My Year in No Man's Bay Read Online Free PDF Page A

faces of others approaching like the masks of automatons, and my own face matches theirs. Even our outlines and shadows appear utterly shapeless. Only a dead, stillborn mankind appears to me, wretches who provide no sense of a path to follow.
    On that evening bus trip when, on the plateau of Vélizy, in accordance with my daily observation practice, I almost unconsciously turned toward the people behind me, I finally managed to see people as distinct again.
In turning my head I got away from judging and condemning. My era, my enemy: this thought, which had been solidifying in my mind with the passing years, lost its content. At that moment no era mattered, or only all eras together: through the faces behind me I gazed into a primeval time, and simultaneously into a new time. Even though nothing connected the passengers to each other, my glancing back created unity among them. Although none of them seemed conscious of it, it was no fantasy. It would have faded into one if I had approached them now with these tidings of joy. (My friend the singer repeatedly did something of the sort during one period of his life: he would appear before a random gathering of people to sing them awake, and as a rule each one would stare all the more fixedly into his corner, and a certain Pentecostal spirit would arise only if he broke off his song and pelted them with curses.) I certainly felt a wave of feeling sweeping me toward those people, but at the same time some instinct kept me at a distance. “That’s it!” I merely thought, and then: “That’s how it is.” And further: “You should not try to do anything with it, just go off to your corner now and tell about it, and—since oral narration has never worked for you—in writing.” And further: “The faces of strangers, the most reliable source of pleasure.”
    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 driver—as they do in the country—into 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.
    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