Peter Handke - Moment of True Feeling

Keuschnig went down the hill, step for step. What affectedly carefree gaits, what inimically serene faces. He felt no desire to emulate them, only a furious impulse to ape them — all these faces so bright and summery that the only way to bear them was to ape them, as sometimes at a café, often involuntarily to be sure, you ape the facial expression of those women who trip past you so mincingly, looking neither to left nor right for fear of losing their semblance of beauty, or as a drunk returning a stare is likely to put on the starer’s expression.

A woman coming in the opposite direction broke into a smile in the middle of the street and began to run. He was frightened. Had she gone mad? Then he saw someone some distance off, walking toward her — and he too was smiling. Imperturbably smiling, they approached one another, preserving their smiles the whole way despite every obstacle, although the man stumbled over an empty wooden crate and the woman collided with a passer-by. Keuschnig couldn’t bear the sight any longer and, conscious of pressure on his bladder, walked away. Now, he thought, they’ll be putting their preposterous arms around each other, looking into each other’s pitiful eyes, kissing each other’s pathetic cheeks, left and right. And then imperturbably they’ll go their senseless ways. Spooky! He had the feeling of having to lower his bottom jaw to let the accumulated saliva run out. He saw a child standing lost in thought; a bubble came out of its mouth and burst. He passed a man carrying a black attache case. You’d think he’d be ashamed! Keuschnig thought. When I see somebody like that, I could cross myself. — Yet he himself was carrying just such an attaché case, and instead of throwing it into the nearest trash can he heroically went on carrying it. Heroes of everyday life. He couldn’t get rid of the idiotic smile he had put on to ape people, and it was starting to itch. He didn’t scratch with his fingers but tried to relieve the itch by making even worse faces. Even the infants under the parasols, with their mashed-carrot-colored cheeks struck him as fakes. Even they, he thought, are only acting as if. The truth is that they’re absolutely fed up with their preposterous baby existence! When he saw an animal, he was amazed that it wasn’t doing its business at that particular moment. Once he thought: if anybody speaks to me now, I’ll crack his skull for him. If anyone so much as looked at him, Keuschnig said to him in his thoughts: Watch your step! (Nevertheless, he couldn’t see why no one spoke to him. When a Frenchman from the provinces asked him the way to the RUE DE L’ORIENT, he was grateful to be able to direct him, and his next few steps were winged.)

To everything that crossed his path he wanted to say: Don’t show yourself again! And instantly whatever it was did show itself again, in another form but with the same loathsome substance. He didn’t catch sight of things; they showed themselves. He walked quickly for fear that someone would notice his ruthlessness. Yet when a woman with a conspicuously low-cut dress came toward him, he stared brazenly in an attempt to spy her nipples. — Everything seemed taken care of, as though in a game of puss-in-the-corner the last player had found a place and there was no further need for a supernumerary to be standing around. How boring he seemed to himself; how alone!

The sweet familiar after-feeling in his member, which ordinarily stayed with him long after he had been with Beatrice, had soon left him. Now he looked only at the ground. A peach stone that someone had just thrown away lay damp on the sidewalk; looking at it, Keuschnig suddenly realized that it was summer, and this became strangely important. A good omen, he thought, and after that he was able to walk more slowly. Perhaps there would be more such signs. The plate-glass windows of a café that had closed for the summer were whitened on the inside … The wheels of a bicycle on top of a passing car flashed as they turned. The smell of shellfish came to him from the market stalls that had closed in the meantime, and he breathed deeply, as though that smell had power to heal.

When at the foot of the hill he stepped out into the Place Blanche, there was suddenly so much space around him that he stopped still. “San Diego.” Had he heard that or only thought it? — In either case, no sooner had SAN DIEGO entered his head than he clenched his fists and thought: Who said the world has already been discovered?

In the next moment, while standing motionless on the Place Blanche, he wanted to leave Paris immediately. But then he realized that though a journey might at one time have made some difference, it wouldn’t any more. From this thing that had hit him, there was no possibility of flight. Besides, it hadn’t hit him — it had just happened. It had long been due. San Diego and his fist clenching — both meant he would stay in Paris and not give himself up for lost. I’ll show you yet! he thought. — Even so, the sound of a typewriter coming out of a travel bureau filled him with envy and yearning; the keys were being struck hesitantly — now one letter, now another — as though someone were typing the difficult name of some city beyond the sea. And then the click of a calculator — as though the waiting customer’s bill for the plane fare and his stay in the faraway city were being made out.

A couple were standing on the sidewalk, both decrepit with age. The man rested his trembling head on the woman’s shoulder, not as a momentary gesture but because he couldn’t hold it up. With one hand the woman pressed his head against her shoulder, and thus inseparable they slowly crossed the square. Like man and wife, Keuschnig thought contemptuously, and yet for a moment he was mollified by an intimation of something else. “You’re not the world,” he said to himself, feeling strangely proud of the couple. — But when he stepped into a cab a moment later the usual dog in the seat beside the driver barked at him as if he shouldn’t have been allowed to get in, and at the old familiar sound of the diesel engine he experienced a murderous rage. Oh yes, now he was the world, and all at once his attempts to hush up the fact appeared to him in the form of an image: he had an apple out of which a bite had been taken, and kept trying to put it into a basket with others in such a way as to conceal the damage, but the apple kept rolling to one side, and the bitten part always ended on top. And that was the truth of it: already the driver was cranking down his window and shouting “Salaud!” at the traffic, already he was talking to him over his shoulder as to an accomplice. From now on, thought Keuschnig, I won’t answer anyone — I’ll only SPEAK SIDEWAYS. Whimper sideways. All at once he sympathized with the dog for letting his tongue dangle from the side of his mouth. What massive nausea — beyond the help of smelling salts! A minute of silence! he thought, just one minute of silence, please, in this eternal hubbub of absurdity! A tumult had sprung up on a street corner, and now everything around him was one great tumult; no end in sight — but the one thought in his head was the thought of an end.

Suddenly he saw his face in the rear-view mirror. It was so distorted that at first he refused to recognize it. He wasn’t looking for comparisons, but several animals came to mind. No one with that face could express thoughts or feelings. He looked at himself again, but since he was now prepared, as he had been in the morning outside the bakery, he couldn’t find the same face, not even when he grimaced while searching for it. But it had happened: with that one unplanned glance he had lost his acceptance of his own appearance. What self-control Beatrice must have needed! Women are said to be less squeamish than men. In any case, he thought, a person with a face like that should keep quiet. With such a mug you’ve got to have your nerve with you even to carry on conversations with yourself. Inconceivable that he would ever again say amiably to himself: “Come on, old fellow.” On the other hand — and at this thought he sat up straight — with such a face I can afford to have feelings which up until now have come to me only in dreams! — and instantly he remembered the brand-new pleasure it had given him to pee on a woman in a dream. He had been upset when he woke up. That wasn’t me, he had thought. But such pleasure went with his newly discovered face; far from being unlike him, it was his very own self. He now understood that with this unmasked face nothing, nothing whatsoever, could be unlike him. “Not like me” had lost its validity as an argument. But by the same token he could now dispense with remorse. With such a face no excuses were possible. Keuschnig thought himself capable of anything, even a sex murder. At last he owned to himself that killing the old woman in his dream had been a sex murder. — Suddenly the cab driver’s dog began to growl at him, and Keuschnig was afraid of himself. Time to get back to work, he thought. Good old office.