My Year in No Man's Bay

by Peter Handke

  It was conspicuous that he usually stumbled upon such spots near temples, specifically in their far-branching, always narrow, tapered hinterland, carved out of virgin forests, here a small vegetable garden, there just such a cemetery, connected by an old wagon trail; and the couple of Buddhist monks, always busy, appeared there in the role of farmers.

  And again one morning he saw in such an area a cluster of people who did not merely appear to be country folk, men and women, but were the spit and image of those from home, with stooped backs, prolapsed knees, gout-ridden, and this group of village pilgrims broke out in a unanimous cry of astonishment at the sight of the temple bell, at which each one straightened up from his stoop, stretched, stiffened, snapped upright, and one of the farmhand types almost tipped over backward.

  That he almost always saw such no-man’s-lands or villages only from the exterior was something he found perfectly all right. Remarkable architect that he was, he almost never felt drawn to interiors. He even avoided these wherever he could.

  The many different voices speaking inside him did not interfere with one another. Each one—that of the wood inspector, the wind expert, the acoustical engineer, the vagabond and dowser—could have its say, at length, was distinct from that of its predecessor, which it took account of, continued, supplemented, grounded. That would yield an entire book (and someday he means to write it himself). And in between, and often for a very long time, the voices also kept silent, and he was, again as since childhood, just someone or other, feeling invisible.

  In time many of the Japanese appeared to him more like travelers than himself. He was the native. Having set out with a swarm of them before dawn to climb Fujiyama, he went off on his own before they had even reached the tree line and spent the day searching for mushrooms, in the course of which he came upon a deer, small and stocky, almost like a wild horse, like his deer on the karst. And in Yokohama, where he lingered for an entire day on a slope above the harbor in the “European Cemetery,” with the graves of the first traders to come in the nineteenth century, he sat or walked, like the cemetery watchman of many years, behind native visitors, who photographed each other in front of the mostly English inscriptions, and here and there young people, as dusk fell, kissed; and then another time he stood in one of the temples of mountainous Nikko while the priest deep inside called out “Amida!”—that single word that was supposed to secure eternal blessedness—but how he called it out! He stood in the background as the temple servant on duty, one step away from the group who had come by bus from Tokyo and seemed more amused than anything else by the priest’s cry.

  Only the Japanese children violated from the beginning his imagined unobtrusiveness. He was the one on whom rested the bright black eyes of the infants (one of whom was always crossing his path, although during the entire time he never once saw a pregnant woman), and in front of the giant Buddha of Kamakura, enthroned out in the open, so large and heavy that he positively radiated peacefulness, he, the observer half in shadow, became a more significant sight for the children filing past all day than the colossal statue. And although he not once caught an adult passerby looking at him, afterward he sometimes carried glances inside him, especially from women, deeper and more durable than anywhere else: and each time he realized how much he had needed to be noticed after all.

  Thus from time to time he himself was responsible for his plunging again into the world as it streamed past, not only by making himself noticeable but also by noticing things himself, and not merely various no-man’s-lands or the bare countryside.

  On the day of the great Buddha of Kamakura, he stood there until evening on the shore of the Pacific amid a group of girls in dark blue school uniforms who, one after the other, tossed long-stemmed roses like spears out into the ocean, and then danced until the flowers were carried out to sea and night fell. And then again schoolchildren, adolescents, in the railroad station of northerly Sendai, running in swarms alongside the train departing for Tokyo, in which sat their teacher, who had just taken leave of them forever; they were uttering wild cries of dismay, wailing, their tears visibly flying, their half-raised arms like stumps, their weeping spreading through the entire station, while at the same time the teacher, sitting in his compartment, wept silently in unison with them, something my friend had not experienced in any other country on earth, and also not in the land of dreams—only in the portrayals, everywhere in Japan, of the various animals mourning the death of the Buddha.

  In early summer, back in the north, to which he felt most powerfully drawn, while crossing on the former ferry, now converted into an excursion steamer the size of an ocean liner, from Aomori to Hokkaido, he caught himself, shortly before docking, under the still-bright midnight sky, in the dense crowd of passengers on deck who were taking flash pictures into the void, running his hand from behind over the hair of a beauty, a tall woman with a very broad Mongolian face, as previously he had now and then run his hand over the head of one of the children. And she, too, let it happen, except that she turned toward him and did not smile. Never had anyone looked at him that way.

  The horizon all around displayed long, smooth strands of clouds, almost horizontal, floating, just like the hair of his fellow passenger, though instead of black they were snow-white, and the ship’s arrival signal was still that of the former ferry, the only long-sustained note that had reached his ears up to that point in Japan, where from the traffic lights to the gameboys everything merely peeped and trilled (the temple gongs always died away too soon for him, and the dark drumming of water as it shot out over stones poking up through a cataract, a rarity everywhere in the world, was even more rarely to be heard out in the Japanese countryside, so difficult to get to).

  On the island they became lovers, and he spent a few weeks with her, during which hardly a word passed between them, in a fishermen’s village, where they occupied a hut built on stilts among several similar ones, each standing on its own spot and painted in its own color, there along the steep, rocky slope.

