My Year in No Man's Bay

by Peter Handke

  I experienced the painter outside the city, far from our usual meeting places, in a moment that had to bond me to him. And it was mutual. He urged me to go with him, wanted to have me along that afternoon when he went on with his work (though invisible behind a screen), and accompanied me, since I had to pick up my son at his school in Paris, many kilometers back to the Périphérique, where we took leave of each other only after a great deal of back-and-forth, as later became our custom when saying goodbye.

  Many streets in these suburbs bore the names of resistance fighters or opposition figures killed by the Nazis. Along one of them, rue Victor-Basch in Arcueil, I was acquainted with a particular tree. It was a cherry tree that stood not in an enclosed garden but in a turnout on a street in front of an apartment building, right by the rail line. First came the blossoms, without a single leaf greening, and the trunk was dressed in a swirl of white, dense and lightly flared, piled sky-high and glowing up above more brightly than any spring cloud. Then the blossoms floated away, one day with the April snows or hail, another day with the suburban butterflies. At the beginning of June the fruit was ripe, not tiny like that of a wild cherry but of biblical proportions, and where earlier everything had been white, now everything was a rich red. And on each new day of that week, when I got to the tree, the fruit was unharmed. No blackbirds fell upon it (did the trains streaking incessantly past the tree frighten them off, as elsewhere strips of foil might?). And the occasional passersby there did not help themselves either, although the lowest of the cherries almost caressed their heads; no one even stooped to pick up the plump balls, some of which had split as the wind knocked them to the asphalt, which became dark and darker from the squashed fruit. Only I ate and ate, first the cherries from the ground, since I had no way of knowing whether an owner might not appear from somewhere, and later those within reach of my toes and fingertips.

  Then it was clear that the tree was common property, and once, when I saw a painter’s ladder in the wide-open lobby of the apartment house, I promptly borrowed it and climbed up to the crown, where the cherries are said to be tasty as nowhere else (and that turned out to be true).

  In the village of Rinkolach there had been just such a generally accessible cherry tree, in the middle of the village, or, conversely, was the middle established by the tree? Not only the taste from those days but also that special feeling at the top—more powerful than being high in the air on a mountain peak, along with the swaying that is probably unique to a cherry tree—this I rediscovered in the foreign suburb; rediscovered? no, for the very first time this becoming aware of the past occurred: a becoming reflective, a recognizing of something from before, taking its dimensions, a sort of precision—memory! It was the semi-shade in which I saw the world so much more clearly and astonishingly (and that remained true from suburb to suburb, out into the forest bay here).

  At home we had picked the cherries with our lips, also because with the violent swaying of the branches we had no hand free. And even outside of the fruiting season that tree meant something to us, an unspoken place of asylum: anyone who fled to it could not be harmed in its precinct, and as soon as the pursuers entered, too, it meant that a reconciliation had to take place. And the public cherry tree of Rinkolach still exists; I pass and walk around it at least once a year. It is alive, despite several lightning strikes, it bears fruit, now somewhat sour and watery; except that each time it seems more orphaned (or who is the orphaned one?); no more children, either around it or in it, and if in the meantime another spot has become the middle of the village, I do not find it; but perhaps I do not stay around long enough.

  And now I sat, who?, in the tree in Arcueil, hidden, in my custom-made suit and necktie, felt my thirst for cherries diminish at the mere thought of the Bievre down there in the valley, though it had long since gone underground, scraped my fingertips on the fissured, especially sharp bark of the old cherry wood and sniffed them, to make myself more receptive, receptive just as I still do today on my very own cherry tree, dead except for one branch, here in the bay between the hills of the Seine, in fear of becoming numb and number, starting with my extremities.

  I thought at the time, no differently from now, that everyone’s eyes and ears had to be opened by these things as mine were, and so at the beginning I occasionally invited one person or another from the metropolis, who I thought would have a sense of place, to join me on my pilgrimage beyond the city limits.

