The Ride Across Lake Constance and Other Plays

by Peter Handke

  (Pause. KOERBER-KENT scratches his behind and they regard him.)

  KOERBER-KENT

  I just happened to think of our minority stockholder …

  (Pause.)

  LUTZ

  Don’t you ever dream?

  KOERBER-KENT

  Ah! Monstrous dreams!

  LUTZ

  Well! Let’s hear.

  KOERBER-KENT

  (Powerfully) I … I’m walking in the woods alone …

  (Long, embarrassed silence. Pause. VON WULLNOW laughs.)

  LUTZ

  You are laughing?

  VON WULLNOW

  I was remembering.

  LUTZ

  Was it that funny?

  VON WULLNOW

  Remembering it was. (Pause.) The grain bins in the loft, the trickling grain and the mouse shit inside, the swirl of grain that my memory delved into like a boy’s naked foot, the grains between the toes, the vacated wasp nest, still so enlivened by memories, on the underside of the roof tile. (Pause.) I’ve got to stop. Remembering makes me a good person. Otherwise I would make up in a moment. Oh, Quitt. Oh, Quitt, why hast thou forsaken us?

  LUTZ

  Now I know what we are going to do. We have to talk about ourselves, about us as individuals—what we’re really like. I for one sometimes feel like hopping up and down on the street and don’t do it. Why not? And last summer passed by without my having enjoyed it once while I was sitting in my office with its tinted window. Every so often I do something crazy: I eat the rotten part of an apple, slam a car door before everyone’s gotten out … or something like that … and if that doesn’t help, there’s always … (To KOERBER-KENT) our minority stockholder. (QUITT returns.) He’ll show him where the moon is rising.

  QUITT

  I do miss you. And perhaps you miss me too.

  VON WULLNOW

  Quitt, today I had a bag of flour in my hand. Do you know how long it has been since I’ve held flour in my hands? I don’t even know myself. The package was so soft and heavy. This weight in my hand and at the same time the gentleness of the pressure—I was transported into delicious unreality. Doesn’t the same thing ever happen to you?

  QUITT

  I find the most vicious reality more bearable than the most delicious feeling of unreality.

  LUTZ

  (Trying to distract) How is your wife?

  QUITT

  My wife? My wife is fine.

  LUTZ

  She looked well just now. With her cheeks all rosy as though she’d just played tennis. That made me think of my wife, who has to rock the child all day long on the terrace. You know, we have a retarded child who screams as soon as we stop rocking: my wife stands days on end in the garden and pushes the swing, imagine that. But she’s gotten to like doing it nowadays. She says that it calms her down too. And she feels it makes her superior to the other women in the neighborhood who can’t think of anything to do but tell their cleaning women how to do chores. By the way, excuse me for talking about myself.

  QUITT

  I like women who do nothing but give orders.

  VON WULLNOW

  I know you like hearing stories, I have one.

  QUITT

  Is it long?

  VON WULLNOW

  Very brief. A child walks into a shop and says, “Six rolls, the Daily News, and three salt sticks!”

  QUITT

  Go on.

  VON WULLNOW

  That’s the story.

  (Pause.)

  QUITT

  It’s beautiful.

  VON WULLNOW

  (Suddenly embraces him vehemently.) I knew you would like it. I knew it. I’m usually too shy to touch anyone, but this time I simply must. (He pulls QUITT’s cuffs out of his jacket, takes his hand.) I’ve been looking at this dirty fingernail all the time—now I have to clean it for you. (He does so, using his own fingernail, steps back.) I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I’m blissed out with memories recently. Do you remember that time we dressed up as workers at the opera ball? With red bandanas, T-shirts, high-pegged pants, and muddy boots. The way we stepped on the ladies’ toes? The way we scratched our crotches? Staring at everything, our mouths agape? Ordered Crimean champagne and drank out of the bottle? And at the end pushed our caps back and sang the “Internationale”?

  QUITT

  Crimean champagne is an illegal label. It should be called “Sparkling Wine from the Crimea.” (Pause.) Yes, we played the part very expertly, so that we could only play ourselves.

