My Year in No Man's Bay

by Peter Handke

  Or was I merely imagining that? Even when I now walked the wintry paths, the summery cricket calls piped up, especially if I stood still now and then, and also in the dead of night, in my house, I heard them recently, impossible to tell whether outdoors or in my head; it woke me up, more easily and instantaneously than usual, and in the dark I allowed the sound to spin on.

  During the summer, what the crickets were engaged in seemed in fact to be the creating of a web. With their voices, as it sounded to me, they were knotting the silence into a tissue. Noise-sick, as I so often was when I got to the woods, I promptly felt, once in their realm, a wonderful soothing. More gently and reliably than the rustling of the trees, they healed my noise-worm-eaten head. Although the chirping of the crickets emanated from the ground, from the earth’s interior, it drew me upward. I had a visual image of the sound: a Jacob’s ladder, knotted from the most delicate ropes. And thus I also had an image of the crickets themselves: thousands and thousands of them rocking in a heavenly wheat field. No other animal, no bird could call this way, so monotonously and intensely, and in even, sonorous unison; more than an image, an infinitely repeating ornament, which, to be sure, broke off at once as I approached or made my presence felt.

  The crickets were most likely to be heard in the more inaccessible and at the same time sparse parts of the forest, on the steepest crest of the sunken roads, behind seven-kindling-bundle obstacles, and on still days. Often there was nothing for miles around to be heard but them, whom, however, I never actually got to see. But even among so many other sounds theirs remained the penetrating and decisive one. I felt when I heard it as though I were standing on tiptoe. It summoned me to listen, as silence alone could hardly do anymore, and that then appeared to me as the task to be completed, a sweet one. The cricket concert was moving, and in its furtiveness spoke to my heart like no other sound in this year. Yet I often found myself thinking only of a clock, or rather of the winding of one, as quietly as possible, on and on, close to the limit of audibility.

  I have no reason to miss the cricket music now; but I would have liked to play it for my friends when we celebrate our reunion. But did it even come from crickets? Didn’t it sound more gentle and at the same time more choral, more far-flung than the shriller, as it were more constricted, Austrian chirping that I have in mind from my childhood? And why am I also unable to imagine as its source the crickets from those days, black as they were, roundish, robust, armored? Isn’t it more likely those particularly tiny grasshoppers or locusts of which I found one on an already cold evening in my chimney corner, grass-root-pale and fragile, perching motionless and silent on the side of my finger? And that is how the animal remained when I held it up to the full moon; except that for the moment its silhouette became gigantic.

  In the first months of the year there was a particular group of itinerant workers in the bay who were cutting down and sawing up trees in the windbreak sections of the forest. They not only worked in the forest; they also lived there, in huts on wheels (not the same as house trailers).

  During almost my entire time here I had been running into them, and always there was at least one woman among them, often children and dogs as well. But this year’s workers had no family members along, and, as far as I could tell, there were never more than two of them together. Laundry hardly ever hung out to dry, and since they had only the one unit of housing, there was no circle or kraal as in previous years. They were either at work, with their one-man chain saws, often at a considerable distance from one another, or in the evening in the hut, by kerosene light behind the always drawn curtain over the doorway, smoke eddying from the pipe in the roof (or not, as the case might be), a teakettle, slim as a minaret, with two spouts!, on a camp stove outside, and incessantly piping Arab music, audible far off at the edge of the forest, yet not turned up loud at all.

  They had hammered together a table of birch logs outside, the seats consisting of oil canisters, the Islamic half-moon on their sides indicating their origin. Yet I never found them there, and only once outside the forest, at night down in the settlement, or only one of them, the older one, when he joined us in a bar. The woodsman said something, in sounds that were incomprehensible not because they were in Arabic or Berber, but unlike any language ever heard; and without even raising his voice in the racket of the bar. All that was certain was that he was not placing an order, or begging, also not asking a question, but rather making a request, a large, plaintive one, in which the only clear thing was the movements of his mouth and his eyes, at the same time half in shadow, because of the distance between those standing at the counter and him, which he made no move to reduce. He addressed everyone that way, from a distance, except me, probably the only one he recognized, from our daily exchange of greetings up there in the woods. I was dying to have him finally turn to me, as if I alone could have been of service to him, and on the other hand I acted as though I did not know him, and as if in his eyes I was supposed to behave this way. The old man left; the others had long since focused their attention elsewhere. He also hardly gave me time, and I missed the moment. And out on the streets, whose darkness was so different from that of the woods, where I subsequently ran into him as he continued his roaming around on that one evening, it was too late. He did not need anything now, or did not show it, or could not show it anymore.

  A little while ago, almost a year since that evening, when I again passed the two woodsmen’s campsite, not the slightest trace remained, neither the birch table nor even a spot of oil. Nothing but a feeling, as broad as the cleared ground, was there, for which I sought the fitting image for writing about it, but in vain.

  And what happened later with the birds’ sleeping tree, that one plane tree on the square in front of the railroad station?

