My Year in No Man's Bay

by Peter Handke

  Who in the world needed another song, his song, a new song?

  The singer fell into a sort of brooding, trying to picture to himself those who stood between him and his audience—the record company executives, the booking agents, the copyright holders. No, he could not picture them, they offered no image—so repulsive were they to him. He was not a businessperson, would never be one, and thus everything he had done since youth and had intended for his own people belonged to these others, who were not his people. They held the rights, and he was the supplier. Accordingly they were convinced, nowadays more and more, that they were the ones creating the event and its heroes. What had one of them said, the one to whom he had “supplied” his biggest song, around which he had been circling for months in a chaos of words and notes and which he had written down in a moment without sound, between fear of death and joy? “Let’s see what I can make of this!” Jettison the middlemen, the singer brooded. But how? It’s the system, and any other, no matter how different, is still the same. Act as if nothing were wrong. Those people between my creations and the world don’t exist. They aren’t there. With a snap of the fingers I make them disappear. I decide: everything I have done up to now and will do from now on belongs to me and no one else.

  And he could say what a song was: “In it the most distant streets flow into each other.” With this line he leapt to his feet and shouted or murmured names into the dark surf, as at the end of a concert he announced the names of his backup singers or band: “Orpheus in the Upperworld! The fish, rain worms, and snakes lamenting the Buddha’s death. Moses piecing together the Tablets of the Law. John Lennon, Liverpool. Van Morrison, Dublin. Blind Lemon Jefferson. John Fogarty. Lao-tzu. Blaise Pascal. Baruch Spinoza, who sang that human wisdom consists not in thinking about death but in living! Marsyas pulling off Apollo’s skin!”

  On the way back, again beneath the village streetlights, a storm gust was so powerful that in a series of puddles the rainwater jumped from one to the other, and so on in this way as far as the horizon. And now he had the desired wind in his face, in which it looked more than usual as though balls were rolling in his armpits as he walked.

  From the dark building at a distance from the others, tall and narrow, an old folks’ home, came angry groans. At the same time the Pleiades sparkled above, initially all seven stars crowded together in a little heap, from which then each emerged separately, glance after glance. And here in Dornoch he also listened for the birds’ sleeping place: too late; the sparrows, wherever they might be, were silent.

  When he had walked around the night-dark church, which stood in the middle of a grassy area, inside the church the stone sarcophagus of the crusader, who lay with legs crossed and his dog beside him, the street was suddenly thronged with local residents, leaving a choir rehearsal. No matter which way one of them went, the same snatches of song could be heard from all directions, and if one of them launched into a new song, another singer over there, already out of sight, would promptly join in, and he wondered why he had never had a singer as a friend, except someone he did not really know, from afar, and why, when he was put in a chorus, he always sang out of tune. But whenever stars were gathered to sing together for some cause, didn’t they necessarily produce cacophony, starting off wrong, one too soon, one too late, each with a different version of the lyrics?

  Following those choir members who formed the only small group, he found his way to the village pub, where everyone shook hands with him as if he were an old acquaintance. A drunk, already more falling down than just swaying, was playing pool, and made each shot with hairline precision. Above the wooden floorboards, which had been cleared, with tables and benches pushed to the sides, a tape was fiddling a square dance, to which no one was dancing, and the singer, for whom his ancestors had been looking for the longest time—“Where in the world can he be now?”—saw himself finally discovered: “Ah, so there he is!”

  Outside, a few bars on the Jew’s harp brought air into his lungs. The song felt so close, and then again so unattainable, that it frightened him. He had been away from population centers and the news only a couple of days, and already they did not exist anymore, or at most in casual thoughts, detached, never serious.

  In his northern Scottish lodgings all was sleep-still, only a couple of lamps to light his way. For what had looked at first like a cottage, the corridor was unusually long, as the room was spacious, the ceiling high.

