Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

On the bus he had breathed a peephole in the ice flowers on the window, through which he looked out in his own fashion, barely moving his head. They entered an area almost without human traces, deserted and more than deserted, leading into an expanse with invisible boundaries, in spite of the cold already green as in spring, as if made for fruit growing, except that no roads led there, and even the few cart tracks immediately came to an end: this had to be one of those areas that at unpredictable intervals, hardly related to precipitation, was flooded, the result of subterranean water pressure, which made it shoot up like jets from holes in the ground, forming large lakes from one day to the next, which could then be crossed only by boat.

Yet my son took in not the image of the strange landscape but a subject for scientific research: nature as “landscape” did not count for him. He was not interested in looking at things, or at any rate he hardly lingered over that. He immediately, as a matter of course, shifted his focus to the particulars, allowed these to impress themselves on him, distinguished them from one another, and looked for what they had in common.

The first thing he had always looked for, beyond the phenomenon, was its underlying principle. And having detected this, as a rule instinctively, in the twinkling of an eye, he was able, as he then once wrote me from his travels, to achieve “an entirely different view.” Except that he did this in passing, kept it to himself, explained nothing (at most uttered, more to himself, his one-syllable “Look!”), and only when he was asked came out with his conclusions, inferences, his always convincing theories, which, translated literally, were of course “observations.” Thus in his account of that bus trip he merely mentioned in passing, along with Traveling Band on the radio and the way his nostrils froze during the short rest stop in Vrhnika, the gray that altered from one type of tree to the next — thousands of shades of gray, passing, blinking, flashing by his peephole, and only later, in the spring, during a longer stay on Lake Ohrid, did he set about writing down his “Observations on the Variations in Winter Gray.”

Then the so-called Threshold of Postojna, a threshold also in a historical sense for all the migrations of peoples through the ages, from east to west, actually more flight than migrations, and more a narrow pass or battlefield than a threshold.

For Valentin, however, this was a mere threshold in the rock, a geological formation. For him there was no such thing as history, and in politics he was a self-proclaimed idiot. He did not even know that the Yugoslavia he was using as his corridor had earlier been Communist, had even earlier been overrun by the Germans, had even earlier been a kingdom, and even earlier … If chastised, he would at most have responded that such “earliers” were everywhere, extending back into prehistoric times, and that would be all well and good if everyone did not arbitrarily derive from his particular “earlier” all of — what was it called? — history, and then, from that, exclusive rights to the present. “I learned in school that two thousand years ago this was the Roman province of Illyria, and today in Ljubljana I saw in a window the book title Are We in Reality Not Slavs but Illyrians? To me what is real should be first and foremost what exists now.”

Now, after the Threshold of Postojna, it began to snow, which it had been too cold to do before. At an unmarked stop by a road through the woods, a schoolchild, his cheeks rosy, stepped in the swirling white out of the underbrush, and did not even need to warm up particularly on the bus; while waiting he had crouched in a natural basket formed of branches, without freezing.

And after the next threshold, the one leading into the lowlands along the Adriatic coast, it was raining, and in Nova Gorica, where darkness had long since fallen, a warm wind was blowing, in tune with the palm trees there, which rustled. From the bus station, a glass shed in a wooded park, walking paths radiated in a star pattern, and Valentin joined the largest group. On this evening he walked along among the unknown silhouettes as if he were a local person going home, and not only because he had the address of the place where I had stayed there.

The offspring of a villager, he had none of the traits of one. Where I had stubby fingers, his had turned out long, narrow, and almost oddly flexible; I could not imagine they would ever display hundreds of little scars like his father’s. Likewise my neck, which was squat, or perhaps hunched between my shoulders out of old boarding-school habit, had in him grown freely into the air, also strong and straight, and when he was tired his head never drooped to the side like mine, or to the back, like his grandfather’s on the farmyard bench of an evening. At the same time, Valentin had larger feet than I, and his soles had more standing surface than those of almost all the cottagers and their offspring in the region we came from, where people stand better on one leg than on two (one immediately notices, whether inside churches or outside at gatherings, that the men as well as the women, the entire population, are constantly shifting from one foot to the other, just like that, standing next to each other and talking, often shifting at the same time, as if in a preestablished rhythm, giving the impression of a regional dance that consists of constant rocking back and forth, swaying, wobbling).

My son likewise shows no tendency, as we do, when meeting even a familiar person, to become skittish (observation in the Jaunfeld villages: that in everyday conversation, even between neighbors who have known each other all their lives, each looks somewhere else — as if they felt brush by them and flash through them that old uneasiness on soil where they were once only tenants).

And it means little to him that he is an Austrian, or a German, and not merely because he has a Catalan mother. He is neither ashamed of it nor is he proud of anything in that connection; he is indifferent toward it, in a way that seems entirely new to me, as far as one’s own country is concerned. As a young person I suffered from Austria — I use this expression advisedly — and thought I was the only one, discovering only later: many suffered. Yes, we suffered from Austria, and differently from the way I imagine a German suffering from his Germany. That a person then became head of state who represented to a T the outlines of our perhaps half-forgotten youthful suffering brought all this back and at the same time made it obvious that this was a suffering without hope, for life.

Valentin, on the other hand, who had been living in Austria for years now, had a few places, or rather spots, there, where he liked to go, and that was enough of a country for him, if he even used such a word. And when I visited, if he happened to take me to them, I allowed myself to catch his enthusiasm, for I noticed how important it was to him that I at least approve of what he liked. Although he had spent most of his time in suburbs, dragged out there by his father, and then eventually reconciled to it, all that now seemed as if it had never taken place, and in Vienna he never looked for a possible equivalent to the suburbs of Paris, unlike me (every time on the very morning of my arrival, as if salvation depended on it). He strikes me as the kind of person — and his entire generation with him? — who is less intent on finding a permanent home than on having hideouts here and there, located neither in the center nor on the outskirts, but usually, almost as a rule, somewhere in between.

Also my habit of walking everywhere means little to him. But when he walks, from one hideout to the next, he moves so quickly, without ever breaking into a run, throwing his whole body into it, that I can barely keep up with him.