My Year in No Man's Bay (12 page)

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Authors: Peter Handke

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary

BOOK: My Year in No Man's Bay
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And thus I can also picture reconciliation with someone with whom I have seemingly broken for good. Yet if I spin this out in my imagination and examine the idea to see if it is serious and realistic, most of my former loved ones or kin become even more shadowy to me.
Restoring good relations with someone in my imagination, where images seize hold and hold true, has proven successful thus far only with the woman from Catalonia once, and once with Filip Kobal. In that daydream, while the woman from Catalonia was raging silently against me, her eyes dull black and her lips almost white, without hesitation I led her into the next room, where I sat down beside her and held her head, jerking as if bolts of electricity were darting through it, held it between my two hands, which did nothing but wait until the wild gallop inside her skull had subsided.
And in much the same way Filip Kobal came toward me on a sunny forest path in early spring here in the bay. The shadows of the trees' crowns, still without leaves, cast a pattern on the sand of the path, and when I reached his spot, with another movement of my two hands I casually conjured out of the earth and the light the mythical beast of this region. It was not a chimera, but rather a tiger of the steppes, peaceable, sunshine yellow, branch-shadow black, whereupon my companion and I continued on our way together as though nothing had ever come between us.
 
 
T
hese are my fantasies of reconciliation, and I believe in them. But along with them there must also be at work within me a dream-deep distrust, even a revulsion against any form of coming together again.
How else to understand last night's dream, following right upon the day on which I wrote about the happy ending to the trouble between me and my sister? In the dream she was raging and enormous, hurled clumps of earth at me, then stones, heavier and heavier ones, and was finally intent, in a massive murderous impulse, on bashing in my head with a boulder.
And even the friends and family whom I now accompany from a distance have all been on the point of disappearing from my sight.
With whom shall I begin? With those who merely by virtue of their profession are so similar to me that trust was accompanied from the beginning by something like a natural distrust. Thus even before I knew the singer, I often felt a certain uneasiness when music began to play or so much as a single instrument, as if such sounds were false, indeed presumptuous, lacking harmony with the moment, especially when the music was an actual performance.
My inner conflict over music has meanwhile become insurmountable, my uneasiness as a rule more powerful than my emotional response, especially after the fact. It upsets me most when a voice or an instrument rings out above the rest or emerges all by itself. In this connection I recall from childhood in the Jaunfeld region a singer in our church who now and then performed the solos in the hymns, letting his tenor ring out, especially at night, during outdoor performances, where he stood apart from the choir and invisible, somewhere in the darkness high above the heads of the congregation, for instance up in the bell tower, and suddenly from that heavenly height sang out above the people below and over the entire quiet countryside, arousing general emotion, also in me, the child, who, however, even then felt the clammy touch of something revolting in those solo nights and recoiled from such song, as from the sense of community it created. When I think back now, of all the cultural events in that rural area, I found this the most unsettling, and when I mentioned it one time to the village priest, he revealed to me that before his days with the church choir this particular singer had been the most full-throated herald of Hitler's Greater Germany.
I could open myself up to singing or music making only if it took place incidentally, among other things—sounds, silence—and if I was not the audience, or if it did not address itself to an audience at all but turned away, toward the heavens, or inward, or into the void. Kobal knew what he was summoning me home with when he spoke of the litany and hymn singing. I can still be overwhelmed by a speaking voice that imperceptibly passes into chant and then goes back to speaking. All it takes is for the priest of the Russian Orthodox church here in the bay to raise his voice slightly during his sonorous Slavic recitation of Scripture, and I have to rein myself in to keep from weeping. Yes, as Kobal
said, I quake. And it is enough for me if music is heard from afar, by chance, not intended for me. After an all-day hike across country, in the dusk, in an unfamiliar region, a few notes knock almost inaudibly at one's ear: the larger world opens up.
Sometimes all it takes is the sight of an instrument. It need not even make a sound. And thus the mere fact that my friend is a singer can fill me with elation, while as soon as he opens his mouth to sing, I am again overcome with exasperation, although his voice sounds like almost nothing, or not like one of those trained voices that put me off at the first note. When he plants his feet firmly on the ground and sings, I often feel at odds with my friend; but when I hear him speaking, and in my imagination his singing voice accompanies his speech, or simply in his silent presence, it makes me feel good to know that he is a singer. (In the meantime there are concerts in which he hardly sings and instead does almost nothing but speak, murmur, gesticulate, laugh out loud, as if talking to himself.)
 
 
I
feel less exasperation with painters, at least with my own, who meanwhile has made his film in Spain, as well as the architect, here in the person of the carpenter, who I know is at the moment somewhere by the sea in northern Japan, in deep snow, sketching a telephone booth to which several steps lead up—thus it remains accessible even with this depth of snow.
When it comes to painters, I am sometimes repelled by their unrestrained or panic-stricken rush of images, which makes me able to sympathize with, if not understand, the various historical instances of iconoclasm (yet book burning remains incomprehensible to me). This happens with my friend in particular, so that, unlike with the singer, for whom I find it entirely justified, I cannot approve of his having all that money, and furthermore find it suspicious that he always appears so cheerful and extroverted. Nothing, it seems to me, gets under his skin anymore. He rejects anything resembling a new beginning or a metamorphosis. He has had his hard times, he says, and now he has a right to pleasure, in his work and otherwise, and also to wealth. And indeed, for a long time now every one of his pictures, in spite of their mono-tonality, has something uniformly supple about it, entirely consistent
with the impression this sixty-year-old makes, which caused someone to write about the innate capacity for transformation that makes particular metamorphoses superfluous, and another wrote: “He speeds from victory to victory.” Things were different only with this film, which he kept wanting to call off, and which, despite his intense seriousness and fresh excitement, made him feel for the entire two months, just as in his early days as a painter, as if he were dancing in a dream, constantly at risk of falling down.
But perhaps I am the one who is bad for my worldly friend? I once heard from a third party who had visited almost all the painters and writers of our times that the former seemed quite tranquil in old age, sociable, cheerful, whereas the older writers seemed dissatisfied, touchy, disgruntled, and even the successful ones apparently felt cheated.
 
