My Year in No Man's Bay (67 page)

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Authors: Peter Handke

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary

BOOK: My Year in No Man's Bay
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At my feet piles of dark droppings shaped like olive pits: did that indicate there were still rabbits here in the woods? Two heavy fists pressed down on my shoulders, which were then the hoofs of a horse that whispered something into my ear.
Everything splendid I have experienced since my birth awakened in me, and I wrote my ancestors the following postcard: “Come. Get yourselves here!” “And my friends,” I thought further, “in just a little while they will tell me their stories from this year, altogether differently from my versions, and also entirely different stories. Away! Out of the forest!”
 
 
P
orchefontaine belongs to Versailles, yet the palace is far away. I have never felt really drawn to it, as though there, unlike in no matter what churches, final extinction reigned. The kings would never return? And a royal city without a river, even without a brook? Who knows.
Porchefontaine, more a suburb than a part of the town, has at any rate become dear to me. And at the same time the Echelles proprietor, with his establishment there, and I argue incessantly about whether his region has more to offer than mine. If I cite our transmitter, he counters with his “more essential and also more graceful” water tower (which, however, is not located within the township); if I praise our railwaymen's hanging gardens, he rates the couple of flower beds at the Porchefontaine station above them, because the (sole) shed there is made not of corrugated metal but of solid railway ties (yet the majority of the beds have gone to pot, and no trace of terracing); and even if he concedes that there are hardly any palms in his region, he still considers the only two there, which, standing side by side, constitute a pair, more interesting than our eight or nine, in that they are “like an entire forest,” whereas ours are isolated, in my Goethe's expression, merely “huge stalks.” The only things for which
he envies us are our very own buses—those of Porchefontaine, long accordion vehicles, wide, space-devouring, belong to Versailles, the capital, which has priority. Yet we are in agreement on the fact that the houses in our two bays, with forests round about, are in all respects ideally sisterly, and therefore would not need sister cities anywhere in Europe (except that in his bay there have been rumors of the construction of an underground highway, straight through the foot of the mountain).
 
 
T
he day before the day before the day before yesterday, on the way there, going downhill, I pushed leaves with my foot over the traces of the wintertime mushroom seekers, if possible more violent than their predecessors, the earth churned up by them as if in a hasty burglary; or weren't these perhaps the traces of birds going after worms? And at the campsite of the foreign-seeming windbreak workers, this time I found debris, an empty pack of not at all common cigarillos and likewise a bottle with the label of a fine Bordeaux. And a desperate dog went panting through the woods after his master.
It was stormy. An express train, visible halfway up on the Porchefontaine embankment, let out an Indian war whoop, while many passengers nibbled on shish kebab as if on a train through Greece. A temple bell rang, a muezzin called out over the sea, the settlement spread far inland along a fjord, by the sunken road at my back Scottish dunes overlapped, before me lay a giant's glove, I brashly stuck my hands into the winter stinging nettles; didn't they sting? Oh my, yes!
And what happened then? Evening could come now. The light down below at the edge of the woods was rocking in time to the wind in the branches, between flaring and fizzling. From the already dark thicket a stone flew past me, no, a bottle. A child playing? The transformer, long before the first house, was clothed in marble, as one might expect of the palace town of Versailles, and was called
sirène.
Then in the first house a woman was sitting in the lamplight, snipping stitches out of a piece of fabric, while two cats sat in front of the house like a pair of shoes, and an adolescent asked me the time (my answer, as I saw later, was wrong), and a few steps farther on the first driver asked me for directions (my information, as I realized too late, was completely wrong),
and the next one asked me for a light (I had none, and he drove on, cursing).
I went, as the proprietor and cook had instructed me, to buy bread, watched, in the evening line at the bakery, as the inhabitants of Porchefontaine, at least the older ones, fished for coins in purses as shabby as those in my bay—which made me think they had at home not so much piggy banks as piglet banks—and carried my sheaflike load, which my arms could barely encompass, to our place of celebration, hearing halfway there, from a sprawling orphanage, otherwise silent as the grave, the voice of my son echoing.
The restaurant gave the impression, as always, that it was just being renovated, because of the ladders leaning on all sides against the isolated building, all the way up to the eaves, so close together that from afar it looked as though they barred all access; and high above it all another ladder swayed, fastened by ropes to the ridgepole, of rubber, inflated with helium, covered with electric bulbs, which now at night were on.
The restaurant, looking from the outside otherwise like a house no different from the others in the area, stood, with a garden in between, at the foot of the embankment where commuter and express trains traveled at different levels, both above the roofline. The proprietor had secretly, immediately after moving in, uncovered the source of the Marivel brook, located there, as he had discovered from the original maps of the area, and long since integrated into the sewer system, all the way to where it flowed into the Seine at Sevres; he had lined the trickle according to the model of the Fontaine Ste.-Marie in front of his earlier tavern. For the first time after almost a hundred years under ground the Marivel has thus become visible again, at least up to the end of his property, and also sounds decidedly different from the way it sounds through the manhole cover down the street (whose course even today, as long ago, faithfully follows the windings of the vanished brook).
On this evening our tavern had a garlanded entrance, not very conspicuous, because so soon after Christmas other doors in the village were also decorated, only differently.
 
