Short Letter, Long Farewell

by Peter Handke

  I couldn’t find my way back to the hotel. It occurred to me that I sometimes put money in my shirt pocket. Sure enough, I found a ten-dollar bill and took a cab. I couldn’t help laughing when I got to my room: the door was locked and this time there were no scratch marks on the lock. I lay down on the bed. At last! I was beginning to feel pretty good. Lucky I’d put my plane ticket in my overcoat pocket; I’d even tucked some money into it, more than a hundred dollars, small bills that I had received as change. I had always paid with big bills, so as not to reach into my pocket more than once; and now my magnificence had paid off. My spirits rose and rose. I looked through all my clothes for money. Bills crackled in every shirt I touched; I even found a quarter in one of the trouser cuffs. I piled the money on the table and lost myself in the sight of it as I had that afternoon in the water running silently from the faucet. The window curtain swayed gently in the outflow of the air conditioning. There was a radiator too! With five coils. They were not parallel! When I looked again, I realized that I had forgotten about perspective.

  I called up my mother in Austria. There it was early next morning. She said there had just been thunder and lightning. A storm in the early morning! She had already been outside and taken in the washing. She had been very active lately; that made her forget about time. The Social-Democratic president had been reelected; at an election rally, the opposition candidate had denied that he was a National Socialist, let alone a Jew. I had the impression that my mother was telling jokes. I asked her for my brother’s address; for the last few years he had been working in a lumber camp in northern Oregon. What did I want it for? “I’ve got to go see him,” I said. I wrote down the address: the name of the town was Estacada. I’d have my ticket changed and fly there next day.

  I went down to the patio and settled under a palm tree by the swimming pool. There was no wind; now and then the bartender behind me shook a drink; from time to time the soft-drink machines rumbled and the cans inside clanked, when the cooling motor shut off. There was no one in the water; in the indirect lighting, it stirred gently, as though in memory of the fallen wind. Above the patio the stars twinkled so brightly that I couldn’t help blinking, and the air was so clear that I saw not only the lighted crescent, but the dark part of the moon as well. So far, I thought, I had hardly met anyone in America who was immersed in anything. One look was enough; then you turned to something else. Anyone who stopped to look a little longer assumed the pose of a connoisseur. The same with the villages, they were never immersed in the landscape, they were always plunked on top of it; they stood out from their surroundings and seemed to have been put there by accident. Only insensible drunks, drug addicts, and the unemployed stared at anything in this country. Was I drunk? I pushed my glass so close to the rounded edge of the table that in the end it tipped all by itself and fell into the swimming pool.

  I could hear that when the traffic lights changed outside only a few cars started up. A man behind me at the bar was talking into his empty glass to his girl; now and then he would rub his teeth against the rim of the glass. I couldn’t stand it any more. Again I withdrew.

  Back in my room, I finished reading Green Heinrich. When he found himself unable to draw a certain plaster figurine, he realized that he had never really concerned himself with people. He went home to his mother, who had been supporting him up until then, and found her with quivering cheeks, dying. For years after that he was morose, weary of life, as though pumped dry. He revived only when the woman who had loved him because she envied him for his thoughts came back from America. At that point his story became a fairy tale, and when I came to the passage: “Happy and content, we ate together in the dining room of the Golden Star,” I had to look away for fear of bursting into tears. Then I cried all the same, rather hysterically, but it made me forget time.

  I lay in the darkness; all at once, when I was almost asleep, I felt sad because my money had been stolen. It wasn’t a sorrow or regret, only a senseless physical pain that I couldn’t talk myself out of: something had been torn out of me; there was a hollow place inside me that would have to heal. I didn’t want to think any more. In my dream, tomatoes were being washed in an enormous bowl; someone fell into it and vanished under the tomatoes. I looked at the bowl (it was on a stage) to see if he would come up again. “If anything more happens to me,” I said to myself aloud in my dream, “I’ll crack up.”

