Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

“A child,” I thought, “keeps joy going in the world, and what else is the world?” That I had already had a similar thought: all the better.

Then in the course of the summer the business with the mushrooms in the bay began, in time even interfering with my year’s work, and this time the danger came from me myself.

But perhaps I am exaggerating, and mushroom hunting should be seen more as a kind of competition to sitting and recording, a fruitful one?

During that year every species of edible mushroom gradually found its way to my heart, and the main characters, yes, were the cèpes, or, as we called them in Austria, king boletes. I had never been a mushroom expert, and am still not one today. (Or any kind of “expert,” God forbid.) Yet finding them had been a great pleasure way back in my childhood, even if in the Jaunfeld region I had at most had an eye for what we called egg yolk mushrooms, or chanterelles, which often had parasols or umbrellas that more than covered both palms. I recall how after an extraordinarily rich find, halfway into the mountains along the Yugoslav border, when I was out hiking with my grandfather, a night came during which in my sleep I zigzagged from one yellow patch of chanterelles to the next, scooping them up, and in the end that was one of my most enduring nightmares. And no one in the house ate these yellow ones; they were sold (I owed my first paperbacks to the proceeds) to a cooperative and transported from there by truck to the regional capital. And if memory serves me, there was not a single find of king mushrooms in my entire childhood. My grandfather turned up, rarely enough, with one, called jur ek in Slovenian — rather disrespectfully, precisely out of admiration? — but he, who otherwise was happy to share, did not reveal his sources to me, his frequent companion, and I still picture stumbling one day upon a sealed testament in which he passes on to me the secret locations.

Not until the summer of my move here on the other side of the hills above the Seine did I suddenly see, without really looking, on a sunken road, from whose crest it was not all that far east to the next Métro, and only a hop, skip, and jump to the Eiffel Tower, king boletes standing there, amazing also in their perfection so close to the mountain-bike ruts, and as if they were there just for me. The hat in the crook of my arm was then wonderfully weighed down by the few light brown caps, whose fresh smell accompanied me through the subway and along the avenues, except that the pedestrians in the metropolis took them, along with the leaves clinging to them, for theatrical props, real live objects like the edibles in the windows of Japanese restaurants.

That summer was also the summer of the king boletes on the future Bordeaux bank, along the forest side of the bay’s main road, grubbed out of the earth by children sliding down for fun. And both finds I cooked for a reconciliation meal with the woman from Catalonia, or wasn’t it simply a matter of enjoying them together, without any particular purpose? And of these meals I still recall that we immediately pushed aside the other ingredients, meat as well as herbs, because all at once these tasted so insistent, even coarse, and put only the white thin mushroom slices into our mouths, one piece only after we had thoroughly savored the previous one; that with each bite the taste promptly became a feeling, not merely gratifying the palate but also the head and then the entire body; and that, if we two mushroom eaters took on the air of conspirators, certainly not ones planning anything bad.

Since then I have been on the lookout every year in the bay, but have hardly ever encountered the king bolete again (except in the autumn at the market on the railroad station square, though heaps of them there, at fruit and potato stands, with a little sign indicating their origin, cèpes de Corrèze, a region considered the most remote or interior in France).

Instead I collected the multitude of other edible varieties, and was happy with every russula, cèpe, or ringed bolete, varieties the mushroom-seeking clubs tended to leave behind. For years I also spent not a few autumn evenings studying a large-format, thick book with the title The Mushrooms of Alaska, simply as a stimulus to fantasizing, at the same time struck by the similarities among a number of mushrooms from the tundra up by the Bering Strait or from the volcanic Aleutian Islands and those here in the bay, for instance in their rich coloration, along with their adaptation to the soil colors, also their woodiness (especially those under birches). And I encountered variations so rare in the forests here that they were not mentioned in even one of the French mushroom guides — which claimed that the chestnut forests and acidic soil around Paris made for poor mushroom country — but turned up in a Slovenian guide, the fruit of an expedition of engineers, as researchers and authors.

The king boletes, after almost a decade in which they had not allowed me to catch a glimpse of them in this area, returned only this year, and again unexpectedly, without my having to search for them, and most abundantly right around my spot deep in the woods behind the Nameless Pond, where I settled down two seasons ago to get on with my work.

One midsummer morning when I arrived there, the first one received me, majestically, right after I had slipped through to the burned-out stump, my backrest. And to convey the sight, I shall use after all what I noted down at the time: “Reflection in the face of a beautiful thing: ‘I have never seen such a thing before!’ And although he had often seen it before, he was thinking the truth.”

I then waited a long time to pick it, traced an arc around my find, first picked one of the much softer and more yielding ringed boletes, in which, when I held it to my ear, maggots were raging audibly. And when I finally took hold of the shaft of the thing, or being, or king — without my fingers’ quite getting around it — I felt a trembling in it, and when I cut it off, with utmost care, using my pocketknife, there was a sound from the last subterranean fiber as if from a string even lower than the lowest guitar string, and certainly not one that was snapping.

As I then took my place, with a glance at the rotund form at my side, it was as if my daily work quota were already done for today.

From that time on, for months, until late fall, I did not once begin my writing until I had found at least a hatful of edible mushrooms, which I first lined up on the forest floor, with all their faces toward me.

Initially there was hardly another king bolete among them; coming upon one remained for a goodly time a rarity. But gathering the other kinds (and they, too, had to be searched for attentively) in the forests around the bay, and occasionally eyeing them, in the midst of my work, could be refreshing and cheering. I then saw myself, while I continued writing about the year here and my distant friends, as having company, one which with its so varied colorations and sizes accompanied me.

And this did not produce a sense of guilt like picking wildflowers: these mushrooms, the fragile, snow-white head of the inky caps (still too young to have ink in their lamellae), the rough-skinned boletes, called birch scaberstalks, repeating in miniature a birch with their scarred-looking stems (though with a reddish-brown mushroom cap in place of the tree’s crown), the bluish russulas, called indigo milkcap, at the same time spattered with the clay of the sunken path — they had all lived for the purpose of being found by someone, by me, for example.

Whenever such a mushroom had already been nibbled away by worms, I had a sense of having missed something, and specifically with this one; as if it had grown not for this brood of worms but only for being consumed by someone like me, and perhaps beforehand being gnawed at a bit by a snail. And it was the same with the mushrooms that had simply dried up or rotted: I felt sorry for them, sorry that at the appointed time they had not become a taste sensation in a human mouth.