by Peter Handke
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.
Equally multiple intertwinings, each day more motionless, with perhaps only about a dozen puffed-up skin pouches, producing a soft, piercing fluting, could be seen on land, at my feet on the mossy bank, and when the bodies toddled apart, there turned out to be more and more of them, as with that very small automobile from which, on the basis of a bet, one after the other an entire cohort of students used to scramble. (Where the same thing happened underwater, it was reminiscent on the contrary of the head-over-heels tumbling of a group of astronauts in zero-gravity space.)
And then one day the waters were toadless again, also cleaner than ever before, and instead other unevennesses on its surface, gelatinous masses, black-dotted, with the dots over the course of several weeks growing into the circles and lines of tadpoles, round heads with tails, which soon began to jerk. And since then in all the months I have not seen another toad in my special place.
And the muskrats, too—or is it a new, unfamiliar type of animal, something between a rat and a beaver and a dormouse?—have not been there since fall, while all summer long they scurried every day back and forth between the pond and the land, at home in the hollows of the root mound formed when a swamp birch fell, right at my feet, at the tips of my toes.
It was always liveliest there at the beginning of the week, when the whole tribe of beaver rats, giants and dwarfs and infants, was on the move, around the entire branching water source, gathering food, especially pieces of bread left behind by Sunday hikers on the other, open shore, and almost every minute another animal head would pop out of one of the holes in the root mound, sniffing like a rabbit, the hairs of its beard bristling, translucent roundish cat ears.
As I watched them, I continued writing, and I often used the sight of them, of their reddish, deeply soft coat, of their paws, which looked to me more like delicate white fingers, of their dark, point-glowing eyes, to ponder a word, a connection; their faces, likewise their stocky necks, suddenly of snakelike length when they reached for a morsel, helped me achieve a particular tremulous presence of mind; and with the passing months they no longer jerked back into their hiding places at my writing movements, with which intermittently, at the beginning of a new line, I also sketched their squirrel cheeks, or the apple peels they held between their teeth like a knife—the presence of those muskrats restrained my hand, not always with success, from becoming abrupt.
I also tried simply sitting still with them—but no, only with my writing did they come out of their holes, and similarly only when I was writing did the big turtle sit on the trunk that had fallen into the water and stretch its head toward the sun.
And in the course of the year, of the summer, of the fall, it seemed that when I sat still that way, but yet was busy, events occurred in my field of vision that would never have come about through observation or pure contemplation, even an entire day’s worth; yes, it was as if only my constant writing provoked the appearance of living things previously invisible in the landscape, perhaps not even existent.
Was a certain way of glancing away from the space or the field of vision, of looking elsewhere, all that was needed for a form of flora or fauna unheard of even in this area, including those thought to have died off long ago, to reveal itself, as if it had always been there? A leaf, quietly drifting on the water, suddenly turned, stood straight up, and revealed itself as a primeval animal.
How often in childhood I had crouched in the deepest underbrush, by the overgrown ditches, waiting for an event. Nothing had stirred. But now, surreptitiously, as I sat engrossed in the story of my distant friends, so much was happening, things I could never even have dreamed of in those days, in a more original period, in a still hardly disturbed countryside.
On one of my first summer writing days, quiet, warm, with a high blue sky, on the way to the woods I had had the phrase “eagle-circle day” in my head, and sure enough, at midday, when far and wide nothing more was moving, the embodiment of that notion, an eagle, the eagle, after prolonged circling at the zenith, landed, even if only for an instant, in the highest fork of the sturdiest, most cliff-gray of the dead trees in the pond, with a profile such as has never been seen on any coat of arms, and for whose return I have now been waiting for months; the entire trunk rocked when it flew away, and part of the fork broke off into the water.
And for several days, later in high summer, little fishes leaped up out of the puddle, as if prodded by the blustery wind, leaped in a wide arc, making the water spray all over, each time one swarm of fins after the other, lengthwise over the body of water, with a whiplike crack, which in turn scared into the deciduous forest the bunch of wild doves, which, sitting on the leafless branches above the pond, were more apt to be mistaken for vultures than elsewhere.
