The Year
I
almost missed the right moment for telling the story of or reporting on this particular year in this region.
For one thing, it seemed to me that simply by living, walking about, taking things in, I had already written the book, that each day in itself was at the same time the day's work, and explicit word-making was more like a superfluous addition, a retracing, that would result in gratuitous ornamentation; for another thing, now that I had already spent several years in the bay, it was too late for such a one-year report, because, always thinking “too soon, too soon,” I was waiting for the aforementioned right moment, instead of simply beginning at some point.
This is what I finally did, actually with little faith, half convinced that the execution of my plan was a mere re-presenting, and was also taking place at the wrong moment, too late, or perhaps too soon after all. But I did it, and with the very first sentence all these hesitations were gone. (They were replaced and intersected by others.) I, the writer, was now the one who decided; and if I was ever anything, it was the writer. I experienced that once again simply by sitting down, as after every longer intermission, and writingâfrom the activity itself.
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irst of all I decided what would not be included in my notes on one year in the bay. And what would be included would not be decided in advance; to paraphrase Wittgenstein, or simply to play with language, it would dis-cover itself, and in my writing down of things I would follow it.
What would not play a role but at most be mentioned: anything I had not experienced myself as an eyewitness, or verified, at least after the fact. Thus in the course of this year the statue of the Blessed Virgin was stolen from the pilgrimage oak at the edge of the forest. And upon hearing the news I went there and first observed the empty spot up in the fork between the branches, then, a week later, the plaster replacement figure, obviously mass-produced, and finally the original, which had turned up again. And I found out only from the bay's weekly newspaper about the old lady who left her house one morning and with her diamond ring scratched the paint on all the cars parked on the main street, and yet I felt as though I had been there.
What they call world history was also to be kept out as much as possible, less because of my dislike or distrust than in recognition of my weakness where not only that but also all major events are concerned: I do take an interestâand television does not prevent my feelings from being profoundâyet I could hardly say anything about these events, let alone write anything. Not that the world's seemingly endless obstacle race leaves me speechless. It is only that in this connection images very seldom occur to me, images which, I sense, I would need in order to say anything, and when they have occurred to me, they have not once provided me with the necessary opening bars.
My weakness, with regard to both the horrors of history as well as the things that occasionally move me profoundly, is that I cannot transform them into images and cannot fall into a rhythm, as for instance William Shakespeare could, and who else? History becomes an image for me at most later on in my dreams, often even a compelling image, but then without a context, and if there is a beat to it, it breaks off every time in the middle, and furthermore the period in which the action occurred has never been my current one, generally agreed to be certainly epoch-making, but each time a past period, already almost legendary, once with Goebbels as the protagonist, transformed into a saint, during
his last days in Berlin, another time with Nicolas Poussin as the main character, during his unhappy year as court painter in his native France; or the dream took place at the end of time and of history, on the day before Judgment Day.
But I persist in my weakness. And who knows whether things may not be different someday? Whether world history will not eventually give me a coherent dream? And who says I have to wait until night for that? I'm thinking incidentally of my brother, probably the only master our village of Rinkolach has ever had, master in a trade, and his lifelong struggles with his country, his religion, his contemporaries, himself, his desire for victory, his desire for self-destruction, his ghostsâindeed his “preparations for immortality.”
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long time before I set out to record this year of 1999 in the bay, visits to me had already become fewer, and in the last months, the months of preparation, they ceased altogether. As a result of my son's moving out, then my wife's, the house gleamed freshly in the emptiness, a little also the shabbiness, of this new beginning, and I asked myself whether it wasn't being completely alone there that I valued above all else and for which I had been fiendishly scheming all the time, not unlike a long-premeditated crime. (“You can't share your rustling of the trees and your trembling of the grassesâexcept in the book”: Ana.)
And after the initial befuddlement, then desolation, then longing for deathâno, it was thoughts of doing away with myselfâI was in good spirits, nothing else. I undertook no more journeys, not even short ones within the country. Instead I set out on foot every morning, even often in the winter rain, beyond the area, in all directionsâexcept toward Parisâfarther than ever before, and undertook actual marches through mud and night away from the bay, also as though I had something to be afraid of there.
I read hardly any newspapers anymore and no books, except the pamphlet in which the stonemason from the transitional period between the Romanesque and the Gothic told in fragments the story of his Middle French forays: “The New Cathedrals, Building the New Tower of Babel.”
Likewise I stopped making notes, put the pile of filled notebooks away in the most inaccessible cupboard, took down the maps of the Seine hills and the aerial photographs (smuggled by someone out of the air base up there for my purposes), wrote no more letters, removed from my desk the stones, wild apples, falcon feathers, and other fetishes, leaving only a row of pencils almost the width of the surface, most of them old and used up, and the ball of clay, scooped up from a sunken road here and long since become hard as rock (even paperâthis above allâI banished from my sight), and then in the week before beginning I avoided any kind of preparation, forbade myself even to break into a run, drank before going to bed more wine than usual, expressly to distort and muddy my dreams, usually so clear and incisive, especially in the dark season, turned away when I felt drawn to look at something, and finally was waiting only for the first snow.
The last thing I did was sweep and scrub the house, even into the out-of-the-way cornersâthe housekeeper had given notice after my family moved out, explaining that there was nothing further for her to do with me there aloneâand pruned the trees in the yard, more than necessary, so as to have additional spaces and openings to look through from my window; even opened with my clippers a small, round breach in the hedge, which, from my ground-floor study, was to serve as a peephole through the garden next door to the road I had declared the main one.
