My Year in No Man's Bay (50 page)

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Authors: Peter Handke

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary

BOOK: My Year in No Man's Bay
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U
sually it rained so hard for a while in springtime that some of the former brooks, without which the fairly impenetrable network of valleys, often actually ravines and gorges in the suburb's landscape, would never have formed, overflowed the sewers of which they had long since become a part, and on the surface, if only fleetingly and quite harmlessly, traced out their old meanders: for instance the almost forgotten waters of the Marivel on the boundary between the bay and the upper valley, a name now attached only to an apartment complex, a
résidence.
Some writers of letters to the editor of
The Hauts-de-Seine News
offered the opinion that this was a bad omen, while others took it for a good one.
Likewise leaves wafted and whirled, without a real storm, from the woods, long before summer, for days, flying high through the bay, as if to blot out the sun, not withered leaves from the year before, but the pale green leafage of the current year, barely sprouted from the oaks as well as the edible chestnuts, birches, beeches, and again that was interpreted
one way or another (for those who had seen it as the handwriting on the wall, the summer foliage that followed, more luxuriant than it had ever been, was a miraculous sign).
 
 
A
s for me, the summer was remarkable particularly for those legendary lizards, the central figures in the coat of arms of the bay town, to which, by the way, a coat of arms was as little suited as a castle or any kind of overlord.
When I came upon them, on the gray-sanded sunny bank deep in the forest, I at first mistook the two animals for pieces of bark, and then for dead, because they were lying on their sides, close together, their whitish bellies almost skyward, and, unheard of for lizards, did not dart away the moment they were prodded but remained motionless, completely lifeless to the touch. And only after that was there a pulsing in their necks, increasingly powerful, and finally I noticed the foot of one of them on the other's body, tiny and yet pawlike. I sat down on a tree trunk on the other side of the path, which since that time I have called Lizard Way, and watched the couple, as I have subsequently done every time there is still, sunny weather, play dead while copulating—apparently? didn't lizards conceive virginally?—while above the treetops, through the great blueness, the transmitter sent out flashes from its upper deck, like a lighthouse operating by day.
With the passing weeks and months, the two animals moved, each on its own, into holes in the bank, side by side, in which they lodged like giant cave dragons of old, only gradually discovered by me amid the camouflaging shimmer of the clay, with their rigid, scaly triangular heads, from which only rarely their tongues darted out.
 
 
F
or this attempt at a chronicling of one year in the no-man's-bay I have not yet looked even once at my notebooks (although they fill the two upper drawers in one of the few pieces of furniture in the house, the dresser, to the point that they stick). In my storytelling I am following only my memory, and would like to keep it that way.
And with the help of—or according to the measure of—my memory, it is again animals, when I recall how the spring continued, as Pythagoras'
pupils recalled their day before yesterday, that determine my image of the bay at that time.
First, even before the lizards, on the days that did not get a little warmer until around noon, on another path by a bank in the forest, I came upon a colony of wild bees. These had their holes, numerous, honeycomb-close, like an earth city, in a zone of the gray-blue sand that is called here Sable de Fontainebleau, although the Seine hills are far from the town of Fontainebleau. The sand dug out by each of the bees, forming bulging ramparts around their holes, seemed to come from a considerable depth; it looked so unweathered, unwintry fresh, and pale as wood shavings, providing, along with the barely noticeable yellow of the pussy willows, the first spring color in the great expanse of tree gray.
Those hundreds of circles of sand on the mossy bank first drew my attention to the craters in the middle, which, when examined from a squatting position, turned out not to be empty at all. Hairy black heads with antennae filled the openings, at first only here and there, and then, after a warm hour of sun, in almost every earth comb. Fine sand blew and slithered in all directions, along the entire bank, and finally here and there a couple of bees flew out of their grottoes and took off, some black-armored, others red-pelted, toward which pollen?, while the majority who remained behind, merely crawling around their holes, were now pounced on by slim, all-black flies, at second look also bees, only of a different gender?, which circled and rolled about with the bigger, more colorful ones as if in foreplay.
That was repeated several days in a row on the Wild Bee Path, except that more and more of the plump chief bees were left lying as cadavers next to their holes. (I explained this to myself as the result of the persistent nighttime frosts; they had frozen to death.) And in spite of the stronger sun, the thousand-grotto city seemed to be dying out more and more; a rarity now when a hairy black head slowly struggled up to the light or landed with yellow-dusted legs; and the dive-bombing small bees had completely disappeared. And only later, when I turned over one of the curled-up putative frost-corpses did I see an empty thorax, as if sucked out, and it was exactly the same with all the others: only the back held together for appearances' sake; underneath nothing was left.
The legs of the dead, gilded with pussy-willow pollen, thus became for me the next color of spring. And even later, when I pushed the dead
leaves aside one at a time at the base of the bank, I discovered under them the main deposit of mining-bee corpses, heaps of them, all topsy-turvy, on top of and underneath one another, swept together after the slaughter as if in mass graves, and all the cadavers were completely without flesh between the head and the abdomen.
Since then, for the rest of the year, I have not seen any mining bees, either murderers or victims, either at the long since flooded settlement in the grotto bank or anywhere else. In the summer I was stung a few times in my yard by bees, true enough, but those were the usual kind (which, however, likewise in summer, for an incredible, sun-darkening moment, whooshed through that same yard, no, roared, a swarm-cloud, in flight).
Only once, also in summer, did I have an experience with perhaps similar wild bees, but I hardly got to see them. And my experience was then entirely different.
That was the day when, in one of the bay's forests, on the edge of a ravine, I finally found my way to the cliffs I had been missing in the area as a sort of nourishment for the senses. I had been following the upper edge of a brook bed, during a hot noon hour completely free of wind—and there: the cliffs, in which I had almost ceased to believe anymore, after all the terrain symbols for
roches,
which then turned out to have been blasted or built over, now only names on maps.
I stopped in my tracks, on a path overgrown with beech seedlings, at the foot of the row of massive rocks, emerging so unexpectedly out of the forest, with the sun shining on them and the trees at some distance. These were cliffs as cliffs should be, for climbing, for hurling oneself to one's death, for taking shelter under in a storm.
And then I again heard a roar, but different from that of the honeybee swarm and that of the warplanes that were still tracing their practice loops more often than usual from Villacoublay to the Ile-de-France: it was very close, and also, unlike the bombers, had something profoundly even about it, and came from the cliff in front of me.
For the moment there was no other sound. The entire stone face, as high as a building, and smooth as a pebble, was thrumming, and not until I was within a hand's breadth of it did I notice the crack from which that mighty sound surged—I almost had to put my ear right against it to be certain. Surged? It surged through me, swept me away,
and I allowed it to surge through me. And at the same time I was almost gripped by fear, and not only because of the occasional bee that came shooting out with its lone buzzing, which once out in the open promptly dissipated or sounded like nothing worth mentioning.
That there was such a roar inside the cliff had to do not only with the population of wild bees in there but also with the way the fissure probably widened out inside into a cave: the bees returning home sounded as shrill as wasps in the moment of squeezing into their refuge, and a moment later their sound was swallowed up in an entirely different sonority, the roar from deep within the cliff. As close and threatening as the sound was, I had, on the other hand, never heard anything come from a greater distance. If this was a trance, there was nothing more real than a trance. Only this made presence of mind possible. If ever there was a music of the spheres, it was resounding from the earth here.
In that hour with the cliff bees, the noon stillness did not last very long in the surrounding area. On that very day in Paris another peace conference was taking place, in connection with one of the civil wars, and the airspace above the seven-airport region was soon filled with the rattling and rumbling of helicopters ferrying representatives of the warring parties back and forth between Villacoublay, Buc, Toussus-le-Noble, Guyancourt, St.-Cyr-l'Ecole, and the Elysée Palace. But even while the squadrons were flying uninterruptedly over the treetops, I was listening only to the roar of the wild-bee colony in the cliff—like the humming of my childhood in the telegraph poles, except that it was a live sound if anything ever was, a sound before every other sound—and I tapped my foot to it and wished we might all have such a ringing in our ears, in our skulls, in our hearts, for me and you in the hour of our death.
 
