My Year in No Man's Bay (31 page)

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Authors: Peter Handke

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary

BOOK: My Year in No Man's Bay
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This was accompanied now by the very high notes of a saxophone, which, when he had opened his eyes, went on playing in another room. The wind had fallen. The sky above was bright, the gulls below still raven-dark, and they really were ravens now.
 
 
T
he woman playing the saxophone sat, the child at her side listening without stirring, in the dune-sand-yellow kitchen at the laid table, in an even longer dress than the previous evening and rubber boots with high heels. He silently joined her, drank a cup of coffee such as he had tasted neither in Italy nor in Hawaii, until she put down her somewhat battered instrument and without much ado, as though she were simply switching from one language to another, told him that in her childhood
she had once spent a summer at the ferry station for the Hebrides, Kyle of Lochalsh, about a hundred miles to the west, on the other side of the watershed, on the Atlantic. She came from Dornoch, here on the North Sea, and had made her way halfway around the world, but only at the ferry in Kyle of Lochalsh had people been good to her. “Dover, Vancouver, San Francisco, Valparaíso are nothing compared to Kyle. When I'm an old woman I'd like to lick the salt from the windshield of the ferry in Kyle.”
Not for the first time the singer noted that people who did not get along well with the place they came from did not really long to be off in distant cities; they longed instead for something they had known early in their lives, only a few hills and rivers away, which with the years had become legendary.
And he felt the urge to get to that Kyle of Lochalsh, if possible entirely on foot, even if it would take him until spring, until fall; he wanted to set out at once, told the two of them that, bowed to the child, kissed the woman's hand, received from her a rain hat to put on over his cap, laid a banknote on the doorstep, and that same afternoon was standing somewhere in the interior, between the two oceans, on a southeastern slope sheltered from the wind, facing the banana palm that he had been sure grew even here in the north of Scotland, hidden in the tangle of wild rhododendron.
 
 
T
he singer continued his westward journey into the spring and summer.
He went astray at least once a day, in spite of maps and compass, often willingly, and when he no longer knew where he was he became all the more sharp of eye and ear.
For an hour he would move along as if on wings, the next hour would draw him, head down, toward the mud, impossible to get past on the high moors, and not only in winter. Sometimes in the evening his head would be bursting from the roar of the brooks all around, and the next morning the racket would draw him anew. Again and again he almost fell, or he slipped and tipped over, and each time the twitching that went through his body was followed by redoubled alertness and mental
acuity. He recognized that the apparent obstacles in his path were nothing of the kind, at least nothing significant.
He took an ownerless boat lying by a lake in the moor, seemingly since prehistoric times, with as little hesitation as he headed over a pass that appeared on no map. In the morning, with his sleeping bag rolled up, he struck out from the tumbledown hut, stinking of sheep droppings, set in a wasteland of heather, wiped his behind in the morning with a fan-sized bog leaf, damp from the rain, sat in the brief midday sun with his bread and apple on the throne formed by a stray boulder, stumbled in late afternoon into a hailstorm with stones so hard they pounded down his outstretched fingers, and in the evening lurched like a vagabond, impossible, with that hat over his cap, to identify as a man or a woman, along an illuminated avenue leading through a park toward a highland castle-hotel, called, for instance, Ceddar Castle, where, without his having a reservation, the double doors swung open for him at a distance, showing the torchlit, fireplace-warmed great hall, and then, combed, parted, in necktie and custom-tailored suit, he took his evening meal with the family of the Japanese crown prince on his left, the stars of the Glasgow Rangers on his right, at the head table the great-great-grandson of Sir Walter Scott and the heirs of Robert Louis Stevenson, but he belonged there a bit more than all of them, and the next day continued his game of—what?—of getting lost. And at the same time he never felt alone. “I am with my song.”
And just as he presented a different image from hour to hour, the seasons kept jumping around, winter appearing in the middle of summer, spring leading back into fall. In the last night of January a cuckoo called, then none again until sometime in June. In May on the heath out of a clear blue sky a great many leaves fell, but from where? And in a cold dusk a snake crept toward him on a patch of snow.
Altogether, just as in dreams, at one moment almost nothing was impossible, and then again everything seemed to be over and done with. The torrents, which, seen from a distance, gushed from the crests of the mountains, a host of them, in white, long waterfalls, reminded him today of a medieval, no, of a prehistoric time, which, however, still lay ahead for humanity, and on the following morning the entrails from the nocturnal slaughter of a small animal by a bird of prey at the foot of a
lonely church tower were enough, and the only things that seemed valid were the bestial and barbarous, even if only until he caught sight of almost the only reliable thing, the red-and-yellow van marked “Royal Mail.”
 
