My Year in No Man's Bay

by Peter Handke

  If he looked in another direction, he could see the unmade bed in his bedroom, which would remain thus until late at night. It was cold in the two rooms, the only ones that were still lived in; no housekeeper to light the stove; and he himself did so only when company came, and even then often not.

  In his sermon he wanted to challenge the Pope, in all seriousness, and that soon warmed him. For not long ago the man in the Vatican, in connection with a war in which enemy soldiers had raped and impregnated women, had called upon the women in question to love these children and bring them into the world and raise them in this spirit. What upset the priest was less the assumption that the women would carry to term these embryos conceived in violence than the command to love them. Could something like love be imposed from without, and furthermore from on high, publicly? To praise love, as the apostle Paul had done once and for all in his epistle to the Corinthians, was one thing; but to declare it a law and proclaim it as such, wasn’t that entirely different? Certainly he could well imagine that one of these women gradually, or more likely suddenly, might be seized (“surprised”? “afflicted”?) by a sort of love for such a fruit of her womb. But first of all, wasn’t that her own business, yes, her secret, and no one on the outside, not even the deputy of God on earth, could presume to approach a human being with a commandment to love. Or at most in private, as priest and pastor, like him, and then not in the form of a commandment but perhaps as a mere possibility, a little pointer.

  He, the priest, was angry at his Pope for speaking of something like love in prescriptive terms, and he wanted to express that openly in his sermon (although precisely thereby his outrage would be perceived as part of a game). Wasn’t the love of a violated woman for this alien seed more the stuff of a story, a novella, than of a sermon from the pulpit? To be told only long, long after the event? Or perhaps not even in eternity? Something to keep unspoken, a matter only for the mother herself? And might not such love, in the cases in question, have long since gone silently and fervently to work, only to be desecrated by the papal edict? But was such a love even capable of being desecrated, by no matter what interference?

  The greatest outburst of anger he had witnessed up to now in his life had come from a priest. It had happened during religion class, in the school in his native village, and the perpetrator had been that priest who was the epitome of gentleness, and not only in the eyes of the children. Instead of singing a psalm as usual, to put himself and the class in the right mood for the reading and narrating from the Bible, he posted himself in front of the class, at first without a word, his briefcase closed and his face disconcertingly red, and it became redder and redder as he broke into shouts so loud that they shocked even these farm children, accustomed to quite a bit from home. Every single one of them cringed, and was overcome with fear and horror, which grew from moment to moment, for the entire hour; for that was how long the priest screamed at the assembled children, without pausing for breath. At first they could make out only individual phrases here and there, like “Judgment Day,” “brood of vipers,” “end of the world,” “wailing and gnashing of teeth,” “spew forth!” and only near the end, when he began to tell a story, though still full of wrath, raging and yelling, did it become clear what this was all about: the previous day, upon entering the deserted church, he had caught one of the village children in front of the altar, thumbing his nose and sticking out his tongue at Christ on the Cross. But it was not a simple childish prank; the longer the priest raved, the more the listeners came to see it as the worst offense possible, which could lead only to eternal damnation. Although he indicated that he had recognized the blasphemer, and he was seated there among the others, he did not name him and even avoided looking at anyone in particular. Even though the last word he spoke in this hour was “Vengeance!” repeated several times, he stressed that the avenger would be someone else. And they all felt implicated; each one slunk away, sure that he was guilty of sticking out his tongue at the Lord from the shadows, and maybe even spitting at Him; even he, who later became a priest himself, and in those days was already the “child of Siebenbrunn,” the one with natural piety, had at the very least been an accessory to the crime, and from now on it was all over for him with what had been in his eyes the “greatest fun,” the Mass?

  Not only a believer but also a little propagator of the faith, or one who animatedly told anyone who would listen about his faith, that was what he had been as the child of Siebenbrunn.

  The church, at some distance from the village, at the foot of a hill from which, as the place’s name indicated, in bygone times seven springs had actually burst forth, next to the farm of his father, who was also the sexton, from the beginning represented for him an extension and special part of the family holdings; very early on he was entrusted with the key to it: over the centuries erosion had piled up earth around the little sanctuary, more and more cutting down the size of the door; the threshold had been raised, and as a result the keyhole was low enough for him to reach. But for a long time he kept his distance from everything inside the church, and touched nothing. It was his father alone who rang the bells, laid out the priest’s robes for Mass, changed the flowers, lit the candles. The boy did not even feel drawn to be an acolyte, and whenever he substituted for someone, finding himself unexpectedly too close to the altar, especially the gilded tabernacle, in whose hollow interior he could actually sense the Holy of Holies, he would feel like an interloper; and he became terribly clumsy, pouring wine on the priest’s fingers, spilling incense on the altar steps, and during the entire Mass was scooping up the pellets there before the eyes of the congregation.

