My Year in No Man's Bay (9 page)

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Authors: Peter Handke

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary

BOOK: My Year in No Man's Bay
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T
he two lights inside me have gone out. First the distant and the closer countries vanished from within me—the steppes of Mongolia, the highlands of the Cerdagne in the Pyrenees—then my imagined allies beyond the seven mountains. (My only remaining ally resides on the nearest opposite slope, and at the end of our visits to one another I see in this petty prophet of Porchefontaine more and more a caricature of my idea.)
Was this merely because I later met my absent figures of light face to face, or rather was brought together with them, through intermediaries?
Each of them seemed possibly even more reluctant than I, at any rate less generous with himself, or, on the contrary, proposed an alliance to me, thereafter plaguing me across the continents with dedications of his early-morning aphorisms, his minutest linguistic or legal glosses, his exhibition catalogues from Lübeck to Solothurn and Osaka.
None of these scattered folk casts light anymore. Nowadays the diaspora does not provide a community for me, and offers me nothing for my book.
 
 
M
eanwhile it is almost March here in the bay, and finally snow has come, too. Last night the roofs of the cars coming down from the plateau had a thick layer of white on them, and the sparrows in the birds' sleeping tree in front of the Hôtel des Voyageurs crouched there in the cold, fluffed up to twice their size.
And in front of the unlit palace of Versailles, shining out of the darkness, after an hour's walk in a westerly direction along the Route Nationale 10, veils of snow crystals slithered and lapped over the huge, deserted open square, and a young stranger, his Walkman over his ears, the only person out and about, smiled at me out of the snowstorm, and I thought of several people who had once meant something to me, whose day I had accompanied in my thoughts for a time, and who nonetheless were now out of the question for this story of my distant friends.
In contrast to the singer as text seeker, the painter as filmmaker, the carpenter as architect, the reader, my son, the priest, my woman friend, I have lost those others. A whole series of people who for years were very close to me no longer exist, and not because they have died. They are all living, on the other side of the railroad tunnel, in Paris, farther away in Munich, Vienna, Rinkenberg, Jerusalem, Fairbanks, Ptuj. From time to time I still hear from these people with whom I was once on such good terms. But it no longer moves me, there are no sympathetic vibrations inside me now; when I hear them mentioned, I feel reluctance and revulsion. Unlike my rally participants, no matter how I would like to recall their image from before, I cannot bring them to mind. The trail
of light left by these figures, who once seemed cut out to be companions for life, has been extinguished, and its place has been taken by something dark, without our having become enemies.
And that seems final. Never again, I have to assume, would we find our way back together, either through a heart-to-heart talk or through your or my masterpiece.
And then yesterday, continuing around the side of the palace of Versailles, between those pitch-black former edifices of power, on the street with its massive cobblestones, on which the tires made a deep, humming sound as the cars rounded the bend, I saw the snow dancing tier upon tier into the night sky, transected by a dove, and thought of the only politician who had ever been close to me, who now, after his fall from power, sat there in his retirement quarters, around the corner from his successor, in the heart of Vienna.
 
