Peter Handke: My Year in No Man's Bay

He got up very early and, the only foreigner in the hotel, like the other guests ate dark soup and a piece of greasy eel down in the labyrinthine basement. Out on the streets of Morioka, which stretched across the broad valley ringed by hills, there were large hummocks of glare ice, old and black with dirt. The snowy massif, visible in a gap between the hills, rising in one fell swoop from its base to its peak, looked in spite of the distance somewhat like a city on a hill.

The architect walks along without a plan; one will take shape in the course of the day and with the still-unexplored environs. He is merely flirting with getting lost, as he did yesterday farther south in Sendai and a week ago on the mountainous paths of the national park south of Nara, and the sight of this urban area, in which even here in the desolate north every corner is built up (passages of only a hand’s breadth, hiding places for cats, have been left between the houses as earthquake protection), gives him the first impetus for this day’s excursion or for the rest of his journey: to find a no-man’s-land, however tiny, in this Japanese plain, linked together into an unbroken surface for habitation or cultivation. A no-man’s-land could comfort him as the rising of the moon might comfort another.

It is easy to get lost in a Japanese city, even in Morioka, which is not exactly old, and with this in mind the architect moves with increasing zest through this regional metropolis in which suburban street follows suburban street, and I accompany him. I can feel him better from afar. If I were eye to eye with him, his appearance and his manner would perhaps distract me from him. In his absence I forgot every time what he was like; only his essence counted, free of characteristics and idiosyncrasies.

If he then appeared in flesh and blood, I was distracted as always — in the meantime I had merely forgotten it — by his skimpy mustache, which drooped over his lips; I was shaken out of my equanimity by the way he walked a few steps ahead of me; it even took my breath away that he was next to me, around me, present.

Was I better off altogether at a distance? Was this the only way I could save my breath for the others?

Alone with a friend, unlike with a woman, I often felt out of place, even if I had been full of pleasure when I set out to join him. At the sight of him, I looked in another direction. Something jolted me out of my enthusiasm for the other person and turned my head. (According to one of her friends, the poet Marina Tsvetayeva, whose home in exile during the thirties I recently passed on a side street in this area, is supposed to have shown him only her profile when he was around.)

In the other person’s company it seemed to me time and again that our friendship had no basis. Maybe love was also a swindle, but a tangible one, whereas friendship was an illusion? After talk of friendship didn’t one often hear, from a mouth that spoke the truth, the observation that he had no friend: “My only friend is dead,” or “My best friend was my father,” to which the others had nothing more to say?

I, too, was so overwhelmed at some moments by the thought that twosomeness among friends rested on complicity and was sheer illusion that I had to pull myself together so as not to see grounds for a squabble or even a schism in every comment made by the person I happened to be with. One time I let something of the sort slip out, and a friendship ended on the spot. If it had been love, the end would at least have been drawn out. Here there was not the slightest hesitation. We immediately burned all bridges. It was as if we had both been waiting for a sign before putting an end to our game of lies. Enmity broke out between us like that between two leviathans, even more powerfully from his side than from mine.

But wasn’t it more than simply our loneliness that had previously attracted us to each other? And why did this kind of falling-out never threaten us when we were in a group? Why, when it detoured through other people, did our friendship cease to be something flimsy, proving instead heartwarming, cheering, for instance in a glance exchanged over the shoulder of a third party, in our simultaneous noticing of the same detail, in a common determination to overlook or overhear something unpleasant? Also, when in the midst of hustle and bustle one merely sensed the presence of the other person, an exchange would take place between us friends, by roundabout ways, past the heads and bodies of the others, of events, sights, sounds. Such experiences helped me grasp Epicurus’ epigram, “Friendship dances rings around the human world.”

In this connection a little parable (which does not quite fit, and is not meant to): In the forest that extends westward from Paris over the hills of the Seine to Versailles, there used to stand, in the clearing of the Fontaine Ste.-Marie, an old dance hall from the turn of the century, where, in cages stacked one on top of the other, the proprietor of the inn next door raised birds for participation in international competitions. While their singing and their colors were of great importance, it was primarily the bearing of these altogether tiny creatures, particularly that of neck, head, and beak, that counted. The most showy color, the finest voice was not enough; what made the difference was the way the bird turned its head. A bird could be considered for a prize only if its body, neck, and beak did not form a straight line, and also only if it did not suddenly break into song. Singing to another bird could not be done directly; a crook, a bend, a curve, was required, and one that aimed slightly past the other, out into space. Deviation, along with this slight oblique turn, was right, and also beautiful. As he showed me through the shed and explained the rules of competition, the breeder pointed out to me the many incorrigible birds who burst out in song, and their directness actually did strike me as crude and inappropriate. It was unacceptable. Then my patron removed the cloth from his champion’s cage. The bird was no larger, more colorful, or more elegant than his fellows. But when his master positioned himself in front of him, he stood up straighter, and his neck and head formed a bent arrow, with the beak as its point. The arrow was aimed a few degrees away from the man, and at the same time slightly upward. Although the bird, unlike those around him, remained silent, he seemed to be singing. Or is it only my imagination that now makes it so?

The older I became and the farther I moved from my native region, the more it meant to me to be among friends now and then. The clan from which I come has almost completely died out, and my own small family, which the dreams of my youth conceived or conjured up for me, has fallen apart; at the same time I cannot even muster the certainty that I have failed.

To be united with my friends, not merely with one of them, but with several at the same time, preferably with all those who have been scattered to the winds, has meanwhile become my highest goal, aside from reading and writing. But I must not be the focal point; none of us should be that, and this also entails meeting in a place equally familiar or strange to each.

In poem after poem, Friedrich Hölderlin, in an era that was probably not much rosier than mine, could as a rule call as many as three things “holy.” In my story that adjective would have a place at least once: for our rare celebrations of friendship. Each time — and often years intervene — I feel more moved by such gatherings, most of which have a prosaic purpose. Earlier, when I still felt attention directed at me, I would acknowledge it with an abnegating gesture, breaking the existing harmony by employing a counterspell. Now, when none of us any longer is at the center of attention, I gaze into the circle and would like to lift up my voice when the moment comes.