My Year in No Man's Bay by Peter Handke

Author:Peter Handke [Handke, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Literary
ISBN: 9781466806825
Google: DtOGbxnd5hIC
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 1998-08-05T04:00:00+00:00

Who was she? And how did it happen that each time she set out searching anew it was in the Middle East of all places, in Turkey, whose inhabitants still lurked in the minds of her southern Slav contemporaries as arsonists, throat cutters, and stomach slitters, even though their domination of her part of the world had ended long ago?

I read once in an article entitled “Speech and Silence of Women in Medieval Epics” that women at that time avoided any speech that threatened or exerted pressure: orders, directness, and questions that expected an answer. And in an article on “Interrogative Intonation in Various Languages” I once read that German questions were marked by an interrogative intonation, whereas questions in the Eskimo languages managed without; where do you fit in, my dear friend, in this respect?

I do think I know a few things about her. To begin with: of all of us, she is the only one without cares, sometimes to the point of being infuriating. For her, only the present seems to exist, whatever is more or less peaceably there. Anything that is not there, if it does not attract her, she considers a nonthing or nonperson. And even if her conversational partner knew otherwise: from her face he could never imagine her living with a man, let alone having children, being a mother. Even when no longer all that young, she still seemed, to use an image from an earlier century, virginal, at least at first glance, transient, and likewise for the person who saw her again after a long time, always swept away into the prevailing daylight, surrendering to it as the most crucial factor, something also visible in the angle of her head and her posture: for this she could forget even her searching, with the greatest of ease, without transition.

And she knew no fear. Whenever she heard about a fearful person, her eyes would stare in incomprehension like a cow’s, and her face would become beautifully clueless. Equally foreign to her was any compassion, and far from despising a compassionate person, she would be angry at him: if anything could be done to help, she did it at once; if not, she ignored the other’s misfortune.

And she was the one who did not have a name for anyone or anything, or if she did, not the original one. Her using a name was such a rarity that the listener would experience either disenchantment (probably initially hers) or a solemnity unusual for her. But as a rule, for her nothing in the world had a particular or unique name. “Dalmatia,” where she had been living for a long time, was not allowed to be called that, but “the coastland” or the “steep coastline” (even “karst” was too specific for her), and equally impossible were “thistle,” “hemlock,” “Tito,” “Ephesus”; only words such as flower, bush, marshal, city, perhaps “philosophers’ city” could cross her lips. She usually did know the various particular names, but it was as if she were saving these for a special occasion.

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