by Peter Handke
The water of the new bay, which she reached as the last swallows were still swooping across the sky, again at a run, in loping strides, was —without a ship, hardly even a boat—thickly populated by swimmers, probably from the village nearby, all generations together, their heads gazing out over the still, bright surface of the ocean as if everyone were present.
She joined them, swam as she had previously run or strolled, and the sea, which at the same time did not make her feel wet, buoyed her up under her arms, embraced her, mothered her, as if celebrating the return of the Prodigal Daughter, and as if this were all that had been necessary to quench the thirst of her many days’ journey. She dove down, saw on the ocean floor, half buried in sand, the sarcophagi of a sunken ancient cemetery, or petrified boats, their keels pointing up?, and afterward she sat down on the shore, her face turned inland, from which now, in the katabatic wind, parachutists, an entire squadron, facing toward the coast and, some of them linked together in figures as during an air show, float down onto the “Bay of the Prodigal Daughter”: from close up, the wings of linden blossoms, with the fruit capsules dangling from them, and swarms of bats zigzagging around them.
And my friend murmurs half out loud, turning to no one in particular, including herself: “I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s all over with me. I shall die soon. Today was a happy day. Thank you. When was that? It was a long time ago. I am mourning. Ah, movement! What do you want to search for? Look. One must look. Sweet life. I am afraid. Is anyone there?”
And she listens to her own voice and is amazed at what comes out of her when she simply talks to herself this way.
And she longs to perish, longs for glory?
5
The Story of the, Architect and Carpenter
When I was in Japan, in every new place, in the cities and even more in the countryside, I imagined undertaking the journey with a farmer from my Central European village, Rinkolach, and a woodsman from the same Jaunfeld area.
I would have been the tour guide, so to speak, but one who kept silent if at all possible, and in the presence of the wooden temples, the fields and trees, would have been merely a witness to the exclamations, the observing, the touching, the describing, the comparing, perhaps even the theorizing of the two others with their expertise.
With their calm, endless capacity for wonder they would have, I thought, kept my own wonder alive; without them it pretty much dissipated after a few days. Instead of taking in the differences, as at the beginning, with refreshed eyes, thoughtfully, I found myself observing almost exclusively the similarities, which manifested themselves more and more concentratedly with every day that passed, and from which, unlike in Europe, there seemed to be no escape into unpopulated areas or into nature (at most in the national parks), such that at times I actually felt like a prisoner on the Japanese islands.
If I set out to get productively lost, I did not once succeed, blocked as I was on all sides by barriers or impenetrable thickets. If, on the other hand, I set out with a destination in mind, also in a hurry and short of time, for instance trying to make a train, I would get so hopelessly lost that in the end I did not know anymore which was right or left, had two left hands or feet for every movement, and collided with all the passersby in Japan, who without exception took the shortest route and also never stepped out of a person’s way.
Without the woman from Catalonia at my side sometimes—this was our honeymoon—I might perhaps have knocked down one of these millions of prison wardens, who acted as though I did not even exist, and embarked on a meaningless flight.
But with my two fellow villagers I would have found constant pleasure in Japan. Every day they would have grasped and explicated in my presence things that could not be found in any guidebook; they would have been the right teachers for me, their unhurried eyeing of an object and then of the relevant subject matter, articulated in astonished conversations with themselves; in no time flat they would have been on intimate terms with the local folk, without imposing themselves on them and without even exchanging a word, with construction workers, cottagers, priests, drinkers, women at the market, gamblers.
Imagining their company did help me now and then, but did not replace their physical presence, the actual expert fingering, sniffing, measuring.
The carpenter and architect did not need such companions. Wherever he was in the inhabited world, when faced with any questionable phenomenon he could summon and deploy from within himself an entire team, as it were, in which one complemented the other, helped him along, took over his role. If he was constantly talking to himself on his trip to Japan, it was a discussion, usually in question-and-answer form, between not merely a builder and a woodworker but also, for instance, a geologist and a well digger, a teacher and a road builder, a photographer and an ironworker, and, last but not least or in between, an actor and a nobody or a ne’er-do-well. As he learned from unfamiliar objects, he learned from himself.
Yet he accomplished hardly anything, and did not even much care. When he built something, it was almost always without a commission, without a client, for himself, or for no particular reason, on the piece of property he owned, a scruffy savanna on the Italian karst, above Trieste, which he had inherited from his parents, or secretly, on no-man’s -land, especially that of cities—to the extent such a thing could even still be found anywhere nowadays.
That these structures stood there unfinished, one and all, was not his intention, at least not his express intention. As he said, he wanted to leave himself as much time as possible for each, and it did him good, he remarked, to start something new in the meantime, and besides, it was a pleasure to do everything himself. And furthermore, he had no money.
