Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

Who in the world needed another song, his song, a new song?

The singer fell into a sort of brooding, trying to picture to himself those who stood between him and his audience — the record company executives, the booking agents, the copyright holders. No, he could not picture them, they offered no image — so repulsive were they to him. He was not a businessperson, would never be one, and thus everything he had done since youth and had intended for his own people belonged to these others, who were not his people. They held the rights, and he was the supplier. Accordingly they were convinced, nowadays more and more, that they were the ones creating the event and its heroes. What had one of them said, the one to whom he had “supplied” his biggest song, around which he had been circling for months in a chaos of words and notes and which he had written down in a moment without sound, between fear of death and joy? “Let’s see what I can make of this!” Jettison the middlemen, the singer brooded. But how? It’s the system, and any other, no matter how different, is still the same. Act as if nothing were wrong. Those people between my creations and the world don’t exist. They aren’t there. With a snap of the fingers I make them disappear. I decide: everything I have done up to now and will do from now on belongs to me and no one else.

And he could say what a song was: “In it the most distant streets flow into each other.” With this line he leapt to his feet and shouted or murmured names into the dark surf, as at the end of a concert he announced the names of his backup singers or band: “Orpheus in the Upperworld! The fish, rain worms, and snakes lamenting the Buddha’s death. Moses piecing together the Tablets of the Law. John Lennon, Liverpool. Van Morrison, Dublin. Blind Lemon Jefferson. John Fogarty. Lao-tzu. Blaise Pascal. Baruch Spinoza, who sang that human wisdom consists not in thinking about death but in living! Marsyas pulling off Apollo’s skin!”

On the way back, again beneath the village streetlights, a storm gust was so powerful that in a series of puddles the rainwater jumped from one to the other, and so on in this way as far as the horizon. And now he had the desired wind in his face, in which it looked more than usual as though balls were rolling in his armpits as he walked.

From the dark building at a distance from the others, tall and narrow, an old folks’ home, came angry groans. At the same time the Pleiades sparkled above, initially all seven stars crowded together in a little heap, from which then each emerged separately, glance after glance. And here in Dornoch he also listened for the birds’ sleeping place: too late; the sparrows, wherever they might be, were silent.

When he had walked around the night-dark church, which stood in the middle of a grassy area, inside the church the stone sarcophagus of the crusader, who lay with legs crossed and his dog beside him, the street was suddenly thronged with local residents, leaving a choir rehearsal. No matter which way one of them went, the same snatches of song could be heard from all directions, and if one of them launched into a new song, another singer over there, already out of sight, would promptly join in, and he wondered why he had never had a singer as a friend, except someone he did not really know, from afar, and why, when he was put in a chorus, he always sang out of tune. But whenever stars were gathered to sing together for some cause, didn’t they necessarily produce cacophony, starting off wrong, one too soon, one too late, each with a different version of the lyrics?

Following those choir members who formed the only small group, he found his way to the village pub, where everyone shook hands with him as if he were an old acquaintance. A drunk, already more falling down than just swaying, was playing pool, and made each shot with hairline precision. Above the wooden floorboards, which had been cleared, with tables and benches pushed to the sides, a tape was fiddling a square dance, to which no one was dancing, and the singer, for whom his ancestors had been looking for the longest time—“Where in the world can he be now?”—saw himself finally discovered: “Ah, so there he is!”

Outside, a few bars on the Jew’s harp brought air into his lungs. The song felt so close, and then again so unattainable, that it frightened him. He had been away from population centers and the news only a couple of days, and already they did not exist anymore, or at most in casual thoughts, detached, never serious.

In his northern Scottish lodgings all was sleep-still, only a couple of lamps to light his way. For what had looked at first like a cottage, the corridor was unusually long, as the room was spacious, the ceiling high.

It was deepest night when the singer, whom even a lightning strike would not have awakened, was shaken out of his sleep by a child crying. It did not stop, and he got up, put on his ankle-length raincoat, and made his way through the house until he came upon the crying child, alternating between the highest and the lowest notes, in a crib on casters, which, being pushed back and forth by the young woman, added its own screeching and creaking.

The singer asked the mother whether she would mind if he tried to quiet the child, too, and she gave him permission. With his hands on the headboard, he did nothing but, without moving it, give the bed tiny shoves, invisible to a third party, at first unevenly but with all his strength; all one could hear was a series of sounds consisting merely of rustling and scraping, which, now longer, now shorter, insinuated itself into the bawling and, when that first paused, could become regular, rhythmic, and articulate, like a piece of music. To make the child keep on listening and at the same time calm down, this sound had to hit the right moment with each note, and the whole time he had before his eyes the billy goat in a burning barn who had not followed him out into the open until he had seized his horns in his hands and neither pulled nor pushed but done almost nothing, yet with the utmost patience and attentiveness!

When the infant had finally sighed himself back to sleep, the mother was long since asleep, and the singer, too, soothed by his own lullaby, sank, the minute he was back in his guest bed and had closed his eyes, into the sleep of a newborn. He lay there with his face close to the window, again amazingly wide for a cottage in the dunes, through which the winter constellations shone all together into his dreams, and thus themselves were already the dream. Orion, the Hare, Castor and Pollux, broad-thighed Cassiopeia, the veil of Berenice, and then as yet undiscovered ones called Weymoor, the Headless Woman, Iron Gate, La Grande Arche, and finally the morning star alone moved through his innermost being with the slowness of the universe and penetrated it. Such a caress the singer had never experienced before.

This was accompanied now by the very high notes of a saxophone, which, when he had opened his eyes, went on playing in another room. The wind had fallen. The sky above was bright, the gulls below still raven-dark, and they really were ravens now.

The woman playing the saxophone sat, the child at her side listening without stirring, in the dune-sand-yellow kitchen at the laid table, in an even longer dress than the previous evening and rubber boots with high heels. He silently joined her, drank a cup of coffee such as he had tasted neither in Italy nor in Hawaii, until she put down her somewhat battered instrument and without much ado, as though she were simply switching from one language to another, told him that in her childhood she had once spent a summer at the ferry station for the Hebrides, Kyle of Lochalsh, about a hundred miles to the west, on the other side of the watershed, on the Atlantic. She came from Dornoch, here on the North Sea, and had made her way halfway around the world, but only at the ferry in Kyle of Lochalsh had people been good to her. “Dover, Vancouver, San Francisco, Valparaíso are nothing compared to Kyle. When I’m an old woman I’d like to lick the salt from the windshield of the ferry in Kyle.”