  Either this was never taken seriously, or while we were out there together hardly anything emerged having to do with the particular region. The region lost its value; did not even begin to reveal it. First of all, as soon as the other person was at my side, I had to fight off a bad mood, as if by his mere presence he were displacing our surroundings, and then most people, and not only the dyed-in-the-wool city dwellers, after at most a brief period of alertness, stopped paying attention, were somewhere else entirely in their thoughts, and what they said neither had anything to do with the landscape we were passing through together—which was almost all right with me—nor was affected, guided, or inspired by it in the slightest (which then enraged me against my companions).

  In my imagination they should have stood up straighter, moved their whole bodies, looked around them, spoken in a calmer, deeper, solid voice, and instead they fell in on themselves, stumbled repeatedly, kept their eyes on the ground, and now and then one of them lost his urban-sophisticate tone, which turned out to have been an affectation, and spoke in a labored way, without emphasis and resonance, precisely as one imagines a lifelong resident of the suburbs.

  And I was infected by it: I mumbled, hobbled, and stumbled along just like the man next to me, and we two formed a pair that was not merely ludicrous like Bouvard and Pécuchet but also out of place.

  Walking with others, I usually experienced something similar to what I had earlier experienced when I read aloud, to a person to whom I felt close, something I had just written: although I had been glowing with pleasure as I set out with my manuscript to see him, and he, too, had been eager, it was as if each of us scuttled away into a corner, farther and more apart than ever before, and I still have those stranger’s eyes before me whenever, after reading aloud, stumbling more and more, I with effort raise my head.

  Thus, with rare exceptions, I stopped taking others with me to places where for me, and, as I realized, for me alone, a new territory opened up—where my personal field of exploration lay.

  I even kept my forays, pushed farther every day, a secret from my family, as if they were a vice, something pointless, at the very least selfish, unworthy of an adult responsible for himself and his kin. If at home I was asked where I had been so long, I would lie, saying, for instance, that I had gone to a movie on the Right Bank, an unusually long one; had played billiards at the Place de Clichy, had crashed a reception at the Austrian embassy and drunk an entire bottle of wine, had got into an argument with a policeman in front of Les Invalides; with the woman from Catalonia I even used the lie that for professional reasons I had spent hours following an unknown beauty, a “worldly woman,” from the Pont Neuf to God knows where; I went so far as to lie to my son, unnecessarily and inexplicably, as I have often lied in my life, groundlessly, without enjoyment, simply because of being asked and having to open my mouth.

  But for me that disappearing day in, day out into the suburbs was the first good habit I had acquired up to then. Here was finally a habit I could be happy about; never would I want to be rid of it.

  The morning after a trip the first thing I did, under the pretext of going to the doctor’s, was to plunge into the bushes on the far side of the Périphérique overpass and head for the wide-open spaces in the no-man’s -land between Malakoff, Laplace, and Fontenay-aux-Roses. The first tree beyond the city limits, no matter how scrawny, rustled at me more tangibly than the more luxuriant exemplars of its species on the other side. Drinking coffee, more bitter than anywhere in the city, in one of the cavelike bars, I tasted a more penetrating reality,
and the sight of the old aqueduct stretching high above the Bievre Valley, not just one monument among many like the monumental structures of Paris, gave me a sense of monumentality different from that in the city, as did the similarly scattered churches in the region, often lower than their surroundings, also sunk deeper into the ground, as if forming part of the ruins behind them, where I regained possession of the past and of history, which in the course of my life had made me skittish, regained it for instance in the stone figures around the arched portal of the church in Bagneux, made easier to overlook by the fact that the devotees of progress who participated in various revolutions had thoroughly smashed their faces and limbs, leaving only a few curves of shoulders, heads, and toes: never again, was the message that came across to me from that scratching-out of eyes and smashing of skulls, would the perpetrators go back to the saints, whose stories had been told to the end. They had stood there as the idols of a power that had become illegitimate; this had to be hammered into the world with each blow.

