My Year in No Man's Bay

by Peter Handke

  I often stood and looked at the ground until the forms there, of fallen branches, leaves, moss, each began to glow separately: only thus did I get into seeking, without specific purpose. And I went seeking where most of the others did, on the path or close to it, and only late in autumn farther into the underbrush: my most astonishing, my most wonderful finds occurred as a rule where everybody passed through. Whenever I became tired, I rested, continuing to seek more slowly, or caught my breath while focusing on an optical illusion, a piece of rind, a patch of sunlight, also a poisonous mushroom. Time and again I also went seeking with the light shining in my eyes; to concentrate then was a game. I was less successful in noisy conditions, for instance near a highway; only in silence did I feel that I was now in Findland, at least in the find direction—although in time I also knew otherwise.

  It was fruitful to look up from the ground at intervals, treetop- and skyward, after which things down below on the ground took on clearer contours; likewise to seek while concentrating on the day before yesterday—almost always something heaved up from underground, even if instead of the Bordeaux mushroom it was merely a little cèpe, the sight of whose flesh flooded my heart with a joyous yellow; and likewise to seek after a moment of terror, because after that my eyes looked sharper, by themselves, without any effort on my part.

  Whenever those troops of seekers or plunderers or forest pirates crossed my path, I imagined, in contrast to them, a different, new kind of seeker. He did not seek in orthodox fashion, which in the case of mushroom seeking meant at a distance, actually at a distance from at a distance. What did that mean? For instance, following in the muddy footsteps of the organized, mechanized seekers: it turned out, and not only once, that he found himself facing a king bolete too large for the keen eyes and sonar devices, which otherwise did not miss so much as a button; so huge that the entire forest appeared around it as a Baroque setting, and he stammered at the majesty reposing in glory in its midst, “My, my, where did you come from?”

  To seek at a distance also meant: at a distance from time. For instance, my new seeker hardly believed in Sunday finds, but certainly, and without reservation, in those of Mondays. A huge sigh of relief, after the hordes passed through, had gone through the woods during the night and sunrise hours and had had its most immediate effect on the mushrooms; the Monday finds, in the renewed stillness, with cricket-harping, could be counted on to be the freshest, and turned up primarily on the main paths, which the previous evening had still been tramping and bicycle-racing zones. The Monday mushrooms could be so beautiful that the seeker would say at the sight of one: “Boy, you’re so beautiful you should be real!”

  But for a modern seeker like this, in addition to the temporal there was also a spatial distance from the distance of the seeker guilds, at a distance from their underbrush seeking grounds or hardly traversable plantations, for example the places behind the cemeteries here in the bay’s forests, where the layers of leaves were not only considerably thicker but also mixed with rotted flowers and such, which had been thrown over the wall. Altogether, it was the delimited, overseeable spots, and not the great expanses, where one got into the right kind of seeking without even trying. The modern seeker had only to walk up and down there attentively, and at the same time selflessly.

  Was being free of oneself desirable, then? Yes. And how? Something like this: “Be still now! Be still in yourself!”

  And it got warm again during the search, when leaves blown from far away, from trees entirely different from those hereabouts, mingled with the local ones. Then it became a matter of getting one’s head into the searching angle, especially since late fall played tricks on the seeker more and more, to mention only the slanting light, and the mushrooms, under the fallen leaves, took on camouflage colors.

  That seeker figure that hovered before my eyes while I myself was seeking moved with a particular seeking step, of unprecedented elegance, in a unique search dance, from one foot to the other, at the same time the most inconspicuous of dances. And from his sort of seeking he had become athletic, and part of it was that again and again he went backward, or turned in a circle for a while (did not merely look over his shoulder), in a fashion similar to that in which long ago, on the Jaunfeld Plain, at the celebration of the summer solstice, the young men carrying torches had swung them around during the procession, according to ancient custom, to get these torches to flare up constantly—a custom which, according to the latest parish bulletin, is supposed to be revived soon.

