My Year in No Man's Bay by Peter Handke Read Free Book Online Page A

too, came from the turbulent sea, swept in, washed in, rocked in the tides that rolled in and out for years or decades on end, now calm, now more hectic, past thousands of capes and cliffs, through the straits of Meudon, through the narrows of Sevres, through the first inlet, called the “Puits sans Vin,” fountain without wine, and a second inlet, called the “Carrefour de la Fausse Porte,” crossroads of the false portal, into the narrowest, most twisting and turning, remotest metropolitan bay, all the more fathomable for me in its namelessness, we, the driftwood that had come the greatest distance, and thus also rarer than in the mouths of the bay, yet for that very reason amazingly distinct.
    At the same time, those in the bar, since they all stand alone, somewhat resemble an ancient tribe on the only remaining reservation, and in reality I encounter them, when they are going about among the local passersby out on the street, as the remnant that hardly counts anymore, the remnant of the remnant of the original inhabitants of this region. They seem fundamentally misshapen, as if smashed out of their child’s and youth’s forms by a single blow from a fist, a moment’s impact, which I sometimes, in a different sense, wish on the other passersby, who have apparently remained unharmed, and likewise on myself.
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    N o such sense of expulsion in the few minutes of the night of storytelling. There are simply some standing—I do not know who they are—there—I do not know how. If any outside lights were still on previously, they have gone off in the meantime, for instance the barbershop’s, in front of which could be a sign: “Last Chance for a Haircut Before the Big Woods,” and by eight at the latest that of the bakery, which in fact already has the woods in its name, and whose reversed
in BOULAGERIE suggests Cyrillic script to me, as if I were looking out the window of a bar on Lake Ohrid. Only the outskirtishly pale light of the streetlights, leading to the wooded ridge and breaking off just before it, remains. The pinball machine and the video game inside have been turned off, their flashing lights extinguished, the seductive mechanical melodies and voices silenced. The cards or dice on the tables way in the back stay as they are. No one is doing anything more. At the very most the tradesman among us is casually repairing something for the proprietor, moving back and forth between the counter and the kitchen, as if he were at home. Otherwise there are no distinctions among those present, no barriers anymore. Even when the patron is not standing among the others, he could be just anyone behind the bar. No one is smoking now. The day’s debris on the floor has already been swept up. No one is loud or especially quiet. Everyone who speaks has the same intonation, and it matches the peaceful atmosphere in the dim café.
    In the sense in which people use the term “intake personnel,” during such nights of storytelling I experienced those who were standing around as a sort of “uptake personnel,” whether one of them happened to be talking, listening, or listening to something else. Now a sort of game was in progress, one without rival players and sides, the opposite of all the games that I, at least, had witnessed over the years, which were accompanied by both hotheadedness and coldness, of which in the end only the coldness remained, most rigidly in the so-called game of kings, chess.
    What we are playing here comes closest to a team’s warm-up before a match—except that the match itself is already there. In the brief interval, a transformation has occurred in those remaining behind together, stranded or not, even if the next day on the street one will look right through the other.
    It may be that I will never see humanity this way again. Yet it existed in those nights there. It exists. I do not need any image as a continuation; it has