  VON WULLNOW

  And now you’re in cahoots with them.

  QUITT

  How so?

  VON WULLNOW

  By thinking only of yourself. The huge share of the market which you control provides the enemies of the free-enterprise system, who are our enemies too, with the welcome opportunity—

  LUTZ

  (Interrupts him. Quickly) Not like that. (To QUITT) I’ve been thinking a lot about death lately. Everything I encounter looks like a sign to me. When I read in the papers “Next Wednesday, junk collection,” then I sense at once: “That junk, that’s me.” Recently when I entered a tobacco shop somewhere out in the country I saw an obituary pinned up on the wall—and under the obituary lay a filthy, shriveled-up glove: that leather glove, that’ll soon be me, my heart fluttered.

  QUITT

  And I recently saw an empty plastic bag in a hallway with the legend “Hams from Poland” on it. Should that have been a sign too? In any event, I suddenly felt incredibly safe when I read that.

  LUTZ

  Don’t you ever think of death?

  QUITT

  I can’t.

  VON WULLNOW

  (Strikes his fist against his forehead.) And I can’t any more! I’d like to open a newspaper now and read the word asshole in it. This jungle. This slime. This swamp. These will-o’-the-wisps. (LUTZ has nudged him with his elbow and VON WULL-NOW calms down.) These will-o’-the-wisps above the swamp when we used to walk home in fall after our dancing lessons! Wanda on my arm, I could feel her goose bumps through her blouse, and a pheasant screamed in its sleep as I kissed her—an ugly word actually, kissing—only the cracks of our lips touch each other, as unfeeling as peeled-off bark. (Pause. VON WULLNOW looks at LUTZ, who gives him the cue by forming the word nature with his lips.) Why nature? Of course, I was about to talk about nature: it was nature that made me aware—by teaching me how to perceive. Houses, streets, and I were just a daydream at first, dreamer and what he dreamed were in the same bubble where the dreamer—hypnotized by the invariably same, never-changing spot on the buckling house wall, grown together in his sleep with the same street curve day in and day out—also considered himself part of his dream. Dark spots inside me as the only thing undefined. Then the bubble burst and the dark spots inside me unfolded like the forests outside me. Only then did I begin to define myself as well. Not the civilization of house and street, but nature made me aware of myself—by making me aware of nature. So: only in the perception of nature, not in the hallucinatory hodgepodge of the objects of civilization, can we arrive at our own history. But nowadays most people have become so civilized that they simply dismiss rapport with nature as some kind of withdrawal into childhood—although it is children whom one keeps having to make artificially aware of nature—or, even if they pretend to have rapport with nature, cannot endure this nature without the mirage of civilization: inside the forest they have no feeling for the forest; except from the perspective of the window of their terraced house which they designed and built themselves, and which they would immediately sell to someone—only then would the same forest be an experience of nature for them. You’re going to ask me what I mean by all this.

  QUITT

  No.

  VON WULLNOW

  I mean to say that you, you with your ruthless overexpansion, are destroying our nature. You senselessly transform the old countryside where we could come to our senses into construction sites. Your blind depar
tment stores squat like live bombs in our old city centers. Every day a new branch goes up, differing from the others only by its tax identification number, which you even set up in neon light to blink from its roof as an advertisement of your sense of public responsibility!

  QUITT

  A good idea, isn’t it?

  VON WULLNOW

  You’re ruining our reputation by carrying on just the way the Joneses think a businessman behaves.

  QUITT

  Perhaps it’s not our reputation I’m ruining but you.

  VON WULLNOW

  You know neither honor nor shame. The manure pit behind my country house is too good for you. I’d like to choke you by stuffing blotting paper down your throat. I damn you! Whosoever utters your name before me, there shall I reach into his mouth and rip out his tongue, and with my very own hands in fact. Wait, I’m going to step on your foot. (He does so, not that QUITT reacts. VON WULLNOW blows up his cheeks and slaps them with his hands. He bites the back of his hand. He hits his head with his fist, quickly touches up his hair.) You’ve disappointed me, Quitt. It’s a pity about you. I liked you best of all. We’ve got so much in common. I still admire you. Whenever I have to reach a decision I think of what you would do under the same circumstances. (He screams) You rat, you Judas, for twenty pieces of silver—

  QUITT

  Thirty, to be exact.

