...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.]