 
I
nside, in a space unexpectedly as large as a barn, the master of the house was standing alone by the fireplace, and it seemed to me I had already come upon him decades ago in his stirring up of the fire, in the same black custom-made suit, standing erect, with a very long poker that allowed him to do what he had to without kneeling. And as always he was showing his Egyptian profile.
But in his face, usually so unapproachable, which he surprisingly turned toward me, there now seemed to be realized what he had once so fervently invoked: “I should like to see a picture of myself as a child, and I mean a picture of me shouting, crying, lost!” There it was. And at the same time he led me, his hand on my shoulder, quietly and amiably as never before into the kitchen, where he even allowed me to help him continue to prepare the food.
I put down the just-found last mushroom of the year, from one of the bomb craters, where my searching had previously been in vain, a so-called blewit, of all edible things the one with the most delicate smell, adding it to the king boletes on the table reserved just for them. Although still deep-frozen, these also seemed freshly picked, firm, heavy, as rosy as Snow White in some illustrations, before she opens her eyes to life again: thanks to the chef, who before freezing them had extracted some of the water (the person who collected them had been someone else, however).
 
 
T
he swinging door to the kitchen was propped open with a chair, and there was thus an unobstructed view of both the entire curtainless restaurant as well as the bar area, separated from it by a screen.
Indoors as well the house was trellised with the proprietor's ladder collection. By now there was not a corner without rungs, and yet I did not have the same feeling as in that other restaurant in the hills of the Seine, now long closed, where every spot, ledge, niche, windowsill was occupied by a rooster in porcelain, plaster, clay, fabric, in all colors and sizes, neck after neck stretched for crowing, which made my head reel on every visit; the ladders, often set up in pairs, like husband and wife, the latter with the broader end up, had with time become an unobtrusive
pattern that at the same time allowed the background happenings to enter their very own clearer, well-rounded sphere.
Such structuring was accomplished even by those fairly numerous pieces which, in conformity to a preference of the collector's, had unequal spaces between their rungs or were missing some altogether, and even by the few chicken-house ladders from five continents, simply nailed with cross-slats, boards almost without gaps.
But the eye was drawn farthest by the natural ladders, where nothing had been added, at most something taken away, like the numerous tree trunks leaning against the walls, hardly ever more than arm-thick, often left in their bark, merely capped, and the branches on the sides trimmed to just about sole-worthy rungs. And among these, my chief attention was drawn to one that, instead of segments of branch as footholds, had rock-hard tree fungi, alternating, now left, now right, actually grown out of the trunk at rung intervals, and that all the way to the top, firmer to the step than the branch stumps otherwise, a spirited formation, and furthermore in its white-on-white a handsome contrast to the blackish wood of the inn: but the person who had discovered this natural wonder in his meadow, cut it down, hauled it through the woods and over the hills, and added it to the other ladders in the restaurant, that was once again not the ladder fanatic himself.
 
 
O
therwise the dining room in the Auberge aux Echelles in Porchefontaine, as I noticed that evening, had gained a column in the middle, which, from the base up, represented a tall, shrouded figure.
And behind it, between the rung patterns, two suburban streets crossed, one leading from the railroad station in the direction of the forest, the other the local main street, with the bus line in the direction of the center and the royal palace. And here, too, outside a wide-open window, there was a birds' sleeping tree—as I was entering I had promptly received my share of their largesse on my good suit—in the prophet's view more densely occupied this year than “yours over there,” also more variously, for the sparrows let in other birds as well. Just now it was the moment in the tree for competing for perches and making a racket, along with the whirring of wings like splitting pieces
of bark, as indeed the rest of the evening traffic out there was also more lively.
 
 
B
y contrast every one of the chef's actions indoors took place almost imperceptibly. When pouring seasonings he seemed to reach into midair with both hands. And I did as he did. And likewise I drank tap water while working (“no comparison with the water in your bay”).
And then the familiar signal for another of the petty prophet's devastating tirades: the humming, without any particularly intentional derision, of Beethoven's “Ode to Joy”! And, this breaking off abruptly, there came, as if out of the blue: “What is left to narrate at your eye level? No one deserves a story anymore.” Or: “Where is the person who has not gambled away his potential story during these decades? The number of animal species is declining more and more, and the human species are increasing steadily. And to be interested in these people you would have to be a botanist. But worms, which do not undergo metamorphosis, still belong, according to your Goethe, to the plants. Storytelling survives at most as a disease or as phantom pain. The heavens have disappeared, like a book turning in on itself, the book has disappeared like the heavens turning in on themselves. Life still exists only in the spandrel realm between railroad tracks, runway, and highway. Perhaps for each individual the book of his life continues to exist. But what is in it? A person without ideas is even more dangerous than one without feelings. Ideas: those would be arms, durable—but I see only stumps. Metamorphosis was demanded of you. But haven't you just continued to swindle? What has fallen away from you but a rotten toenail? You could not be deeper, warmer, more alert in the world than in your book. Are you still in that book? As a storyteller you are no longer needed, and as a chronicler you are being chased away. A ladder, quick, a ladder! were Gogol's last words. Rainbow light, yes, but no rainbow appears. All of my chillun are weary.”
He fell silent sooner than usual, and I said, “Marina Tsvetayeva wrote of a friend: ‘As a farewell he made a fire in the stove for me'!”
Whereupon he replied, “She used to come often to my place at the Fontaine Ste.-Marie in Meudon, and in the middle of the woods she complained that there were no woods there. I wonder whether she is still so upset. On the other hand: if a poet is not upset, she will die.”
 
 
“
O
n the other hand”: such an expression I had never heard from him before.
For the moment the prophet had nothing more to proclaim. Previously he would have favored the pedestrians moving past outside as if on wheels with the remark “Scurrying do-nothings!” On this evening, for the moment when they came out of the darkness and took on first form, I saw them as an infinitely repeating ornament, lacking only—but how!—linkage. This linkage, however, seemed achieved with the behind-the-ladder painting, the only one on the restaurant wall, which portrayed the great meteor of Mecca, surrounded by a huge, solid mass of people (a linkage that did not suit me, a deceptive one). And at the same time, outside, very much by himself, a black street sweeper went by, on his head, to protect him while he was vacuuming leaves, earmuffs—but no, it was not yet autumn.

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