  It was deepest night when the singer, whom even a lightning strike would not have awakened, was shaken out of his sleep by a child crying. It did not stop, and he got up, put on his ankle-length raincoat, and made his way through the house until he came upon the crying child, alternating between the highest and the lowest notes, in a crib on casters, which, being pushed back and forth by the young woman, added its own screeching and creaking.

  The singer asked the mother whether she would mind if he tried to quiet the child, too, and she gave him permission. With his hands on the headboard, he did nothing but, without moving it, give the bed tiny shoves, invisible to a third party, at first unevenly but with all his strength; all one could hear was a series of sounds consisting merely of rustling and scraping, which, now longer, now shorter, insinuated itself into the bawling and, when that first paused, could become regular, rhythmic, and articulate, like a piece of music. To make the child keep on listening and at the same time calm down, this sound had to hit the right moment with each note, and the whole time he had before his eyes the billy goat in a burning barn who had not followed him out into the open until he had seized his horns in his hands and neither pulled nor pushed but done almost nothing, yet with the utmost patience and attentiveness!

  When the infant had finally sighed himself back to sleep, the mother was long since asleep, and the singer, too, soothed by his own lullaby, sank, the minute he was back in his guest bed and had closed his eyes, into the sleep of a newborn. He lay there with his face close to the window, again amazingly wide for a cottage in the dunes, through which the winter constellations shone all together into his dreams, and thus themselves were already the dream. Orion, the Hare, Castor and Pollux, broad-thighed Cassiopeia, the veil of Berenice, and then as yet undiscovered ones called Weymoor, the Headless Woman, Iron Gate, La Grande Arche, and finally the morning star alone moved through his innermost being with the slowness of the universe and penetrated it. Such a caress the singer had never experienced before.

  This was accompanied now by the very high notes of a saxophone, which, when he had opened his eyes, went on playing in another room. The wind had fallen. The sky above was bright, the gulls below still raven-dark, and they really were ravens now.

  The woman playing the saxophone sat, the child at her side listening without stirring, in the dune-sand-yellow kitchen at the laid table, in an even longer dress than the previous evening and rubber boots with high heels. He silently joined her, drank a cup of coffee such as he had tasted neither in Italy nor in Hawaii, until she put down her somewhat battered instrument and without much ado, as though she were simply switching from one language to another, told him that in her childhood she had once spent a summer at the ferry station for the Hebrides, Kyle of Lochalsh, about a hundred miles to the west, on the other side of the watershed, on the Atlantic. She came from Dornoch, here on the North Sea, and had made her way halfway around the world, but only at the ferry in Kyle of Lochalsh had people been good to her. “Dover, Vancouver, San Francisco, Valparaíso are nothing compared to Kyle. When I’m an old woman I’d like to lick the salt from the windshield of the ferry in Kyle.”

  Not for the first time the singer noted that people who did not get along well with the place they came from did not really long to be off in distant cities; they longed instead for something they had known early in their lives, only a few hills and rivers away, which with the years had become legendary.

  And he felt the urge to get to that Kyle of Lochalsh, if possible entirely on foot, even if it would take him until spring, until fall; he
wanted to set out at once, told the two of them that, bowed to the child, kissed the woman’s hand, received from her a rain hat to put on over his cap, laid a banknote on the doorstep, and that same afternoon was standing somewhere in the interior, between the two oceans, on a southeastern slope sheltered from the wind, facing the banana palm that he had been sure grew even here in the north of Scotland, hidden in the tangle of wild rhododendron.

  The singer continued his westward journey into the spring and summer.

  He went astray at least once a day, in spite of maps and compass, often willingly, and when he no longer knew where he was he became all the more sharp of eye and ear.

  For an hour he would move along as if on wings, the next hour would draw him, head down, toward the mud, impossible to get past on the high moors, and not only in winter. Sometimes in the evening his head would be bursting from the roar of the brooks all around, and the next morning the racket would draw him anew. Again and again he almost fell, or he slipped and tipped over, and each time the twitching that went through his body was followed by redoubled alertness and mental acuity. He recognized that the apparent obstacles in his path were nothing of the kind, at least nothing significant.

