My Year in No Man's Bay

by Peter Handke

  After that he was healed of his foreignness. He had reached the point of no return, and there my son, who otherwise always had a strange look whenever I asked him whether he was happy, could say he was, yes! No more thinking that he was missing something in his Viennese cellars; and before his eyes a wonderfully long trip. Nothing, nothing, would make him turn back now.

  First, however, he went to get some sleep, under a cypress in the local cemetery, on the slope just beyond the tracks, boat channels, and streets, and waking up as if it were the next day, although he had drawn only a few deep breaths, seeing a blond young woman in dark clothing watering the plants on a freshly dug grave, he took the local bus to that very Piran where “the day before yesterday” he had slunk around like a total stranger.

  From then on, although he continued to dawdle and also returned to his practice of repeating night trips the following day, his journey took on a sort of elan.

  Still on the Istrian coast, in Porec, he copied off the oldest building there a Latin tribute to a famous man; he, until then completely without ambition, was gradually catching fire for some undertaking or other—“I shall do something”—and wanted a similar memorial to himself one day: “In his honor this hall has been doubled in size,” and then forgot such dreams again, for instance spending an entire Sunday in Pazin, back in the interior of the country, knowingly missing one train after the other, while he listened to the doves calling through the city and out into the whole expanse of countryside.

  He, ever meticulous, positively finicky about his clothes, discovered shabbiness, or the particular form of it characteristic of Yugoslavia, felt accepted by the deliberately unpleasing, pocket-sized, shacklike lodgings as by a reality more compact by comparison with that of the Europe he knew, stood, soon no longer distinguishable from those next to him, at bars often set up for only a day out in the open, squatted, leaned, and lay down among the scraps of newspaper, indecipherable to him, in the dust and weeds outside bus shelters, forgot departure times, slept his daily brief day-before-yesterday sleep on the floor of public toilets, curved in a U-shape around the bowl, by train embankments, also in the middle of a railroad yard.

  Letting himself go was not merely a game for my son now. He even considered it something worth striving for; only in this way could he fulfill his potential; only by letting himself go would he also belong to the others, be less conspicuous and alone.

  As for his face, it took only a little, a reddening of the cheeks, a swollen lip, for him to seem on the skids (at least to me). And on the other hand it took even less, almost nothing, or just that momentary dozing off, for the apparent bum to change back, into a young man? No, rather into an ageless scientist, someone untouchable, the very opposite of the genuinely down and out, for whom, according to Pythagoras, no doctrine was even conceivable, because not even a dream could cleanse their souls anymore.

  Roaming over the Croatian island of Krk, in the company of similarly scraggly figures, when talk arose of cutting off the braid of one of them, it was he who in the general hesitation flipped open his jackknife and hacked away until the victim burst into tears. In Zadar, after an ashtray was hurled at a mirror, he was beaten up and thrown out of the bar, and then stumbled along for days, now one among many in that country going around in bandages and dressings, his on his chin, another’s above his eye, that of the woman way up front on the bus on her knee. Then on the trip to Split it was not the driver but Valentin who picked the music, well received by all the other passengers; he stood with his cassettes up front by the windshield, as if at his post, calm, in his mind planning the right transition from the present tape to the next, unapproachable, untouchable. And at the bus rest stop in Dubrovnik, on the Dalmatian coast, he amazed those present by doing one-second sketches of their faces, so good that one of those whose portrait he had done went parading through the bar, sticking his picture under everyone’s nose with a triumphant and also menacing “That’s me, see!” And in Ohrid, outdoors, with a view of the sea and the almost bald mountains of Albania, he wrote, from memory, his piece on the different grays of the wintry trees (which in the meantime has won a prize).

  Now it stayed light in the evening so long that he did not need to retrace his steps the following morning. But near the Greek border, in Bitola, Macedonia, after the middle of April, shortly before Easter, snow caught up with him, actually only the flash of a few flakes at night by the bonfires in front of the former mosque where chess players were sitting, whom Valentin then beat one after the other. On an unlit side street a mule meanwhile stood motionless by a cart, its head lowered, in expectation of heavier snow.

  Although it was just as cold the next day, on the other side of the border, in Florina, Greece, he felt welcome there in a different way from in his father’s Yugoslavia. That country, he wrote me, was really not for him, or not right now, though it would be later, and that indubitably. The appearance of standoffishness in the people, even toward each other, was too predominant; their friendliness remained to be discovered, behind the stolidness and the embarrassed scruffiness and coarseness. But whoever would be the discoverer?

  In Greece he found himself back in the here and now, after the gloom of the previous months, due not only to the winter. What a gleam in Florina from the watches on the arms of passersby. And whereas in Yugoslavia there seemed to be only one direction and its opposite, here he was caught up in a cosmic confusion, a welter of possibilities.

  On the day before Easter his travels took him on toward Thessaloniki, for the first time in a long while again on the trail of me, or of the hero of my story “Stones of Ignorance.” And again a long bus trip, over mountain thresholds, and again snow, which in the coastal area became nocturnal rain.

