by Yoko Tawada
Later I asked Jörg whether the train from Moscow to Paris really did once pass through Bochum. Jörg replied like a proud elementary school student eager to win praise from his teacher: “Yes, certainly. The train traveled from the Far East. It must have smelled of the Pacific seaweed that collects on the coast of Vladivostok, or like the stones of the Great Wall of China, the sand of the Mongolian desert or the salty waters of Lake Baikal. The train crossed the Urals to reach Moscow, then passed through Bochum on its way to Paris.” “This means that we aren’t living at the edge of the world after all, but rather along a major thoroughfare. From here you can take the train anywhere.” Jörg’s eyes clouded over. “What I don’t know is if the train ever stopped here. I’ll ask someone.”
That night I couldn’t sleep. Jörg was snoring. When I held the wings of his nose shut with two fingers, he quieted down. From a distance I could hear the faint grating sound of the drive axle, the clatter of the couplings, and a long, howling reverberation from the train tracks. Somewhere not far from my pillow a train was passing. Only insomniacs were aware of its existence.
I left the house and walked without direction or plan until I was tired. Then I retraced my steps, without having accomplished anything. “Sparrow” was the name of that small, brown, ordinary bird. When I stayed home, the same thoughts kept circling in my head. Can I really go to Saigon after the child is born? How much longer will the embryo remain in my belly? How old does the child have to be to fly? If my big sister or my mother were here, I could ask them all these things. My mother used to love teaching me about sexuality, as if she were determined to turn me into an utterly feminine dumpling. The human soul was spherical, she would insist, and even the body of a woman must be made of curves. I never listened to her and would interrupt or change the subject by quoting Confucius. He wrote, for example, that he had never encountered a person who preferred science to “colors.” The Chinese ideogram for color can mean many different things. What Confucius surely meant here was sexual desire. “That’s obvious,” my mother would answer dismissively, “Who could be more interested in science than sexual intercourse?” If I had known my way around Confucius better, I would’ve told her many more things to make her fall silent. But I’d imported my knowledge only secondhand, or more precisely, secondmouth. An old teacher had started talking to me about Confucius during recess after he’d noticed my interest in his philosophy. I myself couldn’t read Chinese characters. Surely it must be exciting to be able to write, say, the ideogram for “color,” which supposedly resembles a squatting woman with a man on top of her. Such characters, I imagined, had to be far more exciting than my mother’s sexual realism. “I think it’s a shame I can’t read Chinese.” “Well, would you rather read Confucius and Mao than spruce up your appearance?” “You have something against China. Don’t you realize how silly that is?” Confucius said one should not contradict one’s parents. But what was I supposed to do if my foolish parents were against Confucius? Sometimes I imagined the heady odor of ancient Chinese books. It might have protected me from the smell of women that always filled our house like rotten mangos.
I wrote a letter to my family telling them that I had unexpectedly received a scholarship to study in Germany and therefore was planning to remain here a while longer. I intentionally wrote Germany and not Bochum so they wouldn’t worry. Jörg observed me with a nervous expression when I asked him for stamps. To reassure him, I translated the letter aloud. He then tore it from my hand, put it in his leather bag and promised he would mail it for me.
One month went by without my hearing anything from my family. Jörg didn’t have a calendar on his wall, but since I was having my period again, I knew that approximately one month must have passed. Why didn’t my family write to me? Had they forgotten me like an aborted child? Was my family under surveillance and thus unable to write back? Back in the 70s, there were parents who sent their talented children into exile alone because they thought their individual development more important than keeping the family together. But wasn’t the notion of exile outdated? In my class at school there was a girl who’d just returned with her family from Switzerland.
