My Year in No Man's Bay (4 page)
What was there to tell specifically? It was already dark on the plateau. It was raining. The windows of the bus were steamed up. The passengers were of all ages and yet seemed of the same age. That had to do with their eyes, which my gaze took in all at once, in the shadowy light back to the very rear of the bus. My fellow passengers were outlines, with eyes in them, as if scratched by a blade into the otherwise indistinct faces, there in full, like a flock of birds jam-packed into a certain tree or a lone bush.
And then the bus came downhill from the plateau through the forest into the valley and stopped at the station with connecting trains to Paris and Versailles. We got out in the rain, and each disappeared, after thanking the driverâas they do in the countryâinto the various suburbs, barely lit, in contrast to the city of light behind the chain of hills.
Other than that I have nothing to tell about this event. And at the same time I feel an urge to start telling it again, to find a new rhythm, or even just a single new word.
That is how it has always been for me. I was sure of having something
original on the tip of my tongue. And the only thing I could think of was: portraying it. And then all that would appear was a deserted street, a bus passing, a gust of wind. A flood of words, hesitation, nothing more to tell, the story at an end; I tried again, then again, and again.
original on the tip of my tongue. And the only thing I could think of was: portraying it. And then all that would appear was a deserted street, a bus passing, a gust of wind. A flood of words, hesitation, nothing more to tell, the story at an end; I tried again, then again, and again.
Maybe that took a toll on me earlier. In the meantime I have come to accept it. My habit of winding up, grinding to a halt, starting from scratch, is all right by me. If I am a stutterer, at least I am a self-aware one.
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And come to think of it, my friends who are to appear in this narrative are all stammerers: the singer, but also my son, the priest, the architect or carpenter, also my woman friend (less so the painter, who now joins this company for the first time, to narrate with his film, and even less the friend who right now is tracing the stations of my “writer's tour” through wintry Germany, the reader).
From the very first word, I believed in their way of telling stories. Perhaps that is also why I see them all gathered far away from here. Tell stories, my friends, but don't tell histories, at least nothing from world history, don't reproduce world history. Tell me prehistories, which then turned out to be all there was. Hesitate, or bungle, take wrong turnings over and over again; perhaps in this way I will develop an ear for the tensions in your stories that the prettied-up world histories do not have, at least no longer have nowadays, not since
War and Peace.
And thus I also notice that you, in this respect unlike most of my earlier friends, who long since stopped needing anything, still need something, and for that reason, too, are my friends.
War and Peace.
And thus I also notice that you, in this respect unlike most of my earlier friends, who long since stopped needing anything, still need something, and for that reason, too, are my friends.
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want to try again with the people on the suburban bus that evening. No, I did not see any universal law in effect. It even seemed that the darkness, not only around the passengers, but also in the faces themselves, grew deeper each time I glanced back. The common element that emanated from all of them was a desolation in which I could detect a still-unidentified tremulous patience. This story had to continue.
want to try again with the people on the suburban bus that evening. No, I did not see any universal law in effect. It even seemed that the darkness, not only around the passengers, but also in the faces themselves, grew deeper each time I glanced back. The common element that emanated from all of them was a desolation in which I could detect a still-unidentified tremulous patience. This story had to continue.
And in fact didn't it then continue? At the open-air stand in front of the railway station an adolescent was buying a few things for supper, and every time he asked for an item, he added, “For me and my mother!”
until the woman behind the counter corrected him: “For my mother and me!”
until the woman behind the counter corrected him: “For my mother and me!”
