by Peter Handke
An additional factor was that while I was circling the square, slowly and unceasingly as evening fell—a brightly lit stadium surrounded by near-darkness, a rump metropolis, New York’s Bronx surrounded by chestnut forests—my ancestors, the dead ones, from far away in the village of Rinkolach on the Jaunfeld, also those interred in the Russian taiga, could be felt walking by my side. What a rare occurrence. Otherwise they turned up almost only in conjunction with those images I had of the future in which I was a resistance fighter in a world war, and they gave me their approval there, and almost only there. But this place and my plan for it meant even more to them. This was the place and the approach that would make them most consistently present to me. Here and thus, with my observing and recording, they could be counted on to be constantly and reliably butting in. And those interred in the taiga would also light my way in the form of a bud on one of the wintry linden trees up on the railroad platform. That was how it was.
And I was also certain that I had something even better ahead of me than the resistance struggle I had so often daydreamed into existence. The locale, my future realm of action and inaction, seemed, as the workday drew to a close, as indestructible as it was inexhaustible. Here there would not be the same danger as with systematically recording one’s dreams, which as a result of the process became more and more fuzzy and finally ceased altogether, or were no longer worth mentioning. Here, as I envisioned it, recording things would, on the contrary, cause the events to blossom, day after day. All the objects, obscure corners, and likewise people’s gestures, as well as their postures, would present themselves to me for the long haul as unspent, imperishable, always good for a new surprise, in bright contrast to not only Austria and Germany. Here I would not have to begin by summoning up and ordering the physicality of the world by means of scientific, religious, philosophical inquiry, would not have to rely on the miracles of the moment. For me something would be happening, taking place, and revealing itself constantly, and that would be true not only for this one hour but for at least an entire year. There, for me and my way of thinking, was where it was. It was there.
And how did it happen, then, that your plan of merely recording turned into a story, and also hardly about the railroad station, whose double name was at first supposed to provide the book’s title? And why are you not sitting at a window in the Hotel des Voyageurs, but in a house a few streets away, and as a resident, a day- and nighttimer, and as a property owner? And why, during your writing year in the bay, have you not remained that pure, strong observer, but have instead participated more than ever? Where are your eyewitness notes, your annals?
I did not take my project to the hotel, first of all simply because, as it turned out, the plane trees blocked the view from every window (at least during their more than half-year foliage time), if not of the railroad yard, the wooded hills, and the sky, then certainly of the square below, of the happenings down there that I was particularly keen for, of the ground altogether, in the form of earth, grass, pavement, obvious proximity. And furthermore, I did not want to attract attention, and as a hotel guest, as was already clear to me after several test visits, my person would not have gone as unnoticed as in Paris or Versailles, and that would have jeopardized the restfulness of my observing, even if I sat there out of sight. And finally, none of the windows had the table-wide sill for taking notes or even just supporting my arm that meanwhile had become an idée fixe with me. And as a result of my becoming a resident in the place, my field of vision has expanded, from the square in front of the station and the streets leading into it to the entire forest bay, to just the degree necessary for developing and enriching my proposed undertaking.
And the fact that my planned recording, reporting, chronicling, remaining on the outside has become twisted into a story, and a first-person one, stemmed from the recognition, at the very beginning of the year, that I, the writer, would fail with this book if I did not in turn work myself into it, to give the project the necessary vulnerability, like an animal, which during a fight leaves its throat exposed at certain junctures (and it always made me, the reader, feel good when in a book this kind of first-person narrator spoke up and validated the project, and also intervened in it).
And the thing responsible for the fact that my planned sketchy recording turned into old-fashioned sequential narration was another “once more,” a dream. Tonelessly and imperiously, it outlined a narrative as the only form I could even consider, gave me an order, which at the same time made such good sense to me that I then obeyed.
Yet I ask myself whether the dream hasn’t betrayed me.
Is it possible that even the kind of dream that happens deep in one’s heart, and pierces one as no daytime image or event ever would, can be false?
Sometimes it seems to me that storytelling has been used up, or that there is something rotten about it, and not only my own. Something like the texture has become threadbare over the course of the millennia and no longer holds together, at least not for a larger context, unless it be a question of war, an odyssey, downfall. (And it is not even serviceable for that anymore?)
But on the other hand, the contention that storytelling, the book-long variety, cannot do without catastrophes is something I have never understood. I challenge this alleged principle. It should not be considered valid anymore. I want things to be different.
And that became the source of conflict in my activity. Many features of the area here have lost their original magic over the years, and in the process, the bay, at least in its totality, has come to seem no longer worth telling about, certainly not because I have become accustomed to it or because I am getting older—that with age pleasure wanes should also not be considered valid—but, perhaps, because I, now a resident, have succeeded too little at preserving my distance.
