The Left-Handed Woman by Peter Handke

She was thirty and lived in a terraced bungalow colony on the south slope of a low mountain range in western Germany, just above the fumes of a big city. She had brown hair and gray eyes, which sometimes lit up even when she wasn’t looking at anyone, without her face changing in any other way. Late one winter afternoon she was sitting at an electric sewing machine, in the yellow light that shone into the large living room from outside. One entire side of the room consisted of a single pane of glass, looking out on the windowless wall of a neighboring house and on a grass-overgrown terrace with a discarded Christmas tree in the middle of it. Beside the woman sat her eight-year-old son, bent over his copybook, writing a school essay at a walnut table. His fountain pen scratched as he wrote, and his tongue protruded from between his lips. Now and then he stopped, looked out of the window, and went on writing more busily than ever. Or he would glance at his mother, who, though her face was averted, noticed his glance and returned it. The woman was married to the sales manager of the local branch of a porcelain
concern well known throughout Europe; a business trip had taken him to Scandinavia for several weeks, and he was expected back that evening. Though not rich, the family was comfortably well off, with no need to think of money. Their bungalow was rented, since the husband could be transferred at any moment.
    The child had finished writing and read aloud: “‘My idea of a better life. I would like the weather to be neither hot nor cold. There should always be a balmy breeze and once in a while a storm that makes people huddle on the ground. No more cars. All the houses should be red. The trees and bushes should be gold. I would know everything already, so I would not have to study. Everybody would live on islands. The cars along the street would always be open, so I could get in if I happened to be tired. I would never be tired any more. They wouldn’t belong to anyone. I would always stay up at night and fall asleep wherever I happened to be. It would never rain. I would always have four friends, and all the people I don’t know would disappear. Everything I don’t know would disappear.’”
    The woman stood up and looked out of the smaller side window. In the foreground a line of motionless pine trees. Below the trees several rows of individual garages, all as rectangular and flat-topped as the bungalows. The driveway leading to the garages had a sidewalk, and though it had been cleared of snow a child was pulling a sled along it. Down in the lowland, far behind the trees, lay the outskirts of the city, and from somewhere in the hollow
a plane was rising. The woman stood as if in a trance, but instead of going stiff she seemed to bend to her thoughts. The child came and asked her what she was looking at. She didn’t hear him, she didn’t so much as blink. The child shook her and cried, “Wake up!” The woman shook herself, and put her hand on the child’s shoulder. Then he, too, looked out and in turn lost himself, openmouthed, in the view. After a while he shook himself and said, “Now I’ve been woolgathering like you.” They both began to laugh and they couldn’t stop; when their laughter died down, one started up again and the other joined in. In the end they hugged each other and laughed so hard that they fell to the floor together.
    The child asked if he could turn on the television. The woman answered, “We’re going to the airport now to meet Bruno.” But he was already turning on the set. The woman bent over him and said, “Your father has been away for weeks. How can I tell him that …” The child heard nothing more. The woman made a megaphone with her hands and shouted as if she were calling him in the woods, but the child only stared at the screen. She moved her hand back and forth in front of his eyes, but the child bent