  He took an ownerless boat lying by a lake in the moor, seemingly since prehistoric times, with as little hesitation as he headed over a pass that appeared on no map. In the morning, with his sleeping bag rolled up, he struck out from the tumbledown hut, stinking of sheep droppings, set in a wasteland of heather, wiped his behind in the morning with a fan-sized bog leaf, damp from the rain, sat in the brief midday sun with his bread and apple on the throne formed by a stray boulder, stumbled in late afternoon into a hailstorm with stones so hard they pounded down his outstretched fingers, and in the evening lurched like a vagabond, impossible, with that hat over his cap, to identify as a man or a woman, along an illuminated avenue leading through a park toward a highland castle-hotel, called, for instance, Ceddar Castle, where, without his having a reservation, the double doors swung open for him at a distance, showing the torchlit, fireplace-warmed great hall, and then, combed, parted, in necktie and custom-tailored suit, he took his evening meal with the family of the Japanese crown prince on his left, the stars of the Glasgow Rangers on his right, at the head table the great-great-grandson of Sir Walter Scott and the heirs of Robert Louis Stevenson, but he belonged there a bit more than all of them, and the next day continued his game of—what?—of getting lost. And at the same time he never felt alone. “I am with my song.”

  And just as he presented a different image from hour to hour, the seasons kept jumping around, winter appearing in the middle of summer, spring leading back into fall. In the last night of January a cuckoo called, then none again until sometime in June. In May on the heath out of a clear blue sky a great many leaves fell, but from where? And in a cold dusk a snake crept toward him on a patch of snow.

  Altogether, just as in dreams, at one moment almost nothing was impossible, and then again everything seemed to be over and done with. The torrents, which, seen from a distance, gushed from the crests of the mountains, a host of them, in white, long waterfalls, reminded him today of a medieval, no, of a prehistoric time, which, however, still lay ahead for humanity, and on the following morning the entrails from the nocturnal slaughter of a small animal by a bird of prey at the foot of a lonely church tower were enough, and the only things that seemed valid were the bestial and barbarous, even if only until he caught sight of almost the only reliable thing, the red-and-yellow van marked “Royal Mail.”

  I received my most recent picture of my friend after the beginning of summer, when he had finally put the watershed between Scotland’s two oceans and then also Kyle of Lochalsh behind him and, having taken the ferry over to the Inner Hebrides, within calling distance, at least for his voice of thunder, was now crossing the island of Skye, mainly on foot.

  This picture again had to do with the Royal Mail, on a day after a day of heavy rain, since his walking until then had been almost entirely a slipping and sliding, initially down in a fjord amid the knee-high shore seaweed, now high above along a treeless alpine slope on a crisscross pattern of sheep terraces, churned into deep mire; he had willingly strayed up there, believing from afar that it was a multitude of mountain paths, all coming together in a single broad path leading up to the peak of Ben So-and-so.

  But the network of paths beaten into the mountainside by the sheep hoofs turned out to be even more impassable than that peculiarly Scottish tracklessness, which, with the rounded, disappearing mountain shapes, at first seems as if it can be crossed effortlessly and then turns out to be a highland moor, its steep slopes, where the ground should be firm, as deceptive as the flat areas; the sheep slopes, too, were moor, and before each step he had to test the ground ahead. And furthermore, the animals whose terrain it had been, had, because of their jumpiness, unlike cows, dug or stamped out an extremely uneven, nervous zigzag. Time and again, at the places where the sheep had leaped, the apparent tissue of paths tore, and the singer had to become a moor mountain climber, which, by the bye, gave him a certain satisfaction.

  When he reached the top, bareheaded, his cap and hat long since tucked away, suddenly the path led, instead of toward the peak, over flat surfaces, as if into infinity, and on firm, dry, even ground, high above the tree line, with a few pines huddled together.