  During the day, when they went outside, they touched up the paint and improved the dock, which was given a slight curvature, and who has ever seen two people, both in overalls of the same whiteness, working so close to each other and never getting in each other’s way? Only people who had grown old together in house and garden could sometimes achieve that—but these two were still far from old.

  The carpenter’s heavy hand became, in loose imitation of Vitruvius, my friend’s Roman ideal, identical with the architect’s elegance. When the two of them, finger to finger, pulled the skin off the fish they had fried together, squatting hip to hip, the bones formed an arrowhead pattern in the pale flesh, and in the dim light of the narrow pebble beach, after midnight a single shell, the size of a fist, shone iridescent in all the colors of the spectrum.

  When he set out to leave her, it was understood that they would meet again by the year’s end at the latest, and from then on would do everything side by side. Through her, the rest of the natives had become more accessible to him (sometimes even too much so for a reserved person like him). After that he had only to seek out certain places—not only the farmers’ or fish markets, or the strange village on the northern sea where there was hardly any transition between the boats and the cottages—and the Japanese would reveal themselves in what was to him—this vigilant man from border country—an unfamiliar rootedness, even impudence, and, what is more, out of the public eye, lost the tormenting fear of failure they usually displayed there; when among themselves, they cheerfully made mistakes, merrily did the wrong thing.

  What he had initially read in a travel guide now acquired another meaning for him: “You cannot get lost in Japan.”

  This morning, already in mid-autumn, in Nara, the original capital of the empire, where he spent the night in the suite made almost entirely of wood that the woman from Catalonia and I had occupied during our honeymoon, the corridor outside as broad as a street, my friend found the courage to take his first picture of a Japane
se no-man’s-land, then passed part of the forenoon lying on a temple balustrade facedown, his gaze through the gaps in the floor focused on the reddish, shimmering earth below, just as in childhood he had looked down from the gallery of the house on the karst into the chicken yard below, and in a residential quarter he again witnessed even the natives stumbling over the high threshold of their dwellings, and later he marveled for days over the course he had taken, not merely during this year in Japan but from birth.

  He was born at the bottom of a doline, above San Pelagio near Aurisina, on that land he later inherited, a stone’s throw from the barriers on the Yugoslav border, brought into the world by his mother during an air raid while she was working in the fields far below, at a turnaround, and he imagined that his birth and childhood in the great hollow of the sinkhole, with the unique sounds characteristic of the place and the very round horizon above his head, had provided a sort of outline for his future life and his profession, also simply when, in his few earlier attempts at building houses, he had always left the roof uncovered—strange carpenter!—open to the sky, citing the example of the Romans, who did not allow the temples to Jupiter, the sun, and the moon to be roofed over.

  And furthermore—while here in the bay, amid the leaves blowing in from somewhere all year long, this autumn’s first are falling, softer than the others, coming down perpendicularly, at the same time more slowly—he thought today in Nara about how the unvarnished fir planks of the ship and the dining table of nutwood back home had smelled after being washed down with hot water: how spicy, how appetizing. And about the pile of firewood out in the courtyard that reached up to the eaves, stacked almost without gaps, and how he had seen the only hole, down near the ground, triangular in shape, not as a hiding place for the cat but as the model for some future human habitation: he would sit in there himself someday and watch from the warmth the earth being swept clean by the north wind, the Bora, whom his parents called “the purest of women.”

  And for years he had stared transfixed into the pit right behind his parents’ house where there was a bubbling, hissing, spitting, steaming from the lime being slaked, and for years he had also cracked the whip in the orchard on the steppe, using the juniper handle he had carved himself.

  And then that cold morning in July when he no longer sat on the bus to Aurisina and Trieste as one commuting student among others but as a first-day apprentice, apart from the other passengers, in his still new-blue stiff work overalls. And how he then, in the Don Bosco Home, felt such homesickness for precisely the shabby spots at home: the worn linoleum under the table, the hot-water reservoir in the woodstove, encrusted with mineral deposits, the burn marks under the ash box, the pitted enamel of the washbasin, the scraped wooden threshold with the rusty nailheads.

  And then the years during which he worked alongside his father as a carpenter, outdoors, feeling uneasy only on the day of the topping-out, not because his father would get drunk again, but because his father would not be as jolly from the drinking as all the others.

  And then another such cold morning before he set out for the university, across the border to Vienna, when his parents planned to dress him ceremoniously in the cutaway of the godfather who had died in the war, which they had been keeping in a trunk up on the wooden gallery for just such an occasion, black with fine gray stripes and heavily padded shoulders, and this often tried-on garment, which previously had always been still too big and heavy for him, when it was unfolded this time suddenly hung there in tatters, shredded by moths.

