by Peter Handke
With the passing weeks and months, the two animals moved, each on its own, into holes in the bank, side by side, in which they lodged like giant cave dragons of old, only gradually discovered by me amid the camouflaging shimmer of the clay, with their rigid, scaly triangular heads, from which only rarely their tongues darted out.
For this attempt at a chronicling of one year in the no-man’s-bay I have not yet looked even once at my notebooks (although they fill the two upper drawers in one of the few pieces of furniture in the house, the dresser, to the point that they stick). In my storytelling I am following only my memory, and would like to keep it that way.
And with the help of—or according to the measure of—my memory, it is again animals, when I recall how the spring continued, as Pythagoras’ pupils recalled their day before yesterday, that determine my image of the bay at that time.
First, even before the lizards, on the days that did not get a little warmer until around noon, on another path by a bank in the forest, I came upon a colony of wild bees. These had their holes, numerous, honeycomb-close, like an earth city, in a zone of the gray-blue sand that is called here Sable de Fontainebleau, although the Seine hills are far from the town of Fontainebleau. The sand dug out by each of the bees, forming bulging ramparts around their holes, seemed to come from a considerable depth; it looked so unweathered, unwintry fresh, and pale as wood shavings, providing, along with the barely noticeable yellow of the pussy willows, the first spring color in the great expanse of tree gray.
Those hundreds of circles of sand on the mossy bank first drew my attention to the craters in the middle, which, when examined from a squatting position, turned out not to be empty at all. Hairy black heads with antennae filled the openings, at first only here and there, and then, after a warm hour of sun, in almost every earth comb. Fine sand blew and slithered in all directions, along the entire bank, and finally here and there a couple of bees flew out of their grottoes and took off, some black-armored, others red-pelted, toward which pollen?, while the majority who remained behind, merely crawling around their holes, were now pounced on by slim, all-black flies, at second look also bees, only of a different gender?, which circled and rolled about with the bigger, more colorful ones as if in foreplay.
That was repeated several days in a row on the Wild Bee Path, except that more and more of the plump chief bees were left lying as cadavers next to their holes. (I explained this to myself as the result of the persistent nighttime frosts; they had frozen to death.) And in spite of the stronger sun, the thousand-grotto city seemed to be dying out more and more; a rarity now when a hairy black head slowly struggled up to the light or landed with yellow-dusted legs; and the dive-bombing small bees had completely disappeared. And only later, when I turned over one of the curled-up putative frost-corpses did I see an empty thorax, as if sucked out, and it was exactly the same with all the others: only the back held together for appearances’ sake; underneath nothing was left.
The legs of the dead, gilded with pussy-willow pollen, thus became for me the next color of spring. And even later, when I pushed the dead leaves aside one at a time at the base of the bank, I discovered under them the main deposit of mining-bee corpses, heaps of them, all topsy-turvy, on top of and underneath one another, swept together after the slaughter as if in mass graves, and all the cadavers were completely without flesh between the head and the abdomen.
Since then, for the rest of the year, I have not seen any mining bees, either murderers or victims, either at the long since flooded settlement in the grotto bank or anywhere else. In the summer I was stung a few times in my yard by bees, true enough, but those were the usual kind (which, however, likewise in summer, for an incredible, sun-darkening moment, whooshed through that same yard, no, roared, a swarm-cloud, in flight).
Only once, also in summer, did I have an experience with perhaps similar wild bees, but I hardly got to see them. And my experience was then entirely different.
That was the day when, in one of the bay’s forests, on the edge of a ravine, I finally found my way to the cliffs I had been missing in the area as a sort of nourishment for the senses. I had been following the upper edge of a brook bed, during a hot noon hour completely free of wind—and there: the cliffs, in which I had almost ceased to believe anymore, after all the terrain symbols for roches, which then turned out to have been blasted or built over, now only names on maps.
I stopped in my tracks, on a path overgrown with beech seedlings, at the foot of the row of massive rocks, emerging so unexpectedly out of the forest, with the sun shining on them and the trees at some distance. These were cliffs as cliffs should be, for climbing, for hurling oneself to one’s death, for taking shelter under in a storm.
And then I again heard a roar, but different from that of the honeybee swarm and that of the warplanes that were still tracing their practice loops more often than usual from Villacoublay to the Ile-de-France: it was very close, and also, unlike the bombers, had something profoundly even about it, and came from the cliff in front of me.
For the moment there was no other sound. The entire stone face, as high as a building, and smooth as a pebble, was thrumming, and not until I was within a hand’s breadth of it did I notice the crack from which that mighty sound surged—I almost had to put my ear right against it to be certain. Surged? It surged through me, swept me away, and I allowed it to surge through me. And at the same time I was almost gripped by fear, and not only because of the occasional bee that came shooting out with its lone buzzing, which once out in the open promptly dissipated or sounded like nothing worth mentioning.