And likewise in this succession the water snakes returned, last seen by me a decade ago, in the summer when I moved there, and since then never again; glided from a grassy bay into the pond and made it twice as large by plowing through it, changing direction again and again, one here, one there, thin, so fragile, on their raised heads white blurry spots. Only after the Sundays when the opposite bank became bright (not black) with people and dogs, I often had to wait for the middle of the week until, during my writing, on the otherwise perhaps smooth pond surface in one spot the odd teeny-weeny waves would turn up and then for hours move back and forth on a very curvy cruise.
Each of these animals had its more or less brief heyday during the summer, so that I have a clear impression, for instance, of the week of the water strider, of the day of the hornets, of the dusk of that giant hedgehog,
tapping its way, mammoth-sized, through last year’s leaf layers, the hour of the seagull that fluttered into the bayou by mistake, the long, long moment of the giant dragonfly, hovering in the air directly before my eyes, face to face with me, its four-wing rotor transparent, nothing of the insect clearly outlined except the seemingly eyeless face, of an uncanny yellow, or the entire face a single universe-sized yellow eye, in whose omnipresence, after a moment’s pause, I continued my sentence.
That was already in early fall, and then the dragonflies continued to come, even on warm November days, though also never again so close.
The only creatures besides the little birds in the bush that kept me company the entire time were the ordinary pond ducks and the coots. The latter, light in weight, could skim across the leaves that had fallen into the water, or, when they swam, they glided along in a straight line, their tail feathers sticking straight up in the air, beyond the densest thicket of the nameless lake, like Indian canoes, from which sometimes a warning cry sounded.
And the ducks here on the Nameless Pond had the peculiarity that they did not look all that ordinary as they rolled and pitched in the confusion of water, greenery, and decomposing wood, but rather as rare and remarkable as all the rest of the animal life; each, in its appointed time, was a mythical beast (including the few squirrels).
With the people who appeared at intervals on the opposite bank, such correspondences manifested themselves less frequently, and hardly ever on holidays, when, enhanced by the surface of the water, at times something like a human loudspeaker wall was going full blast over there. (But here it helped to remember that the place where I was, unlike a house, did not give me any particular rights.)
Nevertheless, when a dog suddenly threw itself into the water, it sometimes came across as the leaps, along with the splashdowns, of heavy fish, not yet discovered by me, or I heard the whir of the mountain bikes during the downhill swoops of the self-appointed adventurers, more properly called path destroyers, as the sound of the wild doves circling the treetops.
And in the course of the seasons altogether different forest people gained the upper hand in the clearing on the other side, people of whom I sometimes thought, when I had my eyes first on my paper, then over there on them, that they, too, had been sketched in the air or summoned to that spot only by my own activity.
One day a heavily laden group of emigrants or Sherpas trudged past over there; on another the woodsmen were cooking their lunch on a fire so big that even days later I could still warm my hands, chilly from all my sitting by the water, over the residual glow; on a third I wrote until sundown while watching a young man who during all those hours sat on one of the other banks, went into the pond, swam, washed his hair, shaved, slipped back and forth between the swamp vegetation, always almost just as noiselessly, and in whom I eventually recognized an escaped murderer, after his picture appeared in The Hauts-de-Seine News. And Don Juan returned, his mustache neatly brushed as always, and with the same woman!
And the noisemakers, at least those on the weekdays, with their restlessness, never lingered by the Nameless Pond, and precisely the intervals were then filled with a never before experienced sort of stillness, so delightful that often and even more often I felt my eyes grow moist from the feeling; it was not permissible for me to remain alone with this silence; it was supposed to be shared.
And not only because of the many helicopters above me, continuing all summer to shuttle between the peace talks in Paris and the air base at my back, I hardly ever felt outside of time by the water; I was not merely intermittently a witness of world events during the year but also a participant. Sitting in that natural wing chair with my pencils on the bare earth while the waters before me coursed back and forth, I traveled with the day through the world. Who knows of, who can describe to me a lovelier round-the-world tour?
Thus during the day I stayed away from life in the bay. On my circuitous morning route to my water seat, I avoided the railway station square with its shops, the only realm where from time to time, especially on market mornings, things were lively in an ordinary sense. Only in the evening did the time come for moving about there, preferably on one of the straightforwardly loud tangential streets. After the daylong secrecy out there by the damp-black hairy cones of the willow roots arching over the pond surface, among which a crocodile mouth would have seemed almost too familiar, I felt swept by a particular wind on these arteries and highway access roads, as once on the boulevards in the middle of Paris after my dim-room work.
