by Peter Handke
And again the image changes. The entry had not yet been negotiated. I had not yet turned into the bay, as I usually did at that spot. The previous highway, after an unexpected curve, cut across a hollow and became a nocturnal landing strip in a penal colony, far from the rest of civilization. Although the inmates could move about relatively freely, they slunk past the wire fences and piles of muck with heads either bowed or turned away from each other, and though the paths were wider here, each walked at a distance from the next person, including the couples, and not only the old ones, to whom it was probably not a new experience, for either the man or the woman, to be a few steps ahead of the other.
There were hardly stores in this sector; the one supermarket, like those otherwise found on military bases, was without displays, without price lists, with sight screens, and if a product was visible, then only its back, and the cashier’s head itself seemed to be that of a prisoner, just as the children sat there trapped in the bare neon-glare-lit room, in a deeper cut in the hollow, in a camp school, born already unfree, the offspring of the banished.
In addition, out of the hill-darkness all around, the watchtower loomed, many-storied, huge, each story shining down fixedly on the isolated stragglers and slinkers along the track, and only from the top of the tower a restless flashing and smoldering.
On that evening I did not feel I had arrived in my bay until I reached the square in front of the local railroad station, full of motion from the shadows of the plane trees, whereas usually the bay began way back at the Route Nationale and sometimes even before that, for instance at the Armenian church, or at the shop of the alterations tailor beyond the junction, the Pointe.
On another such day during this year I returned after tracing a similar arc through the woods, from which far more wood roads and hiking paths led to the settlement than streets from anywhere else. And just as I daily had the experience of noticing something I had previously overlooked, it was the same now: by a clearing deep in the forest, among the oaks and edible chestnuts, a palm tree; and one of its fronds, on an almost windless day, was rustling and rattling like a sail on the high sea. An owl hooted, and yet it was the middle of the day, with the bells of the Catholic church chiming noon, and the almost simultaneous siren from the roof of the only official building in the bay—a mere annex to the main building somewhere else—an indication that it was the first Wednesday of the month.
In the distant outlet of the forest, directly facing it, stood a house, framed and overarched by the last trees; the path led directly to the door and the few steps up to it. It was a sight so different from that at the other end of the forest, up on the plateau with the office complexes, which as a rule displayed only their often windowless side elevations to the roads there, and then only parts of these, the edge of a wall, a ventilation pipe, a propane gas tank, their colors also clashing with any of those in the forest. Perhaps, I thought, this impression of the office buildings’ defiantly confronting the trees stemmed not only from the fact that the buildings towered above the latter, but also that one had to go uphill to reach them in the end, whereas the wood roads more or less gently descended toward the houses in the bay and merged with the side streets or even pointed toward a particular door, as though that were its destination.
Yes, the houses down below, the great majority of them, were proportioned to the forests around them, and not only when glimpsed momentarily through the trees. I have never seen woodlands and human dwellings achieve such a vital and beautiful communion anywhere else. That comes, I saw, specifically from the bay character of the settlement, extending deep and with every glance deeper into the otherwise intact primeval forest—an illusion renewed almost daily and perfectly fine with me—and even more from the wildness, no, the aboriginal quality of almost every individual shape amid the hodgepodge of houses, comparable to the trees in the forest primarily by virtue of a similarity in the spaces between them. And to me, the new arrival, even when I had long since passed the outer edge, and instead of on the wood road was walking down the side streets here, which I hoped would go on forever, the robustness and simultaneous delicacy of the arboreal structures and the residential structures seemed similar.
On that day the boundaries of the bay thus extended to include the last houses up on the opposite slope, and the intrusive sounds, almost the only ones in this great expanse, were the shouts of children playing, dogs barking, hammering, while behind me, from the woods, the owl could still be heard.
And on yet another day, as I was walking home toward midnight, by full moon, on the wood road, no owl was hooting anymore. Instead a fox was standing in front of the house at the forest outlet, and stood there, and stood there, a fox profile as never before. And when it ran then, showing up in a flash several gardens away, it appeared to me as a ghostly flitting through all the fences and walls and house foundations, whereupon it just stood still again, its entire silhouette horizontal, from the bushy tail to the perfectly pointed nose, its head over its shoulder for a long, long stare at me, at no one but me, and from there it dashed on again, fleeing or directly toward me? A shudder ran through me. Where was that? Was that even here in the bay at all? And in the current year?
As for this, the first thing I recall is the bats, again in a clearing in the forest, at dusk up in the hills of the Seine, and that was in January, right at the beginning of my sitting down, during a hike over the hills to Meudon, and a warm wind was wafting. The bats did not show their faces again until late summer, and then only for one evening, flying by rapidly in a zigzag through my yard, above which a few swallows were still swooping.