That there was such a roar inside the cliff had to do not only with the population of wild bees in there but also with the way the fissure probably widened out inside into a cave: the bees returning home sounded as shrill as wasps in the moment of squeezing into their refuge, and a moment later their sound was swallowed up in an entirely different sonority, the roar from deep within the cliff. As close and threatening as the sound was, I had, on the other hand, never heard anything come from a greater distance. If this was a trance, there was nothing more real than a trance. Only this made presence of mind possible. If ever there was a music of the spheres, it was resounding from the earth here.
In that hour with the cliff bees, the noon stillness did not last very long in the surrounding area. On that very day in Paris another peace conference was taking place, in connection with one of the civil wars, and the airspace above the seven-airport region was soon filled with the rattling and rumbling of helicopters ferrying representatives of the warring parties back and forth between Villacoublay, Buc, Toussus-le-Noble, Guyancourt, St.-Cyr-l’Ecole, and the Elysée Palace. But even while the squadrons were flying uninterruptedly over the treetops, I was listening only to the roar of the wild-bee colony in the cliff—like the humming of my childhood in the telegraph poles, except that it was a live sound if anything ever was, a sound before every other sound—and I tapped my foot to it and wished we might all have such a ringing in our ears, in our skulls, in our hearts, for me and you in the hour of our death.
It was not yet summer when I then went to the woods to write. On the one hand I had long had in mind to sit out under the open sky with my stuff, as I had during my time in Ulan Bator. On the other hand I left my study not of my own accord but as a fugitive.
To be sure, there had always been noise around the house now and then, but in the meantime it had become so bad that even in unsettled weather I ran away from it. By noise I do not mean children crying and sounds of work. Although high-pitched whines, drilling, hammering, and squeaking could get on my nerves, I knew I had to put up with it, and battling my way through even seemed good for the text: as if it were to be tested for accuracy that way. There was a crash with whose help I found my way back to a train of thought I had lost during a period of too much stillness; wasn’t there a danger of letting language run away with me in the stillness? This other noise, however, was dangerous in a different way. It seemed
malevolent to me. It was not even that the noisemakers were taking aim at someone else—someone else, anyone else, did not exist for them.
In the last few years I had acquired some new neighbors. With the many trees and dense hedges, I hardly saw them, and merely heard, all the more clearly because I could not see it, that things were being torn down, built, rebuilt. Some evenings it was actually a relief when, in place of the earlier pitch-blackness and desolateness, from the area around the yard here and there another illuminated window shone. To be surrounded at a distance by the silhouettes of small houses, their roofs hardly visible through the treetops, was nice. It was as if a village had sprung up around my property, or a circle of wagons.
The nights in the bay still kept their spacious elastic fragrant peace. The problem was that I had to wait for daytime for my undertaking, or my observing. And now there was hardly a day without this noise, which left room for nothing else, and all the more noticeably in that it disrupted the very special silence of the region, and always without reason.
There were days when I was surrounded by it so completely and complicatedly that the only thing I could do was laugh and quietly keep plugging on. While one of the faceless neighbors was assaulting his environment through wide-open windows and doors with every madness aria ever composed—any music, no matter how lovely, blared this way now—the one next to him was blasting away—with an air gun? but then where did the smell of burning come from, penetrating into my study?—tirelessly at the swarms of pigeons in what was not even his grass, and the invisible third neighbor around the corner was trying out one of his ever-increasing number of fiendish machines, using the acquisition of the week to go at the not terribly old apple tree in his pocket-handkerchief yard—which he wanted to turn into a raised barbecue terrace?—instead of digging up the tree, grinding it to bits, on the spot, stump, root, and branch.
To this day I know hardly anything else about these people except that they have some of the attributes of campers (but aren’t there quiet campers, and nice stories about them, and don’t campgrounds have their rules?), and at any rate none of the attributes of residents, either of their houses or of the bay. Never have I encountered them except on their properties, or by their cars, which are always ready to start up, whose engines are also often running when the owners are somewhere else, and whose alarms go off at intervals, now here, now there. And never was even one of these neighbors to be found at Mass, or at the local bars, on the soccer field, on the boules court, in the handball hall. When the outdoor market opens on Sunday morning on the square in front of the railroad station, they may just possibly pass through the crowd, recognizable by their weekend-only garb, glaringly bright warm-up suits and jogging shoes.
They seem to be of no particular age, neither poor nor rich, and it is uncertain, too, whether they come from the country or the city. If of any origin, then from an alien, extremely alien planet. The only thing that is clear is that they have never had a neighborhood and will never understand what a neighbor is; that in their work other human beings never occur, or if they do, then only as raw material; and that for them Sundays and holidays exist only so that they can broadcast into their surroundings from inside their hedges, as though they were sitting there in its midst, their ever so inventive racket, which always erupts suddenly and at double decibels.
And none of these neighbors feels disturbed by the fellow next door. Each is so engrossed in his own din that he does not even register the other one’s. When one of them, again on a Sunday afternoon, out of nowhere, broke the last existing sound barrier, and I, convinced that something terrible had happened to him, wanted to alert his immediate neighbor from my ladder, propped against his fence, there at my feet a shadowy figure, surrounded by a cloud of dust, continued with utmost equanimity to operate a sandblaster, with which he apparently wanted to render his façade as marble-smooth as the palace of Versailles, while to my left a sprinkler was hissing for the benefit of a lone patch of grass with the approximate dimensions of a doghouse, and what to my right was incessantly whinnying behind the shrubbery was anything but a herd of horses, and diagonally at my rear cries of passion continued to blare from a rented video, accompanied next door by the hundredth repetition of the waltz of the fleas or Bolero. One of these neighbors remarked once that he did not even hear the noise anymore. So what did he hear? And there had been a time when I thought: If salvation, then through hearing. But what was there to hear now?
