Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

The singer took off his woolen cap, stepped up to the one stele that stood twice as tall as the others, outside the circle, and leaned his head on it. Against his forehead he felt not so much the stone as the lichen, spreading, rust-colored, and scratchy. The predominant sensation became the beating of his heart, noticeable at the spot where he was touching the rock, filling his entire body, pulsing, pounding, as if passing into the interior of the column, and at this moment it would have suited the singer if the tall stone had given way and crushed him. He even shook it, without success. But this time no line of a song came to him instead, or only a word for one, “present,” or a fragment, “On the road … practice the present.”

When he opened his eyes, two sheep with raven-black faces were staring up at him from the grass. He squatted down at a distance from the circular cairn and shared his provisions with them, bought in the railroad station of Inverness; the apple he ate himself. Thus removed from the burial place, he became witness to one of those tenths of a second from so-called prehistoric times when the main stone, set up by the Celts or someone, became perfectly perpendicular, as it had remained standing through the millennia to that moment. It grew quiet on the knoll, including the bleating and grunting.

Still expectant of death, the singer, much later, set out to return to the valley, again cutting across fields, without paths or even wild-animal tracks. He crossed in a zigzag, from one field to the other, every thickly wooded gorge, where one false step in the slipperiness could have made him disappear, never to be seen again, on the bottom, under the unbroken canopy of leaves over the bog. And on the other hand he took each step carefully, and if he had fallen he would have kept his balance and would, broad as he was, have rolled over and over like a ball and landed softly on his feet.

He moved through the often thorny thicket in such a way that he did not receive so much as a scratch, and in his folk-dancer-like agility he would not even have been prey for one of the descendants of the pumas once released into the Scottish hills and surviving in these almost inaccessible gullies. The singer made his way along his path with the help of only his two legs, for he needed both hands to strike the Jew’s harp, the only instrument besides a harmonica that he had taken along on this hike.

Down in Inverness he fetched his backpack from the locker and took a room in the hotel that formed a part of the monumental granite railroad complex and had a suitably fine lobby with a grand staircase and chandelier.

No one recognized him, and no one would recognize him. That was his decision.

When after a shower he stepped out onto the square in front of the hotel, it was already long since dark, and it was raining, heavily and at the same time inaudibly. Having ducked into a rear courtyard to listen, the singer said to himself that he had never heard such a quiet rain as this Scottish one. All the louder the cackling of the sparrows, which were fighting head to head for a sleeping perch up on the ledge of the main church, or were chattering with each other before going to sleep. Like the plane tree here by the suburban railroad station, in Inverness the ledge was far and wide their only place for the night. There as here the sidewalk underneath was encrusted with their thick white droppings.

In a pub he leaned against the bar like the others and drank a beer, glancing occasionally at the bull’s-eye when a dart landed in it. As everywhere, the singer could not be distinguished from the local people, except that he might be from farther out in the country. When he heard “Mr. Tambourine Man” coming from the jukebox at waist height, he thought that the songs of thirty years ago had painstakingly worked things out, while in the meantime they all sounded so glib, his as well? The beat he tapped on his thigh with his fingers did not fit the song.

He consumed his evening meal deliberately, with a bottle of wine over which he sat for hours, almost alone in the dining room at the window of the best restaurant in Inverness, as the new justice of the peace? architect? soccer coach? directly before his eyes the river Ness, which seemed disproportionately wide for this rather small town. Besides, the river was rising and seemed to be galloping toward its nearby mouth at the North Sea. The water was of a blackness that did not come merely from the darkness outside, and also merely as the color of moor water would not have had such density and brilliance. The rushing from the January rains had to contribute to the effect. To accompany the mighty current, which he felt at the same time in his arms, the singer beat out the steady refrain “Winter — water, winter — water, winter — water.” Then he reminded himself that he was on an island, though not a very small one, and that for him, a person from the continent (with an English mother), an “island river” was a child-wondrous concept, especially one that raged this way.

The waiters, of whom there were several, had meanwhile not budged from his side. Instead of with a credit card he paid in cash, a thick packet of which, damp at the edges, he had loose in his pocket; the clip that went with it was dangling from his ear. He did not want anyone to be able to trace his whereabouts.

On the wooden bridge outside, of a length suitable for a metropolis, staring at the peat-black turbulent water, the singer recalled how once before, after a sort of concert on a cruise ship with a group of rich Americans in a Turkish bay, fairly far out, he had jumped overboard at night in his clothing and shoes and had swum toward land through all the lively motorboat traffic, looking neither to right nor to left, coming up for air with eyes closed, over and over again, in defiance of death.

On the opposite bank of the Ness the suburbs began immediately. In one spot the sky had cleared, with a star so bright it had a ring around it like the moon: Sirius. Below, in one of the huddled suburban houses, a window was open to the mild air. An old woman in a housecoat was leaning out as if for a long time, and out of the silence she and the singer greeted one another.

Up the hill, along the Caledonian Canal that ran along halfway up, he stepped into a suburban pub, still open, though probably not for long; inside it looked like someone’s living room, with a fire burning in the fireplace, on whose mantelpiece stood a collection of books with the Pickwick Papers, one of the books he had in his tower house, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and The Bobbsey Twins in Echo Valley. He sat down with a glass of whiskey in a wing chair and gazed at the only other guests, a very young couple who kept sticking their tongues down each other’s throats, undeterred by the coughing and choking this caused. Having finished with that, they promptly moved apart, as if their game were over. The girl leaned back in the shadows, and the boy turned to the singer and asked him, out of the blue, in a perfectly calm, also polite voice, whether he was one of the lumberjacks. In response to his nod, the young man told him that he was a Gypsy, had come here as a child from Poland, and was in the process of training as a forester near Inverness. But in Scotland there were hardly any forests left, whereas after the Ice Age the entire land had been covered by the great Caledonian Forest, first bright with birches, then darkened by the Scottish firs, then mixed with oaks. Probably he would be the first Gypsy forester.

Up by the canal, the door to an automobile repair shop was still open, and the singer, who liked to look into such places, saw in the brightly lit bays a few young fellows at work, with a song coming from the radio of a car being repaired, accompanied by the clang of tools. He listened attentively, clenching his fists in agitation, and only when he was back in the darkness again did he realize that the song was his.