And thus even in this place, ideal for my project, I drifted more and more into the kind of judging that makes me disgusted with myself, and furthermore is destructive to the imagination, the best part of me. How determinedly ignorant I was in the beginning, as far as people were concerned, how wonderfully opinionless. And now? How I left the local passersby alone in my thoughts. And now? Torn between my exuberance here, my distaste there (at the thought of another Sunday with the various generations in warm-up suits on the railroad station/market square, of the thousandth mountain-bike rider zooming through the quiet underbrush, no doubt a great thrill to him), I then see only one possible way: to go back to my initial idea of being purely an eyewitness: look, register, record; the storytelling part as a sideline, and also never premeditated, rather, just as it comes, as a by-product of reporting, which would remain the underlying tone.
With my eyes and ears I practice this daily, and succeed time and again in making a snap judgment transform itself into the lasting pleasure of perception, of having-one’s-five-senses-together with the aid of the chronicler’s role.
Yet when it comes to writing things down, that has not worked out. Whenever I tried to achieve this kind of objective recording and witnessing, in the middle of the first sentence things would twist and turn on me into a kind of premature storytelling, even prattling. Was it conceivable that nowadays there was nothing left in the world to tell, merely the compulsion to tell stories?
On the other hand—my conflict—I encountered here, and again daily, so many phenomena for which inventorying, reporting, notifying, in short, any kind of naming, was just wrong or simply impossible. The only thing to do was to let them be—by telling about them, or circling around them, or touching on them, or letting them resonate, or letting their vibrations die away. And together with the area itself, these phenomena included, for some extraordinary moments, inhabitants of the place. (To be sure, I have almost nothing of the sort to tell about the usual adults, only about certain children, many old folks, and from one to three joggers or indefinable types.)
Even when telling about these phenomena does not promise any coherent narrative, I still find its preliminary form—observing—fascin
ating as nothing else can be. This is my form of participation, and participation is music enough for me, and storytelling is the music of participation.
The chronicle does not correspond to what I continue to intuit, beyond the profound dream: the chronicle does not correspond to humanity. Only when the facts, the blind facts, thousands of them, can shed their scales, get clarified, and acquire language-eyes, one here, one there, am I, leaving the chronicler behind, on the right path, the epic path, and life, once so deprived, is enriched.
And thus I muddle along, having faith in spite of everything, following that dream, and continue to circle the epic it called for. If nothing comes of it: that’s good, too. I have long since stopped being wild about doing it right. Wrong directions, wrong moves: all the better.
In truth, the situation is more dramatic than that: my panic long ago at what I could only much later call the “metamorphosis” arose, after all, when I, about to write a story, in a flash lost all certainty that deep within me a new story could always be discovered and brought to light every time I sat down to write something, a story that in the course of the sentences and paragraphs would unfold on its own, without my plucking and plotting. And I could not get on with myself, with the book, with the world until I found the other certainty that within me was, if not story after story, then something even more disarming, something that did not merely postpone the end like the stories of the thousand and one nights: storytelling, inventive in itself, independent of particular inventions.
But what if such storytelling, too, stayed away, forever, and that were the signal for the next metamorphosis, again like a fight to the death? Metamorphosis? And what came afterward? If even storytelling lost its universal significance, did anything at all come afterward?
Since the beginning of this year I have been swept back and forth. At one point I see myself traveling along, in conjunction with my undertaking, in some airborne vehicle, brand-new, spanking modern, which for short stretches dives into dark, narrow passageways filled with screeching skeletons, and then again the whole thing appears to me on the contrary as an interminable trip through a tunnel of horrors, with the wide-open, naturally colored outside spaces barely glimpsed as they flash by for an instant before the trip continues for days through nothing but black backdrops with swinging scythes and bared teeth.
I had been living in the area for a long time before it first revealed itself to me as a bay. Previously it had appeared to me this way only in a figurative sense, for instance late at night in the most remote bar, with a couple of silent men standing at the counter and others asleep at the tables, along with damp-shaggy stinking dogs, when I envisaged a sort of flotsam that had slipped past all the other massive and more densely entangled debris and had finally been driven and washed in here, one piece at a time, to this last station or remote “bay.”
That my domicile in fact has the form of a bay was something I finally saw one day from the ridge that traces a wide curve around it, and in addition I had to be standing way up on the catwalk at the top of the transmitter; from its base, even from the middle levels, the settlement below remains, if not hidden, at least unclear in outline, as a result of the wooded slopes that run down toward it all around; it looks as though the large, pale deciduous forest continued through the hollow, rising on the other side in the west to the next, unchanging, but already far-off glimmering hill country.
The transmitter, set in the middle of a convergence of roads and wood roads, is usually accessible only to authorized personnel, but I got in through the good offices of my petty prophet of Porchefontaine, who, in between two restaurants while one of them was in bankruptcy, was managing a canteen there in his inimitable fashion.
