Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

I had not been able to look at the real Ana this way even once. An expectant calm emanated from her, at the same time impudence or playfulness, or the storytelling urge (as indeed she often said after a bruising quarrel that she had been dying the entire time to tell me how her day had gone). This fellow passenger did not avoid my gaze; she allowed it to have its way, then even responded with a smile, created in her expressionless face merely by my looking at it.

This was thinking in images, wordlessly. In this image the woman from Catalonia had a plane tree from the forest of Gerona as a background, from which a sparrow burst forth like a flying fish. She was a bride, would be that to the end; a needy person; a person pleading for protection. And so were other women, mothers of eleven, murderers of six, strumpets, high jumpers, Amazons.

And an almost forgotten yearning returned. And that was the night when I got out early in Meudon — Val Fleury, while the Gypsy woman continued on to St.-Quentin-en-Yvelines, and hiked home on foot through the scorched tunnel under the hills of the Seine. (And for the very last time I saw Ana in the form of a woman’s lost glove in the bushes.)

It is of course not true that during this year of 1999 I had no contact with a local resident. I even acquired a good neighbor, at least one, a child.

Before the child turned out to be a neighbor, I had already seen him quite often, in the little Russian church on the edge of one of the forests here, and once also on the handball court during a game played by the local team, the pride of the region after working its way up into the First League. He was with his parents, but I actually had eyes only for him.

In the Slavic church he, for his part, once looked during the whole Sunday Mass only in my direction, though alternating between my face and my shoulder, or the empty space above it, back and forth, until I imagined he was looking for another child there. He was still almost a baby, not yet speaking, only from time to time making sounds, once a bull bellowing, then the harsh cry of a large bird, and in between he crawled around on all fours among the congregation.

It was during this spring that his father, with him in his arms, unexpectedly came crashing through the bushes and pounded on my door, his eyes so big that I took their expression for ecstasy. In actuality he had just been informed that during an operation on his wife in the Sèvres hospital her heart had stopped under anesthesia. He asked me to watch the child until he got back, in a stammer that was more Russian than French, and I went on with my writing, holding the small child on my lap, the rhythm making him soon nod off, heavy in my arm, until after some time the father returned with news of her death.

From then on I also met this neighbor away from the chapel, at his house. There, to be sure, I was usually alone with the boy, who was called Vladimir; the man, one of the drivers of the peculiar buses in the bay — of which more later — occasionally worked until almost midnight, and it had become the routine for me to stay with the child if possible.

Whenever I prepared the evening meal for us both, it came to mind how at one time the thought of having a family, my family, had not made me feel strange or beside myself, but rather positively sturdy, with both feet on the ground. To create a family: for me in those days there was, as far as everyday life was concerned, no greater fulfillment; and I wanted to do my work not merely for those entrusted to me but also in their midst, unisolated, without a solitary study. To do the housework as well, washing windows, cooking, darning stockings, was all right with me; I had not really needed the precedent of David Herbert Lawrence, another cottager’s son, who had expertly scrubbed the floor for his aristocratic wife.

Now during evenings with Vladimir, and most powerfully during apple peeling or cutting bread, the memory of that meant it was coming alive again for me, also as something I had been missing after all throughout the time I was alone. The half orphan’s ways intensified this feeling. If I, worn down by my neighbors’ racket, actually felt hostile toward one child or another out there, that was unthinkable with this one here.

When he imitated me, it was never a question of mimicking; he did it in his own unique way, in whose reflection my actions in turn pleased me and made me happy. Thus it happened that in his presence I sketched out on a piece of paper what I had in mind to write the following morning, whereupon he, though only beginning to speak, every time wrote and drew something, which, although it seemed fairly similar, was an entirely different process: his writing was very vehement, yet his drawing was very deliberate. And both were done smoothly, without hesitation, and he always knew when something was finished; with the dashing final stroke and a last mighty drop of spit falling from his open mouth onto the paper came the decisive: “Done!” (But with the start of an undertaking, even selecting crayons, he was choosy, like the itinerant workers.) Compared with his, my own handwriting seemed to me ugly, also insignificant, and I wished it were as indecipherable, dense, and delicate as that of this little child.

When in the course of the year he acquired speech, it was quite an event to hear his first questions. That raising of the voice at the end of a sentence had the ring of a formulation never heard in such a way, close to song. And I experienced an even greater event when Vladimir then, in response to a question of mine, for the first time began to tell a story. That happened completely apart from his usual speaking and even singing; a long, tense silence preceded it, followed by a palpable formation of images and then a rhythm in the deepest recesses of the child’s inward being, a shining forth, and then he launched into it, his introductory sound a rolling of the tongue, a clacking, a positively melodic jubilation.

Yet in his everyday speech, too, he visibly had an object before his eyes for every word, in contrast to so many French children, who before the first image had learned already the words for it, so that even for them as adults the words could never represent something actually seen.

And another special thing happened with him: when he began to stammer. It was not regression into infant babbling, but rather a sort of ecstatic state, from which the child, so fiery and imperious that no one needed a translation, took a position on the world’s goings-on and proclaimed his view of the situation. These speeches always began with a sharply articulated, almost shouted “And now!” and only after that launched into inspired stammering.

If Vladimir could say of someone: “I know him,” the expression was infused with pure pleasure. If he was asked what this person or that “did,” he would reply: “He’s there.” But at intervals he would fall completely silent, and when I then glanced over at him, his eyes would be wide open, focused on me, as they had been for a long time already, almost alarmingly. And when he played, what credulous playing it was — the credulity of play.

Sometimes he merely listened for a while, and it became clear to me, from the birdsong, trains pulling in and out (which in the meantime I had otherwise long since stopped hearing), the rattling of the garbage trucks (here often in the evening), how wide the bay was becoming. With him at my side, it was as if the barking of dogs, as well as the year-round screeching of the ravens, were happening for his and our protection. And when he then slept, I sat next to his room in the kitchen as the household employee on call, and I liked that as much as the unaccustomed view from there through the trees of my own house, with lights on, as always at nightfall, in every room, and looking so mysterious from the unfamiliar kitchen.