Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

So his winter day’s dream of a great story that would bind together and at the same time thoroughly air out his fellow countrymen, and not only them, had blown away with that snow? No, he was convinced that any day now a new Wolfram von Eschenbach would — not appear, no, simply be there, drifting in from a side street, with a wealth of purely epic place names, of which the first might be, for example, Respond/ Upper Bavaria.

Although my “Writer’s Tour” is studded with South German to West German place names, the reader felt less constricted by them than usual, because for one thing the story is short, and it also looks more like a notebook. He understood, too, that I could not be the one to write the book he was longing for, that demon-exorcising book about the other Germany. First of all, I would have had to spend my childhood there and remain in residence here and there a long time, instead of merely making the tour; I would have had to sit and wait for such an epic, like a piece of property. “And then you’re only half German and decided against your half-Germanness. You renounced your father, very early on, in the first disappointment after your search for paternal salvation, and later, on your tour, you also renounced your fatherland, and have not set foot in it since, have even avoided the river that forms the border, which, with its broad, bright, gravel-covered banks is like something from antiquity, where both of us used to swim, with unalloyed pleasure, avoided it out of fear of crossing the line down the middle and thus ending up in German irreality. At the same time you swore fealty to the German language, and many reproached you for that as a contradiction. What you write in any language other than your German does not have the value in your eyes of something written. What you think in French over there in your foreign land carries no weight for you. To be sure, even if you undertook to return to your fatherland, I do not believe that someone like you would succeed in writing the book of conversion that I envision for my Germany. Not even Friedrich Holderlin, with all the power generated in him by initial concurrence, then near-despair, then sober illumination, managed to get past the Germans in their country and their cities in favor of a larger, more broad-minded, and at the same time solid epic concept. In Hyperion his German contemporaries loom large as the sheer counterimage to his heroes, the Greeks, who immerse themselves in the common struggle for restoration of the realm where the decisive factor is the idea of the sun, embodied in books, trees, a table, a plate. What seemed impossible for him to narrate in prose he invoked in his poems. He challenged German youth to take up the legacy of long-lost Hellas and establish an equally brilliant empire, specifically by force of arms, which his poems now called holy, as previously air, water, the vine. According to Holderlin, after the Greeks it is now the turn of the youth of Germany to take their place in history. They, and they alone, epitomize the world spirit, and they will celebrate their sacred slaughter, on the banks of Father Rhine or on the Elysian Fields, as the legitimate successors to the Hellenes. No, these poems were bad enough, even without being misused in the following century. And anyway: my wish for Germany, which actually seems possible, since I can wish it, is not a poem but precisely that long, long narrative. When it comes to narrative, the rule is: no misuse. An epic cannot be misused. No, it can be used again and again, and the user is amazed each time at what he missed the previous times, and pities the animal at his feet, whether cat or hedgehog, because it cannot read! O narrative, exhaustive, of German lands, different from anything found in newspapers and previous books, where are you? And in my imagination it is not a young man who will presently approach bearing it in his hands, but a saucy, wonderfully beautiful young woman, not blind in the least.”

The reader kept sending me such letters from his travels through Germany, once following the route of the tour described in my occasional story, then again in any direction that suited him; in these letters, in typical fashion, he could not refrain from taking the stance of a prophet, toward me as well as toward the world.

The one just quoted he wrote at the beginning of his travels, still in midwinter of the current year, as he rode in an almost empty passenger train from Oldenburg to Wilhelmshaven, where at twenty I had first looked up my father. And although it is true that even when I think of Germany here, from afar, my imagination fails me and the images refuse to coalesce: when I felt my friend setting out with such anticipation, I was happy to travel at his side, thinking of him instead of the country, suspended in a more innocent, purely momentary present.

I see him in his train, which stands out sharply illuminated against the dusky North German flatlands, high up in the all-glass cabin of a suspension railway, or of a carousel as big as Germany. And besides that I see the dark silhouette of a horse in a pasture, its motionless head bent to the ground, as if rooted to the spot.

In Wilhelmshaven on Jade Bay the tracks ended, and when a train pulled out, the loudspeaker would announce, “Attention, the train is backing out!”

The reader went to the hotel right next to the station, which catered to salesmen and itinerant workers. While in the stairwell and hallways only the night lights were on, it was all the brighter in the taproom, and in a silence like that of a waiting room, for instance at a ferry slip, along with a couple of sailors a policeman was sitting, very young, with a voice so gentle that the reader, at the next table, fell to wondering who the patron saint of policemen was, like St. Joseph for carpenters and St. Christopher for teamsters. Yet the other man had merely looked over and asked what he was reading. He held up the book: the Novelas ejem-plares. And as always happened to him with Cervantes, he was not really succeeding in getting into the stories, and not merely because he was reading them in Spanish, one word at a time, and also not because he felt the policeman watching him.

After an hour of catching his breath by the pitch-black bay, while runners still panted past him constantly, and eating his evening meal at a Turkish restaurant in the pedestrian zone, which seemed to be all there was to Wilhelmshaven, he sat on a bench at the railway station, and later, until long after the last train’s departure, on a baggage cart by the bumpers where the tracks ended. The row of shrubs over there was the only thing still stirring around midnight. The rounded, slightly convex bumper beams gave off a calm reflection. A railroad car, which had been standing on a siding for a long time, wheezed. The waxing moon was now bright enough so that the objects on the platform acquired an additional shadow. It was not cold, and the reader had taken off both his shoes, whose oval, blackish openings down by his feet, as he gazed at them, more and more took on the form of mouths opened in a death cry, and then were nothing but his shoes again, at the end of a long day.

The following morning the reader set out for that pond in the Wilhelmshaven hinterland where, according to my story, I had planned, at my first reunion with my father, to let him drown.

The water was still there, out among pastures with mossy hillocks, on the edge of a birch forest. But it could not be seen until he was standing directly beside it, because it lay so deep in a hollow below ground level, such as one otherwise finds only with groundwater lakes in old gravel pits. It also appeared as large as a lake, and beyond a bend it seemed to extend much farther, with an arm in horseshoe shape, like the cutoff meander of a river, peat black, impossible to see into from above.