Peter Handke: The Ride Across Lake Constance and Other Plays

KILB

How?

HANS

Because an itching big toe means that you should remember something, and someone who remembers becomes a human being. So all I need to do is remember.

There was a time something inside me wanted to scream

At the mere thought that I might dream.

Now I want to learn to dream without end

So that the floor of facts I might transcend.

My eyes I want to learn to close

So as to know more of the little I knows.

In my youth a palm reader told me a fable

That I would be able

To change the world’s plan.

I hereby announce that at least my world is changing.

( He quickly punches the balloon punching-bag fashion. The balloon bursts. HANS exits.

KILB concentrates, puts the stool on its legs, gently closes the cover of the piano, puts in order what needs putting into order.

QUITT returns .)

KILB

Not yet!

QUITT

You again.

KILB

But we haven’t seen each other in ages.

QUITT

Not ages enough. Recently I thought of a mistake I once made. I couldn’t remember what kind of mistake it had been — but I was sure at once that it was not an important mistake. Later on I remembered more distinctly: it had been an important mistake after all. It occurred to me only when I was dealing with you.

KILB

Please stay like that.

( Pause. )

QUITT

Kilb, I’m happy that you came. And please note that I said “I’m happy” and not “it makes me happy.”

KILB

Please don’t become too friendly now. ( Pause. QUITT regards him for a long time .) Why are you looking at me?

QUITT

I’m only too tired to look elsewhere. Why don’t you at least sit down, so that I won’t become even more tired. ( He points to the deck chair .)

KILB

No, that’s too deep for me, I’ll never be able to get out of it. (QUITT sits down in it .) Particularly if you keep your hands in your pockets the way you do. I always keep my hands out of my pockets in moments of danger.

QUITT

Kilb, nothing is possible any longer. I feel like I’m the sole survivor, and I find it unappetizing that there’s nothing left except me. If only there were an appetizing explanation for this state of affairs — but my awareness is the awareness of a pile of garbage in an infinite empty space. Imagine: the telephone no longer rings, the postman doesn’t come any more, all street noises have ceased, only the wind is rustling one dream further away — the world has already died. I’m the only one who hasn’t heard of the catastrophe. I’m actually only a phantom of myself. What I see are afterimages, what I think are afterthoughts. A hair bends over on my head and I’m frightened to death. The next moment will be the last and un-time will begin. Just a moment ago there was still a bubble where I was, but not any more. I know that my time is over. You were right, Paula.

KILB

Absolutely right. You’re an anachronism, Mr. Quitt. Like the goose step of your soul right now.

QUITT

Be quiet. No one but I can say that. ( He bounces a little ball and looks at KILB.) Now that it’s just the two of us, instead of becoming different you only become afraid that you might become different. ( Pause. ) There is nothing unthought of any more. Even the Freudian slip from the unconscious has already become a management method. Even dreams are dreamed from the beginning so as to be interpretable. For example, I no longer dream anything that isn’t articulated, and the pictures of the dream follow each other logically like the sequence of days in a diary. I wake up in the morning and am paralyzed with all the speeches I’ve heard in the dream. There’s no longer the “and suddenly” of the old dreams. ( The ball escapes and rolls away .) Oh, too bad … ( He gets up. KILB has approached .) The chair really is too deep, you’re right. When I think of myself, using precise concepts, I have one attack of nausea after the other. This businessman with a handkerchief in his breast pocket and his English worsted suit full of Weltschmerz on board his private plane the soot from whose jets drifts down on the workers’ apartment projects, with organ music of the Old Masters oozing from the built-in loudspeakers — stop it, get rid of it, bomb it, it’s logical. But: every logical conclusion is immediately contradicted within me by this totally indecisive yet totally self-assured feeling.

KILB

It’s logical. You want to go on living.

QUITT

The little man wants to put on airs.

KILB

Why not. What else has the little man left to put on?

QUITT

You’re right. Why not? A good cue. I’m still stuck too deep in my role. Spitefully I walk past the spastics in the V.A. hospitals and look away when someone rummages in garbage cans for food. Why do I do it, actually? There’s scarcely anyone who looks as if he could still fall out of his role. I once walked on the street and suddenly noticed that I didn’t have anything to do with my face any more …

KILB

The old story with the masks.

QUITT

Yes, but now someone who experienced it is telling about it. Outside, the muscles clung’ to the dead skin, then one dead layer on top of the other, only inside, in the deepest center, where I should have been, there was still a little twitching and something wet. A car would have to crash into me at once! — Only then would I stop making a face. And not merely show my true face when I can’t avoid the onrushing car any more, I thought. But this dead skin, that already was my true face.

KILB

Nothing but stories. Where’s the connection?

QUITT

I don’t know anything about myself ahead of time. My experiences only occur to me in the telling. That establishes the connection. I’m now going to tell you what is hell for me: hell for me is the so-called bargain, what’s cheap. In a dark hour I happened into a restaurant which had the same menu that people like me usually eat, only half as expensive — but this wasn’t the same food: the meat deep-frozen, thrown into the pan and fried to death; the potatoes waterlogged; the vegetables something slopped into the pot with the liquid from the can; the paper napkin shredding after one wipe, and tossed in as a freebie, a tablecloth with static electricity, which made the hairs on my fingers stand on end. Pressed to the table because others sat next to and beside me, the only view the frosted windowpane in front of which the potted flowers flapped in the air from the heating vent. Only a luxurious existence isn’t a punishment, I thought. Only the greatest luxury is worthy of a human being. What’s cheap is inhuman.

