My Year in No Man's Bay

by Peter Handke

  All the more terrible, then, my letdown when the magic faded, the first time and likewise the times after that. The woman and I would be laughing heartily at the coup we had pulled off against the stick-in-the-mud rest of the world, and two floors farther up in the elevator I would find myself trapped with a stranger inside the most impenetrable cliff. After a cheerful parting from the next of these huntresses, at an international airport, both of us convinced that over the last few days we had inscribed each other feature by feature into the book of eternity, I was sitting on the plane, with the sea far below, the foam on the crest of the waves still visible, and wishing the window would give way and hurtle me into the abyss.

  In these situations my sense that I deserved to be executed became stronger and stronger, and I was also grimly accepting; saw myself stepping in front of the firing squad and tying the blindfold over my own eyes, as tight as it would go.

  But all of this happened in another country, not a trace of it in my home, in the suburb.

  That was taboo. I did not even work there, hardly wrote a line in the years that followed. First of all, my books had brought in enough so that for the time being I could afford this, and then I felt, unlike after a period of letting myself drift, neither the desire nor the need (both had to be present) to sit down at my desk.

  My chief occupation for years was leisure, which, however, was not the same as doing nothing. I was taking time off, though in a different sense from working-class people when they take time off. At the beginning of my residence in the suburb, I still looked to the great city of Paris for evenings out or special occasions. Then, disappointed by my cosmopolitan acquaintances, all of whom found the area where I lived lacking in interest—otherwise they would have followed my example!? —I no longer had the slightest idea what to do there, and took my leisure alone, going from one suburb to the other during the day, in summer as in winter, and in the evening stayed at home.

  What absolutely had to be done I did myself, hit or miss. I let the grass in the yard grow until only the top of my son’s head showed above it, even when he was standing up, and then I cut it with a scythe. Likewise in winter I pushed the snow, which tended to stay on the ground longer than down in Paris, off the sidewalk, and in the process exchanged my first words with a neighbor who was doing the same and who had until then always seemed, in his silence, the epitome of a small-town crook, yet now turned out to be the soul of innocuousness and gentleness. I went shopping, cooked, ironed, darned, sewed—here my years in boarding school came in handy—washed the windows, at least before Christmas, Easter, and the birthdays of those living in the house, scrubbed the floor, also to smell the water drying on it, and promised myself to be the first in my family not to let himself be bent crooked and stooped by physical work, but rather to use it to straighten my back permanently and inheritably. To be sure, my activities were not the same as the grinding labor they had done as hired men, which even the strongest will could hardly transform into something positive.

  But primarily I walked the entire area; lived with my son; read.

  And I thought I was close for the first time to the right life, and not just for me. Vanished from society, gradually forgotten by my former world, I felt as though I could finally be pure there, and even now I still wonder sometimes why I did not stick with it. Then again I tell myself that in that period I was near madness and that this life was as wrong as it could possibly be. And even then I knew: as it was, it could not bring fulfillment.

  Yet that was something I always had before me, day after day. It was an utterly serious life, very different from the interludes, elsewhere, with the new breed of women. Busy with nothing but leisure, I thought at every step that I was entering an advent period, which I scented and sniffed as a child does snow in the air. Today I see myself there, off the beaten track, behaving more like my own god, in proud anticipation of perdition, which at the same time would mean ascension. What did come seemed at first exactly the opposite.

  I often walked through the hill forests extending as far as Versailles, which, seen from Paris, began in my suburb.

  Curious that Marina Tsvetayeva, who had lived in Meudon and then in Clamart and was a person in great need of walks and forests, should have complained so bitterly in her letters that there was no forest in the vicinity. Yet I also understand her. For the forest out there began fairly surreptitiously, and a stranger to those parts standing on its edge was more likely to be repelled. As a Russian she was used to the evergreen forests of the east, while here a pine or even a spruce among the oaks and edible chestnuts was a rarity; and her birches, less rare, seemed in size and appearance to conform to the predominant varieties of trees, their trunks unusually thick and their bark more black than white because of the cracks. The white showed up only at a distance, in the depths of the forest, when a swaying passed through the dense ranks of trees there, which then brought the birches’ whiteness into view.

  Yet the wooded borders of these suburbs hardly allowed such glimpses. A person coming from elsewhere would often hardly even see them as borders, but rather as mere outcroppings of dense vegetation, between houses, with barriers in front of them, mere hiding places, strewn with litter as in no other country, the dog feces, always forming a little pyramid, a sign for turning back at once.

  If you manage to overcome your distaste and push onward, the beaten track does widen into a path, the bushes draw apart and shoot up into trees. But nowhere the depth and spaciousness that creates the feeling of a forest. A stranger to the country has the sense instead of being in what remains of a forest that was gobbled up—it gives this impression—by the suburb’s structures, which, wherever he looks, are so close that here and there they seem to cut the last tree trunks in half.

  Nothing would be more understandable than for a person to give up once and for all, coming to the conclusion that in this country, tidied up by the Enlightenment, propped up by reason, systematically planned and unified by grammar, there is no room for a forest; the unchanging sounds of civilization, of cars, trains, helicopters in this remnant of forest seem to offer confirmation.