So for a house on his land (he acted as though he did not know whether it was intended for himself), he had dug out a small sinkhole to create a cellar, but since then nothing had been added: only the hemispherical form, hollow, its walls like its rounded floor finished with the local white, gray, and bluish limestone, lay there sunk into the steppe under the open sky, and a spiral staircase built from the wood of the narrow, tough karst oaks, without a railing, stuck up out of the hollowed-out cellar, rose above the earth’s surface, and ended at about the height of a diving board, with a final, thicker, threshold-wide step leading out into space—that was where the entrance level of the house was probably supposed to be, with a round floor plan, eventually or never?
To be sure, he had already erected a doorframe made of the same weather-resistant wood as the staircase, broad like a portal, set into a marble base, but it stood, and apparently not only temporarily, somewhere else entirely on the lot, with nothing else around it, and seemed to belong to a second house or a future courtyard wall; and the ramp of tamped red earth, located somewhere else again, gently mounting into nowhere, was perhaps conceived of as the approach to a barn, or at least such a thought was suggested by the ladder wagon left from his parents’ days that stood there, with stone chucks behind the wheels, the shafts stretched forward as if in anticipation of a new draft animal—though he then put the barn somewhere else entirely, at first nothing but four tall poles set in concrete, topped by the ridgepole and the rafters, uncovered to this day, through all of which the air whistled, except in the entryway built down below, its boards tightly joined, with two completed doors and even a glazed and puttied window, an entryway large enough to sit in—but what did that have to do with a barn?
A trench from the First World War ran right through the builder’s work area; his parents had filled it with rock and especially brush when they cleared the land, and he piled more on top of the juniper, grapevine roots, blackberry bushes, interwove the whole thing, stuffed the interstices with the tough savanna grass, the hard, clumpy red earth, smoothed and rounded the top, creating, along the former trench, the longest, most curving, most elastic bench for sitting on that I have ever encountered, although it was not certain that this structure had been planned as such: would he raise the bench later to the height
of a wall, perhaps even studding the top with bottle shards?
At first sight someone might perhaps have mistaken all his piecework for a movie set. But for that the individual elements were too solid. A set designer or builder would never have been capable of designing and devising actually usable nooks like the craftsman and master here. And in distinction to a movie set, with these structures the adventure being played out or the relevant story would remain utterly mysterious, or, on the contrary, would not pose the slightest mystery.
His architectural works outside of the inherited parcel, in hidden no-man’s -lands in the four corners of the globe, stood there unnoticed. Aside from his friends, hardly anyone knew that those mounds that could easily be confused with local piles of rubble and soot were, under their camouflage, bake ovens, cisterns, root cellars, and woodsheds.
This notion stemmed from his childhood on the karst, in a borderland, which additionally had the “Communist threat” on the other side of the border, against which a third of the entire Italian army was massed, with weapons and tanks, all camouflaged under fake woodpiles, from which, when he was on his way to school, he would suddenly see a tank’s gun thrusting, under fake igloos of stone, which would unexpectedly flip open, revealing the nose of a rocket, inside a lone tree of the steppe, from which, through a sliding door, a heavily armed guard would emerge: the architect and carpenter’s later structures were the reverse of all this.
The only money he earned, in addition to that from odd jobs, came from a position at the University of Udine, where, for one hour per week, he taught the architecture of Greece and Rome, and his earnings went almost entirely on his building projects, or, as he called them, “void building,” “memory building,” “attention building.” That he could spend this year in Japan was a birthday present from us, all his friends, and to reciprocate he had promised us a sort of photograph album, with the working title “No-Man’s-Land Strips in Japan.”
Yet up to now, the middle of autumn, he had hardly taken a picture, although the painter had given him a camera that could take pictures with the most accurate long-distance focus, and although, contrary to expectation, here and there among the Japanese subdivisions, which were built up almost solidly, something similar to terrain vague had turned up; he had hardly taken a picture either of the theme of his journey or of anything else typically Far Eastern, but instead perhaps a picture of a motorbike wrapped in a silvery tarpaulin in Yokohama, the hands of three children, one on top of the other, on an umbrella handle on the tiny island of Izu, a wooden rack for drying rice straw, similar to the hayracks in Carinthia and Slovenia, at the turnaround in a field in the north—and that could have been anywhere in the world.
The moment was gradually approaching for fulfilling his promise. But, as he just wrote to me, he still feels reluctant to take pictures. And the photograph he did send along, of the Ryoanshi Temple, which he had just visited for the second time, of the “nothingness” or contentlessness of Kyoto, did not show the famous empty pebble garden with mossy boulders (and in addition perhaps the rake belonging to the monk-gardener), but, as a wobbly snapshot, merely the masses of visitors, sitting head by head on the balustrade around the square, their legs dangling down, apparently talking loudly, laughing, squinting as they faced the expanse of nothingness.
The handwriting in the architect’s letter was certainly not that of a person who had been sitting idle. It was that carpenter’s writing that I take as my model now and then. By that I do not mean the thickness of the carpenter’s pencil, intended for marking and numbering pieces of lumber, but rather the heaviness of the hand, perceptible to the reader, from which I sense: the man who wrote that must have been working just beforehand, using his entire body.
