My Year in No Man's Bay (51 page)

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Authors: Peter Handke

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary

BOOK: My Year in No Man's Bay
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They seem to be of no particular age, neither poor nor rich, and it is uncertain, too, whether they come from the country or the city. If of any origin, then from an alien, extremely alien planet. The only thing that is clear is that they have never had a neighborhood and will never understand what a neighbor is; that in their work other human beings never occur, or if they do, then only as raw material; and that for them Sundays and holidays exist only so that they can broadcast into their surroundings from inside their hedges, as though they were sitting there in its midst, their ever so inventive racket, which always erupts suddenly and at double decibels.
And none of these neighbors feels disturbed by the fellow next door. Each is so engrossed in his own din that he does not even register the other one's. When one of them, again on a Sunday afternoon, out of nowhere, broke the last existing sound barrier, and I, convinced that something terrible had happened to him, wanted to alert his immediate neighbor from my ladder, propped against his fence, there at my feet a shadowy figure, surrounded by a cloud of dust, continued with utmost equanimity to operate a sandblaster, with which he apparently wanted to render his façade as marble-smooth as the palace of Versailles, while to my left a sprinkler was hissing for the benefit of a lone patch of grass with the approximate dimensions of a doghouse, and what to my right was incessantly whinnying behind the shrubbery was anything but a herd of horses, and diagonally at my rear cries of passion continued to blare
from a rented video, accompanied next door by the hundredth repetition of the waltz of the fleas or
Bolero.
One of these neighbors remarked once that he did not even hear the noise anymore. So what did he hear? And there had been a time when I thought: If salvation, then through hearing. But what was there to hear now?
An additional factor was that almost every single one of the hitherto remaining interstices, even the most inconspicuous slots, were walled up in no time flat by the new arrivals, used for garages, recreational spaces and various storage spaces, or for enclosures for newly added spiral staircases, so that in the fairly tight ring of buildings around me, instead of the breeze from the woods, a massive echo was created, which made impossible a pinpointing or locating of individual noises, which would at least have provided a kind of reassurance.
And more and more the loudness of these neighbors also came to lack that regularity with whose help one might perhaps have got used to it. The longer they stayed in the bay, the more erratic their world of noise became. I could no longer rely on the initial din. This would break off suddenly, and after a brief, squishy soundlessness, like the sudden cessation of a mosquito's whine in the night, an entirely different one would break out. Something even worse than a roar filled the air: a whanging.
And when all the other inhabitants of the bay had set out somewhere for the day, even if only to the nearby forests: my racket experts stayed behind, at least on Sundays and holidays, glued to the spot, and if they did not create pandemonium outside, they rumbled around inside, armed with machines, between cellar and attic, as invisible as they were audible far and wide. It could happen that in between, exhausted by their frantic activities, they slumped down and stretched out all four paws. But there was always one who kept going in place of all the rest, alone, indefatigable, and it was because of him that I went to the woods to work, even in thunder and lightning.
His new house, with a run behind it for the German shepherd, was the structure closest to the study that had been meant to be my place for the year in the bay. And although there could hardly be anything left to do on his almost immediately clear-cut property, I heard, especially with the onset of spring, my unknown neighbor constantly busy there: if on the other side of the hedge, a few steps from my desk, peace
reigned for a change, it meant he was away, the dog shut up in the garage, where it made all the more noise.
The man had a special piece of equipment for each of his gardening activities. There was nothing he did by hand. And each of his equipment sessions took at least as long as the equivalent manual operation. He went about them with grim thoroughness, yet afterward the soil or plantings, viewed through my hole in the hedge, looked exactly the same as before: barer, more monochromatic, more even, more smooth it could not possibly become. Along with the lawn tractor, which almost filled the speck of lawn, including the flagstone terrace, he also operated a sort of shredder, like an antitank mine, for any clumps of grass around the periphery that might have escaped; a sort of motorized water jet for annihilating any traces of weeds in the chinks between the pavers; a sort of trimmer that worked like a laser beam, only much louder, with which he pulverized the couple of blades of grass that might stick up above the rest (never did I discover through my peephole even a single blade poking up); a lawn dryer after too much rain; and all that at the same high volume, though at different pitches, from dentistlike whirring to rattling, shrieking, and thrumming, which made an ordinary banging and grating seem positively comforting.
In addition, from time to time he fired, even under a clear blue sky, a sort of weather cannon, and called in yet more machines to spear intruder leaves that blew in from neighboring yards, for burning out a mole tunnel, for smoking out an ant heap, for neutralizing the squawking of sparrows, for diverting the stronger gusts of wind.
Whenever I, sitting in my study, halfway quiet for a change, heard just beyond my yard the unmistakable squeal of the parking brake and then the crash of the garage door closing, I knew that any moment now one of these machines would start up, which one first? And while trying to take a deep breath outside the door to the study, I saw through the bushes the silhouette of my neighbor pacing off his angular course with one of his power tools, looking self-absorbed and quietly collected, while his dog, driven mad by his pitch-black garage exile, sensing my presence, let out behind the shrubbery sounds entirely different from the earthworm sucker-upper or the depth charge used for detecting a stinging-nettle root invading from next door.
Such tumult (a word which, in the decrees against disturbance of the peace, was always linked with the word “scandal” in the days when the bay was still a royal domain) I could tolerate, at least for a time, at least during the day, and much more easily during work than during mere sitting and watching. The noise receded into the work, was sonorized, so to speak, by my absorption, took on a different sound quality, a darker one. But no sooner would the beginnings of tiredness or distraction brush me than the noise would pound all the more stridently at my study door and against my skull. Then it became dangerous. My material was not yet impervious, and even now, toward the end of the year, is still not impervious. If one sentence or paragraph went, the entire thing was at risk. What was threatened was less my head, my ability to think, than the absolute necessity for me, unlike for a scientist or a chronicler, to become as one with a feeling, a heartbeat, or the rhythmic image.
And with the passage of time I then noticed that in my writing-down, as an effect of the noise, hardly any heart was involved. Without that, however, my thoughts appeared to me as mere singsong. I no longer knew what I was doing. With every attempted image immediately rubbed raw by new whanging, I ended up blindly lining up words next to each other, without any sense for transitions.
How should I call it to my neighbors' attention that I was still there—not as a writer, simply as a neighbor? In the tiny interval between the time my omni-tool neighbor got home and set the parking brake, and the moment he revved up, I would step outside the study door, for example, and try to make myself audible by blowing the shavings out of the sharpener as loudly as possible as I sharpened my pencils. No other noise occurred to me.
Should I shout my sentences into the neighborhood before I wrote them down, like Flaubert? Instead I once tossed a burning log over the hedge at man and dog, whereupon the master, invisible, retorted in a chalky-smooth Sunday voice that I was the one disturbing the peace, after which he promptly cranked up his latest acquisition, a device with which he was either drilling for oil under his seared grass or plowing it up in search of a field-mouse nest.
Thus, with the passage of time, I would jump at even the sound of birds or of water boiling in my own house, as if at the howling of a motor or raucous voices from a party on a nearby terrace.
 
