Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

If I seem to be making myself out as worse than I was at the time, my intention is not to ask to be refuted but rather to have something to tell. Can it be that this was the only way for me to get started? When I was in boarding school, crammed in like a sardine with the others at Mass, didn’t I invent sins or upgrade venial failings to atrocities so I could slip away to the confessional in back, from which I would emerge energized and proud of my stories?

But then I did become more closely acquainted with someone in the region: the later petty prophet of Porchefontaine.

At the time he was proprietor and chef of the restaurant in the hollow of the Fontaine Ste.-Marie, by the clearing in the middle of the woods, as now at a restaurant by the railroad embankment in the suburb of Versailles: since then both of us have moved our base of operations two valleys to the west in the Seine hills, and each of us still finds himself at about the same distance from the other. Between our houses there is a similar set of foothills to cross.

In that period in my lire — which, for all my idleness, was a time of preparation — he became for me something that meant more than friends: an adversary whose acumen awakened my own; a misanthrope on whose rationality I honed the substance of my illusions; a tester in the face of whose deliberate heartlessness my own heart opened up as if in the presence of a secret.

The entire person attracted me as just such a secret. He was as he was; in contrast to me, he did not merely feign disgust and distaste; and yet that could not be all there was.

Even though he was my double as no one had ever been before, and finally the one I welcomed, there had been a time when he had made entirely different choices. At moments I was convinced my thoughts mirrored his exactly, yet when I articulated them, the tone was wrong. Only when they came from his mouth did they sound authentic. Again unlike me, he stood by his condemnation of the world. No, he was not my mirror. And at the same time, when I was by myself, I experienced — a word that otherwise only my friend the priest can use without embarrassment — longing for him; likewise for his place.

The stone cabin there on the edge of the clearing, long since gone without a trace, is still for me the most charming tavern on earth, the epitome of an inn. The first time I approached it, after a two-highway, three-secondary-road, four-forest route, I took it for a snack bar, or, with the ponds nearby, a fishermen’s pub. But then there was a door, of glass, with a lace curtain; and the Egyptian standing outside, seemingly moving in his motionlessness, like a dancer, in combination with his black suit and white shirt, transformed the barrack, and my long journey there contributed to the impression, into a caravansary.

Its proprietor did not, to be sure, return my greeting, and I had to go around him to enter, and same with a Doberman that unexpectedly, soundlessly, rose from the threshold on long, gangly legs. The dining room, one step beyond, was bathed in green from the forest outside all its windows. The few tables stood well apart from each other, with light tablecloths and napkins artfully swirled in the glasses, in which candle flames were mirrored, although guests were sitting only in a corner in back (in any other restaurant they would have been given a table by the window, also to make it look inviting to passersby).

I stood for a while, and when no one came, I picked a table. I waited patiently. No matter what happened now, I knew I was in the right place for a meal. If not today, I would eat here another time, and then again and again. Unlike in other nice places, I felt no immediate urge to ascertain the particulars. I simply waited, deaf to the conversation at the table behind me, tired from my long walk and happy.

The patron appeared, the man with the Egyptian profile, coming now through the swinging door from the kitchen, and wordlessly set before me bread, wine, water, and olives with stems, and had no sooner given the bread basket another turn toward me than he was already out of the small room. The bread was warm, saffron yellow when broken open, with a fragrance of the Orient that went with the pattern of the dishes. The courses that followed, likewise presented in silence and without my having ordered them, on ordinary plates, were classic French cuisine, and yet they seemed different by a degree. There was something more to them; later I noticed that, on the contrary, this effect actually came from something’s being left out. Besides, each dish, served by the chef, the proprietor, was sliced and arranged in a way that brought to mind the story of a Chinese butcher: this butcher had learned how to carve in such a way that in faithfully adhering to the original shape he created entirely new shapes.

Thus it was as if I found myself sitting down to a meal that would have been equally suited to the Mongolian steppe or to a salmon river in Alaska, and as if I were also that far away, out in the open. I had not been particularly hungry. But even before the first bite it occurred to me, just at the sight of the modest dish, simply presented in the right light on the scratched cafeteria plate, that something had been missing up to now. Why else should I heave such a great sigh of relief? Why else should I have to keep such a tight grip on myself so as not to cry? Did this mean I had been miserable all this time, and had not realized it until this moment of nourishment?

Then the proprietor’s voice made itself heard. He admonished the guests behind me, whose clothing hardly differed from his, to laugh less vulgarly, also to speak more softly, and about something other than food, wine, politics, business, and winning games, for instance about the eclipse of the moon last night or the biography of Pythagoras, which he strongly recommended for the way of life it depicted.

The group seemed accustomed to hearing such things from him and hardly paid him any heed. Nor did it bother them apparently that he then remained standing by their table, arms crossed, as if to speed their departure from his place, and, while they were still making their way to the door, was in a hurry to set the table while still clearing it, to eliminate every trace of them.

And no sooner were they outside than he laced into them, as if talking to himself: They were like everyone nowadays, synthetic human beings, placed in the world to wreak havoc and cause commotion; conceived without love; instead of being born innocent from a mother’s body, extruded somewhere, ready for use and for molding; their youth devoted to sharpening murder weapons; their maturity, behind their human masks, an endless massacre; and in the end they would just splinter, unseen and unheard, canceled out, wiped off the radar screen, neutralized.

I only half listened, not knowing whether I should take this seriously; objected, feeling it was my duty, that an innkeeper was there for everyone and should keep his opinions to himself. I did not allow myself to be deflected from my enjoyment of the meal, my delight in this out-of-the-way spot, and I thanked the chef and proprietor for it. Without looking at me, he said that it was not for the sake of me, the chance guest, that he had served up this meal, but rather to pay homage to the good things to eat and to celebrate the day as it came. And after he had poured me mint tea, in a high arc from an oriental-style onion-shaped pot, I had no sooner stood up than he slapped the seat of my chair with a thick waiter’s towel, as he had done with the others while they, too, were still there.

After that I stopped in there regularly, also because of the view.

It was as if the dining room had neither walls nor a roof, and as if outside, amid the heavy foliage of the mammoth oaks, dots of the sky shone like bluing onto the set table, and as if the clay path under the trees were the picture into which not the painter entered, but his people, and without disappearing into it.