Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

The crickets were most likely to be heard in the more inaccessible and at the same time sparse parts of the forest, on the steepest crest of the sunken roads, behind seven-kindling-bundle obstacles, and on still days. Often there was nothing for miles around to be heard but them, whom, however, I never actually got to see. But even among so many other sounds theirs remained the penetrating and decisive one. I felt when I heard it as though I were standing on tiptoe. It summoned me to listen, as silence alone could hardly do anymore, and that then appeared to me as the task to be completed, a sweet one. The cricket concert was moving, and in its furtiveness spoke to my heart like no other sound in this year. Yet I often found myself thinking only of a clock, or rather of the winding of one, as quietly as possible, on and on, close to the limit of audibility.

I have no reason to miss the cricket music now; but I would have liked to play it for my friends when we celebrate our reunion. But did it even come from crickets? Didn’t it sound more gentle and at the same time more choral, more far-flung than the shriller, as it were more constricted, Austrian chirping that I have in mind from my childhood? And why am I also unable to imagine as its source the crickets from those days, black as they were, roundish, robust, armored? Isn’t it more likely those particularly tiny grasshoppers or locusts of which I found one on an already cold evening in my chimney corner, grass-root-pale and fragile, perching motionless and silent on the side of my finger? And that is how the animal remained when I held it up to the full moon; except that for the moment its silhouette became gigantic.

In the first months of the year there was a particular group of itinerant workers in the bay who were cutting down and sawing up trees in the windbreak sections of the forest. They not only worked in the forest; they also lived there, in huts on wheels (not the same as house trailers).

During almost my entire time here I had been running into them, and always there was at least one woman among them, often children and dogs as well. But this year’s workers had no family members along, and, as far as I could tell, there were never more than two of them together. Laundry hardly ever hung out to dry, and since they had only the one unit of housing, there was no circle or kraal as in previous years. They were either at work, with their one-man chain saws, often at a considerable distance from one another, or in the evening in the hut, by kerosene light behind the always drawn curtain over the doorway, smoke eddying from the pipe in the roof (or not, as the case might be), a teakettle, slim as a minaret, with two spouts! on a camp stove outside, and incessantly piping Arab music, audible far off at the edge of the forest, yet not turned up loud at all.

They had hammered together a table of birch logs outside, the seats consisting of oil canisters, the Islamic half-moon on their sides indicating their origin. Yet I never found them there, and only once outside the forest, at night down in the settlement, or only one of them, the older one, when he joined us in a bar. The woodsman said something, in sounds that were incomprehensible not because they were in Arabic or Berber, but unlike any language ever heard; and without even raising his voice in the racket of the bar. All that was certain was that he was not placing an order, or begging, also not asking a question, but rather making a request, a large, plaintive one, in which the only clear thing was the movements of his mouth and his eyes, at the same time half in shadow, because of the distance between those standing at the counter and him, which he made no move to reduce. He addressed everyone that way, from a distance, except me, probably the only one he recognized, from our daily exchange of greetings up there in the woods. I was dying to have him finally turn to me, as if I alone could have been of service to him, and on the other hand I acted as though I did not know him, and as if in his eyes I was supposed to behave this way. The old man left; the others had long since focused their attention elsewhere. He also hardly gave me time, and I missed the moment. And out on the streets, whose darkness was so different from that of the woods, where I subsequently ran into him as he continued his roaming around on that one evening, it was too late. He did not need anything now, or did not show it, or could not show it anymore.

A little while ago, almost a year since that evening, when I again passed the two woodsmen’s campsite, not the slightest trace remained, neither the birch table nor even a spot of oil. Nothing but a feeling, as broad as the cleared ground, was there, for which I sought the fitting image for writing about it, but in vain.

And what happened later with the birds’ sleeping tree, that one plane tree on the square in front of the railroad station?

The sparrows spent the night there all through the summer, merely becoming invisible in the dense foliage. They could be heard, however, in early evening, from far away on the side streets, through the sound of the trains and the noise of the cars, jockeying for position or conducting other negotiations. When the square underwent repairs in August, they at first stayed away because of the jackhammers, also at night, but toward Assumption Day they returned and when the asphalt was put down, they were the first (not, as is usually the case, dogs) to leave their tracks in the still-soft material, in the form of large loops and suggestions of meanders, made not by hopping but by running.

Late at night it happened sometimes, and without one’s clapping one’s hands down below, that they, or a couple of them, would fly up out of their foliage, which would suddenly crash apart, and like a swarm of flying fish would plunge into one of the neighboring tree crowns, though every time soon returning, each separately, to the original tree; likewise none of the new plantings on the square became a second sleeping place; though the new bamboo stalks served during the day as swings.

In late fall, in the bare time of year, the best place to observe the sparrows perched in their limb forks was indoors behind the high glass façade of the Bar des Voyageurs, from its counter. Several steps led up to it, and thus I had the birds, at least those in the lowest story of the plane tree, at eye level, without making myself conspicuous by craning my neck, as I would have out on the sidewalk. On one side they were sharply illuminated by the café’s neon sign (and brightly daubed by its three-coloredness), and on the other side lit by the strong yellow lighting on the railway platform behind them on the embankment, which projected their shadows, close enough to touch, onto the glass door, very distinctly and larger than life, with blackbird or even raven beaks.

With this view of the more or less sleeping birds, I received indoors from the bar, and also from outside, more stimuli than I had probably ever received from any observations of whatever kind. I participated in the video games — in whose variations I then saw nothing much different from the sparrows’ jerking of their heads — as well as in the hurrying home of those who arrived by train, which occurred in batches, with their classic light brown baguettes, across the dusky square. On Sunday evenings the silhouettes of large, heavy suitcases crisscrossed each other there, almost always carried by single passersby, unaccompanied, and the duffel bags of young soldiers called up for duty, who often set out on foot through the forest to the fighter-pilot base on the plateau.

The inhabitants of the bay, with the exception of those standing at the bar, almost always the same people, also showed nothing but their silhouettes. It was something else again with those without a permanent residence here, who, until the first cold weather, often even after dark, even in the rain, perched together on a bench next to the station entrance, they, too, very visible in the lighting of the square. The majority of them looked to me pretty much like those everywhere, although in the course of the year at least one had joined them, who, still young, was different.