My Year in No Man's Bay

by Peter Handke

  I read histories of the place and acquired a geological survey map of the region—I had to go to the national institute in Paris for it—so as to have firmly in mind the base, layer upon layer, on which I was moving around.

  I found particularly appealing the houses, almost without exception unstuccoed, especially in the lower town, built of the local sandstone, most of it obtained at the beginning of the century from underground quarries, which, long since abandoned, invisibly pock the landscape; half a century later, a new high-rise building collapsed into such a cavern, which the builders had not wanted to think about; the collapse caused as many deaths as an earthquake, and since that time anyone who buys a house in the affected area receives a certificate: no mine shaft below; the ground at this location is solid. I concentrated on the façades, which were laid course upon course out of these unequally sized stones, so obviously extracted from the local soil, each in its apparently accidental form and yet all of them fitting together so perfectly; in this way I honed my ability to perceive color, sometimes calling on my son for help with characterizing the shadings.

  The blocks, and also blocklets as small as a child’s fist, were a light gray, in which you could see on closer inspection a tinge of yellow, as if from clay, shot through with darker veins, which with time could go slate blue or moss green, also glassy bulges, unexpectedly sparkling in all colors, ranging to coal black, also pure white grains, such as you find in the sand of a brook, the size of ant eggs, and like them oval.

  As a result of the prominent yellow, all these façades could give an appearance of sunshine, even on a rainy morning, a very odd sunshine, coming up from below, which is otherwise a peculiarity of clay landscapes, deserts, badlands. (The woman from Catalonia, on the other hand, felt mocked by this phenomenon: for what stretched before one out in nature in the similarly colored familiar Spanish meseta here flickered before her as a structure.) The closer I came to the stones in the suburban house, often bumping them with my nose, and examined them, the more I had an entire planet within my grasp, embodied in this one thing, as once before, very long ago in childhood, the sight of a drop of rain in a yellow-brown-gray-white bit of dust on the path had made the world open up to me for the first time. And it was not some strange planet but here, the earth, and one that was peaceful through and through.

  In similar fashion a crater now opened up in the building stone, fresh for the touching with the tip of a finger; ridges formed, and the observer, moving above this scene at barely an eyelash’s distance, was showered with a sense of shelteredness brought on by the barely perceptible crumbling of the tiny weathered bits, which recalled the strangely meaningful glow along the eroded edges of the sunken roads back home.

  Another feature of this world in miniature was that when you looked closely it turned out to be inhabited, if only by a tiny creature, the size of a pinhead, dangling here on a thread from a cliff, and a shimmering something like a one-celled animal on the opposite slope, beyond the seven mountain ranges, the two of them reminiscent of Robinson and Friday.

  All my life the unapproachability of the world, its incomprehensibility and its inaccessibility, my exclusion from it, has been terribly painful to me. That has been my fundamental problem. Belonging, participating, being involved was so rare that each time it became a great occasion for me, worthy of being recorded. Every time the world, the peaceable one, became a world, nature’s and civilization’s bending, extending, taking on color, was not only an event but a moment of recognition: with this recognition there would be no war.

  There, during my first stay in the suburban region, at the midpoint of my life, for a good two years, such events fell into my lap almost constantly, on some days there for the plucking every other moment like the cherries in the treetop in Arcueil. The planet took on shape and became good to the touch. During that period it seemed erotic.

  That applied also to eating, which began, along with the walk, drawn out as much as possible, to the restaurant, together with its spaces and vistas, to awaken a barely discovered pleasure (though immediately attenuated when the dinner table was not located in my new region). And of course I had drunk previously, primarily to be a part of things—see above—but it was here that I first realized what it meant for wine to be delicious. I often withdrew to the most remote corner of the house with a glass, after midnight, turned out the light, took a sip in the pitch darkness, and then, when I could feel the first sip actually rising to the tips of my hair, another.

  And in their first years the woman from Catalonian Gerona and the man from the Jaunfeld Plain in southern Carinthia had certainly found their way to each other quite often, in passing, in brushing by each other, like sleepwalkers, as if the exciting element were more the air between them, each other’s presence, their mutual strangeness. But not until we were here did we have each other personally in mind, and this marriage, although it may have lasted only through one late summer and a fall, appears to my memory more complete and eventful than all that had gone before—of epic proportions; with a horizon.

  Always in the same spot, always in the same corner, with the same gestures, in a never varied tempo, a sort of spaciousness emerged, different from that of all the countries and continents from earlier: we created this space and were its center (and likewise felt stronger there than ever before, two who were lost for all eternity, as if we were coupling far off on the moon). “I think this region is good for love,” she said one time, her words as usual spoken more to herself than directed at me.

  Only a third party could do justice to our history as a couple, and, since no such person is at hand, I must play the role myself, or at least take a stab at it.

