My Year in No Man's Bay

by Peter Handke

  And this morning he sat by the window of his office and waited for daybreak—while yearning for the winter’s night to last a good while longer (as the weeks of Advent meant more to him than Christmas itself; for its celebration this time the priest from the next parish would take his place). He, without domestic help, had ironed his shirts, rinsed out his coffee cup, had even, long before sunrise, gone skidding over the most terrible roads around the Rinkenberg to give his vehicle the patina of a forester’s car, for my sake, and the day before had instructed all the dying to hold off until the new year and his return, and was now sitting, as he otherwise seldom did, quietly, in his traveling clothes, the heavy tome he had just been reading balanced on his shoulder.

  Down below on the icy path, likewise as if for the first time since all the wars and events of the century, a glazier with his rack of panes on his back, which caused a glittering all around in the first rays of the sun. But his main attention was focused on the holes, the ventilation pattern in the wall of the tumbledown barn across the way, shaped like a circle of sunflowers, in the middle an opening in the shape of an acorn, like that of the ace in a deck of cards. Pavel had already been waiting a long time for something to waft into his face from these pitch-black grids, like that third calling. And what if this one revoked the two previous ones?

  With my other distant friends I shared during the year here in my bay fewer such moments, perhaps because they all ended up too far away, and furthermore in places of which I hardly had an image (or too definite a one), perhaps because they were either too young or less old than my son Valentin and Father Pavel, perhaps also because I received no word of them, as was the case with my singer.

  Nevertheless, even without a complete train of images, I continued to see the wandering through the world of each individual friend—I had only to point my thoughts in his direction—in a sharply delineated light: this was like looking through the telescope in my house at the moon, the full moon, which each time made me feel as if I were not only seeing the glaring white surface but were also gazing into the depths of the smallest crater, at the bottom of the basin there with its boulders and their shadows.

  Thus almost the only thing I knew about the architect and carpenter was that he, more in the latter role, had been on the move until now, into the winter, from one mountain village to the next in southern Japan, and was offering to work for farmers, repairing their wooden structures. As a rule he did not even ask, but without ado worked his way in from the outer edge of the property, from a lean-to in the meadow, a turnstile, a rack for drying straw, the lattice door of a root cellar. Just the sight of these Japanese villages, huddled together with their curved, bronze-dark roofs overlapping, as if dedicated to the heavens, made tears sometimes come to his eyes. Not to jump onto the train of images like so many architects today, but to add his own to the organically developed image!

  If he was not remunerated every time, he was at least tolerated, especially since he promptly went to work in a way that brooked no contradiction. He did, to be sure, stay out of the way, yet did not behave like a stranger, but as if he were at home, on the karst or in Friuli, except that now, abroad, he finished every one of his projects. And after his return he would adhere to this pattern on his own building site. “It’s time to build”—this was one of the few messages I received from him.

  The tools for his repair work, work which had the aura of inconspicuousness, he fabricated himself, or the Japanese farmers occasionally helped him out with tools that had long since been deposited in corners, behind the machinery: there were still carpenter’s pencils around, for marking boards, no different from everywhere in Europe, the special short-handled hatchets, the long, flexible string, and to go with it the old carpenter’s cans with a red liquid through which the string was drawn and then snapped against a tree trunk to mark the cutting line, a smacking sound on the wood probably heard everywhere in the world.

  Occasionally he also came through large cities like Osaka, and noticed that there all the physical or “dirty” work was usually done clandestinely, by strangers like him, only with darker skin; the screens in front of new buildings under construction allowed one to see in even less than those elsewhere, and it was also as if the workers there had explicit instructions to remain out of sight: a rarity when in the midst of the construction noise a human figure could be seen in a gap in the screen, and then with his back to the street, a rear view, and promptly swinging hand over hand back into the wings.

  For a few hours, during a night in a hotel by the station, somewhat like one in England, made of brick, except that it was in Tokyo, after he had looked out at the maze of tracks in the railroad yard until the last commuter trains pulled in, from which station officials with long poles with hooks on the end fished out more and more drowsy drunks, in suit and tie, with briefcases—a constant staggering back and forth over all the platforms, combined with being shoved along, push after push—the carpenter in wintry Japan went insane. In him, this patient man, it was more the eruption of an impatience he had been holding in for a lifetime, or the sudden cessation of those different experts’ voices in him; it jolted him out of his sleep, whereupon he paced up and down until daybreak, repeatedly and with all his might pounding his head with both fists; the last time this had happened to him he had been a child. And he would have continued in this fashion if, with a small billowing of curtains, the Mongolian woman, the bride of Hokkaido, had not appeared to save him, putting him to bed and silently taking him between her legs.

  And the following morning, alone again, Guido set out toward me in the bay, with a stopover in Alaska, where he wanted to study the characteristic wooden shelters known as cachés, which were built on stilts against bears and had always interested him; and on the telephone he promised to build a window seat in my study, with a writing surface above it.