 
I
received my most recent picture of my friend after the beginning of summer, when he had finally put the watershed between Scotland's two oceans and then also Kyle of Lochalsh behind him and, having taken the ferry over to the Inner Hebrides, within calling distance, at least for his voice of thunder, was now crossing the island of Skye, mainly on foot.
This picture again had to do with the Royal Mail, on a day after a day of heavy rain, since his walking until then had been almost entirely a slipping and sliding, initially down in a fjord amid the knee-high shore seaweed, now high above along a treeless alpine slope on a crisscross pattern of sheep terraces, churned into deep mire; he had willingly strayed up there, believing from afar that it was a multitude of mountain paths, all coming together in a single broad path leading up to the peak of Ben So-and-so.
But the network of paths beaten into the mountainside by the sheep hoofs turned out to be even more impassable than that peculiarly Scottish tracklessness, which, with the rounded, disappearing mountain shapes, at first seems as if it can be crossed effortlessly and then turns out to be a highland moor, its steep slopes, where the ground should be firm, as deceptive as the flat areas; the sheep slopes, too, were moor, and before each step he had to test the ground ahead. And furthermore, the animals whose terrain it had been, had, because of their jumpiness, unlike cows, dug or stamped out an extremely uneven, nervous zigzag. Time and again, at the places where the sheep had leaped, the apparent tissue of paths tore, and the singer had to become a moor mountain climber, which, by the bye, gave him a certain satisfaction.
When he reached the top, bareheaded, his cap and hat long since tucked away, suddenly the path led, instead of toward the peak, over flat surfaces, as if into infinity, and on firm, dry, even ground, high above the tree line, with a few pines huddled together.
From them, too, came the unanimous roar that he had previously, when he stuck his head over the crest, taken for a personal greeting from the spirit of the mountains. Winds from different directions met there. One minute it turned cold and dark, the next summery warm. The tooting of the second ferry, the one from the island town of Uig to the Outer Hebrides, was the only sound that wafted up from the foggy depths and seemed at the same time to come from the clouds above. The dots of foam in the grass, which was delicate as only grass under alpine firs can be, puzzled the singer: had they dropped from the mouth of a rabid fox?
Now the clouds took on two different shapes: some, formless, drizzly, drifted in from the west and were rain clouds, and the others, from the east, formed windrows, brighter, with space in between, and carried snow. And at the moment when the two types of clouds encountered each other, they merged into a great uniform glowing haze. And now the western clouds also carried snow, and from both sides a curtain drew slowly and steadily across the entire sky, reaching down to the earth.
The hidden highland birds cackled, barked, neighed. The snowing created a sphere in which colors emerged, the brown of the pines, the green of the heather, the black of the rubber boots. The flakes, clumped together but still with individual crystalline parts, melted on the mountain climber's nail bed, hot with exhaustion.
And now in the tracklessness way up there, the red-and-yellow vehicle with the postal horn comes rolling out of the curtain of snow, this time a jeep. On every weekday during his journey he had been able to rely on it; out of affection he had even counted the patches on the mailbags; and one time, when the storm over Kyle of Lochalsh had ripped a card addressed to me out of his hand as he made his way to the mailbox, and he thought it would never be seen again, the card actually reached me, though with a few puddle stains.
So was there a house on the plateau at the peak that had mail delivered? Perhaps in a eucalyptus grove? He quickly wrote another card, with the snow crackling on it, to the Queen of England or someone, finishing just as the mail vehicle came rattling up. It stopped, with a robust gray-haired Scottish woman at the wheel who reminded him of his mother. And he placed the card in her outstretched hand, and she
shoved it in among the other pieces of mail, held together with a rubber band.
It seemed to the singer as if something in him were beginning to heal, something which, although he had sung about it again and again, he had not even wanted to have healed.
The Story of the Reader
W
here had that been?
He was sitting with his girlfriend by a swampy pond in the forest near a city. Dusk was far advanced, and the two of them had not said a word for a long time. Instead, from the small round body of water, light rose, the only bright thing all around, a reflection of the last bit of daytime sky, or of the night sky as above large cities?
His entire life up to then had been marked by a sense of futility. This did not leave him even during this one hour, yet was accompanied by a tranquillity or feeling of safety that was new to him. The girl beside him felt that, and bowed before this realm. The back of a fish arced soundlessly from the surface and dove under again, a dolphin. The muskrat, about to scurry from one hole in the bank to the next, stopped in midcourse and sniffed the air, standing on its hind legs, its tail broadened into the shape of a beaver's. After all, nothing was happening, with the forest darkness all around, but the light at their feet, the water and the light.
His entire childhood and youth he had spent in Germany, in the Reich, then in the state in the east, then in the republic in the west, in the country and in cities, from the Mittelgebirge down into the ancient
river valleys and up into the Alps. But here by the swampy pond was the first time that he had seen a world open up in his country, if not for him then for someone else, for instance his descendants.
Where had that been? And what was her name again, the young woman from that time? And if he had children perhaps, why were they even more hopeless than he had ever been?
 
