Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

In the street of the immigrants or refugees, the longest, narrowest, and straightest side street in the bay, against the background of the railroad embankment, an entire procession of people was moving along, as had become almost common in this year, one behind the other, with shopping carts, suitcases on wheels, also handcarts. But for the first time, one of the cottage doors there was open, as wide as possible, uninhibitedly, and allowed one to see all the way inside: there are supposed to have been very few years, perhaps only two, in the Roman Empire when in its capital city the doors to the temple of war could be closed — and today instead the open door of peace here. In some places the walled-up gaps between the buildings had been reopened, and one was a rabbit hutch, another a baking oven area, the third simply a new vista, or seemed, if it remained dark, full of treasures, treasure-dark; the whole place was actually blooming with in-between spaces, or the brightness of bird feathers prevailed. On the carts, the immigrants had long since ceased to haul their possessions or produce. There was a glint of time-and space-eating machines.

By the railway embankment I joined those waiting by the kiosk for the bay bus and watched the commuter trains up above, where the passengers, who for a good part of the terrible year of 1999 had almost all sat motionless behind the panes, had begun here and there to wipe off the steam again. From the nearby station the loudspeaker became audible, which for foreigners on their way to Versailles called out the name of the station for a change: Hakubutsukandubutsuen! (But wasn’t that a stop in Tokyo?) Let those people on the train see me: I was proud to be standing here, precisely in this place, and obviously also to live here.

Those of us who got onto the small bus, with my neighbor as driver, to whom I said, “ Dober dan! ,” greeted those who were already sitting there. It was a day when the children were out of school, yet because the seats were so low we all looked somewhat like schoolchildren, and also perched there, squeezed together like children in school buses. The newly tinted windows darkened the view from inside much less than the other way around. From the most remote tip of the bay, the camel herd with rocking humps again headed for the Turkish Mediterranean, and the large, snow-white bird that calmly strutted across the street ahead of the bus, right at the crosswalk, and then rose into the air on the other side, was no seagull but an albino raven (“There is no such thing!”). Two boys sat across from me, with Serbian-Balkan faces, of whom one then leaned toward me as if to hit me and picked a white hair off my collar, with the comment “Old!”

We got a good shaking from the vehicle, and I wished it were even more. As we passed the Etang des Ursines, you could tell by the water there that it had been frozen over not long ago, the ripples in the pond were so fresh and the water seemed to be flowing. We were thus circling the bay by a northern sea. The sky spread far beyond the densely stacked little houses, the drooping electrical and telephone wires like those above a fleet of boats drawn up on land for the winter, and I thought that only after all my years here in the suburbs had I seen for the first time, upon returning to Rinkolach, a sky over the Austrian village. Then a bus in the other direction crossed our path, with the autistic children clumped together in the back of the bus, who were sometimes hauled through the bay all day long, in the hope of relieving their isolatedness within themselves.

Igot off by the tunnel and the railwaymen’s hanging gardens and observed there from the overpass the Seine hills all around, mountainlike almost everywhere, here as a riegel, there as a saddle, though every individual spot was a saddle, and where was the “yoke”?

And having climbed over the bolted gate, under the wreathed arbor formed by the willow branches, in the silence of the wintry garden rows, on the edge of the track cut, I laid the tamarisk broom back in its place, took in return an unharvested turnip from a bed, peeled and ate it, which made me, so shortly before the end of the year, feel October more intensely than ever in reality, stumbled, next to one of the corrugated-metal huts, upon a previously overlooked fig tree, full of fruit, though withered, and thought, with nothing in my ear but the path-narrow, fast-flowing canal under my soles, covered from step to step by flagstones, that this was the place now for snowing.

Its moment, a single one, I then missed, for the first time in my life; a railroad retiree, stepping unexpectedly out of his shed, pointed his finger at me and then brushed something from my collar, which was a snowflake: “Neige!”—“Ja, Schnee!” I said, involuntarily in German.

Once out of the cut, I knocked the snow or mud off my shoes and continued on my pilgrimage, keeping to the edge of the forest, past the Russian church, where I greeted the dark blue of the onion dome and the light blue of the porch door, on to the old-fashioned remains of the bay, the length of castle-high stone wall with the well-preserved gate opening, until the day before the day before yesterday still called the Lion Gate of Mycenae, because of the two boulders sticking out on top, a door with access not to the Castle of Mycenae but to the hill forests above the Seine.

And there in the arch, in which the tree trunks, their image sharpened, shimmered, a trinity of suburban vagrants were stumbling and weaving homeward into the underbrush, among them the year’s new addition, with the same plastic bags as his confreres, the same scratches on his nose from blows and falls, and even his head-wobbling, just a short while ago still maintaining a counterrhythm, already showed agreement, with puppetlike self-confidence.

And thus he also laughed at me over his shoulder, framed by the Lion Gate, with a huge toothless mouth, yet with his original wealth of curls, and said, “I don’t need to be rescued.” And the day before he had been sitting on the sidewalk outside the supermarket, next to him one of the bay’s idiots, who was preaching to him, at which the handsome young drinker merely kept grimacing.

And what happened then? Having set out on my loop back to the railroad station, I had the encounter with the other fool or idiot of the bay, who stopped me on the sidewalk, with barely room for two, and said straight to my face that right there in the underpass, at the thought of Christ’s sufferings, tears had come to his eyes. Sometimes God caused him pain (a fist blow to the chest), grabbed him, shook him, did not leave him in peace. It was too bright inside him, and this light was his fear — whereupon he jerked the pencil out of my hand and with glowing eyes sack-hopped away, as if nothing had happened. And I stopped at the nearby gas station, where the attendant lent me his ballpoint pen for a note.

Then I went into the Bar des Voyageurs and was recognized just from my profile by the proprietor, whose head was bent: he put the usual down before me on the counter. I was so engrossed in thoughts of my book that I again said my thanks in German; and the proprietor answered me in his Arabic.

The weekly Hauts-de-Seine News was lying there, and I leafed through, looking for the column devoted to the bay: nothing, except the announcement of the fairy-tale hour: “The story is that of a poor woman who lives with her three daughters in a little village at the foot of a mountain. One fine day she discovers at the market a picture that will change her life.” And then another fairy tale: “A princess is seeking a husband. But the suitors are all too loud for her.” And I added in my thoughts: “Have I in my life as a writer ever got beyond such prehistories? I always felt a great story within me, and by the time I had finally told the prehistory, the book was already over. And hasn’t it been exactly the same this time?”