Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

From the pale yellow a brimstone butterfly fluttered up. I saw the gray stretch enlivened by the similarly gray lizards, seemingly just born, a threesome, matching the coat of arms of the suburb, which extends into the woods here. And there, where the path suddenly blackened, to complement it a huge raven stalked along and sparkled, his bowing and scraping reminiscent of a duck, his sparkle reminding me of my runaway wife (a note from whom I had, just that morning, when I stepped into the study, found taped to the outside of the window). But the unpopulated places, too, were churned up by the tracks of animals, not only those of dogs, horses, and cats — which are led through the woods on leashes by their owners — but also those of mice, rabbits, birds, and then at my feet I searched for the print of the local mythical beast; but saw only clumps of rabbit droppings, as if expelled in mortal fear; mouse innards breaded with sand; feathers with tufts of animal fur stuck to them.

As I continued to sit on the tree stump at the edge of the dune path, my mind more and more vacant, I began to feel as though at any moment a horse-drawn carriage would drive by, garlanded, with my departed or defunct ancestors riding in it.

Meanwhile midday had come, balmy air, and the familiar yet always alarming joggers turned up, from the hundreds of office buildings up on the plateau, colorful like nothing else in the forest. One of them, as usual (and, as usual, a different one), called out a greeting. A little later, after the howl of a jet landing at the Villacoublay air base, squadrons of helicopters flew by carrying visitors of state, heading northeast over the hills toward Paris, whereupon it occurred to me that on that day a conference on a civil war was taking place.

I saw a man going straight ahead along the dune path, between sun and shade, up and down, dark stretches of sand and light ones. I caught sight of him while he was still far off, in the place where I could sense that other zone, veiled in distance. It was the medieval stonemason, tramping alone through France at the end of the Romanesque period, the man whose notes I had been reading just that morning. He strode along, although overtaken again and again by one of the joggers, maintaining the same even gait whether going uphill or down, and likewise in the deepest sand, the gait of a villager, shoulders back, arms and legs swinging wide, not of a contemporary villager, but rather of one from prewar days. He was dressed accordingly: a black suit with an open jacket and trousers fluttering around his knees, a white shirt without a necktie, a gray vest. With every change of color in the sand of the path, in a hollow, on a rise, the walker glowed in new splendor, one colorful panting figure after another circling around him. When he paused for a moment, I fantasized that he was hammering his stonemason’s mark into a tree with a chisel. At my spot it was I who greeted him. A laconic greeting in reply, and already his back, shoulders rolling, as if there were balls of air in his armpits.

I followed him with my eyes, past all the bomb craters to left and right, obscured by the joggers as he was, until he disappeared into that so very different section of the path, no longer in the present but also no longer in his Middle Ages. And what had I just read in his notes? “I do not belong in the current era. I only wreak havoc there.” And on the other hand: “Today I shall find something I thought lost forever; there are such days!” And what was written on the paper the woman from Catalonia had stuck to the outside of my window? “We must remain at odds for a while longer. And even longer. And even longer.” But didn’t that thought come from me?

The adventure stories that meant the most to me told of a person’s search for the most suitable place for him to live. For example? And weren’t those actually fairy tales? And which ones?

In my youth I wanted to be swallowed up by a metropolis. But none of the Austrian and German cities through which I passed fit that description. Not only the manner of the passersby but also the sounds, the smells, and the buildings made me feel like a stranger to those parts. And at home in the country I had perhaps been everything but that. Being a stranger to those parts also implied the opposite of what I desired: to be swallowed up. Even the springlike fragrance of lilacs in the villa sections of Graz, Vienna, Munich, Berlin could plunge me into misery. At the sight of the palaces of Schönbrunn, Nymphenburg, and Charlottenburg, of the magnificent hanging gardens along Hamburg’s Elbchaussee, of the Cologne Cathedral, even of the great rivers, the Rhine, the Main, the Danube, running through great cities, I had the sensation of dust in my eyes.

The first time I felt I had become one with the wide world was in a town: that time among the limestone blocks on the harbor of Piran on the Istrian Peninsula. It was a mild evening between Easter and Whitsun, the same as now, thirty-five years later; I had just taken that examination on Roman law and wanted nothing in my mind but the white-gray boulders rearing up before me, with the gentle harbor waves breaking in the gaps between them. In Spanish towns, the largest and the smallest, I then had a similar experience, for instance during my summer semester in Santiago de Compostela, with the sensation, which always took me by surprise, that these places expanded from day to day, with more and more corners emerging from the shadows, even if today it may be no more than a newspaper stand far back in the dark lobby of an apartment building or tomorrow the wooden ladder leaning against part of the church ruins on an overgrown island in the river.

Yet neither there in Spain nor in Piran in Yugoslavia was there any question of staying. At the time, for my further training, the suitable metropolis seemed to be Paris. That stemmed first of all from the fact that beginning with the moment of my arrival nothing there repelled me or excluded me; that not the slightest element interposed itself between this world-class city and me, who, and I felt I was this, was open to the world. And then again it was a color that revealed the place to me: the light, expansive gray of the asphalt on the boulevards that gave me the impulse to set out, to walk and walk — something I had had no desire to do everywhere else — and to cover the entire city, in all directions. Here was my future; here I would later on live as well as work. And at the time I could picture doing both only in the center, where I actually did have an apartment — at least it seemed central to me, which, indeed, gradually became true of almost every part of Paris; I never had to go through even the smallest lifeless stretch between my lodgings and the lecture halls, the left bank of the Seine and the right, the laundromat and the movie grottoes; and besides I had got away not only from the lilacs and the jasmine but more importantly from the whole Western European great outdoors and was quite content with the unchanging gray trunks of the plane trees.

When I had to return to my country for my year in the Viennese courts, and after that a position in the legal department of the Austrian Southern Railway, it occasioned a pain similar to what I had experienced in childhood when I was dragged away from the village of Rinkolach to that horrible boarding school. I sat with my suitcase in an outdoor café by the Gare de l’Est, the asphalt at my feet showing the innumerable overlapping imprints of bottle caps from the hot times of year, and I felt as if I were experiencing all this for the last time. As if along with the gray of Paris I had to take leave of the world. A few drops of rain fell and were gone at once. At the thought of the coming years in Austria and my profession as a lawyer, I became aware for the first time of that black cloud, of which I could not tell whether it welled up inside me or on the horizon, which was poisoned by it, the cloud that meanwhile, I imagine, is merely resting, always ready to become active again. But a decade later I was living back in the metropolis where I belonged and working in the profession for which I am halfway suited, if for any. Working? Profession? I embarked on my project.