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.]
Monday, 15 June 2015
...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.]
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.]
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.]
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.]
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.]
[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.]
[The Long Way Around, from Slow Home-Coming, Handke, P.]
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