  When I arrived in Oregon late next morning, it was raining. Though hitchhiking was forbidden, I stood outside the airport in Portland with my straw hat on my head, trying to thumb a ride to Estacada. I had come via Salt Lake City on a Hughes Airwest plane. Time and again during the trip, I had felt that I was someone else’s double, moving in a vacuum. I had read once that people make senseless chewing motions after a bad fright; my trip to Oregon was like that, I thought.

  A vegetable truck hauling California lettuce to the mountains finally picked me up. There was no windshield wiper on my side and I couldn’t see much. That was all right with me, I had a headache. Once in a while I’d forget the pain, then I’d take a breath and remember it again. The driver was wearing a checkered shirt with a buttoned undershirt under it. He must have had a tune running through his head the whole time, because he kept drumming on the wheel with his fingers. But he didn’t sing; the only sound out of him was a whistle as the road climbed and the rain turned to snow. At first the snow fell off the windows, then it began to stick.

  Estacada is a town of eleven hundred, at an altitude of over three thousand feet. The main source of livelihood is lumbering. I caught myself looking for first aid, police, fire department signs. At the intersection of two state highways just outside the town, the driver pointed out the motor inn, and there I took a room for the night. The price was five dollars. I slept until late in the afternoon; then I rolled off the bed. When I began to feel cold on the floor, I put on my coat and walked up and down in front of the television set. The images were blurred, because Estacada is surrounded by mountains. I went down to the lobby and asked the way to the unmarried loggers’ quarters. The snow plows weren’t running so late in the year and I walked through deep snow. There were hardly any trees in the town, only here and there they had left a symbolic fir tree, which gave you a start when the snow came tumbling down and the branches swished upward. The curtains of all the houses were drawn; steam rose from the ventilators of the snack bars and from the sewer gratings, around which the snow had melted. The door of the drugstore was open; inside, someone with bandaged thumbs was drinking coffee.

  The light bulb over the entrance to Gregor’s barracks had burned out, maybe from a short circuit caused by the melting snow. I stamped the snow off my shoes, but no one came out. The door wasn’t locked; I went in, it was almost dark, the only light came from a street lamp outside. I saw a piece of paper on the floor. Thinking it was a message for me, I picked it up and turned on the light. It was a Western Union telegram that I had sent my brother from Salt Lake City.

  On the table there was a deck of ornate German playing cards; beside them lay a small alarm clock that seemed to have fallen over from ringing. On one chair, two long, mud-caked shoelaces; on the other, a pair of pajama pants, hand-me-downs from me; on top of them a handkerchief with 248, my clothing number at boarding school, embroidered on it; that handkerchief must have been fifteen years old.

  The clothes closet was open; a string had been attached to the inside of the door and at the other end to the stovepipe; socks and underdrawers were hanging on it. I touched them; they were dry and felt hard. On the cold stove lay a saucer with a lump of rancid butter in it; in the butter there was a thumbprint. In the closet, a few wire hangers, the kind the dry cleaners give you; and on the hangers unironed shirts, torn at the seams and armpits.

  The bed was unmade; on the sheets gray spots, crushed moths, and in a fold still another moth; under the bed, empty beer cans.

  On the window sill, a box of soap flakes; beside it, marks of cat’s paws.

  On th
e wall, a calendar from Austria with a color photograph of a woman in a peasant hat against a field of daffodils; under the photograph, a print of the general store in our home village.

  That photograph on the calendar—

  So little happened in our childhood and there was so little to see that we looked forward every year to the picture on the new calendar. In the fall, we waited eagerly for the insurance agent who came to collect our annual premium and in return left the insurance company’s calendar for next year, with a new picture on it.

  Was my brother in America still sending for the new calendar with the new picture?

  That thought was so intolerable that it was quickly crowded out by a feeling that came as a relief. I put the telegram on the table, cautiously following up with my other hand for fear of breaking something.

  On my way out I saw, beside a wash basin, a pair of low-cut shoes; inside them a pair of cotton socks that seemed to have grown into them. They were very pointed shoes, a style that had been fashionable ten years before. Children were running around in a slaughtering yard; a butcher’s apprentice picked a child up and held him over a dead pig. Slipping now and then in the snow, I went up the main street of Estacada. I didn’t look back.

