Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

This bleak, unchanging highway finally dipped under a railroad overpass, on one side of it a bunkerlike concrete protuberance, the Rive Gauche (Left Bank) station, on the other side a building whose ridgepole hardly came up to the height of the railroad embankment, the hotel (with bar) of the same name. A woman, shadowy, ran inside, and in passing he heard her asking for a glass of water. And after her, out of the darkness under the bridge, came a pack of derelicts and inquired, one more addled than the next, after the Route Nationale or the Rive Droite station.

The underpass, then, barely lit, nothing but pale, crumbling concrete, some of it already fallen, had a ceiling from which thousands of whitish nails were sticking, at second glance stalactites, deposits from the concrete, of which drops landed on the asphalt sidewalk, falling onto the corresponding stalagmites or ground dripstones, tiny mounds, glassy cones, which could now be felt under one’s soles. The rattling of trains overhead interjected itself into the sound of trucks crashing along, and a squad of soldiers came by at a run, loaded with heavy sacks, almost knocking over the stranger to these parts.

On that evening this was the main access to the no-man’s-bay, in the form of the gate to a dripstone grotto, with the rounded mounds below as its threshold; since then, whether returning home or setting out, I have always made a point of rocking and swaying on them for a moment on the balls of my feet.

After that a leap to another image: in front of a dense, lumpy-wet stretch of woodland along the road, a longish, dim rectangle of light, the across-the-way bar, with the name Little Robinson, a sort of log cabin, surrounded by junk and even more by tree trunks, more higgledy-piggledy than stacked, but protected by tarpaulins as if for several rough winters; the silhouettes inside less those of patrons — the proprietor seemed to be alone there with a shaggy dog — than again those of branches lined up and halves of tree trunks. And smoke puffed from this shack. And then in the woods something rare after all, bunches of rowan-berries, in a resolute red.

And again the image changes. The entry had not yet been negotiated. I had not yet turned into the bay, as I usually did at that spot. The previous highway, after an unexpected curve, cut across a hollow and became a nocturnal landing strip in a penal colony, far from the rest of civilization. Although the inmates could move about relatively freely, they slunk past the wire fences and piles of muck with heads either bowed or turned away from each other, and though the paths were wider here, each walked at a distance from the next person, including the couples, and not only the old ones, to whom it was probably not a new experience, for either the man or the woman, to be a few steps ahead of the other.

There were hardly stores in this sector; the one supermarket, like those otherwise found on military bases, was without displays, without price lists, with sight screens, and if a product was visible, then only its back, and the cashier’s head itself seemed to be that of a prisoner, just as the children sat there trapped in the bare neon-glare-lit room, in a deeper cut in the hollow, in a camp school, born already unfree, the offspring of the banished.

In addition, out of the hill-darkness all around, the watchtower loomed, many-storied, huge, each story shining down fixedly on the isolated stragglers and slinkers along the track, and only from the top of the tower a restless flashing and smoldering.

On that evening I did not feel I had arrived in my bay until I reached the square in front of the local railroad station, full of motion from the shadows of the plane trees, whereas usually the bay began way back at the Route Nationale and sometimes even before that, for instance at the Armenian church, or at the shop of the alterations tailor beyond the junction, the Pointe.

On another such day during this year I returned after tracing a similar arc through the woods, from which far more wood roads and hiking paths led to the settlement than streets from anywhere else. And just as I daily had the experience of noticing something I had previously overlooked, it was the same now: by a clearing deep in the forest, among the oaks and edible chestnuts, a palm tree; and one of its fronds, on an almost windless day, was rustling and rattling like a sail on the high sea. An owl hooted, and yet it was the middle of the day, with the bells of the Catholic church chiming noon, and the almost simultaneous siren from the roof of the only official building in the bay — a mere annex to the main building somewhere else — an indication that it was the first Wednesday of the month.

In the distant outlet of the forest, directly facing it, stood a house, framed and overarched by the last trees; the path led directly to the door and the few steps up to it. It was a sight so different from that at the other end of the forest, up on the plateau with the office complexes, which as a rule displayed only their often windowless side elevations to the roads there, and then only parts of these, the edge of a wall, a ventilation pipe, a propane gas tank, their colors also clashing with any of those in the forest. Perhaps, I thought, this impression of the office buildings’ defiantly confronting the trees stemmed not only from the fact that the buildings towered above the latter, but also that one had to go uphill to reach them in the end, whereas the wood roads more or less gently descended toward the houses in the bay and merged with the side streets or even pointed toward a particular door, as though that were its destination.

Yes, the houses down below, the great majority of them, were proportioned to the forests around them, and not only when glimpsed momentarily through the trees. I have never seen woodlands and human dwellings achieve such a vital and beautiful communion anywhere else. That comes, I saw, specifically from the bay character of the settlement, extending deep and with every glance deeper into the otherwise intact primeval forest — an illusion renewed almost daily and perfectly fine with me — and even more from the wildness, no, the aboriginal quality of almost every individual shape amid the hodgepodge of houses, comparable to the trees in the forest primarily by virtue of a similarity in the spaces between them. And to me, the new arrival, even when I had long since passed the outer edge, and instead of on the wood road was walking down the side streets here, which I hoped would go on forever, the robustness and simultaneous delicacy of the arboreal structures and the residential structures seemed similar.

On that day the boundaries of the bay thus extended to include the last houses up on the opposite slope, and the intrusive sounds, almost the only ones in this great expanse, were the shouts of children playing, dogs barking, hammering, while behind me, from the woods, the owl could still be heard.

And on yet another day, as I was walking home toward midnight, by full moon, on the wood road, no owl was hooting anymore. Instead a fox was standing in front of the house at the forest outlet, and stood there, and stood there, a fox profile as never before. And when it ran then, showing up in a flash several gardens away, it appeared to me as a ghostly flitting through all the fences and walls and house foundations, whereupon it just stood still again, its entire silhouette horizontal, from the bushy tail to the perfectly pointed nose, its head over its shoulder for a long, long stare at me, at no one but me, and from there it dashed on again, fleeing or directly toward me? A shudder ran through me. Where was that? Was that even here in the bay at all? And in the current year?

As for this, the first thing I recall is the bats, again in a clearing in the forest, at dusk up in the hills of the Seine, and that was in January, right at the beginning of my sitting down, during a hike over the hills to Meudon, and a warm wind was wafting. The bats did not show their faces again until late summer, and then only for one evening, flying by rapidly in a zigzag through my yard, above which a few swallows were still swooping.