My Year in No Man's Bay

by Peter Handke

  I followed him with my eyes, past all the bomb craters to left and right, obscured by the joggers as he was, until he disappeared into that so very different section of the path, no longer in the present but also no longer in his Middle Ages. And what had I just read in his notes? “I do not belong in the current era. I only wreak havoc there.” And on the other hand: “Today I shall find something I thought lost forever; there are such days!” And what was written on the paper the woman from Catalonia had stuck to the outside of my window? “We must remain at odds for a while longer. And even longer. And even longer.” But didn’t that thought come from me?

  PART 2

  1

  Where Not? Where?

  The adventure stories that meant the most to me told of a person’s search for the most suitable place for him to live. For example? And weren’t those actually fairy tales? And which ones?

  In my youth I wanted to be swallowed up by a metropolis. But none of the Austrian and German cities through which I passed fit that description. Not only the manner of the passersby but also the sounds, the smells, and the buildings made me feel like a stranger to those parts. And at home in the country I had perhaps been everything but that. Being a stranger to those parts also implied the opposite of what I desired: to be swallowed up. Even the springlike fragrance of lilacs in the villa sections of Graz, Vienna, Munich, Berlin could plunge me into misery. At the sight of the palaces of Schönbrunn, Nymphenburg, and Charlottenburg, of the magnificent hanging gardens along Hamburg’s Elbchaussee, of the Cologne Cathedral, even of the great rivers, the Rhine, the Main, the Danube, running through great cities, I had the sensation of dust in my eyes.

  The first time I felt I had become one with the wide world was in a town: that time among the limestone blocks on the harbor of Piran on the Istrian Peninsula. It was a mild evening between Easter and Whitsun, the same as now, thirty-five years later; I had just taken that examination on Roman law and wanted nothing in my mind but the white-gray boulders rearing up before me, with the gentle harbor waves breaking in the gaps between them. In Spanish towns, the largest and the smallest, I then had a similar experience, for instance during my summer semester in Santiago de Compostela, with the sensation, which always took me by surprise, that these places expanded from day to day, with more and more corners emerging from the shadows, even if today it may be no more than a newspaper stand far back in the dark lobby of an apartment building or tomorrow the wooden ladder leaning against part of the church ruins on an overgrown island in the river.

  Yet neither there in Spain nor in Piran in Yugoslavia was there any question of staying. At the time, for my further training, the suitable metropolis seemed to be Paris. That stemmed first of all from the fact that beginning with the moment of my arrival nothing there repelled me or excluded me; that not the slightest element interposed itself between this world-class city and me, who, and I felt I was this, was open to the world. And then again it was a color that revealed the place to me: the light, expansive gray of the asphalt on the boulevards that gave me the impulse to set out, to walk and walk—something I had had no desire to do everywhere else—and to cover the entire city, in all directions. Here was my future; here I would later on live as well as work. And at the time I could picture doing both only in the center, where I actually did have an apartment—at least it seemed central to me, which, indeed, gradually became true of almost every part of Paris; I never had to go through even the smallest lifeless stretch between my lodgings and the lecture halls, the left bank of the Seine and the right, the laundromat and the movie grottoes; and besides I had got away not only from the lilacs and the jasmine but more importantly from the whole Western European great outdoors and was quite content with the unchanging gray trunks of the plane trees.

  When I had to return to my country for my year in the Viennese courts, and after that a position in the legal department of the Austrian Southern Railway, it occasioned a pain similar to what I had experienced in childhood when I was dragged away from the village of Rinkolach to that horrible boarding school. I sat with my suitcase in an outdoor café by the Gare de l’Est, the asphalt at my feet showing the innumerable overlapping imprints of bottle caps from the hot times of year, and I felt as if I were experiencing all this for the last time. As if along with the gray of Paris I had to take leave of the world. A few drops of rain fell and were gone at once. At the thought of the coming years in Austria and my profession as a lawyer, I became aware for the first time of that black cloud, of which I could not tell whether it welled up inside me or on the horizon, which was poisoned by it, the cloud that meanwhile, I imagine, is merely resting, always ready to become active again. But a decade later I was living back in the metropolis where I belonged and working in the profession for which I am halfway suited, if for any. Working? Profession? I embarked on my project.

  Not until I began to look for a place to live did I come to know the outskirts of Paris, along with the gates leading out of the city, arranged like the markings on a clock. There had been no real gates for a long time, merely streets, which as a rule widened into squares at the point where they crossed into the suburbs. The apartments I saw in the inner quartiers were usually more beautiful or more elegant, often even quieter. But I chose a place near one of those squares, which, as time passed, came to signify to me more departure than entry gates, unless I was away for weeks and somewhere else entirely, for instance in the mountains: thus I returned once from a hike in the Pyrenees, dozed off on the evening bus from the airport, was surprised in my sleep at the unexpectedly more powerful and at the same time more even noise of the engine, finally appropriate to the wheels and the enclosure of the bus, opened my eyes and saw myself turning onto one of those well-lit boulevards that lead straight from all the provinces of France into the center of this city, for which the word “metropolis” seemed fitting as for no other in the world—and behind us, as a broad outlet into the blackness of night, the square of the Porte d’Orléans.

