Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

Yet as always in the presence of such a presumed treasure, out of enthusiasm or feverish excitement she could not refrain from promptly removing it from the spot, getting her claws into it. “Here it is,” she thought each time, “I’ve found you at last,” and hurled herself upon it as if upon her destiny, finally discovered, which would bring the solution to the riddle of her life that she had long since ceased to expect from any man or system, and why not in the form of this unique wooden cudgel on the alluvial cone at the base of the coastal mountains, let’s say near Bodrum, alias Halicarnassus, although almost only the husk was still wood, while the inside, the core, was packed lengthwise with shells or fish bones? shaped like drinking straws and open at both ends, so that she could imagine looking through the wooden pipe as through a particular prism that broke the light as nothing else would and had been lying in that very spot just for her. “And now tell me, precious thing: Who am I? What should I do? Where is my place? How will I come into possession of my power? What is going to happen to me next? Light my way.”

That piece of wood had long since been rolled back to the rubble cone, just as later the salt-white erotic three-legged stool, break-in booty from a saltworks distillery, was returned the same evening. But this morning, after a night in her sleeping bag up on the boat deck, at the first call of the muezzin (or his voice on tape), still in darkness, beneath the stars, from the distant land, along with the first cock’s crow, which reached her at the end of the bay, over the sea, she again awoke with the sentence on her lips, “This is the day for the treasure; I will have hunted it down before sunset, and the world will share my amazement.”

Who was she? And how did it happen that each time she set out searching anew it was in the Middle East of all places, in Turkey, whose inhabitants still lurked in the minds of her southern Slav contemporaries as arsonists, throat cutters, and stomach slitters, even though their domination of her part of the world had ended long ago?

I read once in an article entitled “Speech and Silence of Women in Medieval Epics” that women at that time avoided any speech that threatened or exerted pressure: orders, directness, and questions that expected an answer. And in an article on “Interrogative Intonation in Various Languages” I once read that German questions were marked by an interrogative intonation, whereas questions in the Eskimo languages managed without; where do you fit in, my dear friend, in this respect?

I do think I know a few things about her. To begin with: of all of us, she is the only one without cares, sometimes to the point of being infuriating. For her, only the present seems to exist, whatever is more or less peaceably there. Anything that is not there, if it does not attract her, she considers a nonthing or nonperson. And even if her conversational partner knew otherwise: from her face he could never imagine her living with a man, let alone having children, being a mother. Even when no longer all that young, she still seemed, to use an image from an earlier century, virginal, at least at first glance, transient, and likewise for the person who saw her again after a long time, always swept away into the prevailing daylight, surrendering to it as the most crucial factor, something also visible in the angle of her head and her posture: for this she could forget even her searching, with the greatest of ease, without transition.

And she knew no fear. Whenever she heard about a fearful person, her eyes would stare in incomprehension like a cow’s, and her face would become beautifully clueless. Equally foreign to her was any compassion, and far from despising a compassionate person, she would be angry at him: if anything could be done to help, she did it at once; if not, she ignored the other’s misfortune.

And she was the one who did not have a name for anyone or anything, or if she did, not the original one. Her using a name was such a rarity that the listener would experience either disenchantment (probably initially hers) or a solemnity unusual for her. But as a rule, for her nothing in the world had a particular or unique name. “Dalmatia,” where she had been living for a long time, was not allowed to be called that, but “the coastland” or the “steep coastline” (even “karst” was too specific for her), and equally impossible were “thistle,” “hemlock,” “Tito,” “Ephesus”; only words such as flower, bush, marshal, city, perhaps “philosophers’ city” could cross her lips. She usually did know the various particular names, but it was as if she were saving these for a special occasion. Or at first she did not even want to know the names, especially place names; her letters carried place names only in their cancellation stamps, and at most she might ask the recipient long afterward what the “village on the lagoon with the miniature turtles” had been called, where she had spent a week in the “half-moon country.”

The most noticeable feature of her speech, however, was that she did use names, but ones she had invented, in the form of circumlocutions or images. Just as her “container,” “river beyond the mountain,” or “conifer that loses its needles in the fall” resembled the clues in a crossword puzzle, I found myself time and again trying to guess what she meant by her “fruit that makes you sleep well afterward,” her “day on which the trees with the white bark stand next to the front door,” her “star with a belt and the male sex organ beneath it.” Maribor, where she had been born, was always referred to by her as “the town with the red tiled roofs” (although that might have long since ceased to be true), and the Drawa, which became wide there, as “the river with the smoking ice floes,” simply because once as a child on a particular winter day she had observed this from the great bridge, when it was so cold that everything seemed rigid but the huge, wild ice floes galloping along with much crashing and banging and smokelike frost clouds that rose from them, from which all the pedestrians on the bridge fled, except her, of course.

Those tiled roofs, stacked in layers all the way to a distant horizon, had been, seen long ago from the window of her room during her childhood and youth, the entire city of Maribor, with the addition of the long mountain ridge in the south, which only in a moment of impassioned homesickness was given its name by her, “Pohorje!” And from tile to tile the red had often changed its shade, so that in her eyes an eternal writing, which did not begin or end anywhere in particular, spread over the roofscape, formed by the darker patches, in curlicues, waves, loops, crosses, indecipherable, which she nonetheless never tired of reading; the longer she let her gaze travel back and forth over it, the purer she felt; and when later, in another Slovenian city, was it Ptuj? with a similar roof map of the world before her eyes, in the midst of it, on the largest of the roofs, was it the cathedral? real writing, monumental, dark on light red, leapt out at her, “IHS,” she saw such obviousness as positively barbarous.

And the ridgepole tiles on those roofs had also been something special, she said, one long hood after the other, and thus in many rows, often a little irregular, as if slightly bent, marching in procession toward the four points of the compass, which for her at that time had all been called “Land of the Rising Sun,” “Orient,” “Levant”—not names but images to evoke. And if names, then only those derived from the sun, or from its reflection, the colors (when a cow was called “Brownie”), or from the forms of the earth (“the High Road,” “the Deep Ditch,” and all the capes of “Finisterre”).