The bills were now paid in advance, as much as possible; the heating-oil tank was filled, the lane freshly strewn with crushed rock. And the first snow fell, if initially only, as I heard one morning on the radio, in the highlands of the eastern Pyrenees: I saw it from afar on the crops of the short-legged dark horses in the meadows by the RÃo Segre in the enclave of Llivia. And that was enough for me. I would begin the next day with my year in the no-man's-bay.
On the evening before the beginning, the blade of a jackknife with which I wanted to tighten a screw snapped back and cut me in the index or writing finger, so deeply that for a moment, before the flesh closed up again, still without a drop of blood, I saw the white of the bone flash. In the hospital, outside the bay, where the wound was sewn up, the doctor said the finger should be kept still for weeks, and “What is your profession?”
That was all right with me. All the better: I would make do with my other fingers, thus avoiding the familiar pitfall of false dexterity. No more postponement.
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n the hour before I went downstairs to my study, I started a fire upstairs in the fireplace, of beech wood, as my grandfather always did before the Feast of the Three Kings, except that he used the glowing embers, and like him I then held my hat over it, and pulled it, still smoky-warm, over my head, for that kept headaches away for the rest of the year.
After that I went out to the yard, got up on the tallest ladder, and sawed a funnel-shaped opening in the top of the spruce, imagining that the mythical beast hiding in the woods, of whose existence I am convinced, would, if it were winged, build itself a nest there in the course of the year, to serve as its outpost in the bay, and I could have it and perhaps its brood in sight from time to time during my writing.
Then I went to the Bar des Voyageurs at the station, read a letter from my carpenter friend from Morioka in northern Japan and my favorite paper,
The Hauts-de-Seine News,
suburb by suburb, on the way home took a roundabout route, so as to pass the dog next door, locked in the garage during the day, and let the massive animal, which repeatedly jumped at the steel door, bark at me and bark himself out, and finally squatted in the yard by the open door to my study until, in the sparse grass at my feet, a path through the fields appeared.
The first sentence after that, not thought out in advance, promptly led me deep into the forest bay, and only now can I return there.
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stranger crossing the bay on the rather leisurely local train, trav-A eling for example from the center of Paris (which is almost everywhere, after all) out to Versailles, will, at the sight of the expanses of hanging vegetable and fruit plantations to either side of the tracks, interrupted at first by no houses, only toolsheds, at most be surprised at suddenly being out in the countryside, the more so since during a 3,200-meter stretch in the dark just now he may have thought he was in the subway (the supposed subway is in actuality the tunnel through the
barrier formed by the Seine hills). The stranger will hardly be likely to get off at the station with the plane tree, unless he has time and no particular destination, and unless the surprisingly rural quality or rather the sudden indefinability of the landscape reminds him of something and holds out the promise of some curious excursions.
When I hear other languages in the bay, it is almost always from residents, especially the Portugueseâno, they actually tend to conceal their native idiom, speaking in public more the language of the countryâthe North Africans, the Asians, most of all the Armenians and the Russians. Pretty much the only foreigners who are here intentionally, also of their own accord, come from nearby Paris, and can be recognized as outsiders precisely by their not presenting themselves as such, but instead as people from the capital in one way or another, including having the accent to match; and then they are not in the area for its own sake, but are using it only as the starting point or end point of a hike.
Otherwise I have encountered in these ten years almost exclusively foreigners who found their way to the bay either by chance or even involuntarily. One evening a couple from a provincial city came into one of the few restaurants, sought out, if at all, only by residents of the bay; they had wandered in from one of the industrial exhibitions on the periphery of Paris. The couple immediately drew attention to themselves there, in and of themselves and then also because of their completely different, louder, gesticulating, space-grabbing self-assurance, and finally they expressed in such clear signals and utterances their superiority to the region, also their disdain, in the presence of the scattering of brooding, seemingly hunched-over local folk that I, if they had not wolfed down their food and disappeared quickly, would have got up from my seat and, as a representative of the place, barked at them to behave themselves in a manner appropriate to strangers and guests here among us.
It was far more often than once that I heard people who had strayed into the region asking from their cars, “Can you please tell me where I am?” and when a car with a strange license plate pulls over to the side of the road, I am almost sure in advance that someone inside, looking quite lost, will be unfolding a map. And one time, when I was heading home long after midnight, several people came running toward me over
the dark square in front of the railroad station, waving their arms and uttering cries of dismay (I immediately picked out my son in the group): as it turned out, a group of Chinese, who had mistakenly not got off the train until after the tunnel, and had now spent hours, meanwhile seized by panic, running back and forth like headless chickens, trapped in this indecipherable, night-cold no-man's-land cage, without taxis and without any passersby at all, without an open bar or police station.
But hadn't things been this way since long ago, not only in this current year of 1999? This year only one foreigner has stuck in my mind thus far: that almost-friend, a journalist, who changed his specialty from sports to war. When I, meanwhile more receptive to visits, perhaps precisely as a result of my months of activity here, showed him around the region, he considered it very special because he saw in a store window “souvenir” plaques of marbleâin reality grave plaques in the stonecutter's display. He has remained in my memory because he, still a very young man, was dead soon after that, killed in the German civil war.