Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

In early summer, back in the north, to which he felt most powerfully drawn, while crossing on the former ferry, now converted into an excursion steamer the size of an ocean liner, from Aomori to Hokkaido, he caught himself, shortly before docking, under the still-bright midnight sky, in the dense crowd of passengers on deck who were taking flash pictures into the void, running his hand from behind over the hair of a beauty, a tall woman with a very broad Mongolian face, as previously he had now and then run his hand over the head of one of the children. And she, too, let it happen, except that she turned toward him and did not smile. Never had anyone looked at him that way.

The horizon all around displayed long, smooth strands of clouds, almost horizontal, floating, just like the hair of his fellow passenger, though instead of black they were snow-white, and the ship’s arrival signal was still that of the former ferry, the only long-sustained note that had reached his ears up to that point in Japan, where from the traffic lights to the gameboys everything merely peeped and trilled (the temple gongs always died away too soon for him, and the dark drumming of water as it shot out over stones poking up through a cataract, a rarity everywhere in the world, was even more rarely to be heard out in the Japanese countryside, so difficult to get to).

On the island they became lovers, and he spent a few weeks with her, during which hardly a word passed between them, in a fishermen’s village, where they occupied a hut built on stilts among several similar ones, each standing on its own spot and painted in its own color, there along the steep, rocky slope.

During the day, when they went outside, they touched up the paint and improved the dock, which was given a slight curvature, and who has ever seen two people, both in overalls of the same whiteness, working so close to each other and never getting in each other’s way? Only people who had grown old together in house and garden could sometimes achieve that — but these two were still far from old.

The carpenter’s heavy hand became, in loose imitation of Vitruvius, my friend’s Roman ideal, identical with the architect’s elegance. When the two of them, finger to finger, pulled the skin off the fish they had fried together, squatting hip to hip, the bones formed an arrowhead pattern in the pale flesh, and in the dim light of the narrow pebble beach, after midnight a single shell, the size of a fist, shone iridescent in all the colors of the spectrum.

When he set out to leave her, it was understood that they would meet again by the year’s end at the latest, and from then on would do everything side by side. Through her, the rest of the natives had become more accessible to him (sometimes even too much so for a reserved person like him). After that he had only to seek out certain places — not only the farmers’ or fish markets, or the strange village on the northern sea where there was hardly any transition between the boats and the cottages — and the Japanese would reveal themselves in what was to him — this vigilant man from border country — an unfamiliar rootedness, even impudence, and, what is more, out of the public eye, lost the tormenting fear of failure they usually displayed there; when among themselves, they cheerfully made mistakes, merrily did the wrong thing.

What he had initially read in a travel guide now acquired another meaning for him: “You cannot get lost in Japan.”

This morning, already in mid-autumn, in Nara, the original capital of the empire, where he spent the night in the suite made almost entirely of wood that the woman from Catalonia and I had occupied during our honeymoon, the corridor outside as broad as a street, my friend found the courage to take his first picture of a Japanese no-man’s-land, then passed part of the forenoon lying on a temple balustrade facedown, his gaze through the gaps in the floor focused on the reddish, shimmering earth below, just as in childhood he had looked down from the gallery of the house on the karst into the chicken yard below, and in a residential quarter he again witnessed even the natives stumbling over the high threshold of their dwellings, and later he marveled for days over the course he had taken, not merely during this year in Japan but from birth.

He was born at the bottom of a doline, above San Pelagio near Aurisina, on that land he later inherited, a stone’s throw from the barriers on the Yugoslav border, brought into the world by his mother during an air raid while she was working in the fields far below, at a turnaround, and he imagined that his birth and childhood in the great hollow of the sinkhole, with the unique sounds characteristic of the place and the very round horizon above his head, had provided a sort of outline for his future life and his profession, also simply when, in his few earlier attempts at building houses, he had always left the roof uncovered — strange carpenter! — open to the sky, citing the example of the Romans, who did not allow the temples to Jupiter, the sun, and the moon to be roofed over.

And furthermore — while here in the bay, amid the leaves blowing in from somewhere all year long, this autumn’s first are falling, softer than the others, coming down perpendicularly, at the same time more slowly — he thought today in Nara about how the unvarnished fir planks of the ship and the dining table of nutwood back home had smelled after being washed down with hot water: how spicy, how appetizing. And about the pile of firewood out in the courtyard that reached up to the eaves, stacked almost without gaps, and how he had seen the only hole, down near the ground, triangular in shape, not as a hiding place for the cat but as the model for some future human habitation: he would sit in there himself someday and watch from the warmth the earth being swept clean by the north wind, the Bora, whom his parents called “the purest of women.”

And for years he had stared transfixed into the pit right behind his parents’ house where there was a bubbling, hissing, spitting, steaming from the lime being slaked, and for years he had also cracked the whip in the orchard on the steppe, using the juniper handle he had carved himself.

And then that cold morning in July when he no longer sat on the bus to Aurisina and Trieste as one commuting student among others but as a first-day apprentice, apart from the other passengers, in his still new-blue stiff work overalls. And how he then, in the Don Bosco Home, felt such homesickness for precisely the shabby spots at home: the worn linoleum under the table, the hot-water reservoir in the woodstove, encrusted with mineral deposits, the burn marks under the ash box, the pitted enamel of the washbasin, the scraped wooden threshold with the rusty nailheads.

And then the years during which he worked alongside his father as a carpenter, outdoors, feeling uneasy only on the day of the topping-out, not because his father would get drunk again, but because his father would not be as jolly from the drinking as all the others.

And then another such cold morning before he set out for the university, across the border to Vienna, when his parents planned to dress him ceremoniously in the cutaway of the godfather who had died in the war, which they had been keeping in a trunk up on the wooden gallery for just such an occasion, black with fine gray stripes and heavily padded shoulders, and this often tried-on garment, which previously had always been still too big and heavy for him, when it was unfolded this time suddenly hung there in tatters, shredded by moths.

Then came the many years until the moment, when, on the great plain down below by the limestone base of the karst, in Aquileia, which had been so close all the time and had once been very familiar, and not only from school excursions, behind the basilica that stood all by itself back in the grasslands between the mouths of the Isonzo and the Tagliamento, at his feet the former Roman harbor filled with the frogs’ gentle evening croaking, he found himself completely drawn into that antiquity of which he had previously been conscious only in bits and pieces, actually only a single piece, from a homey, swamp-black corduroy road, a section of alder, particularly swamp-resistant (according to Vitruvius) — the one moment when those couple of logs half buried in the path, which every time had announced something to him rather than reminded him of something, now became one with the once-mighty city of Aquileia, the metropolis of the ancient world, which at that moment did not seem at all vanished to him; it was now, it had arrived, it was his world, his future field of work: “Classical antiquity and I are one.”