Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

Perhaps I succeeded least in traveling along later on with my woman friend: “Because you (thus that master of explanation, my petty prophet of Porchefontaine) lost, with the disappearance of the woman from Catalonia, your wife, any image at all of a woman.”

But as I now think back to those months, to Helena’s moment by the sea-flooded stone sarcophagi in the Turkish bay, I see that somewhat differently. I felt as though I was there when she, weary of the eternally wine-dark sea and of the ship’s helm, merely simulating a gathering of people with its jerky movements, in between turned back toward Dalmatia, heartily laughed at there by her two children, who, as always, were no longer and not yet expecting her, and in the following autumn set out again, this time to Egypt.

Instead of continuing to wander around there, she worked until now, using a skill she had once acquired, one of her many, on the restoration of an early Christian Coptic church in Cairo. She was the oldest in the group. Yet no one would have noticed that; she presented herself as an apprentice just like all the others, and during this time made herself, as only she, the beauty queen, could, invisible.

Although there, already fairly close to the edge of the city, or at least in an enclave far from the center of town, almost exclusively natives were at work, in the barely chapel-sized building young people from all over the world had come together, youth such as was perhaps to be observed only here, at this little-bitty restoration work, on the door ornamentation, the inlays, and especially the frescoes, and otherwise nowhere else on earth.

From outside one’s eye at first fell on only scattered individuals, for instance the girl up in the tower, who, her upper body leaning out of an opening, yet without twisting, was scrubbing down the wall. The interior, however, was packed, up to the ceiling, with similar young people, busy scraping, injecting, stroking, brushing. Each of these hand movements required hardly any room, took place in one spot, like a dot, close to soundlessness, at the same time with an intensity that bent all parts of the body to the task. Often elbow to elbow with the next person, from one level of staging to the next, they all had a place to work in and radiated that certainty, as uncramped on their knees as on their tiptoes.

The satisfaction, so quiet, that emanated from the restorers — along with a little transistor-radio music, whether the Mississippi sound of Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Central European Tyrolienne of Haydn, or the inner-Arabian singing of Uum Kalsum, at whose sound the walls of Jericho came tumbling down in an entirely different way — was, as the work progressed steadily, one that resulted from having time; or, as if what they were doing were something like gaining time, the most precious thing, not only for them, the young people, here alone, but of general utility and general validity: no matter what troop of warriors, to whom in their killing-training camp such a restoration might be shown on film, would have their eyes opened to the fact that in the current era there were other images besides those of the evil empire in their video games.

Yet away from such activity my woman friend was caught up in a state of near oblivion, menacing as never before. Not the fact that she was constantly losing her way in Cairo afflicted her, but that her wandering each time led her into seemingly permanently ruined and garbage-strewn areas, where the dusty lump of rubble that she just barely missed stepping on was the face of a human being, very alive and not at all old, lying there amid rags and charred animal skulls, and the rusty tin can next to him was his blood-warm hand. Once, thinking herself completely alone in an expanse of smoking tatters, she had, crouching down to relieve herself, almost done it on one of these seemingly camouflaged people, asleep, or unconscious, or dying.

More and more she felt the urge to fall down beside them. Into the North African winter she did not speak another word, remained, except when at work, silent even with herself, no longer knew her name (that single name that otherwise tripped off her tongue with such gentle self-confidence). It did her good, in between and on days of rest, to turn away from the unchanging, also all equally round and naive-eyed faces of the Coptic saints, which day in, day out were as close to her as under a microscope, and look into those so differently alike faces of Egyptian antiquity, and at the bodies belonging to them, by no means so childlike, inside which, in the heart muscle, the pyramids had palpably been first of all, even before the actual building, like funeral barges ready to set sail for infinity.

Two cards Helena sent me, wordless ones: one of just such a broad-shouldered ancient Egyptian, striding along with a curved space between his trunk and the arch of his shoulders (unthinkable in Christian figures of that region), onto which she had sketched on one side the moon, on the other the sun; the second with a papyrus, as the hieroglyph for “green.”

Before her departure, she took the train to Helwan, up the Nile, where the deserts were closer, and also because of the similarity of the town with her “Helena.” (The river itself remained for her not only nameless; with time she had also forgotten it so completely that one day on a bridge her heart stopped at the sight of the oil-streaked water in the unsuspected depths.) In Helwan a December rain was falling, a child was making its way carefully through the wet part of a puddle, as if to wash off the citywide mud, and my woman friend sat down outside of town on a pile of rubble in the Arabian Desert, which appealed to her more because of its darker coloration, also the absence of human beings, than the left-bank section facing Libya. The sand there also had coarser grains, and the rain could be heard very clearly plashing on it, also more into the wide-open spaces, all the way to — here articulated thoughts finally resumed inside her—“the Red Sea,” over the empty, rippled expanse, which appeared tinted and inscribed like the roof-tile landscape back in Maribor outside her bedroom window. And here, too, there were sparrows.

The painter lost in the course of this year just about everything that could be lost.

The Catalan state, whose reestablishment he, previously the world-famous artist of that country, had cursed—“This state is an injustice, its establishers are traitors”—confiscated his estates there. His foreign properties burned down, along with the arsenals of paintings. A new iconoclastic movement, fleeting as a dream and all the more lasting in effect, also destroyed his works in museums (his black was stamped over with Day-Glo corrosive paint). The banks once founded specifically for painter-princes went bankrupt. One of the last gallery owners announced an exhibition with my friend’s few remaining paintings and then disinvited him, without explanation. His film, which premiered in the fall in Madrid, in a theater so full that the audience was also sitting on the steps, was crowded out a week later by an American film, which the theater owner had to run, lest he be prevented from ever showing another Hollywood film. The one copy disappeared, and the original cans of film, the negatives, without which no further copies could be made, were tossed out onto the rails as worthless during a train robbery, run over by the train, and, it was reported on the news, shredded beyond repair.

And still, after the time spent filmmaking, he was incapable of going back to his painting. “I don’t know anything about painting, have never known anything — except perhaps what not to do.” For a time there was probably a voice inside him repeating over and over that he was finished (or something of the sort). Yet the moment then came when he no longer wanted to have that said of him. To be sure, he seemed to accept it when on his trip up the Spanish meseta, to the sources of the Río Duero, here and there, in Tordesillas, in Burgos, in Soria, an old admirer expressed pity for him. Yet within himself he had long since achieved the Roman amor fati, love of fate. Yes, he was glowing with love for everything that had happened to him during the year. In the pitch-darkness within which he moved, his eyes opened wide not only with watchfulness but also with passion for knowledge. He was ready for a battle, though in his own way, instead of with clenched fists with fingers spread wide.