by Peter Handke
While they were still laughing, Françoise said seriously: “I would like to tell the story of my life, and do you know why? Because I keep discovering more and more how much I have in common with other people of my age, especially women. To tell the truth, all my experience has been very impersonal, yet there has always been something very personal about it. When I think back, my personal experiences always seem to have been brought about by the political events of the time. The day the North Vietnamese took Dien Bien Phu, my stepfather got drunk and raped me. The man who later became my husband took advantage of a headline about an OAS bombing to speak to me on the bus. After the Algerian War we had to move because our apartment was owned by a dispossessed Algerian colonist, who needed it for himself. When France walked out of NATO, I lost my job as secretary on an American Air Force base. In May 1968 my husband went off with another woman … Perhaps it’s because I’m a woman that so much of my experience has been determined by outside events. Almost all my experiences have been sad; as a matter of fact, you can hardly call them experiences. But they’ve changed me. If at the age of forty I get cancer or they take me to an insane asylum, I’ll know why.” “What about your more cheerful experiences?” the writer asked. “Do you account for them in the same way? Your possibly beginning to love me, for instance?” “Thanks to the unions,” said Françoise, “I have a steady part-time job. As a result, the work doesn’t disgust me as much as it might, and I’m not so worried about being thrown out of work. That gives me more time for the better feelings.” The writer wrote something in his notebook. “I just remembered,” he said, “that every time the waiter at the restaurant today opened a bottle of wine he held the cork up to his nose but didn’t really smell it.” “Yes,” said Françoise, “but did you notice how worn down his heels were? I think the reason you’ve lost interest in people is that you’re always looking for obscure details and you’ve run out of them. There’s nothing left for you to discover but the inexhaustible riches of everyday life, and you turn up your nose at that.” “I have not run out of obscure details,” said the writer, who ate with his left hand and wrote so vigorously with his right that the table moved. “In the last few minutes,” he said, “my curiosity has revived—right now I’m curious about somebody.” Françoise pinched his fat cheek and he suddenly stuck his finger in her ear. “About whom?” asked Keuschnig, who, feeling secure, had almost humbly let them talk the whole time, while looking at the wart in Françoise’s shaved armpit. “About you, my dear Gregor,” said the writer, without looking up from his notebook. His ball-point broke; without a moment’s delay he took out another and went on writing. This time no one laughed but Stefanie.
Here we go, thought Keuschnig, and the bite he had just taken of a peach became tasteless in his mouth. “Even here in France,” he said aloud, “the fruit doesn’t taste like anything any more.” “We were talking about you before you came in,” said the writer. Keuschnig asked no questions, though he was curious to know what they had said. “There’s nothing to say about me,” he said. Stefanie was looking at him from the side. That disturbed him, but he didn’t want to justify her by returning her look. Above all, I mustn’t grin as if I’d been caught out! He thought of the sleeping child and wanted to rest his head on the table and fall asleep. From the hallway he heard water trickling in the plumbing of the apartment upstairs, and suddenly he started scratching the base of his nail as he had done years before, in order to see the moon underneath. In the next moment a ball-point clicked, and he gave a start. Now the catastrophe, he thought. He has found out who I really am. He stood up, went to the window, and quickly drew the curtain; now, at least, no outsider would see what was about to happen. He remembered something Stefanie had once said at the sight of Agnes and another child sitting surrounded by toys but not knowing what to do. “They can’t play any more,” she had said. I can’t play any more, he thought, and a blood vessel under his eye twitched almost soothingly. He wanted to prepare himself, but didn’t know how. He sat down at the table again and wound his wrist watch. Not a grain of dust on his suit. At last the ball-point was being pointed at him and Keuschnig couldn’t help grinning.
“I saw you in town today,” said the writer slowly, smacking his lips on the wine he had just swallowed. “You had changed. You always used to look the same when I ran into you now and then, but my impression of you was different each time—I felt good about that. But today you were changed, because you were trying so desperately to look the same as usual. You were so intent on seeming to be your old self that you startled me, it was like seeing a double of someone who’s just died walking down the street. You were the same, but in such a peculiar way that I only recognized you by your suit. And stop looking into my eyes, it won’t work; you can’t fool me any more that way. After Stefanie took your plate away just now, you secretly, behind your cupped hand, cleared away the peas you had spilled while eating. After every sip of wine you wiped your lip marks and fingerprints off your glass, and once when your napkin was lying on the table with the stains where you had wiped your mouth on top, you quickly turned it around—just as you turned that loaf of bread you’d bitten into. You won’t let anyone do anything for you, Gregor. You won’t even let anyone pass you the salt—as if you were afraid that in helping you someone would get close enough to see through you. What are you trying to hide?”
