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

stories. Perhaps that is also why I see them all gathered far away from here. Tell stories, my friends, but don’t tell histories, at least nothing from world history, don’t reproduce world history. Tell me prehistories, which then turned out to be all there was. Hesitate, or bungle, take wrong turnings over and over again; perhaps in this way I will develop an ear for the tensions in your stories that the prettied-up world histories do not have, at least no longer have nowadays, not since War and Peace. And thus I also notice that you, in this respect unlike most of my earlier friends, who long since stopped needing anything, still need something, and for that reason, too, are my friends.
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    I want to try again with the people on the suburban bus that evening. No, I did not see any universal law in effect. It even seemed that the darkness, not only around the passengers, but also in the faces themselves, grew deeper each time I glanced back. The common element that emanated from all of them was a desolation in which I could detect a still-unidentified tremulous patience. This story had to continue.
    And in fact didn’t it then continue? At the open-air stand in front of the railway station an adolescent was buying a few things for supper, and every time he asked for an item, he added, “For me and my mother!”
until the woman behind the counter corrected him: “For my mother and me!”
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    A nd before I went into the nearby Café des Voyageurs as always, I looked up into the plane tree that during the winter months served the sparrows on the square as a sleeping place, the same birds’ sleeping tree for all these years; at night the sparrows roosted only in this one, although the square in front of the station is ringed with trees, and not far beyond the embankment crowned with lindens begin the wooded hills whose trees extend almost down to the houses, an upland forest of oaks and narrower edible chestnuts: the proprietor of the Voyageurs, whose upper stories are a hotel for itinerant workers and salesmen, called “sales representatives,” says the plane tree became the sleeping tree because of the warmth escaping from his heated hotel rooms. In any case, at night I have never seen a single sparrow in the other trees on the square, or only briefly, for a moment, chased away by the large crowd nearby, because it was disturbing their peace.
    And on this rainy evening there was a gleam of wetness through the entire tree, both on the stumpy sparrow beaks and on the black, shriveled round pods of the plane tree from the previous year, yet only the latter, hanging by threads, moved, swayed, swung: the sparrows, even on the thinnest twigs, kept completely still, and had I not known that they were assembled there, their pale gray bodies would have merged with the blotches on the tree’s bark, which resembled them in form and coloration. And later at the bar I succumbed to the temptation to repeat my glance from the bus with the others standing there: nothing. And even later the patron behind the counter taped shut with adhesive tape the mouth of someone who was getting obstreperous. And in the brightly lit trains passing up above on the embankment silhouettes sped by, fewer and fewer. And on the way to my house a neighbor’s wolfhound, locked in the garage, was hurling himself as usual against the steel door.
    And then I ate in the kitchen and listened to the news on the radio. And toward midnight—it had stopped raining and a warm wind was blowing—I went out and sat in the yard, at a distance from the house, where I had turned on the lights, and let the music from Radio Beur,
the station of the North Africans in Paris, drift out through the open kitchen window, as I had done the night I moved in here, even then at a distance from the house, in the farthest corner of the yard. From the other houses, long since dark and wrapped in wintry silence, came