...of Germany

It was by pure chance that I also went to see my father that year. We hadn’t heard from him in a long time, and I was surprised when he answered the phone. He was living in a small town in northern Germany. As we had done on our few previous meetings, we made elaborate arrangements to meet, missed each other as usual, and spent the whole evening trying to figure out why. Since the death of his wife, he lived alone in the house; he didn’t even have a dog anymore. He saw his likewise widowed woman friend only on weekends; in between, one called the other’s number each evening and let the phone ring briefly as a sign that he was still alive. (but here neither house nor man will be identified in the usual way.) In his eyes I saw the fear of death and suspected a belated sense of responsibility. Here, it seemed to me, was someone’s son. Halfhearted inquiry was swept away by the spirit of questioning, and I was able (wanting to was enough) to ask about what had long been kept silent. And he answered me, partly for his own sake. Casually, he told me that mornings, when he looked at himself in the mirror, he felt like “smashing his face,” and then for the first time I discovered in him the forlornness, bitterness, and rebelliousness of a hero. When late that night he took me to the train, a poster fastened to a tree outside the station was ablaze; some unemployed taxi drivers had set it on fire.
Once after that, I caught sight of another Germany, not the Federal Republic and its Lander, nor yet again the ghoulish Reich, nor the half-timbering of the petty principalities. It was earth-brown and wet with rain, and it was on a hilltop; it was windows; it was urban, devoid of people, and festive; I saw it from a train; it was the house on the other side of the river, it was humorously quiet and was called Mittelsinn; it was “the silent life of regular forms of silence”; it was the enigma; it was the recurrent and real. The man who saw it had a crafty feeling like Lieutenant Columbo after solving a case; yet knew there could never be lasting relief.

[The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire, from Slow Homecoming, Handke, P.]

...of a stand-off

I remembered how once, when I was out walking with my grandfather, he showed me how to keep dogs at a distance; even when no stone was available, he would bend down as if to pick one up, and the beasts would shrink back every time. Once he even threw earth into a dog’s mouth; the dog swallowed it and let us pass.
I attempted something of the kind with mastiff of Puyloubier, but he simply roared at me out of a vastly magnified mouth. As I bent down, a yellow Paris Metro Ticket, cancelled and covered with my jottings, fell out of my pocket; in a moment of exuberance I tossed it through the fence. Instantly, the dog turned himself into a marten (a marten, as everyone knows, will eat anything) and bolted my paper: greed, but also revulsion incarnate.
In my fancy, the worms inside him that lived on him flung themselves in dark turmoil on the ticket - and, lo and behold, the dog excreted an inverted little tower, as pointed as its dagger ears. It was only then that I noticed that he had staked out his official territory on the concrete with comparable dried and bleached formations (a grandiosely scribbled hieroglyphic).
Gentle suasion (or speech of any kind) would have been inconceivable in the face of such unreasoning animosity. I therefore crouched resolutely down, and the Legionary mastiff fell silent. (Actually, he was only startled for the moment.) Then our faces moved so close to each other that they vanished as in a cloud. The dog’s eyes lost their glimmer, and the dark head turned blacker than crepe. Our eyes met - or rather one eye met another; one-eyed, I looked into his one eye. Then we both knew who the other was, from then on we could only be mortal enemies forever; at the same time, it dawned on me that the beast had long been mad.

[The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire, from Slow Homecoming, Handke, P.]