  So this was the only era in which a person and a place became identical for me, or in which a person meant a place, took me in. Even the most intimate connectedness with another person—this or that ancestor, my son—did no good when the place we inhabited together was fundamentally unhomelike to me. All the love in the world could not achieve anything if I did not have the place.

  This existed independently of my family. At home I felt like myself the minute I set foot in my region, but not, however, with my mother or my grandparents. And later, when Valentin and I were living alone together, if I returned with him after a long absence to a place that was not my own, even on the approach I could try to persuade myself as much as I liked that the person at my side meant more to me than anything else in the world, and, and—still, all the blood would drain from my heart. And even now, when I have the urge to visit him, my repulsion at having to go to Vienna to do so is even greater.

  The place always gained the upper hand. My near and dear and my places always failed to coincide except, in particular moments and in a nowhereland, with a friend, and that time with the woman from Catalonia—when she, to be sure, did not substitute for the place but rather potentiated the existing place and gave it elan. For the first time in my life I came home to a person, to my wife. For this period the house and wife belonged together. In her I came home to my house-within-the-house.

  As far apart as we were in years, we became the same age. For the first time ever I saw myself as young, as I had not for a moment seen myself in my youth. And being faithful became a source of pleasure, and at the same time was nothing special.

  Didn’t our spontaneity and complete absorption in one another also result from the setting of the house and grounds in that gentle hollow, as if at the bottom of an abandoned quarry, or in the so-called depression of the Dead Sea, where we had begotten the child? Now the two of us lay together like two long before a child; and as if we still did not have one. Would anything similar have happened between us on raised ground? Has anyone heard of a couple who were flooded with desire in a storm on a mountaintop? And as we lay there, one floor above us our child talked in his sleep, the pedestrian cycle switched on and off at the night-shrouded railroad station across the way, the chains of hills huddled behind us, and there was a rustling of leaves outside our window.
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  That was the time when I could touch another person, when I felt a powerful urge to do so, and simply for the sake of touching her. For hours I wanted nothing else but to feel every part of this woman. I wanted to grab her from the top of her head to her heels and take her between my fingertips. In bending her, tapping her, plucking at her I convinced myself of the two of us. And on the other hand it was as if I were supposed to measure her for something, an additional, very special, amazing dress. And even in my dreams, as I slept at her side, this fingering, tying, hooking, cutting out, continued. I felt fulfilled by it: that was it. And I saw myself smiling secretly and silently to myself, turned away, in profile, like my son in his hiding place when he was very small. And rested against her rib like a mountain climber in a trackless waste.

  For the continuation of the story a flesh-and-blood third party would be appropriate here, a person who would not merely make a pretense of distance, a chronicler: “In the first days of winter the woman left the house in the suburb.”

  I have my own opinions on the matter, as on more and more subjects (O harbor of Piran, and me at twenty, with no opinions on anything), yet what I think resists taking written form, or, for me, being written excludes the former. And I have the same problem with all rational explanations, deductions, and parallel examples, however clever, even if for a moment they made sense to me orally, and occasionally even do me good. Faced with being written down—with authority—even the most profound understandings have gone up in a puff of smoke every time, leaving me temporarily at a loss for words. I could then make a fresh start only if I had no idea how the few remaining fragments fit together, if at all. From the moment I set out to write, the path I took was different from the previous one, fundamentally so, a stumbling path.

  And so I feel the urge here, too, to have no context, and to remain that way to the end of the following paragraph.

  The woman from Catalonia was divinely carefree, in the sense I once found in an epistle of Horace, seemingly directed at me, where he says I should shake off the cold compress of cares in order to achieve divine wisdom. And when she was delighted she delighted an entire circle; a sort of cordiality communicated itself then to almost all the others, whereas I remained alone with my delight, shut it up inside me and brooded over it. And likewise her happiness shone forth and disarmed others; put to shame my occasional incredulity, healed my disintegration; beautified along with her also the person near her. I, on the other hand, did not know what to do with my happiness, or, overcome with awkwardness, at least did nothing good with it; seemed to lack an instinct for happiness, came across as abrupt and unloving.