  VON WULLNOW

  Twenty, I say.

  QUITT

  (To KOERBER-KENT) But thirty is right, isn’t it?

  KOERBER-KENT

  Yes, it was thirty pieces of silver. According to the latest findings, it’s a question of—

  VON WULLNOW

  (Screaming) Pervert! Atavist! (LUTZ places a hand on his shoulder.) I once dreamed that we grew old together. Every day we drove in a carriage through town, playing bridge. And now all that is supposed to remain a dream? Let’s stop fighting each other, Quitt. It could be so beautiful—just the four of us—that is, five, counting Mrs. Tax—and since all the others have thrown in the towel in the meantime, we lone wolves have become so big there’s no longer any need for arrangements. Those who help us into our coats after our conferences could conduct our affairs for us. Let’s not underbid each other any more.

  QUITT

  I underbid you. (VON WULLNOW roars.) Does it help?

  VON WULLNOW

  A hobnailed boot in your privates! Don’t you understand me! What am I at this moment? A radical! How I’d simply like to yawn at you. Do you have a slice of bread on you?

  QUITT

  Are you hungry?

  VON WULLNOW

  I’d like to have something to crumble between my fingers. My brain is scraping against my brain pan. Actually a pleasant sensation. So animalistic. (To LUTZ) I won’t say anything more now. (To QUITT) I’d like to switch with you, you shark. Besides, it’s time for your wife to pass through the room again, isn’t it? Come on, say something, I’d like to have something to laugh about! Dear Hermann … (Pause. He takes QUITT’s arm.) You know, I could be your father? Let’s go fishing together, fathers always take their sons fishing. Up the stream before the thunderstorm hits. I’d like to be drunk now so that I could remember something. (He lets go of QUITT’s arm. ) Apropos streams. You ruin them with your plastic monsters, let the countryside choke on plastic still lives stamped “biodegradable” where no environment is even left or, at most, a multicolored mildew on the ground, a soot-colored dust on a sweetly crinkling leaf, a fish belly in the churning water. Do you know what children ask when they’re actually shown a big ripe tomato? Is it made of plastic? they ask. And I personally saw a child that didn’t want to sit down in a Rolls-Royce because the seat wasn’t made of plastic. Let’s stop all this overexpansion, Hermann—or let’s limit ourselves to products for environmental protection. There’s still a pretty penny to be made in that field. Everything could be the way it used to be.

  QUITT

  But you stopped expanding a long time ago. Besides, as you say so rightly, the functional units are diminishing in size. So the number of units can continue to increase, right? I’m not the kind of man who wants to leave everything the way it is. I can’t see anything without wanting to utilize it. I want to make everything I see into something else. And so do you! Except that you can’t any more.

  VON WULLNOW

  (Steps away from QUITT.) You refuse to understand us.

  QUITT

  I understand you very well. You know what it means when one of us becomes human or even speaks about death. An emotion, after the first moment of fright, becomes a method for us.

  VON WULLNOW

  It’s not that I call your behavior treason—but what should I call it? Faithlessness? Treachery? Unreliability? Falseness? Cuntiness? Disloyalty?

  QUITT

  Those are the expressions you apply to employees. Among us I would call it businesslike behavior.

  VON WULLNOW

  Now I really won’t say anything more. I’ll stick my finger down my throat in front of you. (Does so and leaves, but returns at once.) And I really was attached to you. (He leaves and returns.) You with your frog’s body. (He leaves and returns.) My spit is too good for you. All I’ll do is spit it from the back to the front of my mouth. (Does so, leaves once more, returns once more, is beside himself, makes a horrible face, and leaves once and for all.)

  (LUTZ wants to say something.)

  QUITT

  I know what you want to say.

  LUTZ

  Then you say it.

  QUITT

  It’s true. I didn’t stick to our agreement.

  LUTZ

  But you didn’t plan it that way.

  QUITT

  I simply forgot about it, did I?