  But as I kept walking—who knows why?—it happened one time that there among the trees I could feel the deep woods as much as ever before. As I turned off, once, and then again, a door gave way, and after that the area in which I wandered for hours was nothing but a forest, or woodland. (Similarly, time and again in dreams I am in a house I have known for years, and I stumble upon an unfamiliar, empty, yet comfortably furnished lower story that has always been there, ready for me, and then each time for the length of the dream I wander through the adjacent, still-undiscovered suites that open up around every corner.) Even with a few highways to cross in between, along with occasional hammering, rattling, and rumbling from the world outside, the silence gained the upper hand and kept it, up and down over the hills, along the sunken roads, on the paths along the embankments, on the paths along the ridges.

  At the time I had the sensation of being constantly shoved and carried along, whether simply out walking or collecting chestnuts to roast at home in the evening, and continuing when I stopped at the inn at Fontaine Ste.-Marie, whose clearing marked the middle of the forest.

  As never before, nature revealed itself to me as my measure. To take in nature’s sounds and finally become completely immersed in listening was what constituted for me at the time fulfillment. And it even seemed to me I was in the process of pulling it off.

  When I nevertheless felt drawn to my desk, I already hesitated in the next room. Having been out and about for all those hours, permeated by the silence, its modalities, creations, styles, and examples, I had already done my work! I felt reluctance about writing it down, which seemed to me an unnecessary, and an unseemly, variation.

  Such silence I experienced not only out in nature but likewise on the paths that ran along the rail line between here and Brittany. And the sounds of the suburbs formed part of it. Sometimes I would have liked to live even closer to the
tracks, and every time I walked by, I peered at a certain grayish-yellow sandstone house that stood directly by the embankment just before that railroad bridge, at the height of a dam, that linked two suburbs. I wanted to see if the house, with the whirring of passenger trains and the crashing of freight trains right outside its windows, might be for sale someday. Not a few of the older people living along the tracks in shacks, with one main room and a kitchen but with oversized yards, kept chickens, and my ears were more attuned than decades ago in the village of Rinkolach to the crowing of the different cocks, which I could tell apart while still in half-sleep in my bed before daybreak. The occasional barking of dogs, quite far apart, created, not only when I was out walking but also in the nocturnal stillness of the house, along with the trains, a further sense of spaciousness in the landscape.

  Most silence, either rural or urban, had oppressed me up to then or made me restless. But this type of silence suited me.

  As a result of my long time abroad, away from speaking German, I had fallen into the habit, without noticing it, of using the various foreign languages even when alone with myself. In the suburban silence I noticed how often these idioms found their way into my monologues, indeed already predominated, not as a result of my personal watching and listening but simply as standard phrases. And I realized what had given me that soothing sense of my snapping into place every time I had picked up my pen: it had been a homecoming, to my work and, just as powerfully, to my native German.

  If I ever thought I could achieve harmony with—with what?—no “with,” simply harmony, it was in my early years there, when I was unemployed, unsociable, out in the primeval forests and the cultural desert of the suburb.

  Having only fleeting contact with others, surrounded by a peace I wanted to defend and cherish just as it was (at any rate not phony), I saw myself as leading a life of epic proportions, despite its uneventfulness, along with my son and several ancestors, long gone yet dreaming on in me.

  The harmony went deepest for me in the face of those happenings that, in and of themselves, seemed mainly without resonance. From the motion of a suburban cloud, the way a snowflake hit the red asphalt of the sidewalk and turned into a cherry stain, I could pick out a sound and listen to it fade away. And that was all? Yes. And at the same time I knew I was in a phase of preparation; I intended to use my walking, observing, and reading to sharpen myself into an arrow.

  Another little metaphor on this subject (which again will not fit perfectly): the Brittany line ran along for a stretch in a concrete-walled cut. Despite the slight distance from Montparnasse, their station of origin or destination, the trains whizzed through there as if already out in the open countryside, and the air current they created always buffeted the luxuriant vegetation that hung down over the steep walls of the cut. The same thing happened with the occasional bushes twisting their way up from below. Even the ivy, which had managed to worm its way into the concrete, was torn loose in the course of the years by the gusts, and floated after the trains as they sped by.

  Time and again the vegetation was removed, and then, before new vegetation maybe took its place, a pattern of rough semicircles was revealed on the wall, often layered on top of each other, light patches scratched and etched in the concrete by all the bunches, fans, trailing streamers as they brushed back and forth. If that stretch of wild growth had earlier appeared random, when it was cleared away the half-ring or half-moon forms left behind in its absence appeared entirely orderly. They differed only in size, and were rounded off either at the top or the bottom, depending on whether the plants had been growing up from below or hanging down from above.

  And from time to time, when I stood there by the railway cut and no train was passing at the moment—if it remained that way for more than a minute, it could mean only that there was a strike on—contemplating at my feet these chalk-gray, swooping etchings of something no longer there, something from before, so much more powerful than if the growths themselves had actually been present, being whipped back and forth by the trains, I had an experience of massiveness, tension, movement, wild goings-on. In that pattern of shrubs and wind at the railroad cut, past, present, and future became interwoven and spoke to me.