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nd before I went into the nearby Café des Voyageurs as always, I looked up into the plane tree that during the winter months served the sparrows on the square as a sleeping place, the same birds' sleeping tree for all these years; at night the sparrows roosted only in this one, although the square in front of the station is ringed with trees, and not far beyond the embankment crowned with lindens begin the wooded hills whose trees extend almost down to the houses, an upland forest of oaks and narrower edible chestnuts: the proprietor of the Voyageurs, whose upper stories are a hotel for itinerant workers and salesmen, called “sales representatives,” says the plane tree became the sleeping tree because of the warmth escaping from his heated hotel rooms. In any case, at night I have never seen a single sparrow in the other trees on the square, or only briefly, for a moment, chased away by the large crowd nearby, because it was disturbing their peace.
nd before I went into the nearby Café des Voyageurs as always, I looked up into the plane tree that during the winter months served the sparrows on the square as a sleeping place, the same birds' sleeping tree for all these years; at night the sparrows roosted only in this one, although the square in front of the station is ringed with trees, and not far beyond the embankment crowned with lindens begin the wooded hills whose trees extend almost down to the houses, an upland forest of oaks and narrower edible chestnuts: the proprietor of the Voyageurs, whose upper stories are a hotel for itinerant workers and salesmen, called “sales representatives,” says the plane tree became the sleeping tree because of the warmth escaping from his heated hotel rooms. In any case, at night I have never seen a single sparrow in the other trees on the square, or only briefly, for a moment, chased away by the large crowd nearby, because it was disturbing their peace.
And on this rainy evening there was a gleam of wetness through the entire tree, both on the stumpy sparrow beaks and on the black, shriveled round pods of the plane tree from the previous year, yet only the latter, hanging by threads, moved, swayed, swung: the sparrows, even on the thinnest twigs, kept completely still, and had I not known that they were assembled there, their pale gray bodies would have merged with the blotches on the tree's bark, which resembled them in form and coloration. And later at the bar I succumbed to the temptation to repeat my glance from the bus with the others standing there: nothing. And even later the
patron
behind the counter taped shut with adhesive tape the mouth of someone who was getting obstreperous. And in the brightly lit trains passing up above on the embankment silhouettes sped by, fewer and fewer. And on the way to my house a neighbor's wolfhound, locked in the garage, was hurling himself as usual against the steel door.
patron
behind the counter taped shut with adhesive tape the mouth of someone who was getting obstreperous. And in the brightly lit trains passing up above on the embankment silhouettes sped by, fewer and fewer. And on the way to my house a neighbor's wolfhound, locked in the garage, was hurling himself as usual against the steel door.
And then I ate in the kitchen and listened to the news on the radio. And toward midnightâit had stopped raining and a warm wind was blowingâI went out and sat in the yard, at a distance from the house, where I had turned on the lights, and let the music from Radio Beur,
the station of the North Africans in Paris, drift out through the open kitchen window, as I had done the night I moved in here, even then at a distance from the house, in the farthest corner of the yard. From the other houses, long since dark and wrapped in wintry silence, came through the often very narrow gaps that separated them the rustling of the forest, or it was the wind in the cedar right next door, pretending to be the growling of a forest. And the business with the bus continued to stir me. This was not like we-experiences: I did not feel torn between my longing to merge with the others and my congenital inability to do so. Here I was the observer, and could say “we” only from the sidelines. Observing was my project. And it was a big project. Never again could I let myself get involved in action, or in any action but observing and elaborating upon it. Wasn't it also a fact that dreams in which I myself was the hero had become increasingly rare? Even as a dreamer I had been transformed from a figure in the plot to a witness. As such I was not helpful to anyone, true, but I knew that I was active. And that night in my backyard was not the first time this became clear to meâand why had I drifted away from this insight every time and aimed for a fatally wrong target, whether as a lawyer in court or as an author of articles who believed he could make history as Emile Zola once had? Would I betray my realization this time, too? Where would I go shooting off to in my next hotheadedness, deluded anew that this action was something that would last? And didn't I think at the same time that my very own life, in all its uneventfulness, was my only basis for pathos?
