degrading him. Everything that’s individual about him becomes a tic. I feel that I can’t be as fair to other people as I am to myself. When I make somebody talk on the stage, he clams up on me after the first few sentences; I’ve reduced him to a concept. I think maybe I’d do better to write stories.”

  “What concept?”

  “You must know people,” I said, “who try to reduce everything they see, even the most extraordinary things, to a concept, to do away with it by formulating it, so they won’t have to experience it any more. They have words for everything. And then, because there aren’t really any words for what they’re trying to say, what they say is usually an invitation to laugh, a joke, even if they haven’t formulated it with this in mind. That’s how it is in my play. As soon as somebody says something, if only with a gesture, the character is reduced to a concept and I can’t do anything more with him. I’ve been wondering whether I oughtn’t to bring in someone else in every scene, a servant figure to interpret the new situation for the others, a kind of counterfigure to the usual wise observer who comments on the story and keeps the threads together. Because everything this servant says in his comments—and he comments on everything—turns out to be wrong. What he predicts never happens, all his explanations are absurd. He turns up as a deus ex machina where none is needed. Two characters need only look in different directions and he barges in to reconcile them.”

  “What’s the play called?” the dramaturge asked.

  “Hans Moser and His World,” I said.

  I explained to Claire that Hans Moser was an Austrian actor who played only servant parts but who in the course of the action showed everyone his place. “He played very carefully, very seriously, because he always took the action to heart, but sometimes, after engineering some intrigue, you’d see a shy smile on his face. In his movies we couldn’t wait for him to come on.”

  I had talked a good deal and now I recovered my perception of what was going on around me. On the next table there was a cellophane cigar wrapper in the ash tray. The cigar must have been very long! I laughed. Claire gave me a quick glance and we wanted to be closer together. The woman behind the bar tapped the buttons of the cash register with the top of a ballpoint pen; the drawer jumped out and hit her in the stomach! The dramaturge looked sleepy, his eyeballs were yellow, I’d have liked to put my arm around him but didn’t want to frighten him. “She liked having that drawer slam into her,” he said. I was going to disagree with him, but then I noticed that he was only pondering a theatrical situation.

  We drank a good deal. Claire treated us to rye and drank more than the two of us together. In the street we zigzagged, there were hardly any cars, we kept pointing things out to each other. In a side street the dramaturge went up to two black prostitutes. He’d look around at us now and then; he was standing a few feet away from the women and talking to them; when they said something, he’d bend over as though straining to hear. That gesture of inclining his ear without moving closer to them suddenly showed me how much he had aged, and that made him seem more lovable than ever before. With two fingers he plucked lightly at one girl’s wig; she slapped his hand and said something in an angry voice. He came back to us and told us what she had said: “Don’t touch me! This is my country! Don’t touch me in my country!” For a moment he rubbed his chest, a gesture I had never seen him make. That gesture seemed to be his only answer to his helplessness.

  “I’m completely cut off from life,” he said later in the bar of his hotel. “It exists for me only in comparisons with my inner states. I haven’t seen a fish being scaled for years, but last night when I woke up in a state of anxiety, I saw glittering scales all around me. I haven’t been exposed to nature for ages, but when I reach out my hand for my glass, I feel like the body of a spider that’s just been killed and is slowly, as though still alive, sinking to the ground on its thread. I’ve stopped noticing the commonplace acts of life, like putting my hat on, riding on escalators, or eating a soft-boiled egg; but later they come back to me as met
aphors for my situation.” He left the room, came back after a while and told us he had vomited. His lips were still wet from the water he had drunk afterward. He lined up a few pills of various colors in front of him and swallowed them in a strictly determined order. “At first I felt as if I’d stuck my finger into a water faucet and the air in it had exploded,” he said. He bowed to Claire and asked my permission to dance with her. I watched them: Claire moved lazily in one place, while he, in a variety of steps, moved back and forth in front of her; through the low-ceilinged bar droned the gloomy music of the Creedence Clearwater Revival: “Run through the Jungle.”

  We took him up to his room. “I’m leaving town tomorrow,” I said. When I stepped out of the hotel with Claire, the night was so bottomlessly dark that I reeled. Clinging to each other, we went to the car. In the stillness I heard a ghostly din; from the Mississippi, I think. We went into a building site; I sat on a crate, drew Claire down to me, and penetrated her right away; something seemed to crunch. We couldn’t hear each other any more, I hurt, I was bleeding, the pain eased, and a tune ran through my head, the same words over and over: “Peppermint steak on Sunday.”

  In the car on the way back to Rock Hill, I said to Claire, “I feel as if I were half asleep: I woke up gradually and in waking my dream images became slower and slower; then they stopped and turned into beautiful, quiet half-sleep images. I’m no longer afraid as I was in my dream, I let the images soothe me.”

  As we were passing a street lamp after getting out of the car, the shadow of a great night bird flew soundlessly across the brightly lit street. “Once on a 131 boat ride through the Louisiana bayous a night owl flew into my face,” said Claire. “That was when I was pregnant.”