Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

He traveled south, crisscrossing Slovenia, from the coastal area back into continental Europe, from early spring into winter and vice versa. For a long time he saw the sea, the Adriatic, only for seconds, from afar, from the limestone ridges. Sometimes, after covering a stretch in the dark, when he had not been able to see anything, the next morning, in daylight, he would take the bus back the way he had come, approximately to the place where night had fallen.

It was already February when he found a place to sit by the harbor of Piran, otherwise hardly a day’s journey from Nova Gorica, on the breakwater there, my stones of ignorance, in the face of which, when I was his age, thirty-five years ago or the day before yesterday, everything I had learned and all my origins had fallen away from me, and for an afternoon and an evening I had felt nothing but that I was cocooned in the world, a feeling that never came back so completely, if at all, after Piran and that first day by the sea.

From this vicarious refresher course, Valentin sent me a drawing of the stone blocks, nothing but these; the bay and the wooded shore opposite he had erased. Seen thus, with nothing around them, filling the paper and furthermore executed with excessive precision, the blocks looked unrecognizable, might just as well be animal heads, cracks in a wall, bundles of laundry, and were, or created, when I held them up close to my eyes, just as long ago, for seconds at a time, the image of nothing at all. Yes, I had seen these objects back then, and myself with them, as just this pre-creational, unformed. But how could one escape knowledge in the long run? No matter: my stones were still there.

Hardly imaginable that in the calm bay of Piran such a breakwater was necessary, and yet farther out by the punta with the lighthouse Valentin encountered wall-high masses of pebbles, thrown by the most recent Adriatic floodwaters from the ocean bottom high over the seawall onto the promenade, up to the foundations of the houses on the spit of land, much as a previous storm had buried those saltworks in the neighboring bay of Strunjan, where the youthful first-person narrator of my much later “Stones of Ignorance” story, aroused by the salt-white emptiness, hounded by lust for an unspecified woman, who, however, never appears, then decides it is now or never: he must sit down and write a book.

This sea, calm as a pond today, tomorrow a raging monster, began to preoccupy my white-skinned son, previously a rather reluctant guest on the Atlantic and the Pacific. Yet he saw “my” saltworks only on exhibit in the Piran salt museum, in photos, with the last remaining objects, the corncob as the smallest sluiceway possible, the bread stamps the various saltworks families had had for the bread that was baked for them in the communal ovens, the hats with extra-wide brims that also protected their eyes and noses from the blazing sun there.

He also studied in Piran that particular gray of the palm trunks, and in the mild evening on the docks for the first time enjoyed a folk dance, even the costumes; or he caught a sense of how the dancers enjoyed finally having such a different performance space for their dance and their music, otherwise always performed only far off in their narrow Alpine valleys; here their accordions, clarinets, costumes, and limbs were animated by the wind on the harbor square, serving as a great dance floor, and open besides at the rear to the salt tide.

During the first month of his trip he had not always been so much in the thick of things. From time to time he had even been seized with desolation.

Again unlike me and many of my generation, being isolated, alienated, or dislocated did not give him a heightened sense of reality. (At least when I was his age, it was often the odd twist, the element of strangeness that made me feel at home, synchronized.) Only on his first day did all the unfamiliar silhouettes provide an escort for Valentin; then they took on hostile or at any rate unfriendly features; shifting his focus to music or nature no longer created a protective sphere around him.

For the first time in his life he found himself in a truly foreign land, and this seemed particularly meaningless to him, for he had gone there after all without any necessity. This was not his world, not Europe; these Balkans, of which he had had no image ahead of time, did not allow him to form one even now. And if the streets in the couple of larger cities with their hordes of pedestrians had been great centers for stimulation and relaxation well into the century, including for my generation, they were nothing of the sort for my son now: reality for him was assured only by his few regular hideouts at home in the in-between districts, along with the jam-packed crowds of his contemporaries who frequented them — not even friends.

But turning back was not possible. He had told his people at home about the trip, and until it was completed he could not show his face among them. And yet at the beginning, every time he made one of his morning excursions back in the direction he had come, retracing the previous night’s stretch, he was strongly tempted to stay on the bus as it traveled north, and flee back to his own world.

During just such a spell of back-and-forth, at the station in Koper, Istria, which on the previous evening, through the steamed-up windshield of the bus, had been nothing but a rain puddle in the drizzling darkness, the turning point came.

Various factors were at work: the transportation center in the freshness of morning, long and low, with lots of glass, in which the sky was mirrored and through which the sea shone, far outside town, the depot for buses, for a couple of boats, and likewise for trains, whose tracks ended at a belt of reeds, showing a new shade of winter gray, among them scattered vegetable gardens and orchards won from the sea, each populated by one sheep; a saying of Pythagoras, encountered as he read on in the biography: “Every place demands justice”; simply counting silently, and perhaps even the local brandy, helpful this time, drunk outside standing up, with other drinkers, older and younger, at the tent-like snack bar between the end of the tracks and the bus platform.

After that he was healed of his foreignness. He had reached the point of no return, and there my son, who otherwise always had a strange look whenever I asked him whether he was happy, could say he was, yes! No more thinking that he was missing something in his Viennese cellars; and before his eyes a wonderfully long trip. Nothing, nothing, would make him turn back now.

First, however, he went to get some sleep, under a cypress in the local cemetery, on the slope just beyond the tracks, boat channels, and streets, and waking up as if it were the next day, although he had drawn only a few deep breaths, seeing a blond young woman in dark clothing watering the plants on a freshly dug grave, he took the local bus to that very Piran where “the day before yesterday” he had slunk around like a total stranger.

From then on, although he continued to dawdle and also returned to his practice of repeating night trips the following day, his journey took on a sort of elan.

Still on the Istrian coast, in Porec, he copied off the oldest building there a Latin tribute to a famous man; he, until then completely without ambition, was gradually catching fire for some undertaking or other—“I shall do something”—and wanted a similar memorial to himself one day: “In his honor this hall has been doubled in size,” and then forgot such dreams again, for instance spending an entire Sunday in Pazin, back in the interior of the country, knowingly missing one train after the other, while he listened to the doves calling through the city and out into the whole expanse of countryside.