My Year in No Man's Bay

by Peter Handke

  And the money for his trip was almost entirely his own, from working as a disc jockey in various young people’s nightclubs and from selling his first pictures; a contribution came from my sister’s estate, which, because it consisted of almost nothing, struck him all the more powerfully as an omen. My son sometimes makes so much of his frugality that I have come to view it as one of his main characteristics, like his punctuality, which does not stem from a sort of obsequiousness but rather manifests itself as that of a tyrant, whose time one wastes at one’s peril; woe unto him who, regardless of the fact that he may be much older and even more powerful, comes even a quarter of an hour late to a meeting with my son, let alone without an excuse.

  Having arrived in Ljubljana on a frosty January day by train, by way of Graz and Maribor, Valentin continued on by bus to Nova Gorica. At first Yugoslavia was merely a country he had to pass through on his way to his site for a walking tour, Greece. It meant as little to him beforehand as his ancestors. Although receptive to and gifted at foreign languages, new ones as well as old, he gave everything Slavic a wide berth, except the literature, as if its very sounds were an imposition; the music, whether folk songs or the works of nineteenth-century Russian composers, even repelled him; he felt as if his blood were being sucked out by those “parallel fifths, which are taboo, and not without reason, in melody” (whereas I at his age had shivered through entire nights in my pitch-black student room on the Kahlenberg with Mussorgsky).

  Nevertheless he could do nothing now, as at other times, but keep his eyes and ears open. In contrast to his father, who in something new often notices an incidental or grotesque feature, or nothing at all, he immediately notices the salient characteristics, and quite casually. I have often wondered whether he, who has this eye for whatever is essential to a phenomenon, and yet, it seems to me, is never astonished at anything, is really cut out to be the researcher he wants to become someday. In many respects he is superior to me—but what is his passion? his dream?

  Thus he had now set out, almost too well prepared, I thought, on this yearlong journey, had anticipated every unusual situation and had taken something along for it. But was that really true? Didn’t his main baggage consist of a present from the petty prophet of Porchefontaine, Valentin’s benefactor from the time he was a child, an ancient Greek biography of Pythagoras, in which the philosopher’s guideline for life had less to do with tools and measuring instruments than with untrammeled observation of phenomena and committing them to memory?: thus Pythagoras had had his disciples get out of bed each morning only after they had repeated to themselves the previous day’s lessons, and then those from the day before; this retrieval of the day before yesterday, without aids, purely from memory, was, according to his biographer Iamblichos, perhaps the essence of the Pythagorean doctrine.

  And thus my son, on closer inspection, had his few tools—his army knife, drawing pencils, a geologist’s hammer—more as a sort of ballast, to keep “both feet on the ground.” Committing the phenomena to memory was not something he set out purposefully to do; rather he brushed by them, his thoughts elsewhere: “If you expect an object to leave a lasting impression,” he told me once, “you mustn’t under any circumstance stare at it; you should look through it, though attentively, and only then will the impression be reliable and lasting, and its gestalt will give rise to discoveries more readily from an afterglow than from the thing itself!” (His other approach was to turn away intermittently from his object, intentionally immerse himself in something else, so that, when he turned back toward it, he could “catch it as it was!”)

  Valentin produced that day-before-yesterday experience often on the same day by falling asleep right after an event, for moments that took the place of an entire night, and, after the first waking up and recalling, falling asleep a second time: now, after the passage of barely an hour, he saw the object in the light and form of the day before yesterday. Wasn’t that sufficient as a dream?

  A trip by bus on a winter’s day, through an unfamiliar country, was particularly suited for this kind of brief, two-time slumber. And thus the “day-before-yesterday effect” assured that even before he reached Postojna, the prehistoric dugout from the moor of Ljubljana that he had just seen in the museum there had engraved itself upon his memory for the rest of his life, its length, weight, peat-blackness, fissured surfaces.

  On the bus he had breathed a peephole in the ice flowers on the window, through which he looked out in his own fashion, barely moving his head. They entered an area almost without human traces, deserted and more than deserted, leading into an expanse with invisible boundaries, in spite of the cold already green as in spring, as if made for fruit growing, except that no roads led there, and even the few cart tracks immediately came to an end: this had to be one of those areas that at unpredictable intervals, hardly related to precipitation, was flooded, the result of subterranean water pressure, which made it shoot up like jets from holes in the ground, forming large lakes from one day to the next, which could then be crossed only by boat.

  Yet my son took in not the image of the strange landscape but a subject for scientific research: nature as “landscape” did not count for him. He was not interested in looking at things, or at any rate he hardly lingered over that. He immediately, as a matter of course, shifted his focus to the particulars, allowed these to impress themselves on him, distinguished them from one another, and looked for what they had in common.

