Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

Whenever the singers drifted out of the melody, someone, usually on the sidelines, would join in and bring them back together with his strong voice. And after Communion the wings of the icon angel were kissed. And the eagle, the emblem of John the Evangelist, with its damp-looking robe of feathers, seemed to me as if it had just escaped from deep waters, into which it had been drawn by a monster fish; yet it flirted with its eyes, with no one in particular. And at another Sunday Mass I again saw in the picture of the Evangelist that eagle swooping down on its prey, and, instead of striking it first, conferring shape on it.

My father died during the year, far off in the house on Jade Bay, found only after his death (in the otherwise spotlessly clean bathroom, snippets of whiskers on the razor blade); which of us two was David, and which Absalom?

And that kindhearted salesclerk in the shopping center on the plateau of Velizy, of whom I had thought for a moment that all that stood between us, not only him and me, and a new, eternal brotherhood was one blink of the eye, has not been seen since spring. And the footprint of my son, at that time still small, in the asphalt of the sidewalk, beyond the hills, in the first place we lived in, the place where from time to time I went for my oracle, was tarred over during the summer. And that ball of clay, the only impractical thing on my writing table, cracked to bits on the day I hit myself too hard on the forehead with it. And the eyrie of the mythical beast in my garden, created when I cut off the top of the spruce tree, has remained empty to this day (although on the most windless day in August a giant shadow floated over me there, and once, when a wailing sound suddenly broke out behind the house, followed by cries of pursuit, for a moment I saw something with gray stripes diving down under the cherry tree, flying low, almost brushing the grass, a falcon, as it swooped off through the underbrush, half turned onto its back, its claws stretched out sideways, and one morning in the eyrie a wide-open beak moved, which then turned out to be the ears of a nest-robbing cat).

Athe beginning of the year a hare showed itself to me in the woods, far off in the sun, and since then no other. The shots in late fall, however, were aimed more at wild doves, of whom then entire rows, shot down from the sky, cloud-gray-blue, lay displayed on the butcher’s marble counter. On the other hand, the foxes have multiplied, and, as I gathered from a remark made in a bar by one of the old-timers, who usually pointedly keep silent on the subject, are larger than ever before. At the beginning of winter, I myself encountered, on another midnight walk home through the wooded heights, as many as I normally encountered only as eyes peering out of the darkness, now standing boldly along the road. And from the long since depopulated foxholes along the banks of the sunken roads, the poles stuck in by children playing have disappeared, which gives the impression that they are occupied once more.

The minibus, the bay’s public transportation, which circles all day long and appears at the same places approximately every half hour, has been given a colorful high-gloss coating instead of its subdued white, and also dark-tinted windows. Nevertheless the heads of the passengers can still be made out, cut off at the bottom because of the low seats, as children’s usually are, and the landscape thus visible on the other side through the rather slow-moving bus — the forest-edge trees, the ponds, the railway embankment — appears, as before the reconditioning, as part of the vehicle, grown together with it. And even now it can give me a jolt whenever I catch sight of the few people waiting at one of the poles marking a bus stop that is probably obvious only to the natives; they are leaning against a lamppost, for a bumpy ride that will take them two side streets farther, and I get on with them, just like that.

The reconditioned bus is missing that display space on the back intended for the community’s barely leaflet-sized posters announcing events, perhaps because films are no longer shown anywhere here, not even slides of the Amazon or other places. Even though the display frame passed me empty for a long time, I still see there the weekly classics announced in the bay’s movie theater: Vera Cruz— a man sentenced to death flees, Rio Grande . Perhaps I shall become a moviegoer again soon.

If I ask myself what happened all year on the long, hilly, yet perfectly straight street that for me constitutes the main street here, this is what comes to mind: the many moving vans, some with Cyrillic writing, others with Greek lettering on them; the flight attendant waiting, long before midday in the otherwise empty landscape, in front of the sandstone school, for the children to be let out; the young women in a hurry, coming from where? in the morning, with the infants, who, taken in hand by older children at the door, likewise disappeared as quickly into the houses as the mothers into their cars; and of the few pedestrians, the one ordinary original resident, recognizable from the window of my study, no matter how far away he was, through the spyhole I had cut in the hedge, by the white of his cigarette, always at an angle, flaring up for a moment in front of a dark garage door, and along with it his barking cough, each time linked with the sight of his wife in their cottage around the corner by the edge of the forest, scrubbing wash outdoors behind the house, on a board with a drainage hole, though only her husband’s handkerchiefs, because his smoker’s-cough mucus would otherwise stain all the other things in the washing machine. And one time on that long, straight, hummocky stretch an old woman was walking alone with a shopping bag over her bent arm, and the next time I looked she had dissolved into the water-gray asphalt.

The market, set up as an experiment, with barely three or four stands, once a week, along the main street by the athletic fields, from which balls were constantly crashing against the wire fence, right behind the meat, fruit, and cheese, was given up again in the course of the year; the one on the station square was sufficient for the bay?

And what kind of main street is it, almost without stores, with only a single café, the street’s middle section bordered by a forest, with king boletes right there on the bank every year, and, at its end, going uphill into a sunken road roofed over by bushes? — I saw it as such, again and again.

One of my noise neighbors, the most indefatigable of all, had an accident later in the year when one of his mini-machines slipped (achieving all the more racket production and power output), and he bored his way home with it. Or was he torn apart by his noise-sensitive German shepherd? Only subsequently did I hear that he was a philosopher and teacher, much in demand, author of a story with the title “The Legend of the Holy Noisemaker,” of a book called Zen and the Art of Loudness, and of the brochure “How Can I Kill My Garden?”; a man like me; a colleague.

A couple of his neighbors in turn moved, or pitched their tents somewhere else. In their place came, from the civil-war-torn regions, refugees, the kind of people for whom the bay had always been more than a mere reception camp.

They settled in, here and there around my house, as if forever. They have been very quiet, at least until today, and I have already caught myself asking in the morning at my table, “Where has all the noise gone?” as though I needed it now for getting to work.

These immigrants resembled the original inhabitants, now long since in the minority, except that they were much younger, and even shyer or more timid. They clearly did not wish to be seen, and I sometimes used the child Vladimir, as I walked along side streets holding his hand, to get a good look, so to speak, at the new arrivals. Because it was natural for the child to keep stopping, they could not become suspicious when I imitated him and then perhaps simply followed his gaze.