Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

And telling stories in writing is something else again. There, without a specific audience, without my voice’s getting in the way, not forced to wait for the right moment — that is within my control when I write, which unlike any other activity gives me an awareness of having time — my telling stories comes to me in a way that oral storytelling comes only by pure luck, often invalidated the very next day. Only in written form is my storytelling suited to my nature, on the right path, at home, no matter whom it deals with, even my son.

This has meanwhile become a conviction, reinforced by the observation that all my life, whenever I opened my mouth to tell a story, even if I was bursting with it, I hardly ever found a hearing, but instead alienated others and spoiled their fun. Where was the humor I kept trying to slip in edgewise? Only through my writing and being read was a change brought about.

This year, when my son was traveling in Southeastern Europe, almost always alone, I did not worry about him, for the first time. Nothing could happen to him, and for moments at a time this very thought made me uneasy again.

Yet wasn’t it true that in the preceding years, at precisely those times when I knew him to be in danger, my otherwise constant worry about him had ceased, replaced by a pleasurable sense of acceptance? And since the dangers, always major ones, had multiplied of late, hadn’t that very fact rendered me immune to my age-old worry about my closest kin? But: was he really still my closest kin? And: who was I without my age-old worry?

For example, that time when Valentin was trying to hitch a ride on the outskirts of town and his leg was almost torn off by the kick starter of a motorcycle that grazed him as it whizzed by, and he would have bled to death then and there if help had not arrived immediately, as I left the hospital where my son was lying with shattered bones and went home in the middle of the night, I felt receptive as never before to this particular hour of the night, to the region altogether, and grateful; the way things were now was right; I had shed a part of myself, a part that was past its usefulness. Only an adult could be as light of heart and unshakable as I was then — or unmoved? At any rate, that hour, and the others that followed, almost fatal to my son, gave me a standard by which to measure.

It is not entirely accurate to say that Valentin undertook his journey to track down his father’s youth. One stimulus, among several others, was a story I had invented out of the whole cloth, a first-person narrative (a form that always suggests itself when the bulk of the task facing me consists of inventing and playing out the possibilities), the only one of my books he read, actually at the suggestion of, no, under orders from his girlfriend, although otherwise he knows the classics, as well as my contemporaries, from Filip Kobal to Kazuo Ishiguro, also Peter Turrini and Max Goldt, and now at twenty-two, out of fear of soon having nothing more to discover, is a great reader, the only one among thousands, but wasn’t I the same in my day? And besides, time and again he has knowingly deviated from the route of my story and has picked up the story again only at intervals, as a sort of travel guide, more testing it than using it (“many mistakes, but apparently intentional ones”).

And the money for his trip was almost entirely his own, from working as a disc jockey in various young people’s nightclubs and from selling his first pictures; a contribution came from my sister’s estate, which, because it consisted of almost nothing, struck him all the more powerfully as an omen. My son sometimes makes so much of his frugality that I have come to view it as one of his main characteristics, like his punctuality, which does not stem from a sort of obsequiousness but rather manifests itself as that of a tyrant, whose time one wastes at one’s peril; woe unto him who, regardless of the fact that he may be much older and even more powerful, comes even a quarter of an hour late to a meeting with my son, let alone without an excuse.

Having arrived in Ljubljana on a frosty January day by train, by way of Graz and Maribor, Valentin continued on by bus to Nova Gorica. At first Yugoslavia was merely a country he had to pass through on his way to his site for a walking tour, Greece. It meant as little to him beforehand as his ancestors. Although receptive to and gifted at foreign languages, new ones as well as old, he gave everything Slavic a wide berth, except the literature, as if its very sounds were an imposition; the music, whether folk songs or the works of nineteenth-century Russian composers, even repelled him; he felt as if his blood were being sucked out by those “parallel fifths, which are taboo, and not without reason, in melody” (whereas I at his age had shivered through entire nights in my pitch-black student room on the Kahlenberg with Mussorgsky).

Nevertheless he could do nothing now, as at other times, but keep his eyes and ears open. In contrast to his father, who in something new often notices an incidental or grotesque feature, or nothing at all, he immediately notices the salient characteristics, and quite casually. I have often wondered whether he, who has this eye for whatever is essential to a phenomenon, and yet, it seems to me, is never astonished at anything, is really cut out to be the researcher he wants to become someday. In many respects he is superior to me — but what is his passion? his dream?

Thus he had now set out, almost too well prepared, I thought, on this yearlong journey, had anticipated every unusual situation and had taken something along for it. But was that really true? Didn’t his main baggage consist of a present from the petty prophet of Porchefontaine, Valentin’s benefactor from the time he was a child, an ancient Greek biography of Pythagoras, in which the philosopher’s guideline for life had less to do with tools and measuring instruments than with untrammeled observation of phenomena and committing them to memory?: thus Pythagoras had had his disciples get out of bed each morning only after they had repeated to themselves the previous day’s lessons, and then those from the day before; this retrieval of the day before yesterday, without aids, purely from memory, was, according to his biographer Iamblichos, perhaps the essence of the Pythagorean doctrine.

And thus my son, on closer inspection, had his few tools — his army knife, drawing pencils, a geologist’s hammer — more as a sort of ballast, to keep “both feet on the ground.” Committing the phenomena to memory was not something he set out purposefully to do; rather he brushed by them, his thoughts elsewhere: “If you expect an object to leave a lasting impression,” he told me once, “you mustn’t under any circumstance stare at it; you should look through it, though attentively, and only then will the impression be reliable and lasting, and its gestalt will give rise to discoveries more readily from an afterglow than from the thing itself!” (His other approach was to turn away intermittently from his object, intentionally immerse himself in something else, so that, when he turned back toward it, he could “catch it as it was!”)

Valentin produced that day-before-yesterday experience often on the same day by falling asleep right after an event, for moments that took the place of an entire night, and, after the first waking up and recalling, falling asleep a second time: now, after the passage of barely an hour, he saw the object in the light and form of the day before yesterday. Wasn’t that sufficient as a dream?

Atrip by bus on a winter’s day, through an unfamiliar country, was particularly suited for this kind of brief, two-time slumber. And thus the “day-before-yesterday effect” assured that even before he reached Postojna, the prehistoric dugout from the moor of Ljubljana that he had just seen in the museum there had engraved itself upon his memory for the rest of his life, its length, weight, peat-blackness, fissured surfaces.