  LUTZ

  Not exactly forgot perhaps, but you didn’t take it seriously enough.

  QUITT

  Why should I have taken it seriously?

  LUTZ

  (Laughs.) Not bad. Very tricky indeed … (Pause.) Excuse me, I interrupted you. You were going to say something.

  QUITT

  No, that was it.

  LUTZ

  Why don’t you defend yourself?

  QUITT

  Why don’t you accuse me?

  LUTZ

  You must be very unhappy.

  QUITT

  Why?

  LUTZ

  One is completely locked up inside oneself like you only when one is miserable. I know that from my own experience.

  QUITT

  Don’t compare me with yourself.

  LUTZ

  There, you see. For you there’s only you, you don’t even want to be compared. You must be in pretty bad shape. (He’s been playing with his forefinger and thumb the whole time, unconsciously, as though he were counting money.)

  (QUITT takes hold of his hand.)

  QUITT

  Why don’t you admit it: that’s nothing but your new gesture for something tangible? Anyway, you’ve been counting money ever since you started to talk.

  LUTZ

  All right. Now I’m going to tell you what I think of you.

  QUITT

  But watch out. Perhaps you’ll think differently once you’ve begun to speak.

  LUTZ

  Once I begin to speak everything is completely thought out. I don’t stutter. (To KOERBER-KENT) He multiplied his share of the market at our expense. I have nothing against his methods, but he should have discussed them with us. And besides, of course I do have something against his methods: he recruits the ex-convicts away from us in the labor market and promises them a sympathetic environment—and that means that he leaves them entirely to themselves in a certain area of production and pays all of them the same low wages. As he admitted just now, he manufactures smaller and smaller amounts of his products but without changing the size of the package, so that the buyers believe they’re getting the same amount. This way his prices appear to remain the same while we have to raise ours. He lets doctors buy shares in his
drug firms and then they prescribe his medicines. (To QUITT) You duplicate our most expensive products with cheap materials. Your guarantees are only valid for Three-Star refrigerators. You print the national eagle on your retail price tags, so that it looks as though they are government-approved. Your price tags are huge—so that people believe your things are cheaper even when they are at least as expensive as anywhere else. The price structure has cracked, Quitt. We are standing at the deathbed—at the deathbed of the old concept of price—and have gotten sore feet ourselves. We shiver in the shadow of your competition. As far as I’m concerned, I’m still far too calm. Perhaps that is the calm before the next breach of the agreement, which will be my downfall. I can already see the hailstorm in the distance, and panic flattens my ears against my head. I’m afraid, Quitt, afraid of the great storm when I won’t be wearing the thick coat of capital. And yet I tried to save the structure by firing thousands. Quitt, you ruined our prices. You pushed them down to prewar levels! Everything has a slight crack. Every day there’s one product less on the market. It’s all over with the beautiful diversity of the market. Even the high consecration is for nothing. It’s the end of all our proud figures. I’m at a loss. I am at a most poodle-befuddled loss and in utter despair. (To KOERBER-KENT) I was my parents’ only child. Even my birth was a practical decision: it meant my mother’s death. At age four I kneaded imitation coins out of mud. At age seven I picked flowers for invalids in the neighborhood and sold them. In school they called me “Moneybags.” A sensible boy, my father said. He still has respect for material values, said my relatives. Before my first communion, the priest said that if you really wanted something afterward and really believed it, the wish would come true. Still feeling the pressure of the host against my gums, I walked all the way home with my head lowered: because every cell of my body believed I would find the coin I had wished for. (To no one in particular) Since that time I’ve had my doubts about religion. (To KOERBER-KENT) But I remained reasonable and became more and more reasonable. He’s all business, people said of me. But now it’s all over. All over. I don’t want to believe anything any more. What’s there left to believe in if that s.o.b. destroys our prices and our rational system? What kind of age is that? What’s still valid? I too want to be unbusinesslike at last! (Pause. ) I dreamed that I was running and kept on running so that a huge banknote wouldn’t fall off my chest. Just the way I keep on talking now. I’d like to put my head into a bowl of water and drown myself. (Exit.)