  And there I also lived for a couple of years with the woman from Catalonia and our son. All the rooms except Valentin’s, which gave on a small walled garden, were dark and with no particular view; from one of the windows I could see the city bus depot at the gate. From her Iberian childhood Ana was used to darknesses of a very different order in houses, from the front doors far into the interiors. And I actually appreciated the lack of a view. From my years in the vineyards, with a view of Vienna, the hills of the Vienna Woods, and the Pannonian plain, stretching to infinity, I still felt ill at ease with any panorama or belvedere (the street in Sievering where I lived in a rented apartment was also called “Bellevue”). Sometimes, when I sat facing that view for a long time, I could feel the pain, agony, and death struggles in hospital rooms down below, all mixed up together, and I understood that neighbor who during the winter months saw the bare stakes up and down the hills of the vineyard outside his picture window as the crosses in a cemetery, and likewise that other neighbor who, to get away from the distant and even more distant horizon of the lowlands, including the magnificent sunsets, finally moved to the most confining hilly moraine country, from where he wrote me that the lines of the landscape crowding in on him had cured him of the fear of death that had haunted him on his “Bellevue” property.

  So it was also a blessing to be shielded at my desk and elsewhere in the apartment from wide-open spaces and boundlessness. When I raised my head, there was water at eye level, close enough to touch, running in the gutter; or a truck, with a load of sand and a shovel stuck in it, drove by. I often worked there, and the hours with the family could be surprisingly festive.

  By compensation, wide-open space entirely different from that of my bird’s-eye view awaited me when I stepped out of the house with its dark nooks onto the square at Porte d’Orléans and began walking. In the beginning I still headed into the city, going from one center to the next: Alesia, Montparnasse, St.-Germain, whose fraternally broad tower I could always rely upon to give me a sense o
f arrival.

  For a good year I did not get past the city limits, at most crossed to the middle of the bridge over the beltway and immediately turned back. All the harmony characteristic of the metropolis, not only in the buildings but also in the movements of the passersby, seemed abruptly to fall apart over there in the suburbs of Gentilly and Montrouge, the former to the left of the arterial road, the latter to the right, the two indistinguishable at first sight. Just as the houses lost their common features, so, too, the pedestrians, far scarcer than inside the gates, without so much as a by-your-leave lost their character. They seemed slower to me—an inelegant slowness like that of people who are lost—also more awkward. Although there were few of them, they avoided each other, as I saw from above from the vantage point of the bridge, on the much narrower suburban sidewalks, turning in the wrong direction and not infrequently colliding with each other, while on the other hand the people of the metropolis filed past each other in the heaviest crowd with the grace of dancers. And the slower the pedestrians moved, the faster the cars went there beyond the gate, where the avenue with a name turned into a national highway with a number, “Nationale 20.” They no longer glided, but whizzed by, and the stretch of highway that followed was also infamous for its accidents. I understood those who translated the word banlieue as “place of banishment.” Even the sky above, no matter how blue it may have been, lost its Parisian materiality (which of course came into view again when one glanced over one’s shoulder). It became clear that the appearance of the sky took its cue from what was down below and happening on earth. At the time I felt the sky was not operative above the suburbs. It did not reach down to the ridgepoles and streets, and outside the city limits no longer extended into the splinters, pores, and bubbles of the asphalt. Extra portas its gray no longer had color value.

  Nevertheless I felt drawn more and more powerfully out into this nothingness. Soon, long before my fortieth year, I had recognized that city life, even on the edge of town, was not for me anymore: for all the casualness it lent me, to the point of a redeeming self-forgetfulness, for all the verve (with which, to be true, I often no longer knew what to do), almost nothing from this environment gripped me, and without being gripped by something, something before my eyes, I was deprived and felt lifeless, or at least not at my best. Over the years, things in the metropolis had stopped having a lasting effect, cafés and movie houses, the boulevards, the Métro, even water flowing in the gutter, scraps of paper blowing across squares, cats dashing between the rows of graves in the great cemeteries, clouds passing overhead. As pleasant as things in the metropolis could continue to be, they had become meaningless. They no longer signified anything, no longer gave me intimations, no longer reminded me of anything (did not connect with anything in my childhood memories), had ceased to make me dreamy or inventive—and that was all necessary for feeling enthusiasm or even an everyday sensation of life. Although I was still young, big cities no longer held any charms for me. In my eyes they were dominated by inconsequentiality; and my days were not supposed to be inconsequential. And in the meantime I have realized: in the metropolises, just as in the sun, I easily lose my memory; in the shade, in the dark, it comes back to me, indefinite yet monumental. In the time of Gilgamesh the gods still belonged in the capital city of the land. And now?

  But it was without ulterior motives that I then ventured beyond the Porte d’Orléans into the suburbs (I later read in a book by Emmanuel Bove that for one of his heroes, who moved, initially still in a cheerful mood, from the edge of Paris out to Montrouge, even the flies on the walls gradually lost their luster).