Not that the writing is shaky. Rather, it is rounded, the fingers, just washed, rest on the paper, except the index finger and the thumb, blood coursing through them from the manual labor in which he was just engaged, and the joints follow accordingly, and with them the lines, loops, connections, and transitions among the individual letters. The carpenter’s writing has something about it as handy as it is hearty, it is painted and built, and it breathes like the thing written; I decipher it as a document.
Thus I have likewise developed the habit of seeking out some physical work that involves the whole man—not a sport—before I get down to writing. Except that my raking, sawing, chopping, cropping, thinning is different from the carpenter’s painstaking fitting, joining, measuring, nailing, bracing, and more often than not I fail to achieve with my gardening that pulse of variety that would make my hand not only heavy but also flexible.
And as I look again at my distant friend’s letter, I picture him that same morning, on a vacant lot in Kyoto, onto which, overgrown as it is, he fought his way with the help of a bamboo knife, and where he has gathered and piled up stones to make a hidden fireplace, from the outside merely the empty base on which at one time, in the outer courtyard of a now vanished holy place, the demon of deterrence once stood. For secretly the architect has an entirely different project in mind than the aforementioned photo album: to leave behind in a Japanese no-man’s-land another such camouflaged structure.
Back there in the winter snow of Morioka he was already close to accomplishing it. After weeks of searching from south to north, he was standing, not all that far from the center of town, at the first break in the rows of houses that otherwise stretched unbroken across the long island country of Japan.
The sight of the windy strip, with nothing but a clump of bamboo poking tall and narrow out of a puddle frozen solid, down to the gravel at its bottom, without a sign that new building activity was in the offing, for the moment did him nothing but good. A very long time ago something must have been built in this opening, of which now only a certain artificial unevenness, its forms blurred, served as a reminder. The wire fence that separated it from the street had gaps where one could slip through; it had rusted out long ago, and no sign either indicated that the place prohibited entry or announced new construction. From the crown of the bamboo, whose shafts were bluish, came a seething and humming, and the listener wished the sound would resolve itself into an utterance that he could take away with him.
Instead a little plane broke through the clouds above him, and from it boomed that martial loudspeaker voice that had accompanied him, so to speak, all through Japan, in which a nationalist party was demanding the return of the islands lost to Russia during the Second World War. And the following morning, when he came to his project site very early, still in bitter-cold darkness, equipped with a tinsnips and the many pockets of his special jacket stuffed with the necessary tools and materials for erecting the planned enclosure—a space in which the rustling of the bamboo in the midst of the emptiness could resonate—he found it illuminated by spotlights, the bamboo hauled away, the first holes bulldozed, and the area swarming with workers in blue overalls and yellow helmets, like all over the world, and even the Keep Out sign had English subtitles. And so he watched the workmen, dark like Mongolians, until the sun rose (late and very slowly above Morioka, already very far to the north): the first thing they set up was a tall wooden partition, a sort of screen from the street. And although they appeared to overlook him, in time it seemed after all as though they were following, as with a foreman, his eyes’ silent directives, which, because he knew what the next step had to be, were always one step ahead.
The medium-sized high-rise buildings around the center of Morioka looked hardly any different from those in Udine, for example, and the many sparsely wooded hills reminded him of those of Friuli, from between which, just as here, the snowcapped mountains in the north gleamed. What was so different from home in this remoteness, except perhaps that instead of the accustomed clanging of bells a gong sounded? And the carpenter felt compelled to get away from the cities, in the opposite direction from most architects.
At the railroad station in Morioka, while he was waiting for a train to take him farther north, where the couple of f
alling snowflakes collided in the air, for the first time on his journey one of the natives approached him, a young boy, and requested permission in English to ask him a few questions, but then could not stammer out even the first question.
To get out into the Japanese countryside, into a village, into nature, then became more tedious than tracking down the last hiding place of vagueness in the cities. But since he was fired up with enthusiasm for such a destination, it had to exist, as he told himself. And since he had unusual patience—“refresh your heart, be patient” was his motto—even the routes he took gave him pleasure.
Yet as a rule he had to plot them out himself, especially where the plains thickly dotted with settlements and cultivated fields met the mountains. Here he suddenly encountered virgin forest so dense that he could move forward only with the help of his special folding hatchet. How had the itinerant poets of earlier centuries made their way through here? Or had it been easier to cross the Japanese countryside on foot in those days? But hadn’t almost all of them died young, and in the course of their wandering?
He then recognized that the quintessential rural and village settings were very like the Japanese urban no-man’s-lands: they, too, often existed only for a single moment, though in different form. On yet another morning, now much later in the year, having arrived, as it were, by the back way at a mountain temple, and then been for hours its only visitor, squatting in the dim outhouse there, hidden in a remote spot behind plum and cherry trees, for a moment he had again experienced the sense of security he had had using the privy on his parents’ solitary farm near Aurisina, reachable only through the barn or by way of a long, roofed wooden gallery; whereupon he wrote to me that it was time for my long-promised “Essay on Convenience Stations.”