...of a portrait

The Cezannes that I saw at an exhibition in the spring of 1978 struck me as such things of the beginning, and I was overcome with a desire to study such as had hitherto been inspired only by Flaubert’s prose style. These were works of his last decade, when he came so close to his aim of “realising” his subject that the colours and forms alone sufficed to do it honour. (“By relaity and completeness I mean one and the same thing,” said the philosopher.) And yet these paintings show no added light. The feted subjects owe their effect to their own colours, and sometimes the overall effect of the lighter landscapes is one of darkening. The nameless Provencal peasants of the late nineteenth century, the heroes of the portraits, loom large in the foreground; with no particular insignia of royalty, they dominate an earth-coloured ground, which is there land, their country.
Darkness, lines, composition, reinforcement, darkening eyes; yes, I was shaken. And after two years of “study,” an appropriate sentence fits itself together: the silence of these pictures seemed so complete because the dark lines of a composition reinforced an overall tension which (as the poet put it) I could attain by “darkening over” to it, that is, by a leap, in which two pairs of eyes, separate in time, met on a painted surface.
“The picture has begun to tremble,” I jotted down at the time. “What freedom, to be able to sing someone’s praises.”
One portrait in particular moved me, because it pictured the hero of the story I had yet to write. It was titled The Man with the Folded Arms: a man, whose picture would never bear a proper name (but who was not no one or just anyone), seen in the corner of a rather empty room defined only by its wainscoting; sitting there in the darkness of the earth tones that also modulate the man himself; a man, it seemed to me, at “an ideal age: already substantial, but still capable of yearning.” (True, when I studied his posture, I was put off by the hand tucked back under the arm, and it took an effort of will to unbend it.) The man’s eyes looked obliquely upward, without expectancy. One corner of the mouth was slightly distorted by a thicker shadow line: “humble sorrow.” His open white shirt was bright, as was his large rounded forehead under his deep-black hair - vulnerable in its nakedness. I did not see this man in my own image, or as a brother; I saw him, rather, as an accomplice, who, now that I have finished his story, is once again the inviolate Man with the Crossed Arms, radiating a silent little smile.

[The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire, from Slow Homecoming, Handke, P.]

…of synaesthesia

It was then that I first looked seriously at the paintings of Gustave Courbet, many of which portray the life of peasants in the mid-nineteenth century, and was moved by the lofty silence of these pictures, especially one entitled The Peasants of Flagey (Doubs), Returning Home from Market. And then I knew: these are the right pictures - and not only for me.
Courbet, as his precisely localised titles show, regarded the subjects of genre paintings, these scenes of everyday life, as the true events of history. And so it is that to the sympathetic mind his peasants - as they sift grain, stand at a graveside, prepare a dead woman for burial, or return home from market at dusk (and those as well who only sit and rest, sleep and dream) - form a self-contained procession, which includes “my” genre painting of an old woman, who on a warm sunny day much later walked down a back street in West Berlin with her shopping bag and, during a brief silence that made her everyday reality more profound, revealed to me the housefronts as our shared and still happily enduring peace procession.

[The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire, from Slow Homecoming, Handke, P.]

...of tearfulness

Yet this woman was the first person by whom I felt appreciated as well as recognised. In the eyes of my parents, I was always “too serious” (my mother) or “too dreamy” (my father); my sister, it is true, regarded me as the secret ally of her craziness; my girlfriend’s gaze when we met was often rigid with an embarassment that melted only when at last - and I didn’t always succeed - I smiled at her from deep inside me; and even my teacher, who understood everything, once said - when in the course of a class excursion I had suddenly run off across the fields and into a thicket, just to get away! to be alone! - well, when I came back, he said with an undertone of irrevocable judgement: “Filip, you’re not right in the head.” The squaw of the Karst, on the other hand, gave me, heartwarmingly, the trust at first sight which, after a few days in her house, became an expectation, a wordless refutation of my constant self-disparagement (“I’ll never amount to anything”); an acquittal as surprising as it was reasonable; encouraging and protective; and so it has remained. And it was she who, before I had even opened my mouth, gave me credit for a sense of humour. At home I had often forbidden my mother to laug, because her laugh reminded me of the way women guffawed when men were telling dirty jokes, and my school friends thought I was a killjoy, because when someone was telling a joke I’d point out a scratch in the tabletop or a loose button on his jacket just as he was coming up to the punch line. Only my girlfriend, when we had been alone for a while, would sometimes manage - addressing me in the third person as in eighteenth-century dialogues - to cry out in astonishment: “Why, he is an amusing fellow!” But whereas she had reacted to some little random remark of mine, my way of looking and listening was enough for my present hostess, and whatever she showed me or told me, she did it with the joyful gusto that an actor absorbs from an alert audience - so perhaps the so-called sense of humour is nothing other than a happy alertness. Though once, toward the end of my stay - the two of us were sitting at the kitchen table and I was just looking silently out into the yard - she said something different. Something contradictory? Or complementary? She said that I had inside me a great, silent, passionate tearfulness; it wasn’t just there, it was raging to get out, and that was my strength. She went on to tell me that once in Lipa, when it was almost dark in the church, a man had stood there alone and erect, and sung the Psalms in a firm yet delicate voice. What had struck her most was that he had held his eyes shut with the fingers of one hand. She stood up to act out the scene for me, and we both burst into tears over that absent man.

