My Year in No Man's Bay (46 page)

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Authors: Peter Handke

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BOOK: My Year in No Man's Bay
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It may be that all this led me to feel, if not like the owner of the entire area beyond my own property, then at least responsible for it, especially since hardly anyone else seemed to care about the place, to see himself as one who also had something to say and some say, if only “Out of the way!” “Don't build here!” “Don't you dare cut down this apple!” or even just “Quiet!” Although not borne out by the facts, it seems to me as though my chief occupation during that first period in the bay consisted of such using and cherishing, guarding and defending.
 
 
W
hen did the woman from Catalonia disappear for the second time? One can almost describe it as “an entire lifetime” that we have been playing the game of losing each other. Perhaps we are both convinced that nothing can happen to us, we will never be finished with each other, and thus push the game to the limit, keep putting off the serious part, or what is real in us, longer and longer, until suddenly there will be no going back, and one of us will be irrevocably lost to the other.
It is a dangerous game, a sinful one (it was not my friend the priest who said so, but I myself); for we see that we should stay together, even without the formal sacrament, in glory, and that it would be a dreadful shame to spoil it. “Fragmentary experience—complete dreams”: in this belief, too, one of my favorite mottoes for many years, Ana resembles me.
So it was always for only moments at a time that we were serious with each other. And but a moment after such a repeat honeymoon we might run into one another, coming from different directions, and cringe; so thoroughly had we forgotten the other person's physical reality in no time at all.
Very often the intimacy we had just experienced would be transformed abruptly into mutual rage. Who was this man? Who was this woman? The house in the bay, not so much roomy as full of odd corners, favored such estrangements, and as far as I am concerned, so did the fact that I was infatuated with my property, or, to use an old expression, I “had a fancy for it.” Such a fancy tended to have a paradoxical effect. And once more Ana and I used the game of loss to put off thinking about our true relationship with each other, put it off until the relationship was over. With each new day of grim dissension she and I both thought to ourselves that there was still time to find our way to the relationship we had had before, and one day: too late. It was the end not only of the game but of the two of us. And now, in retrospect, too late, I think: we were not really those two who once walked toward each other on the bridge to find harmony, nor those two who wanted to destroy each other with their bare hands, but beings of a third sort who had not yet been discovered for one another.
The Year
I
almost missed the right moment for telling the story of or reporting on this particular year in this region.
For one thing, it seemed to me that simply by living, walking about, taking things in, I had already written the book, that each day in itself was at the same time the day's work, and explicit word-making was more like a superfluous addition, a retracing, that would result in gratuitous ornamentation; for another thing, now that I had already spent several years in the bay, it was too late for such a one-year report, because, always thinking “too soon, too soon,” I was waiting for the aforementioned right moment, instead of simply beginning at some point.
This is what I finally did, actually with little faith, half convinced that the execution of my plan was a mere re-presenting, and was also taking place at the wrong moment, too late, or perhaps too soon after all. But I did it, and with the very first sentence all these hesitations were gone. (They were replaced and intersected by others.) I, the writer, was now the one who decided; and if I was ever anything, it was the writer. I experienced that once again simply by sitting down, as after every longer intermission, and writing—from the activity itself.
 
