The Left-Handed Woman by Peter Handke Read Free Book Online Page B

“You mean you want to be alone like this
all your life? Don’t you long for someone who would be your friend, body and soul?”
    The woman cried out, “Oh yes. I do. But I don’t want to know who he is. Even if I were always with him, I wouldn’t want to know him. There’s just one thing I’d like”—she smiled, apparently at herself—“I’d like him to be clumsy, a regular butterfingers. I honestly don’t know why.” She interrupted herself. “Oh, Franziska, I’m talking like a teen-ager.”
    Franziska: “I have an explanation for the butterfingers. Isn’t your father like that? The last time he was here he wanted to shake hands with me across the table and he stuck his fingers in the mustard pot instead.”
    The woman laughed and the child turned his head, as though it were unusual for his mother to laugh.
    Franziska: “By the way, he’s arriving on the afternoon train. I wired him to come. He’s expecting you to meet him at the station.”
    After a pause the woman said, “You shouldn’t have done that. I don’t want anyone right now. Everything seems so banal with people around.”
    Franziska: “I believe you’re beginning to regard people as nothing more than unfamiliar sounds in the house.” She put her hand on the woman’s arm.
    The woman said, “In the book I’ve been translating there’s a quotation from Baudelaire; he says the only political action he understands is revolt. Suddenly it
flashed through my mind that the only political action I could understand would be to run amok.”
    Franziska: “As a rule, only men do that.”
    The woman: “By the way, how are you getting along with Bruno?”
    Franziska: “Bruno seems made for happiness. That’s why he’s so lost now. And so theatrical! He’s getting on my nerves. I’m going to throw him out.”
    The woman: “Oh, Franziska. You always say that. When you’re always the one that gets left.”
    After two or three attempts to protest, Franziska said with a note of surprise, “To tell the truth, you’re right.”
    They looked at each other. The children seemed to have fallen out; they stood with their backs to each other gazing at the air, the fat one rather sadly. The woman called out, “Hey, children, no quarrels today.”
    The fat boy smiled with relief and—circuitously, to be sure, and with downcast eyes—the two of them moved closer to each other.
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    The woman and the child were waiting at the small-town station. The train pulled in and the woman’s father, a pale old man in glasses, waved from behind a window. Years ago he had been a successful writer, and now he sent carbon copies of short sketches to the papers. He
couldn’t get the door open; the woman opened it from outside and helped him down to the platform. They looked each other over and in the end they were pleased. The father shrugged, looked in different directions, wiped his lips, and said his hands smelled unpleasantly from the metal of the train.
    At home he sat on the floor with the child, who took his presents out of his grandfather’s bag: a compass and a set of dice. The child pointed at various objects in the house and outside and asked what color they were. Many of the old man’s answers were wrong.
    The child: “So you’re still color-blind?”
    The grandfather: “It’s just that I never learned to see colors.”
    The woman came in, carrying light-blue tea things on a silver tray. The tea steamed as she poured it, and her father warmed his hands on the pot. While he was sitting on the floor, an assortment of coins and a bunch of keys had fallen out of his pocket. The woman picked them up. “Your pockets are full of loose change again,” she said.
    The father: “That change purse you gave me, it didn’t last long.