  And then things would change drastically again. She trusted no one, distrusted every moment. Even in her radiance there was a constant checking to see whether the person on whom it shone was actually receptive to it and was in agreement with her; if she observed the slightest contradiction or even a momentary distractedness, her face became an evil mask, without any change except the loss of its characteristic soulfulness, perhaps in a single quick glance over her shoulder, with which she thought to trap the other in not being in agreement with her. Nothing about her startled me more; with the passing years I feared nothing more, and in the end nothing sent me into more of a rage than this ever-ready suspicion in the midst of her glowing, followed by sudden mood swings, when a huge tongue would be stuck out at me, while her lips remained tightly closed. Often all I had to do was leave her alone when I went to do an errand, and on my return she, who had just been rejoicing in our closeness, would be staring hostilely at a spot on the wall, feeling let down, indeed betrayed. And every time I had a sense that she was right. Although I came to her without ulterior motives, captivated by her cheeriness and also her cordiality, at such moments of sudden reversal our relationship appeared as unfounded and meaningless to me as to her. I was the wrong person. I was not the one she had been waiting for; I was a surrogate husband. To be sure, I was not yet unfaithful to her, and nevertheless I understood why I was suspect to her, just as I have always understood why, wherever I go, a patrolman eyes me and then detains me as a possible thief, terrorist, child murderer: I have never done or planned anything truly evil, and yet from the time I was very small I have felt worthy of suspicion—for what? For whatever the case of the moment might be, the current outrage. Even when things were this way between the woman and me, I still considered every other man wrong for her. Strangely enough, the hours, and, in that period, days and weeks, of harmony merely heightened her expectations and at the same time her fear: just as she trusted no one, she also did not believe anything could last. A dream could separate her from her lover; our merely sleeping side by side, without any particular incident, after an evening of fulfillment, could spark dissension overnight.

  And then, when, like the previous times, something not worth mentioning had happened and she again lost her “belief” (her last word to me) in me, but this time as if in a gush, and from then on just went in circles, alternating between staring at me contemptuously and making imploring gestures to some unknown being, it came to me that the right person for this woman could only be a god. But what kind of god, and where was he? Certainly he would not come from heaven, or in the shape of a cloud or a rainstorm, but rather in human form, like you or me, only more radiant, and he would blow away her primeval distrust by finding it amusing.

  But as it was, both of us, one as stubborn as the other, allowed our relationship to go to pieces, and without consideration for our child, who at the beginning silently stepped between us as a mediator and then just as silently retreated from the field of battle. Without her belief in us two, I also lost mine. Just a moment ago I had been carrying around her image within me for life, and now: the image was gone.

  And as was almost the rule whenever I broke up with someone: the separation seemed to me, in contrast to our being together, the higher reality, likewise the struggle, fierce, body against body, that preceded it.

  The harmony had seemed like someone else’s experience, a fairy tale, and it has not been that long since I came to think of the fairy tale as embodying the highest of all realities. I saw the real me only in the person affected by the loss. I was at home in sorrow and dissension, in absurdity. Catastrophe involving those close to me was the place where I belonged. If, in the midst of happiness, I seemed gloomy, inaccessible, and frightening to others, it was in pain and helplessness, in despair that I began to glow and inspired general confidence.

  And in actual fact I never felt so close to the world as when there was no one and nothing left for me. “Serves me right!” was a thought that warmed me through and through. “You have a drive toward nothingness,” the woman from Catalonia told me, and not only during that period. But who was saying what to whom? Did what with whom? Of the two of us: who was who? It seems to me as though, in order to get close to the truth, I would have to tell the story of someone else, of others, which I suppose I have been doing in any case for a very long time.

  There was something great between us, and she went, and I let her go. Finally she went. Her last glance, over her shoulder, was hatred, so pure that everything round about seemed dipped in white, a white that was intent on destruction and also had the strength for it. I had to turn away immediately, feeling my skull on the point of exploding in its rays. (Fratricidal wars, it is claimed, especially those in which the participants have no emotional stake and are also not convinced of the necessity of the struggle, are the most cruel, and in this sense a fratricidal war broke out between Ana and me.) And at the same time, in my turning away as she was going, I got caught up in observing, found myself absorbed in the television antenna on a nearby roof, which in the evening sun appeared to me as a gleaming arrow, and likewise I felt the presence of a distant friend as he sat quietly at his daily work somewhere, while here the drama of my fate was playing itself out. My head was buzzing, felt as heavy as a boulder, and that was all right. There was a raging storm between the woman and me, and I was in good spirits
. Things were not all that bad. I could study them.

  Afterward, alone as never before, I lived without any conviction that man and woman belonged together. In my eyes there was nothing that connected anyone with anyone else. Later on I experienced with one woman or another days of ecstasy or merely of exaltation, which both of us mistook for adventure, even happiness. Each time, observers, friends as well as strangers, saw the relationship as beautiful and found our pleasure contagious. Especially older people, no matter how grumpy they normally were, became cheerful at the sight and gave us their blessing. Only children eyed us without comprehension, or disapprovingly, and I myself felt almost constantly queasy.

  But such episodes actually entailed a freedom that I experienced at the time as progress. However discreetly this casual, blessedly superficial flowing into one another occurred: we thought we were on the cutting edge of our era, its avant-garde and secret protagonists, and with our physicalify—which was a sort of soulfulness, wasn’t it?—were writing history.

  At the time, even more than “I” it was one woman or another to whom the whole thing meant “onward!” To them, these tireless couplings represented a goal for the entire human race next to which every other activity shrank to insignificance. And any man vouchsafed the image of such a being—transformed into a queen? a guerrilla? the woman from Revelation?—had to feel allied and complicit with her. These women had right on their side, for the moment and for the future.