  Since the flight from Narita to Anchorage did not leave until late in the evening, by way of farewell on his last day in Japan the architect took for the second time the commuter train to the Eastern Sea of Kamakura, to try, weak as he still was from his night of madness, trembling in every limb, to gain new tranquillity before the house-sized Buddha there. And afterward he had time for the beach on the Pacific, where at sunset yet another (or the same?) group of girls in dark blue school uniforms yet again threw very long-stemmed roses into the waves, like lances, at intervals, into dusk, in which the colors of the flowers drifting out to sea, especially the red, became things unto themselves.

  Perhaps I succeeded least in traveling along later on with my woman friend: “Because you (thus that master of explanation, my petty prophet of Porchefontaine) lost, with the disappearance of the woman from Catalonia, your wife, any image at all of a woman.”

  But as I now think back to those months, to Helena’s moment by the sea-flooded stone sarcophagi in the Turkish bay, I see that somewhat differently. I felt as though I was there when she, weary of the eternally wine-dark sea and of the ship’s helm, merely simulating a gathering of people with its jerky movements, in between turned back toward Dalmatia, heartily laughed at there by her two children, who, as always, were no longer and not yet expecting her, and in the following autumn set out again, this time to Egypt.

  Instead of continuing to wander around there, she worked until now, using a skill she had once acquired, one of her many, on the restoration of an early Christian Coptic church in Cairo. She was the oldest in the group. Yet no one would have noticed that; she presented herself as an apprentice just like all the others, and during this time made herself, as only she, the beauty queen, could, invisible.

  Although there, already fairly close to the edge of the city, or at least in an enclave far from the center of town, almost exclusively natives were at work, in the barely chapel-sized building young people from all over the world had come together, youth such as was perhaps to be observed only here, at this little-bitty restoration work, on the door ornamentation, the inlays, and especially the frescoes, and otherwise n
owhere else on earth.

  From outside one’s eye at first fell on only scattered individuals, for instance the girl up in the tower, who, her upper body leaning out of an opening, yet without twisting, was scrubbing down the wall. The interior, however, was packed, up to the ceiling, with similar young people, busy scraping, injecting, stroking, brushing. Each of these hand movements required hardly any room, took place in one spot, like a dot, close to soundlessness, at the same time with an intensity that bent all parts of the body to the task. Often elbow to elbow with the next person, from one level of staging to the next, they all had a place to work in and radiated that certainty, as uncramped on their knees as on their tiptoes.

  The satisfaction, so quiet, that emanated from the restorers—along with a little transistor-radio music, whether the Mississippi sound of Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Central European Tyrolienne of Haydn, or the inner-Arabian singing of Uum Kalsum, at whose sound the walls of Jericho came tumbling down in an entirely different way—was, as the work progressed steadily, one that resulted from having time; or, as if what they were doing were something like gaining time, the most precious thing, not only for them, the young people, here alone, but of general utility and general validity: no matter what troop of warriors, to whom in their killing-training camp such a restoration might be shown on film, would have their eyes opened to the fact that in the current era there were other images besides those of the evil empire in their video games.

  Yet away from such activity my woman friend was caught up in a state of near oblivion, menacing as never before. Not the fact that she was constantly losing her way in Cairo afflicted her, but that her wandering each time led her into seemingly permanently ruined and garbage-strewn areas, where the dusty lump of rubble that she just barely missed stepping on was the face of a human being, very alive and not at all old, lying there amid rags and charred animal skulls, and the rusty tin can next to him was his blood-warm hand. Once, thinking herself completely alone in an expanse of smoking tatters, she had, crouching down to relieve herself, almost done it on one of these seemingly camouflaged people, asleep, or unconscious, or dying.

  More and more she felt the urge to fall down beside them. Into the North African winter she did not speak another word, remained, except when at work, silent even with herself, no longer knew her name (that single name that otherwise tripped off her tongue with such gentle self-confidence). It did her good, in between and on days of rest, to turn away from the unchanging, also all equally round and naive-eyed faces of the Coptic saints, which day in, day out were as close to her as under a microscope, and look into those so differently alike faces of Egyptian antiquity, and at the bodies belonging to them, by no means so childlike, inside which, in the heart muscle, the pyramids had palpably been first of all, even before the actual building, like funeral barges ready to set sail for infinity.

  Two cards Helena sent me, wordless ones: one of just such a broad-shouldered ancient Egyptian, striding along with a curved space between his trunk and the arch of his shoulders (unthinkable in Christian figures of that region), onto which she had sketched on one side the moon, on the other the sun; the second with a papyrus, as the hieroglyph for “green.”

  Before her departure, she took the train to Helwan, up the Nile, where the deserts were closer, and also because of the similarity of the town with her “Helena.” (The river itself remained for her not only nameless; with time she had also forgotten it so completely that one day on a bridge her heart stopped at the sight of the oil-streaked water in the unsuspected depths.) In Helwan a December rain was falling, a child was making its way carefully through the wet part of a puddle, as if to wash off the citywide mud, and my woman friend sat down outside of town on a pile of rubble in the Arabian Desert, which appealed to her more because of its darker coloration, also the absence of human beings, than the left-bank section facing Libya. The sand there also had coarser grains, and the rain could be heard very clearly plashing on it, also more into the wide-open spaces, all the way to—here articulated thoughts finally resumed inside her—“the Red Sea,” over the empty, rippled expanse, which appeared tinted and inscribed like the roof-tile landscape back in Maribor outside her bedroom window. And here, too, there were sparrows.