  The first thing he had always looked for, beyond the phenomenon, was its underlying principle. And having detected this, as a rule instinctively, in the twinkling of an eye, he was able, as he then once wrote me from his travels, to achieve “an entirely different view.” Except that he did this in passing, kept it to himself, explained nothing (at most uttered, more to himself, his one-syllable “Look!”), and only when he was asked came out with his conclusions, inferences, his always convincing theories, which, translated literally, were of course “observations.” Thus in his account of that bus trip he merely mentioned in passing, along with Traveling Band on the radio and the way his nostrils froze during the short rest stop in Vrhnika, the gray that altered from one type of tree to the next—thousands of shades of gray, passing, blinking, flashing by his peephole, and only later, in the spring, during a longer stay on Lake Ohrid, did he set about writing down his “Observations on the Variations in Winter Gray.”

  Then the so-called Threshold of Postojna, a threshold also in a historical sense for all the migrations of peoples through the ages, from east to west, actually more flight than migrations, and more a narrow pass or battlefield than a threshold.

  For Valentin, however, this was a mere threshold in the rock, a geological formation. For him there was no such thing as history, and in politics he was a self-proclaimed idiot. He did not even know that the Yugoslavia he was using as his corridor had earlier been Communist, had even earlier been overrun by the Germans, had even earlier been a kingdom, and even earlier … If chastised, he would at most have responded that such “earliers” were everywhere, extending back into prehistoric times, and that would be all well and good if everyone did not arbitrarily derive from his particular “earlier” all of—what was it called?—history, and then, from that, exclusive rights to the present. “I learned in school that two thousand years ago this was the Roman province of Illyria, and today in Ljubljana I saw in a window the book title Are We in Reality Not Slavs but Illyrians? To me what is real should be first and foremost what exists now.”

  Now, after the Threshold of Postojna, it began to snow, which it had been too cold to do before. At an unmarked stop by a road through the woods, a schoolchild, his cheeks rosy, stepped in the swirling white out of the underbrush, and did not even need to warm up particularly on the bus; while waiting he had crouched in a natural basket formed of branches, without freezing.

  And after the next threshold, the one leading into the lowlands along the Adriatic coast, it was raining, and in Nova Gorica, where darkness had long si
nce fallen, a warm wind was blowing, in tune with the palm trees there, which rustled. From the bus station, a glass shed in a wooded park, walking paths radiated in a star pattern, and Valentin joined the largest group. On this evening he walked along among the unknown silhouettes as if he were a local person going home, and not only because he had the address of the place where I had stayed there.

  The offspring of a villager, he had none of the traits of one. Where I had stubby fingers, his had turned out long, narrow, and almost oddly flexible; I could not imagine they would ever display hundreds of little scars like his father’s. Likewise my neck, which was squat, or perhaps hunched between my shoulders out of old boarding-school habit, had in him grown freely into the air, also strong and straight, and when he was tired his head never drooped to the side like mine, or to the back, like his grandfather’s on the farmyard bench of an evening. At the same time, Valentin had larger feet than I, and his soles had more standing surface than those of almost all the cottagers and their offspring in the region we came from, where people stand better on one leg than on two (one immediately notices, whether inside churches or outside at gatherings, that the men as well as the women, the entire population, are constantly shifting from one foot to the other, just like that, standing next to each other and talking, often shifting at the same time, as if in a preestablished rhythm, giving the impression of a regional dance that consists of constant rocking back and forth, swaying, wobbling).

  My son likewise shows no tendency, as we do, when meeting even a familiar person, to become skittish (observation in the Jaunfeld villages: that in everyday conversation, even between neighbors who have known each other all their lives, each looks somewhere else—as if they felt brush by them and flash through them that old uneasiness on soil where they were once only tenants).

  And it means little to him that he is an Austrian, or a German, and not merely because he has a Catalan mother. He is neither ashamed of it nor is he proud of anything in that connection; he is indifferent toward it, in a way that seems entirely new to me, as far as one’s own country is concerned. As a young person I suffered from Austria—I use this expression advisedly—and thought I was the only one, discovering only later: many suffered. Yes, we suffered from Austria, and differently from the way I imagine a German suffering from his Germany. That a person then became head of state who represented to a T the outlines of our perhaps half-forgotten youthful suffering brought all this back and at the same time made it obvious that this was a suffering without hope, for life.

  Valentin, on the other hand, who had been living in Austria for years now, had a few places, or rather spots, there, where he liked to go, and that was enough of a country for him, if he even used such a word. And when I visited, if he happened to take me to them, I allowed myself to catch his enthusiasm, for I noticed how important it was to him that I at least approve of what he liked. Although he had spent most of his time in suburbs, dragged out there by his father, and then eventually reconciled to it, all that now seemed as if it had never taken place, and in Vienna he never looked for a possible equivalent to the suburbs of Paris, unlike me (every time on the very morning of my arrival, as if salvation depended on it). He strikes me as the kind of person—and his entire generation with him?—who is less intent on finding a permanent home than on having hideouts here and there, located neither in the center nor on the outskirts, but usually, almost as a rule, somewhere in between.

  Also my habit of walking everywhere means little to him. But when he walks, from one hideout to the next, he moves so quickly, without ever breaking into a run, throwing his whole body into it, that I can barely keep up with him.

