Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

He, who in his profession was always there at once for anyone who needed him, expected the same of his friend as a matter of course, as a duty. He could not imagine that the primary reason for my coming might be, for example, a certain path at a certain time of year, or a stone wall around a field, or the entire region with its milk pickup stands, new or rotting away, and not some living being, and certainly not him.

If previously I had usually informed him of my coming, in time I began to keep my arrival secret and then even tried to avoid this man, who otherwise would have lain in wait for me far outside the village, at the train’s flag stop, standing there by his car, his arms crossed and his legs apart, destroying my monthlong looking forward to the footpath across the fields in the autumnal light, and, even worse, making it impossible for me to take a single step by myself even way out there, far from human habitation.

And besides, it irked me that if anyone it should be this particular person with his clerical collar picking me up upon my return home, and with the local railroad workers as witnesses: it was as if I were letting myself be co-opted by a particular party in front of the whole population.

From now on, no one, not even the priest, was to know in advance of my visits to my old home. At the right moment I would instead simply show up at his house, as I was accustomed to do with my brother. But he, although I changed the times of my visits, seemed to intuit my return to his territory, even if it was only for a matter of hours. On the deserted highway to Rinkolach, my footsteps making the only sound, the wind between my fingers, at sunset, when I pictured him at evening Mass in Moos or Smihel, suddenly I would hear a honking behind me, followed by a curt wave from the village boss that brooked no contradiction, telling me to get into the car, whose door he was already holding open. And the next time I got off one station earlier and slunk by back roads to the village, which I reached long after dark. Heat lightning flashed ahead of me. In its glow, the familiar figure was suddenly there by the cemetery, spreading his arms wide and greeting me, as usual without first saying my name, with loud singing: “Salve in domino!” There, on the way to the graves of my kinsmen, I backed away from my friend, as one would only from a foe, and at the same time I felt like a person who had been caught in the act, as though by being here without his knowledge I was a sort of poacher. And while I was cross at his cutting me off and blindly assuming that we both felt the same way, my recoiling and my reluctance to speak wounded him.

Although we remained standing next to each other and talked, in the alternation between the darkness, which I have experienced so concretely only on the Jaunfeld Plain, and silent heat lightning, it felt as if we had just taken leave of each other for good. I said, when he reproached me for my unfriendliness, that he was a “despot,” “clueless,” a “cannibal” (etc.). He said only that I was “a very simple person.”

I am describing this incident also because the nightmare of that particular nocturnal hour had already faded by the next day. Or had it? At any rate, on the way back from my brother’s house, where I had slept as usual on the couch under the staircase in the hall, I was honked at from behind my back, louder and more imperiously than ever, and then in addition had the headlights flashed at me, in broad daylight — when I had been sure that at this hour he would be teaching his religion at the elementary school in Bleiburg. Without hesitation he gestured to me, just with his fingers, to get in on the passenger side. We then moved to the trunk the crate filled to the brim with early white-skinned apples, just picked by him in the rectory garden. The quarrel of the previous evening, which had seemed absolutely final, was not even mentioned. He did not alter in the slightest his behavior as lord of the village, omnipresent; displayed it even more insistently, exaggerated it. And he also robbed me of that hour alone by the train window, that hour of slow departure, in an arc, one station after another, from the place of my birth, which I need in order to experience the region fully; instead he drove me in his car to the regional capital to catch the express, turning a deaf ear to my protestations. “Leave me!” I said. “No, I’m not leaving you,” he said. And then, after we had arrived much too early in Klagenfurt, a town that had never meant anything to me except for its movie houses, which were gone now, and after we had sat together somewhere, I was the one, as is not uncommon with me, who would not let the other go. “Stay a while, I’ll take the next train, I have time,” I said. “Don’t you remember that they’re waiting for me to do a baptism in Humtschach, and that after that I have to go into the rift valley and call on a parishioner who’s dying? That I’m not the master of my time the way you are, but rather its servant?”

And this is how we worked things out between us. I always keep my arrival secret from him, and whenever I come home to Rinkolach I double back again and again, under cover of darkness, through the underbrush, and the district priest tracks me down, blocks my path, confiscates my open space, ruins my time at home, and after my initial resistance, I accept the unwelcome company, indeed even want to be with this other person for the time being.

But who knows? What I do know is that after that nocturnal quarrel, the new beginning we both made, despite the powers of reconciliation I ascribed to myself, must be credited exclusively to my local friend. Was it only during my childhood that I could make up so matter-of-factly, for instance with our neighbor’s son? Didn’t I cultivate not long thereafter in boarding school one or two insurmountable enmities? Have I in the meantime become one of the “irreconcilables”? At any rate, that word appealed to me for a long time. But even there I no longer know.

Isee my woman friend under the Turkish sun, while here in the Seine hills the first blossoms are raining down from the trees, or rather, I sense her this way, in her environment there, the white-glistening delta of a river between the place where it flows out of the Taurus range and where it reaches the sea. She is turning a piece of wood in her hand that has lain in the water for a long time, in fresh water and in salt water, a narrow cylinder whose wooden parts, the fibers and splinters, have been almost completely replaced, into its very core, by finger-long, spiral-shaped bivalves that have grown into it. Only the outward form remains that of a cudgel, which lies heavy in her hand, heavier than one made of wood could ever be, heavy as stone.

Remarkable that I can think my way to this woman (although she also helps me, as do the others on the road, by writing to me now and then or sending me a sliver of wood, and although I carried with me just such a shell-encrusted piece of wood along the southern shores of Turkey until it began to stink, and the captain of the ship threw it overboard, as he did with everything that did not belong on the ship). Remarkable, because we were once a couple, and our story ended in a way that makes a subsequent friendship appear miraculous. At the time I fled in horror from this woman who loved me.

And here I interrupt this passage. For it seems questionable to me, and not for the first time, by the way, when I refer to the person I was in the past as “I,” not only the child, but also the person from as recently as last year. My “I”-uncertainty is equally great for all the years, and pertains to almost everything I did, everything that was done to me, and everything that happened to me. It is as though I constantly had to put quotation marks around myself in my memories. “I” looked after my three-month-old sister. “I” was mugged. “I” was resuscitated. “I” gave a speech. A moment in which I am not questionable to myself is a rarity, even reinforced with an exclamation point. Then I woke up next to my dead grandmother! Then I walked with my grandfather, facing into the raindrops, through the dust from the path across the fields! Then I sat all summer and fall, and wrote, looked out the window, yes I! Then I caught sight of my son, yes, I! Then I swam in the middle of the year in the middle of the river, yes, I! Yet with most of my experiences I find it difficult to say “I,” would rather substitute some other word, except that none presents itself. I have no choice but to use an undifferentiated “I” as the subject of my active and passive experiences, no matter how false it rings to me.