Keuschnig pretended to look at the writer; in reality he was watching the bubble that formed on the crepes suzette Stefanie was flaming in hot brandy sauce, and finally burst. He put the point of his knife to his forehead and thought: The only purpose of all that talk before was to make me feel unobserved. He searched the table for something to throw. Now I’m going to do it! he thought, and actually threw a chunk of bread at the writer. Not even Stefanie laughed. In a minute he would DISGRACE himself forever. Now he really looked at the writer, imploringly, and the writer turned away, not mercifully, but with the air of a man certain of his triumph and modestly proud of it; turning away from his victim, who was still alive but no longer knew it, with an elegant smile.—Keuschnig felt so ridiculous he thought his head would fall off. He realized that he had unintentionally taken on the writer’s facial expression, the same grin, the same lowered eyelids. In the general silence they exchanged the same short sly glances …
At this moment—he had a big peach stone in his mouth—Keuschnig, in full consciousness, had an experience he had never before encountered except in occasional dreams: He felt himself to be something BLOODCURD-LINGLYLY strange, yet known to all—a creature exhibited in a nest and mortally ashamed, IMMORTALLY DISGRACED, washed out of the matrix in mid-gestation, and now for all time a monstrous, unfinished bag of skin, a freak of nature, a MONSTROSITY, that people would point at, and so revolting that even as they pointed their eyes would fix on something else!—Keuschnig screamed, spat the peach stone into the writer’s face, and began to take his clothes off.
He carefully undid his tie, then laid his trousers, carefully folded, over the back of a chair. The others had stood up. The writer observed him. Françoise tried to catch the eye of Stefanie, who was looking down. The naked Keuschnig ran around the table and jumped on Françoise, who was still trying to laugh. They fell in a heap. Blindly Keuschnig thrust his hand into a plate and smeared his face with leftover stew. He chanced to touch the writer’s leg. “Don’t you butt in!” he said, and hauled off at the writer. Keuschnig rose to his feet, and they began to exchange blows, slowly, blow after blow, eye to eye, soundlessly, systematically, and with the obstinacy of children. After a while Keuschnig realized that he was going to burst out crying, with relief at no longer having to dissemble any more, with grief that it was all up with him. Ah, he thought with satisfaction, I’m crying. But he only turned away from the writer and said gleefully to Stefanie: “This afternoon at the embassy I made love on the floor to a girl whose name I didn’t even know.” —She smiled with only one side of her mouth, and he repeated the sentence to emphasize his malicious intent.
In silence they walked down the boulevard. Nearly all the windows in the tallish houses were dark, and a good many of the shutters had been let down, where people had gone on vacation. Only some of the little attic windows were still lit. What with the boulevard and the railroad cut beside it, the space between the rows of houses was so wide that the sound of their footsteps echoed back from the far side. There were no other walkers. A man and a woman were sitting in a car drawn up at the curb, but they were only looking into space. The sky was full of night clouds tinged with yellow city light, and stars could be seen in the openings between them. The breeze was so faint that only the leaves at the end of a branch or twig stirred. In the light of the street lamps behind them the branches had the look of hard black tracery, in and out of which leaves, that seemed illumined from within, played a game of light and shadow. One had to prick up one’s ears to hear the movement of the leaves; no rustling, only a soft, almost eerie breathing. Here and there among the green leaves a lone withered leaf whispered audibly. Looking out of the corners of his eyes at the slowly shifting foliage, Keuschnig suddenly saw knots of animals thrusting forward and drawing back. A black beetle fell brittly to the ground. The sidewalk was awash with fresh dog piss … Though watching nothing, Keuschnig sensed that nothing escaped him. He stood still and felt the breeze only as cool air on his temples.
As they were passing the RUE DE L‘ASSOMPTION, he remembered the Café de la Paix and the woman he had arranged to meet there the evening of the next day. He sat down on a bench, from which one could look down the long, dark, yet because of its name gratuitously promising rue de l’Assomption. He hadn’t wished for a sign, but now unintentionally he had EXPERIENCED one. Did he need it?
The writer sat down beside him, spreading himself so wide that he almost pushed Keuschnig off the bench. After a while he said: “All of a sudden I feel like seeing Hitchcock’s Vertigo again, that Spanish church tower with the crape-framed blue sky behind it—right this minute! The editors of some anthology have asked me how I felt about prayer, which is apparently being rediscovered. Have you ever prayed?” Keuschnig was going to say something in answer, but only exhaled. The next moment he experienced a thrill of pleasure because he hadn’t said anything. I’m free, he thought. I don’t have to talk any more. What a relief! And he gave a startled laugh.