  It was so still that I stopped more and more often. Steam rose from the neon PIZZERIA and GAS signs. Far away in the village I made out the screen of a drive-in movie; on it I saw only light and shade, there was no sound to be heard. I dropped into an amusement arcade, but I had no desire to play games. Nevertheless I went from one pinball machine to another, absently pushing the balls around. I knew then that I had come to loathe all games; I couldn’t conceive of ever again manipulating such a machine or shuffling cards or throwing dice. No, never again. I was tired. I sat down on a stool next to a drunk, who was leaning against the wall, asleep. His whole face was sweating, his shirt was open, the sweat collected in the hollow of his collarbone and overflowed now and then. He opened his eyes and had to blink before they focused, a scalped rabbit; I left.

  At the motel I went to the bathroom to wash my hands. The hot water faucet was hot to the touch. Had someone just been running water? I stepped back and turned the faucet. First air came out, then a boiling liquid gushed into the basin; a few drops splashed onto my pants and instantly made little holes with black edges. Perfect! I nodded as though in approval. I saw that the threads of both faucets had been scratched. Carefully I opened the cold water faucet and let the acid run out. While washing my hands, I noticed that the cellophane wrapper had been removed from one of the glasses—an invitation to use it. I stared at the glasses: objects from another world, another star.

  During the night I left my room door open. Once I thought I heard someone moving outside the window, but it was only a moth caught between the curtain and the windowpane. For the first time in ages I dreamed nothing at all.

  I woke up as though in a strange element. Early in the morning I went to the sawmill where my brother worked. The air was hazy, the melting snow gurgled under the sewer gratings. I moved in a strange element, as though in someone else’s thoughts. Again I had to run, I couldn’t walk any more. I looked for an image as I usually look for words, to bring me back to myself. Charred tree trunks, gashed hillsides, burned trash bins; in a field somewhere else, straw crackled in the noonday heat. I didn’t want any more imaginings connected with myself. But then suddenly I heard myself as a ventriloquist, my belly took over my part and told me things I didn’t want to know. A girl with a milk bottle came toward me; she was so thin that my astonishment pulled me together.

  The sawmill was in a hollow beside the Clackamas River. From a distance I recognized my brother among the men who were stripping the bark off a fir tree beside a throbbing drying kiln. He was standing on the tree, thrusting a crowbar between bark and trunk. I had stopped on a hummock and was looking down at him. He was wearing gloves and a woolen cap. Occasionally, as he put pressure on the crowbar, his right foot slipped off the peeled tree trunk. A second worker had thrust another crowbar under the bark; the two of them pulled at the loose bark from either side until only long fibers clung to the tree. They cut the fibers with axes and threw the bark on a waste pile.

  Gregor went off to one side. I thought he had seen me and took a step forward. He stopped in a clump of bushes and looked around, but without raising his head. Beside the bushes there was still snow on the ground. He let his pants down and squatted. I looked on as the feces emerged from between his bare buttocks and dropped slowly into the snow. He kept his squatting position long after he had finished. Then he stood up, pulled up his underdrawers and trousers with one motion, and, beating his hands together, went back to the tree trunk. As if that were all I had come to see, I turned around and ran all the way to the motel.

  There was mail for me: a picture postcard with an aerial view of Twin Rocks, a town on the Pacific coast some seventy-five miles west of Estacada. The shore road by-passed the town in a long arc, two black rocks jutted out of the sea, the water foamed around them. In spite of the height from which the picture had been taken, the lines on the road could be distinguished clearly. At one point, where there was a loop in the road, as though for a bus stop or a lookout, a cross had been made with a fountain pen, so forcefully that the imprint could be seen on the other side of the card. “So she’s got herself another fountain pen,” I said to the lady at the reception desk, who was busy sorting out the coins I had paid my bill with. She looked up and had to start counting all over again. She was counting with one hand, holding the other flat on the desk to let her nail polish dry; through the ruffles around her neck I saw a long red scar, which only a moment ago I had seen as a makeup smear. I didn’t ask her how she had come by it; I didn’t want to get her mixed up again.

