Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

But every time the moment came when he viewed their continued familiarity as inappropriate, and tacitly expected them to consult him as their priest. And because that hardly ever happened, except far off in the villages (did such places even exist somewhere?), according to circumstances he would make a point of calling attention to his profession himself, no, his position, and so abruptly that his previous comrades would turn away from him in shock, seeing him suddenly as a man of the cloth.

He insisted on it, however. To present himself as this kind of authority from time to time was his duty. Of course he considered himself one of them, if anyone was. Yet it was not acceptable for them to keep letting themselves go in his presence; they had to give heed to his central concerns, at least now and then. In the long run he preferred to be cursed as a preacher than to be their pal. It filled him with conflict that, except perhaps when he was celebrating Mass or writing his sermons, he appeared outwardly to be anything but a “Reverend.”

How he loved driving, and fast, especially on this broad, rather deserted plain along the border, where during the period when he was engaged to be married he had even participated in an amateur auto race, with the same number painted large on the Volkswagen that he later used for his laundry in the seminary for latecomers.

Yet Carinthia north of the Drau, where he was headed today around noon, remained, as in his youth, a cold, unfriendly region, almost enemy territory, as if — though this was actually not true, if you looked at it the right way — southern Slavic soulfulness and earth-dreaminess came to an end there, and starting with the northern bank of the river, the landscape, including the fields, which were really no different, and the scattered church towers, were pierced by the gaze of the Germanic front soldiers, extinguished by a word-rattling German-speakingness that kept everything else at bay. This image — where did it come from? — he had still been unable to exorcise entirely; not long ago he had looked at the faces of schoolchildren from the capital city bouncing along in the back of army trucks on the tenth of October, the anniversary of the referendum that had joined the southern region to Austria in 1920, and had seen the faces of these children, obviously gleeful at having a day without school and high-spirited because of getting to ride in such a special vehicle, as those of grim volunteers, or at least children who were up to no good.

Such moods, which he called his “daily dose of dementia,” were calmed now by driving, also by the sight of snow high on the Sau Alps, which ran across the entire countryside to the north, and finally dissolved in thin air over on the other side of the rift carved out by the river, at dinner, where he sat with his “brother in office,” simply by virtue of his now having for the first time that day, not shadowy ghosts, but a person with clear outlines sitting across from him, and quite a young one at that, his mouth, cheeks, eyes, forehead nothing but young.

And thus, when his neighbor told him that the sole remaining Slavic grave inscription in the Ruden cemetery had now been removed, or at least hidden, squeezed in between the wall and German-gold stones, it was he who said that did not mean anything; to overlook it would be a form of strength; what mattered was something else entirely!

And he continued talking, about how urgent a German translation of the New Testament was, one neither as colloquial as Luther’s nor like one of the more recent ones, pitched to the understanding of the average newspaper reader, but one that was as literal as possible, from the Greek, which was akin to German, heart and soul, as were no other two languages he could name.

On his way back he thought he heard from a house standing alone at the bottom of the rift a loud sobbing, which turned out to come from the television there.

Out of the river rift, up on the Jaunfeld Plain again, back in his south, open in all directions, he saw from the highway, at the foot of Rinkenberg’s hill, which seemed closer on this dark day, the ancient priest from the village out walking; he had recently gone completely blind, and was being led across the fields by a child, his outstretched hand on the child’s shoulder, a gesture with which the blind man continued to celebrate the Eucharist in his church, proclaiming the texts from the Introibo to the Ite missa est by heart.

My friend turned off to the east, to the village called Dob, or in German Aich, where his parishioner lay dying and at the same time a single figure stood waiting at the edge of town in front of that railroad station he had always associated with Westerns, those films he had watched in his youth, and not merely to kill time; in his thoughts he got out and waited there with Jimmy Stewart.

In the heart of the village — there still was one here — by the outdoor clay bowling alley belonging to the restaurant now no longer in operation, he actually did stop, simply to roll into nowhere the one mud-encrusted, half-rotted wooden ball lying around.

Only after that did he enter the house next door with the dying man, who was fully conscious and at first shrank into his corner at the sight of the man in black, hair and eyes also black. What calmed and strengthened him at once was precisely the odd scorn in the priest’s gaze, which certainly did not pertain to him, the invalid in the last stages. This man facing death asked for the priest’s blessing and did not want to receive it lying down, but instead got out of bed and knelt for it; and thus received Extreme Unction, this sacrament that has almost gone out of use, practiced now simply to ease the conscience of the relatives, to whom the priest in departing indicated outside the door that their father would not die during the night, but tomorrow morning — for a long time now he had had a sense for the moment. And what if he himself died now, this very evening? they asked. He was indignant. “I’m not finished with myself yet.”

Alone, heading back to his car, he found the remote village in midafternoon still permeated with the freshness of morning. In the courtyards turnips were heaped up; a pear, at eye level, felt heavy in his hand; the mountains forming a great circle around the arena of the plain stood there in a color for which the name “Wyoming blue” came to him out of nowhere. How long had it been since he had gotten away from this region, the entire year thus far. He ordered two youths who were sitting on motorbikes and talking at the top of their lungs, while repeatedly revving their engines, to turn them off, went to his car without trying to hear what they were saying about him behind his back, and himself stepped hard on the gas.

The only walk he took this day that deserved the name was on a path through the fields, back to the edge of the Dobrava Forest, his destination the roadside shrine there, from which, on his instructions, a stonemason was removing the stucco and also the postwar frescoes — in the priest’s opinion not only clumsy but also mindless — so that the little place of worship would once more have nothing to show but its medieval stonework, at least for the present.

Now he had his rubber boots on, and also a mason’s jacket and cap, and joined the silent workman in hammering away, one of them outside, the other inside, and the mason was then fired up by his employer’s encouraging shouts, growing louder and louder as the original structure became visible and began to shine through (hadn’t it originally been his, the mason’s idea?).

And later, wearing the same outfit, my friend back home in his orchard picked clean the one apple tree that had not yet been harvested, until the last glimmer of day, when, from the foot of the ladder, a man in a necktie inquired where he might find the priest here, saying the Eternal Light in the church was not working; he was a traveling candle salesman, and also sold electric ones (now preferred by acolytes as better for their lungs). “The priest is on a round-the-world journey,” my friend replied, coughing from the phlegm caused by the candle soot, which would get worse during the winter, and laughed at the salesman’s departing back, neither maliciously nor kindly, just determined to remain uninvolved, decisively unmoved, as the child of Siebenbrunn had been taught by his father the sexton.