 
A
nd where had that been again? After wandering around all day—while always, in accordance with the traditional German parental admonition, “staying on the path like a good boy!” through high-rise, villa, and allotment-garden suburbs, all equally inhospitable and unreal, as were the forests, the village squares, and even the vineyards or the slopes with apple orchards, he had, again toward evening, found himself in a town whose center was built in a hollow, and suddenly in the stillness—of midsummer or deep winter?—had seen himself generously and cordially received by the solid mass of half-timbering erected there, whose network of beams had struck him until then as the epitome of confinement or narrowness.
The town seemed no less deserted than the villages he had gone through to reach it, and yet from its crooked streets, as he descended into them step after step, something like a cheerful expectancy emerged and leaped the gap to him. And that was no momentary deception. The alley dog, the kind that usually made his neck stiffen with fear, licked his hand as if it were seeing him again for the first time in seven times seven years, and then ran on ahead to show him the way. And there it was: the welcoming garland, especially for him, in the form of plastic flowers in a tin can above the door to the house; the summer or winter garden that had a view of a volcanic cone with a petrified prehistoric horse in its basalt wall, and Condviramur and Percival, in the form of a North Hessian or Westphalian innkeeper and his wife, as his hosts.
Were the German fairy tales in force once more, in defiance of history? Was it in his, the reader's power, not exclusively his, but his as well, to awaken to life a place thought to be dead? And why had he been successful in doing so in his Germany only that one time, which now had again been “over” for far more than seven years? Was it his own fault
that it had never been repeated and renewed? What was the name of that town again?
 
