Short Letter, Long Farewell

by Peter Handke

  I looked out at the Pacific. Though the water still glittered in the sun, it was deep-dark. I tried to repeat my first impression of it, the towering mountain wall; but it kept on being flat water until I had brain cramp.

  My first impression of Judith: why couldn’t I bring it back? I tried: a sweet affection that lifted me up and made me as light as a feather. Couldn’t we have kept that feeling for each other? I had forgotten it; we were no longer able to look at each other without grimacing.

  I looked at the sea again: it was so empty that I felt it had eaten me up. Wisps of fog drifted across the beach. The symmetrical parts of my body gaped apart with exhaustion; the empty spaces between them made me sick to my stomach. Filthy, bedraggled, frazzled. I had been enjoying all the poses of alienation available to me for too long; I had distanced myself from people by turning them into “beings”: that being, I had said of Judith, that monster: that, that, that. I crouched, letting my arms dangle between my legs. A helicopter flew low across the road, blinking at the asphalt.

  It grew very still. From far away I heard a plane; its hum was so soft that listening made my head ache.

  I looked around and saw Judith with her bag coming out from between the last houses of Twin Rocks. On the other side of the road she stopped, looked to right and left, then crossed. She had a scarf on her head, maybe her hair wasn’t dry yet. Behind her it was almost dark. She was pointing the revolver at me. “She takes me seriously,” I thought. “By God, she takes me seriously.” She cocked the revolver. The sound was so soft that I heard it only in my imagination and refused to believe it. Though burned to ashes, I was still in one piece, but at the slightest move I would fall apart. So that was it! That was what I thought I had been born for! Disappointed, I stood up from my suitcase and went toward her. With rigid, graven faces we approached one another; suddenly she looked away and screamed like a child having a tantrum, so ferociously that her breath gave out. I held my breath, waiting for her to go on screaming; she was sure to start in again, twice as loud; but she didn’t, she only gulped, as though gagging, and I took the gun out of her hand.

  We stood side by side, shifting from foot to foot, helpless and sullen. I threw the revolver into the ocean, it fell on a rock and went off, there was a hissing in the water, Judith pressed her lips into her teeth with her fist.

  We walked up and down; when one moved, the other stood still. Night fell. A brightly lighted bus pulled into the stop, a Greyhound. The few passengers had pillows behind their heads. The driver motioned to us. I asked him which way he was going, and he said, “South.” We got in. Next morning we were in California.

  John Ford, then seventy-six, lived in a colonial-style house in Bel Air, not far from Los Angeles. He hadn’t made a picture in six years. He spent most of his time sitting on the terrace of his house, talking with old friends. The terrace looks out over a valley of orange and cypress trees. For visitors there is a row of wicker chairs; in front of them, footstools covered with Indian blankets. People sitting in those chairs tend to tell stories.

  John Ford was white-haired; his wrinkled face was strewn with white beard stubble. Over one eye he wore a black patch; the other gazed gloomily into space; now and then he plucked at his chin or ear lobes. He had on a navy-blue jacket, baggy khaki trousers, and light-colored canvas shoes with big rubber heels. When he spoke, he kept his hands in his pockets, even when sitting; he made no gestures. When he finished a story, he turned his face toward Judith and me, until he could see us out of his eye. He had a large head, the look on his face was severe, he never smiled; in his presence you grew grave, even if you had to laugh at his stories. From time to time he stood up and poured California red wine into Judith’s glass; he let me help myself to brandy. Later on, his wife, Mary Frances, came out; like him she came of a family of Irish immigrants who had settled in Maine. She too sat down and listened to him. We looked out into the light from the shaded terrace; storm clouds were coming up on all sides.

  “In our village in Ireland,” John Ford told us, “there was a general store. I remember going there as a kid, they always gave me candy for change. They kept the candy in a bucket for that express purpose. I was there a few weeks ago, first time in more than fifty years. I went to the store for cigars. And what do you know? The storekeeper reached into the bucket and gave me candy for change.”

  John Ford repeated a good deal of what I had heard about America from Claire and other people during my trip; his ideas were not new, but he backed them up with stories. Sometimes, when you asked a general question, his mind would jump from the general to the particular and he’d talk about incidents in his life and people he’d known. He never judged these people, he simply told us what they had said and done. He never mentioned their names unless they were his friends. “It’s unbearable to be enemies with anyone,” he said. “Suddenly a man becomes nameless, a blob; a shadow falls on his face, it gets blurred and distorted, we can only dart hurried looks at it, from below, like a mouse. Having an enemy makes us loathe ourselves. Yet we’ve always had enemies.”