  The child of Siebenbrunn felt at home only way in the back of his church, whether during Mass, in the course of which he regularly experienced an altered state, by the “Kyrie eleison!,” if not sooner, or when contemplating the old paintings, also the frescoes and wood carvings. Before he even learned to spell, he took the situations they portrayed as fact: that was how it had been, that was the only story worth telling, and even if he later found that it was not documented in the specific wording of the Bible, he continued to read the pictures from his church as piously as the Bible. It was thus a certainty that when Jesus was baptized in the river Jordan, an actual dove spread its light-radiating wings in the clouds overhead, that upon Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem a youth waved to him from the top of a tree with a palm frond, that when the Blessed Virgin breathes her last, her soul will escape from the lower part of her body in the form of a tiny child, who will in the same moment have already taken his place on the lap of the Almighty up above in the firmament.

  And the child of Siebenbrunn told these stories to others for years and years, including to those who passed through that desolate place by chance. He invited the other person, the adult, into his church, so to speak, positioned him in front of the pictures, and recited and intoned their stories from the background, in a voice that emerged from an uninterrupted conversation with himself, which simply happened to become audible from time to time. He believed without reservation and serenely in these pictures—there could be no greater serenity—and lived in a continual state of joy, perceptible also to outsiders. Nothing could shake the faith of the child of Siebenbrunn; it was innate. With its first mirroring in the pictures of faith, life “was manifested,” as it said at the beginning of the First Epistle of St. John, a saying he later adopted as his motto. With him, at any rate, a loss of images remained impossible.

  Or perhaps not? That “life was manifested”: did it not apply to “the Word” rather than to images? Had he, the priest, kept joy alive for himself? “Not really” (he now thought, in the middle of morning Mass, at the admonition “Lift up your hearts!”), “or at least not always.”

  Did the child of Siebenbrunn still exist? Where was he? And what had become of him? No, nothing could become of him other than what he already was in the beginning! But then how did it happen that nowadays, if he returned to the area of his childhood at all, he tended t
o avoid his Siebenbrunn and instead sought out the church in the neighboring village, which was almost devoid of pictures, a church that had Job as its patron saint?

  Not once had the child imagined in those early days that the priesthood would be anything for him, although that gentle and hopping-mad local priest had had an eye on him in this respect for a very long time, and then even treated him openly as one of the chosen, for instance because in catechism class he had answered the question as to where the Blessed Virgin had carried her son after the Immaculate Conception, not as the other children did with “in her belly,” but with “under her heart.”

  Only a kind of yearning, unspecific, also undimmed by any troublesome hopes, was there. No question but that he would become a farmer right after finishing school, since his parents had both died young and his sister could not run the farm alone. Thus he lived for a decade, and then also fell in love with a girl, in fact from the village of Job, and the two wanted to marry. That he was always slightly absentminded did not trouble the young woman; she liked him that way.

  What finally brought him to the priesthood was a lecture by an agrarian engineer for the young men of the area, given at the local community center and sponsored by the Agriculture Bureau. The title: “A Vocation for Farming.” First of all, it dawned on him that he lacked all the characteristics of a future farmer: unlike the others around him, he did not feel at all attracted to the fragrance of livestock; nor did his heart swell at the thought of ripening crops; nor did working outdoors make him happy or even proud; instead, he went about his work as if it were a sideline, like any day laborer, and his thoughts were usually somewhere else entirely.

  Once he recognized his lack of vocation, he was seized with a burning restlessness. Instead of to his priest, he turned to the agrarian engineer, whom he looked up in the city of K., to tell him about his fatal lack of interest in farm work. To this day he thought it must have been simply the way he told the story, imploringly, that made the technical expert ask out of the blue whether he had ever considered becoming a priest.

  The moment had come. At last he knew what he had to do. Yet he would have kept on farming if it had not also happened that his fiancee understood him instantly—“with glowing eyes!,” as he told us—and even encouraged his plan, and that his sister around that same time met a man with whom she would run the farm.

  In the beginning he, already an adult, attended a boys’ seminary, where he sat in the back and off to one side at a single desk, avoided by the adolescents and mocked as a “manure farmer” (although as a rule these children’s parents were farmers, too), and then he transferred to a special school for those called late to the priesthood. There he noticed that all the men, from the most varied walks of life, had at least one thing in common: like most ordinary priests, they had experienced while still children something like a summons or a vocation; except that they, unlike the others, had not felt that it applied to them, and had instead followed a course previously laid out for them. And to find their way to the priesthood they had all needed a second impetus, much later, well beyond their childhood. Things became clear to them and the picture came into focus only the second time around. They had had to rely on that second manifestation of life, which thenceforth remained immutable for them in a way that hardly anything did for the other priests—weren’t they, the latecomers, the ones most likely to stay with it for the rest of their lives?

  After saying morning Mass, a silent one, in which his lips moved and no word was audible, it seemed to him as though he had taken a breath that would last him all day.

