Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

On his brief detour from the fronts to the isolated bay, he was, to use the expression that instantly came to me upon catching sight of him, “full of war.” So instead of letting him come into the house, I promptly walked with him from the doorstep out into the landscape. We then sat down on the far side of the body of water with the name Etang des Ecrevisses, Crayfish Pond, at a picnic table by the edge of the forest. This morning, over half a year after his shot in the head, I sat down alone in the cold and emptiness of that spot to recollect better the hour we spent there.

He was constantly snapping pictures, though not of the region but exclusively of himself, and they were also the only ones he included in his war article. The old fishermen, the former Crayfish Pub, the palm tree back in the in-between space of a freshly turned-over root-vegetable garden, the constant trembling or bubbling of the water, like that of the palm fronds, the taiga birches at our back, already with a hint of green, the trumpet blasts, monotonous, curt, muffled, from the track workers on the horizon — to me the music of the bay — the great sky, the broad earth, this quietly vibrating peace certainly did not go unnoticed by him, but he despised them. Somewhere else was war, which counted, and through which he, as young as he was, had finally established a connection with the world. Just as certain characters in animated cartoons had the sign for money (dollars) in their eyes, so he had in his eyes, as if black-ringed in mourning, the sign for war. Relaxation and pleasure now meant to him, and he was not the first: lying on his belly on the ground between two battle lines, barely protected from the hail of ordnance, and feeling his own heartbeat. It was almost as though these very eyes pushed my hand away, when I casually, more for myself, tried to point out something in our surroundings or offered him a few hazelnuts from my garden.

But what came to my mind this morning by that pond, at the sight of the blackish, pre-winter-bare table with carvings left there by lovers and single individuals? I should have waved him into my house, or given him a kick in the pants. How his face came to life for a moment when over there, on the pond road, a parachute-green military vehicle rolled by, with a machine-gun muzzle sticking out through a gap in the canvas.

Later that spring Mont St.-Valérien above Suresnes, the only elevation in the hills of the Seine known as a “mountain” because it stood apart, was transformed overnight into a volcano, again to the amazement of the geologists, who would never have guessed that the magma, thought of in the region as more harmless than almost anywhere else, under all the soft, quiet layers of sand, sandstone, limestone, and gypsum, would ever find its way through them up to the surface.

The eruption was not exactly powerful, no mountaintop was blown off, no rock thrown up, the liquid earth just bubbled up as if from an underground oil tank, though one that was boiling hot. After the one hour of volcanic activity a crater hardly formed, or if it did, it was half filled up again by the rock rubble rolling back down, which also stopped up the magma shaft for the time being.

The flow of lava down the mountain in the direction of the Seine was, however, no trickle but a small stream; the contents of the burst tank were plentiful. The only thing destroyed by it was part of the fort on the peak, used during the war by the Gestapo as an execution place, now a memorial, in whose inner courtyard the new volcano had opened up, and the edge of the famous vineyard of Suresnes, whose delicate yet robust wine bears the designation “Vin du pays des Hauts-de-Seine”: there the magma came to a halt; today, long since cooled, having fused with the sand and gravel it swallowed up on its way down Mont St.-Valérien, it forms what looks from a certain vantage point like a glassy flank — the ground in which a handful of vintners there will cultivate a special basalt wine in the next few years, a red, as a varietal of the wines of the Seine hills.

That vantage point is located here in the bay, at the highest point on the wood road that I call the Absence Road, a point that lies several stories above the extinguished volcano of Suresnes, which in that spring could be recognized through the sprouting leaves by its white smoke, and now, through the bare trees far and wide, by the gleaming tongue below the pale fort, with the platforms of the towers of La Defense in the most distant background. Simultaneously with the brief volcanic activity, the entire hilly area, in its great arc around the Seine, is supposed to have risen by several millimeters, and it actually seems to me as though I no longer, as in previous winters, have to stand on the very tips of my toes to catch sight, from my highest elevation in the countryside, through the myriad of treetops, of the glassy stump of a mountainous cone there on the distant bend of the arc.

Usually it rained so hard for a while in springtime that some of the former brooks, without which the fairly impenetrable network of valleys, often actually ravines and gorges in the suburb’s landscape, would never have formed, overflowed the sewers of which they had long since become a part, and on the surface, if only fleetingly and quite harmlessly, traced out their old meanders: for instance the almost forgotten waters of the Marivel on the boundary between the bay and the upper valley, a name now attached only to an apartment complex, a résidence. Some writers of letters to the editor of The Hauts-de-Seine News offered the opinion that this was a bad omen, while others took it for a good one.

Likewise leaves wafted and whirled, without a real storm, from the woods, long before summer, for days, flying high through the bay, as if to blot out the sun, not withered leaves from the year before, but the pale green leafage of the current year, barely sprouted from the oaks as well as the edible chestnuts, birches, beeches, and again that was interpreted one way or another (for those who had seen it as the handwriting on the wall, the summer foliage that followed, more luxuriant than it had ever been, was a miraculous sign).

As for me, the summer was remarkable particularly for those legendary lizards, the central figures in the coat of arms of the bay town, to which, by the way, a coat of arms was as little suited as a castle or any kind of overlord.

When I came upon them, on the gray-sanded sunny bank deep in the forest, I at first mistook the two animals for pieces of bark, and then for dead, because they were lying on their sides, close together, their whitish bellies almost skyward, and, unheard of for lizards, did not dart away the moment they were prodded but remained motionless, completely lifeless to the touch. And only after that was there a pulsing in their necks, increasingly powerful, and finally I noticed the foot of one of them on the other’s body, tiny and yet pawlike. I sat down on a tree trunk on the other side of the path, which since that time I have called Lizard Way, and watched the couple, as I have subsequently done every time there is still, sunny weather, play dead while copulating — apparently? didn’t lizards conceive virginally? — while above the treetops, through the great blueness, the transmitter sent out flashes from its upper deck, like a lighthouse operating by day.

With the passing weeks and months, the two animals moved, each on its own, into holes in the bank, side by side, in which they lodged like giant cave dragons of old, only gradually discovered by me amid the camouflaging shimmer of the clay, with their rigid, scaly triangular heads, from which only rarely their tongues darted out.

For this attempt at a chronicling of one year in the no-man’s-bay I have not yet looked even once at my notebooks (although they fill the two upper drawers in one of the few pieces of furniture in the house, the dresser, to the point that they stick). In my storytelling I am following only my memory, and would like to keep it that way.