 
A
rchitects remained alien to me in a different way from painters. My friend in Japan is the only one to whom I have become somewhat close, and that certainly has to do with the fact that in recent years he has transformed himself back into a woodworker, a carpenter, and comes across as such; someone who once stopped by when I was here in the house with him at first failed to notice him and then said, when he finally saw him, that he had not realized I had workmen in the house.
In the region where I grew up I certainly knew painters, if only as painters of signs and wayside shrines, but never an architect; even the word was hardly known there. There was the master mason who was also a master builder. And the structures that captured my imagination were hardly ever built of masonry, but rather of wood, also on the small side, and their construction did not require master craftsmen: the barns, the rough board toolsheds, the shelters for harvested crops, and those racks for drying grass, with narrow shingled roofs, scattered at all angles across the mowings; even today I will squint past a monumental stone structure in search of something unobtrusive, of wood. It is simply a fact that to this day things I did not encounter early on can make me skittish; it is a reflex, one I cannot get rid of. I think it comes from the jolt I got at the sight of the boarding school, which at one blow cut me off from my familiar world, that fortress seen from far below that took up an entire hilltop. It did not help that the final and steepest part of the path leading
up to the building passed a mausoleum as big as a house, windowless, with a half-open door from which, every time we returned from summer vacation, a cold breath of decay wafted, coming, I imagined, from the sarcophagus of the bishop who had retired in old age to what would later become this boarding school for future priests.
Although large cities were my element for a time, I have never been on friendly terms with city buildings, either castles or railway stations, either palaces, cathedrals, medieval squares, or high-rise buildings of any sort, bridges spanning rivers or inlets of wonder-of-the-world length, subterranean twin cities. They intoxicated me, dizzied me, but never sparked my imagination. To this extent, even if my siblings have accused me of the opposite, I can say that I have never become a city person. Structures that suggest “city,” and perhaps also “power,” “grandeur,” “authority,” were not on my scale, least of all in places where I was supposed to study: at the universities. These never became “mine,” the one in Vienna as little as the one in Paris, except for a summery campus one time, far out of town near Santiago de Compostela. City people—in my eyes that is what architects are, and I often see them as antagonists.
Only with my distant friend is it different, and even so we are threatened, if not by a falling-out then certainly by wariness. He does not want to build anything more. For years now his work has consisted entirely of travel, and of searching for material for repairing and completing what is already there, which he never wants to see torn down anywhere, no matter what it is. My architect is not a city person, or one sees no signs of it in him. What could drive a wedge between us is the opposite of what so often aggravates me in my painter. Whereas the latter enjoys being celebrated as a winner, the architect presents himself as a loser, and for some time now has actually come across as just that, with the ironic style he adopts at the beginning of any conversation, as if he did not trust himself or the other person to be serious, his veering between impulsivity and rigidity, his interrupting of himself. And this makes me realize that an apparent loser disconcerts me as much as a declared winner.
Even the Japanese police, who otherwise look right past foreigners, as does the rest of the population, except children, have already stopped him several times on his trip—that is how derelict my friend looks, a white man stranded on the coasts of Japan, at least from a distance,
where a pedestrian like him, with his broad-brimmed hat on his bowed head, can only be a mendicant friar, a stranger to the country; from close up, however, even with his worn soles and his threadbare shirt collar, he is elegance personified and humility in human form, which causes anyone spoiling for a fight to step out of his way and even salute him. And he, the most frugal and resourceful of us, who now sleeps in temple enclosures instead of hotels, lives almost exclusively on rice and fruit, and wears his clothing so gently that it veritably blooms, has enough money even in Japan to continue his travels for a good while longer, this entire year.
In the cavernlike fish market of Aomori, where everyone smiled at the carpenter, an older woman with a rubber apron has just given him a few fillets of raw salmon, which he is now eating, crouching in the dusk on top of a snowdrift, behind him poles, swaying boat masts, for the drift has formed right by the ocean, across which he is looking in a northerly direction, toward the island of Hokkaido.
Evening is coming on there, while here in the bay between the hills of the Seine beyond Paris it is the morning of the same day, already spring, with brimstone-butterfly yellow seen out of the corner of one's eye and thousands of frogs softly fluting, piping, or peeping as they mate in the nameless pond, overgrown with underbrush and trees, out in the forest glade. What kind of alienation is supposed to be hanging over me and him? Don't I see us as together across the continents?
And now it occurs to me that it was stone buildings that put me on the alert, for instance the house of the harbormaster of Piran, Istria, on my first day by the ocean, the way it stood there alone on the dock, the sky in its windows, without anything around it, without a yard or a portico, stone rising perpendicularly from the horizontal paving stones.
 
 
I
move on among my friends to the reader. Mightn't he, too, disavow me and write me off? Metamorphose into someone who despises me?
There was a time when our relationship was in danger. It did not even go that well at the beginning. I met him for the first time in one of the two railway-station cafés in that other Parisian suburb where I lived before coming to the bay here; it was the Bar de l'Arrivée, while the other is called the Bar du Depart. I was sitting there waiting for my
son's piano lesson to be over, and now, whenever I sit out on that terrace, I can still hear, through the roar of the traffic and the rumbling and screeching of the trains, from the top floor the obedient and defenseless groping of the six-year-old child on the huge instrument.

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