The Naked Eye (New Directions Paperbook)

by Yoko Tawada

  This was the first time I’d ever spoken with an emigrant who was still living abroad. Before, I assumed all emigrants were more or less rich, fat, and egotistic with shoe and furniture fetishes. I thought you could recognize them at once by the cold gaze with which they judged their fellow men according to their clothes. I couldn’t make any such claims with regard to Ai Van. I might have been talking to one of my girlfriends. I told her I’d married a German tourist I’d met in Saigon and now was living in Germany. “At the moment, though,” I added, “I’m traveling through Europe alone to figure out what I want to study.” “Where are you planning to stay in Paris?” Ai Van asked. It took me a little while to grasp the meaning of her question. I almost started screaming, “Isn’t this train going to Moscow?!” In the faint hope of having misunderstood, I asked her when we were arriving in Paris. “Early tomorrow morning, I think,” she replied gaily.

  Everything went black before my eyes. The train grated to a higher speed to aggrieve me. Moscow was drawing farther and farther away behind the invisible horizon. Ai Van’s lips effervesced with the luxuriantly ornate names of Parisian buildings that didn’t reach my ear. I already knew that Paris was a famous city. And the French Revolution certainly wasn’t bad either—it was a revolution, after all. But I didn’t know what I was going to do in Paris, which felt hopelessly far away.

  My uncle once bragged that he might be offered the chance to take a business trip to Paris. My father replied with contempt that it was ludicrous when a person from a poor family of peasants who had recently acquired a decent standard of living only thanks to the revolution suddenly developed a longing for Paris.

  Unlike my father, who despised his brother, my mother and her sister got along very well. My aunt once told me that as a young girl she and a friend had undertaken a secret expedition into the ruins of a rubber plantation. Her ancestors had owned this land. Beneath a large spiderweb stretched over a sofa like an umbrella, she sat down into the abandoned sofa from which the moldy dampness of the century was rising. My aunt and her friend discovered a trunk beside the sofa. Inside they found the dingy funnel of a gramophone and a few mold-covered books. My aunt flipped through them, took a single book—Balzac’s Seraphita—home with her and tried to read a few passages here and there or rather guess at them. “Our country used to be part of France,” my aunt told me when I was still quite small. I am supposed to have replied: “Then Paris was part of our country! How lovely!” My aunt laughed. This memory made me feel calmer.

  When Ai Van learned that I scarcely had any money with me, she immediately pressed a few large bills into my hand without hesitation. Since I asked whether she knew of an inexpensive hotel, she offered to arrange for me to spend the night with her older sister. She couldn’t bring me home with her as her younger sister was visiting. She wrote down a few addresses and telephone numbers for me.

  C h a p t e r T w o

  Z i g z i g

  Numberless chimneys stuck out from the tile rooftops. Some of them were short and fat, others looked emaciated. I took one of the broad streets that began at the Gare du Nord and walked straight ahead without looking around so that anyone watching me would think I knew where I was going. Only the five-armed intersections made me uncertain. Here I could no longer say what “straight ahead” meant.

  The sky’s curtain was slowly being closed, and the wavy pattern of the cobblestones darkened. Who had taken so much time to arrange these stones so precisely? How could they fit so neatly together? At the point where the pattern of waves gave way to a pattern of snake scales, it began to rain. I stopped in my tracks and looked back: the cobblestones had vanished, replaced by a dull asphalt street. I walked on. High-heeled footsteps approached from behind and overtook me. I saw nothing of the woman’s face, only her tense back. Several others overtook me as well: a man who was pulling up the collar of his summer coat and walking bolt upright as if he might otherwise lose his head; an older woman who showed me her lonely-looking back—perhaps she’d just lost her poodle.

  The dark, wet window frames made me think of rings beneath weary eyes. I didn’t have the courage to show someone the slip of paper and ask directions. People flitted past, hurrying toward their unknown destinations.

