Read Online A Sorrow Beyond Dreams by Peter Handke - Free Book Online

steady, quiet flight, the air clear and cloudless, the lights of changing cities far below. Reading the paper, drinking beer, looking out the window, I gradually sank into a tired, impersonal sense of well-being. Yes, I thought over and over again, carefully enunciating my thoughts to myself: THAT DOES IT. THAT DOES IT. THAT DOES IT. GOOD. GOOD. GOOD. And throughout the flight I was beside myself with pride that she had committed suicide. Then the plane prepared to land and the lights grew larger and larger. Dissolved in a boneless euphoria against which I was powerless, I moved through the almost deserted airport building. In the train the next morning, I listened to a woman who was one of the Vienna Choirboys’ singing teachers. Even when theygrew up, she was telling her companion, the Choirboys were unable to stand on their own feet. She had a son who was one of them. On a tour in South America, he was the only one who had managed on his pocket money. He had even brought some of it back. She had reason to hope that he, at least, would have some sense when he grew up. I couldn’t stop listening.
    I was met at the station and driven home in the car. Snow had fallen during the night; now it was cloudless, the sun was shining, it was cold, the air sparkled with frost. What a contradiction to be driving through a serenely civilized countryside—in weather that made this countryside so much a part of the unchanging deep-blue space above it that no further change seemed thinkable—to a house of mourning and a corpse that might already have begun to rot! During the drive I was unable to get my bearings or form a picture of what was to come, and the dead body in the cold bedroom found me utterly unprepared.

    Chairs had been set up in a row and women sat drinking the wine that had been served them. I sensed that little by little, as they looked at the dead woman, they began to think of themselves.

    The morning before the funeral I was alone in the room with the body for a long while. At first my feelings were at one with the custom of the wake. Even herdead body seemed cruelly forsaken and in need of love. Then I began to be bored and looked at the clock. I had decided to spend at least an hour with her. The skin under her eyes was shrivelled, and here and there on her face there were still drops of holy water. Her belly was somewhat bloated from the effect of the pills. I compared the hands on her bosom with a fixed point at the end of the room to make sure she was not breathing after all. The furrow between her nose and upper lip was gone. Sometimes, after looking at her for a while, I didn’t know what to think. At such moments my boredom was at its height and I could only stand distraught beside the corpse. When the hour was over, I didn’t want to leave; I stayed in the room beyond the time I had set myself.

    Then she was photographed. From which side did she look best? “The sugar-side of the dead.”

    The burial ritual depersonalised her once and for all, and relieved everyone. It was snowing hard as we followed her mortal remains. Only her name had to be inserted in the religious formulas. “Our beloved sister.” On our coats candle wax, which was later ironed out.

    It was snowing so hard that you couldn’t get used to it; you kept looking at the sky to see if it was letting up. One by one, the candles went out and were not lit again. Howoften, it passed through my mind, I had read of someone catching a fatal illness while attending a funeral.
    The woods began right outside the graveyard wall. Fir woods on a rather steep hill. The trees were so close together that you could see only the tops of even the second row, and from then on treetops after treetops. The people left the grave quickly. Standing beside it, I looked up at the motionless trees: for the first time it seemed to me that nature was really merciless. So these were the facts! The forest spoke for itself. Apart from these countless treetops nothing