Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

Once, when she crouched down to relieve herself, there appeared unexpectedly, from all sides, butterflies — small ones and large, blue, white, multicolored; in no time they had swarmed over the spot of urine and were drinking it. As she held still, all around her in the charred landscape she heard the very delicate chirping of crickets, which, like no other sound, wove together or dissolved proximity and distance, a welcome sound after the cicadas’ racket, which here in the dark light was absent for a change. And close enough to touch, glassy in the dull ash gray, a snake glided by, slithering in a zigzag, its head slightly raised, as if looking for its family after the fire.

On with the day. And toward sundown she came to a strip where finally some growth was beginning again, first in the form of blackberry canes, clambering green up into the dead branches, and their berries, which in such a setting somewhat resembled animals made up of thousands of black-gleaming eyes, for which she stood on tiptoe, jumped, took a flying leap. She followed the green strip as it widened, and descended by the steep path, with now and then a breath of ocean air from below, for a while adhering to the rhythm with which a long-bodied Mediterranean hornet flew time and again at a snail shell on the ground, pushing and rolling it along, until the house was finally lying with its open side up, into which the hornet promptly slipped, and my friend recognized, and heard as well, that inside it was now ripping and stripping the rotten flesh from the walls.

The water of the new bay, which she reached as the last swallows were still swooping across the sky, again at a run, in loping strides, was — without a ship, hardly even a boat — thickly populated by swimmers, probably from the village nearby, all generations together, their heads gazing out over the still, bright surface of the ocean as if everyone were present.

She joined them, swam as she had previously run or strolled, and the sea, which at the same time did not make her feel wet, buoyed her up under her arms, embraced her, mothered her, as if celebrating the return of the Prodigal Daughter, and as if this were all that had been necessary to quench the thirst of her many days’ journey. She dove down, saw on the ocean floor, half buried in sand, the sarcophagi of a sunken ancient cemetery, or petrified boats, their keels pointing up? and afterward she sat down on the shore, her face turned inland, from which now, in the katabatic wind, parachutists, an entire squadron, facing toward the coast and, some of them linked together in figures as during an air show, float down onto the “Bay of the Prodigal Daughter”: from close up, the wings of linden blossoms, with the fruit capsules dangling from them, and swarms of bats zigzagging around them.

And my friend murmurs half out loud, turning to no one in particular, including herself: “I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s all over with me. I shall die soon. Today was a happy day. Thank you. When was that? It was a long time ago. I am mourning. Ah, movement! What do you want to search for? Look. One must look. Sweet life. I am afraid. Is anyone there?”

And she listens to her own voice and is amazed at what comes out of her when she simply talks to herself this way.

And she longs to perish, longs for glory?

When I was in Japan, in every new place, in the cities and even more in the countryside, I imagined undertaking the journey with a farmer from my Central European village, Rinkolach, and a woodsman from the same Jaunfeld area.

I would have been the tour guide, so to speak, but one who kept silent if at all possible, and in the presence of the wooden temples, the fields and trees, would have been merely a witness to the exclamations, the observing, the touching, the describing, the comparing, perhaps even the theorizing of the two others with their expertise.

With their calm, endless capacity for wonder they would have, I thought, kept my own wonder alive; without them it pretty much dissipated after a few days. Instead of taking in the differences, as at the beginning, with refreshed eyes, thoughtfully, I found myself observing almost exclusively the similarities, which manifested themselves more and more concentratedly with every day that passed, and from which, unlike in Europe, there seemed to be no escape into unpopulated areas or into nature (at most in the national parks), such that at times I actually felt like a prisoner on the Japanese islands.

If I set out to get productively lost, I did not once succeed, blocked as I was on all sides by barriers or impenetrable thickets. If, on the other hand, I set out with a destination in mind, also in a hurry and short of time, for instance trying to make a train, I would get so hopelessly lost that in the end I did not know anymore which was right or left, had two left hands or feet for every movement, and collided with all the passersby in Japan, who without exception took the shortest route and also never stepped out of a person’s way.

Without the woman from Catalonia at my side sometimes — this was our honeymoon — I might perhaps have knocked down one of these millions of prison wardens, who acted as though I did not even exist, and embarked on a meaningless flight.

But with my two fellow villagers I would have found constant pleasure in Japan. Every day they would have grasped and explicated in my presence things that could not be found in any guidebook; they would have been the right teachers for me, their unhurried eyeing of an object and then of the relevant subject matter, articulated in astonished conversations with themselves; in no time flat they would have been on intimate terms with the local folk, without imposing themselves on them and without even exchanging a word, with construction workers, cottagers, priests, drinkers, women at the market, gamblers.

Imagining their company did help me now and then, but did not replace their physical presence, the actual expert fingering, sniffing, measuring.

The carpenter and architect did not need such companions. Wherever he was in the inhabited world, when faced with any questionable phenomenon he could summon and deploy from within himself an entire team, as it were, in which one complemented the other, helped him along, took over his role. If he was constantly talking to himself on his trip to Japan, it was a discussion, usually in question-and-answer form, between not merely a builder and a woodworker but also, for instance, a geologist and a well digger, a teacher and a road builder, a photographer and an ironworker, and, last but not least or in between, an actor and a nobody or a ne’er-do-well. As he learned from unfamiliar objects, he learned from himself.

Yet he accomplished hardly anything, and did not even much care. When he built something, it was almost always without a commission, without a client, for himself, or for no particular reason, on the piece of property he owned, a scruffy savanna on the Italian karst, above Trieste, which he had inherited from his parents, or secretly, on no-man’s — land, especially that of cities — to the extent such a thing could even still be found anywhere nowadays.

That these structures stood there unfinished, one and all, was not his intention, at least not his express intention. As he said, he wanted to leave himself as much time as possible for each, and it did him good, he remarked, to start something new in the meantime, and besides, it was a pleasure to do everything himself. And furthermore, he had no money.

So for a house on his land (he acted as though he did not know whether it was intended for himself), he had dug out a small sinkhole to create a cellar, but since then nothing had been added: only the hemispherical form, hollow, its walls like its rounded floor finished with the local white, gray, and bluish limestone, lay there sunk into the steppe under the open sky, and a spiral staircase built from the wood of the narrow, tough karst oaks, without a railing, stuck up out of the hollowed-out cellar, rose above the earth’s surface, and ended at about the height of a diving board, with a final, thicker, threshold-wide step leading out into space — that was where the entrance level of the house was probably supposed to be, with a round floor plan, eventually or never?