  He went, in mufti except for the stiff white clerical collar, which, unlike his fellow priests, he never dispensed with in public, out of the parish church and across the already heavily traveled highway to the Inn on the Bend (on the long since straightened curve) for his café au lait, shoved across the counter to him without his having to order, stood there among the handful of workmen out early, men of few words, clearing his throat like them, and skimmed the already wrinkled newspaper, unmoved by even the most terrible events in the world (just as “his” dying parishioners never haunted him, even in dreams; once out of the sickroom he never returned to them in thought, and also calmly said so to anyone who wanted to know). According to the paper, a recent survey showed that the majority of the population considered priests useful to society, even if they seemed to have disappeared almost entirely from public life; except that, the article went on to say, in the eyes of most people they no longer spread happiness or tidings of great joy.

  Then he set out in his forester’s vehicle, whose back seat had been removed to make way for a duffel bag, a pair of rubber boots, the slice of a tree trunk, all lying loose like the few tools and apples, which during the trip overland to the secondary school in B. caused a constant rattling and bumping.

  It was a dark day, one on which small things showed up as if lit from within, and the world, with the sun in hiding, lay open for a new beginning; the rattling of the tools behind him provided a musical accompaniment. It made him think of the painting by Brueghel in the Museum of Art in Vienna, his first picture outside of a church (seen on the only field trip taken by the latecomers, otherwise always penned up in rural Horn, in Lower Austria), which had filled him with as much astonishment as the portrayals of the Gospel in Siebenbrunn, perhaps also because of its title, but who had given it that name?: “The Dark Day.”

  But that picture in Vienna had been melancholy and almost menacing, especially because almost the only bright thing shining out of the gloom of late autumn was the ax or knife blade, with which, if he remembered correctly, an almost faceless peasant silhouette was pruning a bare tree, while the brightness of the present dark day appeared now in the round shape of an apple, now in the oval of a corncob, now in the rectangle of a many-colored beehive standing alone on the edge of Rinkenberg Forest, now in the triangle of a chapel’s shingled roof.

  These objects, registered just this way in passing, brightnesses even for their form alone, appeared regardless of season and had, in their substantiality, in the wood, the fleshiness of the apple, the mealiness of corn, something ethereal as well, which allowed him to feel himself become, for the moment, fruit, silvery shingles, thin air.

  Only once, and then for a long stretch, did that brightness disappear, when a series of unharvested fields intervened, filled of all things with sunflowers, probably self-sown, on this farmland that was more and more being abandoned here, each of the many flower heads, which turned or drooped in every direction, darkened, and this black-in-blackish extending all the way to no horizon.

  He stopped then, although the children were perhaps already waiting in their classroom, by an abandoned farm along the way, half in ruins, in whose chimney cap on this chiaroscuro day the old live owl was sitting again, even if the only part of it that moved was the amber eyes, following the smallest motion of his finger as he walked back and forth before it, constantly looking up.

  Unlike most teachers, the priest did not try to remember the pupils’ names; barely glanced at the individual faces. When I was back home for a visit one time and he took me to class with him, the way he ignored the children annoyed me at first. It reminded me of all the priests I had known since I was very small, in whose eyes I, and likewise those next to me, did not exist and at the same time had a duty to be there.

  But then it appeased me that my friend at least did not impart religious instruction to those entrusted to him. Not only did every child from the outset receive the same, the very best grades: he also did almost nothing but have the children take turns reading the Bible stories aloud, during which he gazed not at the reader but out the window. At the beginning, he said, he had been the expert on the text, and still the reader himself, and then he had recognized how hollow it sounded coming from his mouth, compared with such first-time readers. Often the children did not even need to puzzle out the text, but came out with it fluently, as if nothing in it were foreign to them, and in the process they c
aptured the nerve of the whole in sentence after sentence.

  After that one hour in school, setting out with him on foot, I noticed on the other hand that he knew almost everyone, or everyone past school age, greeting people from afar, and loudly, calling them by name: many of the local people, however, including beyond the town limits, did not return his greeting, not even when he waved and gestured. “They don’t want to know me!” he said. And those who responded to him did so without a smile, and hardly anyone stopped to talk. He commented that it was their “guilty conscience,” while it seemed to me, on the contrary, that these passersby did not derive any real joy from their priest, and not because he was this particular one. His showing up resembled that of a keeper of public order, whose way of keeping order was not needed, not by the young people, and also no longer by most of the older people.

  Always he had been well received only when he did not present himself as who he was. And now and then he even enjoyed being a kibitzer for a while, a participant, or a first-name friend to the people in his congregation, in pubs, outside shops, at soccer games. As long as that was all there was to it, and he, laying aside the priest, contributed nothing but his share to the conviviality, he was well liked; others interacted with him as they had perhaps always wanted to interact with a brother.

  But every time the moment came when he viewed their continued familiarity as inappropriate, and tacitly expected them to consult him as their priest. And because that hardly ever happened, except far off in the villages (did such places even exist somewhere?), according to circumstances he would make a point of calling attention to his profession himself, no, his position, and so abruptly that his previous comrades would turn away from him in shock, seeing him suddenly as a man of the cloth.