Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

Years later I encountered my model again in the form of someone else, on a bus trip through the Yucatan, and knew afterward only that he came from Australia; we were on the road together for no more than a day, in a small, cobbled-together tour group. When the bus stopped, he was always the first one out, as if he already had a direction charted inside him, and involuntarily I followed, though whenever possible choosing my own path; I simply felt the urge to have him in sight, for wherever he went, away from the Maya pyramids, toward ash-darkened and glowing-hot present-day burned-over rain forest with almost nothing else, there had to be something to discover, and without attaching myself to him I wanted to see it from a distance.

A third time I even came across my model in the form of a fellow countryman, from a neighboring valley. He still spoke its dialect, though only when he slipped briefly back into German from English. Otherwise he had become a well-adjusted resident of the American Midwest, at the same time remaining the spit and image of a Carinthian villager, whom I could imagine pulling the rope of a church bell, a heavy one, or as an adolescent suffering from raging hormones, spittle gathering in the corners of his mouth as he stood before the girl of his dreams during the “begging-in” customary in our area, at least in those days. He seemed perfectly at home in Minnesota, so established in and familiar with the place, and also in charge of his domain, to judge by his outstretched arm and the space between his firmly planted legs, like a local lord. Yet he did not exaggerate or imitate anything. I just saw him as more alert than the natives, more on the make (without being called Schwarzenegger), at the same time more thoughtful than his fellow Americans and more contemplative, like someone leading his life on a sort of rampart or fort, a quality indeed possessed to some degree by his house, far from Minneapolis, alone on a prairie, on top of a little mound of fill, with an almost endless view in all directions. And in the city of millions where he worked as a physician, “more or less with my left hand,” but what a left hand, he remained just the same. At the time we were both young, and I was convinced he would make a great name for himself. “I escaped from home, and it’s right here!” he said. “With the smallest sip of coffee I drink, far from my Maria Rojach, not seen or thought of by anyone in the village, I make a contribution to the future of the world!”

I have not heard from him again. Where is he? It has been a long time since I last met the modern person in whom I thought I could anticipate a new world. And I, too, have not stayed the same as during my years in that first suburb.

Without especially holding myself aloof or participating, I learned just enough about people to have life brush me in passing and hardly exert any pressure. During those few years I did not hear bad things about anyone (it was quite different for my son in school, but he did not tell me about that until much later).

The settling, spreading uphill, hardly noticeably yet steadily, was dense and at the same time scattered, and I felt as if my house were protected by the many harmless strangers and their almost constant presence, as quiet as it was palpable; I often forgot to lock up.

The majority of the residents were older, yet quite far from being frail; primarily former retailers and railroad employees, who lived for their inconspicuous, yet on closer inspection practically sculpted, vegetable gardens, and otherwise, too, seemed to be constantly out and about, going for cigarettes or the paper, betting on horses in a certain café, then streaming together from every direction for the Sunday market in front of the station (as now in the bay), knowing in advance and in detail what would be there, and where; I once heard two local people exchange in passing what still echoes in my ear as the customary greeting of the place: “We have it good here, don’t we?” — “Yes, we have it good here!”

In my memory at least I have only people like that as neighbors, and there was a similar couple, a man and his wife, who took care of Valentin when I was away, with whom I sometimes sat for a while after I got back, and not merely out of politeness, also enjoying the apples from their own trees that they served (while on the other hand my son later told me story after story about the mustiness peculiar to their house, a different kind in every corner).

In my imagination they are all still alive, even though most of them meanwhile are probably in the ground, and when I occasionally venture across there, over the two hills, I no longer encounter a single one of them; the greeting, if I get to hear it at all, is different from before. The descendants of the Portuguese, the largest foreign group there, often no longer use their language with each other, or speak it with a French accent. The graves of the Armenians and also the Russians increasingly display, under their own, far-traveled script, lines of the locally customary Roman script.

And the few people from that population of whom I had perhaps a less good opinion during my time there must be doing worse things today, yet even they cannot have turned into complete villains, but at most, appropriately for those suburbs, stock types or minor characters from gangster comedies: for instance, the doctor, the only one in the neighborhood, who filled out prescription after prescription, never really looking at the patients, and in the same breath wrote out a bill, to the bottom line of which would be added, as I said to myself, the profit from the volleys of medications, especially for small children, shared, according to a secret agreement, with his accomplice, the proprietor of the pharmacy, two streets over and around the corner, where, even without my telescope, with the naked eye, I could see the parents of the district coming out, laden as if for all eternity with accordion-sized boxes (and at least once I was one of them myself).

But what do I really know of that place today? Other than that the brooms of the still mostly black street sweepers are now made of plastic rather than of twigs; that the photo automat at the railroad station now takes colored rather than black-and-white pictures; that the one homeless person who used to sleep up in the woods has meanwhile become several?

All that time the shelter up on the railroad platform had no glass in its door, and once, when I went to push it open, I tumbled into dead air. Now glass has been installed. And from the upstairs apartment where I dragged my son to his piano lesson no tinkling can be heard now.

I, too, did no one any harm there, did not get worked up even once, and wanted it to be that way always.

On the other hand, I gradually came to recognize that I also did not take anyone seriously, and this was true not only of the local residents filing past but then also of my absent friends. I hardly wanted to hear about them anymore. I was dissociating myself. My going it alone, in my place and domain, seemed so much richer in content than any togetherness. I barely skimmed my friends’ letters, and then did not answer them. The simple fact that they were constantly doing things and appearing in public made me indifferent to them; if one of them had appeared before me with his activities, I would have scoffed at his scheming.

Yes, from a distance I was unserious, and at the same time hardened toward my friends. And at the side of my son, too, toward whom I outwardly seemed so attentive and patient, I quite often caught myself merely feigning interest. Certainly I listened to him, but I had no heart for the child. Did that not become clear from the fact that I would forget him if he was away for more than a couple of days? Why did all the world treat me in his absence as a single person, someone without attachments who could be enlisted for the craziest adventures?