by Peter Handke
The yellow-and-gray sandstone, that common suburban building material, did not occur in the bay all along a street as elsewhere, but in isolation, likewise buildings of red brick and pale limestone, and the few stuccoed houses displayed from house to house not only different shades but also different pebbliness in their textures. Thus far I have encountered one or two whose walls reveal a pattern like the first application of mortar with the trowel, and just as many, each time again at locations far apart, where the stones, cut into hexagons, were accordingly laid in nature’s basic pattern, most noticeable otherwise in the cracks the earth develops during a drought.
Otherwise the houses tended to have no decoration, except for the chimney pots, often a veritable collection on a roof, one like a pretend factory smokestack with an upside-down flowerpot on top, the one next to it a many-winged miniature pagoda: hamlets in their own right. And on two southern façades thus far, separated by several streets, sundials revealed themselves to me, so unusually tiny—like insurance company decals—that they were a discovery if for no other reason. And on a garden wall, that row of concrete blocks, set on edge, in the form of dice whose black dots had meanwhile been whitewashed, and on a house wall a relief representing billiard balls and a queue.
All the houses in the bay huddled together in the broad hollow surrounded by wooded hills; none stuck up from a rise. None had a tower, an oriel, or turrets, or imitated a palace like quite a few in the neighboring suburbs, and none could be called a “villa,” except by a real estate agent. The one house that was somewhat more imposing resembled a forester’s lodge; the one, the only one, with an arched portal had probably once been a rectory. And in distinction to the other bays in the Seine hills, where one can repeatedly see, when out walking in the cookie-cutter side streets, a rounded Romanesque form here, a Gothic pointed cap there, in none of the established buildings here could I discover a single imitation of another building style, and probably nothing resembling a style at all.
For the architectural style of the Paris suburbs, the expression pavillon has been introduced. But for most of the local lodgings here that is not applicable. They look too unplanned, too little thought out. They are simply residences, or buildings of convenience; yet there is nothing provisional or hasty about them either. They have been standing and existing there in the forest bay since long ago, and are meant to last. I keep seeing them anew, singly and all together, as classic, less in the sense that they are timeless than that they are original, and then, too, in that they gave me a concept of everywhere, not just any old one, but rather a central one, particularly rooted in that place, indeed animated by it.
And I would never have assigned the population there to any particular people or any specific social class. A short while ago I read the remark of a famous architect from the metropolis beyond the hills, who, on the subject of the pavilions in the suburbs, whether ironically or seriously, praised the good taste of the petty bourgeois revealed in them. I do not know. At any rate I have never had any such thought in connection with the inhabitants of those classic residences in the bay here, to my delight.
As a result of the reserve the longtime inhabitants of the settlement brought to each of our encounters, I experienced all of them the same way I did their houses: as modest and untroubled—which is different from humble, or obsequious, and carefree. Each time I want to greet them, even though I do not know them, when they show themselves at their windows or garden doors, which occurs infrequently, and at times I have actually succeeded. And what a glow, a quiet, laconic, also playful glow, I received in return. I can say: In the old people in their cottages in the bay, and most of them are old, I have faith (I cannot say that of the other generations, certainly not of my own). If a single term for them ever came to mind, it was certainly not “petty bourgeois” but “cottager,” as they would say in the area I come from. And in their discretion, I thought, they combined the characteristics of saviors and the saved. Most self-deceptions are more farfetched.
Whether I am walking down the main street or down the hundreds of side streets: these residences appear to me every morning as houses in the purest sense, and still with the freshness of morning in the afternoon. And they form such varied in-between spaces with each other that the things within these spaces—the bushes, clotheslines, benches, and, way in back, the woods—or simply the empty space itself, can walk, drive, ride, or move along with me as I pass. The cheerfully rhythmic glimpses or onward-onward gestures form courtyards between the houses, if only with the breadth of a crack, and, when there is a little more room before the next house, they actually are that as a rule, rather than gardens, grassless, paved with crushed rock, occupied by rabbit hutches and chicken ladders (and soon I will also discover the first beehive there).
With the help of such interstices, the image becomes sharper from one step to the next, like the opening of a curtain, then another and another, back into the deepest background, accompanied by a constant shining forth of individual parts of all the other houses, worked in relief, of a window over there, a gable one yard over, a porch there around the corner, a steep exterior staircase up to an attic room—every separate part recognizably an element of a human habitation, and the entire thing housing in the most fundamental sense, and not a schematic drawing but in the proportion of one to one, also not dreamed up, but entirely real.
An unusual feature for a town was also that the vegetable gardens and fruit trees were located more in front of than in back of the individual houses, whereas from the backyards only a basic element or nothing but pure green could be glimpsed between foundations and edges, with the feeling of a secret meadow spreading out there. I merely intuited this. Merely? Intuition comes to life: hardly anything has a farther reach.
