A Sorrow Beyond Dreams by Peter Handke Read Free Book Online

getting anything hot to eat.
    Her sympathy for him when he was absent prevented her from ever feeling lonely; only a brief moment of forsakenness when she had him on her hands again; the irrepressible distaste inspired by his wobbly knees and the drooping seat of his trousers. “If only I had a man I could look up to”; it was no good having to despise someone all the time.
    This visible disgust in her very first gesture, attenuated over the years into a patient, polite looking-up from whatever she happened to be doing, only crushed him the more. She had always thought him WEAK-KNEED . He often made the mistake of asking her why she couldn’tbear him. Invariably she answered: “What makes you think that?” He persisted: was he really so repulsive? She comforted him, and all the while her loathing grew. They were growing old together; the thought didn’t move her, but on the surface it made life easier, because he got out of the habit of beating her and bullying her.
    Exhausted by the daily labours that got him nowhere, he became sickly and gentle. He woke from his maunderings into a real loneliness, to which she could respond only in his absence.
    They hadn’t grown apart; they had never been really together. A sentence from a letter: “My husband has calmed down.” And she lived more calmly beside him, drawing satisfaction from the thought that she had always been and always would be a mystery to him.

    She began to take an interest in politics; she no longer voted like her husband, for his employer’s and her brother’s party. Now she voted Socialist; and after a while her husband, who felt an increasing need to lean on her, did so too. But she never believed that politics could be of any help to her personally. She cast her ballot as a gift, never expecting anything in return. “The Socialists do more for the workers”—but she didn’t feel herself to be a worker.
    The preoccupations that meant more and more to her, as housekeeping took up less of her time, had no place in what she knew of the Socialist system. Sheremained alone with her sexual disgust, repressed till it found an outlet only in dreams, with the fog-dampened bedclothes and the low ceiling over her head. The things that really mattered to her were not political. Of course there was a flaw in her reasoning—but what was it? And what politician could explain it to her? And in what words?
    Politicians lived in another world. When you asked them a question, they didn’t answer; they merely stated their positions. “You can’t talk about most things anyway.” Politics was concerned only with the things that could be talked about; you had to handle the rest for yourself, or leave it to God. And besides, if a politician were to take an interest in you personally, you’d bolt. That would be getting too intimate.

    She was gradually becoming an individual.

    Away from the house, she took on an air of dignity; sitting beside me as I drove the secondhand car I had bought her, she looked unsmilingly straight ahead. At home she no longer bellowed when she sneezed, and she didn’t laugh as loudly as before.
    (At her funeral, her youngest son was to remember how on his way home in those days he had heard her, while still a long way off, screaming with laughter.)
    When shopping, she dispensed token greetings to the right and left; she went to the hairdresser’s more oftenand had her nails manicured. This was no longer the assumed dignity with which she had run the gauntlet in the days of postwar misery—today no one could destroy her composure with a glance.
    But sometimes at home, while her husband, his back turned to her, his shirt-tails hanging out, his hands thrust deep into his pockets, silent except for an occasional suppressed cough, gazed down into the valley and her youngest son sat snot-nosed on the kitchen sofa reading a Mickey Mouse comic book, she would sit at the table in her new, erect posture, angrily rapping her knuckles on the table