My Year in No Man's Bay

by Peter Handke

  The person who did something after all was my son. Valentin, in defiance of the usual expression, did not “come” to me. He ran, galloped, flitted, leaped, stumbled, dashed. That usually happened after periods of separation, which had meanwhile become infrequent. Previously, even if he had caught sight of me the moment I appeared, his first movement had been a looking away, almost a violent swiveling of his head, as if he had been waiting for anyone but me. But now, picking me out without any particular peering around, even from among a crowd of people in a railroad station or airport, he would promptly break into a run, looking straight at me from way across the building. I did not see the need for help and the pleading quality that later replaced distrust in his eyes and can still appear there, even now that he has come of age; rather, it was an instance of uninhibited pleasure, never preceded by the slightest surprise, even when he could not know I was going to turn up. For he took it as a matter of course that when he had climbed the lighthouse at the end of the earth with his grandparents, in La Coruña (or somewhere else), on the platform at the top I would appear around the corner. And he did not even need to be separated from me to run toward me that way. Once we had just spoken with each other and then met by chance on the street, on opposite sides—he surrounded by friends—and he immediately slipped away and came flying and leaping toward me, a glow on his face that embarrassed me and at the same time made my heart bleed.

  For an entire decade the child and for a while also the adolescent and I lived together this way in harmony; or we were of one mind, without words, each of us, wherever he happened to be just then, equally preoccupied with nothing of moment, like two idiots.

  Only when we walked together did this boy otherwise so silent—to his teachers “silent Val”—begin to speak, the first speaking in tongues I ever witnessed. As a rule, it occurs to me, this happened when we were going gradually downhill, after a longish ascent, and if I still feel drawn today to places from the past, it is to those nameless stretches where my son did nothing but enumerate the world for me.

  One time, after we had gone up and down in the Seine hills, we descended to the Métro station in Issy-les-Moulineaux, located in one of those suburban streets for which the dictionary of commonplaces would offer the word “gray,” and he began to speak about the colors of the houses, and by the end of the street each house had its own color, shading, and nuance; yet he was not inventing or adding anything, simply comparing what was there, making distinctions, emphasizing, and when a building remained gray, which was the exception, it became dove gray, beech-trunk gray, slate gray, so that when we looked back over our shoulders the row of houses stood there as a strip of colors, more varied than any human being could dream up, and even the asphalt of the sidewalks displayed that tinge of red that is a fact in this region on the outskirts of Paris and takes on the deep red of animal blood in the lightest showers.

  I was always threatened by a kind of numbness: losing any sense of coherence, whereupon the world continued to move along without me; instead of conceptual bewilderment, which I welcomed, I was struck with something like a visual bewilderment, for which in the area where I grew up they had an expression—“to stare into the idiot box”—comical only to those who watched someone actually doing it. In the meantime I have been trying to avoid this condition with the help of an aphorism from Goethe’s later years: he says we have an obligation to keep ourselves alive and impressionable, following the example nature gives us. And accordingly, my decade of association with the child seems to have brought this notion of impressionability to my attention—a word I am now writing for the first time, although it has accompanied me since the beginning of this undertaking and actually showed me the direction in which it should be going, far in advance; a multisyllabic word, uncommon in this usage, that set me on the path for an entire book.

  I learned that a child could make one impressionable, much as nature does, simply in its way of being there before one’s eyes, to be perceived without Goethe’s microscope or magnifying glass, for instance with that cowlick, from which the eye moved on to the bracken, the door, the pebbles, the rusty key.

  Then my son and I had a falling-out. It was never put into words. Had that happened—and how close I was to blurting it out, and probably he as well—there would have been no going back. By holding back the final word, each of us made a fresh start possible.

  And yet our falling-out was a fact, and no mere growing apart such as they say is usual for parents and children in a transitional era.

  I see its origin in myself. Even when we were of one mind, I had an ulterior thought: to be alone and on my own again. Back in my family period I was already leading a double life. In hours of harmony I was still on the lookout for something else—the wind in the leaves over there, the quivering rain puddle far off in the light of night—and considered my being with the others a mere episode, though it might last for decades; afterward I would be able to go my way as never before. I lived with those who had been entrusted to me and recognized that inside me something was turning in a different direction, away from closeness, away from fulfillment, away from the present. That counter-direction within me often became so powerful, even during the day and when things were outwardly tranquil, that I could not stand being touched by a child, not even my own, although I was happy with him, in harmony.

  And then came the time when he did not believe in my affection anymore. He did not expressly avoid me; I simply did not exist. At our morning encounters he took cognizance of me without really seeing me. I, who with the passing years had come to need a greeting at least once a day, greeted my son myself, often through a door behind which he had locked himself, usually greeted him two or three times, hardly ever receiving a response. Upon occasion he looked right past me, jostled me, and did not even notice. Although Valentin and I continued to live in the house, more and more rooms, corners, even stair treads, door handles, and dishes seemed to become orphaned.

  In the evenings he came home later and later, and I never knew where he was. Although I asked him to, he never once telephoned; I had simply dropped out of his consciousness. When he did call one time, the people he was with had reminded him of me.