  A shop window filled with old miniatures depicting dogs attracted my attention. I pressed my nose up against the glass to get a better look at the miniatures and etchings. I’d never seen many of the breeds before, yet I realized for the first time in my life that I loved dogs. If I were a dog, I would immediately feel safe in any city.

  The wet streets shone black as the snout of a healthy dog. Would the night eventually just swallow me up? I kept walking. The bright neon advertisements of the restaurants blurred together in the moist air.

  Randomly turning into an alleyway, I found a shop whose plate-glass window displayed pink, light blue, and yellow umbrellas beneath glaring lights. Behind the counter, two saleswomen were arguing. One was much older than the other. Perhaps she was the other one’s mother. There was a period when my older sister, too, argued with my mother on a daily basis. My mother didn’t like my sister’s lover. The argument reached its climax when my mother learned that my sister was pregnant. But then the argumentative phase gradually ended. When you get a high fever, your cold will soon be over—these were the words of wisdom my sister shared with me.

  In another alleyway, two women stood wearing net-like stockings that reminded me of mosquito netting. One woman, whose dress was brown, had golden hair, while the other, who had chestnut brown hair, wore a golden chain. Both of them were attentively observing the passers-by on the boulevard and didn’t even notice I was standing in front of them. Soon a man turned off the boulevard and approached the women with a wobbly gait. This rather fat man, who had drawn his cap down until it all but covered his eyes, pulled some money out of his breast pocket and shook the bills before the nose of the chestnut-haired woman. To my surprise, she smiled at him, took his arm and led him into the darker part of the alley. I followed them and watched them go up the stairs of an old two-story building. Soon the light went on in one of the rooms. Apparently, the woman was renting rooms for the night. I had a few banknotes as well. Ai Van said I could easily live on this money for several days. Therefore it seemed excessive for this woman to be asking so much money for a room in this run-down building. My teacher always told us that it was a basic human right to be able to sleep beneath a roof and between four walls. Earning money by renting rooms, he said, was one of Capitalism’s most grievous transgressions. If this was how people here lived though, I certainly wouldn’t succeed in reeducating them overnight. It was already too late to look for the apartment of Ai Van’s sister. Because of the mosquitoes I definitely didn’t want to sleep outdoors. Here one could apparently get a room using sign language. I went back to the spot where the blond woman was still standing. She was so good-looking she ought to have been in the movies. Maybe she hated cameras, just like me. And who can say which is a better profession? I took out my banknotes and shook them before the nose of this woman, who was at least ten centimeters taller than me. She opened her large eyes even wider and batted her elegant, curved eyelashes. Although I hadn’t done anything different than the man before me, the woman was so surprised she nearly froze. Impatiently I grabbed her by her bare upper arm, making her flinch and take a step back. I pointed in the direction of the old building where the other woman had disappeared with the man, and nodded at her, smiling. She glanced quickly at my banknotes and assumed a pensive expression. Then she searched for something between my eyes and my mouth. She appeared to find whatever it was she was looking for as her frozen face relaxed a little. I took her by the hand and pulled her toward the entrance of the building.

  A large oval mirror hung in the room. The mirror seemed to show me precisely what the woman, too, saw when she looked at me: a shy, scrawny girl. Only her eyes gleamed as if caught in a high fever, and her lips burned apple-red. Was this really me? In high school I was one of
the girls who made a sturdy, mature impression. No one ever told me I was thin or looked childish. The mirror also showed the woman standing behind me. A dramatic curve descended from the back of her neck over her breasts and hips down to her thighs. A masterful brushstroke. When I turned to face her, she no longer resembled a two-dimensional work of art but rather was living matter heavy with flesh. She asked me something. I recognized the word “Papa.” Perhaps she thought I was looking for somewhere to stay together with my father. I said in English, “Only for me.” I always claimed not to know any English. But if I were to drum up every English word I knew, perhaps I could actually speak a little English. Was the woman afraid that without my father I wouldn’t be able to pay for the room? I pressed my banknotes, which had grown somewhat moist with my sweat, into her hand. Then I had to squeeze her hand shut, because the woman was just staring at me and ignoring the money. Apparently there was something wrong with my face.

