My Year in No Man's Bay

by Peter Handke

  The town seemed no less deserted than the villages he had gone through to reach it, and yet from its crooked streets, as he descended into them step after step, something like a cheerful expectancy emerged and leaped the gap to him. And that was no momentary deception. The alley dog, the kind that usually made his neck stiffen with fear, licked his hand as if it were seeing him again for the first time in seven times seven years, and then ran on ahead to show him the way. And there it was: the welcoming garland, especially for him, in the form of plastic flowers in a tin can above the door to the house; the summer or winter garden that had a view of a volcanic cone with a petrified prehistoric horse in its basalt wall, and Condviramur and Percival, in the form of a North Hessian or Westphalian innkeeper and his wife, as his hosts.

  Were the German fairy tales in force once more, in defiance of history? Was it in his, the reader’s power, not exclusively his, but his as well, to awaken to life a place thought to be dead? And why had he been successful in doing so in his Germany only that one time, which now had again been “over” for far more than seven years? Was it his own fault that it had never been repeated and renewed? What was the name of that town again?

  And where had that been? During a long winter he had gone to his workshop every morning to print a book that was causing him particular trouble and pleasure, and back home in the evening, through a city of millions, though always taking only side streets.

  And each time he went out it had snowed, day after day, through the months. It was a light, dry snow that hardly ever stayed on the ground. At most it slithered over the sidewalks and road surfaces, like sand over the ripples of dunes. The system of side streets leading to the central axis, not always parallel to it, that he used, now seemed profoundly silent, and if yesterday it had belonged to the evil Germany, today it belonged to the world at large.

  Snow and epic narration. Yes, what opened up before the reader was no longer just a short tale or a fairy tale, but rather an epic, and it was even set in this typically German area. Was set? No, would be set there in the future.

  The German epics familiar to him appeared starkly contrasted to the one the reader saw taking shape at that time through the veil of snow, from the Nibelungs, in whose heroes, according to Goethe, unlike in Homer’s, no reflection of the gods was at work, to … And Wolfram’s Percival, did that take place in Germany? And Keller’s Green Henry? (An episode.) And Stifter’s Indian Summer? And wasn’t the location of Goethe’s Elective Affinities and Wilhelm Meister, the two narratives that most closely approximated the one envisioned by the reader during his walks back and forth in the snowy light, instead of a factual Germany, the province of a solitary powerful mind, a province cleared inventively and energetically for development, dramatization, and intensification, even in a tragic mode, of his ideals?

  The epic tale of tomorrow—this is how the reader saw it before him in the slowly falling snow—would, as in the work of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, as far as a certain Germany was concerned, definitely behave as though this Germany did not exist; on the other hand, it would not locate the events in an ideal country, dreamed up in isolation, but rather in that worldwide Germany, employing a host of German things and place names, the few that had remained untainted as well as those fraught with guilt, particularly these!

  At that time snow fell for months around a pub on Schellingstrasse where Hitler had often sat and where at the moment the hand of a young waiter from Bari could be seen, through the almost opaque windows, dicing truffles; it fell on Amalienstrasse around a woman who snapped at her child: “You stay here!”; it fell in the Adalbert Cemetery around the statue of the dancer Lucille Grahn, in an appropriate pose, now mimicked by a young girl passing that way; fell far out by the moss of Dachau around the bench on which the reader in earlier times, as an adolescent, after wandering through the concentration camp, had sat engrossed in Grass’s Cat and Mouse until just before the last train left; fell around a loden coat, the Milan cathedral, the Kalahari Desert, meat hooks, the Three Kings from the Orient, idle snow shovels, newspaper vending machines, on sidewalks as everywhere in Munich, with the same headlines from morning to evening, which in those winter months, in view of the epic narrative, meant precious little to the reader, otherwise so easily distracted by anything in written form.

  And where was the epic of Germany now? The books that had talked about the country had again in the meantime, as always before, disheartened him—and precisely, as exciting as some of them were, because of the German names in them. Because of them he could not believe in even the most extravagant flights of fancy. It seemed to him as if there were an epic curse on “Berlin” and “Flensburg,” on the “Weser” and the “Zugspitze,” on the “Black Forest” and “Helgoland,” even independently of his century’s history. And there was no question of his writing himself. He was the reader.

  So his winter day’s dream of a great story that would bind together and at the same time thoroughly air out his fellow countrymen, and not only them, had blown away with that snow? No, he was convinced that any day now a new Wolfram von Eschenbach would—not appear, no, simply be there, drifting in from a side street, with a wealth of purely epic place names, of which the first might be, for example, Respond/ Upper Bavaria.