 
F
irst of all I decided what would not be included in my notes on one year in the bay. And what would be included would not be decided in advance; to paraphrase Wittgenstein, or simply to play with language, it would dis-cover itself, and in my writing down of things I would follow it.
What would not play a role but at most be mentioned: anything I had not experienced myself as an eyewitness, or verified, at least after the fact. Thus in the course of this year the statue of the Blessed Virgin was stolen from the pilgrimage oak at the edge of the forest. And upon hearing the news I went there and first observed the empty spot up in the fork between the branches, then, a week later, the plaster replacement figure, obviously mass-produced, and finally the original, which had turned up again. And I found out only from the bay's weekly newspaper about the old lady who left her house one morning and with her diamond ring scratched the paint on all the cars parked on the main street, and yet I felt as though I had been there.
What they call world history was also to be kept out as much as possible, less because of my dislike or distrust than in recognition of my weakness where not only that but also all major events are concerned: I do take an interest—and television does not prevent my feelings from being profound—yet I could hardly say anything about these events, let alone write anything. Not that the world's seemingly endless obstacle race leaves me speechless. It is only that in this connection images very seldom occur to me, images which, I sense, I would need in order to say anything, and when they have occurred to me, they have not once provided me with the necessary opening bars.
My weakness, with regard to both the horrors of history as well as the things that occasionally move me profoundly, is that I cannot transform them into images and cannot fall into a rhythm, as for instance William Shakespeare could, and who else? History becomes an image for me at most later on in my dreams, often even a compelling image, but then without a context, and if there is a beat to it, it breaks off every time in the middle, and furthermore the period in which the action occurred has never been my current one, generally agreed to be certainly epoch-making, but each time a past period, already almost legendary, once with Goebbels as the protagonist, transformed into a saint, during
his last days in Berlin, another time with Nicolas Poussin as the main character, during his unhappy year as court painter in his native France; or the dream took place at the end of time and of history, on the day before Judgment Day.
But I persist in my weakness. And who knows whether things may not be different someday? Whether world history will not eventually give me a coherent dream? And who says I have to wait until night for that? I'm thinking incidentally of my brother, probably the only master our village of Rinkolach has ever had, master in a trade, and his lifelong struggles with his country, his religion, his contemporaries, himself, his desire for victory, his desire for self-destruction, his ghosts—indeed his “preparations for immortality.”
 
 
A
long time before I set out to record this year of 1999 in the bay, visits to me had already become fewer, and in the last months, the months of preparation, they ceased altogether. As a result of my son's moving out, then my wife's, the house gleamed freshly in the emptiness, a little also the shabbiness, of this new beginning, and I asked myself whether it wasn't being completely alone there that I valued above all else and for which I had been fiendishly scheming all the time, not unlike a long-premeditated crime. (“You can't share your rustling of the trees and your trembling of the grasses—except in the book”: Ana.)
And after the initial befuddlement, then desolation, then longing for death—no, it was thoughts of doing away with myself—I was in good spirits, nothing else. I undertook no more journeys, not even short ones within the country. Instead I set out on foot every morning, even often in the winter rain, beyond the area, in all directions—except toward Paris—farther than ever before, and undertook actual marches through mud and night away from the bay, also as though I had something to be afraid of there.
I read hardly any newspapers anymore and no books, except the pamphlet in which the stonemason from the transitional period between the Romanesque and the Gothic told in fragments the story of his Middle French forays: “The New Cathedrals, Building the New Tower of Babel.”
Likewise I stopped making notes, put the pile of filled notebooks away in the most inaccessible cupboard, took down the maps of the Seine hills and the aerial photographs (smuggled by someone out of the air base up there for my purposes), wrote no more letters, removed from my desk the stones, wild apples, falcon feathers, and other fetishes, leaving only a row of pencils almost the width of the surface, most of them old and used up, and the ball of clay, scooped up from a sunken road here and long since become hard as rock (even paper—this above all—I banished from my sight), and then in the week before beginning I avoided any kind of preparation, forbade myself even to break into a run, drank before going to bed more wine than usual, expressly to distort and muddy my dreams, usually so clear and incisive, especially in the dark season, turned away when I felt drawn to look at something, and finally was waiting only for the first snow.
The last thing I did was sweep and scrub the house, even into the out-of-the-way corners—the housekeeper had given notice after my family moved out, explaining that there was nothing further for her to do with me there alone—and pruned the trees in the yard, more than necessary, so as to have additional spaces and openings to look through from my window; even opened with my clippers a small, round breach in the hedge, which, from my ground-floor study, was to serve as a peephole through the garden next door to the road I had declared the main one.
The bills were now paid in advance, as much as possible; the heating-oil tank was filled, the lane freshly strewn with crushed rock. And the first snow fell, if initially only, as I heard one morning on the radio, in the highlands of the eastern Pyrenees: I saw it from afar on the crops of the short-legged dark horses in the meadows by the Río Segre in the enclave of Llivia. And that was enough for me. I would begin the next day with my year in the no-man's-bay.
On the evening before the beginning, the blade of a jackknife with which I wanted to tighten a screw snapped back and cut me in the index or writing finger, so deeply that for a moment, before the flesh closed up again, still without a drop of blood, I saw the white of the bone flash. In the hospital, outside the bay, where the wound was sewn up, the doctor said the finger should be kept still for weeks, and “What is your profession?”
That was all right with me. All the better: I would make do with my other fingers, thus avoiding the familiar pitfall of false dexterity. No more postponement.
 
