Peter Handke - Moment of True Feeling

Keuschnig went to the desk and read the note Stefanie had written: “Don’t expect me to supply you with the meaning of your life.”—With a sense of humiliation he thought: She beat me to it. Now I can’t say that to her. — All at once he felt like a character in a story told long ago. “That morning he woke up earlier than usual. Even the twittering of the birds still had a sleepy sound to it. A hot day was in the offing …” That was how stories about last days began. The rainbow was still there, but now he wished it away. He went down the long corridor to the child’s room with the ridiculous feeling that his handkerchief was in the wrong pocket, the left instead of the right. How stolidly he continued to exist!

Helplessly he watched the sleeping child. He sniffed at her. She turned over. Finally she woke up with a sigh, but didn’t notice him. She only cried out: “I want a coconut,” and dropped off to sleep again. She woke up with a WISH! he thought. She opened her eyes again, and with her first glance looked far out the window. He made himself noticeable and she looked at him without surprise. “A snow-white cloud has just flown by,” she said. He looked with dismay at the chocolate smudges on her sheet — would he have to change her bedding on top of everything else? Unthinkable. When she wanted to say something, he bent over expressly to show he was paying attention, but that only made him more inattentive than ever. Absently he held her close. “Don’t forget me,” he said senselessly. “Sometimes I forget you,” she replied. In leaving the room he looked at himself in the mirror.

Before lighting the gas in the kitchen to warm the milk, he had one of his idées fixes: they were in the desert, and the match he was now striking was the last. Would it burn? When the match caught fire, he was very much relieved. Then another hallucination: Martial law had been declared, it would be impossible to go shopping in the foreseeable future. Anxiously he looked into the icebox, which was almost empty. He phoned the ambassador and said he couldn’t go to work because the child was sick. That’s asking for bad luck, he thought, and corrected himself: No, not really sick, he just had to take her to the dispensary for her inoculations. — What if she comes down with something because of my lie? he thought after hanging up, and looked her over. She lay in bed yawning, and he took that as a good sign. On the other hand, the overturned toy pail in her room was a warning. He carefully set it straight. Then, rummaging in his trouser pocket, he found two month-old tickets to the marionette theater in the Luxembourg Gardens, and for a few moments felt perfectly safe. A little later he caught himself folding a white sheet in the doorway of the child’s room. Alarmed, he took the sheet somewhere else … The air had gone out of a balloon during the night! He quickly blew it up again. And surely it was no accident that the sausage the child was eating in bed was called morta della! He took it away from her and gave her a piece of garlic sausage instead … He himself ate a pear, core, stem, and all, as only a carefree man could have done — that restored the balance, didn’t it? And to counter the next bad sign in advance, he picked up a book from the floor and placed it accurately in the bookcase. — Later, when he squeezed a toothpaste tube he had thought empty and something came out, he was moved to see how THINGS were coming to his help.

He sat down in the garden, which was now sunny again, and began to shine all the shoes he could lay his hands on. If only he would never run out of shoes! The child looked on in silence, and he managed not to think of anything. When he did think of something, his thoughts were like a soothing half sleep … The sun had warmed the insides of his shoes, and he felt a spurt of happiness when he stepped into them. But what if his sense of security were only a passing mood? The thought jolted him and spoiled his good humor.

He wandered around the apartment, picked things up with the intention of putting them away and after a while put them back where he had found them. He would take a few steps, stop, and turn about, and it suddenly occurred to him that in his perplexity and disgruntlement he was doing a kind of dance. — He couldn’t pass a mirror without looking at himself. He would turn away from one mirror in disgust and look at himself in another. I’m really dancing! he thought. This idea, at least, made it possible for him to move through the somber rooms from end to end of the apartment.

He wanted to watch the train as it passed the house on its way to the Gare Saint-Lazare, where you could change and be at the seaside in two hours … He waited at an open window, and at length a train left the Auteuil station. The light bulbs in the cars flickered as the train passed over the switches. He saw the broad yellow stripes on the cars and the blue sparks under the wheels as something very personal, something exclusively meant for him … The passengers sat propped on their elbows, their faces benignly calm and relaxed, as though they couldn’t conceivably think any evil, not at least for the first hundred yards after the train left the station …

He wanted to go out. But Agnes wanted to stay home. He tried to dress her. When she resisted, he came very close to forcing her into her clothes. He punched his head so hard the tears came to his eyes. Then he left the room and tore up paper. He felt as if he were going to bash his head against the wall — without conviction!

Again he started wandering around. Agnes sat painting watercolors, at the same time eating a piece of cake and smacking her lips. Suddenly he saw himself throw a knife at her. He hurried over and touched her. She pushed him away, not out of hostility, but because he was interfering with what she was doing. He wanted to throw the dirty paint water in her face. If at least he could tell her his story about yesterday, how he had had only to speak and the world obeyed. He tried, but he was so far away, so hopelessly absent, that he garbled every sentence. She laughed at his mistakes and corrected him. “Go away!” she said. Suddenly he was afraid of killing her with a blow of his fist. He went away, far away, and made faces at himself. It seemed to him that with the mere thought of striking Agnes he had forever forfeited the right to be with her for so much as a second. The mortar on the walls looked oozy; in another minute it would fall to the floor in cakes. Even in the toilet, where he always had felt blessed relief the moment he had pushed the bolt, he didn’t feel safe any more. He sat there awhile, too apathetic to squeeze out the shit; then he went somewhere else and stood around, at a loss for anything to do. He thought of what Stefanie had once said when he had asked her if she wouldn’t like to go to London for a few days: “I have no desire to SIT in London all by myself.” And here I sit, he thought, like a woman SITTING in a hotel room in a strange city. The child prevents me from thinking! — But maybe, through the child, I could learn a different way of thinking. — He felt alone in a disagreeable way. In a suddenly remembered image, he saw a furrow that had just been plowed and the writhing parts of a white grub that the plow had cut in two. For a little while he walked in a circle with his head bowed, round and round. The child had such reasonable wishes: that he should make her a paper airplane — that he should simply PLAY with her. But it was impossible for him to play now, to satisfy her reasonable wishes. She was taking everything he had thrown into the trash basket out again … He phoned for the time and heard the revoltingly brutal voice of a man, whom he pictured fat and misanthropic in an armchair, announcing the hour. Again he walked in a circle, his heart growing heavier and heavier. From time to time he shouted at the child to leave him alone. If he could only kick someone! But who? He walked, saw, breathed, heard — the worst of it was that he also lived!