  The sparrows spent the night there all through the summer, merely becoming invisible in the dense foliage. They could be heard, however, in early evening, from far away on the side streets, through the sound of the trains and the noise of the cars, jockeying for position or conducting other negotiations. When the square underwent repairs in August, they at first stayed away because of the jackhammers, also at night, but toward Assumption Day they returned and when the asphalt was put down, they were the first (not, as is usually the case, dogs) to leave their tracks in the still-soft material, in the form of large loops and suggestions of meanders, made not by hopping but by running.

  Late at night it happened sometimes, and without one’s clapping one’s hands down below, that they, or a couple of them, would fly up out of their foliage, which would suddenly crash apart, and like a swarm of flying fish would plunge into one of the neighboring tree crowns, though every time soon returning, each separately, to the original tree; likewise none of the new plantings on the square became a second sleeping place; though the new bamboo stalks served during the day as swings.

  In late fall, in the bare time of year, the best place to observe the sparrows perched in their limb forks was indoors behind the high glass façade of the Bar des Voyageurs, from its counter. Several steps led up to it, and thus I had the birds, at least those in the lowest story of the plane tree, at eye level, without making myself conspicuous by craning my neck, as I would have out on the sidewalk. On one side they were sharply illuminated by the café’s neon sign (and brightly daubed by its three-coloredness), and on the other side lit by the strong yellow lighting on the railway platform behind them on the embankment, which projected their shadows, close enough to touch, onto the glass door, very distinctly and larger than life, with blackbird or even raven beaks.

  With this view of the more or less sleeping birds, I received indoors from the bar, and also from outside, more stimuli than I had probably ever received from any observations of whatever kind. I participated in the video games—in whose variations I then saw nothing much different from the sparrows’ jerking of their heads—as well as in the hurrying home of those who arrived by train, which occurred in batches, with their classic light brown baguettes, acr
oss the dusky square. On Sunday evenings the silhouettes of large, heavy suitcases crisscrossed each other there, almost always carried by single passersby, unaccompanied, and the duffel bags of young soldiers called up for duty, who often set out on foot through the forest to the fighter-pilot base on the plateau.

  The inhabitants of the bay, with the exception of those standing at the bar, almost always the same people, also showed nothing but their silhouettes. It was something else again with those without a permanent residence here, who, until the first cold weather, often even after dark, even in the rain, perched together on a bench next to the station entrance, they, too, very visible in the lighting of the square. The majority of them looked to me pretty much like those everywhere, although in the course of the year at least one had joined them, who, still young, was different.

  I first ran into him in the woods, always alone, either as a mushroom seeker, rushing along, his head constantly twisted to one side, or as a tree-stump anchorite, sitting there as still as if he were studying entrails in the sand at his feet all day long. He had thick, curly hair, a narrow, stern face, wore a windbreaker, and he made me think of an anthropo-sophic teacher or an apprentice, who, to complete his course of study, had to spend some time voluntarily in this remote spot.

  Once, when I wished him good day in a clearing, he even answered me, with a hardly noticeable but all the more noteworthy nod, while his eyes, unchanging in their sternness, showed me his pure, undimmed color of sorrow. Then, still in summertime, I saw him for the first time sitting with the suburban vagrants by the station, much larger than they, erect, with the most balanced face, but in his hand a beer bottle like the rest. Yet it was not completely natural to him; among the others he seemed rigid and wooden, without their melodramatic gestures and voices, and his head constantly jerking to one side, where no one was sitting.

  In the months there on the bench, a transformation then began to take place in him. At the same time it seemed to me as abrupt as those in an animated cartoon. In the twinkling of an eye his smooth skin erupted in grayish-bluish swellings, his lips elongated into a trunk, his ears grew into his skull, his forehead was flattened, his hair stuck to his head, and finally he joined the chorus, reverberating over the entire square, of bleating laughter typical of clochards; not even the jerking of his head, away from the group into the void, is there anymore.

  But from time to time he also unexpectedly came striding out of the darkness past the glass bar, with an elegant, slow stride, in his clean blue windbreaker, his face unmarred as before, the handsomest person in the bay here since the disappearance of the woman from Catalonia, a figure of light, and threw me such an impudent or amused look that I wondered, as I had initially, whether he wasn’t actually engaging in a masquerade, for instance with the intention of writing a book about the region, among whose characters one, and a fairly odd one at that, would be me.

  And then again, one or another of his drinking buddies, just a moment ago one big urine spot from his belt to his shoes, and a billow of stench, would stroll one morning across the square as a gentleman in a camel-hair coat, his hair combed back, Clark Gable engaged in casual conversation with Miss No-Man’s-Bay on his arm, or with his very own son, not in the slightest ashamed of his father.

  And then again: the only one in the group of seated boozers who had ever directed a word at me, except to panhandle, was, as he said, there “because of the secret of this place.” Did this mean that only the mentally disturbed knew that this region was a place? But: they, or the one of them there, were not to be interrogated on this subject! First of all, no answer would be forthcoming, and then, in my life, every time I tried to interrogate someone, I always lost my substance, or any substance at all.

