Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

And then waking up early today in Japan’s oldest city, where not even the temples struck him as ancient, for the wood, even on façades thousands of years old, had, as everywhere in this country, been replaced during this century. And looking down through the knotholes in one of the temple galleries, he saw, lying on the ground, the pine needles mingled with chicken feathers and corn kernels from the courtyard at home in San Pelagio or Sempolaj.

And from one of the pagoda towers, story after story, an unbroken chirping of sparrows, of whom only now and then a little flurry became visible, gray on the likewise gray roof. The doves tripping along in the gravel like first drops of rain. At the sight of the nostrils of a Buddhist holy figure, a desire to see a forest filled with apes the next day, for instance in the mountains around Kyoto.

On the way to the station in Nara, my friend encountered a Japanese woman with freckles, at which he thought, “I have a woman!” A sidewalk sweeper crossed the entire broad street to sweep up a single grain of dust on the other side. Behind a bamboo fence the first Japanese dog growled at him. Many of the passersby were carrying on silent conversations with themselves, which, to judge from their hand gestures, consisted chiefly of mental arithmetic. And, as everywhere, children balancing on the curb. On the evening train to Kyoto, talk going across the compartment, as if from starting blocks.

During his walk on the bridge over the already familiar Kamo River, the night wind billowed the sleeves of the mendicant friar there, his face invisible under the rim of his hat. From the open entryways of the buildings, especially the restaurants, wafted the smell of freshly washed floors. On all the city bridges traffic similar to that in Hong Kong or elsewhere, but under them, among the pebbles on the banks, here and there a frail elderly person, and the thought: “When I am that age, I, too, will go under the bridges.”

The no-man’s-land he had photographed that day had been marked by the concrete foundations of a long since dismantled barracks, emergency shelter after an earthquake, lying there a single stick of wood that was on fire, sending up a tall column of smoke, repeatedly decapitated by the wind. And then, at an afternoon No play, in which the actors kept speeding up their monologues so much that his heart began to race, he had seen another mask that showed him a self-portrait: that of a man caught up, according to legend, “in a one-second dream encompassing his entire life and at the same time aware that, on the contrary, this entire life itself is such a dream”—the expression on the mask one of tremendous astonishment. And outside the city again, on the edge of the wilderness, a Buddha lurking behind the jungle foliage appeared to him as the image of his parents involved in their almost silent work at the bottom of their cultivated doline, where even he, the son, had for decades been surprised and also startled by the faces of the two of them, behind sunflowers, pole beans, cornstalks. And at the end, at the stage of going under the bridge? it seemed to him as though on this day his many voices had come together into one — if only a rather feeble one.

Yes, the time was coming for his building. Except that on the journey he had little by little lost all his tools. And not for the first time in Japan my friend thought, “I’m not even born yet!” It was certainly the first time that he then thought, “I haven’t been anywhere yet!”

On an autumn evening in the current year, he, who otherwise dreamt consistently only on the nights of hoarfrost between Christmas and the festival of the Three Kings, had had a dream that stayed with him, in which he was not a priest but a nobody, a creature, his naked self. He stood there in harsh artificial light before the altar of his parish church, and unexpectedly there came from the sacristy a villager who had recently died, after a miserable death struggle lasting several days. He was larger than life and ordered him to his knees to receive the host. In the dream he had not knelt since his childhood, let alone received the “body of the Lord,” and for those very reasons the moment became special to him. In addition, the voice of the deceased, who, in priestly garments, had become the administrator of the sacrament, was commanding in a way that he had never heard in a terrestrial being. What this voice told him in the dream it immediately confirmed for all time: no way led around this food; to consume it was absolute necessity; without it you are lost! And although upon hearing this voice for the first time in much too long he felt a shudder of awe go through him, it was not just a bad dream; he did not wake up, but slept on, at first trembling and quaking, then peacefully, and finally blissfully.

That night he got up even earlier than usual, also because he had to work on his sermon for Sunday. From his desk he had a view of the back of the rectory and an orchard, which then, as was usual on the Jaunfeld, merged into meadows and fields without more ado. After morning Mass and his morning classes at the school in B., he planned to pick apples that afternoon and take them down to the cellar, without help, all by himself. And what else today? Lunch with the much younger priest of the parish on the other side of the Drau, in an inn halfway between them; another visit to a dying parishioner; an evening Mass for one who had passed away in Rinkolach.

If he looked in another direction, he could see the unmade bed in his bedroom, which would remain thus until late at night. It was cold in the two rooms, the only ones that were still lived in; no housekeeper to light the stove; and he himself did so only when company came, and even then often not.

In his sermon he wanted to challenge the Pope, in all seriousness, and that soon warmed him. For not long ago the man in the Vatican, in connection with a war in which enemy soldiers had raped and impregnated women, had called upon the women in question to love these children and bring them into the world and raise them in this spirit. What upset the priest was less the assumption that the women would carry to term these embryos conceived in violence than the command to love them. Could something like love be imposed from without, and furthermore from on high, publicly? To praise love, as the apostle Paul had done once and for all in his epistle to the Corinthians, was one thing; but to declare it a law and proclaim it as such, wasn’t that entirely different? Certainly he could well imagine that one of these women gradually, or more likely suddenly, might be seized (“surprised”? “afflicted”?) by a sort of love for such a fruit of her womb. But first of all, wasn’t that her own business, yes, her secret, and no one on the outside, not even the deputy of God on earth, could presume to approach a human being with a commandment to love. Or at most in private, as priest and pastor, like him, and then not in the form of a commandment but perhaps as a mere possibility, a little pointer.

He, the priest, was angry at his Pope for speaking of something like love in prescriptive terms, and he wanted to express that openly in his sermon (although precisely thereby his outrage would be perceived as part of a game). Wasn’t the love of a violated woman for this alien seed more the stuff of a story, a novella, than of a sermon from the pulpit? To be told only long, long after the event? Or perhaps not even in eternity? Something to keep unspoken, a matter only for the mother herself? And might not such love, in the cases in question, have long since gone silently and fervently to work, only to be desecrated by the papal edict? But was such a love even capable of being desecrated, by no matter what interference?