Between the room’s four walls I was plagued with anxieties. Out on the street, however, I no longer felt I was cut off from the past. I tried to get away from the idea that there were separate places called “here” and “there.” Despite the distance between them, “here” and “there” had to be connected. The Berlin Wall was said to be more difficult to break through than the Great Wall of China, but on the map of the world in Jörg’s room I discovered an unbroken line that reached from Vladivostok to Lisbon. Bochum wasn’t on the map. There was no desert in the Western part of Europe. The names of so many different cities were represented that the lines of letters touched. How strange it was to think that the existence of these cities whose names I didn’t know wasn’t somehow having an effect on my day-to-day life.
There were a few warm days, but the windows of the neighborhood houses remained closed. In front of the windows grew well-formed flowers that resembled plastic flowers. Hardly anyone planted vegetables in their gardens. Apparently they didn’t need any. Even Jörg hardly ate any vegetables except tomatoes.
My steps grew swifter with each passing day, my eyes wanted to take in more and more. If the day before I walked as far as the house with the little wreath of fir twigs, today I would walk to the house with the grinning plastic dolls. These dolls were wrinkled old men wearing red nightcaps and felt boots. Since I had to begin at the same starting point every day, I walked faster and faster to go even farther. It stayed light out later and later, and between five and nine o’clock time stood still. I didn’t own a watch. When the sun was still shining innocently bright, it might already be nine in the evening. I found this deceptive brightness unsettling, and the way back always seemed to take me much longer. The few shops on Jörg’s street closed punctually at six o’clock. After six there was no one anywhere on the streets although the sun was still shining. The sun illuminated only me, an unimportant character playing a non-speaking role in a theater with no audience.
Once I returned home so late that Jörg was already back from his pub crawl. “Where have you been?” Jörg spoke German to me more and more often. I was doing my best not to learn this language. I was afraid it might fetter me to this place forever. I didn’t need to understand German either. The situation and Jörg’s face showed me clearly what he meant. He also had no intention of teaching me. Jörg seemed to be waiting for me to become a part of his familiar surroundings of my own accord, just as a new, over-starched shirt eventually becomes as supple as a second skin.
Our shared life made us more and more mute. Jörg no longer told any stories, and I didn’t know what to talk about. His wishes were not difficult to discern. He always wanted to eat exactly the same thing. When he was tired from studying, he wanted to rest. When he wasn’t watching TV, it might occur to him to have sex. Here, too, he never thought to modify the fixed scenario by means of words. First there were cold lips, then a hot tongue. My breasts became dough to be kneaded, and then I was overwhelmed by a certain sensation as if I were about to pee. At the same time I watched with detachment as Jörg’s head moved up and down. Now and then he would turn my body over as if frying a fish. I felt ashamed to turn my back to him. Since I couldn’t see him, he seemed too naked to me. It was just the same with my face. I didn’t like it when he gazed at my face too long. “You don’t have to be ashamed, other people do exactly the same thing. You see it in movies,” he explained to me.
The idea of a railway line stretching all the way from Paris through Bochum to Moscow never left my head. One day, immediately upon awakening, the question leapt out of my mouth without forethought: “Did you ever ask anyone about the train tracks near Sieben Planeten?” Jörg had one leg in his pants, the other was still hovering in the air. “Not yet. But you can go there yourself if it interests you so much.” Jörg gave me directions. It didn’t seem to be
any longer a trip than my daily walks, just in a different direction. “My mother walked there herself when she was visiting. Otherwise she was bored staying with me. She said the fields of rapeseed were gorgeous.” I was surprised that Jörg had a mother. Why had she been bored staying with him? Was it boring to have a son? Why didn’t Jörg want to introduce me if we were to marry soon?
I followed Jörg’s instructions and found a street called “Sieben Planeten.” Three little boys were playing with a toy tractor. It was rare to see children playing on the street. There were probably dangerous kidnappers in the region. At the end of the street, a wide vista suddenly opened up, and I was received by the light of the rapeseed fields. The entire surface of the earth was yellow to the horizon. Why did they need so much vegetable oil? There were so few vegetables in this city. Did they like cooking just a few vegetables with lots of oil, or did the oil get used for military purposes? A narrow path led through the middle of the field. To the left and right stood the rapeseed plants that were only a tiny bit shorter than I was. Does a politician have a similar feeling when he walks through the crowd that is receiving him? It seemed I was being welcomed. “Our comrade has come from far away to share her knowledge with us. Let us greet her with applause!” An applause of rapeseed blossoms. I was a model student and always arrived on time for the assembly of young Party members. At the right edge of the field, the inviting shade of a dark green forest beckoned. The path curved toward the forest.