  The woman sat down on the bed, and I sat down beside her. She seemed to be waiting for something. I tried to think what else one should do when renting a room. I couldn’t think of anything. Perhaps she was just lonely. A bit of fuzz clung to her hair above the ear. I reached out my finger to remove it. The woman flinched as if she were afraid of me. What about my body could be so intimidating? Even if we were to quarrel and come to blows, she would be the victor. And above all: What would we quarrel about?

  I remembered my great aunt who had died two years before. During the last months of her life she was afraid of things no one else could see. When I asked her what frightened her, she would say: “A soldier without legs came to see me” or “The bones buried beneath the kitchen sob at night.” Once she poured cold water on herself and said her dress was on fire. She also told me that in the forest there was a charred tree stump from which headless children were born. The word “imagination” meant nothing to her, and a different word, “hallucination,” was something she’d never heard. When I embraced her and stroked her cheek, her flesh would relax. She would then repeat “Thank you, thank you, thank you” and grow a little calmer.

  This woman, too, young as she was, probably suffered from hallucinations like my great aunt. Out of pity I placed my arm around her neck and drew her to me. At first she tried with hesitant fingers to push my belly gently away from her. Then her fingers groped for my spine and read Braille. She asked me something I didn’t understand. Maybe the meaning of the question was unimportant anyway. I couldn’t comfort my great aunt with words either. Instead, one had to say yes to every question and calmly pet her. I nodded to the woman and stroked her cheek. For some reason I couldn’t fathom, she pulled down the zipper of her dress, slipped out of this shell, and opened the hooks of her undergarments. Then she took my hand and pressed the tips of my fingers against her nipple, which felt like the toe of a cat. There was a tiny fissure at its center. Perhaps this fissure was where the mother’s milk came out. I couldn’t remember whether I too had a fissure like this. The woman seemed to have read my thoughts in my face. She unbuttoned my blouse with trembling fingers. My skin looked flat, inexpressive, shut off. Once her fingers began speaking to it, though, my skin began to open up, not just my nipples, but my whole body.

  Suddenly I felt the inner wall of my stomach burning with hunger. I thought of the red of prawns shimmering through moist rice paper, or the white of steamed fish one carefully unwraps from a bamboo leaf The woman asked me a question. As an answer, I placed my hand on my belly. The woman nodded without giving the impression she was about to get me some food. Instead, she stuck her fingers under my belly. At the same time I saw her lips in close-up, her wet teeth gleaming between them. From her mouth drifted a smell like lemongrass, making me dizzy. I lay down on my back, and the woman’s skin blocked my vision. The white, warm skin melted on my tongue, but I didn’t bite any off. I was in a round space, perhaps within a sphere. There was one fixed point on the inner wall of this sphere: the place where my temple touched hers. Both were as hard as stone, thoughtful, not melting together, waiting for something new. I was dreaming of peas. The peas were as hard as stone before they grew astonishingly soft in a pot of boiling water. I dreamt of oysters with lemon juice, eating them with a sobbing sound, my fingers taking on their fragrance.

  I heard someone hurriedly unlocking the door from outside. The woman leapt up; in the doorway stood a man whose well-groomed brown hair hung down like the ears of a dachshund. The woman quickly covered us with the wool blanket while arguing hot-headedly with the man. Then she wrapped the sheet around her, got up and chased him out the door after hurling a few more explosive words in his face. From the floor I retrieved my neck pouch, which contained the money and my passport, and got dressed, while the woman, who had gotten dressed in two seconds, waited for me impatiently. Then she grabbed me by the wrist, ran out of the room and hurried down the steps. We rushed down the alley in the opposite direction to the boulevard. This was a network of dark but pleasant-smelling alleys. Eventually we arrived at the entrance to a building that looked charred. The woman didn’t even have to hunt around for a light switch as her toes could clearly see the steps that led down to a basement. In the basement room the light switch was broken, but through the barred window one could see a little light reflecting off the cobblestones. Between the stacks of cardboard boxes with writing on them stood an animal with horns and a rusty bicycle. The woman sat me down on a box and pointed to the numerals eight and two on her watch. Then she left.