  And with the very first step over the line my curiosity was transformed into a sense of peace and my uneasiness into amazement, and the two produced great alertness. All the houses in the suburbs continued to look either too large or too small to me, the noise on Nationale 20 had something hostile about it, and the few people who had crossed with me on the overpass promptly fell out of step and became isolated from each other (whereas those crossing toward the city were picked up by a common tailwind as soon as they set foot on the overpass). Even the splendid and luxurious articles available only in the metropolis, with which they were loaded down, like border crossers from an underdeveloped country, promptly began to dangle from them, and rubbed against them like ugly and useless trash.

  And yet I felt I was in territory that was not merely different but also new. A special realm began there, as when one enters a forest, when the world through which I have just been moving—one step among the trees is sufficient—draws back and in its place an entirely different one opens up, surprising, infinitely more sensuous, its first effect being to make me listen more attentively. That is followed by looking, smelling, tasting, perceiving as a mode of discovery.

  That was what I experienced, to my amazement, with my penetration into that region outside the city limits. A new realm only for me? No, I felt altogether as if I were in a realm of the new: like the people, things there on the outskirts presented themselves in isolation, which meant that although they might lack the grace and brilliance of their counterparts in the capital, they appeared fresh as the morning. That was not so clear to me at first; I merely sensed it—but how!

  These things and this area had to be something solid, different from all the phantoms with which I had fooled myself every time, in my lifelong pursuit of the place that was right for me, a blind believer who over time had become almost an unbeliever. I had an intuition that in such suburbs there was something to explore. I glimpsed, scented, sniffed it out. Finally, in accordance with an early dream of mine, I could view myself as an explorer in my own way. And I scented and sniffed out, beyond the roar and rumble of the Route Nationale, an as yet unheard silence, which was there as soon as you turned off the road, tangible, to be fingered, licked, and savored, silence as an as yet undiscovered and undescribed wind.

  After that I made my way every day to the suburbs—without this excursion my day felt incomplete—and not only the ones to the south. But my main route remained the zigzag back and forth between Montrouge and Gentilly, crisscrossing Nationale 20, into the silence and back again into the racket, as far as Arcueil and Cachan, where, as I had learned in the meantime, Eric Satie had spent the last decade of his life all by himself (the cemetery on the slope above the Bievre, with the stone aqueduct higher up, was sometimes my destination).

  Satie was one of the few composers who did not strike me as alien beings, inwardly warped and inaccessible. His pieces came across to me as a quiet, clear conversing, in which a particular voice never rose above the others, and that was musical enough for me. After all, I wanted to be stimulated by something other than music; stimulation by music was not good for me. Or: music that is supposed to open me up must already be inside me.

  And I learned furthermore that Satie had also had the habit of walking through these suburbs. Except that he went in the opposite direction, to Montparnasse in Paris, where he might meet his friends at an outdoor café during the years between the wars. I imagined us passing each other now and then, on a side street or by the railroad line that crossed the valley of the Bievre. Apparently he always dressed properly for his excursions into the metropolis, in a dark suit with hat and bow tie, and I, too, was in a period then when I wanted to look more everymanlike than everyman: in custom-made things, including my shirts and even my shoes—which proved excellent for walking—necktie and a broad-brimmed hat, which took the place of an umbrella, and hair as short as I had been advised on every occasion to wear it during my earlier days in society. Sometimes the hallucination of encountering the composer was so powerful that I saw each of us on his side of the street tipping his hat to the other. If I was enamored of an image, a series of notes, a series of sentences, it always meant something to me to be in the native region of the person responsible for it, and even more if this person was long since gone from there, and most of all when he had not been part of an entire group or horde of like-minded others, as happens alm
ost everywhere in metropolises, but had been the only one in his region.

  There in the suburbs I also became friends with the painter, whom I had known for some time from the center of town without our growing closer.

  Again it was the particular place that altered our relationship. I did not know that he had a studio in Bagneux, still farther to the south, already up in the hills overlooking the Seine. One day I saw him there, coming out of a bistro in the palpably different light and wind. At first sight he immediately seemed different from my Paris acquaintance, who, if not worldly, his glasses propped on his head, at least appeared official (perhaps because he was also a professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts). Here he hardly stood out from the tradesmen and local white-collar workers, who, like him, were on their way back to work after a quick lunch. He appeared as inconspicuous as they, and just as formless, or rather unassuming, and yet on closer inspection he had an added air of vulnerability and melancholy that revealed itself to me in the almost humble way in which he held the door for the others, who took it quite for granted. I sensed in him the shoulders, neck, back of the head, and eyes of a child lost to the world, who—I followed him secretly as he went on his way—was visibly becoming high-spirited.

  And then he was also delighted to see me. We hugged each other, as happens only with two people from the same village who hardly had anything to say to each other and suddenly, each of them alone on a long journey, really become aware of each other for the first time on a dock in New Zealand or at a trading post in the Yukon in Alaska.