The rapeseed field was tugging at my hair with invisible hands. The plants wanted me to stay with them. But a different force was propelling me forward, in the direction of a road where the houses appeared to have been not so much constructed as arrayed. There was not a living creature anywhere to be seen: the windows were clean and shiny, the walls of the buildings flawlessly smooth. My shoes were making a strange hollow sound, as if I were walking through a tunnel in high heels. There must have been large hollow spaces beneath my feet. No wonder—for this country, too, had experienced wars. Or had miners worked beneath this bit of road? The houses thrust me away with innocent faces. An old man came out of one of the houses to pluck invisible weeds among his tulips. He turned his turtle shell on me. I kept walking.
At the end of the street, a small forest began. The shadows of the oak trees suddenly appeared more familiar to me than the human habitations. Would it perhaps be better for me to live in a forest than in a city? No, a large cross said to me. Its limbs were white with red tips. At first I couldn’t see the grass-covered railway tracks on the far side of the cross. The rails were rusty, perhaps many years had passed since they’d last been used, perhaps no one had even looked at them in all this time. The tracks disappeared to the left in the shade of trees, to the right in the sunny no-man’s-land.
These train tracks summoned up a secret link tying together the past months and days that hadn’t vanished and gone astray. It excited me to think that the tracks I saw before me continued all the way to Moscow. A cousin of mine was studying in Moscow. I didn’t know his address, but I would surely be able to find him right away since people there would be able to understand me. My cousin would put me on a direct train to Peking. In Peking I would buy a ticket to Hanoi. There might be complications, but compared to my present situation, those other problems would be tiny peas. From Hanoi it would take only another two days to reach Saigon, and surely nothing else bad could happen to me on this stretch of the journey. If only I could get to Moscow!
I wanted to wait for a train to board, but there was no train station. I returned several times on other days and walked along the tracks in both directions. I found no trace of any station present or past. Nor did I ever see a train pass by. Only on sleepless nights when I lay in bed, my eyelashes on fire, could I hear the sound of a train far off in the distance.
Jörg was sitting at the kitchen table scowling, his chin propped in both hands. “What happened?” This was a question I could now ask fluently in German. I loved the word for “happened,” passiert. It gave me the feeling that everything that happened to a person would soon pass over. Nothing was forever. The only thing I still possessed from my past life was my passport, which I always kept in my breast pocket. “I flunked the exam,” Jörg said. Like a big sister, I placed my hand on his head and said: “No problem. Try again!” He took my hand and held it before his mouth like a microphone. “I’m not made for studying. My father isn’t going to send me any more money. This was my last chance. I don’t want to stay at the university. Why don’t the two of us start working together. We can sell cars in the East Bloc.” I nodded, since it made no difference to me whether he was a student or held a job. I was just surprised to learn he had a father. “What does your father do?” “He works in an office.” “Aren’t we going to visit your parents?” “No, it’s out of the question.” Jörg got up and put his wallet in his pants pocket. “Where are you going?” “I just want to have a beer, then I’ll be back.”
An hour went by, and then another, but Jörg did not return. The light brown leather shoes he never wore were sitting in one corner of the room. Out of boredom I started pushing them back and forth with my feet like a soccer player in a slow-motion replay. The second hand of the wall clock advanced with a tremble. I imagined breaking off the hand. Then I decided to go out for a walk. As soon as I reached the end of the street, inky clouds began to flood the sky. I regretted setting off in this weather and spoke the words “Sieben Planeten” aloud, then nothing frightened me anymore. I could smell the approaching rain.
