My Year in No Man's Bay

by Peter Handke

  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.

  He 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.

  Several 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.

  No matter how citified he looked in his hat, tie, and oxfords, the teacher found no terrain too arduous. His clothes soaked by rain, his soles slipping and sliding in the clay, his glasses fogged up, he trudged along gamely. All through the war, while still a child, he had been in hiding in a cellar in the heart of Paris, and now he enjoyed life every day, especially the parts without deep significance. At certain moments while we walked, the tiered horizons of the Seine hills up ahead, even as he stumbled along—this seemed to be his rhythm—he, who was also often gripped by fear of death, preached of a sort of immortality there in the region beyond the hills; wasn’t the fact that this area repeatedly promised immortality a kind of proof in itself?

  Yet even at that time he was convinced that the end of the world was imminent, and it would come from Germany, all of whose landscapes he carried around with him—and here he would point to his chest. In response to the violent acts of the Baader-Meinhof gang, he commented, “This is the end!” and then the same when they committed suicide in prison. We were sitting that autumn evening on a quiet, well-lit square in Paris, and he stared into the darkness, which under his eyes grew denser among the trees and seemed to close in on us; he said it without a trace of smugness, filled with childlike or primitive horror.

  Years later he began to mistrust me, although he continued to write interested letters about what I was doing. This change, I now thought, as I made the little stones ping over the ice of the nameless pond, had started with my asking him to do something for me. I had noticed much earlier how difficult he could become the moment you specifically requested something of him. Any schoolboy lie was good enough for him when it came to dodging others’ expectations. And one time he was supposed to mail something to me in Germany, where I was spending a few weeks to be with my father (which yielded the “Writer’s Tour”). I managed to persuade him, although he said he had dislocated his leg; the post office lay in the opposite direction from his school; and the air in post offices brought on asthma attacks.

  He finally mailed the envelope, but because he had put it off so long, I was no longer at the address I had given him, and the item was sent back. And upon my return he suddenly burst out in a hate-filled tirade. In Germany they had looked at the return address and seen “a Jewish name,” and that was why they had sent the envelope back. “A Jew! Return to sender!” And those were my countrymen!

  He calmed down, and for a while things were all right, until he wrote that he had tried to read my first book, the story of my ancestors, but all these villagers disgusted him. In his eyes they were all anti-Semites, who, if he had grown up among them, would have driven him into exile. Yet my “Drowsy Story” dealt only with rural life after the war, and the characters were Slavic peasants, many of whose sons had been killed for a Germany that had never meant anything to them. And in our region there was not a single Jew, and I recalled a chronicle from the turn of the century according to which, since even at the village fair, the day of greatest sociability, there was no Jew among the outside vendors, one of these had to stand behind his booth dressed as a Jew, in wig and costume, to make the festival complete—which, however, only confirmed my acquaintance in his opinion. He continued to announce he was coming out for a walk, but when I was already expecting him he would call to say he had been detained in town. The times he did come, he would remark as he was leaving that I was probably glad to be rid of him.

  He became most alienated from me when he stopped believing in the possibility of writing new books, or in books altogether. He, who had once been able to trumpet his opinion on a book, and books, with the best of them, now did not even mention a book, no longer asked me about any book, or refused to listen. It seems as though he has given up books, and sometimes I can sympathize with him. Only he no longer comes to see me, and so I cannot tell him that. In his old age he now walks alone, with his immortality on the horizon, and I daresay he probably never needed me for that.

  And I, did I need him? Whom have I ever needed? No one, as the woman from Catalonia always reproached me.

  There would be tales to tell of several others with whom I once considered myself connected and whom I have lost in the meantime, or can no longer bring to mind. I know they exist, often hardly changed since my time with them. But whenever I try to picture them and their day from a distance as I used to, nothing comes to me. I have no associations with them; at their very names darkness closes in.

  The same thing happens to me with my previous publisher, whom I once pictured as showered with happiness when he was reading a manuscript; for entire summers I swam next to him in the icy waters of mountain lakes, heading for the snow on the opposite bank; we were of one mind about our books, past and future. He has long since sold all his book rights to a magazine publishing conglomerate and commutes between his faith healer in Scheveningen, the Institute for Thalasso-therapy in San Sebastian, the Rheumatism Center on the Plattensee, the sulfur baths of Saturnia, the Clinic for Zero Diet in the Caucasus, and his guest cell in the monastery on Mount Athos. I know where he is at any given moment; we are not estranged—it is simply that I no longer see him anywhere. That the rights to everything I had done over the years did not belong to me: that was wrong.

  And it is the same with the woman whom I could view from a distance during one period in my life as my Muse. I knew her from her letters, but at that time it was enough to think of her for a moment across the continent and the ocean, and she would be there. Once, when I was sitting at a loss for words at my writing table, waiting since morning for a first sentence, which kept announcing its imminent arrival yet had not come by nightfall, I felt her
draw near and silently write the sentence out for me, and then the next sentences, down the entire page. And once, when I was flat on my back—and never again would I be able to get around—she came to be with me and rolled, pulled, rubbed, stroked, pushed, licked, seasoned, breathed, kneaded, and rendered me mobile for a long time, at least well past Easter, which was then approaching.

  For decades that woman, whose appearance I cannot even describe, remained in charge of me. From a distance I would turn to her and try out questions on her that were perhaps being asked for the first time since the world began, and she would answer without delay. I included in my books not a few of her letters, always written without corrections. Yet I did not want to know what she was doing; pictured her as having children, going to work, tending her house and garden.

  In the meantime she no longer answers, has fallen silent for good. Even before that she gave me to understand that she was disappointed in me. Then she suddenly turned against me, in a letter of pure hatred. She severed all connection. I was not the person she had taken me for. This happened, I told myself, because I always went on as though nothing were wrong. To keep her respect, I would have had to perish. I would have had to go to hell, and instead I took refuge in my writing. I would have had to go smash at a certain moment. I would not have been allowed to have a wife or child or an everyday life. I was supposed to suffer, or at least not hide my suffering, experience martyrdom many times over, and die a terrible and at the same time pitiful death. Only thus could I have remained true to myself and to her.