Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

The harmony had seemed like someone else’s experience, a fairy tale, and it has not been that long since I came to think of the fairy tale as embodying the highest of all realities. I saw the real me only in the person affected by the loss. I was at home in sorrow and dissension, in absurdity. Catastrophe involving those close to me was the place where I belonged. If, in the midst of happiness, I seemed gloomy, inaccessible, and frightening to others, it was in pain and helplessness, in despair that I began to glow and inspired general confidence.

And in actual fact I never felt so close to the world as when there was no one and nothing left for me. “Serves me right!” was a thought that warmed me through and through. “You have a drive toward nothingness,” the woman from Catalonia told me, and not only during that period. But who was saying what to whom? Did what with whom? Of the two of us: who was who? It seems to me as though, in order to get close to the truth, I would have to tell the story of someone else, of others, which I suppose I have been doing in any case for a very long time.

There was something great between us, and she went, and I let her go. Finally she went. Her last glance, over her shoulder, was hatred, so pure that everything round about seemed dipped in white, a white that was intent on destruction and also had the strength for it. I had to turn away immediately, feeling my skull on the point of exploding in its rays. (Fratricidal wars, it is claimed, especially those in which the participants have no emotional stake and are also not convinced of the necessity of the struggle, are the most cruel, and in this sense a fratricidal war broke out between Ana and me.) And at the same time, in my turning away as she was going, I got caught up in observing, found myself absorbed in the television antenna on a nearby roof, which in the evening sun appeared to me as a gleaming arrow, and likewise I felt the presence of a distant friend as he sat quietly at his daily work somewhere, while here the drama of my fate was playing itself out. My head was buzzing, felt as heavy as a boulder, and that was all right. There was a raging storm between the woman and me, and I was in good spirits. Things were not all that bad. I could study them.

Afterward, alone as never before, I lived without any conviction that man and woman belonged together. In my eyes there was nothing that connected anyone with anyone else. Later on I experienced with one woman or another days of ecstasy or merely of exaltation, which both of us mistook for adventure, even happiness. Each time, observers, friends as well as strangers, saw the relationship as beautiful and found our pleasure contagious. Especially older people, no matter how grumpy they normally were, became cheerful at the sight and gave us their blessing. Only children eyed us without comprehension, or disapprovingly, and I myself felt almost constantly queasy.

But such episodes actually entailed a freedom that I experienced at the time as progress. However discreetly this casual, blessedly superficial flowing into one another occurred: we thought we were on the cutting edge of our era, its avant-garde and secret protagonists, and with our physicalify — which was a sort of soulfulness, wasn’t it? — were writing history.

At the time, even more than “I” it was one woman or another to whom the whole thing meant “onward!” To them, these tireless couplings represented a goal for the entire human race next to which every other activity shrank to insignificance. And any man vouchsafed the image of such a being — transformed into a queen? a guerrilla? the woman from Revelation? — had to feel allied and complicit with her. These women had right on their side, for the moment and for the future.

All the more terrible, then, my letdown when the magic faded, the first time and likewise the times after that. The woman and I would be laughing heartily at the coup we had pulled off against the stick-in-the-mud rest of the world, and two floors farther up in the elevator I would find myself trapped with a stranger inside the most impenetrable cliff. After a cheerful parting from the next of these huntresses, at an international airport, both of us convinced that over the last few days we had inscribed each other feature by feature into the book of eternity, I was sitting on the plane, with the sea far below, the foam on the crest of the waves still visible, and wishing the window would give way and hurtle me into the abyss.

In these situations my sense that I deserved to be executed became stronger and stronger, and I was also grimly accepting; saw myself stepping in front of the firing squad and tying the blindfold over my own eyes, as tight as it would go.

But all of this happened in another country, not a trace of it in my home, in the suburb.

That was taboo. I did not even work there, hardly wrote a line in the years that followed. First of all, my books had brought in enough so that for the time being I could afford this, and then I felt, unlike after a period of letting myself drift, neither the desire nor the need (both had to be present) to sit down at my desk.

My chief occupation for years was leisure, which, however, was not the same as doing nothing. I was taking time off, though in a different sense from working-class people when they take time off. At the beginning of my residence in the suburb, I still looked to the great city of Paris for evenings out or special occasions. Then, disappointed by my cosmopolitan acquaintances, all of whom found the area where I lived lacking in interest — otherwise they would have followed my example!? — I no longer had the slightest idea what to do there, and took my leisure alone, going from one suburb to the other during the day, in summer as in winter, and in the evening stayed at home.

What absolutely had to be done I did myself, hit or miss. I let the grass in the yard grow until only the top of my son’s head showed above it, even when he was standing up, and then I cut it with a scythe. Likewise in winter I pushed the snow, which tended to stay on the ground longer than down in Paris, off the sidewalk, and in the process exchanged my first words with a neighbor who was doing the same and who had until then always seemed, in his silence, the epitome of a small-town crook, yet now turned out to be the soul of innocuousness and gentleness. I went shopping, cooked, ironed, darned, sewed — here my years in boarding school came in handy — washed the windows, at least before Christmas, Easter, and the birthdays of those living in the house, scrubbed the floor, also to smell the water drying on it, and promised myself to be the first in my family not to let himself be bent crooked and stooped by physical work, but rather to use it to straighten my back permanently and inheritably. To be sure, my activities were not the same as the grinding labor they had done as hired men, which even the strongest will could hardly transform into something positive.

But primarily I walked the entire area; lived with my son; read.

And I thought I was close for the first time to the right life, and not just for me. Vanished from society, gradually forgotten by my former world, I felt as though I could finally be pure there, and even now I still wonder sometimes why I did not stick with it. Then again I tell myself that in that period I was near madness and that this life was as wrong as it could possibly be. And even then I knew: as it was, it could not bring fulfillment.

Yet that was something I always had before me, day after day. It was an utterly serious life, very different from the interludes, elsewhere, with the new breed of women. Busy with nothing but leisure, I thought at every step that I was entering an advent period, which I scented and sniffed as a child does snow in the air. Today I see myself there, off the beaten track, behaving more like my own god, in proud anticipation of perdition, which at the same time would mean ascension. What did come seemed at first exactly the opposite.