Peter Handke: My Year in No Man's Bay

That was true a few years ago of an evening with two friends in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia. On a trip, of which I was not yet certain where it would lead me, I had invited the painter and the reader there for my fiftieth birthday. The painter flew in via Belgrade from Perpignan, where he had one of his studios in the nearby Pyrenees. The reader had traveled parallel to me, through Italy, down the eastern coast as I was going down the western coast of Yugoslavia, like me by train and bus, and had then taken a boat in Rimini straight across the Adriatic to Split, hot on my trail by that time, but then, in his usual way, had done the last part on foot, so that I could be alone on the morning of my birthday, as I had requested.

I would have remained alone until evening if the reader and I had not been drawn to the same part of Dubrovnik at the same time, outside the city walls. Where we ran into each other by chance, there was nothing but an open stony field, high above the little fortified city on the sea in its shell-shaped hollow. I found myself driven there by thoughts of my mother, who had spent the last summer of her life in this area, sickened by the heat and yet out walking every day, leaving the shade of the town for the countryside, for the goat and chicken sheds in the middle of nowhere, for the stone walls, for the sparse grassy triangles where roads crossed. The ocean down below had merely blinded her, and the islands meant nothing to her, unlike me. The shrill sound of the cicadas tormented her ears. The light of the limestone karst raged. By a doorpost, all that remained of a house, autumnal sky-blue like the background of the Slovenian roadside shrines, she breathed a sigh of relief in passing. His eyes wide, a wooden cudgel over his shoulder, a native came toward me; at second glance I recognized the reader. At least I had been in Dubrovnik before and could then play the role of host in the courtyard of the most obscure tavern. At that very place the painter later hunted us down, coming straight from the airport. He stood between us, without a word, and him, too, I at first took for a local.

That evening each of us did open his mouth now and then, but for the most part we remained silent. And precisely that was the night of storytelling. One incident followed the other without need for words. From the darkness outside only a breath reached us; the deeper the night became, the richer in material. More than listening to such storytelling, we sat through it. We did look around again and again, get up, go outside, leaving the others alone for a while, but the most active element in that night was the blackness. I had never seen the black of night so full of color, and seldom a color so massive, and in the same breath so fragrant. It had often made me suspicious when the painter came out with his dictum about black’s being the richest of the colors, interacting with light. Now, long after midnight, also long before the first birdcalls, no moon, no stars, I perceived the blackness as the color of a first-day fruit.

It was winter, rainy along the southern Adriatic coast, mild. The late night was windless. We had not stayed in Dubrovnik. I had invited my friends to Ston, a village on the tongue of land toward Korcula. There were the saltworks on one side, on the other, in a bay, man-made oyster beds, with a restaurant adjacent. The previous morning, having gone out there by bus, I had looked into the particulars, and now I guided the painter and the reader from place to place. The table by the bay was set, the white cloth a rarity for Yugoslavia. We had come by taxi; the driver sat at a table at some distance, he, too, having Dalmatian wine and oysters, a common and inexpensive meal in that area. The shells were hardly larger than a coin, and the oyster flesh was correspondingly tiny, yet firm.

Although it was my special day, I set out a present for the others, the same thing for both, a wooden box carved and painted by Albanian craftsmen in Kosovo, purchased the week before in the Croatian town of Zadar, filled with the coarse gray crystals of unrefined sea salt, mixed with sand and autumn leaves, gathered from a pile in the middle of the saltworks, shut down for the winter. The painter stood up and handed me a collection of dull black pencils, all of them already started by him, with dabs of paint on them, for the rest of my journey, so that I could draw in my notebook, for he said he found it unfortunate that I had stopped. And the reader, too, stood up and gave me a book he had printed himself: the notes he had recently discovered, made by a stonemason on a trip between Souillac, Cahors, and Moissac in France around the middle of the twelfth century, in that transitional period between the Romanesque and the Gothic style. The notes were in Latin, true, but having to decipher something, reading a text that did not flow smoothly, always had an animating effect on me; and this commentary dealt with something that might apply to me. It was this remark in particular that caused me to carry the little book around with me without reading it: it scares me off when I am told something seems made for me, and only now do I sense that the time may have come for the stonemason’s story.

It was much later when the night outside, silent as it was, became so overpowering around the village of Ston, about twenty kilometers from Dubrovnik in the big country of Yugoslavia. Here a verb suggests itself, a somewhat odd concept, yet it imposes itself on me. What did the night do? It surged, it surged over us: the surging night. The hill by the bay was girdled by medieval ramparts, which because of their length and breadth, up and down around the mountainous fortress, was called the Chinese Wall (of Ston). This wall now seemed close to where we were. It was the same with the row of spruce on the saltworks dam farther away, on the other side of the hill. The trees’ needles rustled, and the heaps of salt at their feet glistened; a tipped-over wheelbarrow was covered with salt, except for the rusty wheel.

And meanwhile on the gleaming cobblestones of the Stradun, the main street of Dubrovnik, the local residents were still promenading, with the place to themselves now in winter. For the participants in this regular evening corso there was an invisible demarcation line toward both ends of the broad street — or square? — at which every stroller who had not yet done so would pivot. In the course of this parading back and forth by the population, not at all casual but downright energetic, no one continued on to the ends of the Stradun, unless he disappeared completely from the mass, heading home, or elsewhere. But anyone who kept parading made an abrupt turn at that demarcation line, swerving his entire body, leading with the shoulder. The majority swerved long before, those who were arm in arm swerving all at once, as if on an inaudible command, heading back in the opposite direction; even groups taking up the whole width of the street turned this way, magically. The few who continued on to the end seemed for those few steps like sleepwalkers. But at the last moment, within a hair’s-breadth of the imaginary boundary, even the solitary stroller or scuffer would wheel around like a swimmer at the end of a lane. The city elders joined the procession, calmly and deliberately, and the most relaxed and dancerlike ones were the children; they had the pirouette at the turn in their blood. In these hours leading up to midnight no one made a false step, none of those strolling up and down missed the turning point. Several people in uniform mingled with the crowd, also a Catholic priest, sailors, an idiot, whose siblings held him by the hand; and not even he lagged behind in the loop. Down by the harbor the cars came rolling out of the belly of the last ferry from the islands. On the night plane to Zagreb sat a Croatian basketball team, almost the only passengers, after their training camp in Dubrovnik. The tallest of the players, also the team captain, sat next to his Serbian wife, who years before had been Miss Yugoslavia.