My Year in No Man's Bay

by Peter Handke

  And another thing in the bay’s hanging gardens acquired value for me in this particular year: a square, carefully edged in blocks of sandstone, an entirely empty, pebble-strewn square next to the wall of a bower, raised above the beds, at the same time much smaller than these, drip-irrigated as artfully as pointlessly, in years of lying fallow, by a roof gutter, at which I always thought: “This a railwayman built in memory of his wife.”

  The only gatherings in the bay in which I participated all year long were the Sunday Masses (other gatherings—were there any at all here?).

  I did not go to the French Catholic church for them—I was there almost always only in passing—but to that Russian one, likewise on the edge of the forest, diagonally across the way, which was log-cabin-small, and where the Mass was in part read or sung in Slavic. I had already visited it earlier from time to time, with Ana, whom I was once able to embrace there as hardly anywhere else, with Valentin, my son, whom I once, when I turned to look at the adolescent, saw crying, and who never wanted to go to church again after that.

  But in this year of 1999 I made it a rule not to miss a single celebration of the Mass, if possible; it took place in any case only twice a month; the priest also had responsibility for another congregation in the Seine hills. On the Sunday morning in question I became impatient to get there, was afraid of being too late for the Kyrie eleison!, went all the way there at a jog trot.

  From outside—no sound ever issued from the building—the chapel with the blue onion dome on top, the only instantly distinct color in the region, seemed, even when one was standing right in front, always locked up, yes, as if abandoned, closed down—unlike the church vis-à-vis, its bells never rang—and on the way I never encountered another churchgoer. And only once past the outer door, in the porch, could one see from the shopping bags deposited there, with baguettes and bunches of vegetables for Sunday dinner, that the building was occupied, and inside was waiting, each time a surprise, a whole crowd, even if it was perhaps only two dozen, one head next to the other. And at the same time, when one entered, it was unexpectedly as spacious as in a dream, perhaps also because of the candles and their reflection on the wall of icons, likewise because of the priest’s chamber beyond the arched opening, which led back as if into the depths.

  In the cold months the church was always overheated, and that such heating be safeguarded seemed to be the first condition for the continued existence of the congregation: would the priest otherwise have reported on the Sunday before last with such joy on the yield from the collection, taken up for this winter’s heating?

  As for me, the so-and-so from the Slovenian village of Rinkolach on the Jaunfeld Plain, going to Mass was something that had to be done! To hear Slavic spoken, here in the cosmopolitan bay, every second Sunday, in the company of a few others, was not the main thing. But it opened me up first of all; no, ripped me open. No matter how high the notes became, the sound seemed very deep to me. It did not bring back childhood, but with it I became the person I am, often tremulous, yet not defenseless. Without my ever singing along, my lungs expanded. I found myself blending in with the rest, yet I did not once have to open my mouth.

  That I was hearing my ancestors’ Slavic at the same time as a Mass was an essential part of the experience. Only in this form did my participatory feeling become as monosyllabic and as emphatic as it was supposed to. There was a joyousness in me, which, however, could find its way out only through the company of others, this company, for instance. And the gradual unfolding of the Mass made me patient. Furthermore, even if I merely stood quietly in the back for an hour or so, it was a form of physical exercise more refreshing than any kind of gymnastics I could name: free of my aches and pains, I went on my way sound as a bell, and with both feet on the ground. And above all, from the ceremony Gregor Keuschnig saw the things he did only for himself as grounded and illuminated, at least for a short stretch of his way back home to continue his work. And all too soon he felt the urge again to go back to the church to find peace.

  Right inside the entrance, on a chair at the foot of a staircase, for the first few months there was still an old man sitting, who usually nodded off during the reading from Scripture (the spot has been empty for some time). Now and then during the year, when the priest called upon us to think of the victims of the world’s civil wars, he left out the names of the countries involved—there were so many of them—and merely said, in the singular and inclusively, “in the civil war.” Whenever a member of the congregation had read in singsong Russian from an epistle, almost always one of St. Paul’s, the priest would respond, “Peace be with you, reader!” When he disappeared behind the wall of icons, he hoisted his Bible onto his shoulder. And of all the readings, the one that has remained most forcefully in my mind is that sentence addressed to the people of Ephesus that says more or less that as the entourage of the Crucified they are now no longer passersby but have a house.

  How bored and annoyed I sometimes was by the heathens, of whom I quickly became one myself once outside. Although I listened to the Slavic words of the Lord’s Prayer so much more attentively than to the French, that was still, along with the Credo, the only part of the liturgy where I felt excluded. I also missed, from my familiar Catholic Masses, that moment when the priest cried, “Sursum corda! Lift up your hearts!” (Or have I merely failed to hear it until now?) And it struck me as odd that the priest of the Eastern Church, to have the bread and wine become flesh and blood, had to make a point of speaking the appropriate formula, whereas in the Catholic ritual all that was necessary for the transubstantiation was the simple narrative: “On the evening before Jesus was crucified, he took the bread …” This transubstantiation brought about simply by narrative was closer to my heart.

