My Year in No Man's Bay

by Peter Handke

  And then again, as we made our way in the gathering dusk across the backyard to the house, I with my arms loaded down with firewood, the reader holding forth with both hands free, he began to make delicate trilling and fluting noises, his lips pursed, whereupon little birds, sparrows and titmice, came whirring from the trees and bushes and perched on his elbows, which he held akimbo.

  Things settled down with the reader only when he was gone, far away, back in his Germany (which at the time seemed more distant from France than it does now). At intervals he wrote me letters full of little stories about the seasons and reports on his country, and never expected an answer. I could say of him that he let me alone, and that did me good. Of course, my father lived in Germany, too, but I was completely indifferent toward him. Germany, a nonplace, despite my sense of finding myself and feeling at home in the smallest German word-hamlets: through the reader it became a country for me. I viewed him from afar as a poet. He was a court of appeal. And you could rely on the reader as on no one else. I took his letters along on my hikes and pored over every word, swore to be guided by them and never to disappoint him. I had confidence in him as otherwise only in the poets Goethe and Hölderlin, in Heraclitus and John the Evangelist. He was the epitome of constancy, never got worked up, and when he spoke, and not only about books, he gave a definite yes or no—my ideal, which I never attained. I, the writer, followed him on his expeditions in reading: just as I came to enjoy my own work through him, I read, after his telling me about them, the writings of others whom I had previously not known or even disliked. I went so far as to copy out sentences from his letters: “I exist in order to read.” Or: “When I don’t know what to do next: the light shed by reading.” Or: “If I start a family someday, down to the last generation it will be a family of readers.”

  Then, with the passage of time I noticed something about the reader that made me angry at him again. He was not content to be alone with his reading; he was on the lookout for others of like mind. Like me, there were quite a few here and there in Europe and even overseas who followed his example and read the books he recommended. He encouraged that, too. Through his reading he wanted not only, as he expressed it, to “keep myself in top form,” but also more and more to wield power. True, he felt no desire for public prominence. Nonetheless he presided over a circle whose head he was, the great reader. He presented himself as the authority in a most intimate circle, and thus it fell to him to dictate, without television appearances and newspapers, what was worth reading and what not. I saw the reader on his way to founding a sect, a sect of readers. And thus he claimed for himself and his followers exclusivity, infallibility, singularity vis-à-vis the mere crowd.

  The moment came when, after he had again begun to talk in conspiratorial tones about an exceptional book, an exemplary contrast to the prevailing literary nonentities, I wanted nothing more to do with such a reader. And I told him so. Wanting to wield power through reading, and surreptitiously at that, in a whisper, made no sense, I said. He was a bogeyman, a corrupter of children, the antireader, the equivalent of the Antichrist. “Clear out, beat it, let books be books again, each one as best it can!” I blurted that out, unthinkingly, as always when I am in a rage, and when I finally looked at him, his lips were trembling terribly.

  Thus we became friends. He continued to write his letters to me, but he never made mention of a particular book. For a time he tried to refrain from reading altogether, but then found that unnatural. Without reading, he said, he could not see the day in a day. The work that suited him was, and remained, reading and deciphering things. And wasn’t writing an invention that to this day held a secret power?

  To be sure, since then I have never seen him reading his book in public. He does it surreptitiously now, under the table, as it were, which reminds me of those carved medieval stone figures holding their book in their hand, and the hand as well as the book is shrouded in cloth. As a sideline he prints and binds books himself, one every couple of years, like those fragments of the twelfth-century itinerant mason.

  At the moment he is walking along Jade Bay by the North Sea at Wilhelmshaven, where my father still lives. It is night, after the first day of spring. The lights far out on the ocean probably belong to the island of Helgoland, and when the reader turns around, he sees Orion disappearing in the haze on the horizon, “until next winter!”

