Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

It had become time to leave Rinkolach. Now my place of birth was to be only a temporary stopping place. What else could I do there, aside from whitewashing rooms, chopping wood, picking fruit, except let the sun shine on me, let the rain splash on me through the open front door, let summer and winter come (although I had a special liking for all that)? What did I write there except perhaps, and that merely dictated to my brother — anything but touch a writing instrument! — one report for the community news bulletin on the annual meeting of the local water company (although I had a hard time with it, cold sweat and groping for words as always).

And the villagers, despite their tactfulness, a characteristic of small farmers, were relieved to be rid of me at last (although one — the innkeeper — then sent word that the village seemed empty without me). At last they, even the priest, even my brother, could be by themselves again. My presence made me the superfluous one; I was all right in their eyes only when absent. Even Filip Kobal in the neighboring village of Rinkenberg, already a popular figure there, found it embarrassing after a while, despite all the cordiality with which he received me, not to be the only writer in the region, and I could understand his feelings.

Only the dead seemed to need me there at home. At any rate, every time I left the cemetery they fell upon me in the form of an angry swarm of flies.

Ihad a wife, and now I had to go back to her. Without her as my Other, it was all over; this was my thought, an entirely new one for me.

I asked my sister if my son could stay with her a little while longer — or was it she who asked me? — and set out to find the woman from Catalonia, who in the meantime was back at the United Nations in New York. She knew of course that I was on my way to her, but not that I would take a detour by way of the bridge over the Rio Grande, which I did with no purpose other than to catch my breath before our reunion, just as with everyday appointments I had the habit of loafing around beforehand. It was always as if I wanted to gain time that way, but for what?

And why even now, when our reconciliation was overdue? All this while, I had been enthralled by the thought of my distant wife. Compared with her, even my childlike son was only incidental. I had very persistent dreams about us, in which we made love and just stayed together all night long, in majesty and affection. Similarly, during that period of separation, I often felt the woman from Catalonia there with me, invisible, for days at a time, and whether alone or among others, I would again and again turn toward her, looking over my shoulder into the empty corner; unlike in her presence, I made an effort not to do anything that might displease her, and when I did not succeed, my look over my shoulder became a plea for understanding: “Look homeward, angel.”

Later, when we were newly together again, I had such a conviction that she had been with me in certain situations that when we wanted to recall them together I complained each time about her poor memory.

And now our first exchange of glances was repeated when we met, a day before the appointed time, far from the appointed place, I coming from Mexico, she coming from North America. Although preoccupied with her in my thoughts, I did not recognize her at first, and turned to look at her perhaps only because this woman appeared to me so amazingly “pale and young.” But afterward: heaven help us! And she, too, she told me, had recognized me only when she looked back for the second time at someone who, literally, “looked so pale and young.” How tired each of us was then, how tired.

But only her return banished the last vestiges of the crotchetiness I had developed during my period of solitude. She loosened my knotted limbs and relaxed my false fists, and through her new presence I learned to be there with my entire body in every movement, a forcefulness that at the same time could be as little as a gentle touch.

In the Japanese imperial city of Nara we made up for our skipped honeymoon, and then I lived in her two rooms high up in the Adams Hotel on 86th Street in Manhattan, with a view of the reservoir in Central Park. Our harmony there had a trace of amiable irony about what had been done to each of us by the other during the previous decade, and that seemed to make it durable. (And yet a decade later we lost each other for the second time.)

Toward the end of winter I then had the courage, with her in the next room, to sit down at a desk again. All the snowing in New York also made me want to write, especially in the evenings when the lights of the constantly landing airplanes were switched on and in them one could see from my skyscraper window the snowflakes whirling from the potholes in the street up into the heavens.

It turned out to be my shortest book, also because at that time I expected the narrative to unfold more from my groping my way back and questioning myself than from a masterful windup and playing of my trump card, with all the components that had seemed to me to have been part of my repertory far too long.

My piece, although ultimately it was supposed to be nothing but a story, was called “Essay on Neighborhood,” and was a sort of description of the life of one person through the voices of the various neighbors with whom he had had dealings since childhood, and then, privately published, under the pseudonym Urban Pelegrin, by my friend the reader, a printer by trade, it became my worldwide success. The Peking People’s Daily called me a progressive humanist focused on the here and now; the Osservatore Romano (Via del Pellegrino, Città del Vaticano) recognized in my language something related to the gaze of a rural laborer, to whom, sitting on the edge of a field after many hours of toil, the only pleasure left is to gaze at the sky; The New Yorker printed it in English translation before the book appeared, and invited me to a party at the Algonquin Hotel (except that by that time I was long since here in my Paris suburb bay, and did not want to leave anymore). Only The New York Times, swollen with daily reality, could not find its reality in mine, and on the other hand saw my way of writing as too emotional, or too cold, or too subtle, or too old-fashioned. And my enemy in Germany, who meanwhile had become the much-flattered first-name buddy of my former publisher (but even before that, whenever I went to see the publisher, my chair would still be stinking hot from the other man), exclaimed, when I crossed his path — no, he had no path, he was everywhere and nowhere — as he deviled by, with the rolling eyes of a mad dog that to his chagrin was kept away from the object of his rage by a fence: “So, Herr Pelegrin-Keuschnig, how’s sales?” (Once again he thought he had outsmarted me; what he did not know was that Keuschnig was also an assumed name. And as always he, otherwise so adept at sniffing out and tearing to shreds, lost the scent when it came to things that mattered, for these have almost no smell.)

I had actually written my little book simply by lying down and snapping my fingers. All the sentences took shape when I was half awake or dozing, drifting in and out of consciousness, and whenever a sentence came clear, I would jump up and write it down. Word after word emerged as soft as it was immutable, and up to the final sentence, when in the next room, where my wife and lovely neighbor was sitting, a summer wind already wafting through the open window was rolling the pencils back and forth on the table, not a single one needed to be changed.

When the woman from Catalonia and I, on the evening of the same day, were waved by the elevator operator on the top floor of the Adams Hotel into his brass cage, and on floor after floor during the leisurely trip down, more of the monthly and yearly guests got on, until at the end all races and ages were represented, it was decided that the moment had come for us to be with our child again.