Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

I read the news from beginning to end; it was a special kind of pleasure to be a contemporary. In the man at my side I then recognized, for the first time in a bar in the bay, a neighbor, the one who on Sunday afternoons, with a face as confused as the one with which he was drinking his beer here, had the habit of burping into a battery of megaphones — to test them, as he now explained, for the fair. I treated him to a glass, as he did me. Then we remained silent, and whenever the proprietor in his taproom let one of the refrigerator compartments snap shut, my neighbor jumped, and I read from his lips, “Quel fruit!” (What a noise!)

In the course of the year in the Bar des Voyageurs, some of the video games had been replaced by the original pinball machines, which banged ceaselessly with free turns, and likewise a table soccer game, at which a few young people stared as if this were something that had vanished forever and they were its rediscoverers.

The battle-ready characters in the come-on images of the remaining video games kept pumping themselves up, their movements more like those of a sleeping flock of sheep, and when no one set them in motion against each other, the notion occurred to me that of all people the players at these machines would someday become the new readers of books, soon. And were the heads of the table-soccer figures all that different, after all, from the broad-lipped, full-cheeked roundheads of the early Middle Ages, to whom, as for instance to the kings in my garden, I went to be able to draw deeper breaths? And what did I see before me as I drew my deepest breath? Writing, or readiness for the written word.

The proprietor, with always the same presence of mind, had something of the air of a hostel father, and sometimes it was one of his customers who bought the bread for the itinerant workers’ supper, placed the tables on the chairs, swept up the debris from the bar, and the day before the day before yesterday one of the usual steady customers unexpectedly turned up as the help, well-mannered and with authority. How old had the patron become in this year? And how about me? I contemplated the pattern of spots on the back of my hand; they had the form of the Big Dipper.

Behind the glass façade the day was unchangingly dark and clear, and I stayed until the first couple of sparrows appeared in the sleeping tree; they were gathering there, however, long before they were ready to go to sleep. Their wings, constantly whirring up and down the tree, provided brightness on this dark day. The smooth trunk of the plane tree, in its dew-dampness, still looked iced. And behind it the heads of the commuters in the trains up on the railway embankment repeated those of the sparrows: “If you knew how beautiful you look as silhouettes,” my thoughts continued, “you would never want to be anything else again. Stay that way! If I were a painter, I would never paint anything but silhouettes, fragmentarily illuminated, in buses, trains, métros, in planes above the clouds, and these pictures would be the new Georges de La Tours.” And in the plane trees on the plaza there were still multicolored lights from Christmas Eve, among which the sparrows were the other Christmas illumination, or simply a more living component.

Outside there was a smell of fish from the morning market; shreds of jute with Chinese and splinters of crates with Spanish lettering swirling into the air, and sparrow footprints on the asphalt, already slightly blurred, had the formation of the fighter wing that at the same time actually thundered over the plaza, dark as a storm cloud, heading home to the base on the plateau. But it was still the case that I gained deeper insights from the birds’ traces down below on the earth than from anything in the heavens.

And I thought further: “But isn’t believing in human silhouettes, at a certain remove, which must be preserved, my fundamental mistake? Wouldn’t it have been essential for me to get closer, but how? To cross the threshold between silhouettes and — well, what? The figures just now in the bar: if a television interviewer had been there, how they would have spilled their most intimate life stories, from their first fear of death to their first murder and their mother’s letters to them during the war. I have not asked, not once in this entire year.”

Having set out for Porchefontaine, I first took the footpath between the railway line and the suburban houses, heading west. A woman was running along in a zigzag, shouting again and again, “Where’s my paper? Who’s seen my Parisien libéré? What’ll I do? I have nothing to read. What’ll I do?”—followed by two police officers, a rare sight in the bay, who asked whether anyone had perhaps seen an old man, “in pajamas, without glasses,” while at the same time they peered farther down into the railway cut; also followed by a woman in a fur coat who said as loudly as calmly, “I’ve lost my husband”; and finally followed by an unknown person who took aim at me — did he shoot? — at any rate he made the noise with his mouth, and I continued on.

The palm at the crest of the path represented the bay’s western cape. I paused in front of it, and at first only the kinked fronds of the palm moved, slightly, calmly, as if tuning up, and then suddenly all the fronds swung into motion, skyward, earthward, one-hundred-handed, pounded the keys of the present-day air, and following their example, I spread my fingers, let the intervals blow through me, and thought, nonetheless: “In my appreciation for music I have never got beyond the blues.”

From the cape I turned to look back, with my entire body, at the no-man’s — bay once more (meanwhile renamed thus), while on a side street another person also turned to look back, but while walking, once and then once again, and more in sorrow than in high spirits. The route through the broad hollow to the hill horizons on the other side led as if through one vast runway, while the veil of mist hovering over it made it seem as if something were being hatched there; as if, without factories, office buildings, research institutes, something were going at constant, silent full blast there. I saw, on this different sort of world map, finely drawn, the first, the New World. Or: the forest bay as a book, open before my eyes, clear, voluminous, colorful, airy. And this was not, as I had once thought, to be achieved through slowness, but through carefulness, or deliberateness, whether slow or fast.

But what to do with it then? Had I done anything with it? In the backyards of the bay, the clotheslines were hung with nothing but the usual tiny dust rag — of a widow? of a widower? — and the lit-up bus there in the background, at full speed, was a gym, in apparent motion from the children running along its horizontal bars, and as always I felt sad when after the last yard no other came. To leave the place seemed to me each time like a leaving-in-the-lurch. In magnificent Paris nothing required my observation anymore; here, however, in the suburb-bay, almost everything did.

It has been a long time since I went out to Porchefontaine.

Our year’s-end celebration there had been discussed on the telephone by the proprietor of the Auberge aux Echelles (The Ladders) and me. How long ago it is that I saw the man over there beyond the foothills and myself as those two cottage dwellers on the Japanese scroll in the Kyoto Museum, each of them on his own side, to the left and right at the foot of a knoll, in an infinite, otherwise unpopulated mountainous landscape with heavy snow falling silently, as they sit at their work behind the windows of their hermits’ huts, with the most serene expressions, in the knowledge that what they are both doing fits together, and that they will shortly visit each other again.