  I was increasingly suffering in my metropolis—and it seemed to me it would have been even worse in New York, let alone in Rome—from something that had already menaced me in childhood, since my time in boarding school: from loss of place, or space deprivation. (The prophet of Porchefontaine, who originally, before he became an innkeeper, going from one bankruptcy to the next, in suburb after suburb, had been trained as a philosopher, uses the word “dereification.”) And my suffering was not improved by stays in the country, even in the most remote villages, which, after all, should have been familiar to me from childhood.

  Those suburbs, on the other hand, no matter how ailing they might be themselves, became something like my healer. I needed them, urgently, imperatively. “Dull in the head” is for me the same as “ill.” And then there were times, in Paris, and even close to the edge of town, when I became so dull and ill that I wanted nothing but to get out. I felt at once locked in and locked out. The sounds, which my son, whom I otherwise believed unquestioningly, found quieter and more uniform than in small towns, hemmed me in, just as I experienced the absence of sound in the middle of the night as a sort of trap. Sometimes, on my way out to the suburbs, I suddenly broke into a run, as if I were fleeing, all the while scolding myself angrily for not setting out much sooner, and spreading my arms wide, in all seriousness, once I got out there into the empty spaces. More than once tears even came to my eyes, as when a pain is cured all at once, or rather is transformed into something bearable, something sweet.

  Thus I welcomed the widening circle of the suburbs: to the east, windy Ivry-sur-Seine, where more crimes occurred than just those that were always solved in the books of Simenon, which were often set there; to the west, Vanves, furrowed and difficult to take in; spreading up the mountainside, Chatillon with its scattering of buildings, from whose highest point in 1871 Prussian cannon had fired down on Paris, and occasionally even those towns with which nothing could be done and which, along with those responsible, deserved to be blown up. My greeting was silent, and at the same time somewhat resembled an exclamation, and it was directed at the three-dimensionality I had so greatly missed and had now found once more outside the gates, in the form of an apple crate, a dwarf palm, but also for instance the Eiffel Tower, which, discovered outside the city, suddenly appeared as astonishing as it probably is. And day after day, as I was walking through the suburbs, although I myself did not always know exactly where I was, I was trustingly asked by the many people lost there, especially in cars, for directions.

  I made up my mind to live somewhere out there, for a time. I felt a powerful urge to experience the nights out there, and to expose myself to the nights. I thought it would not be forever, just as I pictured myself as married only temporarily, sort of playing at being a father, and also not writing forever.

  So from people who wanted to go to Africa for a couple of years I rented a house in an area still unfamiliar to me. (Even today, when I consider myself knowledgeable about every corner of the departement, almost daily I find myself standing, to my surprise, in a completely foreign world, often simply because I have approached from a slightly different direction.) The house was still occupied by the owners, but how impatient I was for them to get out and disappear to Senegal or wherever. Was that possible, for a person to be crazy about or infatuated with a place to live, and, what is more, with one that tended to reduce every one of my friends to monosyllabic responses when I rushed to show it to them, proudly, the minute the lease was signed?

  One could also see the house, as one of my companions described it, as an “oversized stone grain bin, empty and gutted,” in a row with very similar lumps, roofed in tile, slate, or tin, with a sidewalk in front that barely had room for one person, yet snaked toward an infinitely distant misty vanishing point, of a color that another of my companions, barging along with me in the rain, called “oxblood red”—even my child was alarmed by it, as I could feel through his hand—on a street of the same color where every second car belonged to a driving school, no store and no bar to left or right, and all that in a suburb which, if anyone knew of its existence, stood for monotony and gloom, as witness the newspaper headline intended to spur people to take long trips to palm-lined beaches: “Oublier Clamart [forget Clamart].”