 
I
t was not yet summer when I then went to the woods to write. On the one hand I had long had in mind to sit out under the open sky with my stuff, as I had during my time in Ulan Bator. On the other hand I left my study not of my own accord but as a fugitive.
To be sure, there had always been noise around the house now and then, but in the meantime it had become so bad that even in unsettled weather I ran away from it. By noise I do not mean children crying and sounds of work. Although high-pitched whines, drilling, hammering,
and squeaking could get on my nerves, I knew I had to put up with it, and battling my way through even seemed good for the text: as if it were to be tested for accuracy that way. There was a crash with whose help I found my way back to a train of thought I had lost during a period of too much stillness; wasn't there a danger of letting language run away with me in the stillness? This other noise, however, was dangerous in a different way. It seemed malevolent to me. It was not even that the noisemakers were taking aim at someone else—someone else, anyone else, did not exist for them.
In the last few years I had acquired some new neighbors. With the many trees and dense hedges, I hardly saw them, and merely heard, all the more clearly because I could not see it, that things were being torn down, built, rebuilt. Some evenings it was actually a relief when, in place of the earlier pitch-blackness and desolateness, from the area around the yard here and there another illuminated window shone. To be surrounded at a distance by the silhouettes of small houses, their roofs hardly visible through the treetops, was nice. It was as if a village had sprung up around my property, or a circle of wagons.
The nights in the bay still kept their spacious elastic fragrant peace. The problem was that I had to wait for daytime for my undertaking, or my observing. And now there was hardly a day without this noise, which left room for nothing else, and all the more noticeably in that it disrupted the very special silence of the region, and always without reason.
There were days when I was surrounded by it so completely and complicatedly that the only thing I could do was laugh and quietly keep plugging on. While one of the faceless neighbors was assaulting his environment through wide-open windows and doors with every madness aria ever composed—any music, no matter how lovely, blared this way now—the one next to him was blasting away—with an air gun? but then where did the smell of burning come from, penetrating into my study?—tirelessly at the swarms of pigeons in what was not even his grass, and the invisible third neighbor around the corner was trying out one of his ever-increasing number of fiendish machines, using the acquisition of the week to go at the not terribly old apple tree in his pocket-handkerchief yard—which he wanted to turn into a raised barbecue terrace?—instead of digging up the tree, grinding it to bits, on the spot, stump, root, and branch.
To this day I know hardly anything else about these people except that they have some of the attributes of campers (but aren't there quiet campers, and nice stories about them, and don't campgrounds have their rules?), and at any rate none of the attributes of residents, either of their houses or of the bay. Never have I encountered them except on their properties, or by their cars, which are always ready to start up, whose engines are also often running when the owners are somewhere else, and whose alarms go off at intervals, now here, now there. And never was even one of these neighbors to be found at Mass, or at the local bars, on the soccer field, on the
boules
court, in the handball hall. When the outdoor market opens on Sunday morning on the square in front of the railroad station, they may just possibly pass through the crowd, recognizable by their weekend-only garb, glaringly bright warm-up suits and jogging shoes.

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