  The ornamentation on the ancient city walls of Ecbatana in Persia would have revealed to me something great, as it did to Flaubert when, dreaming of an epic, he became lost in contemplation of it, but unlike to him, the wall would have seemed to me ineffable rather than epic. Here and now, in the ordinary world, grandeur and beauty finally appeared to me describable, as they had not been in the Gobi Desert, at the Lion Gate at Mycenae, at the pilgrim’s portal in Santiago de Compostela. And a few steps later they became completely inaccessible again. What had I seen there?

  And the more I tried to brood it back, the more meaningless it became, and at the same time more uncanny. Don’t try to make something of it, I resolved. Experience grandeur and beauty and then leave it in peace. It does not want to be described. Or not by you. It is not material, not narrative material anymore.

  It was fine with me that during those years I was not merely idle but also experienced no pressure from imagination or inventiveness. For the way I lived there seemed at certain moments close to perfection, especially when I stopped and became all ears. All that was missing was a little push, a mere wisp of something, a pinprick—but of what?—and it would have been the longed-for merging with the surroundings, with the treetop, with the curved space, the bay between the wings of the swallow.

  But by way of compensation for having not the slightest spark of a conception of the future, I now wanted to know things. In the evening I would wait impatiently for Valentin to fall asleep so I could make headway with my studies. I had a telescope there, good enough for an observatory, and with it I looked at the sky, which even there in my first suburb, closer to the periphery, was less polluted by light than in Paris; I traced the deserts of the moon, dotted in Orion’s belt (and in between lowered the instrument and counted up the day’s receipts with the pharmacist, who, far away at the other end of the street, was staying late to balance his register).

  Above all I studied from books. I read word for word and picked out only works that lent themselves to such reading. I soon set aside the local chronicles and histories because they made the region seem sadly diminished in contrast to the greatness, however undefined, of which I daily became conscious there. What was merely worth knowing or interesting did not satisfy me.

  On the other hand, I was filled with a steady warm glow from studying the earth’s forms and their interactions, no longer merely those of this place; and I could follow best when the textbook contained only key words, rather than complete sentences.

  Mountain cirques, alluvial terraces, shifting dunes thus became living images. Coming to understand them lifted all my weariness from me; I felt absolutely clear in the head, as previously perhaps only when I was studying Roman law, and I felt at one with the planet, and vice versa.

  Sometimes, late at night, when I was already asleep, I was filled with such burning desire to know more that the urge itself woke me; I switched on the light, and, sitting up in bed, went on puzzling out the explanations.

  It was sheer pleasure. I understood the term “morphological diversity”: the morphological features on which I was reading up, including those at the ends of the earth, were waiting for me, tomorrow, and each corresponded and responded to an as yet undiscovered vein in my body.

  It happened more than once that the sheet I was lying on, with its folds and bulges, took on the relief of the landscape I was studying just then. The landscape seared itself into my memory by way of the sheet. Then I wanted to lie without a blanket, with the light on. And something similar happened to me on those nights when I sat there deciphering old books from classical antiquity. It was in fact a kind of decoding, for with the help of my boarding-school dictionaries I was cracking the Latin and Greek words to make them yield a sentence, and that alone, before any particular meaning emer
ged, could vitalize and refresh me as much as any adventure. I saw myself as a hairsplitter and since then have never viewed that as a defect in anyone.

  But there was even more in the verses of Homer and Heraclitus; it was no accident they had survived the avalanches and floods of history. One phrase after another brought me face to face with a sun that did not blind me, and also never set as long as someone was reading that way. And if I opened a newspaper or turned on the television afterward, I could follow current events effortlessly. Completely alert, I took an interest in what was going on, at the same time without being surprised at anything, unmoved, prepared in advance for the worst. Afterward I sat in the dark, with a goblet that I held at the very bottom, by its foot, as I had seen it done in paintings of French peasant families from a century long past, surrounded by the suburban night’s silence and the presence of my son asleep upstairs, at the heart of time.

  Why couldn’t my life go on this way indefinitely, the life of an anonymous person in an anonymous suburb, with my crisscrossing the area during the day, my hairsplitting and contemplation of word-suns in the evening, with my sitting bolt upright, and with the small, quiet sleeper for whom I performed an easy night watchman’s service? Now that certain branch is brushing the window on the west side again, the uppermost one, in the gable. Now the furnace is switching off until the next morning. The wind must be from the north; otherwise the mail train, all its cars windowless and painted yellow, would not rumble so through the house. This now is the moment of the piles of coal way in back of the railroad station, now, with the falling moon. And tomorrow I shall again do nothing! We will go up into the forest, past the standing stone, from under which the spring may be trickling again, after the rain, and then, on the other side of the highway, check to see whether the strawberries are ripe at that particular spot. We will eat, my friend, by the ponds of Villebon, and meanwhile observe what is happening on the water. Then I must not forget again to pick up Valentin after school. And in the evening, my dear fellow, we’ll experience the bifurcation of the Orinoco and then work through twelve more hexameters in our Odyssey.