Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

So was there a house on the plateau at the peak that had mail delivered? Perhaps in a eucalyptus grove? He quickly wrote another card, with the snow crackling on it, to the Queen of England or someone, finishing just as the mail vehicle came rattling up. It stopped, with a robust gray-haired Scottish woman at the wheel who reminded him of his mother. And he placed the card in her outstretched hand, and she shoved it in among the other pieces of mail, held together with a rubber band.

It seemed to the singer as if something in him were beginning to heal, something which, although he had sung about it again and again, he had not even wanted to have healed.

Where had that been?

He was sitting with his girlfriend by a swampy pond in the forest near a city. Dusk was far advanced, and the two of them had not said a word for a long time. Instead, from the small round body of water, light rose, the only bright thing all around, a reflection of the last bit of daytime sky, or of the night sky as above large cities?

His entire life up to then had been marked by a sense of futility. This did not leave him even during this one hour, yet was accompanied by a tranquillity or feeling of safety that was new to him. The girl beside him felt that, and bowed before this realm. The back of a fish arced soundlessly from the surface and dove under again, a dolphin. The muskrat, about to scurry from one hole in the bank to the next, stopped in midcourse and sniffed the air, standing on its hind legs, its tail broadened into the shape of a beaver’s. After all, nothing was happening, with the forest darkness all around, but the light at their feet, the water and the light.

His entire childhood and youth he had spent in Germany, in the Reich, then in the state in the east, then in the republic in the west, in the country and in cities, from the Mittelgebirge down into the ancient river valleys and up into the Alps. But here by the swampy pond was the first time that he had seen a world open up in his country, if not for him then for someone else, for instance his descendants.

Where had that been? And what was her name again, the young woman from that time? And if he had children perhaps, why were they even more hopeless than he had ever been?

And where had that been again? After wandering around all day — while always, in accordance with the traditional German parental admonition, “staying on the path like a good boy!” through high-rise, villa, and allotment-garden suburbs, all equally inhospitable and unreal, as were the forests, the village squares, and even the vineyards or the slopes with apple orchards, he had, again toward evening, found himself in a town whose center was built in a hollow, and suddenly in the stillness — of midsummer or deep winter? — had seen himself generously and cordially received by the solid mass of half-timbering erected there, whose network of beams had struck him until then as the epitome of confinement or narrowness.

The town seemed no less deserted than the villages he had gone through to reach it, and yet from its crooked streets, as he descended into them step after step, something like a cheerful expectancy emerged and leaped the gap to him. And that was no momentary deception. The alley dog, the kind that usually made his neck stiffen with fear, licked his hand as if it were seeing him again for the first time in seven times seven years, and then ran on ahead to show him the way. And there it was: the welcoming garland, especially for him, in the form of plastic flowers in a tin can above the door to the house; the summer or winter garden that had a view of a volcanic cone with a petrified prehistoric horse in its basalt wall, and Condviramur and Percival, in the form of a North Hessian or Westphalian innkeeper and his wife, as his hosts.

Were the German fairy tales in force once more, in defiance of history? Was it in his, the reader’s power, not exclusively his, but his as well, to awaken to life a place thought to be dead? And why had he been successful in doing so in his Germany only that one time, which now had again been “over” for far more than seven years? Was it his own fault that it had never been repeated and renewed? What was the name of that town again?

And where had that been? During a long winter he had gone to his workshop every morning to print a book that was causing him particular trouble and pleasure, and back home in the evening, through a city of millions, though always taking only side streets.

And each time he went out it had snowed, day after day, through the months. It was a light, dry snow that hardly ever stayed on the ground. At most it slithered over the sidewalks and road surfaces, like sand over the ripples of dunes. The system of side streets leading to the central axis, not always parallel to it, that he used, now seemed profoundly silent, and if yesterday it had belonged to the evil Germany, today it belonged to the world at large.

Snow and epic narration. Yes, what opened up before the reader was no longer just a short tale or a fairy tale, but rather an epic, and it was even set in this typically German area. Was set? No, would be set there in the future.

The German epics familiar to him appeared starkly contrasted to the one the reader saw taking shape at that time through the veil of snow, from the Nibelungs, in whose heroes, according to Goethe, unlike in Homer’s, no reflection of the gods was at work, to … And Wolfram’s Percival, did that take place in Germany? And Keller’s Green Henry? (An episode.) And Stifter’s Indian Summer? And wasn’t the location of Goethe’s Elective Affinities and Wilhelm Meister, the two narratives that most closely approximated the one envisioned by the reader during his walks back and forth in the snowy light, instead of a factual Germany, the province of a solitary powerful mind, a province cleared inventively and energetically for development, dramatization, and intensification, even in a tragic mode, of his ideals?

The epic tale of tomorrow — this is how the reader saw it before him in the slowly falling snow — would, as in the work of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, as far as a certain Germany was concerned, definitely behave as though this Germany did not exist; on the other hand, it would not locate the events in an ideal country, dreamed up in isolation, but rather in that worldwide Germany, employing a host of German things and place names, the few that had remained untainted as well as those fraught with guilt, particularly these!

At that time snow fell for months around a pub on Schellingstrasse where Hitler had often sat and where at the moment the hand of a young waiter from Bari could be seen, through the almost opaque windows, dicing truffles; it fell on Amalienstrasse around a woman who snapped at her child: “You stay here!”; it fell in the Adalbert Cemetery around the statue of the dancer Lucille Grahn, in an appropriate pose, now mimicked by a young girl passing that way; fell far out by the moss of Dachau around the bench on which the reader in earlier times, as an adolescent, after wandering through the concentration camp, had sat engrossed in Grass’s Cat and Mouse until just before the last train left; fell around a loden coat, the Milan cathedral, the Kalahari Desert, meat hooks, the Three Kings from the Orient, idle snow shovels, newspaper vending machines, on sidewalks as everywhere in Munich, with the same headlines from morning to evening, which in those winter months, in view of the epic narrative, meant precious little to the reader, otherwise so easily distracted by anything in written form.

And where was the epic of Germany now? The books that had talked about the country had again in the meantime, as always before, disheartened him — and precisely, as exciting as some of them were, because of the German names in them. Because of them he could not believe in even the most extravagant flights of fancy. It seemed to him as if there were an epic curse on “Berlin” and “Flensburg,” on the “Weser” and the “Zugspitze,” on the “Black Forest” and “Helgoland,” even independently of his century’s history. And there was no question of his writing himself. He was the reader.