Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

The sheds as a rule were made of corrugated metal, without windows, but often with wooden doors, which came from somewhere else entirely, and wooden additions of the same kind, roofed like porches: there, or in front under the cherry trees, a table and chairs (never more than two), here and there wreathed with grapevines that dangled from forks in the branches.

The hanging gardens first revealed themselves as an attraction, indeed as a sort of cultural monument, in their totality, in their delicate and yet rich and spacious being-in-themselves, next to which all the surroundings, the apartment houses, the wooded hills, receded into mere background, except for the bundles of tracks running through them and the tunnel opening, from which, with every train pulling into the bay, a scorched iron smell puffed over the slopes and their fruits and vegetables, but in harmony with them.

And thus even the individual phenomenon there became worth seeing, and along with the rollers, the wheeled storage chests, and the railroad retirees’ special boules court, merited a detour, as did the rose trellises on a metal shed or an old French door serving as a ladder. And even the former entrance gate to the gardens, standing alone in hip-high fringed grass on the embankment, with the seemingly same-aged willow bent over it, its head touching the earth, forming a round-arched portal from which, on top, thousands of yellow-reddish shoots thrust up toward the heavens, seemed worth a trip to me — what do you Spaniards, Swiss, Americans, Swedes down there in the train want with the palace of Versailles? This is where it is!

And another thing in the bay’s hanging gardens acquired value for me in this particular year: a square, carefully edged in blocks of sandstone, an entirely empty, pebble-strewn square next to the wall of a bower, raised above the beds, at the same time much smaller than these, drip-irrigated as artfully as pointlessly, in years of lying fallow, by a roof gutter, at which I always thought: “This a railwayman built in memory of his wife.”

The only gatherings in the bay in which I participated all year long were the Sunday Masses (other gatherings — were there any at all here?).

I did not go to the French Catholic church for them — I was there almost always only in passing — but to that Russian one, likewise on the edge of the forest, diagonally across the way, which was log-cabin-small, and where the Mass was in part read or sung in Slavic. I had already visited it earlier from time to time, with Ana, whom I was once able to embrace there as hardly anywhere else, with Valentin, my son, whom I once, when I turned to look at the adolescent, saw crying, and who never wanted to go to church again after that.

But in this year of 1999 I made it a rule not to miss a single celebration of the Mass, if possible; it took place in any case only twice a month; the priest also had responsibility for another congregation in the Seine hills. On the Sunday morning in question I became impatient to get there, was afraid of being too late for the Kyrie eleison! went all the way there at a jog trot.

From outside — no sound ever issued from the building — the chapel with the blue onion dome on top, the only instantly distinct color in the region, seemed, even when one was standing right in front, always locked up, yes, as if abandoned, closed down — unlike the church vis-à-vis, its bells never rang — and on the way I never encountered another churchgoer. And only once past the outer door, in the porch, could one see from the shopping bags deposited there, with baguettes and bunches of vegetables for Sunday dinner, that the building was occupied, and inside was waiting, each time a surprise, a whole crowd, even if it was perhaps only two dozen, one head next to the other. And at the same time, when one entered, it was unexpectedly as spacious as in a dream, perhaps also because of the candles and their reflection on the wall of icons, likewise because of the priest’s chamber beyond the arched opening, which led back as if into the depths.

In the cold months the church was always overheated, and that such heating be safeguarded seemed to be the first condition for the continued existence of the congregation: would the priest otherwise have reported on the Sunday before last with such joy on the yield from the collection, taken up for this winter’s heating?

As for me, the so-and-so from the Slovenian village of Rinkolach on the Jaunfeld Plain, going to Mass was something that had to be done! To hear Slavic spoken, here in the cosmopolitan bay, every second Sunday, in the company of a few others, was not the main thing. But it opened me up first of all; no, ripped me open. No matter how high the notes became, the sound seemed very deep to me. It did not bring back childhood, but with it I became the person I am, often tremulous, yet not defenseless. Without my ever singing along, my lungs expanded. I found myself blending in with the rest, yet I did not once have to open my mouth.

That I was hearing my ancestors’ Slavic at the same time as a Mass was an essential part of the experience. Only in this form did my participatory feeling become as monosyllabic and as emphatic as it was supposed to. There was a joyousness in me, which, however, could find its way out only through the company of others, this company, for instance. And the gradual unfolding of the Mass made me patient. Furthermore, even if I merely stood quietly in the back for an hour or so, it was a form of physical exercise more refreshing than any kind of gymnastics I could name: free of my aches and pains, I went on my way sound as a bell, and with both feet on the ground. And above all, from the ceremony Gregor Keuschnig saw the things he did only for himself as grounded and illuminated, at least for a short stretch of his way back home to continue his work. And all too soon he felt the urge again to go back to the church to find peace.

Right inside the entrance, on a chair at the foot of a staircase, for the first few months there was still an old man sitting, who usually nodded off during the reading from Scripture (the spot has been empty for some time). Now and then during the year, when the priest called upon us to think of the victims of the world’s civil wars, he left out the names of the countries involved — there were so many of them — and merely said, in the singular and inclusively, “in the civil war.” Whenever a member of the congregation had read in singsong Russian from an epistle, almost always one of St. Paul’s, the priest would respond, “Peace be with you, reader!” When he disappeared behind the wall of icons, he hoisted his Bible onto his shoulder. And of all the readings, the one that has remained most forcefully in my mind is that sentence addressed to the people of Ephesus that says more or less that as the entourage of the Crucified they are now no longer passersby but have a house.

How bored and annoyed I sometimes was by the heathens, of whom I quickly became one myself once outside. Although I listened to the Slavic words of the Lord’s Prayer so much more attentively than to the French, that was still, along with the Credo, the only part of the liturgy where I felt excluded. I also missed, from my familiar Catholic Masses, that moment when the priest cried, “Sursum corda! Lift up your hearts!” (Or have I merely failed to hear it until now?) And it struck me as odd that the priest of the Eastern Church, to have the bread and wine become flesh and blood, had to make a point of speaking the appropriate formula, whereas in the Catholic ritual all that was necessary for the transubstantiation was the simple narrative: “On the evening before Jesus was crucified, he took the bread …” This transubstantiation brought about simply by narrative was closer to my heart.