  But what did such renewed seeking lead to, except perhaps to a small meal? Aside from the fact that I have never in my life eaten as well and as nicely as in this year—the different kind of seeker, as I conjured him up in my imagination, let me tell you, noticed in passing more than before: saw in passing the transition in the Seine hills from the grayish-blue Fontainebleau sand to the white sandstone named after the Montmorency region, and in passing the hundreds-of-years-old wagon tracks in the forest, going back to the days of kings, and in passing the boulders thrown up half a century ago already, and now again from the bomb craters, and in passing the often amazingly intricate leaf-covered huts of the increasing numbers of homeless in the region.

  And he succeeded, simply through his seeking, even without finding anything, in collecting himself. For what? For naught. And precisely when he made a great, marvelous find he was seized with anxiety: a small, innocuous one should be added to it, by way of confirmation, reassurance. And toward the end of autumn a longing for nothing but modest finds set in, for russulas, ringed boletes, blewits, and ordinary little moss mushrooms—no more majestic mushrooms! And from time to time the seeker actually set out with the motto “Today I shall succeed in not finding anything!” And in midstream, precisely because of his searching, he forgot this, too, and the beauty of the land, the clouds, the trees, and the paths gained the upper hand.

  And an ever-new source of pleasure in seeking would be the mistakes. “What a sad day it will be when I no longer make mistakes!” My future seeker would welcome his mix-ups, would fondle them, use them to study the laws governing human error (and himself), would finally set up a room in his house just “for my mistakes”; would use his optical illusions to keep himself impressionable, as he would use the places in the woods searched until completely empty to collect himself. And thus collected, to continue seeking will appear to him as a renewal of the world. It will become bright, within him as well as in the landscape, from his collected seeking.

  And what now, in wintertime, in the cold, when there is nothing more to seek for in the wooded areas? Yes, there was hoarfrost this morning on the few remaining mushrooms there, which, one way or another, like the ice-covered pond, across which my stones pinged, no longer had a name. And my three-season writing seat, tipped into the water by children playing, stuck up from among the ice floes. And the hoarfrosted cap of one of these nameless mushroom-people bore the mark, paper-thin, of the foot of a very light, very small, seemingly one-legged bird. And at home, from the window of my mistake room, I contemplated the plaster cast, a present from the priest in the village of my birth, of the Magi, out there under the garden beech, and likewise saw in all the lumpy gift packages, which they held out into the void, in the frankincense, gold, and myrrh, likewise a king bolete, lord of the mushrooms.

  In the meantime my son Valentin, on his crisscross journey through Greece, had long since put the site of the ancient oracle in Dodona behind him. It had become a place that he now recalled in approximately the following terms: “That was where, in the morning, when I went on foot from Ioannina up into the mountains, along the road it was still white with April frost, where at noon, as the only guest sitting outdoors in front of the snack shack near the amphitheater, I had a bee fall into my glass, and where, on my way back over the hills toward evening, from behind and in front sheep dogs jumped up on me.” From Dodona he had sent me a leaf from a chestnut oak, so hard that when it was shaken or even just held up in the wind it produced a metallic cl
anging sound, and I could imagine how the entire oracle’s grove had once droned, rattled, spoken. (Hadn’t leaves also been gilded?)

  He involuntarily spent the summer in Athens, for in the great heat the leg that had almost been severed in his accident swelled up, and he lay there, hardly able to move, in a room in a pension. In the course of the month he covered the walls with paintings, motifs, festively colorful people, ditto flowers as large as people, of the sort he had taken note of in the prehistoric frescoes from Thera or Santorini, removed to the Greek National Museum.

  And one day the woman stepped through his door whom he referred to in my presence only as “your woman from Catalonia,” his mother, the person with the most reliable intuition (like me more in connection with bad luck), and took up quarters next to him for a while. For the first time she cared for her son, as if only now the moment had come, and was solicitous, so unobtrusively, as was her style, that he was not even alarmed, as was in turn his style. “My mother was good to me,” he wrote me later.