  Although my “Writer’s Tour” is studded with South German to West German place names, the reader felt less constricted by them than usual, because for one thing the story is short, and it also looks more like a notebook. He understood, too, that I could not be the one to write the book he was longing for, that demon-exorcising book about the other Germany. First of all, I would have had to spend my childhood there and remain in residence here and there a long time, instead of merely making the tour; I would have had to sit and wait for such an epic, like a piece of property. “And then you’re only half German and decided against your half-Germanness. You renounced your father, very early on, in the first disappointment after your search for paternal salvation, and later, on your tour, you also renounced your fatherland, and have not set foot in it since, have even avoided the river that forms the border, which, with its broad, bright, gravel-covered banks is like something from antiquity, where both of us used to swim, with unalloyed pleasure, avoided it out of fear of crossing the line down the middle and thus ending up in German irreality. At the same time you swore fealty to the German language, and many reproached you for that as a contradiction. What you write in any language other than your German does not have the value in your eyes of something written. What you think in French over there in your foreign land carries no weight for you. To be sure, even if you undertook to return to your fatherland, I do not believe that someone like you would succeed in writing the book of conversion that I envision for my Germany. Not even Friedrich Holderlin, with all the power generated in him by initial concurrence, then near-despair, then sober illumination, managed to get past the Germans in their country and their cities in favor of a larger, more broad-minded, and at the same time solid epic concept. In Hyperion his German contemporaries loom large as the sheer counterimage to his heroes, the Greeks, who immerse themselves in the common struggle for restoration of the realm where the decisive factor is the idea of the sun, embodied in books, trees, a table, a plate. What seemed impossible for him to narrate in prose he invoked in his poems. He challenged German youth to take up the legacy of long-lost Hellas and establish an equally brilliant empire, specifically by force of arms, which his poems now called holy, as previously air, water, the vine. According to Holderlin, after the Greeks it is now the turn of the youth of Germany to take their place in history. They, and they alone, epitomize the world spirit, and they will celebrate their sacred slaughter, on the banks of Father Rhine or on the Elysian Fields, as the legitimate successors to the Hellenes. No, these poems were bad enough, even without being misused in the following century. And anyway: my wish for Germany, which actually seems possible, since I can wish it, is not a poem but precisely that long, long narrative. When it comes to narrative
, the rule is: no misuse. An epic cannot be misused. No, it can be used again and again, and the user is amazed each time at what he missed the previous times, and pities the animal at his feet, whether cat or hedgehog, because it cannot read! O narrative, exhaustive, of German lands, different from anything found in newspapers and previous books, where are you? And in my imagination it is not a young man who will presently approach bearing it in his hands, but a saucy, wonderfully beautiful young woman, not blind in the least.”

  The reader kept sending me such letters from his travels through Germany, once following the route of the tour described in my occasional story, then again in any direction that suited him; in these letters, in typical fashion, he could not refrain from taking the stance of a prophet, toward me as well as toward the world.

  The one just quoted he wrote at the beginning of his travels, still in midwinter of the current year, as he rode in an almost empty passenger train from Oldenburg to Wilhelmshaven, where at twenty I had first looked up my father. And although it is true that even when I think of Germany here, from afar, my imagination fails me and the images refuse to coalesce: when I felt my friend setting out with such anticipation, I was happy to travel at his side, thinking of him instead of the country, suspended in a more innocent, purely momentary present.

  I see him in his train, which stands out sharply illuminated against the dusky North German flatlands, high up in the all-glass cabin of a suspension railway, or of a carousel as big as Germany. And besides that I see the dark silhouette of a horse in a pasture, its motionless head bent to the ground, as if rooted to the spot.

  In Wilhelmshaven on Jade Bay the tracks ended, and when a train pulled out, the loudspeaker would announce, “Attention, the train is backing out!”

  The reader went to the hotel right next to the station, which catered to salesmen and itinerant workers. While in the stairwell and hallways only the night lights were on, it was all the brighter in the taproom, and in a silence like that of a waiting room, for instance at a ferry slip, along with a couple of sailors a policeman was sitting, very young, with a voice so gentle that the reader, at the next table, fell to wondering who the patron saint of policemen was, like St. Joseph for carpenters and St. Christopher for teamsters. Yet the other man had merely looked over and asked what he was reading. He held up the book: the Novelas ejem-plares. And as always happened to him with Cervantes, he was not really succeeding in getting into the stories, and not merely because he was reading them in Spanish, one word at a time, and also not because he felt the policeman watching him.

  After an hour of catching his breath by the pitch-black bay, while runners still panted past him constantly, and eating his evening meal at a Turkish restaurant in the pedestrian zone, which seemed to be all there was to Wilhelmshaven, he sat on a bench at the railway station, and later, until long after the last train’s departure, on a baggage cart by the bumpers where the tracks ended. The row of shrubs over there was the only thing still stirring around midnight. The rounded, slightly convex bumper beams gave off a calm reflection. A railroad car, which had been standing on a siding for a long time, wheezed. The waxing moon was now bright enough so that the objects on the platform acquired an additional shadow. It was not cold, and the reader had taken off both his shoes, whose oval, blackish openings down by his feet, as he gazed at them, more and more took on the form of mouths opened in a death cry, and then were nothing but his shoes again, at the end of a long day.

  The following morning the reader set out for that pond in the Wilhelmshaven hinterland where, according to my story, I had planned, at my first reunion with my father, to let him drown.