  I remained infatuated with my future home; was burning to move in. The woman from Catalonia thought at first that I liked the place only because, as usual, I wanted the opposite of everyone else; I felt comfortable only in the role of the loner, the solitary understood by no one, wronged time and again even by those closest to him, with the whole world against him; for otherwise why, when I had it out with her, my wife, would I regularly berate her with the reproach “You all!”—even more significant in Spanish: “Vosotros,” “You others”: “You others are … ,” “You others have …”?!

  But I had no desire to position myself in contradiction to anyone else, to my surroundings, to my times; I was simply filled with enthusiasm, and then I managed to find the words to win over the woman from Catalonia (my son, on the other hand, merely seemed to obey, which for moments at a time undermined my certainty about the direction in which we were going). “Look how transparent the house is!” I said. “Through the front door and the windows overlooking the street the lawn behind the house shines through, with the apple tree there, under which I shall dig up the ground next spring to make a little vegetable garden, so the blossoms will fall white on black.”

  And in her presence I patted, tapped, and circled the plane trees of this suburb, which, standing there pretty much on their own, seemed like the advance guard of the plane forest in her native Gerona; I called her attention to the sounds from the nearby railroad station, which changed according to the type of wind, also to the vibrations of the trains shooting by, already at full speed, toward Brittany, toward the Atlantic; I pointed out the tip of the Eiffel Tower, which she would see from her room or study, through the chimney pots of the houses next door; I reminded her that our street was named after the philosopher of law Condorcet, perhaps the first proponent of equal rights for women, on whom she had written a paper; he had been arrested here while fleeing the radicals of the French Revolution; in my exhilaration I even lied to her that Joan Miró had painted in this very place for an entire summer and fall, up there where the forest began, in a hut belonging to the pea plantations that used to be typical of this place, the spot marked now by a footpath overgrown with blackberry brambles, and then I convinced myself, along with her, that Miró had actually been hard at work once behind the thorns and was still there today, a figure floating in the air.

  Yet on those first evenings in the house out in the suburb, outside the city walls, I was overcome by uneasiness, of the sort familiar to me from childhood when someone in the household was even a little late getting home.

  So here I had similar fits, though everyone was there. I put away the owners’ things or pushed them all into a corner, the African masks, for instance, turned on the lights in all the rooms
as soon as dusk began to fall, was afraid to go down to the labyrinthine cellar (sent the woman from Catalonia and our five-year-old son on ahead; neither of them feared anything in the world), frenetically sawed up firewood, far more than we needed, in the farthest corner of the backyard, and on those mild September evenings built a fire in the fireplace; while my wife sat by the fire for hours, gazing into it in silence, her eyes glowing, I grew weary and irritable at the flames I myself had lit and could not bear her and my hypnotized idleness. This sense of desolation accompanying new beginnings is part of me and is also necessary.

  And one morning, after another night of being utterly petrified, I pushed open a window and found myself, and us, as in a fairy tale, in precisely the place I had wished for. The hostile zone had dissolved in the early-morning air. Now I lived there, and the living was mysterious, as it was supposed to be. And that was to remain the case for a time. What does “for a time” mean? For a continuation, for a moving forward, for a staying in place.

  How comforting and strengthening these fairy-tale-life moments were. From them I learned what freedom was, as on that first day after the eight years of boarding school, except that this time it was immensely more powerful, under the shoulders (a word that in French seems to be derived from the word for wings), in the nostrils, in the fingers, under the soles of the feet. I had time. Go. Up. Out. Do it.

  Every step in that house in the suburb seemed to be that sort of doing or shaping. Whether I was going shopping, taking Valentin to the local school, or hanging around the house: I was doing something, simply by being present in the region day and night. I kept seeking out different ways of getting places, observed, differentiated, compared: the bread in the various bakeries, the gardens, at that time, two decades ago, more vegetable than flower gardens, the cafés, supermarkets, and shoe-repair shops in the upper and lower suburb.