  It is not long until Easter now; hardly any sparrows are sleeping in the birds’ sleeping tree here by the local railway station, and the few who are left perch there at night in their normal size, no longer puffed up against the cold. I go or roll along to the priest of Rinkolach on the Jaunfeld Plain, where I was born.

  Today, Sunday, he is driving back and forth across the countryside because he has to say Mass in several scattered villages, one after the other. His rectory is elsewhere; Rinkolach is merely his branch church. It is a long time since there has been a priest in residence there.

  Patches of snow can still be seen on the plain, especially on the edge of the woods; unlike here, the climate is not determined by the ocean. Yet even where he is, in continental Europe, the air in late afternoon has a lingering mildness, and thus the priest is struck all the more by the contrast between the warmth outside in the open air and the massive cold inside the churches, particularly in the sacristies where he changes for Mass, always in haste, as now in the particularly chilly church of Rinkolach.

  On the table the elderly woman who helps the priest with his robing has placed a jam jar with a bunch of wood anemones; far off at the railway station on the border one of the infrequent Sunday trains blows its whistle, and down in the gravelly soil of the cemetery are piled the bones of my kinfolk, all jumbled and intermingled, with spaces between where there is nothing but the absence of my grandparents’ two sons who died in Russia for the Third Reich, most recently joined by the ashes of my sister.

  Thus I could close my eyes as I just did and spend this Sunday with the distant priest, sit next to him as he eats his midday soup, breathe in the smell in his car, and, stronger than he, who is always in a hurry, be with him in the afternoon when he nods off at his desk, and perhaps myself let my head sink onto my desk here; I would know my friend’s day inside out.

  But even with him there has already been danger. How indignant he has made me at times. It had almost nothing to do with his way of speaking, even if some of his expressions left an unpleasant taste in my mouth, for instance when he said he gave the dying members of his congregations “the death escort.” (Gratifying, on the other hand, that he never called a thing or a person “stupid,” “evil,” or “bad,” but used the term “simple” for it all: a “simple man” was a stupid or limited person; a “simple book” meant something inconsequential, somewhat humorous, and had nothing to do with “admirable simplicity.”)

  What put our friendship to the test during one period: that during the one or two times a year when I returned to my old region he took it for granted that I had to be mainly with him, if with anyone, not with my brother, the only surviving member of my family; I was allowed as little as possible or not at all to go about by myself. As the overseer of the parish, he imposed on the visitor the requirement of registering his arrival, his presence, and his departure, and all in the name of friendship. If I came, he was in charge; nothing else would do.

  He, who in his profession was always there at once for anyone who needed him, expected the same of his friend as a matter of course, as a duty. He could not imagine that the primary reason for my coming might be, for example, a certain path at a certain time of year, or a stone wall around a field, or the entire region with its milk pickup stands, new or rotting away, and not some living being, and certainly not him.

  If previously I had usually informed him of my coming, in time I began to keep my arrival secret and then even tried to avoid this man, who otherwise would have lain in wait for me far outside the village, at the train’s flag stop, standing there by his car, his arms crossed and his legs apart, d
estroying my monthlong looking forward to the footpath across the fields in the autumnal light, and, even worse, making it impossible for me to take a single step by myself even way out there, far from human habitation.

  And besides, it irked me that if anyone it should be this particular person with his clerical collar picking me up upon my return home, and with the local railroad workers as witnesses: it was as if I were letting myself be co-opted by a particular party in front of the whole population.

  From now on, no one, not even the priest, was to know in advance of my visits to my old home. At the right moment I would instead simply show up at his house, as I was accustomed to do with my brother. But he, although I changed the times of my visits, seemed to intuit my return to his territory, even if it was only for a matter of hours. On the deserted highway to Rinkolach, my footsteps making the only sound, the wind between my fingers, at sunset, when I pictured him at evening Mass in Moos or Smihel, suddenly I would hear a honking behind me, followed by a curt wave from the village boss that brooked no contradiction, telling me to get into the car, whose door he was already holding open. And the next time I got off one station earlier and slunk by back roads to the village, which I reached long after dark. Heat lightning flashed ahead of me. In its glow, the familiar figure was suddenly there by the cemetery, spreading his arms wide and greeting me, as usual without first saying my name, with loud singing: “Salve in domino!” There, on the way to the graves of my kinsmen, I backed away from my friend, as one would only from a foe, and at the same time I felt like a person who had been caught in the act, as though by being here without his knowledge I was a sort of poacher. And while I was cross at his cutting me off and blindly assuming that we both felt the same way, my recoiling and my reluctance to speak wounded him.