Another woman was already standing in my favorite spot by the rusty tracks. Her long coat had a high collar that resembled the gills of a tropical fish. On her head she wore ornaments that looked somehow extraterrestrial. Perhaps she was a singer who’d fled from the stage of an opera with futuristic sets. What could be the reason for her having hurried here without removing her makeup and changing clothes? She was older than I was, and had something extraordinary about her. Her presence even seemed to be changing the consistency of the air around her. The clear form of her lips held her flesh together like overripe fruit, and the two ends sometimes dipped down slightly, as if they were remembering a bitter taste. The woman’s spine described a straight line of justice not dependent on any existing law. Each time I blinked, her body dissolved for two seconds into colorful micro-grains.
The darkness around us thickened. The woman gave me a dutiful nod, as if the two of us had an understanding. My heart began to pound violently. It was up to me to take action. Today was the chosen day. I had a vague memory of our having arrived at our agreement in a dream, though the specific terms of the agreement were unknown to me. Suddenly the woman lay down on the tracks and pressed her face to one of the ties. I ran to her, took her by the shoulder and tried to roll her over, but she was as immovable as the spire of a temple whose root is buried in the earth. I thought I heard the sound of a train approaching from a distance—this was impossible though. These tracks had known nothing but rust and weeds for years, certainly no wheels. Then I heard it once more, the sound of an approaching train. Or was it just a streetcar heading into the city center? Or was it the drone of a refrigerator that had been implanted in the depths of my eardrums during my days of loneliness? I wanted to tell the woman to get up, but I couldn’t think of any words. The old words had left my skull, I needed new words to be able to speak to her. But what were new words? The heavy iron wheels continued to turn, coming closer and closer. I glanced about helplessly. Somewhere there had to be an alarm system. In a bush I saw something red—a box with a painted lightning bolt. A lever was growing crookedly out of the box like the tail of a dragon. It wouldn’t budge. I pressed the lever down with the whole weight of my body, my legs dangling in the air, and then crashed down with the lever. The frozen silence gave way to a siren. Innumerable tiny red blinking lights set in a line at regular intervals into the distance began flashing on and off.
I hid behind a bush, and heard the train brake with an ear-rending whinny. A
monstrous shadow stopped, eclipsing my field of vision. A white flower in a bush floated before my nose. For some reason the flower bothered me although it was giving off an enchanting fragrance. A pair of conductors jumped off the train and gathered about the prone woman. Arguing voices and confused footsteps circled in my head while my heart beat even louder. I wasn’t afraid of being arrested. Perhaps they’d claim I had pushed the woman onto the tracks or had stopped the train unnecessarily. None of this would have disconcerted me. There was a question I found far more pressing, but I was afraid to translate it into a language. If I formulated the question, I would first have to give an answer and then take action. To Moscow, to Moscow, to Moscow. If I got on this train, I could ride to Moscow and from there find my way home. I crept through the bushes that ran alongside the train and reached its center. One side of a double folding door was still open from where a conductor had leapt out. I slipped into the train and walked down the deserted corridor. All the compartment doors were locked except for one at the end. White light seeped through a crack in the door. I opened the door carefully and saw a woman my age who looked like me. She immediately spoke a language that ambushed me and swallowed me up. The meaning of her sentences reached my brain cells at once: The woman had reserved a women-only compartment for two persons and had been horrified when no one else joined her. She hated to be alone in a closed-off little space—her relatives had already experienced more than enough of this. I immediately replied that I was in the exact same situation. With clots of tears in my throat I asked if I might spend the night in her compartment. She immediately gave an energetic nod as the siren of an ambulance wailed in the distance.
My countrywoman was named Ai Van, but unfortunately I couldn’t refer to her as a comrade, for she had emigrated to France with her family when she was still a little girl. She had attended the Lycée Saint-Catherine in Paris, married a Frenchman, and was now pursuing a degree in film studies. As we spoke, the train began to move again.