Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

And with the help of — or according to the measure of — my memory, it is again animals, when I recall how the spring continued, as Pythagoras’ pupils recalled their day before yesterday, that determine my image of the bay at that time.

First, even before the lizards, on the days that did not get a little warmer until around noon, on another path by a bank in the forest, I came upon a colony of wild bees. These had their holes, numerous, honeycomb-close, like an earth city, in a zone of the gray-blue sand that is called here Sable de Fontainebleau, although the Seine hills are far from the town of Fontainebleau. The sand dug out by each of the bees, forming bulging ramparts around their holes, seemed to come from a considerable depth; it looked so unweathered, unwintry fresh, and pale as wood shavings, providing, along with the barely noticeable yellow of the pussy willows, the first spring color in the great expanse of tree gray.

Those hundreds of circles of sand on the mossy bank first drew my attention to the craters in the middle, which, when examined from a squatting position, turned out not to be empty at all. Hairy black heads with antennae filled the openings, at first only here and there, and then, after a warm hour of sun, in almost every earth comb. Fine sand blew and slithered in all directions, along the entire bank, and finally here and there a couple of bees flew out of their grottoes and took off, some black-armored, others red-pelted, toward which pollen? while the majority who remained behind, merely crawling around their holes, were now pounced on by slim, all-black flies, at second look also bees, only of a different gender? which circled and rolled about with the bigger, more colorful ones as if in foreplay.

That was repeated several days in a row on the Wild Bee Path, except that more and more of the plump chief bees were left lying as cadavers next to their holes. (I explained this to myself as the result of the persistent nighttime frosts; they had frozen to death.) And in spite of the stronger sun, the thousand-grotto city seemed to be dying out more and more; a rarity now when a hairy black head slowly struggled up to the light or landed with yellow-dusted legs; and the dive-bombing small bees had completely disappeared. And only later, when I turned over one of the curled-up putative frost-corpses did I see an empty thorax, as if sucked out, and it was exactly the same with all the others: only the back held together for appearances’ sake; underneath nothing was left.

The legs of the dead, gilded with pussy-willow pollen, thus became for me the next color of spring. And even later, when I pushed the dead leaves aside one at a time at the base of the bank, I discovered under them the main deposit of mining-bee corpses, heaps of them, all topsy-turvy, on top of and underneath one another, swept together after the slaughter as if in mass graves, and all the cadavers were completely without flesh between the head and the abdomen.

Since then, for the rest of the year, I have not seen any mining bees, either murderers or victims, either at the long since flooded settlement in the grotto bank or anywhere else. In the summer I was stung a few times in my yard by bees, true enough, but those were the usual kind (which, however, likewise in summer, for an incredible, sun-darkening moment, whooshed through that same yard, no, roared, a swarm-cloud, in flight).

Only once, also in summer, did I have an experience with perhaps similar wild bees, but I hardly got to see them. And my experience was then entirely different.

That was the day when, in one of the bay’s forests, on the edge of a ravine, I finally found my way to the cliffs I had been missing in the area as a sort of nourishment for the senses. I had been following the upper edge of a brook bed, during a hot noon hour completely free of wind — and there: the cliffs, in which I had almost ceased to believe anymore, after all the terrain symbols for roches, which then turned out to have been blasted or built over, now only names on maps.

I stopped in my tracks, on a path overgrown with beech seedlings, at the foot of the row of massive rocks, emerging so unexpectedly out of the forest, with the sun shining on them and the trees at some distance. These were cliffs as cliffs should be, for climbing, for hurling oneself to one’s death, for taking shelter under in a storm.

And then I again heard a roar, but different from that of the honeybee swarm and that of the warplanes that were still tracing their practice loops more often than usual from Villacoublay to the Ile-de-France: it was very close, and also, unlike the bombers, had something profoundly even about it, and came from the cliff in front of me.

For the moment there was no other sound. The entire stone face, as high as a building, and smooth as a pebble, was thrumming, and not until I was within a hand’s breadth of it did I notice the crack from which that mighty sound surged — I almost had to put my ear right against it to be certain. Surged? It surged through me, swept me away, and I allowed it to surge through me. And at the same time I was almost gripped by fear, and not only because of the occasional bee that came shooting out with its lone buzzing, which once out in the open promptly dissipated or sounded like nothing worth mentioning.

That there was such a roar inside the cliff had to do not only with the population of wild bees in there but also with the way the fissure probably widened out inside into a cave: the bees returning home sounded as shrill as wasps in the moment of squeezing into their refuge, and a moment later their sound was swallowed up in an entirely different sonority, the roar from deep within the cliff. As close and threatening as the sound was, I had, on the other hand, never heard anything come from a greater distance. If this was a trance, there was nothing more real than a trance. Only this made presence of mind possible. If ever there was a music of the spheres, it was resounding from the earth here.

In that hour with the cliff bees, the noon stillness did not last very long in the surrounding area. On that very day in Paris another peace conference was taking place, in connection with one of the civil wars, and the airspace above the seven-airport region was soon filled with the rattling and rumbling of helicopters ferrying representatives of the warring parties back and forth between Villacoublay, Buc, Toussus-le-Noble, Guyancourt, St.-Cyr-l’Ecole, and the Elysée Palace. But even while the squadrons were flying uninterruptedly over the treetops, I was listening only to the roar of the wild-bee colony in the cliff — like the humming of my childhood in the telegraph poles, except that it was a live sound if anything ever was, a sound before every other sound — and I tapped my foot to it and wished we might all have such a ringing in our ears, in our skulls, in our hearts, for me and you in the hour of our death.

It was not yet summer when I then went to the woods to write. On the one hand I had long had in mind to sit out under the open sky with my stuff, as I had during my time in Ulan Bator. On the other hand I left my study not of my own accord but as a fugitive.

To be sure, there had always been noise around the house now and then, but in the meantime it had become so bad that even in unsettled weather I ran away from it. By noise I do not mean children crying and sounds of work. Although high-pitched whines, drilling, hammering, and squeaking could get on my nerves, I knew I had to put up with it, and battling my way through even seemed good for the text: as if it were to be tested for accuracy that way. There was a crash with whose help I found my way back to a train of thought I had lost during a period of too much stillness; wasn’t there a danger of letting language run away with me in the stillness? This other noise, however, was dangerous in a different way. It seemed malevolent to me. It was not even that the noisemakers were taking aim at someone else — someone else, anyone else, did not exist for them.