Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

And then again, as we made our way in the gathering dusk across the backyard to the house, I with my arms loaded down with firewood, the reader holding forth with both hands free, he began to make delicate trilling and fluting noises, his lips pursed, whereupon little birds, sparrows and titmice, came whirring from the trees and bushes and perched on his elbows, which he held akimbo.

Things settled down with the reader only when he was gone, far away, back in his Germany (which at the time seemed more distant from France than it does now). At intervals he wrote me letters full of little stories about the seasons and reports on his country, and never expected an answer. I could say of him that he let me alone, and that did me good. Of course, my father lived in Germany, too, but I was completely indifferent toward him. Germany, a nonplace, despite my sense of finding myself and feeling at home in the smallest German word-hamlets: through the reader it became a country for me. I viewed him from afar as a poet. He was a court of appeal. And you could rely on the reader as on no one else. I took his letters along on my hikes and pored over every word, swore to be guided by them and never to disappoint him. I had confidence in him as otherwise only in the poets Goethe and Hölderlin, in Heraclitus and John the Evangelist. He was the epitome of constancy, never got worked up, and when he spoke, and not only about books, he gave a definite yes or no — my ideal, which I never attained. I, the writer, followed him on his expeditions in reading: just as I came to enjoy my own work through him, I read, after his telling me about them, the writings of others whom I had previously not known or even disliked. I went so far as to copy out sentences from his letters: “I exist in order to read.” Or: “When I don’t know what to do next: the light shed by reading.” Or: “If I start a family someday, down to the last generation it will be a family of readers.”

Then, with the passage of time I noticed something about the reader that made me angry at him again. He was not content to be alone with his reading; he was on the lookout for others of like mind. Like me, there were quite a few here and there in Europe and even overseas who followed his example and read the books he recommended. He encouraged that, too. Through his reading he wanted not only, as he expressed it, to “keep myself in top form,” but also more and more to wield power. True, he felt no desire for public prominence. Nonetheless he presided over a circle whose head he was, the great reader. He presented himself as the authority in a most intimate circle, and thus it fell to him to dictate, without television appearances and newspapers, what was worth reading and what not. I saw the reader on his way to founding a sect, a sect of readers. And thus he claimed for himself and his followers exclusivity, infallibility, singularity vis-à-vis the mere crowd.

The moment came when, after he had again begun to talk in conspiratorial tones about an exceptional book, an exemplary contrast to the prevailing literary nonentities, I wanted nothing more to do with such a reader. And I told him so. Wanting to wield power through reading, and surreptitiously at that, in a whisper, made no sense, I said. He was a bogeyman, a corrupter of children, the antireader, the equivalent of the Antichrist. “Clear out, beat it, let books be books again, each one as best it can!” I blurted that out, unthinkingly, as always when I am in a rage, and when I finally looked at him, his lips were trembling terribly.

Thus we became friends. He continued to write his letters to me, but he never made mention of a particular book. For a time he tried to refrain from reading altogether, but then found that unnatural. Without reading, he said, he could not see the day in a day. The work that suited him was, and remained, reading and deciphering things. And wasn’t writing an invention that to this day held a secret power?

To be sure, since then I have never seen him reading his book in public. He does it surreptitiously now, under the table, as it were, which reminds me of those carved medieval stone figures holding their book in their hand, and the hand as well as the book is shrouded in cloth. As a sideline he prints and binds books himself, one every couple of years, like those fragments of the twelfth-century itinerant mason.

At the moment he is walking along Jade Bay by the North Sea at Wilhelmshaven, where my father still lives. It is night, after the first day of spring. The lights far out on the ocean probably belong to the island of Helgoland, and when the reader turns around, he sees Orion disappearing in the haze on the horizon, “until next winter!”

It is not long until Easter now; hardly any sparrows are sleeping in the birds’ sleeping tree here by the local railway station, and the few who are left perch there at night in their normal size, no longer puffed up against the cold. I go or roll along to the priest of Rinkolach on the Jaunfeld Plain, where I was born.

Today, Sunday, he is driving back and forth across the countryside because he has to say Mass in several scattered villages, one after the other. His rectory is elsewhere; Rinkolach is merely his branch church. It is a long time since there has been a priest in residence there.

Patches of snow can still be seen on the plain, especially on the edge of the woods; unlike here, the climate is not determined by the ocean. Yet even where he is, in continental Europe, the air in late afternoon has a lingering mildness, and thus the priest is struck all the more by the contrast between the warmth outside in the open air and the massive cold inside the churches, particularly in the sacristies where he changes for Mass, always in haste, as now in the particularly chilly church of Rinkolach.

On the table the elderly woman who helps the priest with his robing has placed a jam jar with a bunch of wood anemones; far off at the railway station on the border one of the infrequent Sunday trains blows its whistle, and down in the gravelly soil of the cemetery are piled the bones of my kinfolk, all jumbled and intermingled, with spaces between where there is nothing but the absence of my grandparents’ two sons who died in Russia for the Third Reich, most recently joined by the ashes of my sister.

Thus I could close my eyes as I just did and spend this Sunday with the distant priest, sit next to him as he eats his midday soup, breathe in the smell in his car, and, stronger than he, who is always in a hurry, be with him in the afternoon when he nods off at his desk, and perhaps myself let my head sink onto my desk here; I would know my friend’s day inside out.

But even with him there has already been danger. How indignant he has made me at times. It had almost nothing to do with his way of speaking, even if some of his expressions left an unpleasant taste in my mouth, for instance when he said he gave the dying members of his congregations “the death escort.” (Gratifying, on the other hand, that he never called a thing or a person “stupid,” “evil,” or “bad,” but used the term “simple” for it all: a “simple man” was a stupid or limited person; a “simple book” meant something inconsequential, somewhat humorous, and had nothing to do with “admirable simplicity.”)

What put our friendship to the test during one period: that during the one or two times a year when I returned to my old region he took it for granted that I had to be mainly with him, if with anyone, not with my brother, the only surviving member of my family; I was allowed as little as possible or not at all to go about by myself. As the overseer of the parish, he imposed on the visitor the requirement of registering his arrival, his presence, and his departure, and all in the name of friendship. If I came, he was in charge; nothing else would do.