Peter Handke - Moment of True Feeling

Keuschnig wanted to talk to somebody right away, to phone the girl from the embassy, for instance. But at this point no one would believe him without seeing.

He left theButtes-Chaumont and continued eastward, still uphill, making his way between villagelike hovels and high-rise apartment houses with awnings that were already being rolled up. There in Belleville he bought a suit with trouser pockets he could sink his hands into, a pair of shoes, and a pair of socks. “It’s not expensive,” said the salesman automaticany — in this none too prosperous neighborhood he no doubt had occasion to say such words rather often. Keuschnig left his cast-offs in the shop and started back down the hill, steering a westerly course that would take him to the Place de l’Op-éra and the Café de la Paix.

Now he saw objects clearly, as if they were on display, and no longer transfigured as they had been an hour before. Everything looked as if it had been cleaned. He himself had emerged from under water after a long stay, and little by little the sun warmed his chilled body. The shimmering cracks in the paving stones called to mind the corners of a woman’s mouth, smiling at him in the deserted, summery street. The clouds drifted, the crowns of the trees parted and closed, leaves slithered across the squares, jostling each other now and then; everything seemed to be in motion. He looked at a vaporous funnel-shaped cloud — I’m perceiving a shape! he thought — and when he looked again, it had dissolved in blue. Surprised, he stopped from time to time and looked excitedly at the sky arching over the houses and shining through the leaves of the trees, looked as though something entirely different began behind it — not the sea, no place at all, but an unknown feeling. It occurred to him that the beds in his apartment still hadn’t been made, but that didn’t trouble him now. From one of the hovels, which was already looking deceptively eveninglike, he heard a sneeze. An old woman in black was standing outside her door. She was wearing thick socks over her stockings. She spoke to someone far away at the other end of the street, and both her voice and the answer to what she said were perfectly clear. On the walls of the houses the shadows of leaves moved in the wind. DO NOTSPIT ON THE STAIRS!he read on a sign in an open stairway. Paris lay stretched out below him, transformed into a desert city by the now reddish light; the buildings with their blinded windows were abandoned colonial structures which, as Keuschnig looked at the glowing sky in the west, blended so perfectly with the avenues of trees that the cars seemed to emerge from the blackest jungle … The sun went down. In the dusk some children were sitting peacefully, silently, in perfect calm on an iron railing, shiny with much use, at the edge of a sidewalk. Someone kept calling that it was time to go to bed, but they didn’t want to break up. A girl with a book in her lap looked at Keuschnig from behind an elderberry bush, and he looked back; little by little, as he looked at her, he saw himself more clearly. How reluctant he had been to start looking at things and people — and now he couldn’t stop! All these biographies crowding in on him so wordlessly almost turned his stomach. He mustn’t sleep — he must make himself empty! From a parked car with its door wide open he heard harpsichord music, and suddenly he felt a profound joy at the thought of the time that lay ahead of him. He needed work, the outcome of which would be as valid and unimpeachable as a law! He wanted no system for his life, but merely thought that though perhaps he could not hope for new objects or people, there ought at least, in his future, to be a more sustained yearning.

He looked at everything that came his way as though it must have something to say to him. A bowl of hard-boiled eggs on the otherwise empty bar of a café. What is there about that black with the bamboo buttons on his coat? And still he was afraid of making some mistake, of missing something essential by not being somewhere else. A woman was coming toward him; her walk appealed to him, so he turned around and followed her, just to see her walking. Now and then she looked over her shoulder, and it seemed as though she were going away from him, only from him.

He saw an overturned wheelbarrow and realized how unmoved it now left him — the fact of its being overturned simply didn’t interest him any more. He was free, at least for this evening and this night. Lusting for conquest, he started running down the hill, and the rows of houses sank, as though reduced by his gaze. “I’m changing right now!” he said. It seemed to him that he hadn’t spoken for ages. He made the kind of sound one might make to frighten an animal, but now it was addressed to everything in the world. Mere breathing, even swallowing, gave him pleasure — every swallowing movement was something new. The world around him was so changed that when, passing a movie house, he saw a photograph of a nude couple covered by a sheet, he thought with amazement: So they’re still making films with lovers draped in sheets! And when, from force of habit, he read in the headlines of a newspaper someone had thrown away: “ … felled by shot in abdomen,” he thought: So people still die of wounds in the abdomen! Although he saw the same things as before, and from the same angle, they had become alien and therefore bearable. Walking with a firm step, he stretched. An unfamiliar perfume came to him through the dusk, but now it did not, as so often in the past, remind him of stifling, hopeless embraces — he no longer remembered, but only anticipated. Passing a shopping arcade, he thought: It could happen here; the unique, never related event could happen here! Outside a café he caught sight of a woman alone; though she was so absent as to be unapproachable, he saw her as the embodiment of a seductive taboo, and once again he thought: Yes, that’s it, that’s her whole story — I would never be able to find out any more about her than in this moment, seeing her sitting there alone. Eagerly he watched his own thoughts, always ready to buttonhole them. He wanted never again to forget anything, and in his mind he recapitulated the moments that had just passed, as though memorizing the words of a foreign language. He had to remember them all, so as to use them later. (Nevertheless he looked forward to every single person he would meet that day, even if they couldn’t talk about anything.) He passed a brightly lighted church; the doors were wide open and he saw the priest raising his arm as a signal for the choir to come in. He saw a hand holding a lighted candle in such a way that the wax dripped onto a tray that was already holding a great many lighted candles. Suddenly the wax dripping from the inclined candle took Keuschnig’s breath away, not because it was dripping candle wax, but because, though he had seen it before, he had never before EXPERIENCED it. When he came to the level streets at the foot of the hill, it still seemed to him that he was looking down at the streets that lay ahead, as though they extended on and on and he was able to encompass the downward-curving surface of the earth in a single glance. Then something on the sidewalk caught his eye (what is it? he wondered); it seemed enormously important — but it was only the last shred of daylight. He read the “Faire signe au machiniste” sign at a bus stop, and it ran through his head like the title of a song hit … Under the evening-blue sky — a star had already come out in the west — the long buildings of central Paris looked totally black, but so furry-soft and rounded that they seemed to have turned into tents, the main tent being the sprawling Grand Palais. He slowed down. The streets were still rather empty, but wherever people were sitting there were a good many of them, talking softly, pressed more closely together than usual. Suddenly he expected a war to break out and bombers to come thundering out of the horizon. A queasy feeling came over him as he thought that everything had been made clear and that nothing more could happen to him.