My Year in No Man's Bay (54 page)

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Authors: Peter Handke

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary

BOOK: My Year in No Man's Bay
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A few of the crews remained in the bay for months; and in the course of the year I also encountered them during the day, at their work, the replacement of the gas pipeline through the woods, the building of a railroad viaduct, the renovation of the bus station. There, on my circuitous routes, it was easier for me, indeed entirely natural, to stop and take in their work (something otherwise done by only the oldest long-term inhabitants here). They pounded stones into place, now and then putting their ear to them, in a manner similar to that in which they spent their time after hours, except that they preferred to be watched at work, it seemed to me. Pride was not the same as unapproachability.
I often stood like this for an hour, for instance when another of these itinerant crews was digging out a spring in the forest, until the moment when shovelful by shovelful the trickle of water became a jet, and one of the workers, in the absence for the time being of a tile, got it to rattle into a hollow leaf. And now we greeted one another. And then we did that as well in the evenings, from a distance, without shaking hands as local bar frequenters customarily did.
Only once did one member of such a team address me in the evening, followed by the man next to him, and so on, until long after midnight. Without their relinquishing their masterful air, like that of dignitaries,
it came out that in their eyes it was not they who were shutting out the population of this region, but rather the residents who were ignoring them. No one, except perhaps the proprietor of the inn—but he himself was a foreigner—ever had a word for the itinerant work crews, or even a flicker of a facial expression. And everywhere they worked it was the same, and this one small exception seemed to these itinerant workers such a joyous occasion that they surrounded me, plucked at me, and finally shoved me around like a newly discovered member of the tribe. (On subsequent evenings, however, all we exchanged was greetings.)
 
 
W
ith the itinerant workers, the majority of them Frenchmen from the provinces who on weekends went home to their families, no matter how far it was, for the only time up to now I found myself enjoying spending time with people here, being cheerful and in good spirits; the gleaming floor tiles and the snowy glistening of the walls in the dining room formed part of this experience. I have never sat or even just stood around this way somewhere with any of the original inhabitants of the bay, although in the meantime I have come to know there is something special about them; at the very most someone—where else but in the bars or perhaps also on a wood road?—confided in me, and then it was only the deranged or those with their heads not screwed on right; but these merely stuttered incomprehensibly and in any case avoided storytelling altogether, and if a question slipped out of me: immediate clamming up, turning away, end of conversation.
That the original population of the bay, although lacking any allures, was somehow unique and perhaps also wanted to maintain that quality, was something I deduced from a fragmentary local chronicle printed in
The Hauts-de-Seine News.
The bay, it said, had been a place of asylum since the beginning of the century, first for Russians and Armenians, then for Italians under Mussolini and Spaniards under Franco. Between the two world wars as much as a quarter of the population here were newly arrived asylum seekers, unusual for a western suburb of Paris.
And that was still reflected, it seemed to me, in the comportment as well as the housing of those who were now old: they, too, had been itinerant workers, and here was their residence (for instance with names like “Our Sundays” or “Sweet Refuge”). As far as I could ascertain, they
spoke with the quick tongue characteristic of French small farmers, but in their case it was not at the cost of reflectiveness; they combined the natives' rhetoric with the eyes of foreigners; but wanted, however, to keep the latter for themselves.
 
 
D
uring this year, after the one week of escape to Salamanca, I rarely went outside the bay.
After working on my project, I was too tired to stride along briskly, and thus I took the commuter train to Paris, if I was going at all. Only once, on the return trip, did I get off one station early, in Meudon-Val Fleury, and walk home, as I had always pictured doing, through the 3,233-meter tunnel under the Seine hills, in a draft smelling slightly scorched, feeling relieved after all when the occasional “Exit” arrows no longer pointed toward my back but forward, toward the bay.
How astonishing it was each time to see the horizon-wide scattered white splendor of the capital, which during my entire time by the jungle waters would actually have beckoned to me, with all its landmarks, if the wooded hills had not stood between us, as a prolongation of my shoe tip, of the skiff almost entirely sunk in the pond, and the muskrats splashing around there.
Nevertheless, on those few Paris evenings I almost never went all the way into one of its centers. Since I had long since begun to shun the movie theaters, boulevards, and sidewalk cafés—and this year all the more—there were only two destinations left for me in Paris. One of them was those interior spaces that were shaken periodically by the Métro underneath; and it was for that, not the film, that I descended into a movie theater one time. And the other was a certain pissoir, perhaps the last of the old kind, made of iron, painted in dark enamel, with a sort of temple roof, the whole thing a miniature round temple, partitioned in two by a pissing wall, down which on both sides water ran constantly from a gutter at eye level, both halves offering standing room for a man in need, shielded from eyes on the street, except for his head and feet, by milk-glass screens, which gently reflected the sun and the city lights.
This little cottage was located by the Pont Mirabeau, actually on the edge of the city, and it still existed, they said, only because of the taxi drivers who had a stand next to there and resisted having to stick money
in a slot to urinate. And meanwhile that had become the only place in Paris to which I felt drawn from time to time. Having got out at Javel station and trudged across the bridge (from which the Seine, certainly mighty at that point, each time seemed less significant to me than my wild little pond) and then being greeted by this structure, otherwise easy to mistake for an empty kiosk, but chimerically changing its form with each of my steps, I would as a rule simply post myself in one of the semicircles, stare for a while at the gutter up above, from which for an eternity the water has been rolling down, wall-wide, listen to it running, also contemplating the spotlights refracted by the milk-glass screen on the other side, and before leaving dip my fingertips into the gutter up above.
And one time during this year I did make my way into a Parisian center after all: that of St.-Germain-des-Près, to contemplate the frieze of the Last Supper above the portal of the church there, from the twelfth century, where the heads that had been knocked off, one after the other, in the revolutionary eighteenth, leaving only the outlines, one of which, that of the apostle John, who has thrown himself on the table before his master, revealed to me the entire planet, the earth.
 
