Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

When I hear other languages in the bay, it is almost always from residents, especially the Portuguese — no, they actually tend to conceal their native idiom, speaking in public more the language of the country — the North Africans, the Asians, most of all the Armenians and the Russians. Pretty much the only foreigners who are here intentionally, also of their own accord, come from nearby Paris, and can be recognized as outsiders precisely by their not presenting themselves as such, but instead as people from the capital in one way or another, including having the accent to match; and then they are not in the area for its own sake, but are using it only as the starting point or end point of a hike.

Otherwise I have encountered in these ten years almost exclusively foreigners who found their way to the bay either by chance or even involuntarily. One evening a couple from a provincial city came into one of the few restaurants, sought out, if at all, only by residents of the bay; they had wandered in from one of the industrial exhibitions on the periphery of Paris. The couple immediately drew attention to themselves there, in and of themselves and then also because of their completely different, louder, gesticulating, space-grabbing self-assurance, and finally they expressed in such clear signals and utterances their superiority to the region, also their disdain, in the presence of the scattering of brooding, seemingly hunched-over local folk that I, if they had not wolfed down their food and disappeared quickly, would have got up from my seat and, as a representative of the place, barked at them to behave themselves in a manner appropriate to strangers and guests here among us.

It was far more often than once that I heard people who had strayed into the region asking from their cars, “Can you please tell me where I am?” and when a car with a strange license plate pulls over to the side of the road, I am almost sure in advance that someone inside, looking quite lost, will be unfolding a map. And one time, when I was heading home long after midnight, several people came running toward me over the dark square in front of the railroad station, waving their arms and uttering cries of dismay (I immediately picked out my son in the group): as it turned out, a group of Chinese, who had mistakenly not got off the train until after the tunnel, and had now spent hours, meanwhile seized by panic, running back and forth like headless chickens, trapped in this indecipherable, night-cold no-man’s-land cage, without taxis and without any passersby at all, without an open bar or police station.

But hadn’t things been this way since long ago, not only in this current year of 1999? This year only one foreigner has stuck in my mind thus far: that almost-friend, a journalist, who changed his specialty from sports to war. When I, meanwhile more receptive to visits, perhaps precisely as a result of my months of activity here, showed him around the region, he considered it very special because he saw in a store window “souvenir” plaques of marble — in reality grave plaques in the stonecutter’s display. He has remained in my memory because he, still a very young man, was dead soon after that, killed in the German civil war.

It is not just since the beginning of this year that I have spent early evenings now and then standing in that bar, also a tobacco shop, that for me marks the last spit, the finis terrae of the bay. But only this year has it become an observation or looking post.

It happens that two major roads from Paris to Versailles meet there, one of them formerly the route that kings took over the chain of hills, both ascents very steep, with an actual top of the pass up there; the other, Route Nationale 10, leading from the great bend in the Seine down by Sevres through a gently climbing, meandering, gradually broadening valley, in my eyes at the place in question already an upland valley. The acute-angled junction of the two roads is officially called a pointe, a tongue, or, as I call it, a spit. Certain buses of line 171 have POINTE posted as their destination or last stop, whereas the majority continue on to the palace of Versailles, and likewise almost all the nearby facilities are called after it: Ambulance de la Pointe, Garage …, Pharmacie …, Video …, Tailleur de la Pointe (specializing in alterations).

In the Bar de la Pointe I avoid standing directly by the door, located I right in the spandrel of the junction, and instead seek out the back of the bar and gaze through the gaps between the others at the counter. And time and again at nightfall I had the image of a particular darkness, in which cars on the former royal road that cuts across the bay were all in a hurry to get onto the decidedly brighter and also wider highway, the Nationale, and as they accelerated it sounded like the squeaking of rabbits in flight, while the vehicles approaching in the opposite direction seemed to hesitate before the already palpable wooded darkness of the bay.

Yet not only in my imagination is this Pointe something like a place of transition, or actually more a line of demarcation. On old postcards it is also represented as such. On one photograph of the two-road spit of land, taken facing toward the east and the metropolis, what is today the Route Nationale still has trolley tracks and plane trees along the sidewalks, then as now the width of a boulevard, seeming even wider than in Paris, because so much less crowded. Only an old man is walking along, on crutches. The road from the pass, on the other hand, already part of the bay, initially more a path through the hollow, has trees only in the background on that turn-of-the-century postcard, the hillside forests, which at that time extended farther down, and for pedestrians on both sides, then as now, there are only slats, boards set on edge, balance beams. In those days the present junction or fork or bifurcation café, was, in accordance with the significance of the spot, an auberge, and why shouldn’t the innkeeper of Porchefontaine, as his last undertaking, someday open a very special place with a view, here on the spit of land?

Iact as if the bay had fixed boundaries. In truth these seem to me to have become fluid during the current year, also because I have undertaken a kind of survey. One day a spot that I previously included as a matter of course falls out of the picture, on another it is reincorporated, and another that had previously gone unexamined reveals its bay character. There is a constant shrinking and stretching going on, and on some days outside the bay I have even circled around little enclaves, and likewise here in the bay, on the contrary, enclaves of other realms.

A factor contributing to such changeability is probably also the way in which I approach my writing terrain. Sometimes, in order to get closer to the original image, I have moved away from it and then approached again in a wide arc. But precisely in this process, as a result of the different directions from which I returned to the bay, its boundaries became most fluid. And my inner image of the entire region also changed and jumped about, depending on the path I took to get home; and thus I came upon it every time as a new arrival who knew nothing about it, which was fine with me for this year, without a trace of memories from my decade-long life here.

Anewcomer of this sort turned off the Route Nationale one rainy evening and promptly found himself in an abandoned coal-mining area in the Ardennes. In the former miners’ settlement, a village along a street that stretched farther than the eye could see, the doors of the few still-occupied houses were slightly ajar, and the road surface, rumbling from the heavy traffic, had blackish streaks and potholes, from whose huge splashes one escaped only into the half-open entryways of the houses.