the station of the North Africans in Paris, drift out through the open kitchen window, as I had done the night I moved in here, even then at a distance from the house, in the farthest corner of the yard. From the other houses, long since dark and wrapped in wintry silence, came through the often very narrow gaps that separated them the rustling of the forest, or it was the wind in the cedar right next door, pretending to be the growling of a forest. And the business with the bus continued to stir me. This was not like we-experiences: I did not feel torn between my longing to merge with the others and my congenital inability to do so. Here I was the observer, and could say “we” only from the sidelines. Observing was my project. And it was a big project. Never again could I let myself get involved in action, or in any action but observing and elaborating upon it. Wasn't it also a fact that dreams in which I myself was the hero had become increasingly rare? Even as a dreamer I had been transformed from a figure in the plot to a witness. As such I was not helpful to anyone, true, but I knew that I was active. And that night in my backyard was not the first time this became clear to meâand why had I drifted away from this insight every time and aimed for a fatally wrong target, whether as a lawyer in court or as an author of articles who believed he could make history as Emile Zola once had? Would I betray my realization this time, too? Where would I go shooting off to in my next hotheadedness, deluded anew that this action was something that would last? And didn't I think at the same time that my very own life, in all its uneventfulness, was my only basis for pathos?
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t had always been night in those hours when I participated purely as an observer, deep night.
t had always been night in those hours when I participated purely as an observer, deep night.
Here in this remote suburb, where there is no theater, also no longer a movie house, the local weekly reports that an association has formed whose program calls for something known as “The Night of the Storyteller.”
I do not know what form this takes, and plan to attend at least one such night in the course of the year. But the very expression brings back to me a whole succession of nights in my life. I am thinking less of evenings in late autumn in my grandparents' barn, where half the village would gather on benches and milking stools to husk corn and would go
around the circle clockwise telling story after story until far into the night. The nights of the storyteller I am thinking of were by and large silent, although there, too, each time a more or less large company was sitting or standing around.
around the circle clockwise telling story after story until far into the night. The nights of the storyteller I am thinking of were by and large silent, although there, too, each time a more or less large company was sitting or standing around.
That was true a few years ago of an evening with two friends in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia. On a trip, of which I was not yet certain where it would lead me, I had invited the painter and the reader there for my fiftieth birthday. The painter flew in via Belgrade from Perpignan, where he had one of his studios in the nearby Pyrenees. The reader had traveled parallel to me, through Italy, down the eastern coast as I was going down the western coast of Yugoslavia, like me by train and bus, and had then taken a boat in Rimini straight across the Adriatic to Split, hot on my trail by that time, but then, in his usual way, had done the last part on foot, so that I could be alone on the morning of my birthday, as I had requested.
I would have remained alone until evening if the reader and I had not been drawn to the same part of Dubrovnik at the same time, outside the city walls. Where we ran into each other by chance, there was nothing but an open stony field, high above the little fortified city on the sea in its shell-shaped hollow. I found myself driven there by thoughts of my mother, who had spent the last summer of her life in this area, sickened by the heat and yet out walking every day, leaving the shade of the town for the countryside, for the goat and chicken sheds in the middle of nowhere, for the stone walls, for the sparse grassy triangles where roads crossed. The ocean down below had merely blinded her, and the islands meant nothing to her, unlike me. The shrill sound of the cicadas tormented her ears. The light of the limestone karst raged. By a doorpost, all that remained of a house, autumnal sky-blue like the background of the Slovenian roadside shrines, she breathed a sigh of relief in passing. His eyes wide, a wooden cudgel over his shoulder, a native came toward me; at second glance I recognized the reader. At least I had been in Dubrovnik before and could then play the role of host in the courtyard of the most obscure tavern. At that very place the painter later hunted us down, coming straight from the airport. He stood between us, without a word, and him, too, I at first took for a local.