[Repetition, Handke, P.]

...of a karst

But could the objects in a countryside and the works of its inhabitants be relied on for any length of time? What of those windless days which occurred in the Karst at every time of year, wordless days without sun or cloud formation, without contour or sound or shimmering colour on this disk of earth, when all life seemed to have died out overnight and I myself was the last creature that still breathed; and this forlornness was not as in other places confined to the moment of waking, was not dispelled by the crowing of cocks or the bells of high noon, all equally tinny, converging from the hundred sectors of the city (the television sets blaring in abandoned houses, the empty roaring buses, black rattletraps with drivers looking as if they’d been burned to a crisp long ago and we held together only by their uniforms). No dead satellite could be more lifeless on such days than a Karst that seemed covered by bone ash, the so-called karren fields where innumerable knife-sharp bones protruded and wouldn’t allow you to tread on them. But that, too, taught me something which only a metropolis can teach a visitor; namely, a way of walking.

[Repetition, Handke, P.]

...of vagueness

The vagueness was underlined by a blind window, to which my gaze was now drawn as to the centre of the world. It was fairly high up the slope on the sunny side of a large house, which I fancied to be the manor belonging to the porter’s lodge across the border. It stood by itself; in front of it there was only a single spruce, whose fur-brown bark brought out the massiveness of the yellow facade. A steep stone stairway led across a strip of meadow to the entrance. A child was on the stairway with his back to me; one foot a step lower than the other, he seemed hesitant; the steps were too big for a child. The slope was hatched, so to speak, with grass, whose fine shadow pattern was repeated in the oblique grooves of the facade. This made the house behind the spruce look more like a yellow rock than like a building. It seemed uninhabited. The child on the steps was in the entrance not to a house but to a playground.
The blind window was, far and wide, the only one of its kind. It owed its effect to the absence of something ordinarily present: to its opacity. Thanks to its extreme vagueness, it reflected my gaze; and the muddle of languages, the confusion of voices within me fell silent: my whole being fell silent, and read.

[Repetition, Handke, P.]

...of meaninglessness

But when the hour was over, my sleep suddenly fell away from me, and it was then that I began to feel alone for good. Half sleep had been, as it were, my last companion in solitude, my guide and protector. And now from one minute to the next it proved to be a delusion. My word-mangling dream had been for a whirligig of ghosts, and now my waking seemed to be the punishment it threatened. And this punishment consisted not in being exposed to the elements in an undoubtedly inhospitable place, but in being stricken dumb. Here, far from human society, objects ceased to have a language and became enemies, executioners in fact. Yet what was destroying me was not that the iron bar protruding from the tunnel wall reminded me of torture or execution - but that, though sound of body, I was without company and, stricken mute, no longer company to myself. True, I saw the bar bent in the shape of the letter S, of the figure 8, of a treble-clef sign, but that was once upon a time; the fairy tale of the S, the 8, and the treble-clef sign had lost its symbolic meaning.
So I fled. Not from dread of the tunnel’s history, not from the silence or the stifling air, or for fear of a cave-in or a lineman - I’d have been only too glad if the lineman had grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and cursed me in every known and unknown language - but in a single impulse of horror at the otherworldly speechlessness that was pressing in on me, for over and above bodily death it meant destruction of the soul, which, now that I am trying to speak of it, is recurring more violently, more devastatingly than ever. Then I had only to run a few steps to be out in the open, whereas today I am confined to the tunnel; there is no escape, no niche, no parapet, and my only way to humankind is to equip the objects of a mute planet, whose prisoner I have become through wishing (mea culpa) to be a storyteller, with eyes that look at me forgivingly. And that is why I now see the little knot of glowworms in the grass outside the tunnel blown up into a fire-spewing dragon guarding the entrance to the underworld - whether to defend a treasure there or for my protection. I do not know.

[Repetition, Handke, P.]