KILB

That’s why your products are always the cheapest.

QUITT

How much do you want for your answer? For once, couldn’t I be the topic? Me — that’s what makes me shy back, that’s what I have had enough of, up to here, and what still lies at the tip of my tongue all the time — something as rare and ridiculous as a living mole. I feel watched by all sides like the dead flesh from a wound that has long since healed, and still I dance on the inside with self-awareness. Yes, inside I’m dancing! I once sat in the sun in actual shock, the sun was shining on me, not that I felt it, and I really felt like the outline of suffocating nothingness in the airy space around me. But even that was still me, me, me. I was in despair, could think neither back nor forward — had no sense of history left. Each recollection came in dribs and drabs, unharmoniously, like the recollection of a sex act. This aching lack of feeling, that was myself, and I was not only I but also a quality of the world. Of course, I asked about the terms. Why? Why this condition? These conditions — why no history but only these conditions? But all the conditional requirements were fulfilled. No “whys” helped any more. Only the unconditional requirements remained. “I’m bored,” a child once said. “Then play at something. Paint something. Read something. Do something,” it was told. “But I can’t, I’m bored,” it said. ( He keeps taking objects from his pockets, looks at them, and puts them back again .) The goose step of my soul, you said? I want to speak about ( Laughs .) myself without using categories. I don’t want to mean anything any more, please, not be a character in the story any more. I want to freeze at night in May. Look, these are photos of me: I look happy in all of them and yet I never was. Do you know the feeling when one has put a pair of pants on backward? One time I was happy: when I visited someone in a tenement and during a long pause in the conversation I could hear the toilet flushing in the apartment next door. I became musical with happiness! Oh, my envy of your sleepy afternoons in those tenements with their mysteriously gurgling toilet bowls! Those are the places I long for: the projects at the edge of the city where the telephone booths are lit up at night. To go into airport hotels and simply check oneself in for safekeeping. Why are there no deper-sonification institutes? How beautiful it used to be when you opened a new can of shoe polish! And I could still imagine buying a ham sandwich, looking at cemeteries, having something in common with someone. Sometimes one thing simply led exhilaratingly to the other — that’s what it meant to feel alive! Now I’m heavy and sore and bulky with myself. ( He punches himself under his chin while talking, kicks his calf .) One wrong breath and I disintegrate. Do you know that I hear voices? But not the kind of voices that madmen hear: no religious phrases, or poetry regurgitated from schooldays, or one-shot philosophies, none of the traditional formulas — but movie titles, pop tunes, advertising slogans. “Raindrops are falling on my head,” it frequently resounds in a whisper in the echo chamber of my head, and in the middle of an embrace a voice interrupts me with “Guess who’s coming to dinner?” or “I’d walk a mile for a Camel.” And I am positive that in the future even madmen will hear only voices like that — no longer “Know thyself” or “Thou shalt honor thy father and mother …” the superego voices of our culture. While one set of monsters is being exorcised, the next ones are already burping outside the window. ( He interrupts himself .) How odd: while I go on talking logically like this, I simultaneously see, for example, a wintry lake at dusk which is just beginning to freeze over, or a small tree with a bottle stuck on its top, and an unshaven Chinese who peers around a doorway — now he’s gone again — and, moreover, during the whole time I keep humming a certain moronic melody inside myself. ( He hums. KILB wants to say something. ) No, I am speaking now. I am blowing my horn! The goose step of my soul. You should try it too. At least try … Stand still, why don’t you! Do I spit when I talk? Yes, I can feel the spit bubbles on my teeth. But my time to speak isn’t over yet. At one time I used to think, Let’s hope the next world war doesn’t start before my new suit is ready. By talking I want to have the transmission of consciousness, now, before you are finished with me. For too long my lips have held themselves joylessly shut. ( He suddenly embraces KILB and holds on to him. ) Why am I talking so fluently? Whereas I actually feel the need to stutter. ( He bends over and therefore presses KILB more tightly. KILB is writhing .) I w … want to s … stutter … And why do I see everything so distinctly? I don’t want to see the grain in the wood floor so distinctly. I’d like to be nearsighted. I’d like to tremble. Why am I not trembling? Why am I not stuttering? (He bends over vehemently and KILB writhes .) I once wanted to sleep. But the room was so big. Wherever I lay down I created spots of sleeplessness. The room was too big for me alone. Where is the place to sleep here? Smaller! Smaller! (He bends over so much that KILB groans. He bends even more and the groaning ceases. KILB falls on the floor and doesn’t move. QUITT crosses his arms. Pause .) I can smell the cologne he smelled of. ( Pause. ) How happy I became once when I put on a shirt one of whose buttons had just been sewn on. My shirt is torn. How beautiful! Then I wore it long enough for it to become threadbare.