by Peter Handke
How should I call it to my neighbors’ attention that I was still there—not as a writer, simply as a neighbor? In the tiny interval between the time my omni-tool neighbor got home and set the parking brake, and the moment he revved up, I would step outside the study door, for example, and try to make myself audible by blowing the shavings out of the sharpener as loudly as possible as I sharpened my pencils. No other noise occurred to me.
Should I shout my sentences into the neighborhood before I wrote them down, like Flaubert? Instead I once tossed a burning log over the hedge at man and dog, whereupon the master, invisible, retorted in a chalky-smooth Sunday voice that I was the one disturbing the peace, after which he promptly cranked up his latest acquisition, a device with which he was either drilling for oil under his seared grass or plowing it up in search of a field-mouse nest.
Thus, with the passage of time, I would jump at even the sound of birds or of water boiling in my own house, as if at the howling of a motor or raucous voices from a party on a nearby terrace.
For my first day of work out in the forest, I sat down by Lizard Way, among the trees a few steps away from it.
It was a warm, sunny May morning, and I leaned against a chestnut tree whose foliage was just beginning to bud, with mossy earth in the root hollow under me. The gentle breeze and the stillness, of which the Niagara Falls-like roar from the distant highway up on the plateau was a part, filled or inspired me with peace.
All day long people passed right by me up there on the bright path. Although I was so close to them, no one noticed me, not even their escort dogs. Around midday most of those passing were joggers from the office buildings in the corporate center of Velizy, with the variation in this year of 1999 that almost all of them were out there without jogging suits, dressed rather in suits and overcoats, with their briefcases and even heavier ballast.
That was in between. Beforehand and afterward, however, sometimes passed by mountain bikers, figures moved across my field of vision such as I had never before seen in the woods, not even in those of the bay, which from the outset had been full of surprises. (And my head was as clear as my chest was marvelously painfully expanded; I was not having hallucinations.)
While here in the shadows of the leaves my pencils darted along evenly, over there in the sun a priest passed by, in an ankle-length soutane, accompanied by a wedding party, the bride and groom and the witnesses; then came, at a distance, relaxed yet alert, the new cast of The Magnificent Seven, all abreast—that was how broad the path was there; then came, after a time, hand in hand, already half lost, gazing heavenward, Hansel and Gretel; then came, hours later, an elegant couple, he in a camel-hair coat, she in high heels and an evening gown—I later recognized the man, tanned, with a blackened mustache, his arm wound around the woman, heading uphill with elastic tread along the edge of the path, through the wild broom, as Don Juan, and the lady as Marina Tsvetayeva (they spoke Russian with each other); then a horse went by, riderless, workhorselike, and with steps as slow as those of his predecessors; and common to all of them was also that they appeared to me less as human beings or as animals than as living beings.
And toward evening the stonemason turned up again, not a wanderer along the path but a person extricating himself from the thick underbrush of the forest reserve over there. He did it matter-of-factly, as if this were simply his way of crossing the countryside, and promptly sank down on the oak stump, so broad that it could have provided a resting place for a dozen hikers. He hung his doublet behind him in the bushes and sat quietly erect, without stirring. A jogger who politely circled around him called out, “Isn’t it great here!” to which the stonemason did not even nod. He ate a piece of bread and an apple, which he peeled in one piece, and now gazed across from his seat, which had so often been mine, into the forest toward me.
I had long since suspended my writing. If he saw me, he did not show it; at any rate, his barely perceptible raising of one finger did not have to mean anything. And yet it seemed to me as if I was supposed to address him from among the trees. I did not do so, and he went to work on his sitting trunk with a conspicuously short-handled hammer and a chisel that I at first took for a crowbar, and finally he disappeared back into the area that had been reforested a few years earlier, where the young trees already grew so dense, with hardly a patch of sunlight on the dark ground, that only a fox could get through. He entered there into a space of his own, like a bullfighter, and in response to the pivoting of his shoulders and hips, so rapid as to be almost impossible to follow, and thus seeming all the more purposeful, the straight saplings swayed no more and no differently than in the wind.
Hadn’t I imagined time and again that like a mythical beast there must also be a hermit in the bay’s forests, and that the old residents knew all about him, as they knew about the beast, but they would not betray him to anyone who had moved there from somewhere else?
I finished my project for the day and then sat down outside the forest by the sandy path, already after sundown, now on the great oak stump myself. The annual rings could not be counted, since the stump was burned coal black, even down into the roots, splayed like fingers and at the same time deeply anchored, and furthermore split by fire. The dense pattern of notches around the base: did this represent the stonemason’s marks, or perhaps rather the footprints of birds, the front toes as clearly delineated V’s, the one back toe a mere brushmark, marks such as were already there at my feet along the path, now toward evening frequented only by birds, for dustbathing and tripping back and forth?
