My Year in No Man's Bay (35 page)
He sprawled there on the river-bend pebbles, these so close to his eyes that when he blinked, his eyelashes grazed them. The flint bulges appeared dark, with a shimmer of light only around the edges. To think that he expected to be strengthened less by looking up into the heavens than by looking down at the ground! And who else would have been able to give himself over to lying down this way? Not Picasso, not Max Ernst, but probably Matisse when very old, Cézanne obviously, Poussin, especially in his in-between period, when he was unhappily painter to the king, and even persnickety Braque.
Except that this grouping no longer had anything to do with him. None of what he had produced out of himself previously in his life could he now claim as his work. What he was trying out at the moment was amateurish drawing after nature, and on every sheet only one thing, a flintstone, a shrub, a pyramid of earth, a wave in the river. With determination he set himself up as a Sunday painter (daily), working with ordinary pencils on writing paper, and their little sound meanwhile
meant as much to him as his earlier stroking, rubbing, scratching, scraping.
meant as much to him as his earlier stroking, rubbing, scratching, scraping.
And thus he wanted to continue wandering and hiking into wintertime, going upriver from one drawing station to the next; he had started out in Portugal, behind Pôrto, where the RÃo Duero flowed steeply downhill into the Atlantic, had then crossed the border and continued on until he was below Zamora, in front of the ruins of the church on the little island in the river that had almost been washed away, while on the other island, around which the current swirled, a dog that had been abandoned there in the wilderness or had found its way there barked and barked for a weekâthen nothing more.
The feelings on this trip were new to him. Although they resulted from tiredness and were called sorrow or desolation, he experienced them more deeply and lastingly than those from his glory days. Weakness and defenselessness conferred a strength all their own, or so it seemed to the former prince. He felt compelled to see, precisely because of his repudiation; to take things in; to act. And thus he might shake his fist in space or spaces and say, “A new kind of painting must come! For which the peoples will mobilize. In the face of which they will fall silent and then go away, go and go. A kind of painting as festive as life. No more pictures hidden away in museums. Cliff painting.”
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he sketcher on the field of rocky rubble at the foot of the great Duero terrace sees above his sheet of paper a flash of lightning from a cloudless sky. It has already gone out of his mind when a peal of thunder follows. Or does this come from a shot fired by the two hunters, father and son, who for hours have been lying on the other side of the tracks, their sights trained on the badlands with all the rabbit holes?
he sketcher on the field of rocky rubble at the foot of the great Duero terrace sees above his sheet of paper a flash of lightning from a cloudless sky. It has already gone out of his mind when a peal of thunder follows. Or does this come from a shot fired by the two hunters, father and son, who for hours have been lying on the other side of the tracks, their sights trained on the badlands with all the rabbit holes?
No, it thundered and lightened, again and again. The hunters disappeared, running. The frogs jumped into the river, the wind died down, and autumn leaves fell, straight down and heavy. The lightning could be seen not in the bright blue sky but rather only in its reflection on the scree; each new bolt seemed to shoot out of the hummocks there.
In the confusion my friend sniffed his pencilsâthe scent of thymeâand continued sketching his object, a single pebble, shaped like a viper's
head. The drawing done, he set out for his camper, up on the chamomile-covered steppe just beyond the town. But first, after traversing a stretch in a sandstorm, with hares, storks, and rats scurrying back and forth across his path, and a sense of well-being from the grains of sand striking his cheeks like sharp blows, he stopped in at the barrack bar, where all the river fishermen and hunters were crammed in together, and there he stayed until the other express roared by, the last of the day, from La Corun
a to Madrid, announced long before between the river terraces with a bull-like bellow.
head. The drawing done, he set out for his camper, up on the chamomile-covered steppe just beyond the town. But first, after traversing a stretch in a sandstorm, with hares, storks, and rats scurrying back and forth across his path, and a sense of well-being from the grains of sand striking his cheeks like sharp blows, he stopped in at the barrack bar, where all the river fishermen and hunters were crammed in together, and there he stayed until the other express roared by, the last of the day, from La Corun
a to Madrid, announced long before between the river terraces with a bull-like bellow.As he continued on up the mountain, the first drops fell from the still-blue sky, and on the entire stretch such first drops again and again. The old cobblestone pavement on the serpentine road was darkened by them to a fresh black and wafted a fragrance up at him. If he painted again, he thought, it would be in camouflage colors like this.
