Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

Once, when a light rain was falling, the patron barked at me that I should go out onto the terrace; because of the trees I would not get wet, and besides, looking and listening, in combination with his dishes, slowed down one’s breathing and kept one warm.

And in fact his inn in the hollow seemed an oasis of summer far into the autumn; as one came up the path, a curiously dry air crackled through the oak leaves, now riddled with holes, which apparently dropped only in the middle distance.

Since in the meantime the proprietor had offended his usual guests for good, and the most recent edition of the restaurant guide now warned people about his gruff manner, there were only a few of us left. Yet even if the place had been packed, running at full steam — which I sometimes wished for — the experience would always have been the same for me there.

The sound of the trees in the clearing, a seething, swelling, blazing, made me understand why one of the auditory ossicles is called the “stirrup.” I felt something tugging at me; gratitude galvanized me, followed by an exuberance that wanted to go somewhere and then nowhere at all: I was there, and I was innocent.

And one day the proprietor stood next to me and said, his hand on the back of my chair: “Sometimes when it gets quiet in the clearing, a fist seizes me by the scruff of my neck from above and hoists me off the ground like Habakkuk in your Bible, one of the minor prophets. I, on the other hand, am the petty prophet, and insist on that.”

From then on we no longer dealt with each other as host and guest. From time to time he sent me handwritten invitations to his place, with descriptions of dishes and wines. Or, when I could not get away, for instance because my son was sick, the restaurateur from the clearing would come to my house, in the evening, on his (very flexible) days off, bringing his pots and pans, and would cook and serve a meal. He would lock himself into the kitchen, and except for faint Arabic music we would hear not a sound from him, and he always took a very long time. Afterward we would play chess in silence — something he nowadays always invites me in vain to do — he with grim intensity, I casually, while inside us, it seemed to me, it was often actually the other way around. He was a stern winner and a laughing loser.

I admired him for his implacability, just as I was annoyed with myself for my readiness to relent after an initial burst of rage. To this day I have not fathomed his secret. And I always feel a kind of uncertainty toward him, going back to our very first shared moment, or perhaps the opposite thereof, that time at the door to his caravan stopping place.

And soon he had to move, after going bankrupt, to another cabin, beyond the next knoll of the Seine hills, by the upper pond in Villebon. And where this second little restaurant stood, there now grows, like the grass on the site of the first, a tangle of stinging nettles and wild blackberries. From its windows I could see the wind rippling the water down below, just as now, in his third place in Versailles-Porchefontaine, I can see on the embankment the long-distance and local trains speeding and rolling by, overlapping and blocking the view of one another.

Sometimes I set out for there for dinner, taking a roundabout route through the forest, and each time get up disappointed, without having had any complaint with the food or the table by the window. For sitting, resting, meals, pursuing my thoughts, I am constantly on the lookout for an inn like the one at Fontaine Ste.-Marie. And I do not intend to stop looking. Perhaps my friends on their various journeys will tell me about finding one.

But as for the clearing, with the bulldozed terrace area, I now avoid it — like all clearings, by the way. It seems to me that nothing more can grow there: as if today’s clearings, even including the jungle of the Yucatán, belonged to the runners, gymnasts, fitness freaks, dogs, bombing squadrons, and poisonous mushrooms. All the entrances to them could be called, like the one here in the bay, “Allée de la Fausse Porte,” the avenue of the wrong door.

And at the same time I think at least once a day of my inn in the clearing: what a lovely, eternal, simple sitting one could have there. All the things that had been studied and understood the night before forgotten, and yet close at hand. The breath of wind moves the space between one’s fingers — a snapping. Reminiscent: only this word for it comes to mind, an introductory word that calls for a noun, in the genitive, the generative case. Reminiscent of what?

And of course there was no staying there (although the solitary proprietor had his room over the kitchen, as if for the long haul).

Those were the years when, without working, I was riding high as never before and hardly ever afterward, and at the same time feeling more threatened and on borrowed time than ever.

Each time I went to bed after midnight, I had the distinct impression of having survived another day, and I actually painted the date of the new day, the only thing I entered in my notebook at that time. I understood the complaints of various involuntary (unlike me) residents of the suburbs, who saw themselves cut off there from the world as it flowed by, consigned for a time to an evacuation or pre-death zone — particularly on certain evenings when, beyond the gates of the metropolis, an un-contoured brightness settled over the streets, on which the newly leafed-out trees shriveled into wilted cemetery plants, and far and wide a queasy silence reigned, the window shutters closed tight on every side, abrupt chirping of sparrows, the wail of car alarms, and the barking of watchdogs.

That became perhaps most tangible in those suburbs greatly in demand as places to live, on the slopes above the meanders of the Seine, where one had a view of the whole city of Paris, as in Garches, Meudon, or St.-Cloud. From Paris down there in its basin, scattered over the landscape as far as the horizon like millions of bright, crowded dice, only a rustling reached the silent hills and panoramic terraces above. Down there was where everything was happening. That was where it was.

The metropolis shimmered, glowed, and way down there, inaudible, was a steady, nest-warm thrumming, and the person who had moved away, way up with his hanging gardens in the fresh air, must have felt he had no hope of ever returning there.

And even I, in my much humbler suburb, in the house from which only the tip of the Eiffel Tower could be seen, found myself thinking at night, perhaps in view of that magic triangle sticking up far off in the gaps between the houses next door, where the lights had been turned off long since, and their dark and dreary cabbage gardens, whether it wasn’t an outrage to be away from that light over there.

It was very fragile and threatening, my grand time, back then before the midpoint of life, in my first suburb.

And then one day I really did go mad. My madness remained inside me and did not last. But if it had broken into the open, there would have been no going back for me. I would have murdered my son — and was afraid I would do so, fled from myself into the remotest corner of the cellar — would have set fire to the house and would have run out on the street with a knife and an ax, striking blow upon blow against strangers, until the end. It was as if I had to destroy one thing after the other, just because it was there.

At intervals I was overcome with ghostly calm and thought all the rage of my serf ancestors, which never had an outlet, had collected in me and had now been transformed into the ravings of a madman. I went to my son, caressed him, pushed him to the ground. The child understood, and avoided me for the rest of the day, but he also did not lock his room; otherwise I would have broken down the door.