My Year in No Man's Bay (69 page)

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Authors: Peter Handke

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Meanwhile in the night sky floated a cloud in the form of an octopus
carapace, as seen long ago in the American Appalachians, with whom? (When a memory comes back to me this way, each time it seems to me someone was with me.) And I thought: To be one with the singer, without having to sing: my ideal. How falling was in me constantly, day after day. And now peace, the great eye. And at the same time: Oh. Goodness. My, oh my! How long had I now been on the road with the book? And the footprints outside in the pale winter grass of the inn garden were mine. I was the mythical beast? Amazement. Eternally amazed, we sat together, each on a ladder rung. The adventure of life showed itself in the form of a single rolling wave in the otherwise tranquil sea.
 
 
T
he last word in that night of Porchefontaine came from the woman from Gerona in Catalonia, Ana, my wife. (I have not yet said that she, meanwhile having climbed down from her pedestal in the middle of the restaurant, was among our company—my first thought: What is to come of this now?”—as was the sweetheart of Valentin, my son, from Baden near Vienna; the wife of Guido, the carpenter, from Hokkaido, Japan; the woman companion of Wilhelm, the reader, that policewoman and reader from Wilhelmshaven on Jade Bay; the Dalmatian husband—or Turkish or Egyptian lover?—of my woman friend Helena; and in addition Filip Kobal, the writer from the shadowy village of Rinkenberg behind my sunny village of Rinkolach, not at all unwelcome to me, for I was happy to have one of my own kind there with me, at least for today and tomorrow—and this time it was I who seized him around the hips and hoisted him from the ground.)
While in the sidewalk window across the way, long after midnight, the old Georges Simenon continued typing away at his
Apothecary of Erdberg,
and then another automobile driver, obviously lost in search of the palace of Versailles or some other palace, rolled past outside, in his highly polished vehicle, as if not of the present—we later invited him to join us—the woman from Catalonia spoke the sentence with which she had always sealed our breakups, only this time without the usual meaning and undertone, not out of the blue and more to herself, but as if she were taking the word from the mouth of the one who had spoken
before her, and were guiding it onward, as gently as possible, as factually: “This is the end.”
 
 
S
till missing was only my vanished friend, the singer Emmanuel, with his voice, the essential piece.
 
 
W
as he missing?
 
 
“
W
as he missing?” With that began his new, his
Last Song
.
 
 
—
January–December 1993
SCIS LEBEDUS SIT GABIIS DESERTIOR ATQUE
FIDENSI VICUS; TAMEN ILLIC VIVERE VELLEM,
OBLITUSQUE MEORUM, OBLIVISCENDUS ET ILLIS
NEPTUNEM PROCOL E TERRA SPECTARE FURENTEM
 
You know, Lebedos is a hamlet
more deserted than Gabies and Fidenes.
Nonetheless I should like to live there,
forget my kin, and be forgotten by them,
from the land gaze out upon the distant raging sea
—Horace
 
Γινεσθε δε πoιηται λoγoυ και μη μoνoν ακρoαται
See to it that you become doers of the Word and not merely hearers.
—Epistle of Jacob 1:22
The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick
 
 
Short Letter, Long Farewell
 
 
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams
 
 
The Ride Across Lake Constance and Other Plays
 
 
A Moment of True Feeling
 
 
The Left-Handed Woman
 
 
The Weight of the World
 
 
Slow Homecoming
 
 
Across
 
 
Repetition
 
 
The Afternoon of a Writer
 
 
Absence
 
 
Kaspar and Other Plays
 
 
The Jukebox and Other Essays on Storytelling
Copyright © 1994 by Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main
Translation copyright © 1998 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc.
All rights reserved
 
 
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
19 Union Square West, New York 10003
First published in 1994 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Germany, as
Mein Jahr in der Niemandsbucht
 
 
Designed by Abby Kagan
Title page photograph by Greg Goebel
 
 
eISBN 9781466806825
First eBook Edition : December 2011
 
 
First American edition, 1998
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Handke, Peter.
{Mein Jahr in der Niemandsbucht. English}
My year in the no-man's-bay / Peter Handke; translated by Krishna Winston.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-374-21755-6 (alk. paper)
I. Winston, Krishna. II. Title.
PT2668.A5M4513 1998
833'. 914—dc21
97-48948

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