Peter Handke: My Year in No Man's Bay

The prologue to his story went as follows: “With God’s summons to me, my eternal summer came to an end. Why did I not remain with my sheep in the desert of the steppe? Why did I listen to the voice from the burning bush? Or: why did I not simply continue to listen to the voice in the bush and do nothing but continue to repeat it? But as it was, I heard a command in that voice: Take action! and followed it, and set out into history, never-ending, and all of my kind were thus: false prophets. As the lover of history I was the eternalizer of hell. But how to deny history? Does it not matter in what country you raise your head to the heavens? Yes, in my despondency I clung to everything, even to my fatherland. And that merely pushed me deeper still into despondency. In my history time I was the crooked flame, not the straight. And yet all the time I had a photograph of myself in my memory, as a newborn, full of bright joy. But in the actual photo, when I saw it, the person with joy was the one who held me swaddled in her arms: my mother. Why did I not remain where I was from my earliest days, in the desert? The larger the desert around me, the richer the wellsprings of fairy tales within me. When I had the desert sparrows in focus, I was at my peak. The burning bush, that was them.”

Here began the merging of the petty prophet into his storytelling, the first word today, more than a week later, in the new year, still echoing within me: “Afterward”; followed then, hours later — in the meantime the last passerby had long since disappeared from the wind-tattered main street, a three-legged dog, wandering home — by these essentially unconnected sentences: “If you are once driven from your promised land, you will return there only by insistently remaining elsewhere. One who is not in the world is impatient. Odysseus was patient. Gilgamesh knew distant parts. I have ceased to spit fish into the desert. Enough of the prophet. I encounter such people now only in certain suicides. And yet I have seen it: during this century another has passed, is still with us, will continue to make itself felt, for instance in the airy dustiness of the suburbs, here and elsewhere. To move things into their place will also be the New World. At the moment numbers are the last refuge. And thus I see the circle of the world renewing itself in counting. From the two histories at odds, a third will emerge. And how will it go? For instance: When I was still slow. Or: When empty shoe-polish containers were still a treasure. Or: In this year I have not swum in a single river. Or: Once at midday a bird was hopping in the tree like a garment hung on it. Worms capable of metamorphosis represent a huge step in nature, and only then do things get lighter and have more air. Thus it is like a fairy tale when one watches the creatures. And fairy tale means: to have penetrated most deeply into the world. He who fetches the blue from the sky makes it richer up in the sky. I have dreamt: The creator went unnoticed, and the creation took heart. I have dreamt: A savior of mankind would be the great forgetter. I have dreamt: I was a handball player looking for fellow players. I have dreamt: By the way in which someone ate he created a work. I understand all the doers, amok-runners, warriors. But the only vision I know is reconciliation. Why is there no peace? Why is there no peace? The great are those who make peace exciting, not war. Homer today would sing the epic of the souvlaki eaters on the train from Corinth to Athens. And this morning I thought: Incomprehensible that one is not immortal. And on another morning: How certain I am, even in the world’s worst times, that everything is different. And on yet another morning: Even if human history should come to an end soon, even in terror, something will have taken place in that history, from the beginning, and will have continued steadily, so glorious, so childlike, so gripping, so interconnected that it could happen only once; as human history in the universe could not possibly be better and more beautiful. God does not see me because I do not let myself be seen by him. Hair-root wind, from-the-ground wind, Habakkuk wind: it is still there, it still exists. The omega, the last letter of the ancient alphabet, has the form of a jump rope.”

Meanwhile in the night sky floated a cloud in the form of an octopus carapace, as seen long ago in the American Appalachians, with whom? (When a memory comes back to me this way, each time it seems to me someone was with me.) And I thought: To be one with the singer, without having to sing: my ideal. How falling was in me constantly, day after day. And now peace, the great eye. And at the same time: Oh. Goodness. My, oh my! How long had I now been on the road with the book? And the footprints outside in the pale winter grass of the inn garden were mine. I was the mythical beast? Amazement. Eternally amazed, we sat together, each on a ladder rung. The adventure of life showed itself in the form of a single rolling wave in the otherwise tranquil sea.

The last word in that night of Porchefontaine came from the woman from Gerona in Catalonia, Ana, my wife. (I have not yet said that she, meanwhile having climbed down from her pedestal in the middle of the restaurant, was among our company — my first thought: What is to come of this now?”—as was the sweetheart of Valentin, my son, from Baden near Vienna; the wife of Guido, the carpenter, from Hokkaido, Japan; the woman companion of Wilhelm, the reader, that policewoman and reader from Wilhelmshaven on Jade Bay; the Dalmatian husband — or Turkish or Egyptian lover? — of my woman friend Helena; and in addition Filip Kobal, the writer from the shadowy village of Rinkenberg behind my sunny village of Rinkolach, not at all unwelcome to me, for I was happy to have one of my own kind there with me, at least for today and tomorrow — and this time it was I who seized him around the hips and hoisted him from the ground.)

While in the sidewalk window across the way, long after midnight, the old Georges Simenon continued typing away at his Apothecary of Erdberg, and then another automobile driver, obviously lost in search of the palace of Versailles or some other palace, rolled past outside, in his highly polished vehicle, as if not of the present — we later invited him to join us — the woman from Catalonia spoke the sentence with which she had always sealed our breakups, only this time without the usual meaning and undertone, not out of the blue and more to herself, but as if she were taking the word from the mouth of the one who had spoken before her, and were guiding it onward, as gently as possible, as factually: “This is the end.”

Still missing was only my vanished friend, the singer Emmanuel, with his voice, the essential piece.

Was he missing?

“ Was he missing?” With that began his new, his Last Song .

— January — December 1993