  Although we remained standing next to each other and talked, in the alternation between the darkness, which I have experienced so concretely only on the Jaunfeld Plain, and silent heat lightning, it felt as if we had just taken leave of each other for good. I said, when he reproached me for my unfriendliness, that he was a “despot,” “clueless,” a “cannibal” (etc.). He said only that I was “a very simple person.”

  I am describing this incident also because the nightmare of that particular nocturnal hour had already faded by the next day. Or had it? At any rate, on the way back from my brother’s house, where I had slept as usual on the couch under the staircase in the hall, I was honked at from behind my back, louder and more imperiously than ever, and then in addition had the headlights flashed at me, in broad daylight—when I had been sure that at this hour he would be teaching his religion at the elementary school in Bleiburg. Without hesitation he gestured to me, just with his fingers, to get in on the passenger side. We then moved to the trunk the crate filled to the brim with early white-skinned apples, just picked by him in the rectory garden. The quarrel of the previous evening, which had seemed absolutely final, was not even mentioned. He did not alter in the slightest his behavior as lord of the village, omnipresent; displayed it even more insistently, exaggerated it. And he also robbed me of that hour alone by the train window, that hour of slow departure, in an arc, one station after another, from the place of my birth, which I need in order to experience the region fully; instead he drove me in his car to the regional capital to catch the express, turning a deaf ear to my protestations. “Leave me!” I said. “No, I’m not leaving you,” he said. And then, after we had arrived much too early in Klagenfurt, a town that had never meant anything to me except for its movie houses, which were gone now, and after we had sat together somewhere, I was the one, as is not uncommon with me, who would not let the other go. “Stay a while, I’ll take the next train, I have time,” I said. “Don’t you remember that they’re waiting for me to do a baptism in Humtschach, and that after that I have to go into the rift valley and call on a parishioner who’s dying? That I’m not the master of my time the way you are, but rather its servant?”

  And this is how we worked things out between us. I always keep my arrival secret from him, and whenever I come home to Rinkolach I double back again and again, under cover of darkness, through the underbrush, and the district priest tracks me down, blocks my path, confiscates my open space, ruins my time at home, and after my initial resistance, I accept the unwelcome company, indeed even want to be with this other person for the time being.

  But who knows? What I do know is that after that nocturnal quarrel, the new beginning we both made, despite the powers of reconciliation I ascribed to myself, must be credited exclusively to my local friend. Was it only during my childhood that I could make up so matter-of-factly, for instance with our neighbor’s son? Didn’t I cultivate not long thereafter in boarding school one or two insurmountable enmities? Have I in the meantime become one of the “irreconcilables”? At any rate, that word appealed to me for a long time. But even there I no longer know.

  I see my woman friend under the Turkish sun, while here in the Seine hills the first blossoms are raining down from the trees, or rather, I sense her this way, in her environment there, the white-glistening delta of a river between the place where it flows out of the Taurus range and where it reaches the sea. She is turning a piece of wood in her hand that has lain in the water for a long time, in fresh water and in salt water, a narrow cylinder whose wooden parts, the fibers and splinters, have been almost completely replaced, into its very core, by finger-long, spiral-shaped bivalves that have grown into it. Only the outward form remains that of a cudgel, which lies heavy in her hand, heavier than one made of wood could ever be, heavy as stone.

