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

autumnal sky-blue like the background of the Slovenian roadside shrines, she breathed a sigh of relief in passing. His eyes wide, a wooden cudgel over his shoulder, a native came toward me; at second glance I recognized the reader. At least I had been in Dubrovnik before and could then play the role of host in the courtyard of the most obscure tavern. At that very place the painter later hunted us down, coming straight from the airport. He stood between us, without a word, and him, too, I at first took for a local.
    That evening each of us did open his mouth now and then, but for the most part we remained silent. And precisely that was the night of
storytelling. One incident followed the other without need for words. From the darkness outside only a breath reached us; the deeper the night became, the richer in material. More than listening to such storytelling, we sat through it. We did look around again and again, get up, go outside, leaving the others alone for a while, but the most active element in that night was the blackness. I had never seen the black of night so full of color, and seldom a color so massive, and in the same breath so fragrant. It had often made me suspicious when the painter came out with his dictum about black’s being the richest of the colors, interacting with light. Now, long after midnight, also long before the first birdcalls, no moon, no stars, I perceived the blackness as the color of a first-day fruit.
    It was winter, rainy along the southern Adriatic coast, mild. The late night was windless. We had not stayed in Dubrovnik. I had invited my friends to Ston, a village on the tongue of land toward Korcula. There were the saltworks on one side, on the other, in a bay, man-made oyster beds, with a restaurant adjacent. The previous morning, having gone out there by bus, I had looked into the particulars, and now I guided the painter and the reader from place to place. The table by the bay was set, the white cloth a rarity for Yugoslavia. We had come by taxi; the driver sat at a table at some distance, he, too, having Dalmatian wine and oysters, a common and inexpensive meal in that area. The shells were hardly larger than a coin, and the oyster flesh was correspondingly tiny, yet firm.
    Although it was my special day, I set out a present for the others, the same thing for both, a wooden box carved and painted by Albanian craftsmen in Kosovo, purchased the week before in the Croatian town of Zadar, filled with the coarse gray crystals of unrefined sea salt, mixed with sand and autumn leaves, gathered from a pile in the middle of the saltworks, shut down for the winter. The painter stood up and handed me a collection of dull black pencils, all of them already started by him, with dabs of paint on them, for the rest of my journey, so that I could draw in my notebook, for he said he found it unfortunate that I had stopped. And the reader, too, stood up and gave me a book he had printed himself: the notes he had recently discovered, made by a stonemason on a trip between Souillac, Cahors, and Moissac in France around
the middle of the twelfth century, in that transitional period between the Romanesque and the Gothic style. The notes were in Latin, true, but having to decipher something, reading a text that did not flow smoothly, always had an animating effect on me; and this commentary dealt with something that might apply to me. It was this remark in particular that caused me to carry the little book around with me without reading it: it scares me off when I am told something seems made for me, and only now do I sense that the time may have come for the stonemason’s story.
    It was much later when the night outside, silent as it was, became so overpowering around the village of Ston, about twenty kilometers from Dubrovnik in the big country of Yugoslavia. Here a verb suggests itself, a somewhat odd concept, yet it imposes itself on me. What did the night do? It surged, it surged over us: the