  And meanwhile, on this cold December night, the sparrows puffed themselves up in their sleeping tree almost to the size of pigeons or vultures, and suddenly shrank to their natural tinyness upon waking and tiptoeing away. For a time during the fall some of them did try out the neighboring plane trees for sleeping, but now they are all together again in their original tree, even if there seem to me to be far fewer of them than in the previous winter.

  Last night there was a constant splashing from the branches down onto the square: not their droppings, and not they themselves, but the melting snow. The day before yesterday, however, in the pre-snow frost, two of them were sleeping as I had never seen sparrows sleep, side by side on their limb like Siamese twins. Not even in their giant shadow on the dusty bar window could I discover any movement. And the last tattered leaf fluttered all the more violently back and forth above them in the night wind. And in the background of the square, along the retaining wall below the railroad yard, passed the bay’s one painter, who paints landscapes here in the open, by the ponds, in the forest, although on his easel I always saw a region entirely different from the one he had before his eyes. And at my back a brainsick man with a deep scar on his temple, whom his mother was bringing back to the nursing home after his Sunday outing, was drinking beer with coffee; he was spilling most of it; the old woman was dabbing it up, again and again.

  I must also tell of an attraction here in the bay, indeed the only one. And that is the hanging gardens on either side of the commuter-railway cut, from the end of the mile-long mountain tunnel under the hills of the Seine to the spot where the cut meets the station embankment.

  They always struck me as something special, and when I was riding the train they always gave me, according to my direction, the most powerful impression of leave-taking or homecoming. Yet it was only in the course of this year of 1999 that I looked at them more closely, up above from the highway overpass and then down below from their midst, on that strangest of paths that ran along the beds and toolsheds.

  As I descended into the cut at the one spot that was accessible—because of a house under construction by the bridge—I was doing something forbidden; but there was no one there to stop me; the gardens had no connection with the bay houses behind them, were separated from them by gateless fences or walls. At worst I could be tooted at by the train engineers, as I have experienced time and again while walking along the tracks. They were the property owners, so to speak; the gardens, as I deduced from the padlocks on the sheds, belonged to the national railroad company. Not once did I encounter on my sneaky excursions—no, I was not sneaking—one of these gentlemen on his home ground, though sometimes from the train I saw them on their plots, as a rule all by themselves, probably already retired older men, otherwise unfamiliar to me in the region.

  The gardens, between the tunnel mouth and the railroad station curve, took up an entire stretch, and were staggered on more and more terraces in the direction of the eastern hills, one above the other, finally even as many as four. They were not fenced off from each other, and you could pass along an uninterrupted, several-kilometer-long field of beds, planted with all sorts of things. That footpath was actually the course of the irrigation channel, its water drawn higher up from the forest-edge pond, and overlaid at precise footstep intervals with stone pavers; in between, in the even gaps, the water could be seen flowing under the walker, so that, from one step to the next, stone and sky reflection alternated.

  The attraction seemed to me to consist even more of the beds and sheds, with their surroundings. At each of my illegal crossings of the much-terraced railroad-garden territory, undertaken in an ever more upright posture, I always encountered, among dozens and later hundreds of types of fruit, at least one kind previously undiscovered by me, even if merely a cultivar.

  In the smallest space there was often so much crowded in together that one noticed the fine distinctions only when crouching down, and then again a single bed could expand into an acre, a little espaliered tree could be the beginning of an orchard, in which ladders as tall as houses leaned; a forest of dill gave way to a raspberry patch, this to a border of lavender and thyme, that in turn to a row of cherry trees, with trunks thicker than I had ever seen, these finally to a sorrel meadow, into whose
middle a peach tree broke, at its feet a bed of artichokes or the most ordinary carrots, turnips—purple and yellow—or cabbages in every imaginable color, almost identical with the Japanese ornamental brassicas, or with nothing at all, spiked with several years’ fallen leaves.

  The sheds as a rule were made of corrugated metal, without windows, but often with wooden doors, which came from somewhere else entirely, and wooden additions of the same kind, roofed like porches: there, or in front under the cherry trees, a table and chairs (never more than two), here and there wreathed with grapevines that dangled from forks in the branches.

  The hanging gardens first revealed themselves as an attraction, indeed as a sort of cultural monument, in their totality, in their delicate and yet rich and spacious being-in-themselves, next to which all the surroundings, the apartment houses, the wooded hills, receded into mere background, except for the bundles of tracks running through them and the tunnel opening, from which, with every train pulling into the bay, a scorched iron smell puffed over the slopes and their fruits and vegetables, but in harmony with them.

  And thus even the individual phenomenon there became worth seeing, and along with the rollers, the wheeled storage chests, and the railroad retirees’ special boules court, merited a detour, as did the rose trellises on a metal shed or an old French door serving as a ladder. And even the former entrance gate to the gardens, standing alone in hip-high fringed grass on the embankment, with the seemingly same-aged willow bent over it, its head touching the earth, forming a round-arched portal from which, on top, thousands of yellow-reddish shoots thrust up toward the heavens, seemed worth a trip to me—what do you Spaniards, Swiss, Americans, Swedes down there in the train want with the palace of Versailles? This is where it is!