by Peter Handke
And that was still reflected, it seemed to me, in the comportment as well as the housing of those who were now old: they, too, had been itinerant workers, and here was their residence (for instance with names like “Our Sundays” or “Sweet Refuge”). As far as I could ascertain, they spoke with the quick tongue characteristic of French small farmers, but in their case it was not at the cost of reflectiveness; they combined the natives’ rhetoric with the eyes of foreigners; but wanted, however, to keep the latter for themselves.
During this year, after the one week of escape to Salamanca, I rarely went outside the bay.
After working on my project, I was too tired to stride along briskly, and thus I took the commuter train to Paris, if I was going at all. Only once, on the return trip, did I get off one station early, in Meudon-Val Fleury, and walk home, as I had always pictured doing, through the 3,233-meter tunnel under the Seine hills, in a draft smelling slightly scorched, feeling relieved after all when the occasional “Exit” arrows no longer pointed toward my back but forward, toward the bay.
How astonishing it was each time to see the horizon-wide scattered white splendor of the capital, which during my entire time by the jungle waters would actually have beckoned to me, with all its landmarks, if the wooded hills had not stood between us, as a prolongation of my shoe tip, of the skiff almost entirely sunk in the pond, and the muskrats splashing around there.
Nevertheless, on those few Paris evenings I almost never went all the way into one of its centers. Since I had long since begun to shun the movie theaters, boulevards, and sidewalk cafés—and this year all the more—there were only two destinations left for me in Paris. One of them was those interior spaces that were shaken periodically by the Métro underneath; and it was for that, not the film, that I descended into a movie theater one time. And the other was a certain pissoir, perhaps the last of the old kind, made of iron, painted in dark enamel, with a sort of temple roof, the whole thing a miniature round temple, partitioned in two by a pissing wall, down which on both sides water ran constantly from a gutter at eye level, both halves offering standing room for a man in need, shielded from eyes on the street, except for his head and feet, by milk-glass screens, which gently reflected the sun and the city lights.
This little cottage was located by the Pont Mirabeau, actually on the edge of the city, and it still existed, they said, only because of the taxi drivers who had a stand next to there and resisted having to stick money in a slot to urinate. And meanwhile that had become the only place in Paris to which I felt drawn from time to time. Having got out at Javel station and trudged across the bridge (from which the Seine, certainly mighty at that point, each time seemed less significant to me than my wild little pond) and then being greeted by this structure, otherwise easy to mistake for an empty kiosk, but chimerically changing its form with each of my steps, I would as a rule simply post myself in one of the semicircles, stare for a while at the gutter up above, from which for an eternity the water has been rolling down, wall-wide, listen to it running, also contemplating the spotlights refracted by the milk-glass screen on the other side, and before leaving dip my fingertips into the gutter up above.
And one time during this year I did make my way into a Parisian center after all: that of St.-Germain-des-Près, to contemplate the frieze of the Last Supper above the portal of the church there, from the twelfth century, where the heads that had been knocked off, one after the other, in the revolutionary eighteenth, leaving only the outlines, one of which, that of the apostle John, who has thrown himself on the table before his master, revealed to me the entire planet, the earth.
On the few evenings between the summer and now when I again wandered around the city, I saw the woman from Catalonia every time: not her imperial self, but in the form of other women, and once that of a man.
On one of these evenings I ran into Ana in a Métro station near the periphery, let’s say at the Porte d’Auteuil, as a transient. She was young, tall and broad-shouldered, with long dark hair, and of a beauty that pierced me to the quick. I was surprised that all the lady-killers in the city, in Montparnasse or on the Champs-Elysées, had not caught wind of her and formed a cavalcade behind her. But that was a year in which more and more young women were wandering around, and thus she was alone there in the half-dusk, as perhaps only such a beauty could be, with her bundle of bursting plastic bags, her fur coat in August, and her head askew.
I followed Ana out of the subway up onto the broad square from which roads led out of the city, where nocturnal plane trees rustled as they always had, and from all directions the headlights of cars crossed. She walked slowly, but without the load that hung down on both sides of her she would simply have remained in one spot; she moved crookedly, as if in a squall, following her wind-cocked head, diagonally across the square, dodging vehicles. And finally she stopped in front of a bustling sidewalk café and unexpectedly, with a simultaneous curtsy, thrust out both hands in a ballet-dancer gesture by a table, begging, without success, and had already disappeared around the corner.
Another time I came upon my wife while crossing, let’s say, the Avenue de Versailles, as a woman hobbling along on crutches, except that the foot was not in a cast, it was missing. She acted as though nothing were wrong, moving gracefully, she, too, out and about alone, and with her one-legged hobbling and at the same time rapidly hastening steps, turned her head every few seconds to look over her shoulder into the void, for a contented blink, as if she were marching overland (she made me realize that an individual can “march” as well).