If anyone was out in the open, it was alone on each of the slopes separated by precipices, searching for mushrooms or simply out there, the old men, “like me,” he thought. But he had not even entered school when they were fighting the civil war, that man there against that other one? And now? Tomorrow on up the river to Tordesillas.
But for today to the clay-yellow church of Toro, where with his eyes he traced the masons' arrows, keys, and circles etched into the blocks of stone. Then to the AlegrÃa Bar on the Plaza Mayor, where at the moment of his entering the glass of fino was already waiting for him, and on the television, just before the coup de grace, torero and bull began playing with one another, seemingly cheerfully. Then on to the Imperio movie theater, where he was alone with the lighting strips along the aisles, like those on a runway. After the film, which he did not watch to the end, it was already night, with the rushing of the Rio Duero in its deep chasm echoing through the town, and up here almost no other sound than the din from the pool halls, as if people tended to disappear into their houses more in Toro than elsewhere in Spain. Then for the late evening meal alone again in the innermost room of a little inn, with a view of a trompe l'oeil window, including curtains over the opaque glass, lit up from behind. Then, after the proprietor's hand on his shoulder in farewell, lying, no longer on his stomach, at some distance from town, in his camper on the savanna, and reading Horatius Flaccus by the oil
lamp: “What? A criminal gets up at night to strangle someone. And you, to save your skin, remain at home?” While turning down the light, brooding over the masons' marks, and the thought: “Arrows in those days still had feathers! And ours today still have them?” And in the dark then a woman singing on the radio,
“¿Quieres un lugar?
”
lamp: “What? A criminal gets up at night to strangle someone. And you, to save your skin, remain at home?” While turning down the light, brooding over the masons' marks, and the thought: “Arrows in those days still had feathers! And ours today still have them?” And in the dark then a woman singing on the radio,
“¿Quieres un lugar?
”
The Story of My Woman Friend
S
he had always wanted to return from her solitary journeys with a treasure. Yet every time she came back empty-handed again, and not because her searching had been without success. Each time she stumbled upon amazing things and took them, bargained for them, or, more often, stole them. She was capable of dragging them around with her on hikes that lasted for weeks, and then leaving them behind somewhere, one after the other, at the latest on the final leg of her journey, the last item perhaps just around the corner from her house.
he had always wanted to return from her solitary journeys with a treasure. Yet every time she came back empty-handed again, and not because her searching had been without success. Each time she stumbled upon amazing things and took them, bargained for them, or, more often, stole them. She was capable of dragging them around with her on hikes that lasted for weeks, and then leaving them behind somewhere, one after the other, at the latest on the final leg of her journey, the last item perhaps just around the corner from her house.
These found objects did not lose any of their specialness in her eyes; they merely revealed themselves toward the end of the journey as something other than the treasure she had had in mind. Over the years they were then brought back to their original place if possible, as now, on her southern Turkish excursion, the old milestone or marker from near Ephesus, which she had laboriously dug out and then rolled for hours with her hands and feet, with a Greek inscription of a fragment from Heraclitus: “The nature of each and every day is one and the same.” Once she had it in a different setting, this object had come to seem like a mere theatrical prop.
Yet as always in the presence of such a presumed treasure, out of
enthusiasm or feverish excitement she could not refrain from promptly removing it from the spot, getting her claws into it. “Here it is,” she thought each time, “I've found you at last,” and hurled herself upon it as if upon her destiny, finally discovered, which would bring the solution to the riddle of her life that she had long since ceased to expect from any man or system, and why not in the form of this unique wooden cudgel on the alluvial cone at the base of the coastal mountains, let's say near Bodrum, alias Halicarnassus, although almost only the husk was still wood, while the inside, the core, was packed lengthwise with shells or fish bones? shaped like drinking straws and open at both ends, so that she could imagine looking through the wooden pipe as through a particular prism that broke the light as nothing else would and had been lying in that very spot just for her. “And now tell me, precious thing: Who am I? What should I do? Where is my place? How will I come into possession of my power? What is going to happen to me next? Light my way.”
