Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

The same thing happens to me with my previous publisher, whom I once pictured as showered with happiness when he was reading a manuscript; for entire summers I swam next to him in the icy waters of mountain lakes, heading for the snow on the opposite bank; we were of one mind about our books, past and future. He has long since sold all his book rights to a magazine publishing conglomerate and commutes between his faith healer in Scheveningen, the Institute for Thalasso-therapy in San Sebastian, the Rheumatism Center on the Plattensee, the sulfur baths of Saturnia, the Clinic for Zero Diet in the Caucasus, and his guest cell in the monastery on Mount Athos. I know where he is at any given moment; we are not estranged — it is simply that I no longer see him anywhere. That the rights to everything I had done over the years did not belong to me: that was wrong.

And it is the same with the woman whom I could view from a distance during one period in my life as my Muse. I knew her from her letters, but at that time it was enough to think of her for a moment across the continent and the ocean, and she would be there. Once, when I was sitting at a loss for words at my writing table, waiting since morning for a first sentence, which kept announcing its imminent arrival yet had not come by nightfall, I felt her draw near and silently write the sentence out for me, and then the next sentences, down the entire page. And once, when I was flat on my back — and never again would I be able to get around — she came to be with me and rolled, pulled, rubbed, stroked, pushed, licked, seasoned, breathed, kneaded, and rendered me mobile for a long time, at least well past Easter, which was then approaching.

For decades that woman, whose appearance I cannot even describe, remained in charge of me. From a distance I would turn to her and try out questions on her that were perhaps being asked for the first time since the world began, and she would answer without delay. I included in my books not a few of her letters, always written without corrections. Yet I did not want to know what she was doing; pictured her as having children, going to work, tending her house and garden.

In the meantime she no longer answers, has fallen silent for good. Even before that she gave me to understand that she was disappointed in me. Then she suddenly turned against me, in a letter of pure hatred. She severed all connection. I was not the person she had taken me for. This happened, I told myself, because I always went on as though nothing were wrong. To keep her respect, I would have had to perish. I would have had to go to hell, and instead I took refuge in my writing. I would have had to go smash at a certain moment. I would not have been allowed to have a wife or child or an everyday life. I was supposed to suffer, or at least not hide my suffering, experience martyrdom many times over, and die a terrible and at the same time pitiful death. Only thus could I have remained true to myself and to her.

During the last days of winter I walked and walked in the cold wind through the woods, and pondered whether it was not I after all who had been forgotten by the others, who had been given up for lost by them. Perhaps I am the one who no longer counts for them, who holds no more surprises for them, who appears in neither their daydreams nor their night dreams?

What, for instance, about the one who of late has been most powerfully present for me in my thoughts as I walked, Filip Kobal from Rinkenberg, the next village over from Rinkolach, whom I once viewed as my successor in writing, more flexible than I, more generous, more warmhearted, more colorful? Yet at one time we often said to each other that it should actually be the other way around, since I came from the village on the sunny side, and he, a few years younger, from the village on the shady side, beyond the hill, which was much steeper there.

We first met as adults, he a lawyer as well; I already had a book to my name, and he at the time was nowhere near that. He did become my successor, at any rate in the legal affairs bureau of the Southern Railway, as a tenant of the house in Sievering, and in other respects, too. Although he was bigger and broader than I, had a more powerful voice, lighter skin and eyes, many mistook him for me. Then, at a distance, I read his first texts and talked him out of all the guilt and self-flagellation he had put into them: “From the shadow of Rinkenberg into the light of Rinkolach!” He, who had previously groaned at the thought of having to go down to the garden gate, learned from me to go walking. Likewise he, who at one time had to clear his throat before every sentence and even then remained almost impossible to understand, became a sought-after reader and panelist, from the heart of Switzerland to Schleswig-Holstein. When he told me, his confidant, that he secretly felt superior to all those around him, that he spent entire evenings sitting alone as if enthroned, with the lights out and the entire world at his feet, I encouraged him to go ahead and let people see that from time to time; it was appropriate for him and his writing, within limits, and since then, whenever he stands up and reads, out comes a mighty voice that drowns out any contradiction, a most remarkable contrast to the diffidence, mumbling, and word-swallowing he still displays in everyday situations. Perhaps he has become an authority even more with his voice than with his books, and at the same time a folksy figure; wherever he appears, he is immediately invited to sing along, to play cards, to go bowling, which is probably unique for our Austria and a homegrown writer, especially nowadays. Yet he still dreads the physical work I recommended to him, partly for waking and schooling his imagination; he recoils at the thought of it, as if this were asking too much of him; a quiver of revulsion runs through him if he has to so much as pick up a trash can. True, he has moved from the shade to the sun of Rinkolach, his house is open to all — natives, refugees, readers — but his elder sister does everything for him, from polishing his shoes to chopping wood and mowing the lawn; with her there, he hardly lifts a finger.

And this Filip Kobal, who could count on being understood by me in a way that a person probably experiences only once in a lifetime, has, I think, turned his back on me forever.

The last straw was his visit to me here in the bay over a year ago. Since then he has sent me not a single sign of life, not even a card from the places where he gives readings, whereas previously I would receive big fat letters from him in his enormous sign painter’s handwriting, for which I once praised him, like so much else. A reason for his silence toward me may perhaps lie in the country once so dear to both our hearts, Yugoslavia, which he, as he puts it in an article, has unmasked as his “own personal illusion” and has “smoked out of himself,” and which still shines on before me as a reality. But I know that one hour of double-voiced storytelling about that country would suffice, and Kobal and I would be reduced to completely unanimous weeping and cursing, weeping, laughing, and cursing.

No, Filip Kobal has written me off because I settled in a faraway country, rather than where he is convinced I belong. He disapproves, as he told me at the end, of my obstinate, and, according to him, arbitrary, abandonment of my place of origin for something that in no respect seemed necessary, certainly not essential as an “exile” (which, to be sure, I have never in my life asserted a need for). It did no good that on that last visit he roamed for days at my side through the hills and valleys of the Seine, dropped in with me on hundreds of bars, churches, hermitages, houseboats, transmitters, and local radio stations.

I took him to the wintry birds’ sleeping tree by the railroad station, even had my opera glasses with me, so that my nearsighted friend could distinguish the massive branches in the plane tree’s crown from the motionless sparrow-balls. I shared with him the minutes of the last session of the town council, filled him in on the proportional assignment of seats to the various parties, from community to community within the département, with its population in the millions, gave a scintillating account of the early history of the region, from the days of the Romans and the Middle Ages to the liberation in 1944 by the division commanded by General Leclerc. In the church in Sevres he found himself standing with me by the tiny spiral staircase from the twelfth century that began high above our heads in the wall — there was no other staircase, not even a ladder — and ended who knows where; in Ville d’Avray, as the wind feathered the water, I showed him the ponds painted by Corot; on Mont St.-Valérien near Suresnes we breathed the air in the former Gestapo death cells; in La Defense we stood together, buffeted by the night wind, in the ghostly light of the Grande Arche.