...of class divide

Once several of us were sitting at a table, talking. At first I joined, but then, suddenly, it was all over between me and the others, the group on one side, myself on the other. I could hear them talking, but I couldn’t see them; at the most, a limb or two flashed across the corner of my eye. But that made my hearing all the sharper; I could have reproduced the intonation as well as the words of every sentence with terrifying accuracy and more realistically than the best tape recorder. They were only saying the usual things, amusing themselves. But the mere fact of their saying such things and their way of saying them infuriated me. Hadn’t I just been trying to join in? Yes, but now I was sitting deathly still on the fringe, wanting them to question me about my silence. And they, it seemed to me, were talking all the more glibly past me, over my head, ass though their only purpose were to show me that they were something special and that I didn’t exist for them. Yes, by talking and talking without the slightest pause while I sat there reduce to silence, these sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie meant to rebuff me and my class. And even if an unfriendly word was never dropped, their way of speaking, their flat, glib singsong, was directed against me. I felt the energy that had accumulated inside me before this get-together - the urge to say something for once - reverse itself into behind my forehead and strike back at me, renumbing my whole brain. That was my first experience of “loneliness,” which up until then had been a mere word to me. Then and there I resolved that I would never go in for this sort of society; and wasn’t it a silent triumph to be unable to join in such talk, to be different? I left the table without saying goodbye, and the talk didn’t subside for so much as a moment. Later, when the story got around, it came to my ears that I hadn’t had a good upbringing, as they put it, “a proper nursery,” and it occurred to me that, sure enough, there hadn’t been a separate room for the children in our house. These incidents left me with a habit that I had to break myself of later; when I got into an argument, I invariably addressed my adversary, however singular, by the second person plural.

[Repetition, Handke, P.]

...of obscuration

In those days I never thought of becoming a teacher myself - I wanted to remain a pupil forever, the pupil for instance, of such a teacher, who was at the same time his pupil’s pupil. Of course, this was possible only while distance was kept, and we forfeited this necessary distance. I perhaps in the exuberance of waking, he perhaps in the exuberance of a discovery which up until then he had only let himseltxf dream of. Or perhaps the trouble was that I couldn’t bear for long to think of myself as chosen. Something drove me to shatter the image he had formed of me, much as it resembled my own. I wanted to remove myself from his field of vision. I longed to live in obscurity as I had for the last sixteen years, hidden in the big blue cavern that was my desk, where no one could have any opinion, high or low, of me - yes, after becoming even better known to someone than to the Doppelganger who had often haunted me in the past, I really and truly longed for obscurity. To be regarded for any length of time as a model, if not a marvel, was intolerable, not because of what my classmates might think, but in my own eyes, and I longed to vanish behind a wall of contradictions. So it came about that after asking a question proving that my thought had kept pace with his, and being buffeted by a look expressing an emotion deeper than joy, I made a hideous face, which was intended only to divert attention from myself but which - I could feel it the moment he did - wounded the young teacher to the quick. He went rigid, left the room, and stayed away till the end of that period. No one else knew what was wrong with him. He thought he had seen my true face in that moment; he thought my earnestness, my love of the subjects studied, my affection for him, who put his whole self into his teaching, was a pretense; he thought I was a cheat, a hypocrite, and a traitor. While the other students talked excitedly, I looked calmly out of the window. The teacher was standing in the yard with his back to the building. When he turned around, I saw not his eyes but his pursed lips, as hard as a bird’s beak. That hurt me, but I didn’t mind. I was actually glad that at last I had no one but myself.
In the days that followed, the beak became even sharper. This however, was not an enemy who hated me but a cold judge whose verdict, once arrived at, was irrevocable. And the cavern of my desk did not prove to be the refuge I had imagined. It was all up with my studying. Every day, the teacher proved to me that I knew nothing, or that what I knew was not what was “wanted”. My so-called knowledge was some sort of foolishness; it had nothing to do with the subject but was entirely of my invention, and in this form, without a certified formula, was no good to anybody. I stared at the cavern where once, as I warmed my forehead, the luminous world of signs, distinctions, transitions, connections, and common denominators had dawned for me, and I was alone with the black cloud inside me. Unthinkable that it would ever break up; it grew thicker, it spread, rose to my mouth, my eyes, took away my voice, my eyesight. This of course no one noticed. During common prayer in church, I had only moved my lips, and in school, since this was our principal teacher, it wasn’t long before I ceased to be questioned or even taken notice of. It was then I discovered what it is to lose one’s voice - not only to fall silent in the presence of others but to be incapable of saying a word to oneself, or of making a sound or a gesture when alone. Such muteness cried out for violence; acquiescence was inconceivable. And this violence could not, as was my little enemy, be directed outward; my big enemy was a weight inside me, on my abdomen, my diaphragm, my lungs, my windpipe, my larynx, my palate, blocking my nostrils and ears, and the heart at the centre of all that ceased to beat, pound, throb, spurt, and bleed, and just ticked sharply, angrily.

