Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

I first ran into him in the woods, always alone, either as a mushroom seeker, rushing along, his head constantly twisted to one side, or as a tree-stump anchorite, sitting there as still as if he were studying entrails in the sand at his feet all day long. He had thick, curly hair, a narrow, stern face, wore a windbreaker, and he made me think of an anthropo-sophic teacher or an apprentice, who, to complete his course of study, had to spend some time voluntarily in this remote spot.

Once, when I wished him good day in a clearing, he even answered me, with a hardly noticeable but all the more noteworthy nod, while his eyes, unchanging in their sternness, showed me his pure, undimmed color of sorrow. Then, still in summertime, I saw him for the first time sitting with the suburban vagrants by the station, much larger than they, erect, with the most balanced face, but in his hand a beer bottle like the rest. Yet it was not completely natural to him; among the others he seemed rigid and wooden, without their melodramatic gestures and voices, and his head constantly jerking to one side, where no one was sitting.

In the months there on the bench, a transformation then began to take place in him. At the same time it seemed to me as abrupt as those in an animated cartoon. In the twinkling of an eye his smooth skin erupted in grayish-bluish swellings, his lips elongated into a trunk, his ears grew into his skull, his forehead was flattened, his hair stuck to his head, and finally he joined the chorus, reverberating over the entire square, of bleating laughter typical of clochards; not even the jerking of his head, away from the group into the void, is there anymore.

But from time to time he also unexpectedly came striding out of the darkness past the glass bar, with an elegant, slow stride, in his clean blue windbreaker, his face unmarred as before, the handsomest person in the bay here since the disappearance of the woman from Catalonia, a figure of light, and threw me such an impudent or amused look that I wondered, as I had initially, whether he wasn’t actually engaging in a masquerade, for instance with the intention of writing a book about the region, among whose characters one, and a fairly odd one at that, would be me.

And then again, one or another of his drinking buddies, just a moment ago one big urine spot from his belt to his shoes, and a billow of stench, would stroll one morning across the square as a gentleman in a camel-hair coat, his hair combed back, Clark Gable engaged in casual conversation with Miss No-Man’s-Bay on his arm, or with his very own son, not in the slightest ashamed of his father.

And then again: the only one in the group of seated boozers who had ever directed a word at me, except to panhandle, was, as he said, there “because of the secret of this place.” Did this mean that only the mentally disturbed knew that this region was a place? But: they, or the one of them there, were not to be interrogated on this subject! First of all, no answer would be forthcoming, and then, in my life, every time I tried to interrogate someone, I always lost my substance, or any substance at all.

And meanwhile, on this cold December night, the sparrows puffed themselves up in their sleeping tree almost to the size of pigeons or vultures, and suddenly shrank to their natural tinyness upon waking and tiptoeing away. For a time during the fall some of them did try out the neighboring plane trees for sleeping, but now they are all together again in their original tree, even if there seem to me to be far fewer of them than in the previous winter.

Last night there was a constant splashing from the branches down onto the square: not their droppings, and not they themselves, but the melting snow. The day before yesterday, however, in the pre-snow frost, two of them were sleeping as I had never seen sparrows sleep, side by side on their limb like Siamese twins. Not even in their giant shadow on the dusty bar window could I discover any movement. And the last tattered leaf fluttered all the more violently back and forth above them in the night wind. And in the background of the square, along the retaining wall below the railroad yard, passed the bay’s one painter, who paints landscapes here in the open, by the ponds, in the forest, although on his easel I always saw a region entirely different from the one he had before his eyes. And at my back a brainsick man with a deep scar on his temple, whom his mother was bringing back to the nursing home after his Sunday outing, was drinking beer with coffee; he was spilling most of it; the old woman was dabbing it up, again and again.

Imust also tell of an attraction here in the bay, indeed the only one. And that is the hanging gardens on either side of the commuter-railway cut, from the end of the mile-long mountain tunnel under the hills of the Seine to the spot where the cut meets the station embankment.

They always struck me as something special, and when I was riding the train they always gave me, according to my direction, the most powerful impression of leave-taking or homecoming. Yet it was only in the course of this year of 1999 that I looked at them more closely, up above from the highway overpass and then down below from their midst, on that strangest of paths that ran along the beds and toolsheds.

As I descended into the cut at the one spot that was accessible — because of a house under construction by the bridge — I was doing something forbidden; but there was no one there to stop me; the gardens had no connection with the bay houses behind them, were separated from them by gateless fences or walls. At worst I could be tooted at by the train engineers, as I have experienced time and again while walking along the tracks. They were the property owners, so to speak; the gardens, as I deduced from the padlocks on the sheds, belonged to the national railroad company. Not once did I encounter on my sneaky excursions — no, I was not sneaking — one of these gentlemen on his home ground, though sometimes from the train I saw them on their plots, as a rule all by themselves, probably already retired older men, otherwise unfamiliar to me in the region.

The gardens, between the tunnel mouth and the railroad station curve, took up an entire stretch, and were staggered on more and more terraces in the direction of the eastern hills, one above the other, finally even as many as four. They were not fenced off from each other, and you could pass along an uninterrupted, several-kilometer-long field of beds, planted with all sorts of things. That footpath was actually the course of the irrigation channel, its water drawn higher up from the forest-edge pond, and overlaid at precise footstep intervals with stone pavers; in between, in the even gaps, the water could be seen flowing under the walker, so that, from one step to the next, stone and sky reflection alternated.

The attraction seemed to me to consist even more of the beds and sheds, with their surroundings. At each of my illegal crossings of the much-terraced railroad-garden territory, undertaken in an ever more upright posture, I always encountered, among dozens and later hundreds of types of fruit, at least one kind previously undiscovered by me, even if merely a cultivar.

In the smallest space there was often so much crowded in together that one noticed the fine distinctions only when crouching down, and then again a single bed could expand into an acre, a little espaliered tree could be the beginning of an orchard, in which ladders as tall as houses leaned; a forest of dill gave way to a raspberry patch, this to a border of lavender and thyme, that in turn to a row of cherry trees, with trunks thicker than I had ever seen, these finally to a sorrel meadow, into whose middle a peach tree broke, at its feet a bed of artichokes or the most ordinary carrots, turnips — purple and yellow — or cabbages in every imaginable color, almost identical with the Japanese ornamental brassicas, or with nothing at all, spiked with several years’ fallen leaves.