 
H
e had been a professor of jurisprudence, with an international reputation, summoned from everywhere to deal with urgent situations like a crack firefighter; then minister of justice, and it was no mere rumor that he secretly ran the government. Abroad, too, this little Austrian cabinet minister was received as a major statesman. And it was he who phoned me himself, long after I had left the diplomatic service, to say he had just finished my book about my youth in the rural boarding school; he had stayed up all night reading. He invited me to call on him as soon as possible, at the office or elsewhere, at any time of day.
So I met with him again and again, this man whom I had previously known only from a distance, at the university, where he had never been one of my examiners. We met either at his place in Vienna, on the rare occasions when I came to that city, or in Paris, where I was already living at the time, or later outside the city, in the Seine hills, though in a different suburb. The double doors in his ministry seemed to swing open by themselves, and not until I was leaving did I notice how high up the latches were. And likewise, whenever I stood with him at the window in his cavernous office, the squares and parks of the city seemed vertiginously far below, and I was in a hurry every time to get back on a level with the ground and out into the fresh air as soon as possible.
Perhaps he did not have that much power, but it was his power I
sensed above all, specifically as a sort of remoteness from ordinary people, even when he recited to me his entire schedule of meetings for that day, with people from all levels of society, from a reception for the Boy Scouts to having a glass of wine with war veterans. I, who spoke with no one for days or weeks on end, saw myself in comparison, at least during those hours, as closer to life, perhaps even immersed in it.
Astonishing how formal his bearing was there, so entirely different from the way he came across on the telephone, although of all his visitors that day I was the only one who had no agenda and also as a rule came at noon, when in any case he merely slipped behind a screen for a snack, in half-darkness. Each of his gestures he acted out, repeated, as if to call attention to it. It was as though this hour with me had an agenda after all: to bear witness to him in office. To be sure, he never said so, but it became apparent that he was inviting me as a chronicler, or at least as one such. Even the delicately rolled slices of ham and dill pickles he shared with me in his niche were supposed to be recorded for later. He never asked about my work, only reported on himself, his next piece of legislation, his most recent trip abroad, not exactly in the form of dictation but certainly with a few repeated turns of phrase that I was supposed to note. He shared these stories with me—about his illnesses, his mistresses—in the tacit conviction that I was there to capture them for posterity.
This became the game that brought us together, operative particularly during his visits to Paris, where each time he appeared with such a large entourage that to me, the witness, at least during his period in office, the country we had in common seemed to possess worldwide importance. When he strode through a salon or a hall of mirrors, with his likewise dark-suited, though much younger, more athletic-looking gentlemen at his heels, always about to dash off to his next appointment, he left in his wake the aura of a historic moment; that was how matter-of-factly and majestically he embodied his power.
And in his presence that impression never faltered, even when he ducked away from his retinue and drove with me out to the little restaurant in Fontaine Ste.-Marie, in the first forest bay beyond Paris, sat there outdoors under the giant oaks and sniffed the cloth napkins, always still a bit damp, pointed out to me the button missing from his double-breasted suit, or the way his eyes were watering because they were no
longer used to the country air, enjoying his anonymity with almost childlike pleasure, one among others on the terrace, yet with emphatic, constantly repeated references to the next gathering expecting him over yonder in the metropolis.
Since his fall from power he has been traveling almost more than before, but I have seen him only once, at his own place. Whereas previously I could call on him at the office whenever I liked, now I was given an appointment—“We'll squeeze you in.” And when I came, I had to wait a long time—as I get older, I like waiting—in a windowless vestibule; the “minister” (they spoke as if he were still in office) was being interviewed over the telephone by Swedish Radio. There was a dizzying to-and-fro of secretaries, butlers, bodyguards, chauffeurs, masseurs, creating the impression of an entire court. In the room I was ushered into, there was also only artificial light; although it was daytime, heavy draperies covered the windows. And when the retiree descended the staircase and also later, when he talked at me, in the presence of a third party, a sort of recording secretary, it was as if he did not recognize me, and I, too, found this politician, whom I had respected as I did no one else, more and more unrecognizable the longer he talked.
What he said reminded me of visits to mental hospitals when I was a lawyer. Here, too, areas shielded from the outside world, and indoor air, hovering near the floor, closing in around your feet; here, too, delusions of omnipotence. Except that in this case the pale figure, shuffled off into nowhereland, had really been—and not that long ago—the major historical actor for whom he now took himself. And that made the situation far less funny than with an obviously insane person in an asylum, and at the same time far more uncanny. There was nothing to laugh or smile about, and no one could even muster any sympathy for this man (as had strangely happened to me once on a visit to the commandant of Vilna, responsible for the murder of many Jews, who took himself for the author of “He who never ate his bread with tears …” and recited the poem accordingly, sternly and proudly, as if even the meter were his own creation, not Goethe's). And while the former politician continued to play at power, I tried to catch the eye of the recording secretary, to exchange a conspiratorial glance, but in vain: she ignored me. In the past he had shown himself a statesman in the way he glossed the world situation with a casualness that breathed authority.
Now, too, he issued an uninterrupted stream of commentary, but his casual remarks to those around him had turned into a sort of prattle. If in power he had been laconic and pithy, he now repeated each hollow comment at least three times. If as a man of power he had been the epitome of presence of mind, impossible to dupe, at the same time displaying a charming roguishness, he now seemed absentminded and humorless. Previously, even when he was reviewing the troops, his independence of mind had manifested itself; now he was merely officious, like a wooden doll (and his handshake felt mechanical when I took leave of him). As a man in power he had appeared muscular, massive; now, although he spent time every day in his workout room, he looked pasty and shapeless. And if he still read books at night, it was only to find material for the ones he himself was dictating.
I stood for a long time on the street outside his darkened house, horrified at this phenomenon that had once again leaped out at me, a chimerical world.
 
 
S
everal writing days have passed since the snowfall. It was snowing well into March, although close to the ground it was not cold at all; the early stinging nettles were already sprouting, the most painful ones. The snow came in fitful gusts, out of the underbrush, as if from a tree blooming in secret or as if tossed, just a handful of grains at a time, tiny snowballs that dissolved in flight into single flakes, floated down, para-chutelike, and immediately melted, leaving little dark spots on the asphalt.
But then with the waxing moon it turned bitter cold over the bay. The ponds, especially the wild nameless one deep in the woods, froze over, the dark ice patterned in the form of kinked reeds, and during my walk out there, before I settled down in my study off the garden, I skipped pebbles over the surface, which pinged, whirred, snapped, peeped through the forest as if from a plucked instrument, and sometimes one of the birds hidden in the water shrubbery felt spoken to and replied.
I did that also to invoke the image of another person who had once been close to me. It was maybe ten years ago that he and I had been
out walking here on a winter's day and came upon a frozen forest pond where we made the pebbles sing.
As I threw them alone this time, I recalled having him next to me, and I was reminded of his windup, awkward, like that of a chubby child, and when we played soccer, he always missed the ball with his foot, and yet it was always he, the clumsy one, who found the more innocent pleasure in such things. How else to explain his crowing laughter, even when, after a huge windup, his stone, always too large, plopped through the ice without a sound.
This man had been a reader for years, so full of enthusiasm that when he talked about a book even people soured on writing or on distant terms with books got fired up or at least grew pensive or puzzled, and those who still did read, halfheartedly, remembered what it had been like when they first discovered books. He, like the politician, was somewhat older than I, a teacher at a Jewish school on the western edge of Paris, without wife or children; in response to a book in which I described living with my son for the first time, he had written me the shortest, most trenchant letter, the kind I would have liked to bestow on someone else: “The story you have written is true. The child is your work.”
This man loved being outdoors, “even though I'm a Jew,” as he said, and thus as often as once a month the two of us would walk the two stretches of forest from Paris to Versailles, the southern stretch from Meudon and the northern one from St.-Cloud.
Along a firebreak, the piles of felled trees all pointed one time in the same direction, every treetop facing toward the mosque-white domes of Sacré-Coeur, many kilometers away, a vista I still look for today and do not find again, unlike the wild strawberries along the path that can be counted on to redden in the same ditches at the end of June.

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