 
F
or my first day of work out in the forest, I sat down by Lizard Way, among the trees a few steps away from it.
It was a warm, sunny May morning, and I leaned against a chestnut tree whose foliage was just beginning to bud, with mossy earth in the root hollow under me. The gentle breeze and the stillness, of which the Niagara Falls-like roar from the distant highway up on the plateau was a part, filled or inspired me with peace.
All day long people passed right by me up there on the bright path. Although I was so close to them, no one noticed me, not even their escort dogs. Around midday most of those passing were joggers from the office buildings in the corporate center of Velizy, with the variation in this year of 1999 that almost all of them were out there without jogging suits, dressed rather in suits and overcoats, with their briefcases and even heavier ballast.
That was in between. Beforehand and afterward, however, sometimes passed by mountain bikers, figures moved across my field of vision such as I had never before seen in the woods, not even in those of the bay, which from the outset had been full of surprises. (And my head was as clear as my chest was marvelously painfully expanded; I was not having hallucinations.)
While here in the shadows of the leaves my pencils darted along evenly, over there in the sun a priest passed by, in an ankle-length soutane, accompanied by a wedding party, the bride and groom and the witnesses; then came, at a distance, relaxed yet alert, the new cast of
The Magnificent Seven,
all abreast—that was how broad the path was there; then came, after a time, hand in hand, already half lost, gazing heavenward, Hansel and Gretel; then came, hours later, an elegant couple, he in a camel-hair coat, she in high heels and an evening gown—I later recognized the man, tanned, with a blackened mustache, his arm wound around the woman, heading uphill with elastic tread along the edge of the path, through the wild broom, as Don Juan, and the lady as Marina Tsvetayeva (they spoke Russian with each other); then a horse went by, riderless, workhorselike, and with steps as slow as those of his predecessors; and common to all of them was also that they appeared to me less as human beings or as animals than as living beings.
And toward evening the stonemason turned up again, not a wanderer along the path but a person extricating himself from the thick underbrush of the forest reserve over there. He did it matter-of-factly, as if this were simply his way of crossing the countryside, and promptly sank down on the oak stump, so broad that it could have provided a resting place for a dozen hikers. He hung his doublet behind him in the bushes and sat quietly erect, without stirring. A jogger who politely circled around him called out, “Isn't it great here!” to which the stonemason did not even nod. He ate a piece of bread and an apple, which he peeled in one piece, and now gazed across from his seat, which had so often been mine, into the forest toward me.
I had long since suspended my writing. If he saw me, he did not show it; at any rate, his barely perceptible raising of one finger did not have to mean anything. And yet it seemed to me as if I was supposed to address him from among the trees. I did not do so, and he went to work on his sitting trunk with a conspicuously short-handled hammer and a chisel that I at first took for a crowbar, and finally he disappeared back into the area that had been reforested a few years earlier, where the young trees already grew so dense, with hardly a patch of sunlight on the dark ground, that only a fox could get through. He entered there into a space of his own, like a bullfighter, and in response to the pivoting of his shoulders and hips, so rapid as to be almost impossible to follow, and thus seeming all the more purposeful, the straight saplings swayed no more and no differently than in the wind.
Hadn't I imagined time and again that like a mythical beast there must also be a hermit in the bay's forests, and that the old residents knew all about him, as they knew about the beast, but they would not betray him to anyone who had moved there from somewhere else?
I finished my project for the day and then sat down outside the forest by the sandy path, already after sundown, now on the great oak stump myself. The annual rings could not be counted, since the stump was burned coal black, even down into the roots, splayed like fingers and at the same time deeply anchored, and furthermore split by fire. The dense pattern of notches around the base: did this represent the stonemason's marks, or perhaps rather the footprints of birds, the front toes as clearly delineated V's, the one back toe a mere brushmark, marks such as were
already there at my feet along the path, now toward evening frequented only by birds, for dustbathing and tripping back and forth?
Across from me, right behind the bank with the lizards, which had already slipped away, and the first trees, was the empty and, to outward appearances, rather gloomy spot where I had been crouching or squatting only a little while ago, and before that the entire day. And at the thought of all the happenings during the course of a day along this woodland path, barely a few hours on foot from the Eiffel Tower, I was filled with an astonishment as powerful as that I had experienced much earlier for at most a moment when half asleep; and the question that Gregor Keuschnig had asked himself a quarter of a century earlier took on new validity: “Who can say, after all, that the world has already been discovered?”

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