  An old floor lamp exactly my height stood beside me. The lamp had a cable that vanished in a dark corner—a good place for an overlooked electrical outlet, but what good was an outlet for a lamp with no bulb? A deformed leather handbag at the base of the lamp was cracked and hard. Opening its metal navel wasn’t easy. I held the bag upside-down. A crumpled, dried-up handkerchief fell out followed by lipstick, a ballpoint pen, and a flyer advertising a movie. The title of the film was Zig zig, and the date was already ten years in the past. This was the first time I saw your name. And this was the one film I was never able to see, even later. A long time passed before I understood that it wasn’t necessarily important whether or not one has actually seen a film.

  The woman was called Marie. She left the basement every evening and returned around two in the morning. When I sat alone in the basement, I felt like a hostage abducted by terrorists. The worst thing about these terrorists was that in reality they weren’t making any demands and thus would never release me. Of course I wasn’t locked up—I had unlimited freedom and could leave the basement if I wished.

  Marie was not an abductor, she was my protector. She protected me by ignoring me. She acted as if she were unable to see me, or as if I were a wildflower that just happened to be growing in her garden. If only I’d been able to exchange just a few words with her. I couldn’t understand her language, and she even seemed to be withholding it from me. When she returned from work, she would install herself in her favorite corner like a work of art for the world to see but was nonetheless unapproachable. I wouldn’t have felt so useless if she had, for example, forced me to join her in her nocturnal perambulations. Or she could have threatened me with her knife and forced me to sell pears. Indeed, she possessed a double-edged knife, but she only used it to peel apples. I missed the sense of being bound to other people. Of course it wasn’t right to offer up one’s body—a gift from our ancestors—as goods for sale. And in any case the desire to provide a service as a way of earning money was a capitalist malaise. I remained behind in the basement, isolated and useless. If I’d had a child of my own, I’d at least have had a task. Perhaps this was the reason other people produced children. The child in my uterus had at some point vanished into thin air. Or the child existed from the very beginning merely as Jörg’s phantom pregnancy.

  During the day I walked around the city so as not to have to sit behind bars. The streets drove me on without a goal from one corner to the next, no armchair waited to receive my weary limbs. Be still, I said to the pavemen
t beneath my feet, but it kept flowing on and on like a conveyor belt, and I was the automobile tire. I remembered the shoes called Ho-Chi-Minh sandals that were made from old tires. If I were to wear them here, they would be seen as a symbol not of frugality but of a ceaselessly increasing velocity.

  Sometimes I saw policemen on the street. What would happen if I were to describe my situation to them and ask for help? “I let down the East Berliners who were expecting me to give a speech. I illegally crossed the border between East and West. A woman played the role of a would-be suicide to stop a train for me. From there, I traveled to Paris without a ticket. I borrowed money from a Vietnamese woman and never went to see her. I am living in a basement without paying rent. Yesterday I stole a rose from a flower vendor.” If I were to tell my story freely, the policemen wouldn’t help me, they’d arrest me. Candor is incompatible with freedom. Is a person any more able to find his way home from inside a prison? What would my relatives and above all my teachers and friends have to say about this? They would no doubt start collecting money right away so that my parents could come visit me in Paris. But what a shame it would be if their first trip to Paris was to see a jailbird. Besides, they would be utterly unable to help me here. In Saigon my father knew influential politicians—connections of no use to us in Paris. When I was younger, I never needed to keep any secrets. As long as I was honest, industrious, and modest, loved my friends, teachers, and family, nothing bad could happen to me. This security was now long gone. I had become a criminal without ever having had any intention of doing wrong, and without having so much as killed a bug. Someone once told me that in Paris one could place international phone calls even from a normal telephone booth. Was there also a direct line to the realm of the dead? I would have liked to call Confucius and Ho Chi Minh and ask them what to do.