  “Why do you say ‘we’ instead or ‘I’?” Judith asked.

  “We Americans always say ‘we’ even when we’re talking about our private affairs,” said John Ford. “Maybe it’s because we see everything we do as part of a common effort. ‘I’ stories are possible only when one stands for all. We don’t take our egos as seriously as you Europeans. Over there you’ll even hear a salesgirl, selling things that don’t belong to her, say, ‘I’ve just run out of this or that,’ or ‘I also have a Cossack-style shirt.’ I heard those things with my own ears when I was over there,” said John Ford. “On the other hand, you imitate each other and hide behind each other; even a servant girl answering the phone puts on the voice of the lady of the house. You always say ‘I,’ but that doesn’t prevent you from feeling flattered when you’re mistaken for somebody else. And at the same time you all want to be unmistakably unique. That’s why you’re always sulking and taking offense, because every one of you takes himself for something special. Here in America nobody sulks and nobody crawls into his own shell. We don’t long to be alone; when a man’s alone, he’s contemptible; all he can do is poke around in himself, and when he hasn’t anybody but himself to talk with, he dries up after the first word.”

  “Do you dream a lot?” Judith asked.

  “We hardly dream at all any more,” said John Ford. “And when we do have a dream, we forget it. We talk about everything, so there’s nothing left to dream about.”

  “Tell us about yourself,” said Judith.

  “Whenever I hear people talking about me,” said John Ford, “I have a feeling that it’s too soon. My own experiences aren’t far enough back. I’d rather talk about what other people have experienced before me. That’s why I’ve always preferred to make pictures about things that happened before my time. I don’t feel much nostalgia for my own past; what makes me nostalgic is things I never got around to doing and places where I’ve never been. Once when I was a boy I was beaten up by a gang of Italian kids—though the whole lot of us were Catholics! One of them, a fat kid, was especially vicious; he didn’t even move his hands, he just spat at me and kicked me. An hour later I saw this kid coming down the street by himself; he was as fat as a pig and he had flat feet. All at once I thought he looked unbearably lonely, I only wanted to be nice to him and comfort him. And we actually did get to be friends!” He thought awhile. Then he said, “I was still in short pants.”

  He looked down into the valley; the last rays of sun were shining through the leaves of the orange trees. “When I see the leaves moving like that and the sun shining through, I have a feeling that they’ve been moving that way since the world began,” he said. “It gives me a feeling of eternity, and I forget that there’s such a thing as history. You people call it a medieval feeling. It’s as if the whole world were still in a state of nature.”

  “But those orange trees were planted,” said Judith. “They’re not nature.”


  “When the sun shines through and plays in the leaves, I forget that,” said John Ford. “I also forget myself and my existence. Then I wish that nothing would ever change, that the leaves would go on moving forever, that the oranges would never be picked and everything would stay just the way it is.”

  “Then I suppose you’d like people to go on living as they have always lived?” Judith asked.

  John Ford gave her a gloomy look. “Yes,” he said. “We would. Up to a century ago the people who thought about progress were the people who had the power to bring it about. Until recently new ideas originated with the powerful; with princes, industrialists, public benefactors. Today the men with power have ceased to be benefactors of mankind; at best they do things that benefit certain individuals. Today all the new ideas come from the poor and powerless. The men with the power to change anything have stopped thinking. So no change is possible.”

  “Is that what you want?” Judith asked.

  “No, I don’t want it,” said John Ford. “But that’s what runs through my head when I look down there.”

  An Indian housekeeper came out, leaning on a cane, and spread a blanket over his knees. “She’s played in some of my pictures,” said John Ford. “She’d have liked to be an actress, but she can’t talk; she’s mute. So she took up the tightrope. Then she had a fall, and now she’s back with me.

  “She was happy on the tightrope,” he said. “All of a sudden it was as if she could talk. She still walks as if she were on a tightrope.

  “There are postures that make you feel like yourself,” said John Ford. “‘Yes,’ you think, ‘this is really me.’ Unfortunately you’re usually alone when that happens. Then you try it with people around and you’re not yourself any more, you fall into a pose. That’s no good. It’s ridiculous. It’s your thoughts you want people to get a glimpse of, not your idiosyncrasies. One day you tell the truth, and you’re startled. You’re so happy you can’t bear it; you try to tell the truth again, and then of course you lie. I still lie,” said John Ford. “Two seconds ago I knew what I wanted, but now I’ve lost it. I’m happy only when I know exactly what I want. Then I’m so happy I feel as if there were no teeth in my mouth.”

  He took us to his study and showed us a pile of movie scripts; writers were still sending them to him. “There are some good stories in there,” he said.