  Remarkable that I can think my way to this woman (although she also helps me, as do the others on the road, by writing to me now and then or sending me a sliver of wood, and although I carried with me just such a shell-encrusted piece of wood along the southern shores of Turkey until it began to stink, and the captain of the ship threw it overboard, as he did with everything that did not belong on the ship). Remarkable, because we were once a couple, and our story ended in a way that makes a subsequent friendship appear miraculous. At the time I fled in horror from this woman who loved me.

  And here I interrupt this passage. For it seems questionable to me, and not for the first time, by the way, when I refer to the person I was in the past as “I,” not only the child, but also the person from as recently as last year. My “I”-uncertainty is equally great for all the years, and pertains to almost everything I did, everything that was done to me, and everything that happened to me. It is as though I constantly had to put quotation marks around myself in my memories. “I” looked after my three-month-old sister. “I” was mugged. “I” was resuscitated. “I” gave a speech. A moment in which I am not questionable to myself is a rarity, even reinforced with an exclamation point. Then I woke up next to my dead grandmother! Then I walked with my grandfather, facing into the raindrops, through the dust from the path across the fields! Then I sat all summer and fall, and wrote, looked out the window, yes I! Then I caught sight of my son, yes, I! Then I swam in the middle of the year in the middle of the river, yes, I! Yet with most of my experiences I find it difficult to say “I,” would rather substitute some other word, except that none presents itself. I have no choice but to use an undifferentiated “I” as the subject of my active and passive experiences, no matter how false it rings to me.

  Onward. Through. So at that time I was my present woman friend’s lover. I was thrilled by the two of us. I wanted to tell everyone I knew about her and me, and did so, too, in my circle: about our first meeting on the main bridge in Maribor, where I knew at once that we would become a couple. I even told my son, at the time still a child, about her, and had to hold myself back from flaunting my rapture with the other woman in front of the woman from Catalonia.

  Yet our story, as far as I am concerned, had begun beyond the body, as an idea, long before I knew my friend: it was that my woman should come from the country most closely related to me. Of course, this idea, which, by the bye, was as ero
tic and captivating as anything could be, had been forgotten instantly when the woman from Catalonia turned her head on that very different bridge in El Paso, and also remained forgotten for years; it came back to me only with the appearance of my friend on the great bridge in the southern Slavic town of Maribor, with people streaming by and the Drawa flowing underneath at an autumnally slow pace, as wide and bustling as a river in China.

  I then avoided any touch for a long time. I did not even want to look her in the eye, as if that would have been too familiar. One night, when the moon was full, she led me to a snow-covered field high above the city, and I did nothing but stand there for an hour; the snow lying on the ground and rustling, its crystals on top forming tiny gables, made more noise than I, and when she reached for my hand I slapped hers away.

  When we finally became a couple, more as a result of her prodding, almost pushing, it made me unhappy. As she undressed, with the agility of a teenager, I was thinking that it was all over.

  And something was over, namely my idea about her and me and our people, and something new was beginning.

  After we had been together, she promptly disappeared, without saying goodbye. Utterly downcast, I fell asleep and awoke the next summery morning as the entirely different person at whom “I” had already marveled as a child, usually also upon waking: unspeakably happy, shot through with sweetness, connected to everything outside of me, irrepressible.

  And in the months that followed, this sort of immediacy prevailed between us as a particular elegance, without any danger of a false step or a misunderstanding. It was a grace that made us invisible. When I think back, I see neither a face nor a body, but in its place the roots of spruce trees growing across the wood road, the clothesline on the terrace, the succession of moraines rushing by on the horizon through the open train window. When I was with her I felt as if I had been swallowed up by an earthquake. That boy who looked right through us as he passed the place by the forest path where we were lying. The band of reed cutters who poled their boat past our sandbank, each looking in another direction, anywhere but at us. Once we lay together under a cherry tree, and again the two of us disappeared, and the only memory image that remains is of the cherries up in the tree, as if each time I looked up there were more of them, small, round, glowing red.