Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

Previously no opening had presented itself to me anywhere. In Ulan Bator, on the other hand, as in the whole empire, one opportunity for participation after another turned up. Except that I — did not want to? — resisted.

I shared an apartment, two rooms in one of the few multistory buildings in the nomads’ capital city, with a German friend who belonged to our group and was my exact opposite as far as dealings with the Mongolians went. Although he had more trouble than I with Russian, the lingua franca, from his first evening on he immersed himself in the population, and that became his nickname, “Mr. Immersion.” No sooner had he set down his luggage than he was outside again and in the midst of the natives, and since the surrounding area offered neither a teahouse nor a refreshment stand, he located the nearest gathering place, downstairs in the doorless entry to our building. As I leaned out of the window upstairs, he was standing on the nonexistent threshold among the much shorter native inhabitants, already one of them. He gesticulated, laughed with them, nodded, and when I looked down again was already squatting like a tailor or a Bedouin or a camel among them, rocking his head like an initiate, with the hand of the man who was toasting him resting on his shoulder.

In our team, my German friend was the most taciturn of all. In our shared apartment, too, he remained silent, only bursting out now and then with a snatch of an almost unbelievable story, and promptly falling back into his brooding, which got on my nerves so much that I, who as a rule also liked to keep still, became the one who did the talking. But the minute he saw natives, anywhere, he would join them so effortlessly that my eyes could not keep up, and would gab with them until late at night, fluently, yes, passionately, and at the same time casually, as if he had always known them, even if no one from his new tribe could understand a word he was saying. And later, from the Yukon River in Alaska, from the bar at the trading post, he sent me on his first evening there a postcard with the signatures and X’s of all the Indians of Region Circle City, and then the Tuaregs in southern Algeria recited immediately after his arrival their most closely guarded poems for him, even into a tape recorder. Although he was German, never really at home and at the same time crowding the available space with his bearing, gestures, and language, he remained out of place only among whites, among Westerners. Among his Tuaregs, Athabaskans, and Kirghiz he seemed to be borne up by the others’ gracefulness, swallowed up in the twinkling of an eye, their long-awaited faithful comrade.

I, on the contrary — who from my first day in Mongolia vibrated with the people there as previously, at all hallowed times, only with the Slovenians, my mother’s people — I ducked every opportunity to immerse myself in their company.

I was timid about getting involved in situations where something resonated in me simply as a result of my standing by. The steppe and its peoples inspired me. It was as if I had already sat here as a child, over there next to the door, wide open in summertime, in the village of Rinkolach on the eastern edge of the Carinthian Jaunfeld Plain, or over there in the grassy triangle at the junction of two roads — except that the image was now animated by figures, more numerous than in those days, and the right ones. Yes, here I did not even make a judgment as to whether I was with the right ones or the wrong ones: it was obvious that on those dusty streets, under those wooden colonnades, and on the savanna, on runways or over the grass and far away, it was my people wobbling, stumbling along, waddling toward each other. Not only from the almost treeless wide-open spaces but also from the crowds of people such light streamed over me that I moved about day and night with my eyes half closed.

After several months, when I no longer stood out as a foreigner anywhere, even among the children, I thought I had taken on the appearance of a native and saw myself in the mirror as such. Not only that I no longer saw any eyelids; even my eyes seemed to have blackened. From beneath similarly black hair I gazed at myself inscrutably and amiably. And for those three years this carried me along out there among the people, without conflict or any other complication.

At intervals the woman from Catalonia came to visit me, the second time with our son, still blond at the time, and a complete stranger to me, and once I invited my sister to Ulan Bator for a few weeks.

How astonished I was, and disappointed, that members of my family recognized me, did not so much as raise their eyebrows.

Yet I was increasingly fearful of disappearing. I felt completely at ease among the Mongolians, included in whatever was going on, and at the same time I was afraid of never getting home. I would not have known where to go home to, yet I felt driven to go home — or a creature that came alive inside me did, like a dog abandoned on a highway median strip. Again and again I had flying dreams, which began blissfully and broke off not with my crashing but with my no longer existing.

Later I read in the works of anthropologists that they experienced something similar. Except that in the beginning they always set out planning to study the foreign people or tribe systematically, and only later recoiled in alarm from it, or from themselves, whereas I did not want to know anything in particular about the local people. Precisely because the things I had known about them beforehand hardly mattered anymore in their presence, I felt at home among them. My very enthusiasm about being among them was partly a function of my ignorance.

Of course I took notes and made sketches, and did both regularly, day after day, to keep both feet on the ground and avoid dissolving in ecstasy. But it was not a question of observing this particular country and its people. The sketches showed only things that might have been anywhere, like a pair of unlaced shoes, viewed from above, or a lightning rod that disappeared at the bottom into a block of concrete. But: were there ever lightning storms? And the Tatars who turned up in my notes were not referred to as “Tatars” or some such thing; they were just villagers or people I encountered.

As we know, on the heels of those anthropologists people journeyed to all the still halfway unspoiled landscapes in the world, arriving by plane, bus, all-terrain vehicle, sometimes covering the last stretch on foot, each of them proudly alone, and even before they got there from their American and European headquarters, they were on intimate terms with the most closely guarded traditional tales of the natives, no matter where. They called themselves “nomads,” had the lightest and sturdiest footgear on earth, as luggage a little backpack with two books; they mingled with the original inhabitants as if they had known them from earliest childhood, and upon their return, in the period before their next departure, this time for Tibet instead of for Australia, they had hundreds of amusing stories, anecdotes, and hair-raising adventures to tell.

I knew a man like this who set out each time with his hands completely unencumbered; he had nothing but his passport and his pockets full of dollar bills. I became fond of him. From each adventure he survived — the coiled snake he encountered when coming down from the Andes and chopped in five pieces with one blow of his machete; the skeletons he stumbled upon in the water at the bottom of a gorge as he let himself down on a rope in the sacred Cenote of the Yucatán Peninsula, victims of the Mayas or recent? — he returned more lost and confused to his Central European wife and his meanwhile grown-up children: Where am I? And what now? And at the same time his stories were much too carefully constructed around a climax for my taste, not that he ever bragged — as though he himself were not really experiencing anything in telling them — and also too matter-of-fact and unamazed: a sweeping gesture, and he was the shaman himself, acted out the dervish. After an evening with him, chock full of perils he had miraculously survived and fluently rattled-off secrets of the bush, from Tierra del Fuego to Hokkaido, I took leave of my nomadic friend with a certain ennui, and found myself longing for a place where there was nothing, yearning for nothingness, nothingness upon nothingness, right around the corner (and half a year later was looking forward to his next visit).