  Whenever the singers drifted out of the melody, someone, usually on the sidelines, would join in and bring them back together with his strong voice. And after Communion the wings of the icon angel were kissed. And the eagle, the emblem of John the Evangelist, with its damp-looking robe of feathers, seemed to me as if it had just escaped from deep waters, into which it had been drawn by a monster fish; yet it flirted with its eyes, with no one in particular. And at another Sunday Mass I again saw in the picture of the Evangelist that eagle swooping down on its prey, and, instead of striking it first, conferring shape on it.

  My father died during the year, far off in the house on Jade Bay, found only after his death (in the otherwise spotlessly clean bathroom, snippets of whiskers on the razor blade); which of us two was David, and which Absalom?

  And that kindhearted salesclerk in the shopping center on the plateau of Velizy, of whom I had thought for a moment that all that stood between us, not only him and me, and a new, eternal brotherhood was one blink of the eye, has not been seen since spring. And the footprint of my son, at that time still small, in the asphalt of the sidewalk, beyond the hills, in the first place we lived in, the place where from time to time I went for my oracle, was tarred over during the summer. And that ball of clay, the only impractical thing on my writing table, cracked to bits on the day I hit myself too hard on the forehead with it. And the eyrie of the mythical beast in my garden, created when I cut off the top of the spruce tree, has remained empty to this day (although on the most windless day in August a giant shadow floated over me there, and once, when a wailing sound suddenly broke out behind the house, followed by cries of pursuit, for a moment I saw something with gray stripes diving down under the cherry tree, flying low, almost brushing the grass, a falcon, as it swooped off through the underbrush, half turned onto its back, its claws stretched out sideways, and one morning in the eyrie a wide-open beak moved, which then turned out to be the ears of a nest-robbing cat).

  A the beginning of the year a hare showed itself to me in the woods, far off in the sun, and since then no other. The shots in late fall, however, were aimed more at wild doves, of whom then entire rows, shot down from the sky, cloud-gray-blue, lay displayed on the butcher’s marble counter. On the other
hand, the foxes have multiplied, and, as I gathered from a remark made in a bar by one of the old-timers, who usually pointedly keep silent on the subject, are larger than ever before. At the beginning of winter, I myself encountered, on another midnight walk home through the wooded heights, as many as I normally encountered only as eyes peering out of the darkness, now standing boldly along the road. And from the long since depopulated foxholes along the banks of the sunken roads, the poles stuck in by children playing have disappeared, which gives the impression that they are occupied once more.

  The minibus, the bay’s public transportation, which circles all day long and appears at the same places approximately every half hour, has been given a colorful high-gloss coating instead of its subdued white, and also dark-tinted windows. Nevertheless the heads of the passengers can still be made out, cut off at the bottom because of the low seats, as children’s usually are, and the landscape thus visible on the other side through the rather slow-moving bus—the forest-edge trees, the ponds, the railway embankment—appears, as before the reconditioning, as part of the vehicle, grown together with it. And even now it can give me a jolt whenever I catch sight of the few people waiting at one of the poles marking a bus stop that is probably obvious only to the natives; they are leaning against a lamppost, for a bumpy ride that will take them two side streets farther, and I get on with them, just like that.

  The reconditioned bus is missing that display space on the back intended for the community’s barely leaflet-sized posters announcing events, perhaps because films are no longer shown anywhere here, not even slides of the Amazon or other places. Even though the display frame passed me empty for a long time, I still see there the weekly classics announced in the bay’s movie theater: Vera Cruz—a man sentenced to death flees, Rio Grande. Perhaps I shall become a moviegoer again soon.

  If I ask myself what happened all year on the long, hilly, yet perfectly straight street that for me constitutes the main street here, this is what comes to mind: the many moving vans, some with Cyrillic writing, others with Greek lettering on them; the flight attendant waiting, long before midday in the otherwise empty landscape, in front of the sandstone school, for the children to be let out; the young women in a hurry, coming from where?, in the morning, with the infants, who, taken in hand by older children at the door, likewise disappeared as quickly into the houses as the mothers into their cars; and of the few pedestrians, the one ordinary original resident, recognizable from the window of my study, no matter how far away he was, through the spyhole I had cut in the hedge, by the white of his cigarette, always at an angle, flaring up for a moment in front of a dark garage door, and along with it his barking cough, each time linked with the sight of his wife in their cottage around the corner by the edge of the forest, scrubbing wash outdoors behind the house, on a board with a drainage hole, though only her husband’s handkerchiefs, because his smoker’s-cough mucus would otherwise stain all the other things in the washing machine. And one time on that long, straight, hummocky stretch an old woman was walking alone with a shopping bag over her bent arm, and the next time I looked she had dissolved into the water-gray asphalt.

  The market, set up as an experiment, with barely three or four stands, once a week, along the main street by the athletic fields, from which balls were constantly crashing against the wire fence, right behind the meat, fruit, and cheese, was given up again in the course of the year; the one on the station square was sufficient for the bay?