  The water was still there, out among pastures with mossy hillocks, on the edge of a birch forest. But it could not be seen until he was standing directly beside it, because it lay so deep in a hollow below ground level, such as one otherwise finds only with groundwater lakes in old gravel pits. It also appeared as large as a lake, and beyond a bend it seemed to extend much farther, with an arm in horseshoe shape, like the cutoff meander of a river, peat black, impossible to see into from above.

  The only way to get down the steep bank was by two overlapping ladders of white-barked birch, not nailed, only joined. Once at the bottom, the reader suddenly understood the expression I had used, “sound horizon,” which, in the context of my usually rather simple vocabulary, had startled him as he was reading the story. Every distant sound was inaudible in the hollow, that of cars as well as any other machinery, and there was nothing to be heard but the interior sounds, which, however, were amplified down to the most delicate by the restricted sound horizon, such that the silence round about took on audible form—the rolling of a clump of earth, the fluttering of loose birch bark, the lapping of one of the infrequent waves.

  It was only the reflection of the winter-black earth banks that made the water seem so impenetrable. From a squatting position one could see clear to the bottom, which, at least as far out as the end of the dock, was lined with the same white pebbles as the narrow beach. Now it made sense to him that in the summer people from town would walk out here occasionally, instead of along their everyday Jade Bay with its powerfully changing tides and often overcast horizons. And there, as if camouflaged under the dock, was also the boat, of which he was certain at once, even if it did not fit the facts at all: “It’s the same one in which you invited your father, who can’t swim, to go for a ride.”

  Paddling out himself and venturing into the arm not visible from the beach, he also saw that my murder plan made sense. Today as then there was only a narrow canal leading into an extensive sea of reeds, with so many twists and turns that even if any swimmers had been there he would have been out of their sight in no time.

  Yes, in that bayou-like corner, beneath the reeds, which formed a roof overhead, in that closed sound horizon, I had intended to make the boat capsize, in the deepest part, with me and my father. Even today I am surprised at myself, for I was dead serious.

  Yet it had begun as a mental exercise, without any basis. For at twenty I did not hate my father. At most it bothered me for a moment or so that he avoided the sun, or that he could not be serious, especially in company. If he was ever the center of attention (“as you would have liked him to be all the time,” the reader wrote me), it was on the strength of his joking around. I saw him as frivolous, and at the same time as a spoilsport. And what bothered me most was to see him as the exact opposite of that father of my daydreams, who until then had been my invisible guiding image, my only one, someone mysterious, my sovereign. And although the Germans’ actions during the last Reich had forever made me the enemy—of whom? yes, of whom, really?—I never held it against my father personally that he, at least according to his role, had been one of the perpetrators. He must have been as unserious about that as about everything else (except perhaps sometimes when he sat on the sidelines and watched quietly).

  My decision that he should disappear into the reeds came perhaps merely from a summer whim, born one night when I was on a walk with my father and pointed out to him a cluster of lightning bugs deep in a clump of bushes, massed together into a glowing ball and seeming to revolve in the dark, and he did not respond with so much as a word. But when I invited him to go for a ride with me in the boat that afternoon, I realized there was no turning back. I had to push him overboard way out in the reeds. I had been planning the invitation all week long, word for word, intonation for intonation, and when I finally got it out, my voice was shaking and very soft. So: this would be it! What followed was easy to narrate, for a change: my father was not in the mood, and I felt infinitely relieved.

  “But how you missed your father during the years before that!” the reader wrote or transmitted to me from the reeds. “The thought of him was closest to your heart. Your allegedly lost youth: you did have it, you were a youth without a father, and to that extent a young person if ever anyone was young. Your thoughts about the future circled not so much around a wife and child as around your abse
nt father. And your thoughts were directed upward, from far below, such as come only from a son in need of a father. The time when you were waiting for your father was the only period in your life during which, instead of being blissful intermittently, as was later the case, you were consistently devout, almost like the child of Siebenbrunn. The image of your father, destroyed by your mother and for a long time not inquired about by you, was, as became clear as you grew up, innate. If you ever expected salvation, it was from your father’s turning up. At the slightest hint of a father, you would have been ready to set out in search of him. During your time of growing up: your father was it. And his image grew along with you. And one day you told your mother to her face that you were not fatherless, as she and the entire village had allowed you to think, but had a father. He exists. He has to exist. My father exists. Tell me who my father is. And where is he? And your mother burst into tears and said: Yes, you have a father. And your father is alive. And there, in the burning silence that followed, you experienced the greatest sense of triumph in your life and also for the first time pictured your life as an adventure. The far side of Eden was to become the here and now. And part of it was that when your mother admitted to you that your long-lost begetter was not a native, not a Slav, but rather a German, you felt proud of this father from the great, unfamiliar country of Germany, and it gave you a further incentive when your mother, whom he had loved, told you your father was not a villager, always spoke High German—not dialect!—and had always led her as light as a feather when they danced, and lived way up in the north, by the ocean!”