Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

The waitress and cook of the Ston restaurant had gone home and had left the back door open for us; it would lock by itself. What distances could be opened up simply by such a going to a door in this Yugoslavia. The night light was sufficient for us. The taxi driver was asleep outside in his Mercedes, bought with his factory earnings when he was in Germany. When we finally climbed in, someone roused himself way in the back of the car. It was one of the workers from a construction company with branches all over Yugoslavia that was building a hotel on the bay. He had just been informed that his father had died, far down in the south, in a village in the mountains of Montenegro, and he asked to be allowed to go with us to catch the first bus from Dubrovnik to Titograd. Along the way he told us his father had died suddenly, of a heart attack, a construction worker like him, forty years old. Since the son did not seem that much younger, he was asked his age. He was twenty-five; when he was born, his father had barely started his apprenticeship, and his mother had still been in school. We said nothing all the way to the dark, locked-up bus station outside the city walls. The buses parked around the barracklike station would stand there empty and inaccessible for hours. Their marker plates, with two letters for the place they came from, bordered by the little five-pointed star of the partisans, ranged from MO for Mostar, SA for Sarajevo, BL for Banja Luka to ZG for Zagreb, TG for Titograd, BG for Belgrade, and there was even an LJ for Ljubljana, very far away, and a VŽ for Varazdin, probably even farther away.

Of that night of storytelling I also thought at the time: Actually this should continue now. So although each of us was already supposed to go his separate way, I urged the others to spend one more hour sitting with me the next day on Dubrovnik’s Stradun. And my friends did indeed come, laconic and full of anticipation. I was the one who did not know what to do next. I wanted a continuation and could not pull it off, at least not in their presence.

And therein lies one of my fatal mistakes in life. Just a few days ago I wrote a note to myself: “Always, even in moments of fulfillment, your tendency to think: It’s not here yet! You always experience even the most perfect present moment as a mere advent. You always expect something more afterward, something bigger, the ultimate. Look! It has been here and is here. And why force something unique into repetition, into a series, into permanence? Consider your monosyllabic friends, for whom once was everything.”

Even this morning, for instance, here, behind the house: when I was using a crowbar to loosen the gravel surface compacted by wintry downpours, sparks flew repeatedly; the chain of hills along the Seine contains a good deal of flint. And once I hit a flintstone hidden so deep in the ground that for a moment I saw a spark that shot not into the daylight but down into the dark, and lit it up with a lightninglike reflection off the soil, whereupon the momentary cave disappeared again. And again the unique occurrence was not enough for me, and I wanted a continuation, hoped with every further blow to see an even more splendid hollow illuminated, until I finally went inside and jotted down: “Your greed for continuations, your mania for completeness.”

But didn’t I long ago establish a principle to guide me in such matters, which went something like this: your experience may be fragmentary, but your narration must be complete!? And apparently this maxim, too, like all those that ever lit my path, dissolved gradually, or, as they said where I came from, a wee bit at a time. Goethe, it seems to me, became increasingly sure of himself as he grew older, despite all the childlike qualities he preserved; the child became an imperious child (and at the same time wrote “gently” and “transitorily”), while I am becoming less and less sure with every passing year, and at the same time would like to write as penetratingly and pointedly as ever. Perhaps I still need a master, and doesn’t the itinerant stonemason from the twelfth European century seem closer to me now, his travel notes beginning with an exclamation and a plea: “Oh, where will this drab highway, along which I now stumble for the third winter, among legions of others, finally become my own green path?”

Ihave experienced nights of storytelling more often with strangers than with my friends. In such hours, the former come together with my friends, as in the fragment of Heraclitus in which the sleeper taps the one who is awake. And I have experienced this most frequently among strangers since I settled beyond the hills, in the hinterland of the great metropolis. The light here probably also has a little to do with it, but mainly it is particular places, the eating places in the region, the bars that close early in the evening. Whenever I can, I want to be among the last. For the most part nothing happens then; the rule is prompt locking-up and the disappearance of all the regulars into the tongue-shaped settlement surrounded by wooded hills. But from time to time the bar — of which there are only two in this particular district — stays open even after the lights have been turned off once, for no particular occasion, in a general, gradual winding-down.

In this transitional moment, a brief, much too brief, night of storytelling takes place among us strangers here. Unexpectedly, the excitement wakes me up, and at the same time I find peace: peace, the great eye. Now the majority of guests leave the café, at the latest at the next hint, the switching-off of the fan or, in winter, of the ceiling-mounted heater. The few who stay behind stand around the room, except perhaps for the one older woman, who sits on the only chair not yet put up on the tables. The iron shutters have been let down almost all the way, the door locked, the key on the inside, and anyone who wants to leave turns it, whereupon someone inside locks up again.

Somewhere a crack is always left open for a glance out into the night. Hardly anything is going on out there; all the roads in the settlement are access roads and end at the base of the chain of hills, or, if they continue into the woods, then only as wood roads, with white-painted barriers where the forest begins. As a rule they merge with a route that makes a loop around the remotest corner of the suburb. This ring road somewhat resembles a breakwater, and the section enclosed by it a harbor, for instance the harbor of Piran on the Istrian Peninsula, where thirty-five years ago I first sat by the sea, as a student, after a major examination, and, there among the limestone blocks, for hours on end, knew nothing at all of myself and my origins, of jurisprudence, of limestone; I was refreshingly oblivious, and appearances were quite enough; I did not want to know what lay behind anything, a state to which I sometimes long from the bottom of my heart to return.

Part of this civilized surface carved out of the woods actually is water, the water of a pond that has been here for centuries. When you glance out of one of the bars at night through the remaining crack, the black water gleams, now and then ruffled by a gust of wind, and the headlights of the infrequently passing cars dart across the water like those of speedboats. But in the second bar, too, outside of which only the empty pavement gleams, when you look out at night you can sense the presence of water right around the corner, not only of this pond but also of the couple of others in this corner of the world, most of them already in the forest.

Those standing in the bar at night appear at first stranded, and in my imagination they have already been there a long time. Not a few of them, as I gather from scraps of conversation, without specifically listening for the information, have lived in their region here since childhood. Although the bars are not dives but rather the only public places in these outlying towns, serving also as tobacco shops, where you can buy newspapers and postage stamps, and in the summer, when the bakery is closed, as bread depots, I have never met a single one of my neighbors there. The citizenry is not included among the guests at the local cafés, at least not in the evening.