They walked on as far as the Passy station. Keuschnig felt an impulse to disappear in the blackness of the Bois de Boulogne. But he didn’t want to walk any more. The blue signal light down in the railroad cut would go on shining uselessly all night … Surrounded by chairs piled on tables, they drank cognac in the one café that was still open. The writer told Keuschnig how a certain bass guitarist had amazed him by never losing his rhythm. “He must have made his peace with the world,” said the writer, who. had just broken a cigarette while putting it in his mouth. A dog barked in the silent streets around the Porte de Passy, and another, up the boulevard, almost at the Porte d’Auteuil, answered, as dogs in the country do at night. In one of the totally dark buildings a toilet light went on and a moment later went out again. Though it was after midnight, a shutter was rolled down. The comfortable apartment houses now gave the impression of impregnable fortresses. The roar of cars could be heard from the Boulevard Périphérique, but none came this way. Was that a rat running across the street on light-colored legs? The sidewalk glistened like the steps of the Métro … By this time Keuschnig was tired and nothing else.
On the way home his fatigue turned to fear and fear made him ruthless. He walked so fast that the corpulent writer fell behind. In his fear he even forgot to see SIGNS. The bare tree roots on the unpaved path beside the railroad cut were terrifying in themselves. When he reached the house in a panic, the two women were sitting on the front steps with their heads together, talking softly. Hostile in their security, they paid no attention to him. Guitar music was coming out of the open door.
They didn’t move aside when he went past them into the apartment. Their only response to his grazing them was to talk louder. He wished them dead.
He sat down in the dining room. The dirty dishes were still on the table. Thoughts pell-mell, in complete sentences, but all unutterable. Unthinkable that he would ever again draw breath to say a word. But equally repellent that he should go to bed now. Like a sick man, he could neither stand nor lie, only sit motionless, leaning forward. He wanted to close his eyes, so as to see nothing more—but for that he’d have needed lids for his whole body. He couldn’t help hearing the women on the steps talk about him in the third person plural—“men like Gregor”—as though he didn’t count any more. Some people passed the ground-floor window talking Spanish in the silent night, and he experienced a fleeting moment of longing and appeasement. The writer came in panting and sat down facing him on the floor. How ridiculous! He knew the writer was there, but didn’t look up. In the presence of this man with his affectation of omniscience, innumerable little worms began swarming in and out of every opening in Keuschnig’s body; an intolerable itch, especially in his member and nostrils. He scratched himself. Dried ear wax detached itself from his auditory passages and fell somewhere … Now I would like to see someone INNOCENT, he thought; someone I know nothing about; neither where he comes from nor what he’s like.—From the writer’s mouth he heard a smacking sound, as though his tongue were detaching itself menacingly from his palate, preparing to speak—and then he really heard him clearing his throat. Don’t speak! “Once I get the hang of it,” said the writer, “I can make do with your gestures. But when your situation gets really critical, you’ll have to start talking.” Keuschnig only bared his teeth. The writer wanted to leave but couldn’t get up off the floor. He rolled back and forth for a while, then called the women to help him. They picked him up, the three of them went out. They didn’t say a word in front of Keuschnig and they didn’t laugh. Once outside, they talked without interruption.
Keuschnig stayed there motionless, until he heard the guests departing from the seated entertainment in a fulsomely rattling diesel taxi. He heard Stefanie putting out the lights all over the apartment and going into the bathroom. He sat in the dark and heard her brushing her teeth. He heard her going down the long hallway to her room, opening and closing the door. He heard things happening one after another, and that day he was unable to skip or disregard any of them.
Much later, without knowing how he got up, he suddenly found himself on his feet, going to her. It was dark in the room. She was breathing as though asleep. He stood there indifferent, beginning to feel sleepy. And then, very much awake, she said slowly: “Gregor, you know I love you …” but her calm gave him a jolt. He switched on the light and sat down beside her. She looked so solemn that the sight of her scattered clothing seemed incongruous. Yet, because of it, he saw her more clearly than usual. Suddenly, while they were looking at each other, he wanted to butt her chin with his head. She began to sob, and he noticed that her arms were breaking out in gooseflesh. “Are you sad?” he asked. “Yes,” she said. “But there’s nothing you can do about it.” He bent over her and caressed her, himself trembling and without ulterior motive. How cold she was all over! He grew excited and lay on top of her. At that she kicked him off the bed and he fell on the floor. Almost contentedly, he left the room.