enthusiasm or feverish excitement she could not refrain from promptly removing it from the spot, getting her claws into it. “Here it is,” she thought each time, “I've found you at last,” and hurled herself upon it as if upon her destiny, finally discovered, which would bring the solution to the riddle of her life that she had long since ceased to expect from any man or system, and why not in the form of this unique wooden cudgel on the alluvial cone at the base of the coastal mountains, let's say near Bodrum, alias Halicarnassus, although almost only the husk was still wood, while the inside, the core, was packed lengthwise with shells or fish bones? shaped like drinking straws and open at both ends, so that she could imagine looking through the wooden pipe as through a particular prism that broke the light as nothing else would and had been lying in that very spot just for her. “And now tell me, precious thing: Who am I? What should I do? Where is my place? How will I come into possession of my power? What is going to happen to me next? Light my way.”
That piece of wood had long since been rolled back to the rubble cone, just as later the salt-white erotic three-legged stool, break-in booty from a saltworks distillery, was returned the same evening. But this morning, after a night in her sleeping bag up on the boat deck, at the first call of the muezzin (or his voice on tape), still in darkness, beneath the stars, from the distant land, along with the first cock's crow, which reached her at the end of the bay, over the sea, she again awoke with the sentence on her lips, “This is the day for the treasure; I will have hunted it down before sunset, and the world will share my amazement.”
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ho was she? And how did it happen that each time she set out searching anew it was in the Middle East of all places, in Turkey, whose inhabitants still lurked in the minds of her southern Slav contemporaries as arsonists, throat cutters, and stomach slitters, even though their domination of her part of the world had ended long ago?
ho was she? And how did it happen that each time she set out searching anew it was in the Middle East of all places, in Turkey, whose inhabitants still lurked in the minds of her southern Slav contemporaries as arsonists, throat cutters, and stomach slitters, even though their domination of her part of the world had ended long ago?
I read once in an article entitled “Speech and Silence of Women in Medieval Epics” that women at that time avoided any speech that threatened or exerted pressure: orders, directness, and questions that expected an answer. And in an article on “Interrogative Intonation in Various
Languages” I once read that German questions were marked by an interrogative intonation, whereas questions in the Eskimo languages managed without; where do you fit in, my dear friend, in this respect?
Languages” I once read that German questions were marked by an interrogative intonation, whereas questions in the Eskimo languages managed without; where do you fit in, my dear friend, in this respect?
I do think I know a few things about her. To begin with: of all of us, she is the only one without cares, sometimes to the point of being infuriating. For her, only the present seems to exist, whatever is more or less peaceably there. Anything that is not there, if it does not attract her, she considers a nonthing or nonperson. And even if her conversational partner knew otherwise: from her face he could never imagine her living with a man, let alone having children, being a mother. Even when no longer all that young, she still seemed, to use an image from an earlier century, virginal, at least at first glance, transient, and likewise for the person who saw her again after a long time, always swept away into the prevailing daylight, surrendering to it as the most crucial factor, something also visible in the angle of her head and her posture: for this she could forget even her searching, with the greatest of ease, without transition.
And she knew no fear. Whenever she heard about a fearful person, her eyes would stare in incomprehension like a cow's, and her face would become beautifully clueless. Equally foreign to her was any compassion, and far from despising a compassionate person, she would be angry at him: if anything could be done to help, she did it at once; if not, she ignored the other's misfortune.
And she was the one who did not have a name for anyone or anything, or if she did, not the original one. Her using a name was such a rarity that the listener would experience either disenchantment (probably initially hers) or a solemnity unusual for her. But as a rule, for her nothing in the world had a particular or unique name. “Dalmatia,” where she had been living for a long time, was not allowed to be called that, but “the coastland” or the “steep coastline” (even “karst” was too specific for her), and equally impossible were “thistle,” “hemlock,” “Tito,” “Ephesus”; only words such as flower, bush, marshal, city, perhaps “philosophers' city” could cross her lips. She usually did know the various particular names, but it was as if she were saving these for a special occasion. Or at first she did not even want to know the names, especially place names; her letters carried place names only in their cancellation stamps, and at most she might ask the recipient long afterward what
the “village on the lagoon with the miniature turtles” had been called, where she had spent a week in the “half-moon country.”
the “village on the lagoon with the miniature turtles” had been called, where she had spent a week in the “half-moon country.”