 
I
n the hour before I went downstairs to my study, I started a fire upstairs in the fireplace, of beech wood, as my grandfather always did before the Feast of the Three Kings, except that he used the glowing embers, and like him I then held my hat over it, and pulled it, still smoky-warm, over my head, for that kept headaches away for the rest of the year.
After that I went out to the yard, got up on the tallest ladder, and sawed a funnel-shaped opening in the top of the spruce, imagining that the mythical beast hiding in the woods, of whose existence I am convinced, would, if it were winged, build itself a nest there in the course of the year, to serve as its outpost in the bay, and I could have it and perhaps its brood in sight from time to time during my writing.
Then I went to the Bar des Voyageurs at the station, read a letter from my carpenter friend from Morioka in northern Japan and my favorite paper,
The Hauts-de-Seine News,
suburb by suburb, on the way home took a roundabout route, so as to pass the dog next door, locked in the garage during the day, and let the massive animal, which repeatedly jumped at the steel door, bark at me and bark himself out, and finally squatted in the yard by the open door to my study until, in the sparse grass at my feet, a path through the fields appeared.
The first sentence after that, not thought out in advance, promptly led me deep into the forest bay, and only now can I return there.
 
 
A
stranger crossing the bay on the rather leisurely local train, trav-A eling for example from the center of Paris (which is almost everywhere, after all) out to Versailles, will, at the sight of the expanses of hanging vegetable and fruit plantations to either side of the tracks, interrupted at first by no houses, only toolsheds, at most be surprised at suddenly being out in the countryside, the more so since during a 3,200-meter stretch in the dark just now he may have thought he was in the subway (the supposed subway is in actuality the tunnel through the
barrier formed by the Seine hills). The stranger will hardly be likely to get off at the station with the plane tree, unless he has time and no particular destination, and unless the surprisingly rural quality or rather the sudden indefinability of the landscape reminds him of something and holds out the promise of some curious excursions.
When I hear other languages in the bay, it is almost always from residents, especially the Portuguese—no, they actually tend to conceal their native idiom, speaking in public more the language of the country—the North Africans, the Asians, most of all the Armenians and the Russians. Pretty much the only foreigners who are here intentionally, also of their own accord, come from nearby Paris, and can be recognized as outsiders precisely by their not presenting themselves as such, but instead as people from the capital in one way or another, including having the accent to match; and then they are not in the area for its own sake, but are using it only as the starting point or end point of a hike.
Otherwise I have encountered in these ten years almost exclusively foreigners who found their way to the bay either by chance or even involuntarily. One evening a couple from a provincial city came into one of the few restaurants, sought out, if at all, only by residents of the bay; they had wandered in from one of the industrial exhibitions on the periphery of Paris. The couple immediately drew attention to themselves there, in and of themselves and then also because of their completely different, louder, gesticulating, space-grabbing self-assurance, and finally they expressed in such clear signals and utterances their superiority to the region, also their disdain, in the presence of the scattering of brooding, seemingly hunched-over local folk that I, if they had not wolfed down their food and disappeared quickly, would have got up from my seat and, as a representative of the place, barked at them to behave themselves in a manner appropriate to strangers and guests here among us.
It was far more often than once that I heard people who had strayed into the region asking from their cars, “Can you please tell me where I am?” and when a car with a strange license plate pulls over to the side of the road, I am almost sure in advance that someone inside, looking quite lost, will be unfolding a map. And one time, when I was heading home long after midnight, several people came running toward me over
the dark square in front of the railroad station, waving their arms and uttering cries of dismay (I immediately picked out my son in the group): as it turned out, a group of Chinese, who had mistakenly not got off the train until after the tunnel, and had now spent hours, meanwhile seized by panic, running back and forth like headless chickens, trapped in this indecipherable, night-cold no-man's-land cage, without taxis and without any passersby at all, without an open bar or police station.
But hadn't things been this way since long ago, not only in this current year of 1999? This year only one foreigner has stuck in my mind thus far: that almost-friend, a journalist, who changed his specialty from sports to war. When I, meanwhile more receptive to visits, perhaps precisely as a result of my months of activity here, showed him around the region, he considered it very special because he saw in a store window “souvenir” plaques of marble—in reality grave plaques in the stonecutter's display. He has remained in my memory because he, still a very young man, was dead soon after that, killed in the German civil war.

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