An additional factor was that almost every single one of the hitherto remaining interstices, even the most inconspicuous slots, were walled up in no time flat by the new arrivals, used for garages, recreational spaces and various storage spaces, or for enclosures for newly added spiral staircases, so that in the fairly tight ring of buildings around me, instead of the breeze from the woods, a massive echo was created, which made impossible a pinpointing or locating of individual noises, which would at least have provided a kind of reassurance.
And more and more the loudness of these neighbors also came to lack that regularity with whose help one might perhaps have got used to it. The longer they stayed in the bay, the more erratic their world of noise became. I could no longer rely on the initial din. This would break off suddenly, and after a brief, squishy soundlessness, like the sudden cessation of a mosquito’s whine in the night, an entirely different one would break out. Something even worse than a roar filled the air: a whanging.
And when all the other inhabitants of the bay had set out somewhere for the day, even if only to the nearby forests: my racket experts stayed behind, at least on Sundays and holidays, glued to the spot, and if they did not create pandemonium outside, they rumbled around inside, armed with machines, between cellar and attic, as invisible as they were audible far and wide. It could happen that in between, exhausted by their frantic activities, they slumped down and stretched out all four paws. But there was always one who kept going in place of all the rest, alone, indefatigable, and it was because of him that I went to the woods to work, even in thunder and lightning.
His new house, with a run behind it for the German shepherd, was the structure closest to the study that had been meant to be my place for the year in the bay. And although there could hardly be anything left to do on his almost immediately clear-cut property, I heard, especially with the onset of spring, my unknown neighbor constantly busy there: if on the other side of the hedge, a few steps from my desk, peace reigned for a change, it meant he was away, the dog shut up in the garage, where it made all the more noise.
The man had a special piece of equipment for each of his gardening activities. There was nothing he did by hand. And each of his equipment sessions took at least as long as the equivalent manual operation. He went about them with grim thoroughness, yet afterward the soil or plantings, viewed through my hole in the hedge, looked exactly the same as before: barer, more monochromatic, more even, more smooth it could not possibly become. Along with the lawn tractor, which almost filled the speck of lawn, including the flagstone terrace, he also operated a sort of shredder, like an antitank mine, for any clumps of grass around the periphery that might have escaped; a sort of motorized water jet for annihilating any traces of weeds in the chinks between the pavers; a sort of trimmer that worked like a laser beam, only much louder, with which he pulverized the couple of blades of grass that might stick up above the rest (never did I discover through my peephole even a single blade poking up); a lawn dryer after too much rain; and all that at the same high volume, though at different pitches, from dentistlike whirring to rattling, shrieking, and thrumming, which made an ordinary banging and grating seem positively comforting.
In addition, from time to time he fired, even under a clear blue sky, a sort of weather cannon, and called in yet more machines to spear intruder leaves that blew in from neighboring yards, for burning out a mole tunnel, for smoking out an ant heap, for neutralizing the squawking of sparrows, for diverting the stronger gusts of wind.
Whenever I, sitting in my s
tudy, halfway quiet for a change, heard just beyond my yard the unmistakable squeal of the parking brake and then the crash of the garage door closing, I knew that any moment now one of these machines would start up, which one first? And while trying to take a deep breath outside the door to the study, I saw through the bushes the silhouette of my neighbor pacing off his angular course with one of his power tools, looking self-absorbed and quietly collected, while his dog, driven mad by his pitch-black garage exile, sensing my presence, let out behind the shrubbery sounds entirely different from the earthworm sucker-upper or the depth charge used for detecting a stinging-nettle root invading from next door.
Such tumult (a word which, in the decrees against disturbance of the peace, was always linked with the word “scandal” in the days when the bay was still a royal domain) I could tolerate, at least for a time, at least during the day, and much more easily during work than during mere sitting and watching. The noise receded into the work, was sonorized, so to speak, by my absorption, took on a different sound quality, a darker one. But no sooner would the beginnings of tiredness or distraction brush me than the noise would pound all the more stridently at my study door and against my skull. Then it became dangerous. My material was not yet impervious, and even now, toward the end of the year, is still not impervious. If one sentence or paragraph went, the entire thing was at risk. What was threatened was less my head, my ability to think, than the absolute necessity for me, unlike for a scientist or a chronicler, to become as one with a feeling, a heartbeat, or the rhythmic image.
And with the passage of time I then noticed that in my writing-down, as an effect of the noise, hardly any heart was involved. Without that, however, my thoughts appeared to me as mere singsong. I no longer knew what I was doing. With every attempted image immediately rubbed raw by new whanging, I ended up blindly lining up words next to each other, without any sense for transitions.