And as I stared after the cripple, I recalled a dream about the two of us. In it I had sawed off one of Ana’s arms, and then did the same thing to myself, and only when I was through with the saw did I become aware that I, too, was now missing a hand, equally indispensable for writing and for something else. And what had the woman from Catalonia said once in response to my story of that time under the staircase in my brother’s house in the village?: “That kind of under-stair person is just what you are, turned in on yourself, warmed by yourself. But again and again a hand reaches out from under your staircase and grabs the person who is passing by outside, or at any rate me, in a way no hand ever grabbed me before.”
Then I once saw Ana as a man, in a restaurant one evening along the outer boulevards. It was a guest just coming in from the dark outside, neither young nor old, a sort of faceless Everyman in a hat and gray raincoat, and as I took him out of the corner of my eye for the woman from Gerona and El Paso, whom he did not resemble in the slightest, I realized that I had been expecting her, and at the same time, from my shock at seeing the angular masculine figure, that my waiting was actually full of apprehension.
And the vanished woman appeared to me one last time in the nocturnal commuter railway, in a stranger, with a very different face, eyes, hair. As I sat facing this unknown woman, I suddenly found myself contemplating my wife of many years.
I had not been able to look at the real Ana this way even once. An expectant calm emanated from her, at the same time impudence or playfulness, or the storytelling urge (as indeed she often said after a bruising quarrel that she had been dying the entire time to tell me how her day had gone). This fellow passenger did not avoid my gaze; she allowed it to have its way, then even responded with a smile, created in her expressionless face merely by my looking at it.
This was thinking in images, wordlessly. In this image the woman from Catalonia had a plane tree from the forest of Gerona as a background, from which a sparrow burst forth like a flying fish. She was a bride, would be that to the end; a needy person; a person pleading for protection. And so were other women, mothers of eleven, murderers of six, strumpets, high jumpers, Amazons.
And an almost forgotten yearning returned. And that was the night when I got out early in Meudon—Val Fleury, while the Gypsy woman continued on to St.-Quentin-en-Yvelines, and hiked home on foot through the scorched tunnel under the hills of the Seine. (And for the very last time I saw Ana in the fo
rm of a woman’s lost glove in the bushes.)
It is of course not true that during this year of 1999 I had no contact with a local resident. I even acquired a good neighbor, at least one, a child.
Before the child turned out to be a neighbor, I had already seen him quite often, in the little Russian church on the edge of one of the forests here, and once also on the handball court during a game played by the local team, the pride of the region after working its way up into the First League. He was with his parents, but I actually had eyes only for him.
In the Slavic church he, for his part, once looked during the whole Sunday Mass only in my direction, though alternating between my face and my shoulder, or the empty space above it, back and forth, until I imagined he was looking for another child there. He was still almost a baby, not yet speaking, only from time to time making sounds, once a bull bellowing, then the harsh cry of a large bird, and in between he crawled around on all fours among the congregation.
It was during this spring that his father, with him in his arms, unexpectedly came crashing through the bushes and pounded on my door, his eyes so big that I took their expression for ecstasy. In actuality he had just been informed that during an operation on his wife in the Sèvres hospital her heart had stopped under anesthesia. He asked me to watch the child until he got back, in a stammer that was more Russian than French, and I went on with my writing, holding the small child on my lap, the rhythm making him soon nod off, heavy in my arm, until after some time the father returned with news of her death.
From then on I also met this neighbor away from the chapel, at his house. There, to be sure, I was usually alone with the boy, who was called Vladimir; the man, one of the drivers of the peculiar buses in the bay—of which more later—occasionally worked until almost midnight, and it had become the routine for me to stay with the child if possible.
Whenever I prepared the evening meal for us both, it came to mind how at one time the thought of having a family, my family, had not made me feel strange or beside myself, but rather positively sturdy, with both feet on the ground. To create a family: for me in those days there was, as far as everyday life was concerned, no greater fulfillment; and I wanted to do my work not merely for those entrusted to me but also in their midst, unisolated, without a solitary study. To do the housework as well, washing windows, cooking, darning stockings, was all right with me; I had not really needed the precedent of David Herbert Lawrence, another cottager’s son, who had expertly scrubbed the floor for his aristocratic wife.
Now during evenings with Vladimir, and most powerfully during apple peeling or cutting bread, the memory of that meant it was coming alive again for me, also as something I had been missing after all throughout the time I was alone. The half orphan’s ways intensified this feeling. If I, worn down by my neighbors’ racket, actually felt hostile toward one child or another out there, that was unthinkable with this one here.
When he imitated me, it was never a question of mimicking; he did it in his own unique way, in whose reflection my actions in turn pleased me and made me happy. Thus it happened that in his presence I sketched out on a piece of paper what I had in mind to write the following morning, whereupon he, though only beginning to speak, every time wrote and drew something, which, although it seemed fairly similar, was an entirely different process: his writing was very vehement, yet his drawing was very deliberate. And both were done smoothly, without hesitation, and he always knew when something was finished; with the dashing final stroke and a last mighty drop of spit falling from his open mouth onto the paper came the decisive: “Done!” (But with the start of an undertaking, even selecting crayons, he was choosy, like the itinerant workers.) Compared with his, my own handwriting seemed to me ugly, also insignificant, and I wished it were as indecipherable, dense, and delicate as that of this little child.
