Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

He, ever meticulous, positively finicky about his clothes, discovered shabbiness, or the particular form of it characteristic of Yugoslavia, felt accepted by the deliberately unpleasing, pocket-sized, shacklike lodgings as by a reality more compact by comparison with that of the Europe he knew, stood, soon no longer distinguishable from those next to him, at bars often set up for only a day out in the open, squatted, leaned, and lay down among the scraps of newspaper, indecipherable to him, in the dust and weeds outside bus shelters, forgot departure times, slept his daily brief day-before-yesterday sleep on the floor of public toilets, curved in a U-shape around the bowl, by train embankments, also in the middle of a railroad yard.

Letting himself go was not merely a game for my son now. He even considered it something worth striving for; only in this way could he fulfill his potential; only by letting himself go would he also belong to the others, be less conspicuous and alone.

As for his face, it took only a little, a reddening of the cheeks, a swollen lip, for him to seem on the skids (at least to me). And on the other hand it took even less, almost nothing, or just that momentary dozing off, for the apparent bum to change back, into a young man? No, rather into an ageless scientist, someone untouchable, the very opposite of the genuinely down and out, for whom, according to Pythagoras, no doctrine was even conceivable, because not even a dream could cleanse their souls anymore.

Roaming over the Croatian island of Krk, in the company of similarly scraggly figures, when talk arose of cutting off the braid of one of them, it was he who in the general hesitation flipped open his jackknife and hacked away until the victim burst into tears. In Zadar, after an ashtray was hurled at a mirror, he was beaten up and thrown out of the bar, and then stumbled along for days, now one among many in that country going around in bandages and dressings, his on his chin, another’s above his eye, that of the woman way up front on the bus on her knee. Then on the trip to Split it was not the driver but Valentin who picked the music, well received by all the other passengers; he stood with his cassettes up front by the windshield, as if at his post, calm, in his mind planning the right transition from the present tape to the next, unapproachable, untouchable. And at the bus rest stop in Dubrovnik, on the Dalmatian coast, he amazed those present by doing one-second sketches of their faces, so good that one of those whose portrait he had done went parading through the bar, sticking his picture under everyone’s nose with a triumphant and also menacing “That’s me, see!” And in Ohrid, outdoors, with a view of the sea and the almost bald mountains of Albania, he wrote, from memory, his piece on the different grays of the wintry trees (which in the meantime has won a prize).

Now it stayed light in the evening so long that he did not need to retrace his steps the following morning. But near the Greek border, in Bitola, Macedonia, after the middle of April, shortly before Easter, snow caught up with him, actually only the flash of a few flakes at night by the bonfires in front of the former mosque where chess players were sitting, whom Valentin then beat one after the other. On an unlit side street a mule meanwhile stood motionless by a cart, its head lowered, in expectation of heavier snow.

Although it was just as cold the next day, on the other side of the border, in Florina, Greece, he felt welcome there in a different way from in his father’s Yugoslavia. That country, he wrote me, was really not for him, or not right now, though it would be later, and that indubitably. The appearance of standoffishness in the people, even toward each other, was too predominant; their friendliness remained to be discovered, behind the stolidness and the embarrassed scruffiness and coarseness. But whoever would be the discoverer?

In Greece he found himself back in the here and now, after the gloom of the previous months, due not only to the winter. What a gleam in Florina from the watches on the arms of passersby. And whereas in Yugoslavia there seemed to be only one direction and its opposite, here he was caught up in a cosmic confusion, a welter of possibilities.

On the day before Easter his travels took him on toward Thessaloniki, for the first time in a long while again on the trail of me, or of the hero of my story “Stones of Ignorance.” And again a long bus trip, over mountain thresholds, and again snow, which in the coastal area became nocturnal rain.

The following morning in the city there was so much traffic that getting from the seaside to the church on the slope where I had found the picture of the Resurrection was an uphill struggle. On the Egnatia, the east-west highway as wide as a river, cars flowed in such an unbroken stream, amid the constant din of police whistles, that the other shore with its façades remained not only inaccessible for a long time but also completely out of sight. And having finally reached the steep, winding north-south artery, without sidewalks, one not only had to hug the old brick retaining walls to get anywhere but from time to time also had to make oneself as skinny as possible, one shoulder leading, one’s hands in the fissures in the wall like a mountain climber’s, to reach the next switchback without being crushed by the trucks.

Valentin visited the fresco in the church of Nikolaos Orfanos described in my story only after all the other Byzantine sanctuaries, no bigger than chapels and squeezed in among ordinary houses, always very hard to find, and this, too, he at first contemplated only with his researcher’s eye: What were the paints made of? Where was the variation in the figures and groupings, seemingly the same from church to church?

And in between, in the open air, he had cast an eye over the equally numerous, but dilapidated, overgrown Turkish-Islamic monuments, especially the moss-green domes of the baths, as if to refresh his retina after all the Christian pictorial sequences, or for relaxation he had gone in any direction where there was nothing to be seen, or down the slope, way down to the smoke-shrouded Aegean sea.

That fresco, too, was in the church, or stone hut, one among too many.

It did not show the usual resurrection of the Son of God, but one of the moments afterward. It is a scene such as I, although pictorially familiar from an early age with every Station of the Cross, have never seen anywhere else. It does not show the Son of God risen from the dead, floating up out of the open grave; nor does he encounter, as in the usual sequence, the women with the anointing oil running away. The painter shows an episode between those two. The Savior, obviously just risen, is by himself, and is walking along in his billowing white shroud through an unpopulated landscape, in the background dark mounds of earth with scattered trees, and above a deep dark-blue sky, in my recollection as black as outer space. Aside from his finger raised in benediction as he walks, no action is portrayed except this billowing and these vigorous steps in an early morning otherwise devoid of human forms, yet the eyes as well as the shoulders of this figure returned from the dead are receptive and permeable to all the light and morning air of the world. Who has experienced such a resurrection? And my first-person narrator thinks at the sight, “This is the image with which the world will begin anew.”

My son, on the other hand, immune to being distracted by the imagination, which he holds in reserve for his dreams, set the record clear: “black as outer space” was an exaggeration, and besides, as far as he was concerned, nothing needed to begin anew; things were new as it was. And then, in full view of that Easter scene in the Nikolaos Orfanos chapel in Thessaloniki, he suddenly fell asleep, there on the bare floor, and woke up even more quickly than usual, and contrary to his custom not in a reliable day-before-yesterday, but in the middle of nowhere. What resulted from this sleep and the shift into a Pythagorean day-before-yesterday was bad, as bad as could be: he was nowhere, had no father and no mother, had never had them; that business about friendship, which, according to that charlatan philosopher what’s-his-name, kept everything together, was a swindle, there was no one backing him up, no one he could call upon, the world, everybody, was fundamentally hostile and evil, he had merely managed to stay out of their clutches up to now, had been sleepwalking, and now that was over.