Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

Instead of “Who am I?” I have taken to asking myself “What is most unique to me?” I do not know. But I know its place, every morning, halfway up the hill, thataway.

But Poussin’s meadow often disappears with the morning light, or at least appears at midday so shrunken that the hilltop as well as the hollow could belong to one of the thousands of craters left by the bombs dropped on Velizy in 1944, whose victims are buried in the cemetery farther up on the flank, and at most I can still see Poussin’s Eurydice in the bushes, just bitten by the deadly snake.

And I belong to the green and gray glow out there only as long as I sit indoors at my table and stay put. The meadow loses its picturesqueness if I go so far as to look at it not from downstairs in my study but from upstairs: either I cannot locate it at first or there is nothing remarkable about it. And whenever I went up to the forest looking for it, I was never quite sure if this was the place I had fixed my eye on that same morning from my window, had scrutinized, studied, observed — even the oak, unmistakable from my house, multiplied as one approached, and had no regal dimensions anymore. And similarly, from my table here, morning after morning the eastern rays of light will dissipate more, like the columns of smoke from the suburban roofs gradually disappearing in springtime. The place is being overgrown. Its image is being veiled. Is its image being veiled?

Well past his childhood I did not think or say “my son” but “the child,” and was also more likely to address him that way than by his name.

Many were put off by that; my own father reproved me in a letter, in his own way, by reporting that one of his girlfriends was “puzzled” by it, and the woman from Catalonia felt that by my constant invoking of the “child” I wanted to immortalize this in my son and, on the other hand, keep him at arm’s length, as an exceptional being.

But what about the moment when I no longer saw Valentin either as a child or as a son, and he did not even have a name, except perhaps “him,” or “that boy,” or “the stranger in my house,” “the ruffian,” “the good-for-nothing,” and the only thing I could manage to say to him was “I don’t know you”? When for his part my son, whenever we still went anywhere at all together, would rush on ahead, strike out in an unforeseen direction, and leave me panting along behind him? When the adolescent’s notebooks, which I did not leaf through until last year when I was cleaning out his old room here in this house, are full of hatred and loathing for me, the man who, according to him, merely put on a show of love, whose presence just got in the way, me, the false father, whose solicitude was an act; who took nothing seriously; whom he wanted to get rid of every single day, wanted to kill with his own hands, with the ax, with a club, with a medieval morning star; about whom he prayed night after night to the heavens above, when I happened to be away, that I would never come home; and in comparison to whom even “my so-called mother,” “the modern woman,” “the woman with the cold shoulder,” “the mournful wanderer,” ceaselessly roaming the world, at most leaving him a scrap of paper with a heart scribbled on it in the empty house, already off to her next nondestination, represented a reference point?

If I think back, it is touching that there were two different times when my son and I were at loggerheads this way: there was the time he secretly raged against me for about a year, while I, according to a memory that does not register the past but feels it, and of which I can therefore be as certain as of a fact, was intensely fond of him, as in the years before that. And the time when I, on the contrary, the father, moved away from him in my thoughts — this is putting it too innocuously — that was later, and I feel, likewise in memory, several glances of my son’s resting on me, as if from the far corner of a dim hall, and I know they stemmed from helplessness, a wondrously tender helplessness.

Unthinkable, back in his childhood, that there should be a question of anything between the two of us but a lifelong story. I experienced hours, even entire days with him that above and beyond that had to lay the groundwork for something, something enduring, a bond that could not be banished from the world.

That did not come immediately with his birth, when, at the sight of that fuzz-covered, dark-skinned little creature, in the presence of his almost bloodless mother, I recoiled as if the woman from Catalonia had foisted a changeling on me. During the first years of his life, which I spent without my family, far beyond the Urals, I saw him so seldom that every time he failed to recognize me and at the word “father” was more likely to look at the Mongolian faces around us than at me, and I, too, felt as though the word did not refer to me. Although I had felt a powerful urge to have a child, and with this particular woman, who would clearly bear me someone extraordinary, whenever “my family” came to mind, it was never the three of us, but, as always before, my grandparents, my mother, her brothers, long since dead, my sister, my brother; and that most decisively where I find the measure for what I call “real”: in my dreams. Deep in my dreams, the woman from Catalonia, my son, and I never appeared in the context of a family; the three of us did not even appear together. Even when we were finally living together in Paris, at first I felt so ill at ease with my son that I avoided being alone with him and often did not come home in the evening until he was sure to be in bed already.

Yet my memory also preserves a few very different moments from that period: the face of a child, behind a door in the dark, where he has hidden and is smiling, a smile in profile such as one sees only during hide-and-go-seek. And in a particular stretch of sidewalk, which I let him walk on the day they were paving it, his footprint, next to that of a large dog. And my searching for refuge and elan, and not only once, in his cowlick. And then, in our first suburb, initially so quiet after the roar of the metropolis, up there in the Seine hills, on the side streets the postman’s regular morning whistling, and inside the house the two of us, intent each time on not missing a note of it, our moment of shared experience.

And in spite of that our life together continued to be determined by an expression in my son’s eyes that has been gone for many years now, and even then appeared only occasionally. I understood that look as one of distrust, as a sign of a serious disturbance. The child’s distrust focused on no one in particular. It was a matter of principle, or at least in the process of becoming a matter of principle. I knew that kind of look from earlier, from myself, in the only photo from my boarding school, a group picture, and I encounter it likewise in children today, more and more, including smaller children. I see it every day in some here in the neighborhood.

For one in particular — he has not been walking that long, and speech is still new to him — the word distrust does not seem strong enough: it should be suspicion. This child looks around for suspicious sights, and not only from time to time — he does so uninterruptedly, eyes darting, somberly from below or over his shoulder. Paraphrasing a saying of the petty prophet of Porchefontaine, I then think, “Two years old — and already it’s all over,” and although it is clear to me that the blame rests with his parents (or someone else), I cannot help condemning the little fellow himself; that’s how upset I am by his unremitting wariness.

My son had that look, but quite unexpectedly, between two looks quite normal for a child. Yet even then I was repelled and felt a surge of rage, directed against him, myself, something unknown. In the face of this sudden darkening of his gaze it seemed to me that it would take only a little for that look to become permanently fixed on his face. I felt an urgent need to dispel that facial expression, by force. Something had to be done about this distrust, unbearable to someone who was subjected to it day in, day out from close up. But I did nothing.