Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

And thus the place names in my more immediate homeland also acquired resonance and rhythm, even if only those of the villages: Dob, Heiligengrab, Mittlern, Bistrica, Lind, Ruden, and of course Rinkolach. The names of the towns, as small as they were — Bleiburg, Völkermarkt, Wolfsberg — remained mute, not to mention Klagenfurt or Villach. Only on the other side of the borders did it continue, with Maribor, Udine, Tricesimo.

And likewise the natives, though again only those in the villages — which in any case were almost all I saw during that year — struck me as people from anywhere, with the appropriate horizon as a backdrop.

All this I took in, and yet for a long initial period I was utterly incapable of having dealings with anyone. Even with my brother I could hardly get out a word. It was a kind of violence that forced me to hide myself from him as from the others, or to turn my head the other way.

And even the simplest daily tasks I seemed to have to learn all over again: to put my jacket on a hanger, to make my bed, to get on a bicycle.

Once, when I was swimming absentmindedly, I paused and almost went under. Another time, when with my brother I had set out after all for the town of B., he sent me off to do an errand, and secretly watched me from outside on the public square, and afterward described how I had suddenly stood there with a package of butter in my hand, not knowing what to do next, and the cashier had had to reach into my pockets for the money, and, when I finally found my way back to him, the butter had melted between my fingers.

That I finally got my bearings can be ascribed, I believe, to the location of my bed or sofa, in the back corner of the entrance hall, under the stairs leading up to the former granary. My brother had hung a lamp for me there, with a switch next to it, and a table and stool also graced my little realm. Here, while reading, looking up through the cracks and knotholes, and likewise while sleeping, I was plainly gathering strength for the world outside. What a relief, simply to have the top of my head touching the underside of the stair treads when I sat there.

During the day I then sat more and more at one of the windows, which as in all the old southern Slav peasant houses was very close to the ground; leaning one elbow on the unusually broad windowsill, the grass of the little orchard in front of the house at eye level, I was merely an observer; I did not touch a writing instrument once during that year, and even longer.

And just as on that evening among the blocks of stone along the harbor of Piran when I was a young man, I had forgotten all knowledge and also no longer had an opinion or a judgment on anything. My brother teased me for having become so tolerant. “Where’s all your anger gone?”

And it was a fact that my way of just staring resembled that of a village idiot. Whatever I saw, I liked. And in the same fashion I accepted everyone and everything I could. In this I felt not limited but slow-witted. Only as one who was slow-witted — this I had experienced again and again — did the person I was awaken in me.

It implied no contradiction that I continued to enjoy studying, even if that was confined to the leaves and blossoms of the weeds in the area, which altogether, the longer I bent over them, swung into motion in a marvelously varied and yet symmetrically delicate round dance. They had names — spurge, valerian, hemlock, plantain — yet for now I wanted only to take in the colors and forms, all intermingled. “Remain impressionable” …

The out-of-the-way and rather inconspicuous vegetation was almost the only thing in which I became engrossed during this time.

So how did I define my metamorphosis? There was hardly anything from earlier, from childhood, to see anew — this I recognized. The old mushroom places in the woods, for instance, were bleak and bare, and the clearings, if any forest was left, had shifted, like moving sand dunes, often without the strawberry and raspberry patches that had previously been there. Even the field paths, along with their deep dust, had disappeared or now took an entirely different course; on the other hand, they had cleared even more logging roads through the hills. The Crab Pond was now that in name only, just as the Inn on the Bend was now located on a straight stretch of road and is supposed to be renamed the Trout.

And in spite of all that, in my eyes nothing about the area had changed. And just as before I was reluctant to block my view of these things with historical reminiscences. Of these, practically the only story people still told was the business with the American soldier, a black, who was dropped by parachute almost at the end of the Second World War, and got so hung up, head down, in a tree by a field that people came running from all direction with flails, scythes, and sickles. I went only so far as to examine, in the rectory, that turn-of-the-century chronicle in which house by house the occupations of the inhabitants were noted. Again: what was Gregor Keuschnig’s metamorphosis?

Since during this year he understood everyone, even the former SS man and the future one, he soon enjoyed an uncanny general confidence. He joined in all the celebrations, was a favorite partner at card tables, and the fact that later on he often confused himself in his memory with one of the others—“Was it me or was it you who was drunk and fell off that ladder in the apple tree?”—proved that he really was part of the village community. (On one thing he even became the expert: on lost objects, in particular the small and smallest ones. He could be counted on to go straight to the right spot in the general area, bend down, and even in the thickest gravel come up with the lost bead or contact lens.)

In his black rubber boots and floppy blue pants, cinched at the waist with a length of rope, he more and more resembled a native, one from earlier times, and he himself, when he sat there with his palm turned upward or sternly looked up and inspected the person facing him, sometimes saw a double image of himself and his grandfather, which the third party then also noticed.

In this region, as out-of-the-way as ever and lacking a middle class, he became a sort of authority, and not only as a finder of lost objects. Finally he was even offered an official position; don’t ask me which.

At the same time he remained aware that he did not belong among people. The same thing would happen to him as in elementary school when he had his only role in a play; as a dwarf among dwarfs in the background, he had nothing to do but sew, and kept pricking his finger (which, to be sure, only his mother noticed), and then in boarding school, where he was chosen to make up the rules for a new game, which turned out to be completely unplayable, and then as a magistrate during his year in court …

But only the children caught on to his chronic unreliability, for instance the child next door, to whom, while in the next room the child’s father lay dying, gasping for breath, to calm the child down he read a fairy tale in which someone’s heart was torn from his living body.

The person who at that time understood almost everyone, disarmed, reconciled, convinced people — that was not me. So, for the third time: That was supposed to be a metamorphosis?

Certainly, all that year I felt an authority in me, but far from the community, alone, as I remained for the most part, and often half asleep. If a metamorphosis, then one without deeds; without external consequences.

And at the same time it was the year during which the Rinkolach chess club won the Jaunfeld championship, during which in Carinthia a former partisan was elected head of the provincial government, and the Blessed Virgin appeared to his defeated opponent in the Bärental, during which, on the other side of the border, representatives of the youth of all the southern Slav peoples gathered and sang “Jugoslavija!” again, during which in Germany part of the population committed mass suicide, during which Japan erected its Great Wall, during which the world acquired a second moon, and at the end of which, on the highway bridge over the Rio Grande between El Paso, U.S.A., and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, for the second time, after exactly a decade, one and the same Austrian from a South Carinthian hamlet and the same Spanish woman from Catalonian Gerona, after both had in the meantime gone or stumbled their separate ways, were reunited.