Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

In the last few years I had acquired some new neighbors. With the many trees and dense hedges, I hardly saw them, and merely heard, all the more clearly because I could not see it, that things were being torn down, built, rebuilt. Some evenings it was actually a relief when, in place of the earlier pitch-blackness and desolateness, from the area around the yard here and there another illuminated window shone. To be surrounded at a distance by the silhouettes of small houses, their roofs hardly visible through the treetops, was nice. It was as if a village had sprung up around my property, or a circle of wagons.

The nights in the bay still kept their spacious elastic fragrant peace. The problem was that I had to wait for daytime for my undertaking, or my observing. And now there was hardly a day without this noise, which left room for nothing else, and all the more noticeably in that it disrupted the very special silence of the region, and always without reason.

There were days when I was surrounded by it so completely and complicatedly that the only thing I could do was laugh and quietly keep plugging on. While one of the faceless neighbors was assaulting his environment through wide-open windows and doors with every madness aria ever composed — any music, no matter how lovely, blared this way now — the one next to him was blasting away — with an air gun? but then where did the smell of burning come from, penetrating into my study? — tirelessly at the swarms of pigeons in what was not even his grass, and the invisible third neighbor around the corner was trying out one of his ever-increasing number of fiendish machines, using the acquisition of the week to go at the not terribly old apple tree in his pocket-handkerchief yard — which he wanted to turn into a raised barbecue terrace? — instead of digging up the tree, grinding it to bits, on the spot, stump, root, and branch.

To this day I know hardly anything else about these people except that they have some of the attributes of campers (but aren’t there quiet campers, and nice stories about them, and don’t campgrounds have their rules?), and at any rate none of the attributes of residents, either of their houses or of the bay. Never have I encountered them except on their properties, or by their cars, which are always ready to start up, whose engines are also often running when the owners are somewhere else, and whose alarms go off at intervals, now here, now there. And never was even one of these neighbors to be found at Mass, or at the local bars, on the soccer field, on the boules court, in the handball hall. When the outdoor market opens on Sunday morning on the square in front of the railroad station, they may just possibly pass through the crowd, recognizable by their weekend-only garb, glaringly bright warm-up suits and jogging shoes.

They seem to be of no particular age, neither poor nor rich, and it is uncertain, too, whether they come from the country or the city. If of any origin, then from an alien, extremely alien planet. The only thing that is clear is that they have never had a neighborhood and will never understand what a neighbor is; that in their work other human beings never occur, or if they do, then only as raw material; and that for them Sundays and holidays exist only so that they can broadcast into their surroundings from inside their hedges, as though they were sitting there in its midst, their ever so inventive racket, which always erupts suddenly and at double decibels.

And none of these neighbors feels disturbed by the fellow next door. Each is so engrossed in his own din that he does not even register the other one’s. When one of them, again on a Sunday afternoon, out of nowhere, broke the last existing sound barrier, and I, convinced that something terrible had happened to him, wanted to alert his immediate neighbor from my ladder, propped against his fence, there at my feet a shadowy figure, surrounded by a cloud of dust, continued with utmost equanimity to operate a sandblaster, with which he apparently wanted to render his façade as marble-smooth as the palace of Versailles, while to my left a sprinkler was hissing for the benefit of a lone patch of grass with the approximate dimensions of a doghouse, and what to my right was incessantly whinnying behind the shrubbery was anything but a herd of horses, and diagonally at my rear cries of passion continued to blare from a rented video, accompanied next door by the hundredth repetition of the waltz of the fleas or Bolero. One of these neighbors remarked once that he did not even hear the noise anymore. So what did he hear? And there had been a time when I thought: If salvation, then through hearing. But what was there to hear now?

An additional factor was that almost every single one of the hitherto remaining interstices, even the most inconspicuous slots, were walled up in no time flat by the new arrivals, used for garages, recreational spaces and various storage spaces, or for enclosures for newly added spiral staircases, so that in the fairly tight ring of buildings around me, instead of the breeze from the woods, a massive echo was created, which made impossible a pinpointing or locating of individual noises, which would at least have provided a kind of reassurance.

And more and more the loudness of these neighbors also came to lack that regularity with whose help one might perhaps have got used to it. The longer they stayed in the bay, the more erratic their world of noise became. I could no longer rely on the initial din. This would break off suddenly, and after a brief, squishy soundlessness, like the sudden cessation of a mosquito’s whine in the night, an entirely different one would break out. Something even worse than a roar filled the air: a whanging.

And when all the other inhabitants of the bay had set out somewhere for the day, even if only to the nearby forests: my racket experts stayed behind, at least on Sundays and holidays, glued to the spot, and if they did not create pandemonium outside, they rumbled around inside, armed with machines, between cellar and attic, as invisible as they were audible far and wide. It could happen that in between, exhausted by their frantic activities, they slumped down and stretched out all four paws. But there was always one who kept going in place of all the rest, alone, indefatigable, and it was because of him that I went to the woods to work, even in thunder and lightning.

His new house, with a run behind it for the German shepherd, was the structure closest to the study that had been meant to be my place for the year in the bay. And although there could hardly be anything left to do on his almost immediately clear-cut property, I heard, especially with the onset of spring, my unknown neighbor constantly busy there: if on the other side of the hedge, a few steps from my desk, peace reigned for a change, it meant he was away, the dog shut up in the garage, where it made all the more noise.

The man had a special piece of equipment for each of his gardening activities. There was nothing he did by hand. And each of his equipment sessions took at least as long as the equivalent manual operation. He went about them with grim thoroughness, yet afterward the soil or plantings, viewed through my hole in the hedge, looked exactly the same as before: barer, more monochromatic, more even, more smooth it could not possibly become. Along with the lawn tractor, which almost filled the speck of lawn, including the flagstone terrace, he also operated a sort of shredder, like an antitank mine, for any clumps of grass around the periphery that might have escaped; a sort of motorized water jet for annihilating any traces of weeds in the chinks between the pavers; a sort of trimmer that worked like a laser beam, only much louder, with which he pulverized the couple of blades of grass that might stick up above the rest (never did I discover through my peephole even a single blade poking up); a lawn dryer after too much rain; and all that at the same high volume, though at different pitches, from dentistlike whirring to rattling, shrieking, and thrumming, which made an ordinary banging and grating seem positively comforting.