  He traveled south, crisscrossing Slovenia, from the coastal area back into continental Europe, from early spring into winter and vice versa. For a long time he saw the sea, the Adriatic, only for seconds, from afar, from the limestone ridges. Sometimes, after covering a stretch in the dark, when he had not been able to see anything, the next morning, in daylight, he would take the bus back the way he had come, approximately to the place where night had fallen.

  It was already February when he found a place to sit by the harbor of Piran, otherwise hardly a day’s journey from Nova Gorica, on the breakwater there, my stones of ignorance, in the face of which, when I was his age, thirty-five years ago or the day before yesterday, everything I had learned and all my origins had fallen away from me, and for an afternoon and an evening I had felt nothing but that I was cocooned in the world, a feeling that never came back so completely, if at all, after Piran and that first day by the sea.

  From this vicarious refresher course, Valentin sent me a drawing of the stone blocks, nothing but these; the bay and the wooded shore opposite he had erased. Seen thus, with nothing around them, filling the paper and furthermore executed with excessive precision, the blocks looked unrecognizable, might just as well be animal heads, cracks in a wall, bundles of laundry, and were, or created, when I held them up close to my eyes, just as long ago, for seconds at a time, the image of nothing at all. Yes, I had seen these objects back then, and myself with them, as just this pre-creational, unformed. But how could one escape knowledge in the long run? No matter: my stones were still there.

  Hardly imaginable that in the calm bay of Piran such a breakwater was necessary, and yet farther out by the punta with the lighthouse Valentin encountered wall-high masses of pebbles, thrown by the most recent Adriatic floodwaters from the ocean bottom high over the seawall onto the promenade, up to the foundations of the houses on the spit of land, much as a previous storm had buried those saltworks in the neighboring bay of Strunjan, where the youthful first-person narrator of my much later “Stones of Ignorance” story, aroused by the salt-white emptiness, hounded by lust for an unspecified woman, who, however, never appears, then decides it is now or never: he must sit down and write a book.

  This sea, calm as a pond today, tomorrow a raging monster, began to preoccupy my white-skinned son, previously a rather reluctant guest on the Atlantic and the Pacific. Yet he saw “my” saltworks only on exhibit in the Piran salt museum, in photos, with the last remaining objects, the corncob as the smallest sluiceway possible, the bread stamps the various saltworks families had had for the bread that was baked for them in the communal ovens, the hats with extra-wide brims that also protected their eyes and noses from the blazing sun there.

  He also studied in Piran that particular gray of the palm trunks, and in the mild evening on the docks for the first time enjoyed a folk dance, even the costumes; or he caught a sense of how the dancers enjoyed finally having such a different performance space for their dance and their music, otherwise always performed only far off in their narrow Alpine valleys; here their accordions, clarinets, costumes, and limbs were animated by the wind on the harbor square, serving as a great dance floor, and open besides at the rear to the salt tide.

  During the first month of his trip he had not always been so much in the thick of things. From time to time he had even been seized with desolation.

  Again unlike me and many of my generation, being isolated, alienated, or dislocated did not give him a heightened sense of reality. (At least when I was his age, it was often the odd twist, the element of strangeness that made me feel at home, synchronized.) Only on his first day did all the unfamiliar silhouettes provide an escort for Valentin; then they took on hostile or at any rate unfriendly features; shifting his focus to music or nature no longer created a protective sphere around him.

  For the first time in his life he found himself in a truly foreign land, and this seemed particularly meaningless to him, for he had gone there after all without any necessity. This was not his world, not Europe; these Balkans, of which he had had no image ahead of time, did not allow him to form one even now. And if the streets in the couple of larger cities with their hordes of pedestrians had been great centers for stimulation and relaxation well into the century, including for my generation, they were nothing of the sort for my son now: reality for him was ass
ured only by his few regular hideouts at home in the in-between districts, along with the jam-packed crowds of his contemporaries who frequented them—not even friends.

  But turning back was not possible. He had told his people at home about the trip, and until it was completed he could not show his face among them. And yet at the beginning, every time he made one of his morning excursions back in the direction he had come, retracing the previous night’s stretch, he was strongly tempted to stay on the bus as it traveled north, and flee back to his own world.

  During just such a spell of back-and-forth, at the station in Koper, Istria, which on the previous evening, through the steamed-up windshield of the bus, had been nothing but a rain puddle in the drizzling darkness, the turning point came.

  Various factors were at work: the transportation center in the freshness of morning, long and low, with lots of glass, in which the sky was mirrored and through which the sea shone, far outside town, the depot for buses, for a couple of boats, and likewise for trains, whose tracks ended at a belt of reeds, showing a new shade of winter gray, among them scattered vegetable gardens and orchards won from the sea, each populated by one sheep; a saying of Pythagoras, encountered as he read on in the biography: “Every place demands justice”; simply counting silently, and perhaps even the local brandy, helpful this time, drunk outside standing up, with other drinkers, older and younger, at the tent-like snack bar between the end of the tracks and the bus platform.