Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

What encouragement it gave her when she learned that somewhere in the world something was publicly and compulsorily known only by its generic name, where, for instance, a forest was known as “the Forest,” a delta “the Delta,” a hilly area as “Collio,” a lake as “Jezero” (that could also be the name of a village on a lake): “I must go there!” Such designations were never deceiving; things with names like that, such as the hillock named “Hillock,” the bay named “Bay,” fulfilled what their names promised, did them proud.

Or didn’t the image of originality and exemplariness that emanated from the brook “Brook,” the place “Kamen” (stone), the desert “Le dé-sert” (even when the place marked thus on the map was only a sandy field in the midst of the bush), come instead from the power inherent in names and markers? How had that ancient debate as to which came first, the things or their names, been resolved? At any rate, as far as she could say herself — and I never heard anything from her mouth but her own thoughts — although the Turkish Mediterranean was not half as wild as other oceans, it, which was called almost exclusively “Deniz,” the Ocean, without all its nicknames, officially as well, billowed up before her every time as only a high sea could, and whenever she reached the top of a range of foothills she took it at first sight for an even higher range of foothills in the distance. Yes, this ocean with the name “Ocean” seemed original to her in the sense that the word is also applied to a human being; he is original — thus an original? — no, the original.

Almost all the given, arbitrary, specialized names sounded to her by contrast like diminutives, unsuitable, almost as idiotic and embarrassing as all dogs that were not simply called “Dog.” If it had been up to her, she would have had her children baptized only with the name “Child,” and she stubbornly referred to them, even in the presence of close friends, in just this way, calling both of them “otrok,” without “my” in front, but also not, as I did with my son, as a way of conjuring them up, but rather as a given: that is what they are called, and that is what they are, and vice versa.

Time and again I heard her reply, when asked her own name, especially by people on the street, where many thought they recognized her, not only in her Yugoslavia, “I have no name!” triumphantly self-assured or furious, and each time believable.

Yet twenty years earlier, just out of school, she had been “Miss Yugoslavia,” and although every year a new one was crowned, for many in her homeland she remained the one and only beauty queen, not forgotten even at the Albanian border, at Lake Ohrid — especially not there. On the magazine covers with naked women that in the meantime have become common, but were not in her day, not a few Balkan adolescents apparently replace the faces with cutout photos of hers, and just recently I heard a boy from the Hungarian minority in Croatia who was going blind say that he had studied every single feature of her face with a magnifying glass, day after day, with the world of light gradually disappearing, so as to have a concept for later of how a woman can look.

On the other hand, it has happened to me not infrequently that in her presence I thought I had never encountered such an unprepossessing, ugly creature. Whereas it was only later that I dismissed various other women, including some described as beautiful, she was “the broad,” “the crone” only at first sight. It was her intention to make such a first impression; she actually enjoyed going unrecognized as much as possible, even now and then by those closest to her, such that they looked away from her as from a man-sized wart. To disfigure herself in this way, all she had to do was change her facial expression a little, not even twist it, and this, practiced before the mirror during her year as beauty queen, she could accomplish at will. And a kerchief over her head, nothing more, provided the appropriate disguise.

Memorable events in her childhood were the Catholic prayer services in the cathedral of Maribor during the month of May, where she floated up to heaven with the hymns and litanies to the Blessed Virgin. An event of another sort was that afternoon under the apple trees in a school that trained nurserymen when two of the young trainees there and she had shown each other their private parts, after which the three of them had tried to kill a stray cat, with almost no fur and looking as if it were about to die, “out of pity,” as the brats said, driving it with stone after stone, stick after stick, to the farthest corner of the orchard, where the animal was still alive and howling, while one of the boys was already in tears and she and the other were becoming more and more silent, “inside as well.”

Then she was the national youth champion in sports, in track, especially hurdles — they had that for women, too, there — in the broad jump, in swimming, in volleyball, and the movements of each continued to vibrate inside her for a long time afterward. It was not only the torn ligaments, the pins in her bones, the stitches that made her give up competitive sports. The only thing she continued to practice was parachute jumping. Yet she did not view that as a sport, and she also kept it as secret as possible; when she described her jumps, she seemed to disbelieve herself, and only when one believed her in spite of that and responded was her enthusiasm kindled.

It was an athlete, after all, who then married her when she was a beauty queen, one of the stars of the Yugoslav national basketball team, a dark, handsome Croatian workingman’s son, who had become rich from sports, always alert even when not on the court, as if ready to go after the ball, and yet, “but not because of his height,” shy and with laconic good manners, always greeting people first or letting them go ahead in hotel hallways and entrances; he and she, the daughter of a shabby inn in Maribor (that was where her room under the eaves was), made a dream couple. She described how people underwent a metamorphosis in every place they entered, even if they did not recognize him and her as so-and-so. In the most dreary people’s meeting hall on a Sunday evening, with the cold December rain and wind outside, with the waiters baring their teeth at the darkness and waitresses showing at most the white heels of their stockings in their clogs, from the moment she appeared she caused great sighs, beaming smiles, straightened backs, welcomes, people taking their seats. Suddenly invisible lights were switched on or lit, also a fireplace fire, and that in Yugoslavia, and then musicians stepped forward, who had been waiting specifically for her in a back room. People clustered around the couple with great emotion, solicitous and childish; at last they could show their best, their true side. Who were “they”?—“The peoples.”

Later the two of them set out together for Arabia, where he worked as an engineer building a pumping station along an oil pipeline and after a few years committed suicide, or, as she said, “went of his own accord.” She told the story that way so that the listener, instead of asking why and how, would merely nod.

She returned to Yugoslavia, to the city of her birth, for a time managed her parents’ inn, engrossed anew in the citywide roof-tile images, and the processions of ridgepole tiles heading toward the Orient. Either she was seen only in the taproom, now in heel-revealing clogs herself, and with grim, dark eyebrows, intentionally penciled in this way, or far away on the wintry back roads, recognizable by her rapid pace, almost like the jerky movement of a speed walker (an athletic discipline), shoulders back and rolling.