Short Letter, Long Farewell by Peter Handke

Author:Peter Handke [Handke, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Literary
ISBN: 9780413337108
Google: xYRoSryoHp0C
Amazon: 1590173066
Barnesnoble: 1590173066
Goodreads: 3338907
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 1972-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

The sound of her steps behind me made me think of an old John Ford picture, The Iron Horse; it was about the building of the transcontinental railroad from Missouri to California between 1861 and 1869. Beginning at the opposite ends, two railroad companies were laying tracks toward the middle, the Central Pacific from the west, the Union Pacific from the east. Years before, a man had dreamed of this railroad and gone west with his son to look for a passage through the Rocky Mountains. While he took leave of his neighbor, his little son awkwardly kissed the neighbor’s still littler daughter goodbye. The father was killed, but later on, now a grown man, the son found the passage. The neighbor became the president of the Union Pacific. After long years, which were painfully long in the picture as well, for the construction work was shown in great detail, the two lines met at Promontory Point, Utah, and the president drove a golden spike into the last tie. Whereupon the dreamer’s son and the president’s daughter kissed for the first time since their parting as children. Though I didn’t know why, I had felt wretched throughout the picture—shooting pains in my chest, compulsive swallowing, internal soreness, itching, chills—but the moment the spike was driven in and the two fell into each other’s arms, I felt their embrace inside me and I stretched inwardly with a sense of infinite relief: my whole body had hungered for the two of them to come together.

I let Claire catch up with me and side by side we went back to the Holiday Inn. The chambermaid told us the child was sleeping peacefully. I noticed that I was hungry. I ate something or other and, leaning back with her hands in her lap, Claire watched me. She blinked seldom and hesitantly, as though her eyes were closing. I looked back attentively. All at once we saw the time we had made love, and now we understood. The feeling for Claire that came over me was so strong that I had to look away. That OTHER TIME, which I had experienced in Providence when the right number had briefly flashed up on the die, now lay stretched out before me like another world that I had only to enter to be rid at last of my fear-ridden nature and its limitations. But then I took fright; it occurred to me how empty and unbeing, how without life of my own, I should be in that other world; overcome by a feeling of universal bliss, free from fear and tension, I myself, as in the play of the cypress, ceased to exist, and for a moment I was so horrified at that empty world that I experienced the child’s boundless dread at suddenly seeing nothing in a place where only a moment before it had seen something. In that moment I lost forever my longing to be rid of myself; the thought of my often childish

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