Free A Sorrow Beyond Dreams by Peter Handke Page A

because having something to do brings me back to life; and lastly because, like an outside investigator, though in a different way, I would like to represent this VOLUNTARY DEATH as an exemplary case.
    Of course, all these justifications are arbitrary and could just as well be replaced by others that would be equally arbitrary. In any case, I experienced momentsof extreme speechlessness and needed to formulate them—the motive that has led men to write from time immemorial.
    In my mother’s purse, when I arrived for the funeral, I found a post-office receipt for a registered letter bearing the number
432
. On Friday evening, before going home and taking the sleeping pills, she had mailed a registered letter containing a copy of her will to my address in Frankfurt. (But why also SPECIAL DELIVERY ?) On Monday I went to the same post office to telephone. That was two and a half days after her death. On the desk in front of the post-office clerk, I saw the yellow roll of registration stickers; nine more registered letters had been mailed over the weekend; the next number was
442
, and this image was so similar to the number I had in my head that at first glance I became confused and thought for a moment nothing had happened. The desire to tell someone about it cheered me up. It was such a bright day; the snow; we were eating soup with liver dumplings; “it began with …”: if I started like this, it would all seem to be made up, I would not be extorting personal sympathy from my listener or reader, I would merely be telling him a rather fantastic story.

    Well then, it began with my mother being born more than fifty years ago in the same village where she died. At that time all the land that was good for anything in the region belonged either to the church or to noblelandowners; part of it was leased to the population, which consisted mostly of artisans and peasants. The general indigence was such that few peasants owned their land. For practical purposes, the conditions were the same as before 1848; serfdom had been abolished in a merely formal sense. My grandfather—he is still living, aged eighty-six—was a carpenter; in addition, he and his wife worked a few acres of rented farm and pasture land. He was of Slovenian descent and illegitimate. Most of the children born to peasants in those days were illegitimate, because years after attaining sexual maturity, few were in possession of living quarters or the means to support a household. His mother was the daughter of a rather well-to -do peasant, who, however, never regarded his hired man, my grandfather’s father, as anything more than the “baby-maker”. Nevertheless, my grandfather’s mother inherited money enough to buy a small farm.
    And so it came about that my grandfather was the first of his line—generations of hired men with blanks in their baptismal certificates, who had been born and who died in other people’s houses and left little or no inheritance because their one and only possession, their Sunday suit, had been lowered into the grave with them—to grow up in surroundings where he could really feel at home and who was not merely tolerated in return for his daily toil.
    Recently the financial section of one of our newspapers carried an apologia for the economicprinciples of the Western world. Property, it said, was MATERIALISED FREEDOM . This may in his time have been true of my grandfather, the first in a long line of peasants fettered by poverty to own anything at all, let alone a house and a piece of land. The consciousness of owning something had so liberating an effect that after generations of will-lessness a will could now make its appearance: the will to become still freer. And that meant only one thing—justifiably so for my grandfather in his situation—to enlarge his property, for the farm he started out with was so small that nearly all his labours went into holding on to it. The ambitious smallholder’s only hope lay in saving.
    So