  Finally, while still a child in age, he began staying out all night, and I could not help waiting up for him. I got dressed and went out. In the suburbs, shortly after midnight, neither trains nor buses are running, and the headlights, shining, of a car, moving, become an unusual sight, and someone there, waiting in the house or in front of it, on the street, as I did time and again in those days, until that hour of night when only a barely audible, but all the more penetrating, hissing comes through the air, as if from all the electrical and gas conduits in the area, and still waiting when the first birds begin to sing and the racket of the day begins again—this person will perceive such a place, and with it the isolation, the silence, the ponds, the forests, only as his enemy. And on just such a night, a bitter cold one, with the glory of the sparkling winter constellations in the sky above the hills of the Seine, fresh snow was on the ground, and every time I walked down the white street in the direction from which I expected my son to come, and each time saw only my own tracks ahead of me, not those of any other pedestrian or any vehicle, I cursed the bay, together with its bamboo, palms, stars, and snow.

  After a series of nights like this, the moment came when my son strolled toward me in the early light with the dreamlike gait of a dancer, and it became a certainty to me that I would reject him. I wanted to disown my child. And I had that thought in these very words, fired up by my intention, as though, having made a breakthrough to a biblical story, I had attained a life goal. While he was asleep in his room, I paced up and down in the yard and repeated, “I don’t know you anymore; go away from here.” But I never spoke any such thing out loud, and not because on one of the following nights he had an accident but rather because the other story was still there between us, biblical or not.

  Yet I know of one father or another who has e
xpressly disowned his son. How irrevocable such ruptures are. How such fathers retroactively deny their sons any good qualities, even those things for which they once unhypocritically praised them to the skies. And besides I am preoccupied with the question: What happened to the prodigal son after his return? And: What if in reality God the Father had long since forsaken his human, crucified son—see God’s disdainful expression in many of his oldest portraits. And: Is there also a prodigal father?

  These are my background stories with my friends, who, while I sit here in my study off the yard, are on the road in different parts of the world on behalf of a new—what kind of?—story.

  But what is it that makes precisely these people my heroes, and not my many other acquaintances, who lend themselves far more obviously to being exemplary figures and contemporaries: my young journalist friend, who just last summer was covering the Tour de France and in the meantime has become a war correspondent; the professor of ancient languages, who now and then comes by here on his Japanese motorcycle, dressed all in leather, each time with a different beautiful woman riding behind him? Besides, don’t I know a great deal more about these acquaintances?

  Yes. Yet precisely the fact that I know so little about my son, my woman friend, the singer, the architect and carpenter, the priest, the reader, the painter, and the filmmaker makes them interesting to me or draws them to me, more from afar.

  That means: fundamentally I do not know any more about all the others, but the little I do know about them already seems to be everything, as if there were nothing more to be learned beyond that. No matter how I view them: they look complete to me, as Austrian society used to; inside me there seems nowhere else to go with them, and not merely because most of them have succumbed to what the petty prophet of Porchefontaine calls, with reference to all of contemporary humanity, “desperate self-deification.”

  The attractive quality of my heroes is precisely that I see them as unfinished and cannot imagine that that would ever change. Unfinished? Incomplete. Incomplete and needy. And they will be incomplete and needy all their lives. Close to despair, none of them will seek salvation in the worship of false idols.

  Of all those whom I know somewhat, only these seven are this way: eternally unfinished, incomplete, needy, cool, hot, always on the go. My poor carpenter, my rich painter, my loafer woman friend, my empathizing reader, my high-handed singer, my somnambulistic son, my jubilant pastor, the only ones with whom I can be together from afar, strike me, in the morning perhaps more, in the evening perhaps less, as figures of light—bold, fiercely decisive. Whenever I was in their presence, I had only to touch them accidentally to feel to the very tips of my fingers that they were in my head.

  I expect something of us—what? Something from the New World. That is unthinkable for me with a single hero, even with two: but from three on it becomes exciting. And to make clear what I mean, I shall offer a variation on an experience of the early Gregor Keuschnig: place beside the pencil on the table a hairpin, for instance, and push a shard of mirror next to them: how astonishing this threesome is. But how much more so when you then roll a pebble toward them, and fifth, blow a piece of string in their direction, and sixth, plop down a lump of resin, and seventh—is this maybe too much already?—nick an eraser among them: what a metamorphosis occurs in every one of the individual objects with each addition, and likewise in all of them together. What an experience, and how it wakes one up, tension created out of nothing, nothing at all.

  Yet as far as my heroes and I are concerned, there have been times when I thought in terms very different from “we.” One of the incentives to my present undertaking was actually the question: “Who is the hero? All of you or I?” In the midst of accompanying these absent ones, at the same time as I was observing things around me, the thought repeatedly interposed itself that I was the only one of us doing the right thing with his life. Only a moment ago I might have been wafting away with the smoke from the house next door or traveling with the passengers in the train to Brittany up there on the embankment, at the same moment so wrapped up in a distant friend that what he was doing just then was a first-person experience for me, and already a voice inside me was severing me from such unity, insisting that my life was entirely unique. Particularly in the backyard, there and present in the procession of impressions offered by the seasons, from within the earth-spanning stillness I became indignant at all the absent ones because they did not know what was beautiful, and were leading such a false life.