Untroubled, yet with constant modesty and care, would also describe the style in which these original settlers added on to their houses in the course of time. Often close to blocking off the in-between spaces, but never entirely doing so. Without fail there always remained a slit, dark, to be sure, but letting one sense all the more powerfully the greening behind at its outlet. And untroubled, too, the way in which some of the additions jut out onto the already hardly present sidewalks, and one balustrade, hardly wide enough for a cat, and one door high in a wall without stairs up to it. And each addition, even a crooked or a sprawling one, merely reinforced the original harmony.
So, is there nothing at all about the buildings in the bay that disturbs you?—Well, perhaps I notice the absence of something: for instance, larger roof overhangs, to allow sitting outside when it is raining, which instead of soaking a person would only spray him now and then.
And probably for longer than just my decade here, but obvious to me only since I began my writing year, something has been happening in the bay that upsets me more than an interruption: the closing of the little vistas. At least once a week I stand in front of another such in-between space, which last time I looked was still part of the spirit-lifting back-and-forth game running deep through the settlement, and it has been walled up, specifically by one of us, those who just moved in, the buyers-up of property.
This year’s wars in the world were civil wars. Yet as a rule the contending parties hardly knew what they were fighting for. It was not that part of the population of the country at war did not live in freedom, or that its language was being suppressed, and also the inequality of opportunity was no longer so egregious as at one time, or was it? At any rate, such things were not cited anywhere as causes. No one cared a fig for causes, or if so, then only for show.
At last there was war in the world again; that was its natural state, that was how it had to be, for otherwise where did those dreams come from, even in lifelong peace, in which it was a reality that my sister put out my eyes, my brother kicked me out of the house we shared, my father ripped my flesh from my bones with his teeth, gazing at me with the eyes of a murderer, and when I came home, my mother, in the form of a giant avenging witch, jumped me. This contradicts th
ose psychologists who declared that within the human race any material for making war had been used up for all time. (I had believed them, and in a way I continue to believe them.)
As wild and cutthroat as these wars were—as they say only civil wars can be—those who waged them had none of the characteristics of close relatives. Instead these were wars among distant cousins, and it seemed as though even in the long peacetime actual brothers had become as alien to each other as though they were separated by ten degrees, and then enemies. Even where no war was taking place: how often in the last decades I have heard someone speak of his brother in a tone that suggested that as far as he was concerned the brother could not only drop dead but also go unburied—and if he were to be buried, then in a grave with another name. After the outbreak of war they went at each other accordingly: bloodthirstily, and at the same time with an “I’m not touching you!” Slaughtering, shooting down, blowing sky-high, yes, but all that only with the fingertips. Devastate and destroy, yes, but at the same time with an expression as if it were all for show.
At least that is how it was with the German civil war, not even the East against the West, but almost each person against every other, and finally more and more often massively against oneself, a threat to the economy and combated by the professional army. This war, which suddenly broke out, in all the countries, early in the spring of 1999, has meanwhile long since ended, and it is as if Germany were finding itself at something like a beginning for the first time, without ghosts, healed, if shaky on its legs and bemused, “I hope for more than just the moment” (the reader); as if now its entirely different history were going into effect. And the other peoples of the earth seem gradually to be following this into a peace that is not even phony, in the sense that for them, Germany, to paraphrase Jorge Luis Borges, is the world consciousness. In contrast to that period before the first millennium after Jesus Christ, now, before the second, ominous signs as well as promising ones are on the increase (except that for many countries a time-reckoning different from the Christian one is in use).
In that spring my almost-friend had dropped in on me in the bay, only yesterday the author of sports reportages as light-footed as they were stirring, and in the meantime, still as young as ever, only pale, with a stubble of beard and a black shirt, a war correspondent in Germany, exclusively for a paper specializing in war in its everyday variations, a paper engaged in passing on news, as even the sentence structure revealed, less for the purpose of informing and explaining than as a power game and profit-oriented business, without a hint of an eye or compassion: my young acquaintance’s very first article was veiled by those employed there and turned into a sort of mask, and he did not get to write any others.
On his brief detour from the fronts to the isolated bay, he was, to use the expression that instantly came to me upon catching sight of him, “full of war.” So instead of letting him come into the house, I promptly walked with him from the doorstep out into the landscape. We then sat down on the far side of the body of water with the name Etang des Ecrevisses, Crayfish Pond, at a picnic table by the edge of the forest. This morning, over half a year after his shot in the head, I sat down alone in the cold and emptiness of that spot to recollect better the hour we spent there.
He was constantly snapping pictures, though not of the region but exclusively of himself, and they were also the only ones he included in his war article. The old fishermen, the former Crayfish Pub, the palm tree back in the in-between space of a freshly turned-over root-vegetable garden, the constant trembling or bubbling of the water, like that of the palm fronds, the taiga birches at our back, already with a hint of green, the trumpet blasts, monotonous, curt, muffled, from the track workers on the horizon—to me the music of the bay—the great sky, the broad earth, this quietly vibrating peace certainly did not go unnoticed by him, but he despised them. Somewhere else was war, which counted, and through which he, as young as he was, had finally established a connection with the world. Just as certain characters in animated cartoons had the sign for money (dollars) in their eyes, so he had in his eyes, as if black-ringed in mourning, the sign for war. Relaxation and pleasure now meant to him, and he was not the first: lying on his belly on the ground between two battle lines, barely protected from the hail of ordnance, and feeling his own heartbeat. It was almost as though these very eyes pushed my hand away, when I casually, more for myself, tried to point out something in our surroundings or offered him a few hazelnuts from my garden.
