Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

But it was premature to describe the last holdouts in the bar as stranded. For among them I recognize one tradesman or another who has done work on my house. Or the older ones, in the minority, seem in the way they silently follow the smallest happenings anything but failures: calm retirees, solemn anglers, dignified widowers (as the older woman sitting by herself always has the air of a not so dignified widow).

And nevertheless it was there at night that the whole area appeared to me for the first time as a bay, with us as driftwood. At the same time that was one of the rare occasions when I saw this isolated suburb as a part of the large city of Paris beyond the chain of hills, to be precise as the most remote, hidden, least accessible bay of the metropolitan ocean, separated from it by the barrier formed all along the horizon by the hills of the Seine, with the road between Versailles and Paris that cut across them forming the only link with the open spaces. And we, too, came from the turbulent sea, swept in, washed in, rocked in the tides that rolled in and out for years or decades on end, now calm, now more hectic, past thousands of capes and cliffs, through the straits of Meudon, through the narrows of Sevres, through the first inlet, called the “Puits sans Vin,” fountain without wine, and a second inlet, called the “Carrefour de la Fausse Porte,” crossroads of the false portal, into the narrowest, most twisting and turning, remotest metropolitan bay, all the more fathomable for me in its namelessness, we, the driftwood that had come the greatest distance, and thus also rarer than in the mouths of the bay, yet for that very reason amazingly distinct.

At the same time, those in the bar, since they all stand alone, somewhat resemble an ancient tribe on the only remaining reservation, and in reality I encounter them, when they are going about among the local passersby out on the street, as the remnant that hardly counts anymore, the remnant of the remnant of the original inhabitants of this region. They seem fundamentally misshapen, as if smashed out of their child’s and youth’s forms by a single blow from a fist, a moment’s impact, which I sometimes, in a different sense, wish on the other passersby, who have apparently remained unharmed, and likewise on myself.

No such sense of expulsion in the few minutes of the night of storytelling. There are simply some standing — I do not know who they are — there — I do not know how. If any outside lights were still on previously, they have gone off in the meantime, for instance the barbershop’s, in front of which could be a sign: “Last Chance for a Haircut Before the Big Woods,” and by eight at the latest that of the bakery, which in fact already has the woods in its name, and whose reversed in BOULA GERIEsuggests Cyrillic script to me, as if I were looking out the window of a bar on Lake Ohrid. Only the outskirtishly pale light of the streetlights, leading to the wooded ridge and breaking off just before it, remains. The pinball machine and the video game inside have been turned off, their flashing lights extinguished, the seductive mechanical melodies and voices silenced. The cards or dice on the tables way in the back stay as they are. No one is doing anything more. At the very most the tradesman among us is casually repairing something for the proprietor, moving back and forth between the counter and the kitchen, as if he were at home. Otherwise there are no distinctions among those present, no barriers anymore. Even when the patron is not standing among the others, he could be just anyone behind the bar. No one is smoking now. The day’s debris on the floor has already been swept up. No one is loud or especially quiet. Everyone who speaks has the same intonation, and it matches the peaceful atmosphere in the dim café.

In the sense in which people use the term “intake personnel,” during such nights of storytelling I experienced those who were standing around as a sort of “uptake personnel,” whether one of them happened to be talking, listening, or listening to something else. Now a sort of game was in progress, one without rival players and sides, the opposite of all the games that I, at least, had witnessed over the years, which were accompanied by both hotheadedness and coldness, of which in the end only the coldness remained, most rigidly in the so-called game of kings, chess.

What we are playing here comes closest to a team’s warm-up before a match — except that the match itself is already there. In the brief interval, a transformation has occurred in those remaining behind together, stranded or not, even if the next day on the street one will look right through the other.

It may be that I will never see humanity this way again. Yet it existed in those nights there. It exists. I do not need any image as a continuation; it has been told to me.

Or was that just my imagination? Did I fail to consider that one of the people standing there no sooner got back to his room over the garage than he beat up the woman he lived with, perhaps that very woman sitting over to one side, his mother, who was just waiting for him to come home; that the second took a detour through the woods, where, on one of the banks of the pond, he injected himself with dope, that the third, I myself, with each such night was drifting farther from those who were his real kin?

Yes. And nevertheless it is not something imagined, but rather a fantasy. Fantasy is not something imagined. And when it came, I realized how much I had needed it, all this time, all day. Observation, absorption, abstraction: my daily bread. So didn’t we need a continuation after all, recapitulation?

It would have destroyed my equanimity if one of my acquaintances had joined this obscure company. Yet he would see me there as I would wish to impress myself on him, as a pure participant, far from hubs of activity of any sort, beyond immediate relevance, having stepped out of all my roles, no longer a lawyer, or a writer, also no longer a father, but also no shade of the dead, and also not isolated but accessible and present. Which, if an old familiar face unexpectedly showed up there, I would have to become conscious of, and that would put an end to it.

Yet it would not be this way if, on such a night, in such a bar, my wife appeared before me, the woman from Catalonia, who vanished long ago.

Did she really vanish? Two days ago, in my study, on the second of February, Candlemas, the festival of the threshold of light, didn’t I see out of the corner of my eye something black flit by outside the window, whereupon I dreamed that night about the steps of the woman from Catalonia on the bridge over the Rio Grande between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez?

Of the people I know, only she would have eyes for this kind of a nobody — although in fact it was she, during our years together, who propelled me from one role to another, from one undertaking to another. And if she showed up here, I would continue to play the person I am, all the more believably, just for her. I would have presented myself to her as a person different from the one with whom she was familiar, if only she had let me. “Let me!” was my constant refrain with her. But she did not let me. If she had let me, she would have been my benefactor.

Now the woman from Catalonia, full of amazement, would let me. She would see me with open eyes: the abruptness gone, and in its place my original equanimity, familiar to her otherwise only from my books, and in which she had soon lost confidence because my life belied it. And at the same time she would see something even worse lifted from me, which likewise had not been part of me from the beginning but only after my years in boarding school: my tendency to drift away from the person I was with, often precisely in brilliant company, and to disappear into myself to the point of no longer being present. I let myself wander into nowhereland, and especially with those closest to me. And yet that vanishing caused me great suffering. How often I had struck myself on the brow and wanted to scratch blood from my scalp, saw my breastplate in two with a two-handed saw.