  And what kind of main street is it, almost without stores, with only a single café, the street’s middle section bordered by a forest, with king boletes right there on the bank every year, and, at its end, going uphill into a sunken road roofed over by bushes?—I saw it as such, again and again.

  One of my noise neighbors, the most indefatigable of all, had an accident later in the year when one of his mini-machines slipped (achieving all the more racket production and power output), and he bored his way home with it. Or was he torn apart by his noise-sensitive German shepherd? Only subsequently did I hear that he was a philosopher and teacher, much in demand, author of a story with the title “The Legend of the Holy Noisemaker,” of a book called Zen and the Art of Loudness, and of the brochure “How Can I Kill My Garden?”; a man like me; a colleague.

  A couple of his neighbors in turn moved, or pitched their tents somewhere else. In their place came, from the civil-war-torn regions, refugees, the kind of people for whom the bay had always been more than a mere reception camp.

  They settled in, here and there around my house, as if forever. They have been very quiet, at least until today, and I have already caught myself asking in the morning at my table, “Where has all the noise gone?” as though I needed it now for getting to work.

  These immigrants resembled the original inhabitants, now long since in the minority, except that they were much younger, and even shyer or more timid. They clearly did not wish to be seen, and I sometimes used the child Vladimir, as I walked along side streets holding his hand, to get a good look, so to speak, at the new arrivals. Because it was natural for the child to keep stopping, they could not become suspicious when I imitated him and then perhaps simply followed his gaze.

  It was even easier with their possessions, in front gardens and courtyards, or the changes, never major ones, and additions they allowed themselves with their houses. Astonishing that they decorated the exteriors far more with this or that from their new place of residence, the bay, than with things brought along and mementos from their own countries. More than one created a pattern of low miniature beds on the bit of ground between the street and his tiny house, surrounded with wooden posts cut from branches in the local forests, filled up with soil also from there, and planted at regular intervals with local tree seedlings, with plants that no one else, not even I any longer, would have noticed, and which in this region were generally considered weeds.

  All this seemed remarkable to the refugees, and feathery mountain ash seedlings as well as the mullein, fox grapes as well as cattails, were given stakes, and tied, often with proper sailor’s knots.

  It made me realize that my own ways of doing things are still determined by my once having been a refugee, and not only during those few weeks in my childhood right after the Second World War when my mother and I, leaving my father in Wilhelmshaven, made our way back and forth across the forbidden zones in Germany to equally forbidden Austria, our only papers consisting of a letter from my grandfather: in his house, with both of his sons killed in action, a downstairs room was available, and there was work in plenty. Even years after our arrival in Rinkolach, although the local people who had survived the war showed me almost nothing but kindness, it was still as though I had no right to be in the country, and a large part of that feeling had to do with the fact that on all my report cards, from elementary school to graduation, the space designated for “citizenship” was filled in in different hands with “stateless.”

  And in observing my new neighbors I also recognized that my own occasional skittishness (quite unlike my mother, who soon after her return home was pretty cocky again) does not stem from the way I was later transferred so abruptly from my village to the boarding school, but rather from the twisted sense of being a refugee and illegal that had grown into me. And a difference between me and these new arrivals also became clear, in the form of a play on words, and why not, for a change?: they, the immigrants, and I, the emigrant.

  And sometimes I simply stood there in the sun in front of the property of these newcomers, holding the child Vladimir by the hand, my mind blank; imitated the child’s quiet, wonderful waiting and watching in the sun or just in the daylight; lost myself happily in the music of his various expressions, or in the sight of his hands held behind him as if to take a running start, as if to fly.

  My year in the no-man’s-bay was almost at an end when a new or previous publisher invited me to a discussion of the manuscript, wherever I pleased, in Venice, Granada, Andorra, Potsdam, in any case in “a beaut
iful place.”

  I invited him to meet me at a pub by the Pont Mirabeau in Paris, from which I could see the little square with that delicate iron and milk-glass pissoir. I brought him a couple of pages, photocopied at the only bookstore in the bay, also a toy store, having selected the pages chiefly for the names of beautiful places that occurred on them.

  As far as the title was concerned, the publisher asked me to consider that the word “no-man,” like “threshold” or “flight,” on a book jacket had a negative and off-putting effect, and that it was old-fashioned to situate the main plot—he had seen through me—in a remote suburb; a contemporary story had to take place in an urban center; yet the book might find readers in spite of that—because it was me. And then he unexpectedly put on a scholarly air, noting that my text’s way of turning verbs into nouns—instead of “I stood,” “my standing,” instead of “the sky turns blue,” “the blueing of the sky”—corresponded precisely to what had happened to Latin after the fall of the Roman Empire, during the Middle Ages.

  Once, after glancing at a couple of lines, he did say—and I noticed for the first time that this man sitting across from me had beautiful eyes now —that despite my declaration in writing, I was still not finished with myself. And afterward on the bridge he offered this to me in parting, to take back to the forest bay: “Both of us know what to think of each other.” What did he mean by that? I brooded, alone in the nocturnal commuter train. And later I thought he probably had the decisive qualification for a book, intuition; but since his life was elsewhere, he despised this.