  And she was then the one who helped him get back on his feet by grabbing her overgrown son, on the August-dusty Lykabettos Hill in the middle of Athens and dragging him, half naked, through a very special patch of stinging nettles: “The nettle run healed me.” After that, again as was her style, the woman from Catalonia vanished.

  Not once during this year did Valentin make the crossing to one of the Greek islands. He had promised his girlfriend that he would visit them only with her, at some later date; he got as far as watching the ferries in Piraeus. In the fall, on the Peloponnesus, he received word that his text on the different winter grays, which he had illustrated with drawings and watercolors, had received a prize, was being printed and displayed in a gallery.

  Never would he have thought that he could be so pleased by a success—his first. And now: how bright the foreign lights became, of Corinth, then Nemea, then Argos, then Nauplia; how it gave him, who had meanwhile been feeling the tug of home, the impetus to continue his journey, to set out on foot. There were successes that hollowed one out; not this small first one. “I would like to make something,” he wrote to me on his twenty-second birthday from mountainous Tripoli in Arcadia, “that would put me in a class with the painter of the chambers of Thera.”

  Upon receiving notice of the prize, he had bought himself a suit, as well as shoes, which, hardly worn, he is wearing today as he waits, in mid-December, in Patras for the ferry to Brindisi to dock. He long ago learned not merely to read Greek but also to speak a few words, whether ancient or modern, such as helios, sun, and cheimon, winter, and in every place he immediately found the one roomy café, each time with a high plaster ceiling and the most elaborate neon-light patterns, where he had his spot, with or without drawing pad, amid the clicking of the dice tossed by the old customers, and no matter where he was, he called it Neos Kosmos, New World. (Didn’t kosmos originally mean “decoration”?)

  Now in wintertime the shrill chirping of the cicadas had long since fallen silent, yet in the rocky expanse, especially that of Arcadia, one could imagine it all the more vividly. Only a short time ago, toward the end of his year’s journey, Valentin informed me that he encountered his father a few times, in the form of doubles, and very strange ones indeed. This happened to him, however, almost only by hearsay, once in Delphi, where in a tourist café there was talk of a rather scruffy fellow who had introduced himself as “Gregor Keuschnig, writer,” had let others pay for his meal and then disappeared with the loveliest woman in the group; and then again in a restaurant, estiatorion, by the Lion Gate of Mycenae, where on the wall hung a postcard, addressed to the proprietor’s lovely daughter, with my signature forged, and above it thanks for help in time of need and for the unforgettable hours with her (postmarked Paris).

  And one time Valentin even saw me in person, by the Piraeus ferries to the Aegean islands, where “I,” barefoot, ragged, younger than in reality, “the writer G.K. in crisis,” was offering to sell to my fellow countrymen waiting in line cartoons that I had drawn myself and carried in a portfolio. Again and again my son in his days as a disc jockey had played a song by the singer titled “I’ll Throw My Father Off My Back”: there, at the sight of my double and counterfeiter he recognized that he had stopped needing to do that a long time ago.

  This morning in Patras, on the stone steps, in the upper town, he had witnessed a man trying to lure his escaped parrot back into its cage from a tree. The bird’s master did this by calling up patiently to the escapee, for hours on end, in a very tender voice, while the bird talked back to him, and he had the cage on his head, its door open, and on the tip of the cage, the sharp spike there, he had stuck an apple, which he turned now and then, or also tossed away into the air, while out of the tree only sparrows flew constantly.

  In between the man put down the empty cage, withdrew, and waited in silence. The escaped bird did not budge. More and more neighbors approached, cautiously, and softly offered advice. And then, as the midday ferry was already blowing its whistle down in the harbor, my son came over and gave the apple on the spike a gentle push, so that the stem, instead of sideways as previously, now pointed straight up toward the pappagallo in the tree. And in that moment the parrot dropped, as if in free fall, jungle-yellow.

