Free Moment of True Feeling by Peter Handke Page B

soft-smooth surface of the shoe polish in a new can, a freshly made bed, an elderly person who had preserved his curiosity represented experience.—I must get over needing guarantees of experience, he thought.
    In the bus he was alone with a North African worker. The North African was drunk. The bus was going fast, because there was no one waiting at most of the stops.
When the driver took the sharp turn into the Avenue Friedland without slowing down, the man vomited in the aisle. The driver pulled up at the curb and without a word opened the door. The drunk spoke loudly in his own language, but without turning toward the driver. Keuschnig pretended to be looking out of the window. Not one of the three in the bus looked at either of the others. The North African began to shout. The driver turned off the motor. It’s too late to say anything now, Keuschnig thought. Suddenly he noticed that the drunk was looking at him and speaking to him. He looked back blandly at him as if nothing were wrong. The North African fell silent and got out. The bus drove on. The driver didn’t say a word, he seemed to need no backing up. When Keuschnig looked at the splattered vomit on the floor, glistening in the harsh white overhead light, he felt it was meant for him.—At the next stop he left the bus, long before Auteuil. In getting out, he said to the driver: “Monsieur, vous n’êtes pas gentil, ” but the words didn’t come out right.
    The drunk had vanished. By then Keuschnig only felt sorry for him; before, he had also regarded him as a nuisance. If he hadn’t been abusive, I’d have helped him, he thought. But because he was angry and stood up for himself, I stopped feeling sorry for him. How could I be so unreasonable? Was I only sorry for myself as I used to be—did I, at the sight of that humiliated man, remember the child who let himself be humiliated without a murmur?—He had witnessed a humiliation; as a witness he felt that he himself had been surprised in a humiliating situation. Keuschnig fled. He ran down the steps of the nearest Métro station, changed at TROCADÉRO, and then at last, bound for
home on good old Line 9, he felt free from persecution.
    Without expressly thinking of it, he felt the varying distances between stations in his whole body. As usual, the distance between RUE DE LA POMPE and MUETTE seemed so long that he was surprised at MUETTE not to be a station farther on; and today as usual, between JASMIN and MICHEL-ANGE-AUTEUIL, he automatically went to the door too soon, though the train was only slowing down for a curve.—When at last the letters MICHEL-ANGE-AUTEUIL appeared white on blue, they struck him as the goal of a long arduous journey.—A good many things were as usual. But he wasn’t thinking of that any more, he only sensed it in a remote compartment of his mind. As though something depended on it, he tried, in throwing away his used ticket, to make sure it fell into the waste bin. It missed … Already at the gate, he retraced his steps, picked up the ticket, and kept tossing it until it landed in the bin.
    By then he was almost home. He took a detour across the Place Jean-Lorrain, where a market was held three days a week. The square was deserted. In the middle there was a small fountain, from the top of which a jet of water flowed into a little basin. The jet was so round, so clear, that Keuschnig put his hand in to break its flow. The leaves of plane trees lay on the asphalt and around their edges the otherwise dry ground was still moist. It was getting dark. The sky, which had kept some of its light, was reflected only in the oily water that had settled in the holes from which the market stanchions had been removed. A cyclist with purring generator turned into a side street. Keuschnig saw the greatly enlarged shadows of coats on the curtain of a restaurant window. The
water in the gutter had flowed off, and here and there a sparrow