  The following morning in the city there was so much traffic that getting from the seaside to the church on the slope where I had found the picture of the Resurrection was an uphill struggle. On the Egnatia, the east-west highway as wide as a river, cars flowed in such an unbroken stream, amid the constant din of police whistles, that the other shore with its façades remained not only inaccessible for a long time but also completely out of sight. And having finally reached the steep, winding north-south artery, without sidewalks, one not only had to hug the old brick retaining walls to get anywhere but from time to time also had to make oneself as skinny as possible, one shoulder leading, one’s hands in the fissures in the wall like a mountain climber’s, to reach the next switchback without being crushed by the trucks.

  Valentin visited the fresco in the church of Nikolaos Orfanos described in my story only after all the other Byzantine sanctuaries, no bigger than chapels and squeezed in among ordinary houses, always very hard to find, and this, too, he at first contemplated only with his researcher’s eye: What were the paints made of? Where was the variation in the figures and groupings, seemingly the same from church to church?

  And in between, in the open air, he had cast an eye over the equally numerous, but dilapidated, overgrown Turkish-Islamic monuments, especially the moss-green domes of the baths, as if to refresh his retina after all the Christian pictorial sequences, or for relaxation he had gone in any direction where there was nothing to be seen, or down the slope, way down to the smoke-shrouded Aegean sea.

  That fresco, too, was in the church, or stone hut, one among too many.

  It did not show the usual resurrection of the Son of God, but one of the moments afterward. It is a scene such as I, although pictorially familiar from an early age with every Station of the Cross, have never seen anywhere else. It does not show the Son of God risen from the dead, floating up out of the open grave; nor does he encounter, as in the usual sequence, the women with the anointing oil running away. The painter shows an episode between those two. The Savior, obviously just risen, is by himself, and is walking along in his billowing white shroud through an unpopulated landscape, in the background dark mounds of earth with scattered trees, and above a deep dark-blue sky, in my recollection as black as outer space. Aside
from his finger raised in benediction as he walks, no action is portrayed except this billowing and these vigorous steps in an early morning otherwise devoid of human forms, yet the eyes as well as the shoulders of this figure returned from the dead are receptive and permeable to all the light and morning air of the world. Who has experienced such a resurrection? And my first-person narrator thinks at the sight, “This is the image with which the world will begin anew.”

  My son, on the other hand, immune to being distracted by the imagination, which he holds in reserve for his dreams, set the record clear: “black as outer space” was an exaggeration, and besides, as far as he was concerned, nothing needed to begin anew; things were new as it was. And then, in full view of that Easter scene in the Nikolaos Orfanos chapel in Thessaloniki, he suddenly fell asleep, there on the bare floor, and woke up even more quickly than usual, and contrary to his custom not in a reliable day-before-yesterday, but in the middle of nowhere. What resulted from this sleep and the shift into a Pythagorean day-before-yesterday was bad, as bad as could be: he was nowhere, had no father and no mother, had never had them; that business about friendship, which, according to that charlatan philosopher what’s-his-name, kept everything together, was a swindle, there was no one backing him up, no one he could call upon, the world, everybody, was fundamentally hostile and evil, he had merely managed to stay out of their clutches up to now, had been sleepwalking, and now that was over.

  And that was the whole story, the only story. He was lost, had always been, and now he realized that. And half a continent away, in my study here, at my desk, I heard, through the bawling of a small child in the yard next door, the wails of my far-off adult son, and thought: Well, well, and then: That’s the way it is. And then I realized that of all my kin the one about whom I knew the least was my son; I knew nothing at all about him.

  The following day Valentin traveled from Thessaloniki southwest over the Epirus mountains in the direction of Dodona, where in ancient times the great oracle had spoken, from amid the groaning of the oak trees.

  PART 4

  1

  The Decade

  For a long time now I have been familiar with the southwestern suburbs of Paris. But there is one forest bay I overlooked for an entire decade. Even on maps of the area, which more and more constitute my morning reading, in place of the paper, I failed to notice that the area was settled. As I took my walks deep into the forests of the Seine hills, nothing but silence emanated from there; sounds came almost exclusively from the highway up on the plateau of Velizy, or the military and state-visit airport of Villacoublay on the other side; only much later, as a permanent resident, did I develop an ear, also at some distance, for the commuter railway, a sort of acoustic ligament running right through the bay, and often pricked up my ears at its high-pitched hum.

  Or when I was out walking along the roads, I must have bypassed that bay every time, not particularly meaning to, perhaps imagining that there, on that last small spit of houses, there was nothing more to see, except perhaps a couple of cottages and sheds, very like the ones here along my path, only even smaller and more pitiful. But it seems to me I did not even have any such thought, simply turned off before I got there, because the road also turned off, giving a wide berth to this area, whose only remarkable feature was a tiny Russian church—the diminutive does not make it small enough—there as if by a birch grove.