When in the course of the year he acquired speech, it was quite an event to hear his first questions. That raising of the voice at the end of a sentence had the ring of a formulation never heard in such a way, close to song. And I experienced an even greater event when Vladimir then, in response to a question of mine, for the first time began to tell a story. That happened completely apart from his usual speaking and even singing; a long, tense silence preceded it, followed by a palpable formation of images and then a rhythm in the deepest recesses of the child’s inward being, a shining forth, and then he launched into it, his introductory sound a rolling of the tongue, a clacking, a positively melodic jubilation.
Yet in his everyday speech, too, he visibly had an object before his eyes for every word, in contrast to so many French children, who before the first image had learned already the words for it, so that even for them as adults the words could never represent something actually seen.
And another special thing happened with him: when he began to stammer. It was not regression into infant babbling, but rather a sort of ecstatic state, from which the child, so fiery and imperious that no one needed a translation, took a position on the world’s goings-on and proclaimed his view of the situation. These speeches always began with a sharply articulated, almost shouted “And now!” and only after that launched into inspired stammering.
If Vladimir could say of someone: “I know him,” the expression was infused with pure pleasure. If he was asked what this person or that “did,” he would reply: “He’s there.” But at intervals he would fall completely silent, and when I then glanced over at him, his eyes would be wide open, focused on me, as they had been for a long time already, almost alarmingly. And when he played, what credulous playing it was —the credulity of play.
Sometimes he merely listened for a while, and it became clear to me, from the birdsong, trains pulling in and out (which in the meantime I had otherwise long since stopped hearing), the rattling of the garbage trucks (here often in the evening), how wide the bay was becoming. With him at my side, it was as if the barking of dogs, as well as the year-round screeching of the ravens, were happening for his and our protection. And when he then slept, I sat next to his room in the kitchen as the household employee on call, and I liked that as much as the unaccustomed view from there through the trees of my own house, with lights on, as always at nightfall, in every room, and looking so mysterious from the unfamiliar kitchen.
“A child,” I thought, “keeps joy going in the world, and what else is the world?” That I had already had a similar thought: all the better.
Then in the course of the summer the business with the mushrooms in the bay began, in time even interfering with my year’s work, and this time the danger came from me myself.
But perhaps I am exaggerating, and mushroom hunting should be seen more as a kind of competition to sitting and recording, a fruitful one?
During that year every species of edible mushroom gradually found its way to my heart, and the main characters, yes, were the cèpes, or, as we called them in Austria, king boletes. I had never been a mushroom expert, and am still not one today. (Or any kind of “expert,” God forbid.) Yet finding them had been a great pleasure way back in my childhood, even if in the Jaunfeld region I had at most had an eye for what we called egg yolk mushrooms, or chanterelles, which often had parasols or umbrellas that more than covered both palms. I recall how after an extraordinarily rich find, halfway into the mountains along the Yugoslav border, when I was out hiking with my grandfather, a night came during which in my sleep I zigzagged from one yellow patch of chanterelles to the next, scooping them up, and in the end that was one of my most enduring nightmares. And no one in the house ate these yellow ones; they were sold (I owed my first paperbacks to the proceeds) to a cooperative and transported from there by truck to the regional capital. And if memory serves me, there was not a single find of king mushrooms in my entire childhood. My grandfather turned up, rarely enough, with one, called jurek in Slovenian—rather disrespectfully, precisely out of admiration?—but he, who otherwise was happy to share, did not reveal his sources to me, his frequent companion, and I stil
l picture stumbling one day upon a sealed testament in which he passes on to me the secret locations.
Not until the summer of my move here on the other side of the hills above the Seine did I suddenly see, without really looking, on a sunken road, from whose crest it was not all that far east to the next Métro, and only a hop, skip, and jump to the Eiffel Tower, king boletes standing there, amazing also in their perfection so close to the mountain-bike ruts, and as if they were there just for me. The hat in the crook of my arm was then wonderfully weighed down by the few light brown caps, whose fresh smell accompanied me through the subway and along the avenues, except that the pedestrians in the metropolis took them, along with the leaves clinging to them, for theatrical props, real live objects like the edibles in the windows of Japanese restaurants.
That summer was also the summer of the king boletes on the future Bordeaux bank, along the forest side of the bay’s main road, grubbed out of the earth by children sliding down for fun. And both finds I cooked for a reconciliation meal with the woman from Catalonia, or wasn’t it simply a matter of enjoying them together, without any particular purpose? And of these meals I still recall that we immediately pushed aside the other ingredients, meat as well as herbs, because all at once these tasted so insistent, even coarse, and put only the white thin mushroom slices into our mouths, one piece only after we had thoroughly savored the previous one; that with each bite the taste promptly became a feeling, not merely gratifying the palate but also the head and then the entire body; and that, if we two mushroom eaters took on the air of conspirators, certainly not ones planning anything bad.
Since then I have been on the lookout every year in the bay, but have hardly ever encountered the king bolete again (except in the autumn at the market on the railroad station square, though heaps of them there, at fruit and potato stands, with a little sign indicating their origin, cèpes de Corrèze, a region considered the most remote or interior in France).