 
A
nd where had that been? During a long winter he had gone to his workshop every morning to print a book that was causing him particular trouble and pleasure, and back home in the evening, through a city of millions, though always taking only side streets.
And each time he went out it had snowed, day after day, through the months. It was a light, dry snow that hardly ever stayed on the ground. At most it slithered over the sidewalks and road surfaces, like sand over the ripples of dunes. The system of side streets leading to the central axis, not always parallel to it, that he used, now seemed profoundly silent, and if yesterday it had belonged to the evil Germany, today it belonged to the world at large.
Snow and epic narration. Yes, what opened up before the reader was no longer just a short tale or a fairy tale, but rather an epic, and it was even set in this typically German area. Was set? No, would be set there in the future.
The German epics familiar to him appeared starkly contrasted to the one the reader saw taking shape at that time through the veil of snow, from the
Nibelungs,
in whose heroes, according to Goethe, unlike in Homer's, no reflection of the gods was at work, to … And Wolfram's
Percival,
did that take place in Germany? And Keller's
Green Henry?
(An episode.) And Stifter's
Indian Summer?
And wasn't the location of Goethe's
Elective Affinities
and
Wilhelm Meister,
the two narratives that most closely approximated the one envisioned by the reader during his walks back and forth in the snowy light, instead of a factual Germany, the province of a solitary powerful mind, a province cleared inventively and energetically for development, dramatization, and intensification, even in a tragic mode, of his ideals?
The epic tale of tomorrow—this is how the reader saw it before him in the slowly falling snow—would, as in the work of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, as far as a certain Germany was concerned, definitely behave as though this Germany did not exist; on the other hand, it would not locate the events in an ideal country, dreamed up in isolation, but rather
in that worldwide Germany, employing a host of German things and place names, the few that had remained untainted as well as those fraught with guilt, particularly these!
At that time snow fell for months around a pub on Schellingstrasse where Hitler had often sat and where at the moment the hand of a young waiter from Bari could be seen, through the almost opaque windows, dicing truffles; it fell on Amalienstrasse around a woman who snapped at her child: “You stay here!”; it fell in the Adalbert Cemetery around the statue of the dancer Lucille Grahn, in an appropriate pose, now mimicked by a young girl passing that way; fell far out by the moss of Dachau around the bench on which the reader in earlier times, as an adolescent, after wandering through the concentration camp, had sat engrossed in Grass's
Cat and Mouse
until just before the last train left; fell around a loden coat, the Milan cathedral, the Kalahari Desert, meat hooks, the Three Kings from the Orient, idle snow shovels, newspaper vending machines, on sidewalks as everywhere in Munich, with the same headlines from morning to evening, which in those winter months, in view of the epic narrative, meant precious little to the reader, otherwise so easily distracted by anything in written form.
 