  From them, too, came the unanimous roar that he had previously, when he stuck his head over the crest, taken for a personal greeting from the spirit of the mountains. Winds from different directions met there. One minute it turned cold and dark, the next summery warm. The tooting of the second ferry, the one from the island town of Uig to the Outer Hebrides, was the only sound that wafted up from the foggy depths and seemed at the same time to come from the clouds above. The dots of foam in the grass, which was delicate as only grass under alpine firs can be, puzzled the singer: had they dropped from the mouth of a rabid fox?

  Now the clouds took on two different shapes: some, formless, drizzly, drifted in from the west and were rain clouds, and the others, from the east, formed windrows, brighter, with space in between, and carried snow. And at the moment when the two types of clouds encountered each other, they merged into a great uniform glowing haze. And now the western clouds also carried snow, and from both sides a curtain drew slowly and steadily across the entire sky, reaching down to the earth.

  The hidden highland birds cackled, barked, neighed. The snowing created a sphere in which colors emerged, the brown of the pines, the green of the heather, the black of the rubber boots. The flakes, clumped together but still with individual crystalline parts, melted on the mountain climber’s nail bed, hot with exhaustion.

  And now in the tracklessness way up there, the red-and-yellow vehicle with the postal horn comes rolling out of the curtain of snow, this time a jeep. On every weekday during his journey he had been able to rely on it; out of affection he had even counted the patches on the mailbags; and one time, when the storm over Kyle of Lochalsh had ripped a card addressed to me out of his hand as he made his way to the mailbox, and he thought it would never be seen again, the card actually reached me, though with a few puddle stains.

  So was there a house on the plateau at the peak that had mail delivered? Perhaps in a eucalyptus grove? He quickly wrote another card, with the snow crackling on it, to the Queen of England or someone, finishing just as the mail vehicle came rattling up. It stopped, with a robust gray-haired Scottish woman at the wheel who reminded him of his mother. And he placed the card in her outstretched hand, and she shoved it in among the other pieces of mail, held together with a rubber band.

  It seemed to the singer as if something in him were beginning to heal, something which, although he had sung about it again and again, he had not even wanted to have healed.

  2

  The Story of the Reader

  Where had that been?

  He was sitting with his girlfriend by a swampy pond in the forest near a city. Dusk was far advanc
ed, and the two of them had not said a word for a long time. Instead, from the small round body of water, light rose, the only bright thing all around, a reflection of the last bit of daytime sky, or of the night sky as above large cities?

  His entire life up to then had been marked by a sense of futility. This did not leave him even during this one hour, yet was accompanied by a tranquillity or feeling of safety that was new to him. The girl beside him felt that, and bowed before this realm. The back of a fish arced soundlessly from the surface and dove under again, a dolphin. The muskrat, about to scurry from one hole in the bank to the next, stopped in midcourse and sniffed the air, standing on its hind legs, its tail broadened into the shape of a beaver’s. After all, nothing was happening, with the forest darkness all around, but the light at their feet, the water and the light.

  His entire childhood and youth he had spent in Germany, in the Reich, then in the state in the east, then in the republic in the west, in the country and in cities, from the Mittelgebirge down into the ancient river valleys and up into the Alps. But here by the swampy pond was the first time that he had seen a world open up in his country, if not for him then for someone else, for instance his descendants.

  Where had that been? And what was her name again, the young woman from that time? And if he had children perhaps, why were they even more hopeless than he had ever been?

  And where had that been again? After wandering around all day—while always, in accordance with the traditional German parental admonition, “staying on the path like a good boy!” through high-rise, villa, and allotment-garden suburbs, all equally inhospitable and unreal, as were the forests, the village squares, and even the vineyards or the slopes with apple orchards, he had, again toward evening, found himself in a town whose center was built in a hollow, and suddenly in the stillness—of midsummer or deep winter?—had seen himself generously and cordially received by the solid mass of half-timbering erected there, whose network of beams had struck him until then as the epitome of confinement or narrowness.