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

of soot on it, and here dog tracks gave way to deer tracks.
    They climbed through underbrush. Birds were singing on every side. Fed by the melting snow, a little brook rushed loudly past. A few dry leaves stirred on the thin branches of the oak trees; strips of white bark hung trembling from the birch trunks.
    They crossed a clearing, at the edge of which some deer stood huddled together. The snow was not very deep; stalks of withered grass peered out and bent in the wind.
    The higher they climbed, the brighter grew the light. Their faces were scratched and sweaty. At the top—it hadn’t been very far—they made a brush fire in the lee of a boulder.
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    In the early afternoon they sat by the fire and looked down into the plain, where now and then a car sent up a flash of sunlight; the child had his compass in his hand.
Once, far below, a spot shone bright for a time and then vanished—a closed window among many open ones.
    It was so cold that no sooner had the clouds of smoke rising from the fire left the shelter of the boulder than they dispersed into wisps and vanished. The woman and the child ate potatoes that they had brought along in a little sack and roasted in the coals, and drank hot coffee out of a thermos bottle. The woman turned to the child, who was sitting motionless, looking down into the plain. She stroked his back lightly, and he laughed, as though that were the most plausible thing to do.
    After a while she said, “Once you sat by the sea like this, looking at the waves for hours. Do you remember?”
    The child: “Of course I remember. It was getting dark, but I didn’t want to go. You and Bruno were angry because you wanted to go back to the hotel. You were wearing a green skirt and a white blouse with lace cuffs, and a wide hat that you had to hold on to because the wind was blowing. There weren’t any shells on that beach, only round stones.”
    The woman: “When you start remembering, I’m always afraid you’ll confound me with something I did long ago.”
    The child: “Next day Bruno pushed you into the water with your clothes on as a joke. You were wearing brown shoes that fastened with a button …”
    The woman: “But do you also remember the evening
when you lay motionless on your back in the sandbox outside the house and didn’t stir a muscle?”
    The child: “I don’t know anything about that.”
    The woman said, “Then it’s my turn to remember. Your head was resting on your hands and one leg was bent at the knee. It was summer, a clear moonless night; the sky was full of stars. You lay on your back in the sand and no one dared say a word to you.”
    After a time the child said, “Maybe because it was so quiet in the sandbox.”
    They looked down into the plain, ate and drank. Abruptly the woman laughed and shook her head. Then she told him a story. “Years ago I saw some pictures by an American painter. There were fourteen of them. They were supposed to be the Stations of the Cross—you know, Jesus sweating blood on the Mount of Olives, being scourged, and so on. But these paintings were only black-and-white shapes—a white background and crisscrossing black stripes. The next-to-last station—where Jesus is taken down from the cross—was almost all black, and the last one, where Jesus is laid in the tomb, was all white. And now the strange part of it: I passed slowly in front of the pictures, and when I stopped to look at the last one, the one that was all white, I suddenly saw a wavering afterimage of the almost black one; it lasted only a few moments and then there was only the white.”
    The child tried to whistle but couldn’t manage it in the
cold. The woman said, “Let’s take a picture before we go.”
    The child photographed her with an ungainly old Polaroid camera. The picture showed her very much from below, looking down; behind her there was