  With my last money I took a taxi to the coast. It was a dark day, made for traveling; the sky brightened only during occasional showers. I had the camera in my lap; there were plenty of sights, above and below, to the right and left, but I was too sad to take pictures.

  Off and on I fell asleep; when I woke up, there was a river valley where I had just seen a bare mountaintop; at my next waking we were driving through dark evergreen woods and I had to lean out the window to see the sky. “Don’t open the window,” said the driver, “it throws the heating off.” It was unbearable to be awake with my eyes closed; whatever I had seen last pressed in on me and took my breath away; it didn’t move back into place until I opened my eyes. A shower was coming down again and I couldn’t see through the windows; I must have fallen asleep, because a moment later the windows were clean and dry, the sun was shining feebly, and an enormous gray mountain wall rose up in front of the windshield. I straightened up and shook myself, the wall widened and reached out to the horizon; it was the Pacific Ocean. The driver turned on the radio; it only crackled. A few minutes later we stopped in Twin Rocks; there were sea gulls on the roof of the one gas station.

  Out! “There are hardly more than a hundred people in this town.” But such sentences were no longer of any use. I wanted to put down my suitcase but I carried it farther and farther. Here the sky was very bright; when the sun shone through the clouds, the chrome fittings on the cars sparkled. Once I stood still, but didn’t put my suitcase down. I saw a child in a window; he was watching me and, lost in a dream, imitating my expression. I went on; swallows were flying about, so fast that I hardly saw anything but motion; like bats in the twilight.

  Sitting on the joiner’s bench

  waiting for our mother.

  Then the black ram comes along,

  butts and knocks us over;

  then the white bat comes along,

  picks us up again.

  The ocean was reflected in the windowpanes of the last houses. Actually: burned-out trash bins! Outside a shop a red and white cylinder was revolving: barbershop and beauty parlor. A woman was sitting inside; her head was under the dryer, hidden down to the eyes; squatting on her heels in front of her, the hairdresser was lacquering the woman’s t
oenails, which were gnarled and crooked, with calluses on the joints. Those were Judith’s toes! Her early years as a salesgirl had ruined her feet. Then I saw her brown doeskin bag on a chair; it was open; no doubt she had opened it to take out the dressing gown she had over her shoulders. It was brocade and glowed darkly in the setting sun. “She’s brought her dressing gown to America!” I thought aloud. While the hairdresser was lacquering her fingernails, I observed Judith: two toes of one foot were twined around the big toe of her other foot. Dreams; wake up in the morning and spit out a night worm. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Judith moved in her chair, with an angry jerk as though anticipating something. In an inexplicable memory, a cork being pulled out of a bottle squeaked obsessively. The hairdresser looked up, half blind from the fingers she had been holding so close to her face; I quickly removed myself from her field of vision.

  Fish skeletons between the bars of sewer gratings; sponges in the cracks between the logs of log cabins; people stepping out of houses, looking up at the sky, and going back in; here the pioneers’ monuments were barrels of lard and soft soap outside the supermarket, with inscriptions relating to the founding of the town. A drunk with bare skin showing under his open fly veered from his path and strode stiffly toward me. I made room for him; he staggered over the spot where I had just been standing and fell on his face in a puddle.

  The sodium street lights went on, though it was still light; one of the tubes flickered. I had a hair in my mouth and couldn’t get rid of it. Besides, I liked it, it gave me something to do while walking. Now and then I broke into a run. I followed the shore road past the last houses until I saw two black rocks in the sea. Then I crossed the street and sat down on my suitcase in the loop that had been marked with a cross on the picture postcard. The sun had just set, a wind had come up. The place was both a viewing point and a bus stop. Hardly any cars passed. I looked down at the rocky beach, which was far below. Pieces of wood tossing about in the foaming water. There was a railing at the edge of the lookout. A woman was standing there with an idiot child, who kept climbing on the railing and shouting down at the ocean. The woman held him fast and finally lifted him down. A bus marked BAY CITY stopped; they got in and I was left alone.