[Repetition, Handke, P.]

...of telling

And now, outside the station I discovered that since my arrival in Jesenice I had been silently telling my girlfriend about my day. And what was I telling her? Neither incidents nor events, but mere impressions, a sight, a sound, a smell. The jet of the little fountain across the street, the red of the newspaper kiosk, the exhaust fumes of heavy trucks - once I told her about them, they ceased to exist in themselves and merged with one another. And the teller was not I, it was the experience itself. The silent telling deep inside me was something greater than myself. And, without growing older, the girl to whom it was addressed was transformed into a young woman, just as the boy of twenty, in growing aware of the teller inside him, became an ageless adult. We stood facing each other, exactly at eye level. This eye level was the measure of the telling. I sensed the tenderest of strengths within me. And it said to me: “Jump!”

[Repetition, Handke, P.]

...of animosity

The next day when she went back to work it seemed that everything had changed.
Even the flies shunned her - even the flies had found her out.
Russ worked grimly behind his counter. As he handed her the plates he declined to meet her eye. It was difficult that way. Mary dropped one - a writhing egg flapping helplessly in a tempest of tomato blood and chipped plate. As she was clearing it up she glimpsed Russ’s reflection in the glass panel - a vindictive splitting his fat-nosed face. Even Alan had greeted her coolly. She no longer felt him gently beaming her with his eyes, and when she turned to him nervously he was always looking the other way, seeming to snigger in silence at her and her losses. I can’t bear it, thought Mary. It’s unbearable. What do you do when you can’t bear something like this?
At mid-morning Mary still trembled alone over the dishes in the smoked and yellow kitchen. Her mind, too, churned and splashed in the villainous water. Why did they hate her? She thought it must be the Hostel. Was it so bad to be there? Did that part of you seep into all the other parts? Or was it the books! When she returned to the Hostel the night before she found that Mrs Pilkington had confiscated four of the boys’ books, without explanation. Two remained: Britt and Management: An Introduction. Mary did not know how serious this was or what she was going to do about it. Then she had a thought that made her whole body fuss with heat. Was it out? Did everybody know about her now? I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, she chanted to herself, and worked on. The flies still circled her, in widening arcs of anxiety. Oh, how vile you must be now, she thought. How vile you must be, when even the flies shun you.

[Other People, Amis, M.]

...of charade

It was not the mask that died among the boots, but you. The girl with the yo-yo was not the only one to know about your masked play. From the very first instant, when, elated with pride, you talked about the distortion of the magnetic field, I too saw through you completely. Please don’t insult me any more by asking how I did it. Of course, I was flustered, confused, and frightened to death. Under any circumstances, it was an unimaginably drastic way of acting, so different from your ordinary self. It was hallucinatory, seeing you so full of self-confidence. Even you knew very well that I had seen through you. You knew and yet demanded that we go on with the play in silence. I considered it a dreadful thing at first, but I soon changed my mind, thinking that perhaps you were acting out of sympathy for me. Then, though the things you did seemed a little embarrassing, they began to present the appearance of a delicate and suave invitation to a dance. And as I watched you become amazingly serious and go on pretending to be deceived, my heart began to fill with a feeling of gratitude, and so I followed after you meekly.

[The Face of Another, Abe, K.]

...of deference

“Come on. Why do always defer to me?”
Without realising it, my voice had taken on a strident tone, and displeased with myself, I scowled invisibly beneath my bandages. Perhaps it was because the heat had come back, but the scars had begun to squirm like leeches, and in the flesh around them I felt a creepy, burning sensation.
I could not overcome the silence with such conversation. Whenever we began, the destination of our dialogue was always the same. I lost all power to say more, and of course you fell silent too. Our silence was not the vacuum that comes from having said all there is to say. Whatever conversation we had fell naturally to pieces and crumbled in bitter silence.

[The Face of Another, Abe, K.]