That evening each of us did open his mouth now and then, but for the most part we remained silent. And precisely that was the night of
storytelling. One incident followed the other without need for words. From the darkness outside only a breath reached us; the deeper the night became, the richer in material. More than listening to such storytelling, we sat through it. We did look around again and again, get up, go outside, leaving the others alone for a while, but the most active element in that night was the blackness. I had never seen the black of night so full of color, and seldom a color so massive, and in the same breath so fragrant. It had often made me suspicious when the painter came out with his dictum about black's being the richest of the colors, interacting with light. Now, long after midnight, also long before the first birdcalls, no moon, no stars, I perceived the blackness as the color of a first-day fruit.
storytelling. One incident followed the other without need for words. From the darkness outside only a breath reached us; the deeper the night became, the richer in material. More than listening to such storytelling, we sat through it. We did look around again and again, get up, go outside, leaving the others alone for a while, but the most active element in that night was the blackness. I had never seen the black of night so full of color, and seldom a color so massive, and in the same breath so fragrant. It had often made me suspicious when the painter came out with his dictum about black's being the richest of the colors, interacting with light. Now, long after midnight, also long before the first birdcalls, no moon, no stars, I perceived the blackness as the color of a first-day fruit.
It was winter, rainy along the southern Adriatic coast, mild. The late night was windless. We had not stayed in Dubrovnik. I had invited my friends to Ston, a village on the tongue of land toward Korcula. There were the saltworks on one side, on the other, in a bay, man-made oyster beds, with a restaurant adjacent. The previous morning, having gone out there by bus, I had looked into the particulars, and now I guided the painter and the reader from place to place. The table by the bay was set, the white cloth a rarity for Yugoslavia. We had come by taxi; the driver sat at a table at some distance, he, too, having Dalmatian wine and oysters, a common and inexpensive meal in that area. The shells were hardly larger than a coin, and the oyster flesh was correspondingly tiny, yet firm.
Although it was my special day, I set out a present for the others, the same thing for both, a wooden box carved and painted by Albanian craftsmen in Kosovo, purchased the week before in the Croatian town of Zadar, filled with the coarse gray crystals of unrefined sea salt, mixed with sand and autumn leaves, gathered from a pile in the middle of the saltworks, shut down for the winter. The painter stood up and handed me a collection of dull black pencils, all of them already started by him, with dabs of paint on them, for the rest of my journey, so that I could draw in my notebook, for he said he found it unfortunate that I had stopped. And the reader, too, stood up and gave me a book he had printed himself: the notes he had recently discovered, made by a stonemason on a trip between Souillac, Cahors, and Moissac in France around
the middle of the twelfth century, in that transitional period between the Romanesque and the Gothic style. The notes were in Latin, true, but having to decipher something, reading a text that did not flow smoothly, always had an animating effect on me; and this commentary dealt with something that might apply to me. It was this remark in particular that caused me to carry the little book around with me without reading it: it scares me off when I am told something seems made for me, and only now do I sense that the time may have come for the stonemason's story.
the middle of the twelfth century, in that transitional period between the Romanesque and the Gothic style. The notes were in Latin, true, but having to decipher something, reading a text that did not flow smoothly, always had an animating effect on me; and this commentary dealt with something that might apply to me. It was this remark in particular that caused me to carry the little book around with me without reading it: it scares me off when I am told something seems made for me, and only now do I sense that the time may have come for the stonemason's story.
It was much later when the night outside, silent as it was, became so overpowering around the village of Ston, about twenty kilometers from Dubrovnik in the big country of Yugoslavia. Here a verb suggests itself, a somewhat odd concept, yet it imposes itself on me. What did the night do? It surged, it surged over us: the surging night. The hill by the bay was girdled by medieval ramparts, which because of their length and breadth, up and down around the mountainous fortress, was called the Chinese Wall (of Ston). This wall now seemed close to where we were. It was the same with the row of spruce on the saltworks dam farther away, on the other side of the hill. The trees' needles rustled, and the heaps of salt at their feet glistened; a tipped-over wheelbarrow was covered with salt, except for the rusty wheel.
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