It was likewise still January that time I stepped barefoot into the grass outside my garden-level study to sharpen my pencils and then spent a good hour walking back and forth between the pear tree and the cherry tree, the ground was so warm under my soles. But it was probably only my imagination that at the same time crickets were chirping from the forest preserve, the result of the great winter silence there sometimes. (More later about the sounds of the crickets here and their connection with the silence.)
No hallucination—although I took it for one at first—was seeing a little snake creeping along the sidewalk at the foot of the Bordeaux bank on the bay’s main street, on a winter night that was damp and cold after all, no, not an earthworm or a novelty store item, and it really moved, though in very slow serpentines, and when I crouched down beside it, it raised its head weakly in the lamplight, flicking its tongue with its last strength, or not at all. The lone late passerby to whom I pointed out the snake was not surprised for a moment to see the animal at this time of year, and altogether the people of the area seemed to find hardly anything astonishing. And as several boys approached from the floodlit athletic field, I pushed the dying snake over the bank into the thick-layered fallen leaves of the forest.
And it was also in the depths of winter that I became a witness to the removal of a ninety-year-old woman, who, alone in her house up on the plateau (part of the bay on that particular day), had caught on fire from her gas stove and had burned up in her living room: when I passed again later that afternoon, pelt-black smoke was still puffing from a smashed windowpane, being photographed by the chronicler of The Hauts-de-Seine News, too late on the scene as usual, and a village expression acquired new meaning for me: “Your place is as cold as a burned-out house!”
And even before the onset of spring something unprecedented happened in the bay and the surrounding area, an earthquake, still inexplicable even to the geologists, also, these say, because so little research has been done on the area: only a small one, to be sure—the rattling of glasses was mistaken by most people for the doing of one of the bombers from the air base again—and yet, in the gypsum-rich part of the circle of hills, the underground tunnel of a former quarry is said to have collapsed, putting an end to mushroom-raising there.
If the earthquake hardly jostled my handwriting in my study, something else did so all the more. I, so dependent on consistency and dail
y routine, was threatened with being brought to a standstill and almost compelled to give up my undertaking, as yet so up in the air, also because I was still only at the beginning. (And where am I now?)
The woman from Catalonia, my wife, who had vanished long since, suddenly reappeared, but not to live with me again, for a third time, but to forestall my, our, book. At least that appeared to me to be her intention during those winter weeks when time and again but never regularly, and also at no particular hour, she would block my path in unexpected places.
It did not solve anything that I fled in between to Salamanca in the Spanish highlands and continued my work there, the Plaza Mayor, seen below in bird’s-eye view from my attic room in a pension, merely pretending to be the view from my study (those weeks seem so distant that I am not clear as to whether the dying snake here wasn’t actually dragging itself through the wet leaves down there on the bank of the Tormes River, and altogether whether the person squatting by the animal isn’t actually my friend the painter): I had to go home to the bay; without my presence there throughout the year the book would lose its locale and its basis.
And on my very first morning back, as I continued my work, “that woman” descended on me again. Actually I merely saw her running away down a side street when I went to my mailbox, located at the end of the lane, as if for a farm, fastened to the lamppost there, and then found, my only mail, a picture postcard of the medieval bridge over the Tormes in Salamanca, the back side left blank.
Ana had keys to the house, and some days I heard her banging around above me. Later she also came downstairs to the study and sat in a corner. I avoided speaking to her, recalling the phrase an almost-friend had used: Let the will-o’-the-wisp have its way; otherwise all that will be left to it will be its substratum, melancholy. (Earlier, when I had repeated that to her, the woman from Catalonia had replied, “But beneath my melancholy my joy may be waiting!”) And she spoke no more than I did, merely watched me in silence, hour after hour, and hadn’t there once been a time when I had wished that of her for my work? Then, as if she sensed that the day’s quota would soon be polished off, she would get up and leave. But on occasion she would come storming in, especially when, increasingly exhausted by the situation, I would be trying to sleep in the next room; she would shake me, still without saying a word, and then be gone again.
And on a spring day she appeared in the backyard and pounded with her fists on the study door. I went out to her. She had the ability to acquire tremendously broad shoulders all of a sudden, and with these she rammed me to the ground. I stood up, and she rammed me again, except that this time I was ready and stayed on my feet. I would have defended myself, but then I would have lost the sentence in the middle of which she had interrupted me, and with it my ability to continue the book. And so, with the woman from Catalonia one fingertip away from me, eye to eye with my enemy, I silently spelled out the next sentence, and likewise the one after that, and at the same time was close to seizing this giant dwarf and spiking her on the fence pickets, longing at the same time to unite instantly with this female body and give Ana a child, wanting at the same time nothing but to put my arms around my wife, and fearing at the same time that one of the neighbors might see us like this.
And what finally did happen: as old as I was, I began to cry, and in the process became as old as I was. And it seemed to me that her hatred was now being transformed into scorn. Yet as I then looked at her, she had disappeared again. And I squatted down on the spot where we had just almost killed each other, became lost in contemplation of the overlapping traces of wallowing and stomping, along with the uprooted grass and clumps of earth, thought that no human race was foreign to me except sometimes my own white one, and even more that of women; thought, “One day we will kill each other”; thought, “I shall find us once more,” and then continued on with this year of mine in the no-man’s -bay.