...of unobtrusiveness

That day too you greeted me with your usual unobtrusive consideration, or better, unobtrusive pity. Our silence, of course, was quite routine too…
How long would this silence, like some broken instrument, go on between us? Even the everyday exchange of pleasantries and gossip had petered out, leaving at best an elementary, sign-like conversation, absolutely minimal. But even in this instance I did not blame you. Moreover, I was amply prepared to look upon it as a part of your pity for me. A broken instrument is liable to produce cacophony; better let it remain mute. The silence was painful for me, but how much more distressing it must have been for you. How fervently I hoped we could somehow use this opportunity to resume talking once again.
Even so, you should have at least asked me why I was going out. Although it was an exceptional event for me to go out bright and early on a Sunday for the whole day, you did not show the slightest surprise.
You quickly regulated the fire in the stove and at once withdrew to the kitchen, and as soon as you had brought a hot towel you went to check on the hot water in the bath. You had not abandoned me, but neither did you stay close to me. I wondered whether all housewives were like that - I am talking about your excessive impersonality. Indeed you acted cleverly. You manipulated time beautifully, with the precision of electric scales, attaching no unnaturalness to our silence.
To overcome this silence, I tried to put on a show of anger, but that did not work. When I saw your heroic efforts to remain calm I at once backed down, quite aware of my own willful self-conceit. The icy lump of silence that lay between us was apparently too deeply frozen to melt under just any pretext. The questions I had prepared as I walked along - possible opportunities for conversation - were so mamny matches held against an iceberg.
Of course, I was not so optimistic as to imagine I could succeed, like a wily salesman, by showing you two specimens of face models and asking which you preferred. The first requirement was that my mask should not appear to be a mask; thus, it would not do to reveal to you the real motive of my question. To do so would be malicious sarcasm. From now on, unless I took up hypnotism, my questions would have to be indirect. But I had no further ideas. I had been optimistic, thinking that I could adapt myself to circumstances, as I had fortunately been able to do so far. For example, I went through various of my friends’ faces with your tastes in mind.
However, you were not a fish living by nature in silence. Silence was an ordeal for you. I myself would be the first to be hurt by any rash mention of faces; you were concerned about this and were trying to shield me. I blamed my own frivolity, but, saying not a word, I by-passed the silence, returned to my study, and locked up today’s booty and my instruments for mold-casting in a cabinet. Then, as usual, I began to take off my bandage in order to cream my face and perform my daily massage. But my fingers stopped unexpectedly in mid-air; I was lost in another dialogue with no one.
- Only my lost face knew how many hundreds of thousands of degrees it would take to melt this silence. And perhaps the mask was the answer. But I could not make it without your advice. Hadn’t I been checked into complete inactivity? If I did not break the vicious circle somewhere, it would end in a stupid impasse, repeating the same sequence. I could not give up the whole thing as useless now. Even if I couldn’t melt away the whole silence, at least I had to try to light a flame.
I rewound my bandage with the determination of a diver putting on his equipment. When my scar webs were exposed I had no confidence of ever overcoming the pressure of the silence.

[The Face of Another, Abe, K.]

...of moral indignation

At precisely that moment you filled two cups with black tea and brought them into the room. When I said nothing, you must have thought I was absorbed in my listening, and you left, keeping your footsteps as quiet as possible. Then, it appeared that I was the one who was mad! Even so, I could not believe it. How should a wound on the face have any effect on one’s sense of hearing? But the deformed Bach, no matter how I listened, would not go back to normal again; I could only assume the wound had produced this effect. I stuck a cigarette through the slit in the bandage and asked myself with a nervous fidget what I had lost along with my face. Apparently my philosophy about faces stood in need of fundamental revision.
Then, suddenly, as if the floor of time had slipped away, I found myself in a memory of thirty years ago. The event I had thought of not even once since then abruptly and vividly came back. It concerned my elder sister’s false hair. I don’t quite know how to put it, but I felt the wig to be unspeakably indecent and immoral. One time I sneaked it away and burned it up. My mother discovered this. She was strangely insistent. She questioned me, and although my action had been intended to do right, when it came to being examined I did not know what to answer and just stammered and blushed. No, if I had tried perhaps I might have been able to answer. But such things are sullied by being spoken aloud; I think my very strict moral sense made me silent… And if I replaced false hair with the word face the same unbearable feeling of frustration would fit in perfectly with the crumbling and empty sounds of Bach.

[The Face of Another, Abe, K.]