  Even now, separated from the yard by the closed window, at my table in the study, when I look out at the cedar, at the beech, at the three stone kings in the grass, and order my distant friends to file past in review, for a moment also seeing them together as a frieze, I can find myself wondering: Who is more where he belongs, the pastor in his forester’s vehicle, by his deathbeds, or I at my table; which of us is on the right path: the singer with his rising and falling notes, the painter with his pictures, materials, tools, machines, or I with my pencil script?

  Am I also a self-deifier? A self-crowned king? One of the millions of self-anointed emperors running around today? The new metamorphosis all the more unavoidable? Or should it be called: expulsion?

  Several weeks ago, on a sunny day, at the very first greening, that of She moss, I traced a wide arc through the woods in the bay here. Beside a sandy path, along a newly reforested area, where it was light, I sat down on a tree stump. Although on one side of the path the trees stood far apart and on the other the recently planted ones had barely reached the height of shrubs, I felt as if I were deep in the forest—it was so quiet, hidden, and at the same time lively there. The occasional airplanes, high above, white, hardly visible in the blue sky, were part of it. The whirring of the highway on the plateau at my back receded behind that of not yet fallen tissue-thin leaves in the oaks, still there even now when spring was beginning.

  As if it were a marker for the middle of the forest, at this place, unlike at everywhere else I had walked earlier, no more water glistened, not even the usual patches of standing water, and no rivulet. The sand, which had not been dumped on the path as elsewhere in the bay but had worked its way up from the subsoil, breaking through a thin layer of humus, fine as dust, was that of an extended dune, which emerged just as nakedly on the slope, although there it was firmer and more clayey, crisscrossed by roots, riddled in places by the mining bees, slipping into daylight en masse before my eyes, as if from ancient cave cities, reeling, flying upward.

  The path ran straight ahead, though continually forming humps and hollows, and disappeared into a distant realm, where a far-off light beckoned, with the same pattern of crooked branch shadows as at the tips of my shoes. The sand changed color from one section of path to the next, going from a loessial yellow to an ash gray, from coal black to a beach white, brick red, desert brown. The colors appeared sharply separated, section after section, and for each one a corresponding animal turned up, as if growing out of that particular sand.

  From the pale yellow a brimstone butterfly fluttered up. I saw the gray stretch enlivened by the similarly gray lizards, seemingly just born, a threesome, matching the coat of arms of the suburb, which extends into the woods here. And there, where the path suddenly blackened, to complement it a huge raven stalked along and sparkled, his bowing and scraping reminiscent of a duck, his sparkle reminding me of my runaway wife (a note from whom I had, just that morning, when I stepped into the study, found taped to the outside of the window). But the unpopulated places, too, were churned up by the tracks of animals, not only those of dogs, horses, and cats—which are led through the woods on leashes by their owners—but also those of mice, rabbits, birds, and then at my feet I searched for the print of the local mythical beast; but saw only clumps of rabbit droppings, as if expelled in mortal fear; mouse innards breaded with sand; feathers with tufts of animal fur stuck to them.

  As I continued to sit on the tree stump at the edge of the dune path, my mind more and more vacant, I began to f
eel as though at any moment a horse-drawn carriage would drive by, garlanded, with my departed or defunct ancestors riding in it.

  Meanwhile midday had come, balmy air, and the familiar yet always alarming joggers turned up, from the hundreds of office buildings up on the plateau, colorful like nothing else in the forest. One of them, as usual (and, as usual, a different one), called out a greeting. A little later, after the howl of a jet landing at the Villacoublay air base, squadrons of helicopters flew by carrying visitors of state, heading northeast over the hills toward Paris, whereupon it occurred to me that on that day a conference on a civil war was taking place.

  I saw a man going straight ahead along the dune path, between sun and shade, up and down, dark stretches of sand and light ones. I caught sight of him while he was still far off, in the place where I could sense that other zone, veiled in distance. It was the medieval stonemason, tramping alone through France at the end of the Romanesque period, the man whose notes I had been reading just that morning. He strode along, although overtaken again and again by one of the joggers, maintaining the same even gait whether going uphill or down, and likewise in the deepest sand, the gait of a villager, shoulders back, arms and legs swinging wide, not of a contemporary villager, but rather of one from prewar days. He was dressed accordingly: a black suit with an open jacket and trousers fluttering around his knees, a white shirt without a necktie, a gray vest. With every change of color in the sand of the path, in a hollow, on a rise, the walker glowed in new splendor, one colorful panting figure after another circling around him. When he paused for a moment, I fantasized that he was hammering his stonemason’s mark into a tree with a chisel. At my spot it was I who greeted him. A laconic greeting in reply, and already his back, shoulders rolling, as if there were balls of air in his armpits.