Since that day my wife has not appeared again. Instead, when summer came there were other threats and hindrances. But don’t you need those, too, for your writing, as the outward calls to order, without which you would inwardly let yourself go?
From time to time, yes, from time to time.
It is the moment for focusing on the houses in the bay, which in the beginning looked so odd to me, and meanwhile stand there so naturally.
Only in this process of writing things down, which sharpened my senses, did I become more attentive to the buildings here. That happened in an almost time-tested way: since I am incapable of forcing myself to perceive something, I would first note down at home at my desk what, without specific observation, had caught my attention about one house or another as I passed it. This allowed me to get away from my little memory trail; I became concrete, described as completely as possible, made up details at random, drifted into make-believe.
With such descriptions of a house and its surroundings in black and white in my mind, actually more like guesses, I would set out a second time in that direction. And only in this fashion did I become capable of seeing how it really was. And far more powerfully than what I had got right my mistakes impressed upon me the real character of the place. Except that in order to achieve that I had to have interjected something in writing between the object in question and my senses, if not something wrong, then something half cloudy, and in any case something in writing. Then all I had to do was go home again and correct this where necessary.
And sometimes I allowed the mistakes to stand; who could say that the telephone booth I had hallucinated onto a certain street corner would not in fact be installed there the next day?
Nowhere else have I seen such houses as those in the bay? Yes, and I have never yet seen houses like those here.
And again it was only during my writing year that I began to distinguish: it is not merely because of the particular building style. It also has to do with their location in this remote spit of a settlement, cutting deep and narrow into the forest. (The solitude or remoteness helped create this world—and what besides?) Not a house there which, observed from a distance—and the majority reveal themselves thus—does not have as a background, high above the roofline, a wooded ridge, which then extends over the roofs of the other houses as well.
The chain of hills round about not only provides the frame for the houses of the bay, but even more forms part of their image. Without it, marking the curved horizon floating gently above them, the houses would stand as if alone, each an incomplete phenomenon, so to speak. Without this omnipresent background of wooded hills the settlement would lack something that constitutes the unique solidarity, if not of the inhabitants, then of the dwellings there.
It has sometimes happened that I have looked out my window and pictured the wooded heights as gone from behind the near and more distant gables in the neighborhood, the eastern chain of hills with the transmitter, the southern slope, called Eternal Slope, of Velizy and the Poussin Meadow in between, the western heights, now at the beginning of November already shrouded in snow clouds; and each time a sense of uneasiness, almost of horror, has seized me at such hilllessness round about, with all the buildings in the fore- and middle ground continuing on into unbounded, drizzly, identical plains.
No. Even by themselves the houses of this region, without the green and gray arc of hill forests above their roofs, are a force, at least many of them. Even on the plains they would assert themselves, and would form lovely and spirit-lifting horizons, one in conjunction with the other, as well as with the front and back yards, around corner after corner, off into mirror-polished depths.
And again, only as a result of this year have I recognized that the city of my childhood longings was not exotic but one exactly like the settlement here in the bay; that those white cities I later chased after through the decades were not the right thing. Or: the White City is nothing for me.
The bay also has white houses, but they are rare, and in contrast to the White City, which begins to glow only from afar, here the last white disappears at a distance,
or one has to search for it. A century ago there was only one such building, which was also called La Maison Blanche. The façades display concealing colors, so to speak. Although yellow and red, even purple paint also occurs, nowhere does it make an impression of brilliance, or even of colorfulness. Yet the houses do not seem camouflaged in any way, but rather embody, in their distinctness and clarity, the fact we know as a house, and these house-facts stand, according to Karl Valentin, out in the open.
But isn’t it also thus in other suburbs? Perhaps. Except that the houses here appear more forcefully, precisely in that they are almost without exception smaller: if just as broad as elsewhere, they are lower; if as high, decidedly narrower. And since, on the other hand, the yards are often larger than elsewhere, the space between houses is entirely different from there. So much more air is visible, no matter how narrow the gaps, between and above the houses’ smallness.
It was this play of staggered in-between spaces that first brought back to me childhood images of a place of the future and rendered them concrete. And the play developed even more drawing power from other unique characteristics of the bay’s buildings. Almost every one of the thousand little houses, strangely angular or strangely spreading, had a form different from the one next door, and when two similar ones did occur, it was as rare as twins, and they always turned up far apart. Besides, they did not stand in a row anywhere, but rather each at an angle to the next, the barracks-flat one close to the street, the next one, towerlike, in back at the end of a bowling-alley-length vegetable garden, and then vice versa, and so on. And at every step you found the façades pointing in different directions, not only around the one pond or the one round, always unpeopled plaza called Place de la Concorde.