Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

More worrisome were the new nomads, who had no sooner tracked down what remained of the aboriginals anywhere in the world than they put them in a book. These books all shared the characteristic of presenting the most intimate portraits of a people-outside-of-civilization as something that existed in only one place, and then, in the same breath, exposing these portraits to the entire world, with the result that all the fuss about protecting and supporting these peoples ended up by wiping them out once and for all by means of facile stories in which the narrator from distant parts pushed his natives back and forth like pawns and mucked around in their dream as if it were his special property. And perhaps it actually did belong to him, and in the traditions of various obscure tribes he was seeing the cosmos of his childhood, spent in Friuli or in Glastonbury. Except that these journeyers to the ends of the earth never told us that. Their own half-vanished notions, of time, the cosmos, nonbeing, ancestors, doubles, were of no interest to them. To them only the dreams of the last more or less aboriginal human beings constituted a valid book.

But perhaps I was merely envious, as the woman from Catalonia expressed it one time when I was raging against the “plunderers.” Their stories, she said, were more worldly than mine, and also more dialogic. I got in my own way, she said, with my endless brooding over form; I lacked narrative technique, while they deployed such technique effortlessly and wrote now like nineteenth-century Russian novelists, now like American novelists of the first half of the twentieth century. And when I continued to rant about these books that had no narrator any longer but instead a master of ceremonies, about those purveyors of reading fodder whose material was so thoroughly processed that nothing was left to read, she commented that I was also jealous because they had caught on. They had a following — and I? A year ago, that crazed woman standing at my garden gate every morning; and that man dying in the local hospital; and that travel-agency courier; and that farmer’s son in Ontario, Canada.

One way or the other, I continued to be guided during those three Mongolian summers and winters by the idea of a book, and then I did write one, my first, the “Drowsy Story,” which dealt not with the local population but with my village ancestors, long since dead, in Carinthia along the Yugoslav border.

I did that during my day job, which consisted of teaching German or English, or handling correspondence, or giving typing lessons. In the summer I put my table outside, by the edge of the road. Neither dust nor sun nor people bothered me. And from those days I still have a longing to be able, just once in my life, to write an entire book from beginning to end outdoors, and not just in a backyard, but far out on the steppe. Never have I breathed so freely, and moved along with the day so effortlessly. And the local people did not seem bothered in the slightest, and eventually not even the people’s militia. A militiaman who stopped each time on his rounds and looked at the sheet of paper in front of me one day even predicted a glorious future for this beginner.

Writing the book became the one great experience of my years in Mongolia. Although the woman from Catalonia hardly visited me, I did not take up with any native woman. Only once did I walk with a girl down a dirt road, behind a herd of cattle, which, although we were too far back to overtake them between the stone walls, let loose with their constant farting and defecating one stench after the other on the half-infatuated couple. And when my sister came to visit, I did lie in her embrace, but only in a dream.

Back in Europe I went through that period in which I firmly believed in the possibility of connections among individuals separated by great distances, including people who did not even know each other personally.

With my first writing phase behind me, I saw myself as pretty much alone in my further undertakings and thus caught wind of a person here and a person there, particularly beyond the borders — a writer, a naturalist, a linguist — who had likewise struck out on his own to track something down, and thus, as he moved along his particular orbit, belonged to me as I to him. These few, all of whose works I studied, appeared to me in my imagination like the landscapes that filled me with greatest enthusiasm: in the midst of all that hemmed me in, they provided an inner source of light. That was a feeling of exaltation such as I never experienced with friends. These others like me caused something within me to glow, or saved me, like my two or three favorite parts of the world, from despair. It was not merely a way out, but rather a destination refreshing to my heart.

The two lights inside me have gone out. First the distant and the closer countries vanished from within me — the steppes of Mongolia, the highlands of the Cerdagne in the Pyrenees — then my imagined allies beyond the seven mountains. (My only remaining ally resides on the nearest opposite slope, and at the end of our visits to one another I see in this petty prophet of Porchefontaine more and more a caricature of my idea.)

Was this merely because I later met my absent figures of light face to face, or rather was brought together with them, through intermediaries?

Each of them seemed possibly even more reluctant than I, at any rate less generous with himself, or, on the contrary, proposed an alliance to me, thereafter plaguing me across the continents with dedications of his early-morning aphorisms, his minutest linguistic or legal glosses, his exhibition catalogues from Lübeck to Solothurn and Osaka.

None of these scattered folk casts light anymore. Nowadays the diaspora does not provide a community for me, and offers me nothing for my book.

Meanwhile it is almost March here in the bay, and finally snow has come, too. Last night the roofs of the cars coming down from the plateau had a thick layer of white on them, and the sparrows in the birds’ sleeping tree in front of the Hôtel des Voyageurs crouched there in the cold, fluffed up to twice their size.

And in front of the unlit palace of Versailles, shining out of the darkness, after an hour’s walk in a westerly direction along the Route Nationale 10, veils of snow crystals slithered and lapped over the huge, deserted open square, and a young stranger, his Walkman over his ears, the only person out and about, smiled at me out of the snowstorm, and I thought of several people who had once meant something to me, whose day I had accompanied in my thoughts for a time, and who nonetheless were now out of the question for this story of my distant friends.

In contrast to the singer as text seeker, the painter as filmmaker, the carpenter as architect, the reader, my son, the priest, my woman friend, I have lost those others. A whole series of people who for years were very close to me no longer exist, and not because they have died. They are all living, on the other side of the railroad tunnel, in Paris, farther away in Munich, Vienna, Rinkenberg, Jerusalem, Fairbanks, Ptuj. From time to time I still hear from these people with whom I was once on such good terms. But it no longer moves me, there are no sympathetic vibrations inside me now; when I hear them mentioned, I feel reluctance and revulsion. Unlike my rally participants, no matter how I would like to recall their image from before, I cannot bring them to mind. The trail of light left by these figures, who once seemed cut out to be companions for life, has been extinguished, and its place has been taken by something dark, without our having become enemies.

And that seems final. Never again, I have to assume, would we find our way back together, either through a heart-to-heart talk or through your or my masterpiece.