Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

After that I was in a mood to stay outside in the yard for a while. I raked the almost leafless grass, merely to see it green up and to see the earth beneath it blacken — what a color — accompanied by a robin, not for my sake, but for that of the earthworms writhing under the fractured ice; observed next to the house foundation the “bay en miniature ” that I had constructed from a piece of moss, with the moss representing the forests, the crushed rock protruding into it representing the houses in the settlement; swept the steps to the house and the paved part of the yard with a broom made of those wonderfully flexible tamarisk twigs, found in or borrowed from the railwaymen’s hanging gardens (what needed to be swept there?); loosened the crushed rock path, in the process of which a button from the uniform of the general or gendarme, one of my predecessors in the house, found its way into my hand and I smelled the hundred-thousand-year-old oyster bed from the underground of the bay; washed a cellar window, out of which probably no one had ever looked, as well as the brick threshold the painter had once fired for me with the inscription from the Gospel according to John: “The son shall remain in the house for eternity,” and thought once more how only physical labor really got my blood to circulate, and in addition made my hair soft and smoothed my skin, and how nevertheless of all my activities it was only through my writing that I had ever been able to feel something like a connection with the world.

In the meantime a repairman came to fix the oil burner in the cellar, and I watched as he took its innermost core, a valve as small as a cherry, between his child’s fingertips and then finally blew it clean with Neptune cheeks. In parting at the garden gate, he pointed out a hitherto overlooked, still empty blackbird nest in the cypress, made, along with grass, moss, and inner bark, of narrow tape from thrown-away music cassettes, and prophesied snow and a change of heart for mankind in the third millennium.

Before I then went back into the house, I stepped back a few paces and saw it, also with the heaps of leaves that had blown into the old shoes outside, standing in pioneer territory, for instance near Fairbanks, Alaska. Why was I not there? But I was there. It occurred to me that anyone who can have a yard and does not have one is a wrongdoer, by omission. But what good did a yard do? Wanting to go out into the yard, again and again. And without the yard, my hummocky world, I did not want that.

Indoors the same dark, clear light prevailed as outside, and I wished that this initial light might remain always, similar to the sun the commanding officer orders not to set until the battle is decided. Emptying out was lightening. The few objects, made from the salt-bleached wood of the saltworks, did not fill the house; a grayish-silvery stool caused all the living spaces to float.

And what happened then? I rubbed the long dining table with sandpaper, and rubbed and sanded and washed it, with my nose almost touching it until I was inside the smell of the wet planks, the most Sunday-like of smells, and then watched the drying, until this tabletop stood for the entire house.

But after that, additional air could come only from language, and so, after I had showered, with a powerful cold jet hitting my heart chamber and my armpits, and had already dressed for the evening, I sat down in the study to write.

And there was peace for a while there on the day before the day before yesterday, a tremulous one. Next to the door, which led straight outside, leaned the wrinkled, already long-standing backpack, and when I got up at intervals and sniffed inside, the smell of all Yugoslavia wafted out. And in between I read in the book of Samuel the story of David and his rebellious son Absalom: how he had suffered as a very young boy, once not being allowed to see his father’s face for years.

A quiver ran through the now ice-free grass blades outside. The reproduction of the Kings of Orient from back home, in the backyard, by the beech tree, had suffered from the year’s weather; the faces of Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar seemed twisted, like those of the homeless on the square outside the commuter station, and what they were holding could also, along with gold, frankincense, myrrh, or king boletes, be a beer bottle each, and what they had on their heads had probably been from the beginning, instead of crowns, the caps of bakers and masons.

Through the spyhole to the main street white had flashed for the twinkling of an eye from a cigarette, and then again upon the return of the Eternal Smoker, and in the house across the way the woman was shouting as never before at the child entrusted to her for the day, which was screaming, likewise as never before; and then from over there silence; and I resolved to write my first letter to the editor, to The Hauts-de-Seine News , on the subject of such day-care mothers (what was the word in French?).

The depression in the wooded hill, at one time called the Poussin Meadow, revealed itself by the trees’ there being, not brown and gray, but inky, and at the same time each tree seemed transparent for the next, and so on, and each a planetarium unto itself, such that despite the old saying I saw the forest for the trees for a change, “in its essential sun,” while in the foreground almost all the chimneys were smoking, in the shape of tails, like the cedar branches even closer to my windows, only bright, so that I thought the expression in a chronicle, centuries ago, for the properties in the area, feux, fireplaces, was still appropriate today, and furthermore: “The chronicle does not capture the world,” and furthermore, as once almost every day: “I have failed, all is lost!” and furthermore: “Today I shall find something I thought to have lost forever! There are such days,” and furthermore: “My table here is too small for an epic,” and furthermore: “No, too large!”

And what happened then? I wished I could put my head down on my writing table, with my arms stretched away from me, and once again I could not do it. And then I did it after all, and fell asleep, while a raven, right by the window, watched me, amiable and curious, waddling on the sill like a duck (from now on I shall see ravens differently). As sleep goes, it was at most a wink — the expression my North German father used — and having shaken it off, I woke up in an unexplored part of the world that had just descended with the dew, dew drops even in the tops of the trees, one of which was of bronze or amber.

And after that it was time to set out, around the bay and through the hill forest on into the neighboring bay of Porchefontaine. It was not raining anymore. It was clear and dark. The wind was blowing off the Atlantic, not cold, not warm. I bent down to the blowing through the grass. Along the lane, with his wares on his shoulder, an elderly rug dealer was walking, and asked, “Are you the owner?” and I said, “Yes!” From between the rows of cypresses a heavy, soft lilac bush tickled my forehead — but no, it was winter now. Lovely, strange transition from the almost roofed-over quiet lane right into the roar of a highway. And in the attic room across the way, suddenly, in the middle of winter, the skylights were open again, in the giant mirror in the background the morning sky, although it was long since not morning anymore. And in front of the mirror stood my sister — but no, she was dead, after all. The thought of my origins: it still cleansed me, stood me on my feet, and showed me the way.

In the front garden of the Russian child Vladimir lay a fork, its tines facing up, and I turned it over. To hear him as I passed roaring like an ox and a lion from deep inside the house spurred me on. It was full of playfulness, as the entire child was full of playfulness, contagious.