by Peter Handke
The sun was already so low that the cars were dark on the dazzlingly bright boulevards. Someone was walking behind him, keeping step with him, neither catching up nor falling back—but Keuschnig didn’t look around. People were standing in line outside a movie house where Ben Hur was being shown. How long was it since he himself had seen that picture; how often since then it had been shown all over the place! Yet there were still people seeing it for the first time, people entirely different from him but at the moment quite the same. How many people were toting bundles of clothing down the street because most of the cleaning establishments closed at the end of July, while others, carrying folded air mattresses in beach bags, were going home from the swimming pools. He sat down on the terrace of a cafe; a sign fastened to the awning said: CHANGEMENT DE DIRECTION: TOUT EST BON. Out in the street, a few yards of old car track that had not been entirely tarred over glistened in the sun. An apartment was still for sale in the new building across the way. Under the café chairs two dogs were barking at each other. A very old man chuckled as he dropped an airmail letter into a mailbox …
It was only when from time to time he saw a woman pass that Keuschnig became uneasy. The lines of the calves and thighs, the clefts of their bosoms filled him with such longing that he felt his face growing stern. Once, when a woman passed behind the frosted-glass pane of a bus shelter and only her silhouette could be seen, he wished she would go on walking behind the frosted glass forever. He was overcome with rage and chagrin at the thought that all these passing women were not meant for him, that he would never see them again, and an intimation came to him of what they might have meant in his life. How it upset him—even today! —when he failed to get a good look at one of those faces —as though he were missing something crucial.
Then the sunshades were lowered, but they still revolved in their supports, for the wind had risen. The waiter smiled on receiving his tip, and today Keuschnig took that smile very seriously. He was grateful to the people who remained seated near him but paid no attention to him. For a long while he watched the water from a hydrant gush foaming into the gutter. When in a newspaper someone had left behind he read that a singer had achieved “a glorious C-major,” he was so moved he almost screamed. He wanted to leave his fingerprints all over the table. A man reading a book beside him took off his glasses, and suddenly Keuschnig was afraid he might be leaving—but the man only thrust the book into the distance and went on reading. What a relief, what peace! … Keuschnig looked around. Maybe something would come of it: a new thought, a possibility. For some time now, a game of ping-pong had been in progress in the cellar under the café, and the regular click-click-click filled Keuschnig with disgust. At last the ball went astray … Thoughtless and unafraid, he left the café and climbed the steep paths of the Buttes-Chaumont.
He passed a police call box. The deep red post was a tangible consolation in a painfully expanding wasteland, and absurdly he made a note of the spot. Someone was RUNNING behind him; no, not running on his account; someone WHISTLED, why wouldn’t he be whistling at him?! Slight incongruities outside him now affected him in his own body; he jumped at the sight of a potato rolling out of a woman’s string bag, cringed when he saw, far below, a child riding a bicycle through a puddle.
He felt cold again. Some blue shirts on a clothesline behind bushes at the edge of the park reminded him of his birthplace, not of any particular event, but of a long, mortal eventlessness. As though that were the possibility, he tried to open his mind to other memories. But nothing happened, except that he suddenly found himself outside the entrance to an underground station in wintry Stockholm … Could new gestures and faces be a way out? How about wagging his head, pursing his lips, and fanning himself with one hand like these French people? No more of that nonsense … By then he was standing on an artificial cliff and looking westward he could see Paris in the yellow evening sun. A little daydream might be his salvation! He felt his pockets to make sure he had his passport. At this point, only someone from another system could hold him back. Not far away, a wrinkled woman with hair on her chin gave a younger man a smacking kiss on the lips, and went off. Keuschnig waited, strangely curious, for the man to wipe away the alien saliva. But he only stood motionless, gazing down at the city, and after a while walked away with long strides.
At that moment Keuschnig felt ashamed of having to die and be dead. The way things had turned out, there was nothing left for him to do but draw a last breath and be a corpse. He could put up with being dead if the rest of the world would stop at the same moment. As it was, his body, in death more pretentious than ever, would only be putting on airs. He took a step forward, not for any precise purpose, but for spite, because he no longer knew what he wanted. —The hair-raisingly repugnant sense of shame he had so often experienced at the thought of living and of being something bodily, nakedly conspicuous and unique, of being ONE TOO MANY, held him back from the last and most singular manifestation of life, and made him for the present stay where he was at the top of the cliff.
