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

not a single sign of life, not even a card from the places where he gives readings, whereas previously I would receive big fat letters from him in his enormous sign painter’s handwriting, for which I once praised him, like so much else. A reason for his silence toward me may perhaps lie in the country once so dear to both our hearts, Yugoslavia, which he, as he puts it in an article, has unmasked as his “own personal illusion” and has “smoked out of himself,” and which still shines on before me as a reality. But I know that one hour of double-voiced storytelling about that country would suffice, and Kobal and I would be reduced to completely unanimous weeping and cursing, weeping, laughing, and cursing.
    No, Filip Kobal has written me off because I settled in a faraway country, rather than where he is convinced I belong. He disapproves, as he told me at the end, of my obstinate, and, according to him, arbitrary, abandonment of my place of origin for something that in no respect seemed necessary, certainly not essential as an “exile” (which, to be sure, I have never in my life asserted a need for). It did no good that on that last visit he roamed for days at my side through the hills and valleys of
the Seine, dropped in with me on hundreds of bars, churches, hermitages, houseboats, transmitters, and local radio stations.
    I took him to the wintry birds’ sleeping tree by the railroad station, even had my opera glasses with me, so that my nearsighted friend could distinguish the massive branches in the plane tree’s crown from the motionless sparrow-balls. I shared with him the minutes of the last session of the town council, filled him in on the proportional assignment of seats to the various parties, from community to community within the département, with its population in the millions, gave a scintillating account of the early history of the region, from the days of the Romans and the Middle Ages to the liberation in 1944 by the division commanded by General Leclerc. In the church in Sevres he found himself standing with me by the tiny spiral staircase from the twelfth century that began high above our heads in the wall—there was no other staircase, not even a ladder—and ended who knows where; in Ville d’Avray, as the wind feathered the water, I showed him the ponds painted by Corot; on Mont St.-Valérien near Suresnes we breathed the air in the former Gestapo death cells; in La Defense we stood together, buffeted by the night wind, in the ghostly light of the Grande Arche.
    In the forests we crouched side by side over the secret springs from which I had scraped away the leaves for him, whereupon they began to pulse before our eyes. I slipped with him into the underbrush to find the foxes’ lair, climbed down with him into the ditch of the giant toad, pointed out to him in passing the rivulet flowing around a menhir, bought apples and milk with him on a farm on the plateau of Saclay, sniffed at his side the great mill of Versailles, passed with him four forest rangers’ lodges in a single afternoon, approached with him, without saying a word, as we made our way uphill on the path taken by Jean Racine and Pascal through the meadows along Rhodon Brook, the barns of Port-Royal, of which I hoped to hear my Filip Kobal say that he had never, not even in our Jaunfeld region, seen such noble threshing-floor roofs, soaring so high toward the heavens, mirroring the centuries.
    I introduced him to the waitress in the church-bar of Jouy-en-Josas, who unexpectedly addressed him in Slovenian and turned out to have been born in Kosovelje on the karst and to the tarot players in the back room along the Route Nationale 10, who were a group of itinerant
Serbian stonemasons; attended with him the Russian Orthodox Sunday service in the blue wood-frame church in the bay here, no larger than a garden shed, but how many people unexpectedly inside, what an enormous missal, and