Peter Handke - Moment of True Feeling

It gave him real pain to expel his breath after looking for so long. Suddenly the child fell heavily against him and almost knocked him over; her cheeks were soft and she was crying over something unconscionably heartbreaking — what? a trembling toy pinscher being carried past in somebody’s bag. “That’s nothing to cry about,” he said. Where the tears stopped, the light was refracted on her cheek and made the skin lighter … A butterfly hovered around his fingertips and refused to go away; as though its clinging to him would stop him from killing it. He caught sight of a black-clad Portuguese woman with a knitted vest over her arm. A white petticoat showed below her skirt. She attended absently to everything, and nothing seemed beyond her reach. Radiating the charm of an idiot, she seemed infinitely untouched, and oh, how infinitely sheltered were the movements of the child in her care! She smiled at a wish another child had expressed to its mother, but here again as though caught up in some serene memory, which — since the child’s wish was immediately satisfied — may have been quite unrelated to the scene before her eyes and in any event was totally free from envy. The knitted vest and the showing petticoat turned Keuschnig’s thought to the poor peasants among whom he had grown up, and he recalled how, as a rule, they were fond of their kin despite all their peculiarities, but were repelled by the same oddities in others, and how he himself had been no different!

He sat in the square for a long while, one among many, with no thought of the future. He expected nothing; just once he had a vision of all these people taking on a strange look and beginning to sob heartbreakingly, but all the while excusing themselves on the grounds that they hadn’t slept the night before, that the sun didn’t agree with them, and that their stomachs were empty. Who could possibly tell them they had nothing to be ashamed of? — When for once he turned away from himself and looked up, he was at a loss to understand why everything hadn’t changed in the meantime. — At last Agnes, now comforted, spoke to him as if she trusted him. She told him a little about herself, and he saw how many SECRETS she already had. She has secrets! he thought, with a glow of happiness. All at once, out of friendliness, she began to use some of his words and phrases. And in everything, in clouds, in the shadows of the trees, in puddles, she saw SHAPES — which he had stopped seeing long ago …

While she was running about with the other children, he was contentedly reading one of Henry James’s frequent descriptions of women’s dress. At last something that wasn’t a newspaper article. “She was dressed in white muslin, with a hundred frills and flounces, and knots of pale-colored ribbon. She was bare-headed; but she balanced in her hand a large parasol, with a deep border of embroidery; and she was strikingly, admirably pretty.” He read on and on, and while reading he looked forward to buying something for the first time in ever so long. He thought of himself walking across a square in a new, light-colored summer suit. With all the new things that were happening to him and the old things that he mustn’t forget, he was sure to have a most extraordinary experience.

When Keuschnig looked up, the child was gone. And the other children were playing quite naturally, as though Agnes hadn’t been there for a long time and they had arranged their game differently without her. He jumped up but sat right back down again, and even read a few lines in his book, unable to skip a single word. He must paint his face — this minute! And cut off all his hair! The trees set up a rustling, and he experienced that moment when suddenly, in the middle of the summer, one shudders at the thought of darkest, coldest winter. He held his breath and tried to stop thinking, as though that would stop the course of events. Frantically he tried to make ready for what was to come. A woman looked at him as though she knew something he did not. Who would be the first to tell him? The women screeching behind him weren’t laughing; they were prognosticating doom. Up until then everything had been flimflam and foolishness. This was the real thing. In that moment Keuschnig resolved, as though everything humanly possible had been tried, that he would not go on living.

He searchedthe whole square, peered into every car that drove up, but only as a matter of form. The unthinkable, because it was unthinkable, was all the more frightfully real. He wanted to go mad immediately; that seemed the only escape. Only in madness could everything be undone; then THE DEAD WOULD COME BACK TO LIFE! Then one could be with them forever, with no thought of death … But powerless to transform himself into a madman, he could only imagine what it would be like. He remained hideously awake. Automatically, with a pleasure he had never known, his hands passed over the bones of his face. Calmly and deliberately, as the guardian would testify later on, he gave him his addresses, said he was going to notify the police, and started eastward through the city streets.

