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

dark and windy; they were almost alone. The child drove an electric car around a circular track, and the woman sat on a bench at the edge of the concrete surface.
    She stood up and the child called out, “It’s so nice here. I don’t want to go home yet.”
    The woman: “Neither do I. I only stood up because it’s so nice.” She looked at the western sky, the lower edge of which was still yellow. Against it the leafless branches looked barer than usual. A sudden gust of wind drove some leaves across the concrete. They seemed to come from another season.

    Â 
    Â 
    Â 
    It was dark when they reached the bungalow. There was a letter in the mailbox. The woman recognized Bruno’s handwriting on the envelope and gave the letter to the child. She put the key in the lock but didn’t open the door. The child waited; then finally he asked, “Aren’t we going in?”
    The woman: “Let’s stay out here a little while.”
    They stood for quite some time. A man with an attache case came along and kept looking around at them after he passed.
    Â 
    Â 
    Â 
    That evening, while the woman cooked dinner, slipping into the living room now and then to correct her manuscript, the child read Bruno’s letter to himself in an undertone: “‘Dear Stefan, Yesterday I saw you on your way home from school. I couldn’t very well stop, because I was caught in a column of cars. You had a headlock on your fat friend.’” At this point the reading child smiled. “‘Sometimes it seems to me that you never existed. I want to see you soon and’”—here the reading child frowned—“‘sniff you …’”

    Â 
    Â 
    Â 
    During the night the woman sat alone in the living room and listened to music—the same record over and over again:

    The Left-Handed Woman
    She came with others out of a
Subway exit,
She ate with others in a snack bar,
She sat with others in a Laundromat,
But once I saw her alone, reading the papers
Posted on the wall of a newsstand.
    Â 
    She came with others out of an office building,
With others she shoved her way up to a
Market counter,
She sat with others on the edge of a playground,
But once I saw her through a window
Playing chess all alone.
    Â 
    She lay with others on a grass plot,
She laughed with others in a

Hall of mirrors,
She screamed with others on a roller coaster,
And after that the only time I saw her alone
Was walking through my wishful dreams.
    Â 
    But today in my open house:
The telephone receiver is facing the wrong way,
The pencil lies to the left of the writing pad,
The teacup next to it has its handle on the
Left,
The apple beside it has been peeled the wrong way
(but not completely),
The curtains have been thrown open from the left
And the key to the street door is in the left
Coat pocket.
Left-handed woman, you’ve given yourself away!
Or did you mean to give me a sign?
    Â 
    I want to see you in a foreign continent,
For there at last I shall see you alone among others,
And among a thousand others you will see me,
And at last we shall go to meet each other.

    In the morning the woman and the child, not conspicuously dressed for the mountain, which was not very high, stepped out of the house. They walked past other bungalows, and once they stopped outside one of the almost .
windowless housefronts and looked at a brown door to the left and right of which two black-stemmed lanterns had been affixed, as though to decorate a gigantic sarcophagus.
    On the gently rising forest path the sun was perceptible only as a somber light. Turning off the path, they climbed a slope and passed a fishpond, which had been drained for the winter. Deep in the woods they stopped at a Jewish graveyard; the tombstones had sunk halfway into the ground. Farther up, the wind whistled on such a high note that it almost hurt their ears. Here the snow was pure white, while farther down there had been grains