  “Simple and clear. The kind of stories we need.” His wife was standing behind us in the doorway; he turned toward her and she smiled. The housekeeper brought him coffee in a tin cup. He drank with his head high, his free hand propped on his hip; clumps of white hair protruded from his ears. His wife came closer and pointed to the photographs on the wall: in one of them John Ford was directing a picture; he was sitting in a director’s swivel chair with a beekeeper’s mask on his face; a few people, likewise in beekeeper’s masks, were sitting and standing around him; at his feet lay a dog with his ears folded back. In another photograph he had just finished a picture, he was kneeling on one knee, holding the tripod of a movie camera; the whole cast was with him, their heads inclined in his direction; one actor had his hand on the camera, as though caressing it. “That was the day we finished The Iron Horse,” said John Ford. “We had one young actress who was always crying. When she stopped, we’d wipe away her tears. That reminded her of her sorrow and she’d start crying again.”

  He looked out the window and we followed his eye; we saw a hill covered with grass and flowering shrubs; a path twined around the hill to the top. “In America there are no paths, only roads,” said John Ford. “I laid out that path because I like to walk in the fresh air.” His bed was covered with a Navy blanket; on the wall hung a picture of Mother Cabrini, the first American saint; he wanted to make a picture about her someday.

  There was a harmonium in the room. His wife sat down at it and played “Greensleeves.” The Indian woman brought in a tray piled with hot buttered corn bread. We ate and looked out the window. “We’ll have corn bread coming out of our ears,” said John Ford suddenly. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  He gave Judith his arm and we climbed the hill. The path was covered with light-colored dust. A few raindrops fell, and where they landed, the dust coagulated into little balls. John Ford told stories; when one of us lagged behind, he stopped, because he didn’t want to turn around when he talked. He talked about his pictures and kept insisting that the stories were true. “Nothing is made up,” he said. “It all really happened.”

  On the hilltop we sat in the grass and looked down into the valley. He lit a cigar with a big kitchen match. “I always want to be with people,” said John Ford. “When I’m with people, I always want to be the last to leave, because I don’t want any of them to run me down when I’m gone. Besides, I want to be there to make sure nobody runs down anybody else who’s left. That’s been my principle in making my pictures.”

  Lightning fell on the hills across the valley. Now and then a gust of wind cut light and dark shadows in the tall grass around us. The leaves on the tree fluttered as though dead. For a time there was no wind at all. Then a bush behind us rustled, though all the other bushes were still. The rustling stopped. A moment later a treetop down by the house was lit up for a moment. For a long while all was quiet, motionless. Then suddenly a murmur ran through the grass at our feet. I blinked, and when I opened my eyes the world around me had darkened and everything in it was close to the ground. The air was oppressive. A big yellow spider that had just been sitting on a leaf popped and fell at our feet. John Ford wiped his fingers in the grass, and turned his signet ring as though to conjure up something. I felt a tickling on the back of my hand. I looked and saw a butterfly that was just folding its wings; at the same time, Judith lowered her eyelashes. To see all this, I had only to take one less breath. We heard the rain falling on the orange trees in the valley. “One night last week,” said John Ford, “we were driving through the desert down in Arizona. There was so much dew we had to use the windshield wiper.” Down in Arizona: at those words I began to remember. John Ford was sitting stooped over, his eye almost closed. Expecting a story, we leaned forward a little; I realized that I was imitating the gesture of a character in one of his pictures who without shifting his position cranes his long neck over a dying man to see if he’s still alive.

  “Now tell me your story,” said John Ford.

  And Judith told him how we had come to America, how she had followed me, how she had robbed me and wanted to kill me, and how at last we were ready to part in peace.

  When she had done telling our story, a silent laugh spread over John Ford’s face.

  “Ach Gott!” he said.

  He grew grave and turned to Judith.

  “Is all that true?” he asked in English. “None of it’s made up?”

  “No,” said Judith, “it all happened.”

  ALSO BY PETER HANDKE:

  Kaspar and Other Plays

  The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (novel)

  Translation copyright © 1974 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.

  All rights reserved

  Published in German under the title Der kurze Brief zum langen

  Abschied

  Copyright © 1972 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main,

  Germany

  Published simultaneously in Canada by Doubleday Canada Ltd.,

  Toronto

  Designed by Elaine Davidoff

  eISBN 9781466807037

  First eBook Edition : December 2011

  First printing, 1974

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Handke, Peter.

  Short letter, long farewell.

  Translation of Der kurze Brief zum langen Abschied. I. Title.

  PT2668.A5K813 833’.9’14 73-87695

 

 

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