Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

In the region where I grew up I certainly knew painters, if only as painters of signs and wayside shrines, but never an architect; even the word was hardly known there. There was the master mason who was also a master builder. And the structures that captured my imagination were hardly ever built of masonry, but rather of wood, also on the small side, and their construction did not require master craftsmen: the barns, the rough board toolsheds, the shelters for harvested crops, and those racks for drying grass, with narrow shingled roofs, scattered at all angles across the mowings; even today I will squint past a monumental stone structure in search of something unobtrusive, of wood. It is simply a fact that to this day things I did not encounter early on can make me skittish; it is a reflex, one I cannot get rid of. I think it comes from the jolt I got at the sight of the boarding school, which at one blow cut me off from my familiar world, that fortress seen from far below that took up an entire hilltop. It did not help that the final and steepest part of the path leading up to the building passed a mausoleum as big as a house, windowless, with a half-open door from which, every time we returned from summer vacation, a cold breath of decay wafted, coming, I imagined, from the sarcophagus of the bishop who had retired in old age to what would later become this boarding school for future priests.

Although large cities were my element for a time, I have never been on friendly terms with city buildings, either castles or railway stations, either palaces, cathedrals, medieval squares, or high-rise buildings of any sort, bridges spanning rivers or inlets of wonder-of-the-world length, subterranean twin cities. They intoxicated me, dizzied me, but never sparked my imagination. To this extent, even if my siblings have accused me of the opposite, I can say that I have never become a city person. Structures that suggest “city,” and perhaps also “power,” “grandeur,” “authority,” were not on my scale, least of all in places where I was supposed to study: at the universities. These never became “mine,” the one in Vienna as little as the one in Paris, except for a summery campus one time, far out of town near Santiago de Compostela. City people — in my eyes that is what architects are, and I often see them as antagonists.

Only with my distant friend is it different, and even so we are threatened, if not by a falling-out then certainly by wariness. He does not want to build anything more. For years now his work has consisted entirely of travel, and of searching for material for repairing and completing what is already there, which he never wants to see torn down anywhere, no matter what it is. My architect is not a city person, or one sees no signs of it in him. What could drive a wedge between us is the opposite of what so often aggravates me in my painter. Whereas the latter enjoys being celebrated as a winner, the architect presents himself as a loser, and for some time now has actually come across as just that, with the ironic style he adopts at the beginning of any conversation, as if he did not trust himself or the other person to be serious, his veering between impulsivity and rigidity, his interrupting of himself. And this makes me realize that an apparent loser disconcerts me as much as a declared winner.

Even the Japanese police, who otherwise look right past foreigners, as does the rest of the population, except children, have already stopped him several times on his trip — that is how derelict my friend looks, a white man stranded on the coasts of Japan, at least from a distance, where a pedestrian like him, with his broad-brimmed hat on his bowed head, can only be a mendicant friar, a stranger to the country; from close up, however, even with his worn soles and his threadbare shirt collar, he is elegance personified and humility in human form, which causes anyone spoiling for a fight to step out of his way and even salute him. And he, the most frugal and resourceful of us, who now sleeps in temple enclosures instead of hotels, lives almost exclusively on rice and fruit, and wears his clothing so gently that it veritably blooms, has enough money even in Japan to continue his travels for a good while longer, this entire year.

In the cavernlike fish market of Aomori, where everyone smiled at the carpenter, an older woman with a rubber apron has just given him a few fillets of raw salmon, which he is now eating, crouching in the dusk on top of a snowdrift, behind him poles, swaying boat masts, for the drift has formed right by the ocean, across which he is looking in a northerly direction, toward the island of Hokkaido.

Evening is coming on there, while here in the bay between the hills of the Seine beyond Paris it is the morning of the same day, already spring, with brimstone-butterfly yellow seen out of the corner of one’s eye and thousands of frogs softly fluting, piping, or peeping as they mate in the nameless pond, overgrown with underbrush and trees, out in the forest glade. What kind of alienation is supposed to be hanging over me and him? Don’t I see us as together across the continents?

And now it occurs to me that it was stone buildings that put me on the alert, for instance the house of the harbormaster of Piran, Istria, on my first day by the ocean, the way it stood there alone on the dock, the sky in its windows, without anything around it, without a yard or a portico, stone rising perpendicularly from the horizontal paving stones.

Imove on among my friends to the reader. Mightn’t he, too, disavow me and write me off? Metamorphose into someone who despises me?

There was a time when our relationship was in danger. It did not even go that well at the beginning. I met him for the first time in one of the two railway-station cafés in that other Parisian suburb where I lived before coming to the bay here; it was the Bar de l’Arrivée, while the other is called the Bar du Depart. I was sitting there waiting for my son’s piano lesson to be over, and now, whenever I sit out on that terrace, I can still hear, through the roar of the traffic and the rumbling and screeching of the trains, from the top floor the obedient and defenseless groping of the six-year-old child on the huge instrument.

At first the gaze of the person who turned toward me from the next table struck me as that of a double, an evil one. Then he addressed me, without transition, without a greeting, without a question, without hesitation, as if I had been his acquaintance from time immemorial: “Gregor Keuschnig, I’m one of your readers,” which, with my son’s disconsolate scales in my ear, filled me with the uncomfortable feeling that I was this stranger’s chosen victim.

That dissipated as he began to summarize, verbal image after verbal image, my books for me — there were only two or three of them. For in this way what I had created came back to me and seemed solid. As reproduced by the reader, in his tone of voice, my stuff sounded robust and at the same time surprising, and I felt in the mood to go and read it myself right away, thanks to the other man’s roguish acting-out, his dastardly laughter at passages quoted verbatim — as if he were taking revenge on the state of the world.

But later on it was disconcerting again that the reader had eyes only for me. When I had picked up my son, he ignored him, as he did the people and places of the suburb, through which he then accompanied us on our errands. At my house, where I invited him to stay for supper, he did not even glance at the fire in the fireplace, and before that, while I was splitting wood in the yard, he stood around and continued to recite from my books, until I found myself wishing a piece of firewood would fly up and hit him in the head. And even the woman from Catalonia did not exist for him, she whom otherwise no one, not even an animal, ignored.