Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

New York at that time was the last big city in which I felt at home.

But in the meantime every town offered itself as the hub of the world — much as more and more individuals, without particular deeds or natural gifts, took on the roles of heroes and srars — including Sp. on the Drau, renamed on the signs Sp./Millstatter See, where I went to pick up Valentin, while the woman from Catalonia, who could break out in a rash at the mere sound of Austrian dialect, waited for us in Paris, deserted now in August.

My sister lived in one of the satellite developments in Sp., built in what had once been the meadows along the Drau, now officially called the Drau River, and with her husband operated the only restaurant in the area, located in the next block.

On a late afternoon, in unwaveringly harsh light that reflected blindingly off the densely parked cars, having reached this wasteland, covering the last stretch on boards laid over mud, after I had got lost again, the same as every other time, and had asked myself why in such places, despite the impressionability I was always cultivating, I immediately lost my keen eye, I saw, sitting under an umbrella on the concrete terrace of the Blue Lagoon Bistro, the only guest, a young man whose face from a distance immediately came within a finger’s breadth of me, as sometimes faces do that bend over you in the moment of waking up, and only when he jumped up, with a long-contained cry of dismay, did it turn out to be the child’s. It was the last time up to now that at the sight of me Valentin came running, and from a standing position, and how he ran. (Much later he told me that at that moment he had finally seen me in my weakness; he could never stand it when I acted strong; even when I held out my arms, he wanted to push them down.)

He was wearing glasses, and the once-dark gaze of distrust had been transformed into the calm, watchful gaze of a researcher. My sister stepped out through the beaded curtain in the doorway, invoked the name of the Madonna, and disappeared, for much longer than necessary, and that, too, was something new: that she, so alien to every tradition, having renounced any origins, voluntarily and self-confidently nothing but a figure in this no-man’s-land, here manifested the ageless behavior of Slavic village women: in her surprise and pleasure she first went off and hid. It accorded with this image that she then returned with bread and smoked ham, served up by her husband, a former ship’s cook, whom my sister constantly put down in my presence, so much so that it was only from quick looks they exchanged that I could tell how much they loved each other. (Though he later left her alone in her hospital room on the day she died; he said she had already long since been unconscious — but I am certain that she was conscious to the last, that all the dying are conscious up to their last moment.)

While we sat there together, until long after the first bat — they had them even there — the first mosquito, and the first star, I secretly resolved that if “my sales” allowed, I would help her buy another eating place, on a public square, like the Fontaine Ste.-Marie, or, if she preferred, at the end of a dock on the Wörther See, with Udo Jürgens as a regular guest arriving in his motorboat and with me as silent partner.

And once during this evening I asked my son, “Where are you?” and he, who in between was serving the few guests, pointed by way of an answer at himself, with both hands, but not at his chest but into his armpits, and even stuck his fingers in there.

And then he described, with my sister as a witness, how I had done everything right as a father. But I knew better.

What has always suited me best is to narrate from one day to the next, as the Odyssey goes from dawn to the rising of the stars, and to continue this way the next morning, or in general just to treat a single day in this fashion.

But how to narrate the decade from our reconciliation to the beginning of this current year, since which I have been sitting here at my desk, and in the briefest way possible, for the story of my seven friends scattered over the world, as well as the chronicle of my year here in the bay, has been crowding in and knocking all this time, at every threshold? I shall try. I will do it.

As my, and our, future landscape, now mine forever, only the hilly suburbs here, open in all directions, could even be considered, with their unstuccoed clay-colored sandstone houses, the settlements poking like long or short fingers into the forest dunes that defined the visual image, and with a silence that made one prick up one’s ears.

Nobody would know us there, and we would be all the more available to each other. The woman from Catalonia wanted to be separated from Paris by one more range of hills than the previous time, my son wanted to go to a “school in the woods,” and my final choice of a place satisfied even my stern ancestors: on a day early in the spring of the following year, instead of falling upon me again as a swarm of flies, they peeped out at me somewhere among the hills in the form of pussywillows overhanging the path, and amiably reached out to shake my hand as I passed.

That was the day on which, after a fall and winter spent searching, I had found the house, but was still in doubt, not because of the house — I had immediately felt at home in it, along with its hollow, as the only right place — but because of its more immediate surroundings. It put me off that houses of the sort that attracted me were so much in the minority. Only en masse, one next to the other, street after street, did these fieldstone structures, in their slight geometric variations, retain a powerfully fairy-tale-like, very immediate character. Here, however, where they were few and far between, they seemed like leftovers from a bygone time, set apart from the mostly stuccoed, yet grotesquely different blocks from the periods between and after the world wars, many with names legible from a considerable distance (although I immediately scraped the name off my house, in the meantime I have come to be fond of some of them after all, for instance “My Sufficiency,” “My Cottage in Canada,” “Sweet Refuge,” “Family Ties,” “My Horizon,” “Our Sundays,” “My Parachute,” and recently I dreamed of a house in the bay with the name “My Births”).

And once during the decade a crow’s feather landed on the Absence Path; the older men in the bar called Fountain without Wine smelled snow one wintry evening, but it did not come; my petty prophet, who had meanwhile moved to yet another restaurant, scared off his guests with a tin cutout of a Moor by the front door, which blew over in the slightest wind; the Three Stations Bar was gutted by fire; a military airplane crashed right nearby in the forest before it could land at Villacoublay — beforehand its huge shadow over the house; I boxed the ears of my almost grown-up son after I had picked him up at the police station, where he had been taken for shoplifting; I threw a burning branch over the fence of a neighbor, the noisiest of all; during the Gulf War no trains passed through the tunnel to Paris for so long that the suburb seemed cut off from the city, as if at the end of time; my son left immediately for Vienna after his last examination at the Lycée Rabelais, halfway into the forest of Meudon; my sister died; the frozen-over Nameless Pond pinged from my skipping pebbles by myself; the woman from Catalonia left me for the second time; having reached the top of the transmitter here, the highest vantage point around Paris, for which I had special permission, I confirmed for myself that my suburb actually did cut into the wooded hills in the form of a bay, more remote than a village on a fjord or a research station in the Arctic; and this morning, in the construction fill of the Absence Path, I came upon the fragment of an inscription with the very words I recall from a tombstone, meanwhile disappeared from the graveyard, back home in Rinkolach: “Returned to His Fluid Ancestral Home.”