Moment of True Feeling by Peter Handke Page A

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.
    At that point everything had really become a joke! Humpbacked and squinting he entered the PARENTS’ BEDROOM. With malignant sloppiness he dropped his trousers on a chair. Then he sat up in the bed and read the diner’s guides, pencil in hand, drawing circles around stars, crowns, and chef’s hats. The tiniest village at the end of the world was still on the map if it could boast a recommended restaurant. How many escape routes were open to him!—He tried to remember the past day and realized he had forgotten most of it. He began to feel proud that he was still alive. His head drooped and quickly he put out the light. He was asleep before his head touched the pillow.
    He awoke soon afterwards at the edge of a precipice, from a dream in which he was about to be murdered. He woke up because it occurred to him at the last moment that he himself was the murderer. He was the intended victim and he was the murderer, who was just coming into the house from the fog outside. Waking didn’t mend matters—the only difference was that his horror no longer expressed itself in objects and images. He had awoken stretched out, his arms straight at his sides, one foot on the other, sole on instep. His teeth were clenched, and his eyes had opened as quickly as the eyes of an awakening vampire. He lay speechless,
incapable of moving, infected with the terror of death. Nothing would ever change. There was no possibility of flight, no salvation of any kind. His heart no longer seemed protected by ribs. It pounded as though it had nothing but skin over it.
    The room was so impenetrably dark that in his thoughts he groaned with hate, disgust, rage—though he didn’t utter a sound. Yet he used to think that here in a foreign country, in a different language, the fits of terror he had had all his life might take on a different meaning, that at least they would not be so utterly abysmal, that, chiefly because thus far he had not learned to speak the foreign language instinctively and in general lived much less instinctively in France than he had in Austria, he would no longer be so helplessly at their mercy as he had been in the land of his birth and childhood … As though these thoughts had given him back his mobility, he began to slap his bed just as in childhood he had slapped some object he had barked his shins on.
    Then he remembered with disgust that before putting out the light he had noticed some dried rings the water glass had left on his bedside table. He’d have to wipe them off