...of a transaction

Close by the two walkers, a woman hugged a man, who merely responded with a smile. But when, after a short conversation, the man tried to fondle the woman, she turned away. Speaking softly, he tried again, drawing her whole body to him; she stiffened and he turned away with a gesture of discouragement. His cheeks went violently red; and Sorger, who noticed for the first time how young the two of them were, thought of the skiing instructor, whose face in the “chapel” had worn an expression of bitter disappointment. And he drew the young fellow entirely into himself - that is, into the shimmering worldwide snowy night, into the healing wintry space, to make him well again.
Then, behind the window of the grocery store, the sad people reappeared - a grotesque, mocking world - in the form of two elderly men (the one sitting behind the checkout counter, white; the other, standing in front of it, black). They avoided each others' eyes as though - aside from the actual circumstance (which undoubtedly played a part) of their being “clerk” and “customer,” “black” and “white” - something more, something worse than personal enmity had erupted between them: the wretched incomprehension that blurs the features and muddles the mind - something that neither wanted and that made them both miserable.
Unlike the young couple on the street outside (where the man, with face averted, was timidly tickling the woman), the faces of the two old men in the grocery store were deeply pale. They did not speak; they hardly moved (except that the black man kept crumpling a brown paper bag). Both kept their eyes lowered; their lids quivered; not once did either appeal for support or help to the other customers, who stood congealed with their purchases, not even impatient, just as pale, silent, and forlorn as the protagonists. Only when the black man, soundlessly moving his lips, finally opened the door, did the clerk raise his face to the next customer, but he did not grin (as the witness outside had expected); he merely showed (to no one in particular) his dark, desperately wide-open, and for a moment earnestly imploring eyes.

[The Long Way Around, from Slow Home-Coming, Handke, P.]

...of variance

Was there no one else in the plane that carried you farther east that night? Your row of seats was empty, and the backrests in front of you were upright in the dim light reflected from the roof of the cabin. - The even hum in the deep, half-darkened cavern provided a background music that preserved the passenger’s connection with the past few hours. He thought of “his people” and made plans to see them soon; he was determined never to be late again. The dead skiing instructor brought the members of Sorger’s own family alive for alive for him. Once upon a time the had felt responsible for his brother and sister. There had been a bond between them that linked them all in a circle. Of late they had had little opportunity for a language in common (they hadn’t lost it, but it had become a kind of memory excercise that they just reeled off). Brother and sister embraced for the first time at the death of their parents. That, at least, was how it looked to the daydreamer, who saw the lights of the towns below him as paths in a cemetery and then as constellations. Then they had fallen silent for many years, at first in indifference, then in hostility. Each regarded the others as lost. When his brother and sister came to Sorger’s mind, it was in the form of a sudden death notice (and they too, he felt sure, expected nothing more of their brother than the news of his death). True, they often appeared in his dreams, sometimes talking to each other as they had never done in reality; but more often they were malignant corpses, lying around the house where they were born, impossible to get rid of. Because they had never become explicit enemies, there was no possibility of reconciliation.

[The Long Way Around, from Slow Home-Coming, Handke, P.]

...of unreality

Sometimes, when Sorger thought about the city, he saw the pass rising from it, unreal, uninhabited, and even without vegetation, sunk in the sombre-grey granite of a stony mountain range; and toward the end of his stay his own person became just as unreal to him. Talking to no one, he had finally stopped talking to himself. For a time, long and short breaths had conveyed secret code messages, and he was almost relieved at the thought that he could manage without speech; it gave him a sense of perfection. Then he sensed a danger in his inner muteness - as though he were an inert object whose sound had died away forever - and he longed to have back the suffering of speech. Unreality meant that anything could happen, but he was no longer able to do anything about it. Wasn’t he resisting an overwhelming power? Sorger feared the decision because he would have no part in it. He had lost his image of himself (which ordinarily enabled him to take action); and there was no one - though he often looked around for the women from Earthquake Park - to set limits for him by touching him. He consistently did his work (preliminary notes for his projected paper), without side glances at anything else, without stopping, in a state of frenzied concentration. And the city moved away from him, as though, little by little, all the windows had been closed to him. Yet “being forgotten” had once been a pleasant thought, and “arranging to be forgotten,” an art.

[The Long Way Around, from Slow Home-Coming, Handke, P.]