My Year in No Man's Bay by Peter Handke Page A

that were deserted at night, while the proximity of the metropolis just over the hills, its glow lighting up the eastern sky, tore at her heart rather than soothing it. With time she came to see some virtues in this particular suburb, made fun of the teeny-tiny middle- and working-class houses as amiably as she made fun of Gaudí’s edifices in Barcelona. She got to know merchants and tradespeople with whom I hardly ever exchanged more than a hello; in the special silence of the wooded hills she had her own spots, which she alone visited and which were off-limits to me. Yet life on a grand scale could take place only in the hub, on the other side of the mountains, as she called the barely hundred-thirty-meter-high ridge. The suburban world here remained for her—to use the expression of the singer’s, who, a child of this area, composed one of his angry songs about it—“rotten.”
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    N o one would come. I would remain alone with a couple of strangers at a bar in the most remote recess of the bay. And stories are told, for instance: it snows; or: something is going on. I am receptive, and the others, I sense, likewise. And up there in the woods sparks would fly from a nocturnal horseback rider, and that mythical beast, which I expect to turn up any day now in the forest, almost devoid of wild animals and yet so overgrown, has pricked up its ears at least once already for its first appearance.
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    B ut every time this nocturnal storytelling has no effect. Because it takes place so remotely, among marginal people, and only there, only there now? “But that can’t be,” I think, “it has to have some effect.”

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    A year ago, when the priest from my native village visited me in this obscure corner while on his way to Chartres—about which he did not want anything said—“I’m here with you, not on my way to somewhere else!”—he spoke of how solitaries belonged together in the diaspora, which nowadays was the place where, for people like us, things were most likely to go on, one person here, another there, which I denied: I expected nothing from a community of the scattered people, the chosen, from secret circles with secret writings and initiation rites, but rather … and here, as so often before, I had no idea what I wanted to say next.
    The priest, standing there, legs apart as at home, winked at me as if he did not believe me, and as though we both knew better. I now felt even more left to my own devices than before. He had come unannounced, as though my house, three countries away, belonged to his parish, and in the back of his car, which was splattered with mud from top to bottom as only the forest ranger’s was here, he had a plaster cast of the Romanesque kings from our village church, which the two of us then hauled to the farthest corner of the yard, where the three knee-high torsos now present their thick-lipped smiles.
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    A community of the scattered was something I believed in only during a period of transition.
    And just as little am I guided by an earlier idea, the product not only of a lack but also of something visible: that of a people. I have never believed in a national people, equally little in a religious people, a linguistic people, and never in The People with the definite article. But neither can I believe anymore in a people of minorities, of people waiting, of readers, of sufferers and victims.
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    T here was only one period in my life when I had the notion of preserving all the changing, indefinable peoples in whom I believed in some more durable form, and even then that could be only something written—not legal files—only a book.

    That was at the time when I was a lawyer, barely thirty, and was not yet writing. I was renting a room in a house up in the hills of Sievering, in the north end of Vienna, and I was working with an older colleague in his firm out past Baden,