Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

Once he recognized his lack of vocation, he was seized with a burning restlessness. Instead of to his priest, he turned to the agrarian engineer, whom he looked up in the city of K., to tell him about his fatal lack of interest in farm work. To this day he thought it must have been simply the way he told the story, imploringly, that made the technical expert ask out of the blue whether he had ever considered becoming a priest.

The moment had come. At last he knew what he had to do. Yet he would have kept on farming if it had not also happened that his fiancee understood him instantly—“with glowing eyes!” as he told us — and even encouraged his plan, and that his sister around that same time met a man with whom she would run the farm.

In the beginning he, already an adult, attended a boys’ seminary, where he sat in the back and off to one side at a single desk, avoided by the adolescents and mocked as a “manure farmer” (although as a rule these children’s parents were farmers, too), and then he transferred to a special school for those called late to the priesthood. There he noticed that all the men, from the most varied walks of life, had at least one thing in common: like most ordinary priests, they had experienced while still children something like a summons or a vocation; except that they, unlike the others, had not felt that it applied to them, and had instead followed a course previously laid out for them. And to find their way to the priesthood they had all needed a second impetus, much later, well beyond their childhood. Things became clear to them and the picture came into focus only the second time around. They had had to rely on that second manifestation of life, which thenceforth remained immutable for them in a way that hardly anything did for the other priests — weren’t they, the latecomers, the ones most likely to stay with it for the rest of their lives?

After saying morning Mass, a silent one, in which his lips moved and no word was audible, it seemed to him as though he had taken a breath that would last him all day.

He went, in mufti except for the stiff white clerical collar, which, unlike his fellow priests, he never dispensed with in public, out of the parish church and across the already heavily traveled highway to the Inn on the Bend (on the long since straightened curve) for his café au lait, shoved across the counter to him without his having to order, stood there among the handful of workmen out early, men of few words, clearing his throat like them, and skimmed the already wrinkled newspaper, unmoved by even the most terrible events in the world (just as “his” dying parishioners never haunted him, even in dreams; once out of the sickroom he never returned to them in thought, and also calmly said so to anyone who wanted to know). According to the paper, a recent survey showed that the majority of the population considered priests useful to society, even if they seemed to have disappeared almost entirely from public life; except that, the article went on to say, in the eyes of most people they no longer spread happiness or tidings of great joy.

Then he set out in his forester’s vehicle, whose back seat had been removed to make way for a duffel bag, a pair of rubber boots, the slice of a tree trunk, all lying loose like the few tools and apples, which during the trip overland to the secondary school in B. caused a constant rattling and bumping.

It was a dark day, one on which small things showed up as if lit from within, and the world, with the sun in hiding, lay open for a new beginning; the rattling of the tools behind him provided a musical accompaniment. It made him think of the painting by Brueghel in the Museum of Art in Vienna, his first picture outside of a church (seen on the only field trip taken by the latecomers, otherwise always penned up in rural Horn, in Lower Austria), which had filled him with as much astonishment as the portrayals of the Gospel in Siebenbrunn, perhaps also because of its title, but who had given it that name?: “The Dark Day.”

But that picture in Vienna had been melancholy and almost menacing, especially because almost the only bright thing shining out of the gloom of late autumn was the ax or knife blade, with which, if he remembered correctly, an almost faceless peasant silhouette was pruning a bare tree, while the brightness of the present dark day appeared now in the round shape of an apple, now in the oval of a corncob, now in the rectangle of a many-colored beehive standing alone on the edge of Rinkenberg Forest, now in the triangle of a chapel’s shingled roof.

These objects, registered just this way in passing, brightnesses even for their form alone, appeared regardless of season and had, in their substantiality, in the wood, the fleshiness of the apple, the mealiness of corn, something ethereal as well, which allowed him to feel himself become, for the moment, fruit, silvery shingles, thin air.

Only once, and then for a long stretch, did that brightness disappear, when a series of unharvested fields intervened, filled of all things with sunflowers, probably self-sown, on this farmland that was more and more being abandoned here, each of the many flower heads, which turned or drooped in every direction, darkened, and this black-in-blackish extending all the way to no horizon.

He stopped then, although the children were perhaps already waiting in their classroom, by an abandoned farm along the way, half in ruins, in whose chimney cap on this chiaroscuro day the old live owl was sitting again, even if the only part of it that moved was the amber eyes, following the smallest motion of his finger as he walked back and forth before it, constantly looking up.

Unlike most teachers, the priest did not try to remember the pupils’ names; barely glanced at the individual faces. When I was back home for a visit one time and he took me to class with him, the way he ignored the children annoyed me at first. It reminded me of all the priests I had known since I was very small, in whose eyes I, and likewise those next to me, did not exist and at the same time had a duty to be there.

But then it appeased me that my friend at least did not impart religious instruction to those entrusted to him. Not only did every child from the outset receive the same, the very best grades: he also did almost nothing but have the children take turns reading the Bible stories aloud, during which he gazed not at the reader but out the window. At the beginning, he said, he had been the expert on the text, and still the reader himself, and then he had recognized how hollow it sounded coming from his mouth, compared with such first-time readers. Often the children did not even need to puzzle out the text, but came out with it fluently, as if nothing in it were foreign to them, and in the process they captured the nerve of the whole in sentence after sentence.

After that one hour in school, setting out with him on foot, I noticed on the other hand that he knew almost everyone, or everyone past school age, greeting people from afar, and loudly, calling them by name: many of the local people, however, including beyond the town limits, did not return his greeting, not even when he waved and gestured. “They don’t want to know me!” he said. And those who responded to him did so without a smile, and hardly anyone stopped to talk. He commented that it was their “guilty conscience,” while it seemed to me, on the contrary, that these passersby did not derive any real joy from their priest, and not because he was this particular one. His showing up resembled that of a keeper of public order, whose way of keeping order was not needed, not by the young people, and also no longer by most of the older people.

Always he had been well received only when he did not present himself as who he was. And now and then he even enjoyed being a kibitzer for a while, a participant, or a first-name friend to the people in his congregation, in pubs, outside shops, at soccer games. As long as that was all there was to it, and he, laying aside the priest, contributed nothing but his share to the conviviality, he was well liked; others interacted with him as they had perhaps always wanted to interact with a brother.