The Left-Handed Woman by Peter Handke Page A

his head to one side and went on staring openmouthed.
    The woman stood in the space outside the garages in her open fur coat. Puddles of melted snow were freezing over. The sidewalk was strewn with the needles of discarded Christmas trees. While opening the garage door,
she looked up at the colony and its tiers of box-shaped bungalows, some of which were already lighted. Behind the colony a mixed forest—most!y oaks, beeches, and pines—rose gently, unbroken by any village, or even a house, to the top of one of the mountains. The child appeared at the window of their “housing unit,” as her husband called the bungalow, and raised his arm.
    At the airport it wasn’t quite dark yet; before going into the terminal, the woman saw bright spots in the sky over the flagpoles with their shimmering flags. She stood with the others and waited, her face expectant and relaxed, open and self-possessed. Word came over the loudspeaker that the plane from Helsinki had landed, and soon the passengers emerged from behind the customs barrier, among them Bruno, carrying a suitcase and a plastic bag marked “Duty-Free Shop.” He was just a little older than she, and his face was drawn with fatigue. He wore, as always, a double-breasted gray pin-striped suit and an open shirt. His eyes were so brown that it was hard to see his pupils; he could watch people for a long time without their feeling looked at. He had walked in his sleep as a child, and even now he often talked in his dreams.
    In front of all the people, he rested his head on the shoulder of his wife’s fur coat, as if he had to take a nap that minute. She took his suitcase and plastic bag, and then he was able to throw his arms around her. For a long time they stood embracing; Bruno smelled slightly of liquor.

    In the elevator that took them to the underground garage, where she had parked, he looked at her and she observed him. She got into the car first and opened the door from inside. Instead of getting in, he stood looking straight ahead. He beat his forehead with his fist; then he held his nose and tried to blow air out of his ears, as though the long flight had stopped them up.
    On the road to the small town on the mountain slope where the bungalow colony was, the woman put her hand on the radio knob and asked, “Would you like some music?” He shook his head. By then it was dark; nearly all the lights were out in the high-rise office buildings along the road, but the housing developments on the hills were bright.
    After a while Bruno said, “It was always so dark in Finland—day and night. And I couldn’t understand a single word of the language! In every other country a few of the words are similar—but there’s nothing international about that language. The one thing I’ve remembered is the word for beer—‘ olut ’ I got drunk fairly often. Early one afternoon, when just a little light had come into the sky, I was sitting in a self-service café. All at once I began to scratch the table in a frenzy. The darkness, the cold in my nostrils, and not being able to speak to anyone. It was almost comforting to hear the wolves howl one night. Or to pee into a toilet bowl with our company’s initials on it. There’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you, Marianne. I thought of you often up
there, of you and Stefan. For the first time in all the years since we’ve been together, I had the feeling that we belonged to each other. Suddenly I was afraid of going mad with loneliness, mad in a cruelly painful way that no one had ever experienced before. I’ve often told you I loved you, but now for the first time I feel that we’re bound to each other. Till death do us part. And the strange part of it is that I now feel I could exist without you.”
    The woman rested her hand on Bruno’s knee and asked, “And how did the business go?”
    Bruno laughed. “Orders are