Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

Iworked less in the yard than in previous years, in recognition of the fact that, contrary to the view that gardening was relaxing, it actually induced in me that very state of agitation I wanted to avoid for my main task.

Of the cherries, I harvested only those that fell past the blackbirds’ and ravens’ beaks, and on the pear tree, which throughout its time threshold had displayed a single white blossom, without a leaf in sight, there was then, without a frost, only heavy rain lasting for days, not one fruit.

I was more apt to continue cutting, raking, hauling in my lane, because of the few original inhabitants passing by there, to whom my activity, like my walking elsewhere with the child Vladimir, was intended to demonstrate my harmlessness. And we actually fell into conversation, always thus: “Good day.”—“Good day.”—“Hard work.” —“But enjoyable.”—“Good day.”

So many pencils have I used up in this one year that the drawer is already having trouble closing from all the stubs stuffed into it, and from each I have taken leave, on another sheet of paper, in writing: “Thank you, Spanish pencil! Thank you, Yugoslavian pencil! Thank you, white pencil from the honeymoon hotel in Nara, Japan! Thank you, twenty-second black Cumberland pencil! Thank you, pencil from Freilassing in Germany, even if that is perhaps not a beautiful place! Thank you, pencil from the bookstore in the bay, even if your lead kept breaking during sharpening!”

The path deep within the forest, with the thick white sand and the lizards along the bank, where the stonemason from the turn of the era sat on a tree trunk, was graveled and tamped down in the course of the year, and the story of the stonemason, although I wanted to trace it like those of my friends, I left lying somewhere.

Of the boat, no, the skiff, in the middle of the Nameless Pond, already in spring half sunk, but still clear in outline, there now sticks out, like the remains of a pile dwelling, only a piece of the once-lacquered hull, without the earlier blue of Istria or Wyoming.

From the one hundred-year-old façade in the bay, the four deck-of-cards emblems in the corners of the half-timbering, the painted diamond, spade, heart, and club, have fallen away along with the mortar.

The vegetable bed, in the middle of one of the bay’s cemeteries, by the warden’s house, bursting in summertime with tomatoes, pole beans, squash, arugula, and separated from the bare field of headstones by a row of arborvitae, seems to have been leveled, and not merely for the fallow months; yesterday a lone bean pod, blackened, still hung by its stem, scimitarlike.

Although now almost an entire year has passed, I still do not see this as “a time,” and simultaneously something within me resists saying I to the person who was sitting at this table here in January.

I, that was back then, like today, the one who time and again lay in his bed at night lost to the world, and who, having gone too long without friends, was overcome by fear of death. Walking, looking, reading, writing were not enough for me; I needed talking, for reinforcement.

Asparrow is running just now right along a gable across the main street, up, down, back: now he knows, as well as our Pythagoras ever did, what a triangle is.

Istill get lost here; and I find that all right for this region of mine.

The day on which my friends were supposed to arrive in the bay fell between Christmas and the new year. That was considered the darkest time. But as far as I was concerned, since childhood I had had during that time the dreams of which I was convinced that they did not apply to me personally but were owed by me to the world.

The night before, I went to bed earlier than usual, and then during the night saw on a wall in medieval Siena a picture, about which disagreement existed as to whether it was by Giotto or not. It portrayed a procession of people, shot through by the rays of a sun, which, the dream said, was the “essence of sun.” Finally the disagreement was resolved as follows: the picture had indeed been painted by Giotto, though not in the town of Siena but outside in a suburb.

I dreamt this during the night before the day before yesterday, and today I am still convinced that the painting is hanging hidden somewhere in Tuscany or elsewhere, and that the circumstances are as they were communicated in the dream.

Igot up while it was still pitch dark, and absolutely silent: it was new moon, with, far from the sky over the metropolis, stars shining all the more brightly, soon covered by clouds, so that finally the only light shining into the house came from the transmitter high on the eastern range of hills, the one installation in the bay that was constantly in operation and to which I once said involuntarily, while walking home on a summer night, “Our tower!” as if it belonged solely to the population here, and I in turn to this.

There were days when I completely forgot about the sky: this was supposed not to be such a day. I immediately set out for the forest, to which, after the lane, it was only a short side street. No one else was out and about; still a good while until the first commuter train. It was below freezing. But the nocturnal darkness, both that between the houses and the even denser, more substantial darkness under the trees, warmed me, as it had long ago during the early mornings of Advent on the way to the worship service called Rorate (“thaw out!”) in our village church — one of the few periods in the year when even in boarding school I did not mind going to church. But what then fell from the sky was, instead of dew, a fine rain that hardly wet me.

With my entry into the forest, the forest gave my head its measure. I climbed up to the top of the Seine hills on the familiar Absence Road, which I called this because its fill consists of construction debris, rubble from foundations, brick walls, bathroom tiles, thresholds, doorframes, a discarded street sign, even a piece of a ceramic house number and a crushed milk can, as if from a farm, sticking up from the bed of the path wherever one looked, forming humps, curbs, and inclined planes, a sunken ship, as it were, along whose keel, facing up, I had often picked my way in the course of the year, zigzagging and leaping, in order to keep myself impressionable, to quote old Goethe.

The morning of the day before yesterday I let this path become nameless again, and after that likewise the High Path up on the edge of the plateau, which in sweeping curves followed its spine, and on which one can circle the entire forest bay, as if on cliff paths close to a precipice; free of names, from below ground for the moment the creation rose up.

I made a little detour from the forest to the office complexes of Haut-Velizy, one mirrored in the next, as glaringly lit up as empty, except for the night watchmen, whole divisions of them spread over the entire plateau, each by himself with his dog in his booth in front at the barred entrance. My Sunday evening walks during the year had been primarily for their benefit, and thus at least one, when he turned his head away from his tiny television monitor to look at me, his thermos bottle in his hand, raised a finger in greeting. And there was also something new: on the terrace of an abandoned office building, the company having gone bankrupt, weeds had sprung up.

Back in the forest, heading downhill on the Green Path (because of its grassy surface), instantly restored to namelessness, I smelled smoke, and then deep in the woods came, in an almost inaccessible preserve, through which I had fought and shimmied my way on many a morning (if ever a path for learning impressionability, then such a one), upon a fire, lighting up only the area around a hut, in whose middle it was, in a loose circle of fireproof poles, which led up, cylinder-shaped, to the smoke hole in the thatched roof; on one side the casbah was open, protected by the dense thicket; a layer of leaves on the ground; no human being.