Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

Although she did not keep notes or make sketches or take pictures on her trip, sending her husband and children only picture-postcard greetings and sending me, in loose imitation of Heraclitus, only fragments like “The village of Kokova shouts its poverty out over the sea,” it seemed to her as though all her movements, back and forth across the country, were being recorded.

With her peculiar style of being on the road, always and intensely focused on the subject at hand, prepared to let herself be surprised and to surprise others, she pictured herself making tracks not only through these regions but simultaneously on a particular map of the world. There each of her present steps seemed at the same moment to be placed as a marker, like the markings of an explorer, and ineradicable, which gave her a good conscience in addition to the pleasure she could experience alone with herself this way: as if her crisscrossing were now a form of work, for the common good if any work ever was.

In addition, as she saw it, not a single step in the course of her journey could be such that it contravened that transfer onto the “trail map” as she pictured it. One false step or thoughtless action, and the entire marker script that she had paced out would be eradicated; her work, her oeuvre, would have been in vain.

From such consciousness she then derived something like an ad hoc ethical imperative: “Conduct yourself on your journey in such a way that you see nothing you do as a violation of your leaving traces.”

But then why did she still expect that the next time she came around a bend she would finally have before her eyes that which she found sorely absent from such a way of life, scandalously lacking? Why did she search, and search, and search?

And from time to time she thought that what she would encounter around the bend would be the ax murderer intended just for her, and her presumed leaving of traces was merely a sickness, part and parcel of that irresponsibility that led her to tell herself that what she was doing should not be judged and punished like the actions of others, simply because she was the one doing it?

And with the outer-space-blue Turkish sky above her, she saw herself as far from where duty told her she should be, indeed as torn away from it, never to return. No matter how faithfully she continued to follow her personal rule, which, again paraphrasing the stutterer Heraclitus from Ephesus — a place already irretrievably left behind — went as follows: “Go well!” and which she had mastered and now modeled for the world around her as otherwise only the woman apothecary of Erdberg (from my unwritten novel) could: in such moments she was behaving, in the eyes of the agency responsible for her, like a vagabond, as a disgraceful neglecter of her main concern.

But what was her main concern?

The others, even her children — thus experience had taught her — were better off without her constant presence; her long absences did them good. Her assignment — thus experience had taught her as well — was her way of being on the road in this original fashion. “My way is my assignment, nothing else!”

Yet now that was no longer valid — for hours, even days, at a time. No matter where she struggled along, eyes opened wide to the millennia-old life of the Orient, her graceful movement providing at the same time an example of pure presentness: nothing more of it appeared on that map that required no reprinting, located — plotted — recorded — transmitted. Among thousands of good news items this was the bad news from this journey. She did not feel herself to be either in the Orient known for its patriarchal atmosphere or in the Levant fabled for cinnamon and clashing cymbals. Spaceship Earth did not answer anymore, even to the most imploring SOS scraped by toes and pounded by heels.

Carefreeness: was my friend in the process of losing it?

It could even be that in the course of the summer, in some city on a harbor, in the bars and bazaars, she was listening for sounds of home: except for a bit of Russian, nothing. During this year she seemed to be the only person from her country spending time in this area, or abroad at all, and for the first time this was not a matter of indifference to her. For the first time she felt something like fear, or a prelude to fear.

One day she could be seen among the yachts, where, without needing money, she offered to help the crew with shopping onshore; and the next day she rented for herself, for continuing her trip eastward, a light cayman with crew, she being the only passenger, in which role she then stood erect in the bow, which was decorated with nothing, nothing at all, and sailed into a bay accessible only to ships and already sparkling festively when she arrived and filled with the sweet scent of wood fires, tying up in the last berth there, to the sound of “Death and the Maiden” drifting across the water from the most distant of the boats. And on a third day, still in the depths of night, she created a silhouette, standing before the glow of a village flat-bread oven in the interior. And in the first gray of dawn she was darting along a path through the hills, whose earth was cracked from dryness into an endless hexagonal net; she walked ahead of a herd of goats, the males’ horns clashing against each other. And that same morning, in a town already up in the mountains, she had a tooth extracted, and at noon stood in a house entryway without a door, contemplating a pair of canine lovers, glued together, no longer able to break loose, howling with strain and pain, tumbling around and around each other, until she felt hungry. And that same afternoon she crossed a mountain village, deserted except for an old woman and her hens, and robbed of its access road by an earthquake; she had to practically scramble over the village, like a wall of rubble and boulders, then wished a good evening to a soldier on patrol with a walkie-talkie, on a rise, in the icy wind, the eternal Taurus snow before his eyes, and then ran downhill, ran and ran, until she reached the next harbor, where the cook on her hired boat was already waiting for his queen of Sheba with the evening meal, while the helmsman lay on his back next to the cayman in the extremely salty water and by the light of the full moon read the newspaper spread wide between his arms, or made it look as though he was reading.

This particular day occurs in the August heat, when even the wind is blazing hot and makes breathing difficult, and my friend has had a taxi drop her off before sunrise near the ruins of an ancient temple to Leda, who was ravished by the chief god in the shape of a swan. Actually the temple was dedicated to Zeus’s lawful wife, his first, whose name was similar, Lato, but the traveler had decided to rededicate the temple in honor of the woman who bore Helen, which happened to be my friend’s name as well.

And indeed, in the darkly shimmering light of dawn, more part of the marly furrowed land than of the sky above it, in the midst of a heavy, soundless stillness, the swan in question swooped down among the fragments of columns, in a sudden dive, casting its shadow ahead of it, like a bird of prey about to pounce on its booty, landed amid splintering and cracking in a puddle, flapped its wings furiously in the air, and promptly lifted off again, vanishing immediately behind the dike along the nearby river, and in the temple precinct, as a branch usually bounces after the departure of a winged creature, the water rippled in widening circles, with the disappearing swan’s flight creating a sound like an immense coughing. “On with the day!” (Another of her favorite paraphrases of Heraclitus.)

After hours of heading inland in the heat, quite often running to make the breeze feel cooler, far from any water, once passing fleshy, hip-high stands of wild sage, once passing stinking sheep skeletons, she found herself marching through a broad stretch of hinterland, where, again for hours, all the umbrella pines and scrub chestnut oaks stood charred, which afforded a view of the world very similar to the one she had had with the black jacket over her head. For a long time she encountered not a single living being, just as the soot colors, up hill and down dale, remained at a distance, and, in the absence of wind here, the only sound came from her footsteps. She waded through ash mixed with pitch. The smell of burning brought back to her nostrils the remembrance of the smokehouses of her childhood and thus now and then provided a sort of cooling by way of memory.