Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

At my back, after a gap to slip through, the underbrush led right up to a forest in the background, not at all dark or crowded, extending up the hill, to the south, so that the sun, filtered through the foliage, shone on my paper as it crossed the sky.

In that same place, on my very first day, I came upon what was left from the sawing up of a mammoth oak, once a cylinder, which had been burned out from the core and had fallen apart, leaving two hollowed-out half cylinders. I rolled the sounder half, with some difficulty — it was so massive — over and over along the mossy ground to a place where it bumped down a steep bank by itself to my watery corner. And there, on the soft, peat-black but not yet swampy ground, I set this shape upright, sat down on the ground, within a foot of my pond bank, leaned back into the half circle of wood, and had a wing chair, without legs, just right for my purposes.

It surrounded me literally and really like a set of wings, and moved with me on the peat soil, yielded, pushed me forward again, but would remain steadfast in the face of my most violent shoves; that was how heavy it was, also from the fire; and besides I felt protected in its curve during my work, shielded from the eyes of the joggers, one or another of whom, especially during mushroom season, would suddenly make the branches crack up there behind me.

There I sat, leaning back (and would like to continue to sit and lean back), and promptly began, with my pencils lined up, the eraser next to them, to write, as if it were child’s play, without the usual fear of beginning. I imagined the sentences following the movements of the water at the tips of my shoes, the air streaming all around the trees, the open sky, not exactly right above my head, but plentifully at brow level and as a reflection from the pond, while the sun, whether on the horizons or at its zenith, followed the outline of the semicircle of my backrest.

Unlike earlier I no longer ground to a halt when I realized that something I was just writing down had already been said long ago, by me or by someone else. If I repeated myself or another person now and then, that was fine with me, and of course I did come to a halt each time, except that now I approached the repetition with additional elan, positively elated at the prospect of it.

Certain other concerns also dissolved into thin air: that in the history of the bay and of my distant friends so little was happening; that the plot was not moving; that the sentences were too long for a book nowadays. I let them get as long as the image that was inside me and motivating me required; all that mattered was having such an image inside me. And if it was long-windedness, I felt it to be in harmony with the back-and-forth ripples of the wind on the water, around all seven corners of the pond, and with all that nothing-at-all in between, a little tremble far off, the drilling motion of the red-throated downy woodpecker in the dead wood, who, when I next look up, is giving its stomach a one-second bath, swooping down, with an incomparably delicate splash. It seemed to me as though such simultaneity acted on my storytelling like a verification; as if the water above all, there in its uniqueness, was what confirmed my work — work? here more a mere synchronized breathing.

Besides, I had an infinitely easier time of it, there by that nameless pond, with my project, always in danger of becoming so tied up in knots that no air was left in it, of making paragraphs, or, instead of being forced to conjure up an appropriate transition and a compelling sequence, keeping going imperturbably. Making paragraphs in this context meant only pausing in the middle for a catching of breath, impossible for me as a rule during indoor writing, for a walking away from the page so that it, too, could have a moment’s peace.

Thus I remained calm when rainfall heavy enough to force its way through the leaves interrupted me. I tucked my portfolio between my jacket and my shirt, put on my hat, actually brought along for mushrooms, and waited.

The wilder the conditions around the water, the more serene and also patient I became. Stormy winds mingled with pounding rain, sand hit me on the fingers, terminal darkness broke in, thick branches came crashing to the ground, another tree tipped headfirst from the bank into the pond, the many birds of the area, large and small, fluttered back and forth, cawing and squawking, barely missing me, and I sat there, leaning back, with my manuscript, and watched, without batting an eyelash, warm around my heart, this panic-stricken world having emerged clear and whole behind the customary, fragmentary, chimerical one, and in the panic-stricken world that mixed-up creation — not chaos — in which I had always felt at home. “Now it’s right.”

When I was busy there by the water, the surroundings looked entirely different from the way they would have looked if I had merely been sitting there idle. Without my specifically taking them in, they became part of me, in passing.

And again in my memory the animals appear first. (Yet I am not thinking here of the mosquitoes that fell upon me in droves, though not until dusk, when I was usually already finished.)

That all began with the migration of the hitherto completely invisible tribes of toads downhill through the woods to their spawning grounds. The Nameless Pond, by which I was sitting, was their chief destination, even for those toads coming from the most distant of the hills of the Seine, although all the other bodies of water offered more room.

But either they were polluted, like the most appealing of them, that pond called Hole-in-Glove, by the oily effluent from the factories up on the plateau, or they had unscalably steep banks, like the Crayfish Pond, unsuitable for amphibians, or, like the other pond, the largest pond in the bay, the Etang des Ursines, they were separated from the forest by a highway. A resident of the bay had tacked a sign to a tree, asking that people leave the crossing as free of traffic as possible during the couple of days every year when the toad migration could be predicted; the animals were threatened with extinction. But, and not only because of the note on the tree, inconspicuous even to a pedestrian, most of the locals’ cars drove as they always did, and every time I walked the road in those days, on my way to my writing place, the flattened corpses were stuck to the asphalt, and the few toads that had made it to the water alive were swimming along the edge of the pond, each seemingly all by itself.

Only to the Nameless Pond, in its hollow deep in the woods, far from the beaten path, was it safe to go; from the toads’ regular stamping grounds they had at most to cross footpaths, going more through underbrush, then through swamps, without firm bank lines, and the oil film sometimes floating on the water probably came only from decomposing wood; at any rate nothing flowed into there but rain and a spring, from which the water bubbled transparent. And again and again, for days, the toads hopped past me now on their copulation journey, here and there a leaping procession, some already mounted piggyback on others, and afterward only their eye bulges peeked from the wild water, which eventually looked warty with them far and wide.

Beneath the surface reigned, denser with each passing morning, a great pushing and shoving of these allegedly dying-out animals. The toads, untold thousands of them, clumped together, separated, clumped together elsewhere, chased each other. In time the clumps became quiet, and often it was not only couples but also clusters of several, a black toad on top of a yellow one, and hanging on to this one a brown-and-white-striped one, and when the entire knot drifted to one side, underneath all the rest yet another turned up, again a black one, chieftainlike.