But what came to my mind this morning by that pond, at the sight of the blackish, pre-winter-bare table with carvings left there by lovers and single individuals? I should have waved him into my house, or given him a kick in the pants. How his face came to life for a moment when over there, on the pond road, a parachute-green military vehicle rolled by, with a machine-gun muzzle sticking out through a gap in the canvas.
Later that spring Mont St.-Valérien above Suresnes, the only elevation in the hills of the Seine known as a “mountain” because it stood apart, was transformed overnight into a volcano, again to the amazement of the geologists, who would never have guessed that the magma, thought of in the region as more harmless than almost anywhere else, under all the soft, quiet layers of sand, sandstone, limestone, and gypsum, would ever find its way through them up to the surface.
The eruption was not exactly powerful, no mountaintop was blown off, no rock thrown up, the liquid earth just bubbled up as if from an underground oil tank, though one that was boiling hot. After the one hour of volcanic activity a crater hardly formed, or if it did, it was half filled up again by the rock rubble rolling back down, which also stopped up the magma shaft for the time being.
The flow of lava down the mountain in the direction of the Seine was, however, no trickle but a small stream; the contents of the burst tank were plentiful. The only thing destroyed by it was part of the fort on the peak, used during the war by the Gestapo as an execution place, now a memorial, in whose inner courtyard the new volcano had opened up, and the edge of the famous vineyard of Suresnes, whose delicate yet robust wine bears the designation “Vin du pays des Hauts-de-Seine”: there the magma came to a halt; today, long since cooled, having fused with the sand and gravel it swallowed up on its way down Mont St.-Valérien, it forms what looks from a certain vantage point like a glassy flank—the ground in which a handful of vintners there will cultivate a special basalt wine in the next few years, a red, as a varietal of the wines of the Seine hills.
That vantage point is located here in the bay, at the highest point on the wood road that I call the Absence Road, a point that lies several stories above the extinguished volcano of Suresnes, which in that spring could be recognized through the sprouting leaves by its white smoke, and now, through the bare trees far and wide, by the gleaming tongue below the pale fort, with the platforms of the towers of La Defense in the most distant background. Simultaneously with the brief volcanic activity, the entire hilly area, in its great arc around the Seine, is supposed to have risen by several millimeters, and it actually seems to me as though I no longer, as in previous winters, have to stand on the very tips of my toes to catch sight, from my highest elevation in the countryside, through the myriad of treetops, of the glassy stump of a mountainous cone there on the distant bend of the arc.
Usually it rained so hard for a while in springtime that some of the former brooks, without which the fairly impenetrable network of valleys, often actually ravines and gorges in the suburb’s landscape, would never have formed, overflowed the sewers of which they had long since become a part, and on the surface, if only fleetingly and quite harmlessly, traced out their old meanders: for instance the almost forgotten waters of the Marivel on the boundary between the bay and the upper valley, a name now attached only to an apartment complex, a résidence. Some writers of letters to the editor of The Hauts-de-Seine News offered the opinion that this was a bad omen, while others took it for a good one.
Likewise leaves wafted and whirled, without a real st
orm, from the woods, long before summer, for days, flying high through the bay, as if to blot out the sun, not withered leaves from the year before, but the pale green leafage of the current year, barely sprouted from the oaks as well as the edible chestnuts, birches, beeches, and again that was interpreted one way or another (for those who had seen it as the handwriting on the wall, the summer foliage that followed, more luxuriant than it had ever been, was a miraculous sign).
As for me, the summer was remarkable particularly for those legendary lizards, the central figures in the coat of arms of the bay town, to which, by the way, a coat of arms was as little suited as a castle or any kind of overlord.
When I came upon them, on the gray-sanded sunny bank deep in the forest, I at first mistook the two animals for pieces of bark, and then for dead, because they were lying on their sides, close together, their whitish bellies almost skyward, and, unheard of for lizards, did not dart away the moment they were prodded but remained motionless, completely lifeless to the touch. And only after that was there a pulsing in their necks, increasingly powerful, and finally I noticed the foot of one of them on the other’s body, tiny and yet pawlike. I sat down on a tree trunk on the other side of the path, which since that time I have called Lizard Way, and watched the couple, as I have subsequently done every time there is still, sunny weather, play dead while copulating—apparently? didn’t lizards conceive virginally?—while above the treetops, through the great blueness, the transmitter sent out flashes from its upper deck, like a lighthouse operating by day.
