Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

Through his sleep whistled the trains down below in the station, and he dreamed the usual dream about his children, scattered across the countries and the continents, who, entrusted to him, had under his very eyes torn themselves away from him and disappeared for good. This time, after a few swimming strokes, they sank in clear water, knee-deep, and remained impossible to find there.

The next morning there was a rainstorm, and although it was part of the singer’s routine to expose himself to something unpleasant, to withstand something each day, he did not set out on foot as planned toward the snow-covered mountains in the north, but took a bus of the Highland Terrier Line, with Dornoch as his destination. In such a storm, unlike in high wind, there were no sounds to be heard while walking. And besides, it was coming from the west and not from the north, where he would have had it blowing beautifully in his face. From Dornoch he would tramp westward.

If he had to ride cross-country, then it should be by bus, and not because he was accustomed to that from his tours. In Plato’s Critias there is mention of the melancholy, who should be sent on a journey by ship to lift their spirits, if possible when the sea is turbulent, so that the atoms in their bodies will be shaken up and can find a healthier arrangement. This effect, and an even better one, could be achieved by a long bus trip, preferably on winding mountainous roads.

An additional factor for the singer was that on the road this way, always in a window seat, either way in front or way in back, drawing the curtain, even in his own tour bus, only to sleep, he could sink into himself, down to a point of complete tranquillity, and at the same time see himself as connected with the surroundings outside, of which he, without even having to turn his head once, could also keep a large portion in sight through the front or rear windshield.

Here, too, he could not tolerate any music, let alone a television above the driver’s head, as had become common elsewhere on cross-country trips. In that sense Scotland was probably too backward, for on this trip from the beginning there was only the landscape outside, seen through untinted glass, and the humming of the engine. The stormy wind, gusting and subsiding, seemed subdued in the rocking interior space. There was plenty of room.

The singer sat, together with one or two other passengers, on the east side, where the windows received the least rain, and from looking out he soon felt warm, although down below rain was blowing in through a crack, and instead of dribbling and trickling, swelled up with foam, blackish, as from a moor. And right past Inverness, on the suspension bridge over the firth, at the sight of the strangely curving, rounded waves down below, on closer inspection seals, he felt as if he had been cast among the animals, and spouted water, tumbled, let himself drift as one of them.

He was alert and feeling irrepressible. An element of pain, an openness, had to be added, and the song would come, he thought.

And then he thought nothing more during the entire trip. Although, besides him, no one on the Highland Terrier was looking at anything in particular, it was as if he were looking in consort with someone else, or as if he were following someone else’s eyes. The region, rolling off into the distance, was so bare that Mongolia came to mind, a place to which his travels had never taken him. The hero of The 39 Steps was fleeing through rain-drizzled rounded mountains, chained by handcuffs to an unknown woman, who was stumbling along behind him. A pheasant fluttered into the air and with its heavy body promptly thudded to the ground in the storm, as if shot down. In moments of clearing you could see, farther off in the North Sea, dusky oil-drilling platforms, like temples. And a year ago on the square in front of the bus station in Cairo there had been a sleeping place for the sparrows just as the night before in Inverness, in a single scraggly, mangy cypress there, and each time, approaching his Nile Hotel by a roundabout route, he had gone toward that shrill racket the birds made as they battled for a spot, audible above the roar of the entire city, so that at least he had something to orient himself by amid the African, or Arab, or whatever chaos. And the one old woman on the bus made him think of his mother, as did so many old crones in the country, although his mother was neither from the country nor a crone, and had not even been present at his first major performance. Whereas his father, who to this day, when his radio in the retirement home went even a week without playing something by his son, would comment that it had been a long time since they had heard anything by him, his mother had been concerned even back then, with his sporadic singing engagements at suburban summer festivals and graduations from Ville d’Avray to Courbevoie, that he was constantly being heard from.

At the sight of the stepped terraces in the craggy landscape, he felt in his own body the jerks with which aeons ago the glacier had withdrawn from there until it was gone from that area — that was how low the Scottish mountains were. All that had taken place unobserved. But someone must have observed it, with eyes that could still be felt? With what eyes? “I’m searching for the face you had before the world was made,” was a line in one of his songs.

Perhaps the singer was also lost in thought during the trip, brooding, bad-tempered, more than anyone else. But that was nothing compared to the moment when he was in song, as another might be in the picture. This being in song was very rare, rarer than a poem. Being in song was the original condition for him.

In the storm a sheep dashing across a pasture now, its damp fleece flying behind it like a coat.

In Dornoch, where the singer was the only passenger to get off, it was almost dark again. The gulls, for whom it was a struggle to fly forward, toward land, appeared black against the sky. The rain had stopped, but the storm from the west would blow all night. The cloud in the band of light left by the setting sun had the shape of a deeply frayed, broad-branched cedar, which, uprooted, came gusting through the air and then disappeared as if in a puff of smoke.

He gave up the idea of continuing his hike today, indeed forgot any plan for the time being. Here in Dornoch the singer felt as though he was already on his way. Was this a seaside resort? a town? a farm village? Except for him there was no one out on the street. Yet in the squat houses and the yards with storm walls he heard heavy steps, echoing, as if on the planks of a boat.

He stood still and watched for the moment when the now-clear firmament would reveal the glitter of the first star. He even knew the approximate spot. And again, as each time previously, in Archaia Nemea in Greece, on Mission Street in San Francisco, he must have blinked at the decisive moment. For there Venus was now, gleaming as always against the horizon, blue-black like a lining.

Below, almost out in the dunes, in the glow of the last streetlight, in front of a flat-fronted wooden house, the figure of a young woman appeared, who, out of breath, as if she had run toward him, invited the singer to spend the night in her house; the hotels in Dornoch were all closed during the winter. He could tell immediately that she did not recognize him, and accepted. He merely said he wanted to stay out until midnight, set down his backpack on her doorstep, and let her give him a key.

Then he made his way, up dune and down, to the North Sea, which came crashing up to the crown of the farthest dune; at first he felt as though he did not belong there, as with every ocean.

He went down into a crouch. Everywhere along the shore little seaweed fires were burning at regular intervals, with not a person in sight, crackling and sparking, intended as light signals out to the high sea. In the glow of such a flame the singer examined a plant sunk into the sand, around which a miniature dune had formed. A single kinked leaf still poked out, lance-shaped, rotated by some storm gusts almost around itself and snapped back into a resting position in between, whereupon the sand around it showed very delicate patterns of the quarter, half, and whole circles it had described, like a wind clock, with the seaweed frond as its hand.