All at once Keuschnig began to feel with the people he saw; his long indifference turned to a sweet sympathy. Those people riding in cars — what torture it must be for them to be always on the move, always fighting their way from place to place in those tin cans; in short, what misery for them to go on living! What despair in the howling of the trucks’ power brakes! For a short moment it struck him that politics, seen as the worldwide defense of concrete local interests and not as inanity masked by bustle and violence, might be possible and worth bothering with. His eyes opened to every detail, but he saw none separate from the rest. A woman taxi driver with a woman passenger; a little boy with a toy tommy gun, bawling as he ran after his mother … He felt he had grown powerful, capable of speaking to everyone and bringing happiness to all. Once in passing he informed a man that his shoelace had come undone, and with no show of surprise the man thanked him. He saw a man in a ten-gallon hat and as though doing him a kindness asked him where he was from. Nothing struck him as ridiculous any longer. At the sight of a woman with a red scarf on her head, climbing the steps to an elevated Métro station, he was at a loss to understand how he could ever have thought of himself. Overwhelmed with regret at having to die now, he took care in crossing the street to avoid every single car.

He had no sensation of his body and hovered weightless in the midst of people dragging themselves painfully along. He was sorry, for the others’ sake! not to have a bit of a toothache. On a bench by a bus stop a man was sitting with his hands in his lap and his head bowed, as though waiting for his pursuers. Keuschnig was sure the man would tell him everything if only he tapped him on the shoulder. He actually did sit down beside him for a moment and asked him what kind of work he did, but the man looked back as though such a question humiliated him!

At one of those little fountains one finds all over Paris, he washed his face in the clear, soundless jet of water, as though he had actually painted it before. How warm the water flowed on this warm day! The closer Keuschnig came to the Buttes-Chaumont, the richer the Paris scene seemed to him. He saw a girl kick away the prop of a motorcycle with her heel and drive off; a big black woman carrying a full plastic shopping bag on her head; a tractor driving down a busy city street, strewing hay behind it; a bakery girl going from café to café with a basket of long loaves, as bakery girls had done since time out of mind; a fat man sitting on a bench in his suspenders; far away, for a few moments, the gilded tips of a park fence … There was nothing his gaze could not take in. In his eyes a woman wedging her handbag under her chin and holding parcels between her knees as she unlocked a house door and pushed it open with one foot stood for moments in a possible life which was being revealed to him now that it was too late. He saw the glittering metal disks at the pedestrian crossings, the treetops moving with a motion of their own as though wishing at every moment to transform themselves into something else; he heard the soft tittering sound of a flock of pigeons flying into the wind; passing a movie house, he heard shots, screams, and the end of a film — soft music and the calm, friendly voices of a man and a woman — smelled freshly polished shoes through the open door of a shoemaker’s shop, saw thick clumps of hair on the floor of a barbershop, saw an ice-cream scoop in dirty water outside a refreshment stand, saw a tailless cat run straight from a doorway to a parked car and sit down under it, heard the whir of a sausage slicer in a horse butcher’s shop, heard the crackle of drying plaster from every floor of an almost finished building, saw the patronne, bouquet in hand, unlocking the door of her restaurant, which she was reopening to make ready for dinner — and said aloud: “What a lot of things there are!” The first grapes of the year, and on them the first wasps; in a wooden crate the first hazelnuts, still in their rufflike carpels; on the sidewalks the outlines of the first fallen leaves, which by then had blown away … The markets were much smaller in the summertime. The coat racks in the cafés — all empty! The post offices freshly painted, the sidewalks dug up for new telephone lines, and the workers down in the ditch grinning as they watched a child wobbling along on plastic roller skates. At a movie house they were running an animated cartoon starring Popeye the Sailorman, who had only to down a can of spinach and he could take on the whole world. How disgustingly squeamish Keuschnig seemed to himself! He felt sure he had overlooked something, missed something that could never be retrieved. He stopped still and looked through all his pockets. A woman wouldn’t dare to stop like that in the middle of the sidewalk, he thought. At last he felt unobserved. Almost contentedly he smelled his own sweat. The incessant roar of the traffic made his head feel better and he let out an animal cry. I don’t have to see any more signs of death, he thought, because there’s no one left to love. Someone dropped a bunch of keys. A well-dressed woman slipped and fell on her behind; but, instead of looking away as usual, he watched her pick herself up with an embarrassed smile. He walked with his hands behind his back like a headwaiter with nothing to do. The cranes moved against the drifting clouds and he moved beneath them, with the calm of eternity.