Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

Nevertheless, when a dog suddenly threw itself into the water, it sometimes came across as the leaps, along with the splashdowns, of heavy fish, not yet discovered by me, or I heard the whir of the mountain bikes during the downhill swoops of the self-appointed adventurers, more properly called path destroyers, as the sound of the wild doves circling the treetops.

And in the course of the seasons altogether different forest people gained the upper hand in the clearing on the other side, people of whom I sometimes thought, when I had my eyes first on my paper, then over there on them, that they, too, had been sketched in the air or summoned to that spot only by my own activity.

One day a heavily laden group of emigrants or Sherpas trudged past over there; on another the woodsmen were cooking their lunch on a fire so big that even days later I could still warm my hands, chilly from all my sitting by the water, over the residual glow; on a third I wrote until sundown while watching a young man who during all those hours sat on one of the other banks, went into the pond, swam, washed his hair, shaved, slipped back and forth between the swamp vegetation, always almost just as noiselessly, and in whom I eventually recognized an escaped murderer, after his picture appeared in The Hauts-de-Seine News. And Don Juan returned, his mustache neatly brushed as always, and with the same woman!

And the noisemakers, at least those on the weekdays, with their restlessness, never lingered by the Nameless Pond, and precisely the intervals were then filled with a never before experienced sort of stillness, so delightful that often and even more often I felt my eyes grow moist from the feeling; it was not permissible for me to remain alone with this silence; it was supposed to be shared.

And not only because of the many helicopters above me, continuing all summer to shuttle between the peace talks in Paris and the air base at my back, I hardly ever felt outside of time by the water; I was not merely intermittently a witness of world events during the year but also a participant. Sitting in that natural wing chair with my pencils on the bare earth while the waters before me coursed back and forth, I traveled with the day through the world. Who knows of, who can describe to me a lovelier round-the-world tour?

Thus during the day I stayed away from life in the bay. On my circuitous morning route to my water seat, I avoided the railway station square with its shops, the only realm where from time to time, especially on market mornings, things were lively in an ordinary sense. Only in the evening did the time come for moving about there, preferably on one of the straightforwardly loud tangential streets. After the daylong secrecy out there by the damp-black hairy cones of the willow roots arching over the pond surface, among which a crocodile mouth would have seemed almost too familiar, I felt swept by a particular wind on these arteries and highway access roads, as once on the boulevards in the middle of Paris after my dim-room work.

Of course here there were no sidewalk cafés, and hardly passersby. But it had been a long time since I had felt drawn, as when I was younger, to sit on terraces of an evening and people-watch. And the right place for such reflective relaxation was inside the bars, while standing at the counter, following the example of the majority there.

Most often in the evening I sought out those two or three bars in the bay where, because rooms were also available, in addition to the local drinkers, male and female, almost always the same ones, you could also find itinerant workers — though only for one glass; after that they sat down to supper in another room, clearly separated from the taproom: in the Hôtel des Voyageurs by a fabric-covered sliding door that opened only when the individual courses were served to those workers by the proprietress in person; in the Hôtel Rive Gauche by a curtain, carefully drawn by the workers themselves. There in their dining chambers they seemed to be carrying on the only important conversations of the moment, with barely moving lips, inaudible, and came at intervals out to the telephone corner to transmit their decisions to the world.

I did not listen in on their conversations; perhaps precisely because my thoughts were elsewhere, or nowhere, I picked up various things. These itinerant workers were very fussy about their food, and not infrequently a group would change lodgings for this reason. For their aperitif — with appropriate facial expressions, and freshly combed and shaved, they drank or sipped it — they stood in a group by themselves, and afterward sat very straight at their tables, reserved for them, painstakingly set, illuminated altogether differently from the bar, each man as collected as courteous, and all of them always equally unapproachable. Yet their evening meal did not last long; as a rule they went up to their rooms early, in summer even before dark, and sometimes I heard one of them complain the following evening about the noise outside, with a quiet assurance I would have wished to have myself. They also did not play cards or dice as the locals did.

A few of the crews remained in the bay for months; and in the course of the year I also encountered them during the day, at their work, the replacement of the gas pipeline through the woods, the building of a railroad viaduct, the renovation of the bus station. There, on my circuitous routes, it was easier for me, indeed entirely natural, to stop and take in their work (something otherwise done by only the oldest long-term inhabitants here). They pounded stones into place, now and then putting their ear to them, in a manner similar to that in which they spent their time after hours, except that they preferred to be watched at work, it seemed to me. Pride was not the same as unapproachability.

I often stood like this for an hour, for instance when another of these itinerant crews was digging out a spring in the forest, until the moment when shovelful by shovelful the trickle of water became a jet, and one of the workers, in the absence for the time being of a tile, got it to rattle into a hollow leaf. And now we greeted one another. And then we did that as well in the evenings, from a distance, without shaking hands as local bar frequenters customarily did.

Only once did one member of such a team address me in the evening, followed by the man next to him, and so on, until long after midnight. Without their relinquishing their masterful air, like that of dignitaries, it came out that in their eyes it was not they who were shutting out the population of this region, but rather the residents who were ignoring them. No one, except perhaps the proprietor of the inn — but he himself was a foreigner — ever had a word for the itinerant work crews, or even a flicker of a facial expression. And everywhere they worked it was the same, and this one small exception seemed to these itinerant workers such a joyous occasion that they surrounded me, plucked at me, and finally shoved me around like a newly discovered member of the tribe. (On subsequent evenings, however, all we exchanged was greetings.)

With the itinerant workers, the majority of them Frenchmen from the provinces who on weekends went home to their families, no matter how far it was, for the only time up to now I found myself enjoying spending time with people here, being cheerful and in good spirits; the gleaming floor tiles and the snowy glistening of the walls in the dining room formed part of this experience. I have never sat or even just stood around this way somewhere with any of the original inhabitants of the bay, although in the meantime I have come to know there is something special about them; at the very most someone — where else but in the bars or perhaps also on a wood road? — confided in me, and then it was only the deranged or those with their heads not screwed on right; but these merely stuttered incomprehensibly and in any case avoided storytelling altogether, and if a question slipped out of me: immediate clamming up, turning away, end of conversation.