Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

And the man who sat down next to me in all my regular bars, dressed in the light-colored suit of a man-about-town, was a monk, and every time he was coming from giving religious instruction to pupils each of whose ears he would have liked to box. And the man in a too small gray smock who waved to me from a distance while loading packages in the yard of a local post office on the outskirts of town — I realized it only out on the street — had been the headwaiter at the Bristol Hotel just the week before. And when I rang the bell of the artist couple’s apartment because I had left something behind, I heard from behind the door cries of passion, which the most insistent ringing could not interrupt — and just a moment ago, in my presence, and all evening in fact, they had been spitting their mutual hatred in each other’s faces. And the traveler to India told me that in the place where he went every year, to get away from society here, he rubbed shoulders with the world’s elite, whereupon his equally gentle girlfriend told me he went away only because he had his brother’s death on his conscience, and as she spoke these words she slipped her bare foot between my legs under the table.

I knew the place where the former Olympic bronze medalist in the slalom, long since homeless, slept in an underground parking garage, knew that the deputy mayor went fishing only because of his depression, spent several nights with my construction-worker brother in the barracks in Simmering where his crew of itinerant ironworkers from Carinthia was staying, was one of the few allowed to attend the funeral of the murdered gambling kingpin, a book publisher on the side, at which his SS friend, a presidential advisor at the time, delivered a graveside eulogy during which he repeatedly broke down, and his wife then had the St. Stephen’s concert choir sing the Mozart Requiem, practiced specially for the occasion.

My comédie humaine from the Austria of that period, modeled loosely on Balzac and Doderer and the Civil Code, remained a figment of my imagination.

Although at times I saw all the characters sharply delineated in my mind’s eye, there were still several rather strange reasons why the story did not allow itself to be written, at least not by me. Perhaps the strangest: on the one hand I intended to capture all of society, including the terrorist (today a housewife once more) urging her cause on me in a staccato whisper as we huddled in a broom closet at the chancellery; including the Yugoslav guest worker, his skin reddened from his work in a laundry, in his free time painting signs for pubs on the eastern outskirts of Vienna, a man who despised the Albanians because they “didn’t have any butts in their britches,” father of a half-Albariian child, off in distant Pristina with its mother.

On the other hand not a single person in this society seemed to fit with anyone else, no matter how I closed my eyes and racked my brains, not even within the established groups, academic and social classes, associations, clubs, and cliques.

Each of these people appeared to me in my imagination alone, without a link to a second or third party of whatever sort.

Not that I had in mind a connectedness, even the most fleeting unity, for this society; its members merely refused to let themselves to be pictured in one and the same story. And the others out there simply appeared as doubles.

Another problem was that on the one hand the individuals whom I was considering as preliminary sketches for my own inventions did not cease to baffle me the more they revealed themselves, and on the other hand not one of them seemed inspired by anything — a cause, a mission. (In my conception, “The Society of the Inspired” had been the book’s subtitle, after “The Apothecary of Erdberg.”) After they unveiled their secrets I actually found not a few of them good and decent, and could even admire and respect quite a number of them, and not only a doctor for being on call at night or a politician for switching his allegiance from one segment of society to another or a bus driver on snowy mountain roads. The only problem: not one of them revealed anything that sparked my imagination.

And similarly I was preoccupied with the evildoers, no less numerous; they assailed me, would not leave me in peace, even in my dreams. Yet they, too, did not galvanize or stimulate me, not even the public speaker during whose hate-filled tirades I could picture all the manhole covers blowing off around his followers gathered on the open square, and the skulls of the dead emerging.

Neither the former nor the latter were anything for my book. Among all these many people, none provided the appropriate starting point, or even the most delicately traced first initial; this only my ancestors offered, the dead and the disappeared.

At the time I came to believe that people in a story could not have anything to do with the living, no matter whom.

When I explained this one time to the petty prophet of Porchefontaine, he replied that I should have started nonetheless. A false start was often more productive than the right one. And besides, nowadays there were nothing but false starts for books. How could I be sure that with the first sentence of my present project I hadn’t turned my key in a door that led nowhere? And wasn’t it possible that I had been deterred from writing my novel of society merely by the prospect that it would have to be one of those obscenely fat books that both of us despised on sight?

Even when writing was not yet my profession, as in those days when I was still an attorney, it already guided my life, less the how than the where. As the years went by and I realized that the country and people of Austria were antithetical to the book of my dreams, I went away to be among the most distant foreigners.

I never attended the School of Foreign Service. When I was with the United Nations, whether first in New York or later as an observer in Israel and Mongolia, where I was working for UNESCO, even if I was called an attaché or a vice-consul or something else, I was either an office worker or the right-hand man to one and the same clever diplomat I knew from my days in Vienna.

Almost every day in New York I would bump into our future federal president, who confused me with someone else, and always with the comment that I spoke remarkably unaccented German for a Slav. The woman from Catalonia said later that I had written my article attacking him just to get revenge; she herself, who at the time knew him from the East River, sometimes held him up to me as an example, with his way of never revealing his thoughts, also his bearing, his dress, his refusal to touch anything for which others, inferiors, servants, could be called upon, his way of never showing any feelings, either joy or sorrow.

In Israel, when she visited me, I found just enough time to get away from the gun emplacements on the Golan Heights for a week on the Lake of Gennesaret, lying there with its locked-up villas and tied-up boats like the Austrian lakeside resorts in winter, except that it was not frozen over but rain-gloomy, then farther into the basin of the Jordan and the Dead Sea, where, far below normal sea level, in that region that had always attracted me, we begat our child, amid her cries of pain — from the salt — and then uphill through the desert to Jericho, with its sand-shimmering desolation, its rustling palms, interminable Arab music blaring from the terraces, among natives who seemed invisible, and then also up in Jerusalem, until that night outside the walls, on Mount Olive, where suddenly in the moonlight, crisscrossed by jet trails, stones came pelting down, if only against the wall, not on the two of us sitting there.

In Mongolia, where I then spent three summers and three winters with a group providing development aid from various UNESCO countries, I remained just as much on the outside, though in a different way.