The most noticeable feature of her speech, however, was that she did use names, but ones she had invented, in the form of circumlocutions or images. Just as her “container,” “river beyond the mountain,” or “conifer that loses its needles in the fall” resembled the clues in a crossword puzzle, I found myself time and again trying to guess what she meant by her “fruit that makes you sleep well afterward,” her “day on which the trees with the white bark stand next to the front door,” her “star with a belt and the male sex organ beneath it.” Maribor, where she had been born, was always referred to by her as “the town with the red tiled roofs” (although that might have long since ceased to be true), and the Drawa, which became wide there, as “the river with the smoking ice floes,” simply because once as a child on a particular winter day she had observed this from the great bridge, when it was so cold that everything seemed rigid but the huge, wild ice floes galloping along with much crashing and banging and smokelike frost clouds that rose from them, from which all the pedestrians on the bridge fled, except her, of course.
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hose tiled roofs, stacked in layers all the way to a distant horizon, had been, seen long ago from the window of her room during her childhood and youth, the entire city of Maribor, with the addition of the long mountain ridge in the south, which only in a moment of impassioned homesickness was given its name by her, “Pohorje!” And from tile to tile the red had often changed its shade, so that in her eyes an eternal writing, which did not begin or end anywhere in particular, spread over the roofscape, formed by the darker patches, in curlicues, waves, loops, crosses, indecipherable, which she nonetheless never tired of reading; the longer she let her gaze travel back and forth over it, the purer she felt; and when later, in another Slovenian city, was it Ptuj?, with a similar roof map of the world before her eyes, in the midst of it, on the largest of the roofs, was it the cathedral?, real writing, monumental, dark on light red, leapt out at her, “IHS,” she saw such obviousness as positively barbarous.
hose tiled roofs, stacked in layers all the way to a distant horizon, had been, seen long ago from the window of her room during her childhood and youth, the entire city of Maribor, with the addition of the long mountain ridge in the south, which only in a moment of impassioned homesickness was given its name by her, “Pohorje!” And from tile to tile the red had often changed its shade, so that in her eyes an eternal writing, which did not begin or end anywhere in particular, spread over the roofscape, formed by the darker patches, in curlicues, waves, loops, crosses, indecipherable, which she nonetheless never tired of reading; the longer she let her gaze travel back and forth over it, the purer she felt; and when later, in another Slovenian city, was it Ptuj?, with a similar roof map of the world before her eyes, in the midst of it, on the largest of the roofs, was it the cathedral?, real writing, monumental, dark on light red, leapt out at her, “IHS,” she saw such obviousness as positively barbarous.
And the ridgepole tiles on those roofs had also been something special, she said, one long hood after the other, and thus in many rows, often a
little irregular, as if slightly bent, marching in procession toward the four points of the compass, which for her at that time had all been called “Land of the Rising Sun,” “Orient,” “Levant”ânot names but images to evoke. And if names, then only those derived from the sun, or from its reflection, the colors (when a cow was called “Brownie”), or from the forms of the earth (“the High Road,” “the Deep Ditch,” and all the capes of “Finisterre”).
little irregular, as if slightly bent, marching in procession toward the four points of the compass, which for her at that time had all been called “Land of the Rising Sun,” “Orient,” “Levant”ânot names but images to evoke. And if names, then only those derived from the sun, or from its reflection, the colors (when a cow was called “Brownie”), or from the forms of the earth (“the High Road,” “the Deep Ditch,” and all the capes of “Finisterre”).
What encouragement it gave her when she learned that somewhere in the world something was publicly and compulsorily known only by its generic name, where, for instance, a forest was known as “the Forest,” a delta “the Delta,” a hilly area as “Collio,” a lake as “Jezero” (that could also be the name of a village on a lake): “I must go there!” Such designations were never deceiving; things with names like that, such as the hillock named “Hillock,” the bay named “Bay,” fulfilled what their names promised, did them proud.
