Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

Keeping himself in the background this way was something at which the reader had less and less success during his travels. Otherwise, wherever he was, he managed with his way of reading to achieve more than merely being overlooked: he created a zone around himself, just wide enough for turning a page, where even guests at a stag party would give him a wide berth. He became taboo, even directed the happenings around him.

But this time, as the days passed, he became downright suspect, except in the vicinity of my father. For he merely pretended to be reading, or he did read, and could have, if asked, recited every detail of the exemplary tale in question, but he remained uninvolved, receptive at most to the elegant structure of the Spanish sentences, and this was not his way of reading. It was like the repeated attempts he had made since childhood to read Don Quixote. He could neither take seriously nor find comical these self-anointed heroes and their flailing around. And yet he kept trying. At some point he had to enter into the world of Miguel de Cervantes. He believed, if not in the author, then at least in his, the reader’s, predecessors, through the centuries. This time he would find his way into the book. The wintry light on Jade Bay, clear, dark, as if from below, would help him.

One time, to make himself receptive for reading, he even swam in the cold February sea, and then thought, with one stroke: “Now!” No. The book remained mute. And afterward, as he ran over a bridge that crossed the locks, he, this corner-of-the-eye person — he picked up things more quickly this way than by looking at them head-on — who had been a goalie in his youth, caught sight of a car following him at a snail’s pace, and the merest thing would have had to snap inside him for him to toss the book into the canal and go after that metal hulk with an iron rod. The car was a police car and in it the young policeman with the gentle voice, who asked if he was still working his way through Novellas ejemplares, whereupon my friend discovered that the person in uniform was a lovely woman.

The reader tried to make headway with the book on Helgoland, and back on the mainland in Delmenhorst, Buxtehude, Hameln, Run-storf am Aalmeer, during Carnival, on Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday, on Ascension Day: Cervantes’s sentences galloped, bounced, and danced, but they did not carry him along with them. Meanwhile he carried on his business, inconspicuous to an observer, yet when the moment came, completely focused, a dedicated businessman.

In a church in Hildesheim, looking at the roundheaded figures from the centuries of a very different Germany, and even looking at the Gothic ones, he wondered how Goethe could have been so disdainful toward such luminous figures and found them distorted and barbarous, he, for whom the human skull matched the vault of the heavens.

But without his reading my friend saw his Germany as more desolate than ever, and himself along with it. Without his reading his Germans appeared to him as usurpers in their own country, either hacking the air space apart with their excessively loud voices or whispering as mythological ear lindworms. When he still read, then under duress: “Liposuction,” “Utilization Factor.” And once, in another German pedestrian zone, he read a sign that beggar children held up to his chest, read it from top to bottom, only to find that they had stolen everything off him but his paperback book.

But he had time, after all. And thus on a day in late spring when he was watching a national soccer match in Frankfurt’s Waldstadion, he saw at halftime, out of the corner of his eye, a person next to him who picked up a book. It was a young woman, in profile. And she held the book away from her, at first still closed, which somewhat resembled the initial position in a wrestling match, also because her shoulders were leaning back and her eyes lowered. The woman’s entire body was involved, and remained so when she began to read. It became just a bit quieter, at the same time more mobile, with the addition of silent exclamations or breaths, as if she were cheering the book on.

“All right, and now I shall read, too,” said my friend next to her, and spelled out in one fell swoop — that was no contradiction — a page on which a Cervantes hero is finally taken seriously by another character in the story, whereupon the reader likewise could finally take him seriously, and read, and spelled out, spelled out and read, on and on. Then he looked up. He had read enough for today and was looking forward to tomorrow, with the book. And he looked at his neighbor, who now, at the end of halftime, closed her own book. Yes, wasn’t it the pretty policewoman from Wilhelmshaven on Jade Bay? She had been following him all this time!

And she turned to him, and the two readers edged closer to each other, and then watched the ball together, which, when it went in the wrong direction, forced them to pay attention, and when it went in the right direction, on the other hand, lifted their spirits. And that was where? Where am I? And the reader could think there was a Germany still waiting to be kissed awake.

The thought formed such a clear image that he believed in it.

Meanwhile late summer has come, or early fall already, and the painter is lying, his materials next to him, facedown on a bed of flint in the shade of the only bush at a bend in the Río Duero, at his head the steep, high, reddish-yellow sandstone terrace overlooking the river, and up above, already far off, Toro, with its façades of the same color, in the province of Zamora on the meseta of western Castile, about seven hundred fifty meters above the level of the Mediterranean at Alicante, while the painter is lying about one hundred meters lower.

The large birds surrounding the painter now in midafternoon are not ravens; they also have beaks too straight and too long for vultures; are they pelicans? — one of them is holding a fish crosswise — flamingos? no, they are storks, which, with their heads bent over their backs, burst out in squawks, one after the other, so that in the deserted and quiet river landscape it echoes like the so-called Ratschen back home on the Jaunfeld, the rattles that replace the church bells during Holy Week until the celebration of the Resurrection.

At some distance from the painter, down there by the bend in the river, on the almost white, almost glassy expanse of flintstone (I have a few lumps of it here on my desk and can smell the sparks in them), are lying fat dead fish, carp and pike, both gleaming gold from the solid coats of flies covering them; the gills of one of the fish are still pulsing, but they, too, are already swarming with flies.

Every morning, upon making his way down from Toro, the painter wanted to ask the fishermen why they simply left some of their catch lying on the bank, and precisely the finest specimens; to this day he does not know. Although he is a Spaniard — he never calls himself Catalan — there are many customs in his own country that even now, when his hair has turned gray, remain a mystery to him, one he is reluctant to solve.

Meanwhile the fishermen are having their meal at the barrackslike bar under the poplar trees on the other side of the Roman bridge, whose low, squat, round arches let through the Río Duero, here white with cataracts, with a roar that scales the steep banks and penetrates far into the streets of the town, but at the bend where the painter is lying is audible only as some soft, windlike sound belonging to the expansive, bald Spanish or Indian summer silence.

It is already approaching evening, and at the foot of the earthen terrace, hardly visible for a moment between two of its foothills, as in the gap in a canyon, the storm-dark Talgo flashes by, the daily express from Madrid to Vigo and La Coruña, which does not stop in Toro, glimpsed just long enough for the silhouette of a passenger to appear behind the tinted window of the bar car; and then, at the next curve in the tracks, which follow the river, between the cliffs, again that Mississippi-wide tooting in the echo of the roar and whistle of this railway thing, as graceful as it is heavy, from which the entire fisherman’s pub on the other side jingles and jangles; this now you see me! now you don’t! is something the painter has not allowed himself to miss once in all his weeks here; and the way it slices through the alluvial plane appeared to him daily as a plowing up of the entire earth and at the same time catapulted him into a previously unknown loneliness. Up! Back to work!