  Then came the many years until the moment, when, on the great plain down below by the limestone base of the karst, in Aquileia, which had been so close all the time and had once been very familiar, and not only from school excursions, behind the basilica that stood all by itself back in the grasslands between the mouths of the Isonzo and the Tagliamento, at his feet the former Roman harbor filled with the frogs’ gentle evening croaking, he found himself completely drawn into that antiquity of which he had previously been conscious only in bits and pieces, actually only a single piece, from a homey, swamp-black corduroy road, a section of alder, particularly swamp-resistant (according to Vitruvius)—the one moment when those couple of logs half buried in the path, which every time had announced something to him rather than reminded him of something, now became one with the once-mighty city of Aquileia, the metropolis of the ancient world, which at that moment did not seem at all vanished to him; it was now, it had arrived, it was his world, his future field of work: “Classical antiquity and I are one.”

  And then waking up early today in Japan’s oldest city, where not even the temples struck him as ancient, for the wood, even on façades thousands of years old, had, as everywhere in this country, been replaced during this century. And looking down through the knotholes in one of the temple galleries, he saw, lying on the ground, the pine needles mingled with chicken feathers and corn kernels from the courtyard at home in San Pelagio or Sempolaj.

  And from one of the pagoda towers, story after story, an unbroken chirping of sparrows, of whom only now and then a little flurry became visible, gray on the likewise gray roof. The doves tripping along in the gravel like first drops of rain. At the sight of the nostrils of a Buddhist holy figure, a desire to see a forest filled with apes the next day, for instance in the mountains around Kyoto.

  On the way to the station in Nara, my friend encountered a Japanese woman with freckles, at which he thought, “I have a woman!” A sidewalk sweeper crossed the entire broad street to sweep up a single grain of dust on the other side. Behind a bamboo fence the first Japanese dog growled at him. Many of the passersby were carrying on silent conversations with themselves, which, to judge from their hand gestures, consisted chiefly of mental arithmetic. And, as everywhere, children balancing on the curb. On the evening train to Kyoto, talk going across the compartment, as if from starting blocks.

  During his walk on the bridge over the already familiar Kamo River, the night wind billowed the sleeves of the mendicant friar there, his face invisible under the rim of his hat. From the open entryways of the buildings, especially the restaurants, wafted the smell of freshly washed floors. On all the city bridges traffic similar to that in Hong Kong or elsewhere, but under them, among the pebbles on the banks, here and there a frail elderly person, and the thought: “When I am that age, I, too, will go under the bridges.”

  The no-man’s-land he had photographed that day had been marked by the concrete foundations of a long since dismantled barracks, emergency shelter after an earthquake, lying there a single stick of wood that was on fire, sending up a tall column of smoke, repeatedly decapitated by the wind. And then, at an afternoon No play, in which the actors kept speeding up their monologues so much that his heart began to race, he had seen another mask that showed him a self-portrait: that of a man caught up, according to legend, “in a one-second dream encompassing his entire life and at the same time aware that, on the contrary, this entire life itself is such a dream”—the expression on the mask one of tremendous astonishment. And outside the city again, on the edge of the wilderness, a Buddha lurking behind the jungle foliage appeared to him as the image of his parents involved in their almost silent work at the bottom of their cultivated doline, where even he, the son, had for decades been surprised and also startled by the faces of the two of them, behind sunflowers, pole beans, cornstalks. And at the end, at the stage of going under the bridge?, it seemed to him as though on this day his many voices had come together into one—if only a rather feeble one.

  Yes, the time was coming for his building. Except that on the journey he had little by little lost all his tools. And not for the first time in Japan my friend thought, “I’m not even born yet!” It was certainly the first time that he then thought, “I haven’t been anywhere yet!”

  6

  The Story of the Priest

  On an autumn evening in the current year, he, who otherwise dreamt consistently only on the nights of hoarfrost between Christmas and the fe
stival of the Three Kings, had had a dream that stayed with him, in which he was not a priest but a nobody, a creature, his naked self. He stood there in harsh artificial light before the altar of his parish church, and unexpectedly there came from the sacristy a villager who had recently died, after a miserable death struggle lasting several days. He was larger than life and ordered him to his knees to receive the host. In the dream he had not knelt since his childhood, let alone received the “body of the Lord,” and for those very reasons the moment became special to him. In addition, the voice of the deceased, who, in priestly garments, had become the administrator of the sacrament, was commanding in a way that he had never heard in a terrestrial being. What this voice told him in the dream it immediately confirmed for all time: no way led around this food; to consume it was absolute necessity; without it you are lost! And although upon hearing this voice for the first time in much too long he felt a shudder of awe go through him, it was not just a bad dream; he did not wake up, but slept on, at first trembling and quaking, then peacefully, and finally blissfully.

  That night he got up even earlier than usual, also because he had to work on his sermon for Sunday. From his desk he had a view of the back of the rectory and an orchard, which then, as was usual on the Jaunfeld, merged into meadows and fields without more ado. After morning Mass and his morning classes at the school in B., he planned to pick apples that afternoon and take them down to the cellar, without help, all by himself. And what else today? Lunch with the much younger priest of the parish on the other side of the Drau, in an inn halfway between them; another visit to a dying parishioner; an evening Mass for one who had passed away in Rinkolach.