A Sorrow Beyond Dreams

by Peter Handke

  That period helped my mother to come out of her shell and become independent. She acquired a presence and lost her last fear of human contact: her hat awry, because a young fellow was pressing his head against hers, while she merely laughed into the camera with an expression of self-satisfaction. (The fiction that photographs can “tell us” anything—but isn’t all formulation, even of things that have really happened, more or less a fiction? Less, if we content ourselves with a mere record of events; more, if we try to formulate in depth? And the more fiction we put into a narrative, the more likely it is to interest others, because people identify more readily with formulations than with recorded facts. Does this explain the need for poetry? “Breathless on the riverbank” is one of Thomas Bernhard’s formulations.)

  The war—victory communiqués introduced by portentous music, pouring from the “people’s radio sets”, which gleamed mysteriously in dimly lit “holy corners”—further enhanced people’s sense of self, because it “increased the uncertainty of all circumstances” (Clausewitz) and made the day-to-day happenings that had formerly been taken for granted seem excitingly fortuitous. For my mother the war was not a childhood nightmare that would colour her whole emotional development as it did mine; more than anything else, it was contact with a fabulous world, hitherto known to her only from travel folders. A new feeling for distances, for how things had been BACK IN PEACETIME, and most of all for other individuals, who up until then had been confined to the shadowy roles of casual friends, dance partners, and fellow workers. And also for the first time, a family feeling: “Dear Brother … I am looking at the map to see where you might be now … Your sister…”.

  And in the same light her first love: a German party member, in civilian life a savings-bank clerk, now an army paymaster, which gave him a rather special standing. She was soon in the family way. He was married, and she loved him dearly; anything he said was all right with her. She introduced him to her parents, went hiking with him, kept him company in his soldier’s loneliness.

  “He was so attentive to me, and I wasn’t afraid of him the way I had been with other men.”

  He did the deciding and she trailed along. Once he gave her a present—perfume. He also lent her a radio for her room and later took it away again. “At that time” he still read books, and together they read one entitled By the Fireside. On the way down from a mountain pasture on one of their hikes, they had started to run. My mother broke wind and my father reproved her; a little later he too let a fart escape him and followed it with a slight cough, hem-hem. In telling me of this incident years later, she bent double and giggled maliciously, though at the same time her conscience troubled her because she was belittling her only love. She herself thought it comical that she had once loved someone, especially a man like him. He was smaller than she, many years older, and almost bald; she walked beside him in low-heeled shoes, always at pains to adapt her step to his, her hand repeatedly slipping off his inhospitable arm; an ill-matched, ludicrous couple. And yet, twenty years later, she still longed to feel for someone what she had then felt for that savings-bank wraith. But there never was ANOTHER: everything in her life had conspired to inculcate a kind of love that remains fixated on a particular irreplaceable object.

  It was after graduating from the Gymnasium that I first saw my father: on his way to the rendezvous, he chanced to come toward me in the street; he was wearing sandals, a piece of paper was folded over his sunburned nose, and he was leading a collie on a lead. Then, in a small café in her home village, he met his former love; my mother was excited, my father embarrassed; standing by the jukebox at the other end of the café, I picked out Elvis Presley’s Devil in Disguise. My mother’s husband had got wind of all this, but he had merely sent his youngest son to the café as an indication that he was in the know. After buying himself an ice-cream cone, the child stood next to his mother and the stranger, asking her from time to time, always in the same words, if she was going home soon. My father put sunglasses over his regular glasses, said something now and then to the dog, and finally announced that he “might as well” pay up. “No, no, it’s on me”, he said, when my mother also took her purse out of her handbag. On the trip we took together, the two of us wrote her a postcard. In every hotel we went to, he let it be known that I was his son, for fear we’d be taken for homosexuals (Article 175). Life had disappointed him, he had become more and more lonely. “Now that I know people, I’ve come to appreciate animals”, he said, not quite in earnest of course.

  Shortly before I was born, my mother married a German army sergeant, who had been COURTING her for some time and didn’t mind her having a child by someone else. “It’s this one or none!” he had decided the first time he laid eyes on her, and bet his buddies that he would get her or, conversely, that she would take him. She found him repulsive, but everyone harped on her duty (to give the child a father); for the first time in her life she let herself be intimidated and laughed rather less. Besides, it impressed her that someone should have taken a shine to her.

  “Anyway, I reckoned he’d be killed in the war”, she told me. “But then all of a sudden I started worrying about him.”

  In any case, she was now entitled to a state loan. With the child she went to Berlin to stay with her husband’s parents. They tolerated her. When the first bombs fell, she went back home—the old story. She began to laugh again, sometimes so loudly that everyone cringed.