  The painter lost in the course of this year just about everything that could be lost.

  The Catalan state, whose reestablishment he, previously the world-famous artist of that country, had cursed—“This state is an injustice, its establishers are traitors”—confiscated his estates there. His foreign properties burned down, along with the arsenals of paintings. A new iconoclastic movement, fleeting as a dream and all the more lasting in effect, also destroyed his works in museums (his black was stamped over with Day-Glo corrosive paint). The banks once founded specifically for painter-princes went bankrupt. One of the last gallery owners announced an exhibition with my friend’s few remaining paintings and then disinvited him, without explanation. His film, which premiered in the fall in Madrid, in a theater so full that the audience was also sitting on the steps, was crowded out a week later by an American film, which the theater owner had to run, lest he be prevented from ever showing another Hollywood film. The one copy disappeared, and the original cans of film, the negatives, without which no further copies could be made, were tossed out onto the rails as worthless during a train robbery, run over by the train, and, it was reported on the news, shredded beyond repair.

  And still, after the time spent filmmaking, he was incapable of going back to his painting. “I don’t know anything about painting, have never known anything—except perhaps what not to do.” For a time there was probably a voice inside him repeating over and over that he was finished (or something of the sort). Yet the moment then came when he no longer wanted to have that said of him. To be sure, he seemed to accept it when on his trip up the Spanish meseta, to the sources of the Río Duero, here and there, in Tordesillas, in Burgos, in Soria, an old admirer expressed pity for him. Yet within himself he had long since achieved the Roman amor fati, love of fate. Yes, he was glowing with love for everything that had happened to him during the year. In the pitch-darkness within which he moved, his eyes opened wide not only with watchfulness but also with passion for knowledge. He was ready for a battle, though in his own way, instead of with clenched fists with fingers spread wide.

  Later in the summer he then turned away from the water of the river, as if he did not want to see himself comforted by it anymore: it was comfort, in fact, which seemed to awaken in him that sorrow he had always resisted, out of the experience that it was almost certain to be followed by bad temper and even world-weariness. He swerved off to the south and all fall roamed back and forth across La Mancha, that almost shadowless rump and residual landscape, so easy to recapitulate with every glance, where the few watercourses had been dried out for years now, and as if forever.

  He also ended up there farther away from the parts of Spain “behind the mirror,” Vigo, La Coruña, Pontevedra, the fjords deep in the interior of Galicia, where he had shot his film and which, it seemed to him in retrospect, had been damaged by the picture making, the spotlighting. Although the camera had always remained at a distance, it was as if the areas had been plundered by the process. And only now, with time, and also with his, the responsible party’s, distancing himself, did these areas gradually return to their senses and go back, recovered, like grass that bounces back after being trampled down, to their place behind the mirror, into the very special light there, which arrayed them as if nothing had happened.

  And he, as far from the sea as also from a source, now became in barren La Mancha—the end of sorrow and of guilt, and no one left who recognized him—entirely free for his love of fate, a love that more than anything else drove him to create, but what? For the time being at any rate Francisco simply kept on reading that kindly master, Horace, who taught him that a god did not have to intervene in a situation until “the knot is worthy of such a savior.”

  And
now, yesterday, on a winter evening in Albacete, the city of knives, seemingly only recently bombed to pieces in the civil war, after one of his daily trips to the movies—the latest Hollywood him—mothered by the movies as in his childhood, the painter stumbled upon something in a corner of the open projection booth, without a projectionist: the copy of his As I Lay Dying that had disappeared from Madrid, six reels, too heavy for a man, but not for him: already they were stowed in his camper, ready to be shown when all his friends were gathered here in the no-man’s-bay. And last night there appeared to him Horace, son of a freedman, with a little paunch, and instructed him to go out and simply ask a young person: “What should I paint?” Upon awakening, Francisco resolved to pose this question to Valentin, Gregor Keuschnig’s son. He would have an answer for him, and he would act upon it. And the following morning the few paintings by the painter that had been spared by the iconoclasts revealed changes; for instance, mine here, the only piece of art in the house, had acquired a black rocky mountain hovering in the air, a hole, or rather a place where one could see through, while the other undamaged pictures changed their coloration.

  And soon after setting out for the north he drove on the high plateau past a shallow depression, apparently dug out centuries earlier, an empty square a little lower than the plowed fields already sown with winter rye, a former livestock pen, overgrown, with bristly grass, the remains of a wooden fence, also of a shed, with shreds of horse tethers, on the ground a donkey’s hoof, a bird skeleton, and he thought: “This is Cervantes’ world! This is Spain!” and then: “This is what my next film will begin with,” and then: “How the human race needs such ridiculous, pointless, and one-sided heroes as Don Quixote from time to time!”