Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

Washed and changed and then out again! already in darkness to Rinkolach, the village at the end of beaten paths, the village through which no street leads onward.

The affiliated church there was open, except for the commemoration of its consecration, held on a Sunday in summer, only for the few Masses for the dead. On this particular evening it was for a small farmer or occasional farmhand, without any family, who had died a long time ago, from the windows of whose former cottage turkeys now looked out, being raised by the neighbors who had ordered and paid for the Mass for him. Aside from the almost obligatory stranger who had somehow wandered in and sat off to one side, these were also the only people waiting for the priest in the dim church, praying, in Slovenian, the long All Souls’ Litany, actually more a sort of invocation, close to singing, and finally, very gradually and very delicately modulating into singing. At first, after entering through the open door, he had merely stood in the background, and they did not notice him until he joined in the last apostrophe, addressed not to the saints but to the Holy Trinity, at a terrifying volume, and also in another key.

The church of Rinkolach (Rinkole in Slavic), on its patch of meadow in the middle of the village, looked from the outside to be about the size of a hall; the inside, of the dimensions of a living room, though for a large family, did not provide enough space in the middle for a so-called “people’s altar,” and thus he said Mass at a distance from the people, raised above them on the stepped platform, usually with the nave at his back, from which, to be sure, the dove of the Holy Ghost embroidered on his vestments kept an eye on the congregation.

For each sacramental act, performed alone, without an acolyte, he stretched his arms wide, summoning all his strength, as if he were doing work that required muscular effort. At the same time he moved along briskly, without prolonging any gesture; even the pauses during which he collected himself or simply waited showed him in a sort of activity. Just as he spread his arms like a weight lifter, he also snapped open the book for the reading of the apostle’s epistle, leafed back to the Gospel, jabbed, with his thick finger, at the written text, hammered, gripping the altar slab with both hands, his forehead audibly against it, fell, with a crash, to one knee, pounded himself so hard on the chest that it echoed, unlocked the tabernacle with a powerful twist of the hand, fished out the chalice with his fist, thrust it toward the congregation—“eat!”—and sawed the air as he delivered the benediction.

Once he had even disappeared in the middle, running to that narrow passageway behind the altar where the wooden structure of the altar, without the gilding, rough, in its unexpectedly mysterious form, could just as well be an old, abandoned flour mill, a part of the flour chute; he remained, as during a Mass in Russia, absent from the action out in front, which merely increased the suspense, and returned only after quite some time, again at a run, for the continuation.

Outside the momentary gobbling of a turkey, the drone of a night plane, the seemingly even more distant screeching of truck brakes.

It was perhaps the last mild evening of the year, and therefore he sat for a while afterward with the neighbors of the deceased on their farmyard bench, long enough for an entire tribe to line up on.

With their backs against the wall of the house, half in darkness, half in the glow of the barn light a little farther off, they sat in silence, facing the barely discernible pattern of the ventilation slits in the barn — in the form of solar rays — hearing the rustling and crackling in the invisible famous branching linden tree (and the hundred-year-old cherry tree) in the middle of Rinkolach, and sat and sat, again as in an earlier time, with which, my friend now thought, something could still be undertaken, something could be done; and not at all sure that with artificial lighting of the dead-end street a “long-cherished wish” of the villagers would be fulfilled, as the community newsletter regularly stated.

How he loved the night wind, the black on black. No star was in the sky. No child was crouching under the bench. A riddle from the old days: “What’s lying under the bench, and when you grab it, it squeals?”—“A chain.” All across the plain ladders were standing in orchards. In the last train from K. the heads of the sleeping passengers were leaning against the windows, and the locomotive’s whistle echoed far into Yugoslavia. A palm tree rustled in the sun on the outskirts of Jericho. In a new German translation of the Bible he would put “confidence” in place of “hope.” The woman next to him brushed the dandruff off his coat collar with a hand that was neither cold nor warm, more mineral-like, like flintstone.

And again, without any movement, he felt, in the first hour of night, the approaching morning, this time, however, as something ice-cold that reached into his armpits and then alarmed him mightily. At the same time, he felt “longing” coming back, his favorite word. No, it was a hunger, in the middle of his heart, and it was not coming back, but had been there forever. And then he caught himself also thinking, “No, I did not give up today — not yet!”

What? Did he need a third manifestation?

To be asked about my son, by anyone at all, has always put me in a bad mood, out of a clear blue sky; it has immediately destroyed the harmony between me and the other person. It was even worse when I was expected to tell stories about him. “Tell us!”: the very form of this invitation rubbed me the wrong way, and all the more so in conjunction with my own child. At least one way out was to say terrible things about him, to revile him from afar, and in general to invent atrocity stories about him (which also could be counted on to elicit an entirely different kind of sympathy than when I morosely stuck to the truth).

Even very early on, whenever I told a third person something about him in his presence, he himself would break in, as if his father were guilty of betraying him. In his absence I still suffer the effects of this, such that when I am forced to speak of him I vividly picture his disapproval. But the law of silence that pertains to my son’s life, including trivial details (these in particular), originates for the most part with me. Already long ago, even without the child’s punishing stare, I was usually conscious when talking about him that this was actually a form of gossip, and inappropriate.

I also strenuously avoid asking other parents about their offspring, and when I happen to do so after all, out of politeness or heedlessness, or heedless politeness? I feel hostile in advance toward any answer they may give, and then I am sometimes surprised at how enthusiastically they come out with the answer, even in the case of bad news, as if certain fathers and mothers found themselves in their verbal element only when speaking of their children — why else would their conversational tone be transformed into triumphal blasts?

My resistance to telling anyone about my son seems therefore not to follow a universal law. Isn’t it actually crazy that I already resent it when a person asking me about my son presumes to use his first name?: “So, how is Valentin these days?”

It is something else again when it comes to telling about my next of kin or ward when no one is asking me about him. Then I occasionally succeed in being perfectly relaxed about it, speaking in a voice seemingly made up of several voices together, so that my son, I am certain, would not only approve but would also feel validated. This kind of storytelling I have inside me. Only it comes out decidedly too infrequently, because it is either the wrong listener or more likely the wrong moment (is there even such a thing as the “wrong listener”?).