  She forgot her husband, squeezed her child so hard that it cried, and kept to herself in this house where, after the death of her brothers, those who remained looked uncomprehendingly through one another. Was there, then, nothing more? Had that been all? Masses for the dead, childhood diseases, drawn curtains, correspondence with old acquaintances of carefree days, making herself useful in the kitchen and in the fields, running out now and then to move the child into the shade; then, even here in the country, air-raid sirens, the population scrambling into the cave shelters, the first bomb crater, later used for children’s games and as a garbage dump. The days were haunted, and once again the outside world, which years of daily contact had wrested from the nightmares of childhood and made familiar, became an impalpable ghost.

  My mother looked on in wide-eyed astonishment. Fear didn’t get the better of her; but sometimes, infected by the general fright, she would burst into a sudden laugh, partly because she was ashamed that her body had suddenly made itself so churlishly independent. In her childhood and even more so in her young girlhood, “Aren’t you ashamed?” or “You ought to be ashamed” had rung in her ears like a litany. In this rural, Catholic environment, any suggestion that a woman might have a life of her own was an impertinence: disapproving looks, until shame, at first acted out in fun, became real and frightened away the most elementary feelings. Even in joy, a “woman’s blush”, because joy was something to be ashamed of; in sadness, she turned red rather than pale and instead of bursting into tears broke out in sweat.

  In the city my mother had thought she had found a way of life that more or less suited her, that at least made her feel good. Now she came to realize that, by excluding every other alternative, other people’s way of life had set itself up as the one and only hope of salvation. When, in speaking of herself, she went beyond a statement of fact, she was silenced by a glance.

  A bit of gaiety, a dance step while working, the humming of a hit song, were foolishness, and soon she herself thought so, because no one reacted and she was left alone with her gaiety. In part, the others lived their own lives as an example; they ate so little as an example, were silent in each other’s presence as an example, and went to confession only to remind the stay-at-homes of their sins.

  And so she was starved. Her little attempts to explain herself were futile mutterings. She felt free—but there was nothing she could do about it. The others, to be sure, were children; but it was oppressive to be looked at so reproachfully, especially by children.

  When the war was over, my mother remembered her husband and,
though no one had asked for her, went to Berlin. Her husband, who had also forgotten that he had once courted her on a bet, was living with a girlfriend in Berlin; after all, there had been a war on.

  But she had her child with her, and without enthusiasm they both took the path of duty.

  They lived in a sublet room in Berlin-Pankow. The husband worked as a tram driver and drank, worked as a tram conductor and drank, worked as a baker and drank. Taking with her her second child, who had been born in the meantime, his wife went to see his employer and begged him to give her husband one more chance, the old story.

  In this life of misery, my mother lost her country-round cheeks and achieved a certain chic. She carried her head high and acquired a graceful walk. Whatever she put on was becoming to her. She had no need of fox furs. When her husband sobered up and clung to her and told her he loved her, she gave him a merciful, pitying smile. By then, she had no illusions about anything.

  They went out a good deal, an attractive couple. When he was drunk, he got FRESH and she had to be SEVERE with him. Then he would beat her because she had nothing to say to him, when it was he who brought home the bacon.

  Without his knowledge, she gave herself an abortion with a knitting-needle.

  For a time he lived with his parents; then they sent him back to her. Childhood memories: the fresh bread that he sometimes brought home; the black, fatty loaves of pumpernickel around which the dismal room blossomed into life; my mother’s words of praise.

  In general, these memories are inhabited more by things than by people: a dancing top in a deserted street amid ruins, oat flakes in a sugar spoon, grey mucus in a tin spittoon with a Russian trademark; of people, only separate parts: hair, cheeks, knotted scars on fingers; from her childhood days my mother had a swollen scar on her index finger; I held on to it when I walked beside her.

  And so she was nothing and never would be anything; it was so obvious that there was no need of a forecast. She already said “in my day”, though she was not yet thirty. Until then, she hadn’t resigned herself, but now life became so hard that for the first time she had to listen to reason. She listened to reason, but understood nothing.

  She had already begun to work something out and even, as far as possible, to live accordingly. She said to herself: “Be sensible”—the reason reflex—and “All right, I’ll behave!”

  And so she budgeted herself and also learned to budget people and objects, though on that score there was little to be learned: the people in her life—her husband, whom she couldn’t talk to, and her children, whom she couldn’t yet talk to—hardly counted, and objects were available only in minimal quantities. Consequently, she became petty and niggardly: Sunday shoes were not to be worn on weekdays, street clothes were to be hung up as soon as you got home, her shopping bag wasn’t a toy, the warm bread was for the next day. (Later on, my confirmation watch was locked up right after my confirmation.)

  Because she was helpless, she disciplined herself, which went against her grain and made her touchy. She hid her touchiness behind an anxious, exaggerated dignity, but at the slightest provocation a defenseless, panic-stricken look shone through. She was easily humiliated.

  Like her father, she thought the time had come to deny herself everything, but then with a shamefaced laugh she would ask the children to let her lick their sweets.

  The neighbours liked her and admired her for her Austrian sociability and gaiety; they thought her FRANK and SIMPLE, not coquettish and affected like city people; there was no fault to be found with her.

