Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

Porchefontaine, more a suburb than a part of the town, has at any rate become dear to me. And at the same time the Echelles proprietor, with his establishment there, and I argue incessantly about whether his region has more to offer than mine. If I cite our transmitter, he counters with his “more essential and also more graceful” water tower (which, however, is not located within the township); if I praise our railwaymen’s hanging gardens, he rates the couple of flower beds at the Porchefontaine station above them, because the (sole) shed there is made not of corrugated metal but of solid railway ties (yet the majority of the beds have gone to pot, and no trace of terracing); and even if he concedes that there are hardly any palms in his region, he still considers the only two there, which, standing side by side, constitute a pair, more interesting than our eight or nine, in that they are “like an entire forest,” whereas ours are isolated, in my Goethe’s expression, merely “huge stalks.” The only things for which he envies us are our very own buses — those of Porchefontaine, long accordion vehicles, wide, space-devouring, belong to Versailles, the capital, which has priority. Yet we are in agreement on the fact that the houses in our two bays, with forests round about, are in all respects ideally sisterly, and therefore would not need sister cities anywhere in Europe (except that in his bay there have been rumors of the construction of an underground highway, straight through the foot of the mountain).

The day before the day before the day before yesterday, on the way there, going downhill, I pushed leaves with my foot over the traces of the wintertime mushroom seekers, if possible more violent than their predecessors, the earth churned up by them as if in a hasty burglary; or weren’t these perhaps the traces of birds going after worms? And at the campsite of the foreign-seeming windbreak workers, this time I found debris, an empty pack of not at all common cigarillos and likewise a bottle with the label of a fine Bordeaux. And a desperate dog went panting through the woods after his master.

It was stormy. An express train, visible halfway up on the Porchefontaine embankment, let out an Indian war whoop, while many passengers nibbled on shish kebab as if on a train through Greece. A temple bell rang, a muezzin called out over the sea, the settlement spread far inland along a fjord, by the sunken road at my back Scottish dunes overlapped, before me lay a giant’s glove, I brashly stuck my hands into the winter stinging nettles; didn’t they sting? Oh my, yes!

And what happened then? Evening could come now. The light down below at the edge of the woods was rocking in time to the wind in the branches, between flaring and fizzling. From the already dark thicket a stone flew past me, no, a bottle. A child playing? The transformer, long before the first house, was clothed in marble, as one might expect of the palace town of Versailles, and was called sirène. Then in the first house a woman was sitting in the lamplight, snipping stitches out of a piece of fabric, while two cats sat in front of the house like a pair of shoes, and an adolescent asked me the time (my answer, as I saw later, was wrong), and a few steps farther on the first driver asked me for directions (my information, as I realized too late, was completely wrong), and the next one asked me for a light (I had none, and he drove on, cursing).

I went, as the proprietor and cook had instructed me, to buy bread, watched, in the evening line at the bakery, as the inhabitants of Porchefontaine, at least the older ones, fished for coins in purses as shabby as those in my bay — which made me think they had at home not so much piggy banks as piglet banks — and carried my sheaflike load, which my arms could barely encompass, to our place of celebration, hearing halfway there, from a sprawling orphanage, otherwise silent as the grave, the voice of my son echoing.

The restaurant gave the impression, as always, that it was just being renovated, because of the ladders leaning on all sides against the isolated building, all the way up to the eaves, so close together that from afar it looked as though they barred all access; and high above it all another ladder swayed, fastened by ropes to the ridgepole, of rubber, inflated with helium, covered with electric bulbs, which now at night were on.

The restaurant, looking from the outside otherwise like a house no different from the others in the area, stood, with a garden in between, at the foot of the embankment where commuter and express trains traveled at different levels, both above the roofline. The proprietor had secretly, immediately after moving in, uncovered the source of the Marivel brook, located there, as he had discovered from the original maps of the area, and long since integrated into the sewer system, all the way to where it flowed into the Seine at Sevres; he had lined the trickle according to the model of the Fontaine Ste.-Marie in front of his earlier tavern. For the first time after almost a hundred years under ground the Marivel has thus become visible again, at least up to the end of his property, and also sounds decidedly different from the way it sounds through the manhole cover down the street (whose course even today, as long ago, faithfully follows the windings of the vanished brook).

On this evening our tavern had a garlanded entrance, not very conspicuous, because so soon after Christmas other doors in the village were also decorated, only differently.

Inside, in a space unexpectedly as large as a barn, the master of the house was standing alone by the fireplace, and it seemed to me I had already come upon him decades ago in his stirring up of the fire, in the same black custom-made suit, standing erect, with a very long poker that allowed him to do what he had to without kneeling. And as always he was showing his Egyptian profile.

But in his face, usually so unapproachable, which he surprisingly turned toward me, there now seemed to be realized what he had once so fervently invoked: “I should like to see a picture of myself as a child, and I mean a picture of me shouting, crying, lost!” There it was. And at the same time he led me, his hand on my shoulder, quietly and amiably as never before into the kitchen, where he even allowed me to help him continue to prepare the food.

I put down the just-found last mushroom of the year, from one of the bomb craters, where my searching had previously been in vain, a so-called blewit, of all edible things the one with the most delicate smell, adding it to the king boletes on the table reserved just for them. Although still deep-frozen, these also seemed freshly picked, firm, heavy, as rosy as Snow White in some illustrations, before she opens her eyes to life again: thanks to the chef, who before freezing them had extracted some of the water (the person who collected them had been someone else, however).

The swinging door to the kitchen was propped open with a chair, and there was thus an unobstructed view of both the entire curtainless restaurant as well as the bar area, separated from it by a screen.

Indoors as well the house was trellised with the proprietor’s ladder collection. By now there was not a corner without rungs, and yet I did not have the same feeling as in that other restaurant in the hills of the Seine, now long closed, where every spot, ledge, niche, windowsill was occupied by a rooster in porcelain, plaster, clay, fabric, in all colors and sizes, neck after neck stretched for crowing, which made my head reel on every visit; the ladders, often set up in pairs, like husband and wife, the latter with the broader end up, had with time become an unobtrusive pattern that at the same time allowed the background happenings to enter their very own clearer, well-rounded sphere.