Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

As a result of the reserve the longtime inhabitants of the settlement brought to each of our encounters, I experienced all of them the same way I did their houses: as modest and untroubled — which is different from humble, or obsequious, and carefree. Each time I want to greet them, even though I do not know them, when they show themselves at their windows or garden doors, which occurs infrequently, and at times I have actually succeeded. And what a glow, a quiet, laconic, also playful glow, I received in return. I can say: In the old people in their cottages in the bay, and most of them are old, I have faith (I cannot say that of the other generations, certainly not of my own). If a single term for them ever came to mind, it was certainly not “petty bourgeois” but “cottager,” as they would say in the area I come from. And in their discretion, I thought, they combined the characteristics of saviors and the saved. Most self-deceptions are more farfetched.

Whether I am walking down the main street or down the hundreds of side streets: these residences appear to me every morning as houses in the purest sense, and still with the freshness of morning in the afternoon. And they form such varied in-between spaces with each other that the things within these spaces — the bushes, clotheslines, benches, and, way in back, the woods — or simply the empty space itself, can walk, drive, ride, or move along with me as I pass. The cheerfully rhythmic glimpses or onward-onward gestures form courtyards between the houses, if only with the breadth of a crack, and, when there is a little more room before the next house, they actually are that as a rule, rather than gardens, grassless, paved with crushed rock, occupied by rabbit hutches and chicken ladders (and soon I will also discover the first beehive there).

With the help of such interstices, the image becomes sharper from one step to the next, like the opening of a curtain, then another and another, back into the deepest background, accompanied by a constant shining forth of individual parts of all the other houses, worked in relief, of a window over there, a gable one yard over, a porch there around the corner, a steep exterior staircase up to an attic room — every separate part recognizably an element of a human habitation, and the entire thing housing in the most fundamental sense, and not a schematic drawing but in the proportion of one to one, also not dreamed up, but entirely real.

An unusual feature for a town was also that the vegetable gardens and fruit trees were located more in front of than in back of the individual houses, whereas from the backyards only a basic element or nothing but pure green could be glimpsed between foundations and edges, with the feeling of a secret meadow spreading out there. I merely intuited this. Merely? Intuition comes to life: hardly anything has a farther reach.

Untroubled, yet with constant modesty and care, would also describe the style in which these original settlers added on to their houses in the course of time. Often close to blocking off the in-between spaces, but never entirely doing so. Without fail there always remained a slit, dark, to be sure, but letting one sense all the more powerfully the greening behind at its outlet. And untroubled, too, the way in which some of the additions jut out onto the already hardly present sidewalks, and one balustrade, hardly wide enough for a cat, and one door high in a wall without stairs up to it. And each addition, even a crooked or a sprawling one, merely reinforced the original harmony.

So, is there nothing at all about the buildings in the bay that disturbs you? — Well, perhaps I notice the absence of something: for instance, larger roof overhangs, to allow sitting outside when it is raining, which instead of soaking a person would only spray him now and then.

And probably for longer than just my decade here, but obvious to me only since I began my writing year, something has been happening in the bay that upsets me more than an interruption: the closing of the little vistas. At least once a week I stand in front of another such in-between space, which last time I looked was still part of the spirit-lifting back-and-forth game running deep through the settlement, and it has been walled up, specifically by one of us, those who just moved in, the buyers-up of property.

This year’s wars in the world were civil wars. Yet as a rule the contending parties hardly knew what they were fighting for. It was not that part of the population of the country at war did not live in freedom, or that its language was being suppressed, and also the inequality of opportunity was no longer so egregious as at one time, or was it? At any rate, such things were not cited anywhere as causes. No one cared a fig for causes, or if so, then only for show.

At last there was war in the world again; that was its natural state, that was how it had to be, for otherwise where did those dreams come from, even in lifelong peace, in which it was a reality that my sister put out my eyes, my brother kicked me out of the house we shared, my father ripped my flesh from my bones with his teeth, gazing at me with the eyes of a murderer, and when I came home, my mother, in the form of a giant avenging witch, jumped me. This contradicts those psychologists who declared that within the human race any material for making war had been used up for all time. (I had believed them, and in a way I continue to believe them.)

As wild and cutthroat as these wars were — as they say only civil wars can be — those who waged them had none of the characteristics of close relatives. Instead these were wars among distant cousins, and it seemed as though even in the long peacetime actual brothers had become as alien to each other as though they were separated by ten degrees, and then enemies. Even where no war was taking place: how often in the last decades I have heard someone speak of his brother in a tone that suggested that as far as he was concerned the brother could not only drop dead but also go unburied — and if he were to be buried, then in a grave with another name. After the outbreak of war they went at each other accordingly: bloodthirstily, and at the same time with an “I’m not touching you!” Slaughtering, shooting down, blowing sky-high, yes, but all that only with the fingertips. Devastate and destroy, yes, but at the same time with an expression as if it were all for show.

At least that is how it was with the German civil war, not even the East against the West, but almost each person against every other, and finally more and more often massively against oneself, a threat to the economy and combated by the professional army. This war, which suddenly broke out, in all the countries, early in the spring of 1999, has meanwhile long since ended, and it is as if Germany were finding itself at something like a beginning for the first time, without ghosts, healed, if shaky on its legs and bemused, “I hope for more than just the moment” (the reader); as if now its entirely different history were going into effect. And the other peoples of the earth seem gradually to be following this into a peace that is not even phony, in the sense that for them, Germany, to paraphrase Jorge Luis Borges, is the world consciousness. In contrast to that period before the first millennium after Jesus Christ, now, before the second, ominous signs as well as promising ones are on the increase (except that for many countries a time-reckoning different from the Christian one is in use).

In that spring my almost-friend had dropped in on me in the bay, only yesterday the author of sports reportages as light-footed as they were stirring, and in the meantime, still as young as ever, only pale, with a stubble of beard and a black shirt, a war correspondent in Germany, exclusively for a paper specializing in war in its everyday variations, a paper engaged in passing on news, as even the sentence structure revealed, less for the purpose of informing and explaining than as a power game and profit-oriented business, without a hint of an eye or compassion: my young acquaintance’s very first article was veiled by those employed there and turned into a sort of mask, and he did not get to write any others.