Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

And whenever I came home with a particularly good find, a model, an example, a model example, I felt a desire to invite someone, an enemy (but did I still have one left?), to a reconciliation meal, or my noisy neighbors. It was not right to cook and eat by oneself this manna, not fallen from heaven but risen from the earth, unpredictable, untamable, even in this day and age unplantable. And yet that is what I did every time, consumed it all, my eyes closed.

What happened in the process: as I cut up the mushrooms, almost every evening, sautéed, perhaps salted, perhaps drizzled them with olive oil or something else, the kitchen, neglected for a long time, became a place for me again, and thus the house was altogether inhabited anew. Come ye and taste.

And afterward I sat in the very back of the yard and wanted to wake all my neighbors with my Arab kitchen-radio music.

And the dreams afterward at night, no matter how unfathomable they remained, became light in exemplary fashion for this eater.

It was after the autumn rains that in the forests of the bay the mushroom-seeking guilds appeared. The region in the hills of the Seine was not overrun by them; there were only a couple, but they searched all the more thoroughly. They seldom allowed themselves to be seen, and in the beginning almost all I encountered was their tracks. These came from the burrowers; from day to day the light gray leafy ground was punctuated by more mold-dark places, where the deepest layer had been brought to the surface.

Sometimes this resulted in actual seeker-marks — circles, spirals, wavy lines, zigzags, rectangles and triangles, labyrinths, and I imagined a series of photographs, “Symbols of the Search.” But mostly it was scenes of violence, as if a wild animal had suddenly pounced on its prey, except that not a hair of this particular prey was left, save a black, deep hole in the earth.

Later I encountered this or that mushroom seeker in person, or actually only the sounds of him reached me at my open-air seat by the Nameless Pond. Each time it was heavy steps coming suddenly out of the tree-stillness, behind my back on the bank, and then stillness again, followed by more pounding and crashing through the underbrush. Otherwise I never heard a sound from a mushroom seeker, no whistling, certainly no humming, not even breathing. At most a dog accompanying him would begin to bark, and would also do so at tooth-baring range, which forced me to get up and continue writing in a standing position.

It could occur that I would turn toward a master or apprentice seeker, but not once was I greeted by him or even favored with a glance; he always kept his gaze, as if cross-eyed, fixed on the ground, sideways. If I saw such a person at all, he was often standing just as a silhouette behind some bushes, motionless and soundless, in a manner otherwise familiar from exhibitionists.

Yet even those who showed themselves clearly had no face, and likewise no discernible age. I never succeeded in looking one in the eye. They camouflaged their hunting, pretended, for instance with a long pole whose tip ended in a metal point, to be gathering edible chestnuts, and when they came upon a king bolete, it was seized in a flash — the bare space afterward looking clawed up and scratched out — and on they went, as if nothing had happened. They were always strangers, people from elsewhere, at times even with hidden sonar devices and mechanical mushroom vacuums, which, operated for moments at high speed, were promptly stashed away again.

That the mushroom seekers roamed the forest in twos or threes was actually more the exception; as a rule they were loners, and from one fall day to the next pretty much the same ones. And nevertheless even the single ones had something of the air of gang members; at any rate they reminded me altogether of a band of card sharks roving the wooded hills. I perceived these seekers as sinister fellows, or shabby sniffers, or at least as crooked birds, their shoes worn down in an entirely different way from those of so-called hoboes, and with their uncanny scraping at my back, for the first time I felt relieved at the sight of the light and bright, and oh so contemporary runners in the clearing beyond the bayou.

In my imagination the gangs of mushroom seekers were after the king boletes — all other edible mushrooms were casually annihilated with a disdainful kick or scraping of the tips of their shoes — with the help of those long poles, as if made for jabbing into the hole of the mythical beast. And in between they also tossed their knives at a find, as one would a hunting knife. They tore up, like new bomb-droppers, the entire forest floor, these seeker-sharks. Since they appeared, I had taken on the habit, before I settled in my writing place, of arranging all my finds from that spot not just next to me, but rather in a circle, clearly on display, which indeed had the effect of forcing them to beat a hasty retreat. At the same time I was prepared for an attack.

But was I any different in my mushroom seeking? Hadn’t I time and again lost any sense of distance as a result of my seeker’s gaze? Had become seeking-blind, as one can become snow-blind? At any rate the moment arrived once a day when my seeking turned into a form of obsession, close to a mania. In the end I, too, was seeking in an ever-increasing radius, away, out of sight of my writing pages (of which one then blew into the water once). How often I had scolded myself for my seeking, wanting to shoo it away from my brow, as Horace shooed away sorrow.

With the recognition that I could not give up seeking, it became clear to me that I had to seek in a different way. When the seeking was right, I had always known I was having an adventure, whether I then found anything or not. Thus I felt a powerful urge to introduce the seeker into my story, the book, even if only the mushroom seeker. For I know how I went seeking (but not how I found).

How does one become a good seeker? For instance, by having something else in mind while seeking, but firmly. For instance, by not turning away instantly from a mistake, but observing it thoroughly. For instance, by learning to seek where there are no signs, perhaps precisely there, at the tips of your shoes, and immediately upon entering the woods, not only deep into it.

I often stood and looked at the ground until the forms there, of fallen branches, leaves, moss, each began to glow separately: only thus did I get into seeking, without specific purpose. And I went seeking where most of the others did, on the path or close to it, and only late in autumn farther into the underbrush: my most astonishing, my most wonderful finds occurred as a rule where everybody passed through. Whenever I became tired, I rested, continuing to seek more slowly, or caught my breath while focusing on an optical illusion, a piece of rind, a patch of sunlight, also a poisonous mushroom. Time and again I also went seeking with the light shining in my eyes; to concentrate then was a game. I was less successful in noisy conditions, for instance near a highway; only in silence did I feel that I was now in Findland, at least in the find direction — although in time I also knew otherwise.

It was fruitful to look up from the ground at intervals, treetop- and skyward, after which things down below on the ground took on clearer contours; likewise to seek while concentrating on the day before yesterday — almost always something heaved up from underground, even if instead of the Bordeaux mushroom it was merely a little cèpe, the sight of whose flesh flooded my heart with a joyous yellow; and likewise to seek after a moment of terror, because after that my eyes looked sharper, by themselves, without any effort on my part.

Whenever those troops of seekers or plunderers or forest pirates crossed my path, I imagined, in contrast to them, a different, new kind of seeker. He did not seek in orthodox fashion, which in the case of mushroom seeking meant at a distance, actually at a distance from at a distance. What did that mean? For instance, following in the muddy footsteps of the organized, mechanized seekers: it turned out, and not only once, that he found himself facing a king bolete too large for the keen eyes and sonar devices, which otherwise did not miss so much as a button; so huge that the entire forest appeared around it as a Baroque setting, and he stammered at the majesty reposing in glory in its midst, “My, my, where did you come from?”