To have the settlement’s houses, seen from up there almost all equally squat, almost all with light red tiled roofs, at my feet as a bay, thrust deep into the wooded heights, which were otherwise of an almost unbroken green, mimicking crown by crown the mounting rows of an amphitheater, arching toward the horizon: that meant something. I stood before this form of settlement as before a discovery. This bay was at once so small and so large. And in retrospect it now seems to me as if a column of smoke were rising from every single chimney, straight, narrow, almost transparent, and one close by the other. A former refugee or work camp, erected for perhaps a month on an extended clearing in the midst of the wilderness, had become a permanent settlement, and merely as such had opened itself up to the ordinary suburban world outside, if only along a narrow corridor, as an access channel; the streets still recalled, and not merely when seen from above, the grid of the camp, just as the houses, no matter how solid they seemed, appeared in this bird’s-eye-view borough to have been pushed around like temporary huts or tents and to be standing every which way.
From the top parapet, dizzyingly high above the treetops, of the transmitter skyscraper (which strangers often take for a second Eiffel Tower, transplanted to the Seine hills), I heard, with all of Paris visible over my shoulder—white on white except for the golden dome of Les Invalides and the iron black of the original Eiffel Tower—far below in the backwoods bay, scattered guard dogs from the camp barking, and also a rooster crowing in response, while the sound of the frequent commuter trains was swallowed up in the whooshing of air currents around the platform; the only other sound that made its way up here was the whistle of the long-distance trains speeding back and forth between Paris and Brittany, on the second rail line, which I now recognized as the bay’s tangent, as the divider between it and the open sea of houses to the west, in the direction of Versailles.
The silence there in the depths of the bay seemed at the same time powerfully alive; it was an active silence, on land and likewise on water, on the two fishponds, both taking up approximately the same area as the two other largish gaps in the delicately laid-out thousand-dice game of the houses: the playing fields of the towns that share the bay area. One of the one-engine planes just flying over would lower its landing gear any minute now and touch down on the main pond as in the Alaskan interior, while from the woods along the banks a long column of camels would appear, riderless and unescorted, and by the edge of the other pond, in mammoth oaks, the temple monkeys would be chattering, and from the bus station on the most distant rim of the bay the bus line with light blue horizontal stripes would take you to Providence.
Any longing I might have for far-off places was assuaged by the sight of the bay. And my homesickness was long gone, and now, toward the end of the century, hadn’t every kind of homesickness vanished from the world, like a disease that has been conquered? And in that place I would no longer need any distraction or concentration in my life, no movies, no games in a stadium, no strolling down a boulevard, no sitting in an outdoor café, perhaps not even any reading. Compared to perceiving, inventorying, and reporting the things that appeared there, I thought, all the rest was a waste of time.
And finally during that hour, from my lookout on the transmitter, I picked out my own house down in the bay, or just a section of its roof between the chestnut tree in the garden and the pair of cedars just beyond. In the midst of the patchwork of red, green, and gray all around, it was further marked by the dark line of the narrow lane, which, overarched by shrubbery, led toward it like a tunnel. I was already living alone on the property at that time, without my son and without the woman from Catalonia. Did I also have no need of friends anymore in my bay? Didn’t I need anyone anymore?
For years I could not imagine that there might be any palms in the surrounding area besides that one in the otherwise treeless courtyard of a cabinetmaker’s shop. It looked as if it were set in concrete, and had apparently been there much longer than the workshop, and not until I had passed the second palm, which I had overlooked day after day, did my search for palm trees begin, with the certainty that there would be no end to finding them, and by now I have reached seven.
It was similar when one day in the local deciduous forest I unexpectedly found myself standing in front of a larch, looking
, with its shaving-brush bunches of needles, as though it had blown in from an area of high mountains; in the meantime I have discovered all around the bay entire groves of larch, seemingly hidden yet out in broad daylight; and similar, too, when one summer evening, by the road, which, if any, is the main road, in the place where it grazes the forest and has a bank, the most splendid edible bolete mushrooms lay, with lemon-yellow flesh, probably scattered by children playing, the special kind called cèpes de Bordeaux in France, since which time, in my mind, the bank has always been called the Bordeaux bank: over the years I later discovered that the forest around the bay was a paradise of these mushrooms; in the current year alone I have brought home several hundred of them, and what nicer and better weight in the hand?
And much that I could not have imagined here beforehand has revealed itself to me and put me on the alert or made my eyes open wide, and that will continue, not only as long as there are children, who hardly miss anything when they are playing; as if the same thing were true of the bay as of the largest borough of New York, about which someone once said, “Only the dead know Brooklyn.”
But even though at that time I stumbled upon my house in just that way—so to speak in the footsteps of the children out playing—in a spit of the bay that had previously eluded me, to this day I have not been able to track down another structure related to it. And yet I am certain that somewhere there must be another house of this sort, designed by the same architect almost a century ago.