Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

Ioften walked through the hill forests extending as far as Versailles, which, seen from Paris, began in my suburb.

Curious that Marina Tsvetayeva, who had lived in Meudon and then in Clamart and was a person in great need of walks and forests, should have complained so bitterly in her letters that there was no forest in the vicinity. Yet I also understand her. For the forest out there began fairly surreptitiously, and a stranger to those parts standing on its edge was more likely to be repelled. As a Russian she was used to the evergreen forests of the east, while here a pine or even a spruce among the oaks and edible chestnuts was a rarity; and her birches, less rare, seemed in size and appearance to conform to the predominant varieties of trees, their trunks unusually thick and their bark more black than white because of the cracks. The white showed up only at a distance, in the depths of the forest, when a swaying passed through the dense ranks of trees there, which then brought the birches’ whiteness into view.

Yet the wooded borders of these suburbs hardly allowed such glimpses. A person coming from elsewhere would often hardly even see them as borders, but rather as mere outcroppings of dense vegetation, between houses, with barriers in front of them, mere hiding places, strewn with litter as in no other country, the dog feces, always forming a little pyramid, a sign for turning back at once.

If you manage to overcome your distaste and push onward, the beaten track does widen into a path, the bushes draw apart and shoot up into trees. But nowhere the depth and spaciousness that creates the feeling of a forest. A stranger to the country has the sense instead of being in what remains of a forest that was gobbled up — it gives this impression — by the suburb’s structures, which, wherever he looks, are so close that here and there they seem to cut the last tree trunks in half.

Nothing would be more understandable than for a person to give up once and for all, coming to the conclusion that in this country, tidied up by the Enlightenment, propped up by reason, systematically planned and unified by grammar, there is no room for a forest; the unchanging sounds of civilization, of cars, trains, helicopters in this remnant of forest seem to offer confirmation.

But as I kept walking — who knows why? — it happened one time that there among the trees I could feel the deep woods as much as ever before. As I turned off, once, and then again, a door gave way, and after that the area in which I wandered for hours was nothing but a forest, or woodland. (Similarly, time and again in dreams I am in a house I have known for years, and I stumble upon an unfamiliar, empty, yet comfortably furnished lower story that has always been there, ready for me, and then each time for the length of the dream I wander through the adjacent, still-undiscovered suites that open up around every corner.) Even with a few highways to cross in between, along with occasional hammering, rattling, and rumbling from the world outside, the silence gained the upper hand and kept it, up and down over the hills, along the sunken roads, on the paths along the embankments, on the paths along the ridges.

At the time I had the sensation of being constantly shoved and carried along, whether simply out walking or collecting chestnuts to roast at home in the evening, and continuing when I stopped at the inn at Fontaine Ste.-Marie, whose clearing marked the middle of the forest.

As never before, nature revealed itself to me as my measure. To take in nature’s sounds and finally become completely immersed in listening was what constituted for me at the time fulfillment. And it even seemed to me I was in the process of pulling it off.

When I nevertheless felt drawn to my desk, I already hesitated in the next room. Having been out and about for all those hours, permeated by the silence, its modalities, creations, styles, and examples, I had already done my work! I felt reluctance about writing it down, which seemed to me an unnecessary, and an unseemly, variation.

Such silence I experienced not only out in nature but likewise on the paths that ran along the rail line between here and Brittany. And the sounds of the suburbs formed part of it. Sometimes I would have liked to live even closer to the tracks, and every time I walked by, I peered at a certain grayish-yellow sandstone house that stood directly by the embankment just before that railroad bridge, at the height of a dam, that linked two suburbs. I wanted to see if the house, with the whirring of passenger trains and the crashing of freight trains right outside its windows, might be for sale someday. Not a few of the older people living along the tracks in shacks, with one main room and a kitchen but with oversized yards, kept chickens, and my ears were more attuned than decades ago in the village of Rinkolach to the crowing of the different cocks, which I could tell apart while still in half-sleep in my bed before daybreak. The occasional barking of dogs, quite far apart, created, not only when I was out walking but also in the nocturnal stillness of the house, along with the trains, a further sense of spaciousness in the landscape.

Most silence, either rural or urban, had oppressed me up to then or made me restless. But this type of silence suited me.

As a result of my long time abroad, away from speaking German, I had fallen into the habit, without noticing it, of using the various foreign languages even when alone with myself. In the suburban silence I noticed how often these idioms found their way into my monologues, indeed already predominated, not as a result of my personal watching and listening but simply as standard phrases. And I realized what had given me that soothing sense of my snapping into place every time I had picked up my pen: it had been a homecoming, to my work and, just as powerfully, to my native German.

If I ever thought I could achieve harmony with — with what? — no “with,” simply harmony, it was in my early years there, when I was unemployed, unsociable, out in the primeval forests and the cultural desert of the suburb.

Having only fleeting contact with others, surrounded by a peace I wanted to defend and cherish just as it was (at any rate not phony), I saw myself as leading a life of epic proportions, despite its uneventfulness, along with my son and several ancestors, long gone yet dreaming on in me.

The harmony went deepest for me in the face of those happenings that, in and of themselves, seemed mainly without resonance. From the motion of a suburban cloud, the way a snowflake hit the red asphalt of the sidewalk and turned into a cherry stain, I could pick out a sound and listen to it fade away. And that was all? Yes. And at the same time I knew I was in a phase of preparation; I intended to use my walking, observing, and reading to sharpen myself into an arrow.

Another little metaphor on this subject (which again will not fit perfectly): the Brittany line ran along for a stretch in a concrete-walled cut. Despite the slight distance from Montparnasse, their station of origin or destination, the trains whizzed through there as if already out in the open countryside, and the air current they created always buffeted the luxuriant vegetation that hung down over the steep walls of the cut. The same thing happened with the occasional bushes twisting their way up from below. Even the ivy, which had managed to worm its way into the concrete, was torn loose in the course of the years by the gusts, and floated after the trains as they sped by.

Time and again the vegetation was removed, and then, before new vegetation maybe took its place, a pattern of rough semicircles was revealed on the wall, often layered on top of each other, light patches scratched and etched in the concrete by all the bunches, fans, trailing streamers as they brushed back and forth. If that stretch of wild growth had earlier appeared random, when it was cleared away the half-ring or half-moon forms left behind in its absence appeared entirely orderly. They differed only in size, and were rounded off either at the top or the bottom, depending on whether the plants had been growing up from below or hanging down from above.