Or didn't the image of originality and exemplariness that emanated from the brook “Brook,” the place “Kamen” (stone), the desert “Le dé-sert” (even when the place marked thus on the map was only a sandy field in the midst of the bush), come instead from the power inherent in names and markers? How had that ancient debate as to which came first, the things or their names, been resolved? At any rate, as far as she could say herselfâand I never heard anything from her mouth but her own thoughtsâalthough the Turkish Mediterranean was not half as wild as other oceans, it, which was called almost exclusively “Deniz,” the Ocean, without all its nicknames, officially as well, billowed up before her every time as only a high sea could, and whenever she reached the top of a range of foothills she took it at first sight for an even higher range of foothills in the distance. Yes, this ocean with the name “Ocean” seemed original to her in the sense that the word is also applied to a human being; he is originalâthus an original?âno,
the
original.
the
original.
Almost all the given, arbitrary, specialized names sounded to her by contrast like diminutives, unsuitable, almost as idiotic and embarrassing as all dogs that were not simply called “Dog.” If it had been up to her, she would have had her children baptized only with the name “Child,” and she stubbornly referred to them, even in the presence of close friends, in just this way, calling both of them “otrok,” without “my” in front, but also not, as I did with my son, as a way of conjuring them up, but
rather as a given: that is what they are called, and that is what they are, and vice versa.
rather as a given: that is what they are called, and that is what they are, and vice versa.
Time and again I heard her reply, when asked her own name, especially by people on the street, where many thought they recognized her, not only in her Yugoslavia, “I have no name!,” triumphantly self-assured or furious, and each time believable.
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et twenty years earlier, just out of school, she had been “Miss Yugoslavia,” and although every year a new one was crowned, for many in her homeland she remained the one and only beauty queen, not forgotten even at the Albanian border, at Lake Ohridâespecially not there. On the magazine covers with naked women that in the meantime have become common, but were not in her day, not a few Balkan adolescents apparently replace the faces with cutout photos of hers, and just recently I heard a boy from the Hungarian minority in Croatia who was going blind say that he had studied every single feature of her face with a magnifying glass, day after day, with the world of light gradually disappearing, so as to have a concept for later of how a woman can look.
et twenty years earlier, just out of school, she had been “Miss Yugoslavia,” and although every year a new one was crowned, for many in her homeland she remained the one and only beauty queen, not forgotten even at the Albanian border, at Lake Ohridâespecially not there. On the magazine covers with naked women that in the meantime have become common, but were not in her day, not a few Balkan adolescents apparently replace the faces with cutout photos of hers, and just recently I heard a boy from the Hungarian minority in Croatia who was going blind say that he had studied every single feature of her face with a magnifying glass, day after day, with the world of light gradually disappearing, so as to have a concept for later of how a woman can look.
On the other hand, it has happened to me not infrequently that in her presence I thought I had never encountered such an unprepossessing, ugly creature. Whereas it was only later that I dismissed various other women, including some described as beautiful, she was “the broad,” “the crone” only at first sight. It was her intention to make such a first impression; she actually enjoyed going unrecognized as much as possible, even now and then by those closest to her, such that they looked away from her as from a man-sized wart. To disfigure herself in this way, all she had to do was change her facial expression a little, not even twist it, and this, practiced before the mirror during her year as beauty queen, she could accomplish at will. And a kerchief over her head, nothing more, provided the appropriate disguise.
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emorable events in her childhood were the Catholic prayer services in the cathedral of Maribor during the month of May, where she floated up to heaven with the hymns and litanies to the Blessed Virgin. An event of another sort was that afternoon under the apple trees in a
school that trained nurserymen when two of the young trainees there and she had shown each other their private parts, after which the three of them had tried to kill a stray cat, with almost no fur and looking as if it were about to die, “out of pity,” as the brats said, driving it with stone after stone, stick after stick, to the farthest corner of the orchard, where the animal was still alive and howling, while one of the boys was already in tears and she and the other were becoming more and more silent, “inside as well.”
emorable events in her childhood were the Catholic prayer services in the cathedral of Maribor during the month of May, where she floated up to heaven with the hymns and litanies to the Blessed Virgin. An event of another sort was that afternoon under the apple trees in a
school that trained nurserymen when two of the young trainees there and she had shown each other their private parts, after which the three of them had tried to kill a stray cat, with almost no fur and looking as if it were about to die, “out of pity,” as the brats said, driving it with stone after stone, stick after stick, to the farthest corner of the orchard, where the animal was still alive and howling, while one of the boys was already in tears and she and the other were becoming more and more silent, “inside as well.”
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