Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

How comforting and strengthening these fairy-tale-life moments were. From them I learned what freedom was, as on that first day after the eight years of boarding school, except that this time it was immensely more powerful, under the shoulders (a word that in French seems to be derived from the word for wings), in the nostrils, in the fingers, under the soles of the feet. I had time. Go. Up. Out. Do it.

Every step in that house in the suburb seemed to be that sort of doing or shaping. Whether I was going shopping, taking Valentin to the local school, or hanging around the house: I was doing something, simply by being present in the region day and night. I kept seeking out different ways of getting places, observed, differentiated, compared: the bread in the various bakeries, the gardens, at that time, two decades ago, more vegetable than flower gardens, the cafés, supermarkets, and shoe-repair shops in the upper and lower suburb.

I read histories of the place and acquired a geological survey map of the region — I had to go to the national institute in Paris for it — so as to have firmly in mind the base, layer upon layer, on which I was moving around.

I found particularly appealing the houses, almost without exception unstuccoed, especially in the lower town, built of the local sandstone, most of it obtained at the beginning of the century from underground quarries, which, long since abandoned, invisibly pock the landscape; half a century later, a new high-rise building collapsed into such a cavern, which the builders had not wanted to think about; the collapse caused as many deaths as an earthquake, and since that time anyone who buys a house in the affected area receives a certificate: no mine shaft below; the ground at this location is solid. I concentrated on the façades, which were laid course upon course out of these unequally sized stones, so obviously extracted from the local soil, each in its apparently accidental form and yet all of them fitting together so perfectly; in this way I honed my ability to perceive color, sometimes calling on my son for help with characterizing the shadings.

The blocks, and also blocklets as small as a child’s fist, were a light gray, in which you could see on closer inspection a tinge of yellow, as if from clay, shot through with darker veins, which with time could go slate blue or moss green, also glassy bulges, unexpectedly sparkling in all colors, ranging to coal black, also pure white grains, such as you find in the sand of a brook, the size of ant eggs, and like them oval.

As a result of the prominent yellow, all these façades could give an appearance of sunshine, even on a rainy morning, a very odd sunshine, coming up from below, which is otherwise a peculiarity of clay landscapes, deserts, badlands. (The woman from Catalonia, on the other hand, felt mocked by this phenomenon: for what stretched before one out in nature in the similarly colored familiar Spanish meseta here flickered before her as a structure.) The closer I came to the stones in the suburban house, often bumping them with my nose, and examined them, the more I had an entire planet within my grasp, embodied in this one thing, as once before, very long ago in childhood, the sight of a drop of rain in a yellow-brown-gray-white bit of dust on the path had made the world open up to me for the first time. And it was not some strange planet but here, the earth, and one that was peaceful through and through.

In similar fashion a crater now opened up in the building stone, fresh for the touching with the tip of a finger; ridges formed, and the observer, moving above this scene at barely an eyelash’s distance, was showered with a sense of shelteredness brought on by the barely perceptible crumbling of the tiny weathered bits, which recalled the strangely meaningful glow along the eroded edges of the sunken roads back home.

Another feature of this world in miniature was that when you looked closely it turned out to be inhabited, if only by a tiny creature, the size of a pinhead, dangling here on a thread from a cliff, and a shimmering something like a one-celled animal on the opposite slope, beyond the seven mountain ranges, the two of them reminiscent of Robinson and Friday.

All my life the unapproachability of the world, its incomprehensibility and its inaccessibility, my exclusion from it, has been terribly painful to me. That has been my fundamental problem. Belonging, participating, being involved was so rare that each time it became a great occasion for me, worthy of being recorded. Every time the world, the peaceable one, became a world, nature’s and civilization’s bending, extending, taking on color, was not only an event but a moment of recognition: with this recognition there would be no war.

There, during my first stay in the suburban region, at the midpoint of my life, for a good two years, such events fell into my lap almost constantly, on some days there for the plucking every other moment like the cherries in the treetop in Arcueil. The planet took on shape and became good to the touch. During that period it seemed erotic.

That applied also to eating, which began, along with the walk, drawn out as much as possible, to the restaurant, together with its spaces and vistas, to awaken a barely discovered pleasure (though immediately attenuated when the dinner table was not located in my new region). And of course I had drunk previously, primarily to be a part of things — see above — but it was here that I first realized what it meant for wine to be delicious. I often withdrew to the most remote corner of the house with a glass, after midnight, turned out the light, took a sip in the pitch darkness, and then, when I could feel the first sip actually rising to the tips of my hair, another.

And in their first years the woman from Catalonian Gerona and the man from the Jaunfeld Plain in southern Carinthia had certainly found their way to each other quite often, in passing, in brushing by each other, like sleepwalkers, as if the exciting element were more the air between them, each other’s presence, their mutual strangeness. But not until we were here did we have each other personally in mind, and this marriage, although it may have lasted only through one late summer and a fall, appears to my memory more complete and eventful than all that had gone before — of epic proportions; with a horizon.

Always in the same spot, always in the same corner, with the same gestures, in a never varied tempo, a sort of spaciousness emerged, different from that of all the countries and continents from earlier: we created this space and were its center (and likewise felt stronger there than ever before, two who were lost for all eternity, as if we were coupling far off on the moon). “I think this region is good for love,” she said one time, her words as usual spoken more to herself than directed at me.

Only a third party could do justice to our history as a couple, and, since no such person is at hand, I must play the role myself, or at least take a stab at it.

So this was the only era in which a person and a place became identical for me, or in which a person meant a place, took me in. Even the most intimate connectedness with another person — this or that ancestor, my son — did no good when the place we inhabited together was fundamentally unhomelike to me. All the love in the world could not achieve anything if I did not have the place.

This existed independently of my family. At home I felt like myself the minute I set foot in my region, but not, however, with my mother or my grandparents. And later, when Valentin and I were living alone together, if I returned with him after a long absence to a place that was not my own, even on the approach I could try to persuade myself as much as I liked that the person at my side meant more to me than anything else in the world, and, and — still, all the blood would drain from my heart. And even now, when I have the urge to visit him, my repulsion at having to go to Vienna to do so is even greater.