  And now Valentin is making his way slowly toward the bay here, for the reunion we are all going to celebrate.

  My friend the priest on the Jaunfeld Plain had been constantly on the move all year, but hardly outside of his parish, except for the visit, occasioned by his sermon defying the Pope, to the bishop in K., who, without a word’s being spoken between them about the whole matter, agreed with him that the caption under a photograph of the two of them in the next church bulletin should read that the child of Siebenbrunn had merely come into town, as farmers often had in earlier times, “to look at the clock again.”

  It was chiefly on account of the dying that he could not get away, even though he did long to now and then. There were no more of them than usual this year, but the need seemed to have grown, among the old as well as among the young, for someone like him, since no one else did it anymore, to stop by, every day if possible, with his disdainful gaze, and lay on his hands. Then they wanted him to stay, even if he just gazed out at the landscape, with his back to them, or read the paper. He was in agreement with the Protestants in at least one respect, namely that faith alone was decisive, and was close to disapproving of so-called good works; these, and here he was of one mind with “his” writer, the apostle Paul, should be refrained from, “lest any man should boast.”

  Except for those who lay dying, all year long hardly a soul in his parish of many villages asked for him, and only very rarely did his appearing cause eyes to light up anywhere; the majority even turned away, not hostilely, only sullenly: “Oh, him again.”

  At the end of October he telephoned me, as promised, because on the Jaunfeld, in the village of Rinkolach, and on the house of my ancestors there, the first snow was falling, “flakes feathered like arrows,” falling in town, on the contrary, horizontally, looking in the headlights of the dense stream of rush-hour traffic like towropes; besides, my brother had discovered his singing voice, the last one in the family to do so, and was singing in the church choir, with such a beautiful voice that Urban, as happened every time when he succeeded at something—and he succeeded at almost everything—broke out in lamentations at his own life-weariness.

  In dark November, lacking sun also because of the mist off the dammed-up Drau in the west, the priest dreamed a repetition of the event that had preoccupied him since that night in the Lower Austrian seminary for those called late to the priesthood: again he found himself, as in reality there, lying in the bed of someone else, who was fast asleep, as he had just been, and he? How in the world had he ended up in this other bed, next to a huge strange body that left him no room? Where was his own bed? How would he be punished? Expulsion from the institution? A mark of Cain on his forehead, for life?

  Then at the beginning
of December came such a heavy frost that the bed of the brooks flowing through the Jaunfeld toward the Drau, from the Petzen and the Karawanken Mountains, froze over from the bottom, up over the pebbles, enlarged into ice balls, whereupon the water on top, forced upward, spilled far over the banks. And for the first time in decades the villagers became skaters again, out until late on full-moon nights, as if things had never been any different in the interval; and blocks of ice weighing tons were cut, as if for the icehouses of a different turn of the century.

  Advent had long since arrived, and there were still a few refugees in the rectory, from the German civil or cousins’ war, refugees from the north and west for a change, instead of from the south or east as usual, Bavarians and Hessians from larger cities, driven out by the Saxons or Frisians or Saarlanders, then seized here by a kind of paralysis, incapable of going home, although since the summer peace had returned to their areas; perhaps they also harbored thoughts of remaining forever in this rather empty land of pines and wayside shrines.

  For a while these few traumatized individuals were lodged in one of the abandoned schoolhouses of the area, speechless, their eyes lowered, and just last night, before his departure today, he had said Mass for them there. While at the Kyrie eleison, the sentences from Scripture, the Hallelujah, his heart as always was suffused with warmth, and, he told himself, as he did every day, he could get along without any celebration except, for all eternity, that of the Eucharist, of thanksgiving, of Communion, with the transformation of bread and wine into the divine body and the divine blood, still he gazed at the refugees’ absent or confused faces with such scorn, increasing as the moments passed—“Could you stop boring the whole world with your misery!”—that the final blessing with which he sent them forth was hardly out of his mouth when all of them burst into laughter, at first still awkwardly here and there, then unanimously relieved.