Across from me, right behind the bank with the lizards, which had already slipped away, and the first trees, was the empty and, to outward appearances, rather gloomy spot where I had been crouching or squatting only a little while ago, and before that the entire day. And at the thought of all the happenings during the course of a day along this woodland path, barely a few hours on foot from the Eiffel Tower, I was filled with an astonishment as powerful as that I had experienced much earlier for at most a moment when half asleep; and the question that Gregor Keuschnig had asked himself a quarter of a century earlier took on new validity: “Who can say, after all, that the world has already been discovered?”
To write I went out into nature, into the fresh air, into the day, into the wind, into the forest, and then if possible every morning, right through the summer and far into the fall. (As recently as yesterday I remained stretched out there until I could hardly make out my own handwriting, and that was also because of the evening dew, for the pencils did not mark properly on the damp paper.)
A couple of times, when the rain became too heavy, penetrating the leaf canopy and not letting up, I continued with my writing in one of the few public buildings in the bay, but hardly ever back at my house; I have been spending more time in my study only since the somewhat quieter days of early winter.
In bad weather I most often sought refuge in the bay’s little post office, the “auxiliary post office”—in general the local agencies have modifiers like “branch,” “annex,” or “provisoire.” There was a counter there intended specifically for filling out forms, even a windowsill, a spacious, broad one for propping one’s arms on and looking out, just as I had wished for from the beginning for my writing year.
Outside the window nothing was to be seen but an area marked off by a brick-red wall at the rear, resembling a grove with its few widely spaced spruces and birches, on the ground the short, thick, yet never mowed grass and the several-year layers of spruce needles and cones, among which then in the course of the summer new white-and-red mushroom caps kept erupting, harvested by me with the consent of the postmistress. This woman was alone most of the time and knitted behind the counter or talked on the telephone, as loudly as—fortunately for my concentration—incomprehensibly; she was almost deaf. The fact that I came in out of the storm, sat there, and went away again without ever leaving a letter with her did not disturb her.
When she did have customers, as a rule they were older peopl
e, with postal savings accounts. Once there was a telegram to be sent, in Spanish, and it took her an hour to transmit the few words by telephone because of having to spell out everything several times, especially the address. The little place had no telex, for there was no demand, and when a person from elsewhere blew in one day wanting to send a “chronopost” overseas, she explained to him that this was the first time she had ever been asked to do this kind of mailing, whereupon the stranger drove off with his express package, to a post office outside the bay.
Otherwise a great stillness prevailed in the auxiliary post office, without the thumping of rubber stamps or radio music; at most the postmistress’s little dog sometimes shifted in his basket. Nothing but the slapping of the rain against the windowpanes; a pattern of shadow from that on the windowsill, or a flash of lightning.
The disadvantage was only that this branch closed early, and thus I sometimes finished my day of recording in the next bay over, in the back room of the restaurant run by the petty prophet of Porchefontaine, whose raging misanthropy I had almost been driven to share by my neighbors’ racket; from time to time it did me good.
In his rooms, too, there by the railroad embankment, in a former station restaurant, there were windowsills, wide ones, extending out to my ribs, and even the benches that went with them, as in the ancestral house in the Jaunfeld village of Rinkolach, and all of this shaken again and again by the wonderful rumbling of the trains directly above me.
In this year the weather changed constantly, and always from one hour to the next. But whenever possible I sat outdoors with my project, out in the woods. And what then became my main sitting place was the spot that had attracted me most powerfully earlier on when I was out walking and doing nothing.
Writing beside a body of water was even more promising than writing beside a path. At first I tried it with the three ponds in the bay, one after the other. For a few days I worked halfway up the hill by a sunken road behind the Etang des Ursines, in the largest and also the oldest part of the settlement, where the prehistoric flintstone and stone ax had been found; after that at the weathered picnic table behind the pond with the crayfish, with the mental image of the war correspondent, now dead, of his shock of hair standing up, his stubble-beardedness, his paleness, his total incomprehension of a person like me; then by the one surrounded entirely by woods, without houses in view, called Hole-in-Glove Pond, under the birches there; everywhere I made good progress, except that I did not like to be seen with paper and pencil—some people did pass by, who, however, mistook what I was doing for drawing; none of them came up close—and except that some fishermen had transistor radios with them.
Nonetheless I finally set out for that body of water which, although it always struck me as the only really old one and also the most extensive one in all the forests of the Seine hills, is not marked on any map of the area, even the most detailed, nor does it have a name, even in the folklore of the bay (but who knows?), and which I privately call, after neither “bayou” (Mississippi) nor “Everglades” (Florida) stuck, the Nameless Pond.
Yet the word “pond” does not fit this puddle either, at the sight of which at least the first passersby call back their children or their dogs with exclamations of disgust and horror. In fact its surface, and not only during a longer drought, looks bubbly sometimes or glistens with an oily film, and I have hardly ever been able to see all the way to the bottom. Trees, long since dead, barkless all the way up, naked, only the whitish-gray trunks remaining, with a few broken-off forks of branches, stand there in the water, among those that have tumbled in from the banks and are still green, and aquatic vegetation with dark-haired root tangles below (masses of them in the light of low water).