 
A
nd where was the epic of Germany now? The books that had talked about the country had again in the meantime, as always before, disheartened him—and precisely, as exciting as some of them were, because of the German names in them. Because of them he could not believe in even the most extravagant flights of fancy. It seemed to him as if there were an epic curse on “Berlin” and “Flensburg,” on the “Weser” and the “Zugspitze,” on the “Black Forest” and “Helgoland,” even independently of his century's history. And there was no question of his writing himself. He was the reader.
So his winter day's dream of a great story that would bind together and at the same time thoroughly air out his fellow countrymen, and not only them, had blown away with that snow? No, he was convinced that any day now a new Wolfram von Eschenbach would—not appear, no, simply be there, drifting in from a side street, with a wealth of purely epic place names, of which the first might be, for example, Respond/ Upper Bavaria.
Although my “Writer's Tour” is studded with South German to West German place names, the reader felt less constricted by them than usual, because for one thing the story is short, and it also looks more like a notebook. He understood, too, that I could not be the one to write the book he was longing for, that demon-exorcising book about the other Germany. First of all, I would have had to spend my childhood there and remain in residence here and there a long time, instead of merely making the tour; I would have had to sit and wait for such an epic, like a piece of property. “And then you're only half German and decided against your half-Germanness. You renounced your father, very early on, in the first disappointment after your search for paternal salvation, and later, on your tour, you also renounced your fatherland, and have not set foot in it since, have even avoided the river that forms the border, which, with its broad, bright, gravel-covered banks is like something from antiquity, where both of us used to swim, with unalloyed pleasure, avoided it out of fear of crossing the line down the middle and thus ending up in German irreality. At the same time you swore fealty to the German language, and many reproached you for that as a contradiction. What you write in any language other than your German does not have the value in your eyes of something written. What you think in French over there in your foreign land carries no weight for you. To be sure, even if you undertook to return to your fatherland, I do not believe that someone like you would succeed in writing the book of conversion that I envision for my Germany. Not even Friedrich Holderlin, with all the power generated in him by initial concurrence, then near-despair, then sober illumination, managed to get past the Germans in their country and their cities in favor of a larger, more broad-minded, and at the same time solid epic concept. In Hyperion his German contemporaries loom large as the sheer counterimage to his heroes, the Greeks, who immerse themselves in the common struggle for restoration of the realm where the decisive factor is the idea of the sun, embodied in books, trees, a table, a plate. What seemed impossible for him to narrate in prose he invoked in his poems. He challenged German youth to take up the legacy of long-lost Hellas and establish an equally brilliant empire, specifically by force of arms, which his poems now called holy, as previously air, water, the vine. According to Holderlin, after the Greeks it is now the turn of the youth of Germany to take their place in history. They, and they alone,
epitomize the world spirit, and they will celebrate their sacred slaughter, on the banks of Father Rhine or on the Elysian Fields, as the legitimate successors to the Hellenes. No, these poems were bad enough, even without being misused in the following century. And anyway: my wish for Germany, which actually seems possible, since I can wish it, is not a poem but precisely that long, long narrative. When it comes to narrative, the rule is: no misuse. An epic cannot be misused. No, it can be used again and again, and the user is amazed each time at what he missed the previous times, and pities the animal at his feet, whether cat or hedgehog, because it cannot read! O narrative, exhaustive, of German lands, different from anything found in newspapers and previous books, where are you? And in my imagination it is not a young man who will presently approach bearing it in his hands, but a saucy, wonderfully beautiful young woman, not blind in the least.”
 
 
T
he reader kept sending me such letters from his travels through Germany, once following the route of the tour described in my occasional story, then again in any direction that suited him; in these letters, in typical fashion, he could not refrain from taking the stance of a prophet, toward me as well as toward the world.
The one just quoted he wrote at the beginning of his travels, still in midwinter of the current year, as he rode in an almost empty passenger train from Oldenburg to Wilhelmshaven, where at twenty I had first looked up my father. And although it is true that even when I think of Germany here, from afar, my imagination fails me and the images refuse to coalesce: when I felt my friend setting out with such anticipation, I was happy to travel at his side, thinking of him instead of the country, suspended in a more innocent, purely momentary present.
I see him in his train, which stands out sharply illuminated against the dusky North German flatlands, high up in the all-glass cabin of a suspension railway, or of a carousel as big as Germany. And besides that I see the dark silhouette of a horse in a pasture, its motionless head bent to the ground, as if rooted to the spot.
 
 
I
n Wilhelmshaven on Jade Bay the tracks ended, and when a train pulled out, the loudspeaker would announce, “Attention, the train is backing out!”
The reader went to the hotel right next to the station, which catered to salesmen and itinerant workers. While in the stairwell and hallways only the night lights were on, it was all the brighter in the taproom, and in a silence like that of a waiting room, for instance at a ferry slip, along with a couple of sailors a policeman was sitting, very young, with a voice so gentle that the reader, at the next table, fell to wondering who the patron saint of policemen was, like St. Joseph for carpenters and St. Christopher for teamsters. Yet the other man had merely looked over and asked what he was reading. He held up the book: the
Novelas ejem-plares.
And as always happened to him with Cervantes, he was not really succeeding in getting into the stories, and not merely because he was reading them in Spanish, one word at a time, and also not because he felt the policeman watching him.

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