  She also got on well with the Russians, because she could make herself understood in Slovenian. With them she talked and talked, saying everything she was able to say in the words common to both languages; that unburdened her.

  But she never had any desire for an affair. Her heart had grown heavy too soon: the shame that had always been preached at her had finally become a part of her. An affair, to her mind, could only mean someone “wanting something” of her, and that put her off; she, after all, didn’t want anything of anybody. The men she later liked to be with were GENTLEMEN: their company gave her a pleasant feeling that took the place of affection. As long as there was someone to talk with, she felt relaxed and almost happy. She let no one come too close; she could have been approached only with the delicacy which in former days had enabled her to feel that she belonged to herself—but that was long ago; she remembered it only in her dreams.

  She became sexless; everything went into the trivia of daily life.

  She wasn’t lonely; at most, she sensed that she was only a half. But there was no one to supply the other half. “We rounded each other out so well,” she said, thinking back on her days with the savings-bank clerk; that was her ideal of eternal love.

  The postwar period; the big city—in this city, city life was no longer possible. You took shortcuts, up hill and down dale through the rubble, to get there sooner, but even so you found yourself at the end of a long line, jostled by fellow citizens who had ceased to be anything more than elbows and eyes looking into space. A short, unhappy laugh; like the rest of them, you looked away from yourself, into space; like the rest of them, you gave yourself away, showed that you needed something; still, you tried to assert yourself; pathetic, because that made you just like the people around you: something pushing and pushed, shoving and shoved, cursing and cursed at. In her new situation, her mouth, which up until then had been open at least occasionally—in youthful amazement (or in feminine acting-as-if), in rural fright, at the end of a daydream that lightened her heavy heart—was kept closed with exaggerated firmness, as a sign of adaptation to a universal determination which, because there was so little to be personally determined about, could never be more than a pretence.

  A mask-like face—not rigid as a mask but with a mask-like immobility—a disguised voice, which for fear of attracting attention not only spoke the foreign dialect but mimicked the foreign turns of phrase—“Mud in your eye!”—“Keep your paws off that!”—“You’re sure shovelling it in today!”—a copied posture, with a bend at the hips and one foot thrust forward … all this in order to become, not a different person, but a type: to change from a prewar type to a postwar TYPE, from a country bumpkin to a city person, adequately described in the words: TALL, SLIM, DARK-HAIRED.

  In thus becoming a type, she felt freed from her own history, because now she saw herself through the eyes of a stranger making an erotic appraisal.

  And so an emotional life that never had a chance of achieving bourgeois composure acquired a superficial stability by clumsily imitating the bourgeois system of emotional relations, prevalent especially among women, the system in which “So-and-so is my type but I’m not his” or “I’m his but he’s not mine” or in which “We’re made for each other” or “Can’t stand the sight of each other”—in which clichés are taken as binding rules and any individual reaction, which takes some account of an actual person, becomes a deviation. For instance, my mother would say of my father: “Actually, he wasn’t my type”. And so this typology became a guide to life; it gave you a pleasantly objective feeling about yourself; you stopped worrying about your origins, your possibly dandruff-ridden, sweaty-footed individuality, or the daily renewed problem of how to go on living; being a type relieved the human molecule of his humiliating loneliness and isolation; he lost himself, yet now and then he was somebody, if only briefly.

  Once you became a type, you floated through the streets, buoyed up by all the things you could pass with indifference, repelled by everything which, in forcing you to stop, brought you back bothersomely to yourself: the lines outside the shops, a high bridge across the Spree, a shop window with baby carriages in it. (She had given herself another secret abortion.) Always on the move to get away from yourself and keep your peace of mind. Motto: “Today I won’t think of anything; today I’ll enjoy myself”.

  At times it worked and everything personal was swallowed up by the typical. Then even sadness was only a passing phase,
a suspension of good cheer: “Forsaken, forsaken,/Like a pebble in the street,/That’s how forsaken I am”; with the foolproof melancholy of this phony folk song, she contributed her share to the general merriment; the next item on the programme might, for instance, be the ribald tone of a male voice getting ready to tell a joke. And then, with a sense of release, you could join in the laughter.

  At home, of course, she was alone with the FOUR WALLS; some of the bounce was still there, a hummed tune, a dance step while taking off her shoes, a brief desire to jump out of her skin. And then she was dragging herself around the room again, from husband to child, from child to husband, from one thing to another.

  Her calculations always went wrong; the little bourgeois recipes for salvation had stopped working, because in actual fact her living conditions—the one-room apartment, the constant worry about where the next meal was coming from, the fact that communication with her LIFE COMPANION was confined almost exclusively to gestures, involuntary mimicry, and embarrassed sexual intercourse—were actually pre-bourgeois. It was only by leaving the house that she could get anything at all out of life. Outside: the victor type; inside: the weaker half, the eternal loser! What a life!

  Whenever she told me about it later on—and telling about it was a need with her—she would shake with disgust and misery, but too feebly to shake them off; her shudders only revived her horror.