 
O
n the few evenings between the summer and now when I again wandered around the city, I saw the woman from Catalonia every time: not her imperial self, but in the form of other women, and once that of a man.
On one of these evenings I ran into Ana in a Métro station near the periphery, let's say at the Porte d'Auteuil, as a transient. She was young, tall and broad-shouldered, with long dark hair, and of a beauty that pierced me to the quick. I was surprised that all the lady-killers in the city, in Montparnasse or on the Champs-Elysées, had not caught wind of her and formed a cavalcade behind her. But that was a year in which more and more young women were wandering around, and thus she was alone there in the half-dusk, as perhaps only such a beauty could be, with her bundle of bursting plastic bags, her fur coat in August, and her head askew.
I followed Ana out of the subway up onto the broad square from which roads led out of the city, where nocturnal plane trees rustled as
they always had, and from all directions the headlights of cars crossed. She walked slowly, but without the load that hung down on both sides of her she would simply have remained in one spot; she moved crookedly, as if in a squall, following her wind-cocked head, diagonally across the square, dodging vehicles. And finally she stopped in front of a bustling sidewalk café and unexpectedly, with a simultaneous curtsy, thrust out both hands in a ballet-dancer gesture by a table, begging, without success, and had already disappeared around the corner.
Another time I came upon my wife while crossing, let's say, the Avenue de Versailles, as a woman hobbling along on crutches, except that the foot was not in a cast, it was missing. She acted as though nothing were wrong, moving gracefully, she, too, out and about alone, and with her one-legged hobbling and at the same time rapidly hastening steps, turned her head every few seconds to look over her shoulder into the void, for a contented blink, as if she were marching overland (she made me realize that an individual can “march” as well).
And as I stared after the cripple, I recalled a dream about the two of us. In it I had sawed off one of Ana's arms, and then did the same thing to myself, and only when I was through with the saw did I become aware that I, too, was now missing a hand, equally indispensable for writing and for something else. And what had the woman from Catalonia said once in response to my story of that time under the staircase in my brother's house in the village?: “That kind of under-stair person is just what you are, turned in on yourself, warmed by yourself. But again and again a hand reaches out from under your staircase and grabs the person who is passing by outside, or at any rate me, in a way no hand ever grabbed me before.”
Then I once saw Ana as a man, in a restaurant one evening along the outer boulevards. It was a guest just coming in from the dark outside, neither young nor old, a sort of faceless Everyman in a hat and gray raincoat, and as I took him out of the corner of my eye for the woman from Gerona and El Paso, whom he did not resemble in the slightest, I realized that I had been expecting her, and at the same time, from my shock at seeing the angular masculine figure, that my waiting was actually full of apprehension.
And the vanished woman appeared to me one last time in the nocturnal commuter railway, in a stranger, with a very different face, eyes,
hair. As I sat facing this unknown woman, I suddenly found myself contemplating my wife of many years.
I had not been able to look at the real Ana this way even once. An expectant calm emanated from her, at the same time impudence or playfulness, or the storytelling urge (as indeed she often said after a bruising quarrel that she had been dying the entire time to tell me how her day had gone). This fellow passenger did not avoid my gaze; she allowed it to have its way, then even responded with a smile, created in her expressionless face merely by my looking at it.
This was thinking in images, wordlessly. In this image the woman from Catalonia had a plane tree from the forest of Gerona as a background, from which a sparrow burst forth like a flying fish. She was a bride, would be that to the end; a needy person; a person pleading for protection. And so were other women, mothers of eleven, murderers of six, strumpets, high jumpers, Amazons.
And an almost forgotten yearning returned. And that was the night when I got out early in Meudon—Val Fleury, while the Gypsy woman continued on to St.-Quentin-en-Yvelines, and hiked home on foot through the scorched tunnel under the hills of the Seine. (And for the very last time I saw Ana in the form of a woman's lost glove in the bushes.)
 
 
I
t is of course not true that during this year of 1999 I had no contact with a local resident. I even acquired a good neighbor, at least one, a child.
Before the child turned out to be a neighbor, I had already seen him quite often, in the little Russian church on the edge of one of the forests here, and once also on the handball court during a game played by the local team, the pride of the region after working its way up into the First League. He was with his parents, but I actually had eyes only for him.
In the Slavic church he, for his part, once looked during the whole Sunday Mass only in my direction, though alternating between my face and my shoulder, or the empty space above it, back and forth, until I imagined he was looking for another child there. He was still almost a baby, not yet speaking, only from time to time making sounds, once a
bull bellowing, then the harsh cry of a large bird, and in between he crawled around on all fours among the congregation.
It was during this spring that his father, with him in his arms, unexpectedly came crashing through the bushes and pounded on my door, his eyes so big that I took their expression for ecstasy. In actuality he had just been informed that during an operation on his wife in the Sèvres hospital her heart had stopped under anesthesia. He asked me to watch the child until he got back, in a stammer that was more Russian than French, and I went on with my writing, holding the small child on my lap, the rhythm making him soon nod off, heavy in my arm, until after some time the father returned with news of her death.
From then on I also met this neighbor away from the chapel, at his house. There, to be sure, I was usually alone with the boy, who was called Vladimir; the man, one of the drivers of the peculiar buses in the bay—of which more later—occasionally worked until almost midnight, and it had become the routine for me to stay with the child if possible.

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