Though he no longer envisaged a way out, he looked around from sheer instinct, and saw, some distance away, the fat writer, who had apparently been looking at Keuschnig for some time, for he was not out of breath from the steep climb. The writer clapped his notebook shut and put it away in the inside pocket of his jacket, as though certain he wasn’t going to need it any more. “I’ve been following you all day, Gregor,” he said. “I have tempered my idea with observations and now I’m satisfied. Incidentally, when the murderess flings herself from the tower of the Spanish church at the end of Vertigo, the sky is not blue, it’s deep-dark and clouded, in the last light of the day. ‘God have mercy on her soul,’ says the nun, and tolls the bell. Your child is at my place with Stefanie and that’s where she’ll stay for the present. I have no further use for you and wish you the best of luck.”—The writer stood there for some time, then made a face or two, perhaps to convince Keuschnig that he was real, and walked off across the grass, blindly trampling a flower bed. “You don’t know anything about me!” Keuschnig shouted after him. At that the writer only raised his arm; he didn’t turn around.
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 the Buttes-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 NOT SPIT 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.
From the Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle on, there were people on the street. Children who should have been home in bed were being dragged coughing through clouds of exhaust fumes. The boulevard was so noisy that the grownups had to bend down to talk to them. Once Keuschnig heard a roaring in the crowd, and all the people seemed to break step and run away. What were they running from? Was he the only one going to the Place de l‘Opéra? Many of the old people looked disgruntled, despite their success in living so long. Seeing a woman at an open window, Keuschnig was sure she was going to jump out. A man yawned and the saliva ran out of his mouth. Keuschnig wanted to take a cab, but the driver, without even looking at him, responded by throwing a black leather bag over his sign. He noticed the swollen ankles of a woman coming toward him, and she made faces at him. Someone leaned against a car with a splintered windshield and vomited. Two men were hopping about on the sidewalk, smiling and pinching each other’s cheeks, but already their teeth were clenched, for in the next moment they would start punching each other. A man with a white handkerchief in his breast pocket was pushed by in a wheelchair. The boulevard was immersed in dark smog; the lower halves of the yellow lamps at the Métro entrances were black with soot. A woman who had been laughing shrilly grew suddenly serious and jerked her head to one side, as though the time had come for her to die. No one got out of anyone’s way; in a moment someone in this jostling crowd would pull a revolver and fire at those faces. The people coming toward Keuschnig looked like people who had been filmed a long time ago; in reality they had ceased to exist—what he saw was only the latest film with them in it. They moved and let themselves drift as if they had had enough of their functions to last them forever. How COMPLIANT they seemed, nevertheless! And meanwhile in their apartments the milk was getting sour, the orange juice was separating, and a viscous scum was forming on the water in the toilet bowls! He passed through the crowd, swaying from side to side for fear of losing his newly won balance. If anyone was in his way, Keuschnig pushed him efficiently aside—after all he had been through, he could allow himself that liberty. He found a trampled letter in the gutter and read it as he went on: “One day, four years ago, I became indifferent to everything from one minute to the next. Thus began the most harrowing period of my life …” It occurred to him that he had never had a real enemy, someone he wanted to destroy mercilessly. I’ll make as many enemies as possible! he thought, grown strangely cheerful. Looking down at the asphalt still soft with the heat o
f the day, he suddenly saw himself as the hero of an unknown tale … Somewhat listless, almost gloomy at the thought that he was due to make someone’s acquaintance, Keuschnig approached the Café de la Paix just as the three-headed street lamps of the Place de l’Opéra went on. On the terrace a light flashed. The cigarette girl was standing at one of the tables swaying her tray. Someone else, approaching at the same time as Keuschnig, was already being beckoned to.
On a balmy summer evening a man crossed the Place de l’Opéra in Paris. Both hands deep in the trouser pockets of his visibly new suit, he strode resolutely toward the Café de la Paix. Apart from the suit, which was light blue, the man was wearing white socks and yellow shoes; he was walking fast, and his loosely knotted necktie swung to and fro …
Written in Paris during the summer and autumn of 1974
ALSO BY PETER HANDKE
Kaspar and Other Plays (1970)
The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1972)
Short Letter, Long Farewell (1974)
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (1975)
The Ride Across Lake Constance
and Other Plays (1976)
Translation copyright © 1977 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. Originally published in German under the title Die Stunde der wahren Empfindung © 1975 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main All rights reserved