A puddle, and yet extending far out? Yes, and this on the one hand by virtue of its complicated shape, going around one corner and then another, entirely different from a man-made pond, and especially by virtue of that unique shimmer of distance or enigma in its most remote spits, with a view through the vegetation and dead tree trunks, over hundreds of sawed-off trunks barely rising above the water, a glow of distance reliable in a way I have never encountered in a puddle, but also not in a full-grown lake, either in that of Gennesaret or that of Michigan or that of Neusiedl. Every time, from sitting there awhile, from the farthest tongues of the puddle, along with the water’s edge, air, and shore, even when nothing was moving, a pull emanated.
And in such an environment I settled down one lovely spring day to continue my work, and that became my established place, except during torrential rains, until the first frosts.
It was in the thicket on the other side of the Nameless Pond, but I had a view of the water, through a long cut, all the way to the bays in the more accessible bank; but anyone standing over there would have had to look hard to catch sight of me, until the time of leaf drop.
At my back, after a gap to slip through, the underbrush led right up to a forest in the background, not at all dark or crowded, extending up the hill, to the south, so that the sun, filtered through the foliage, shone on my paper as it crossed the sky.
In that same place, on my very first day, I came upon what was left from the sawing up of a mammoth oak, once a cylinder, which had been burned out from the core and had fallen apart, leaving two hollowed-out half cylinders. I rolled the sounder half, with some difficulty—it was so massive—over and over along the mossy ground to a place where it bumped down a steep bank by itself to my watery corner. And there, on the soft, peat-black but not yet swampy ground, I set this shape upright, sat down on the ground, within a foot of my pond bank, leaned back into the half circle of wood, and had a wing chair, without legs, just right for my purposes.
It surrounded me literally and really like a set of wings, and moved with me on the peat soil, yielded, pushed me forward again, but would remain steadfast in the face of my most violent shoves; that was how heavy it was, also from the fire; and besides I felt protected in its curve during my work, shielded from the eyes of the joggers, one or another of whom, especially during mushroom season, would suddenly make the branches crack up there behind me.
There I sat, leaning back (and would like to continue to sit and lean back), and promptly began, with my pencils lined up, the eraser next to them, to write, as if it were child’s play, without the usual fear of beginning. I imagined the sentences following the movements of the water at the tips of my shoes, the air streaming all around the trees, the open sky, not exactly right above my head, but plentifully at brow level and as a reflection from the pond, while the sun, whether on the horizons or at its zenith, followed the outline of the semicircle of my backrest.
Unlike earlier I no longer ground to a halt when I realized that something I was just writing down had already been said long ago, by me or by someone else. If I repeated myself or another person now and then, that was fine with me, and of course I did come to a halt each time, except that now I approached the repetition with additional elan, positively elated at the prospect of it.
Certain other concerns also dissolved into thin air: that in the history of the bay and of my distant friends so little was happening; that the plot was not moving; that the sentences were too long for a book nowadays. I let them get as long as the image that was inside me and motivating me required; all that mattered was having such an image inside me. And if it was long-windedness, I felt it to be in harmony with the back-and-forth ripples of the wind on the water, around all seven corners of the pond, and with all that nothing-at-all in between, a little tremble far off, the drilling motion of the red-throated downy woodpecker in the dead wood, who, when I next look up, is giving its stomach a one-second bath, swooping down, with an incomparably delicate splash. It seemed to me as though such simultaneity acted on my storytelling like a verification; as if the water above all, there in its uniqueness, was what confirmed my work—work? here more a mere synchronized breathing.
Besides, I had an infinitely easier time of it, there by that nameless pond, with my project, al
ways in danger of becoming so tied up in knots that no air was left in it, of making paragraphs, or, instead of being forced to conjure up an appropriate transition and a compelling sequence, keeping going imperturbably. Making paragraphs in this context meant only pausing in the middle for a catching of breath, impossible for me as a rule during indoor writing, for a walking away from the page so that it, too, could have a moment’s peace.
Thus I remained calm when rainfall heavy enough to force its way through the leaves interrupted me. I tucked my portfolio between my jacket and my shirt, put on my hat, actually brought along for mushrooms, and waited.
The wilder the conditions around the water, the more serene and also patient I became. Stormy winds mingled with pounding rain, sand hit me on the fingers, terminal darkness broke in, thick branches came crashing to the ground, another tree tipped headfirst from the bank into the pond, the many birds of the area, large and small, fluttered back and forth, cawing and squawking, barely missing me, and I sat there, leaning back, with my manuscript, and watched, without batting an eyelash, warm around my heart, this panic-stricken world having emerged clear and whole behind the customary, fragmentary, chimerical one, and in the panic-stricken world that mixed-up creation—not chaos—in which I had always felt at home. “Now it’s right.”
When I was busy there by the water, the surroundings looked entirely different from the way they would have looked if I had merely been sitting there idle. Without my specifically taking them in, they became part of me, in passing.
And again in my memory the animals appear first. (Yet I am not thinking here of the mosquitoes that fell upon me in droves, though not until dusk, when I was usually already finished.)