Of course here there were no sidewalk cafés, and hardly passersby. But it had been a long time since I had felt drawn, as when I was younger, to sit on terraces of an evening and people-watch. And the right place for such reflective relaxation was inside the bars, while standing at the counter, following the example of the majority there.
Most often in the evening I sought out those two or three bars in the bay where, because rooms were also available, in addition to the local drinkers, male and female, almost always the same ones, you could also find itinerant workers—though only for one glass; after that they sat down to supper in another room, clearly separated from the taproom: in the Hôtel des Voyageurs by a fabric-covered sliding door that opened only when the individual courses were served to those workers by the proprietress in person; in the Hôtel Rive Gauche by a curtain, carefully drawn by the workers themselves. There in their dining chambers they seemed to be carrying on the only important conversations of the moment, with barely moving lips, inaudible, and came at intervals out to the telephone corner to transmit their decisions to the world.
I did not listen in on their conversations; perhaps precisely because my thoughts were elsewhere, or nowhere, I picked up various things. These itinerant workers were very fussy about their food, and not infrequently a group would change lodgings for this reason. For their aperitif—with appropriate facial expressions, and freshly combed and shaved, they drank or sipped it—they stood in a group by themselves, and afterward sat very straight at their tables, reserved for them, painstakingly set, illuminated altogether differently from the bar, each man as collected as courteous, and all of them always equally unapproachable. Yet their evening meal did not last long; as a rule they went up to their rooms early, in summer even before dark, and sometimes I heard one of them complain the following evening about the noise outside, with a quiet assurance I would have wished to have myself. They also did not play cards or dice as the locals did.
A few of the crews remained in the bay for months; and in the course of the year I also encountered them during the day, at their work, the replacement of the gas pipeline through the woods, the building of a railroad viaduct, the renovation of the bus station. There, on my circuitous routes, it was easier for me, indeed entirely natural, to stop and take in their work (something otherwise done by only the oldest long-term inhabitants here). They pounded stones into place, now and then putting their ear to them, in a manner similar to that in which they spent their time after hours, except that they preferred to be watched at work, it seemed to me. Pride was not the same as unapproachability.
I often stood like this for an hour, for instance when another of these itinerant crews was digging out a spring in the forest, until the moment when shovelful by shovelful the trickle of water became a jet, and one of the workers, in the absence for the time being of a tile, got it to rattle into a hollow leaf. And now we greeted one another. And then we did that as well in the evenings, from a distance, without shaking hands as local bar frequenters customarily did.
Only once did one member of such a team address me in the evening, followed by the man next to him, and so on, until long after midnight. Without their relinquishing their masterful air, like that of dignitaries, it came out that in their eyes it was not they who were shutting out the population of this region, but rather the residents who were ignoring them. No one, except perhaps the proprietor of the inn—but he himself was a foreigner—ever had a word for the itinerant work crews, or
even a flicker of a facial expression. And everywhere they worked it was the same, and this one small exception seemed to these itinerant workers such a joyous occasion that they surrounded me, plucked at me, and finally shoved me around like a newly discovered member of the tribe. (On subsequent evenings, however, all we exchanged was greetings.)
With the itinerant workers, the majority of them Frenchmen from the provinces who on weekends went home to their families, no matter how far it was, for the only time up to now I found myself enjoying spending time with people here, being cheerful and in good spirits; the gleaming floor tiles and the snowy glistening of the walls in the dining room formed part of this experience. I have never sat or even just stood around this way somewhere with any of the original inhabitants of the bay, although in the meantime I have come to know there is something special about them; at the very most someone—where else but in the bars or perhaps also on a wood road?—confided in me, and then it was only the deranged or those with their heads not screwed on right; but these merely stuttered incomprehensibly and in any case avoided storytelling altogether, and if a question slipped out of me: immediate clamming up, turning away, end of conversation.
That the original population of the bay, although lacking any allures, was somehow unique and perhaps also wanted to maintain that quality, was something I deduced from a fragmentary local chronicle printed in The Hauts-de-Seine News. The bay, it said, had been a place of asylum since the beginning of the century, first for Russians and Armenians, then for Italians under Mussolini and Spaniards under Franco. Between the two world wars as much as a quarter of the population here were newly arrived asylum seekers, unusual for a western suburb of Paris.
