Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

I stood for a long time on the street outside his darkened house, horrified at this phenomenon that had once again leaped out at me, a chimerical world.

Several writing days have passed since the snowfall. It was snowing well into March, although close to the ground it was not cold at all; the early stinging nettles were already sprouting, the most painful ones. The snow came in fitful gusts, out of the underbrush, as if from a tree blooming in secret or as if tossed, just a handful of grains at a time, tiny snowballs that dissolved in flight into single flakes, floated down, para-chutelike, and immediately melted, leaving little dark spots on the asphalt.

But then with the waxing moon it turned bitter cold over the bay. The ponds, especially the wild nameless one deep in the woods, froze over, the dark ice patterned in the form of kinked reeds, and during my walk out there, before I settled down in my study off the garden, I skipped pebbles over the surface, which pinged, whirred, snapped, peeped through the forest as if from a plucked instrument, and sometimes one of the birds hidden in the water shrubbery felt spoken to and replied.

I did that also to invoke the image of another person who had once been close to me. It was maybe ten years ago that he and I had been out walking here on a winter’s day and came upon a frozen forest pond where we made the pebbles sing.

As I threw them alone this time, I recalled having him next to me, and I was reminded of his windup, awkward, like that of a chubby child, and when we played soccer, he always missed the ball with his foot, and yet it was always he, the clumsy one, who found the more innocent pleasure in such things. How else to explain his crowing laughter, even when, after a huge windup, his stone, always too large, plopped through the ice without a sound.

This man had been a reader for years, so full of enthusiasm that when he talked about a book even people soured on writing or on distant terms with books got fired up or at least grew pensive or puzzled, and those who still did read, halfheartedly, remembered what it had been like when they first discovered books. He, like the politician, was somewhat older than I, a teacher at a Jewish school on the western edge of Paris, without wife or children; in response to a book in which I described living with my son for the first time, he had written me the shortest, most trenchant letter, the kind I would have liked to bestow on someone else: “The story you have written is true. The child is your work.”

This man loved being outdoors, “even though I’m a Jew,” as he said, and thus as often as once a month the two of us would walk the two stretches of forest from Paris to Versailles, the southern stretch from Meudon and the northern one from St.-Cloud.

Along a firebreak, the piles of felled trees all pointed one time in the same direction, every treetop facing toward the mosque-white domes of Sacré-Coeur, many kilometers away, a vista I still look for today and do not find again, unlike the wild strawberries along the path that can be counted on to redden in the same ditches at the end of June.

No matter how citified he looked in his hat, tie, and oxfords, the teacher found no terrain too arduous. His clothes soaked by rain, his soles slipping and sliding in the clay, his glasses fogged up, he trudged along gamely. All through the war, while still a child, he had been in hiding in a cellar in the heart of Paris, and now he enjoyed life every day, especially the parts without deep significance. At certain moments while we walked, the tiered horizons of the Seine hills up ahead, even as he stumbled along — this seemed to be his rhythm — he, who was also often gripped by fear of death, preached of a sort of immortality there in the region beyond the hills; wasn’t the fact that this area repeatedly promised immortality a kind of proof in itself?

Yet even at that time he was convinced that the end of the world was imminent, and it would come from Germany, all of whose landscapes he carried around with him — and here he would point to his chest. In response to the violent acts of the Baader-Meinhof gang, he commented, “This is the end!” and then the same when they committed suicide in prison. We were sitting that autumn evening on a quiet, well-lit square in Paris, and he stared into the darkness, which under his eyes grew denser among the trees and seemed to close in on us; he said it without a trace of smugness, filled with childlike or primitive horror.

Years later he began to mistrust me, although he continued to write interested letters about what I was doing. This change, I now thought, as I made the little stones ping over the ice of the nameless pond, had started with my asking him to do something for me. I had noticed much earlier how difficult he could become the moment you specifically requested something of him. Any schoolboy lie was good enough for him when it came to dodging others’ expectations. And one time he was supposed to mail something to me in Germany, where I was spending a few weeks to be with my father (which yielded the “Writer’s Tour”). I managed to persuade him, although he said he had dislocated his leg; the post office lay in the opposite direction from his school; and the air in post offices brought on asthma attacks.

He finally mailed the envelope, but because he had put it off so long, I was no longer at the address I had given him, and the item was sent back. And upon my return he suddenly burst out in a hate-filled tirade. In Germany they had looked at the return address and seen “a Jewish name,” and that was why they had sent the envelope back. “A Jew! Return to sender!” And those were my countrymen!

He calmed down, and for a while things were all right, until he wrote that he had tried to read my first book, the story of my ancestors, but all these villagers disgusted him. In his eyes they were all anti-Semites, who, if he had grown up among them, would have driven him into exile. Yet my “Drowsy Story” dealt only with rural life after the war, and the characters were Slavic peasants, many of whose sons had been killed for a Germany that had never meant anything to them. And in our region there was not a single Jew, and I recalled a chronicle from the turn of the century according to which, since even at the village fair, the day of greatest sociability, there was no Jew among the outside vendors, one of these had to stand behind his booth dressed as a Jew, in wig and costume, to make the festival complete — which, however, only confirmed my acquaintance in his opinion. He continued to announce he was coming out for a walk, but when I was already expecting him he would call to say he had been detained in town. The times he did come, he would remark as he was leaving that I was probably glad to be rid of him.

He became most alienated from me when he stopped believing in the possibility of writing new books, or in books altogether. He, who had once been able to trumpet his opinion on a book, and books, with the best of them, now did not even mention a book, no longer asked me about any book, or refused to listen. It seems as though he has given up books, and sometimes I can sympathize with him. Only he no longer comes to see me, and so I cannot tell him that. In his old age he now walks alone, with his immortality on the horizon, and I daresay he probably never needed me for that.

And I, did I need him? Whom have I ever needed? No one, as the woman from Catalonia always reproached me.

There would be tales to tell of several others with whom I once considered myself connected and whom I have lost in the meantime, or can no longer bring to mind. I know they exist, often hardly changed since my time with them. But whenever I try to picture them and their day from a distance as I used to, nothing comes to me. I have no associations with them; at their very names darkness closes in.