  It was late afternoon on a clear winter day when I wandered into this hinterland, and, following a railroad cut, which gradually rose to become an embankment, went under an overpass, and reached a square that in any suburb would have been large enough to make one rub one’s eyes, and was also quite remarkable.

  On one side it was bordered by the railroad station, on an embankment several stories high, on all the other sides by buildings huddled together, also distinguished from the previous ones by the fact that every single one was a shop. Nothing characteristic of a suburb could be detected around that extended rectangle, emerging from its surroundings brightly lit by the streetlamps, the shopwindows, the neon signs, the waiting room, animated by the trains streaming into and out of the lower level of the station (on the upper level apartments with laundry hanging out to dry), while the sparrows, looking for a sleeping place, were as audible from the plane trees to the newly arrived observer as the cars, the train whistles, and the one-armed bandits in the three or four cafés.

  Not only because of its three bakers, three butchers, three flower shops, Vietnamese delicatessen, North African restaurant, its newsstand that carried international papers: this was a real town. I had an experience similar to that of my friend the painter with Vigo, the place he had entered through a mirror, as terra nova, which had been there for ages, a planet unto itself, pulsing and vibrating just as now when he discovered it; or similar to that of Filip Kobal with his karst, where he, who for a good part of his life had been on intimate terms with every pile of stones, had one summer evening taken a step off the beaten path in this little highland, usually visible at a glance, and found himself on a “second karst,” right next to or behind the familiar one, with similar desert villages, whose lights, reflected at night here and there in the clouds, had always been present, but for him constituted a fresh, a young light.

  Thus I, too, upon arriving in this unexpected place, was excited and at the same time sure of myself. There was something here for me to do. Yet it did not occur to me that I could ever reside or live in this neighborhood. I wanted only to work here. The square, with the railroad platforms up on the embankment, would be my field of activity.

  And my activity was to consist chiefly of what suited me best, as I had recognized in the meantime: observing. Hadn’t I always been a good observer? One whose manner of empathizing had often not merely influenced events but actually created them? Whenever I had taken the stage as a hero or man of action or intervenor, I had made a fool of myself, if not in front of others, then in my own eyes. But as soon as I became an observer, I felt that I was coming into my own, and that my way of observing was almost the only action possible for me. And I remain convinced that actors become gloomy without an audience and go back to war. Yes, all those gloomy competent ones: I would rather be a bright spectator, as when I started out.

  Yet my observing had never become anything steady, seldom extended beyond an hour, and besides was more a question of luck than discipline (in the sense of an athletic discipline). But now, immediately upon my arrival, I had the idea of steadying it, by making it my work, “for an entire year.”

  Daily, from morning to evening, I would do nothing but record what took place before my eyes on this suburban square and in its environs. I would spend the nights elsewhere, back in Paris, or even farther out, in Versailles.

  And as my place for writing I had in mind a room on the second floor of the Hôtel des Voyageurs, where, as I immediately found out, one could rent a room for several months at a time. I would sit there close to a view out the window through the plane trees, with nothing but paper and pencil, would also need no table; as a writing surface I would wish for a windowsill as wide as the one back home in Rinkolach, where doing homework would pass imperceptibly into looking out, far and farther, and vice versa.

  At the window of the Hôtel des Voyageurs my observing, my empathizing, and my writing would be one. My hand would be guided by nothing but the happenings outside, and if an image, a thought, or a daydream interposed itself, it would be welcome material for my notes, provided it materialized or hove into sight only as a result of my attention to the external world and immediately made way again for this and its yearlong annals.

  I pictured my project as child’s play, as effortless and free of strain and constraint as I had always wished the work of writing might be. Working while at rest, as part of resting, out of restfulness; working as the great form of resting.

  And what did I promise myself from this kind of year of simply recording? Something to read; a book, airy, penetrating, full of discovery, oblique as
none had ever been; the kind I myself needed to read. And why should it be set here, of all places, in such a place? And furthermore without a plot? Because it was a place in which I trusted myself to spend an entire year as nothing but a hardworking observer, and because I wanted to read a book whose locale would not grow a second head from previous knowledge, not a Paris book, not an America book, not an Arctic book, and also not a book that would dissolve into mere atmosphere for made-up stories.

  In this respect I can say that I believed in the place at first sight, and consequently also saw something to do there. In its presence I felt more unrestrained and at the same time more blessed with space than by the Dead Sea or in the Gobi Desert. And I was certain that here I would succeed, if anywhere, in remaining an observer.

  The fact that I would be merely a guest, and only during the day, assured that I would not be co-opted by the square in any way; I would not be in danger, as I might as a resident, of finding myself called upon to participate and abandoning my observation post. And aside from that, the place itself seemed ideal for the policy I had developed over the decades: “Participate by observing!” In this place I was exactly where I belonged with my project, and yet it would never become my home. Any such prospect would have been a threat to me. What I saw before me, however, I experienced as a promise, a moderate and nicely modest one.