by Yoko Tawada
I heard the word projet several times from Marie's lips. The word “love,” on the other hand, could almost never be heard, although I knew this word in French. Most likely it had gotten buried in compounds with other words. The project existed all alone. A project is a promise, a sketch for a house that can be lived in, to which one can invite ones friends. How different I would have been if I’d had a project. But a creature of the streets has no project—always only the selfsame activity that is monotonously repeated. Marie suggests a project to Juliette, a joyful, intelligent project that transforms an alley into the Milky Way. Juliette doesn’t seem too interested.
Juliette puts on her black leather jacket. It smells of criminality. The criminal is a smell, a whisper in the dark, a hiding, a made-up name, an insomniac nervous system, a knife, an endless list of names in one’s head, a running away, a mixed feeling of fear and sentimentality created by the sight of the faint reflection of lights on the train tracks at night. Criminality is my smell.
Juliette puts on her black leather jacket. The leather gleams like the night, the night in which one of the men cuts through a chain with bolt cutters. The gate to the lot provides access to the freight trains loaded with new cars. With practiced hands, the men remove the wedges from beneath the car tires. Then two guards appear and shine a flashlight in Juliette’s face. Juliette raises both hands and freezes. The guards hold their pistols pointed at her and slowly approach. Suddenly a shot is heard, and a shootout begins. Juliette jumps out of the car and throws herself down. One of the guards falls, the other manages to escape. The boss is on the ground, covered in blood. Juliette looks at him; he cannot get up on his own.
A bell rings, Marie opens the door, and there is Juliette, her face half cut off by the door, Marie's lips move toward Juliette’s lips, Juliette refuses, utters angry words and drinks bitter red wine while Marie continues to fuss over her and speak about a meaningful project, projects are always meaningful, Marie tries to encourage Juliette, console her, love her, but Juliette turns away, Marie falls silent, Juliette smashes her wine glass against the edge of the sink, her lips eat the shards of glass, bloody lips, a sliced-up tongue, she drinks the splinters, she drinks death, Marie rushes to her side, uses force to open her bloody mouth, removes the shards of glass, the wildcat bites Marie's fingers, she screams but her fingers don’t stop, Marie’s white sweater is red with blood, shards fall to the floor, tears, an embrace, cut.
You carry around a small, flat container everywhere you go. You don’t swallow shards of glass, but you do swallow a golden liquid and white pills. You swallow and drink and throw up. If things go on like this, you will one day arrive at the square called “Place Vendôme.” But of course this isn’t you it’s a role you’re playing, I know this. Who is it if it isn’t you? If a woman lives in me, she cannot be simply a Marie or a Marianne. Who is she?
Alex invites Marie to dinner and cooks for her, places flowers on the table. Juliette has vanished since the incident at the freight depot. Alex pours his guest a glass of red wine, they talk and laugh. The bottle is empty. Marie faints. Alex tends to her after snapping a picture of the sleeping beauty. This holy image remains in his room, just as I keep a photo of you beside my bed. All of us worship Marie the Holy One.
Alex was already in love with you once before, in another movie, though at that time he was still your brother. Actors have to lose their memories after every film. They forget what they used to be and think the audience has forgotten too.
There is a story about a girl who lost her parents and brother during the Vietnam War. The parents died. The girl was raised by one family and never learned that her brother was still alive and growing up in another family. The girl became a woman, met a man and married him. They had two children. One day as the couple was taking a bath together, the man began speaking of his earliest childhood memory. The woman turned pale, ran out of the bathroom, left the house and never returned.
This episode has nothing to do with the film. It just occurred to me at this moment.
When I imagined having a love affair with my brother, I immediately felt sick to my stomach as if I’d contracted fever from poisonous insect stings.
Marie is gone, possibly dead. She left behind a yellow parcel. “La poste” is stamped on a cardboard box one can buy at any post office. The post office continues to exist after the movie is over, and even after we are dead—undeliverable packages will still be stored there. Marie’s package contains a notebook belonging to her and cassettes with Juliette’s voice on them.
Juliette flees to a harbor town and finds a job at a bookstore. Alex drives there and goes into the shop but hides behind a bookshelf. Juliette has changed. Now she is a woman who wakes up each morning at the same time and drinks coffee from the same cup. She no longer sleeps with policemen, no longer takes baths with her professor, no longer steals perfume. Alex leaves the shop without speaking to her.
If I had visited Juliette, I would have taken all the Plato books off the shelves and thrown them at her. Why didn’t you come to the banquet? Why did you abandon Marie? What has become of the wildcat scent? Where is the thinking water? What’s the point of this final scene? Where should we send the cassettes?
Two women have become one, and once more you were the one who vanished.
Fortunately the other Marie hadn’t gone missing. Thanks to Marie, the raw skin of my emotions became somewhat smoother every day. The pedestrians I saw on the street were broken gramophones, the city itself an unsuccessful film, but I went on sleeping in the basement and living in the movie theaters.
Marie told me she was receiving unemployment benefits. She also worked as a custodian in public spaces and was even able to save some of her earnings. “I always took my work seriously,” she said, laughing at the word “work.” I, on the other hand, was a baby chick that sat at home waiting for food. Marie fed me and gave me pocket money and said I should go to the movies. I thought: things can’t go on like this, but I didn’t know how to earn money. It no longer frightened me to be alone in the basement since my skin was taking on a color similar to its walls. Even the pressure and heat swirling inside my head no longer bothered me.
I convinced myself that I would have to concentrate my energies before I could take the next step. I had put prison and the hospital behind me. Now I had the right to enjoy the exalted state of convalescence. A dignified gleam illuminated this basement hole thanks to the name Marie.
On nights when Marie didn’t return to the basement, I consorted in my head with policeman Alex. Following Juliette’s example, I greedily summoned all my memories of this utilizable pain, every scrap. I felt a mild ache, particularly when I thought of how the policeman could be such a dog. Like Juliette, I was in search of unadulterated contact between organs, a contact free of longing, for you were the one and only object of my passion. Of course I was unworthy of making your acquaintance. The very thought of standing before you filled me with shame. Perhaps Juliette had felt much the same thing. Of all the men around her, she didn’t love a single one—she loved only something that was embodied by Marie. Juliette, though, felt like a piece of garbage in her presence. In school I had learned that one should not let oneself be governed by false modesty, but in this case nothing else was possible. And anyway, even though it was unbearable to feel smaller and smaller when compared to you, it was also a pleasure. It was at most as a dog that I would be able to remain by your side. The sum total of happiness Juliette would derive from her new profession as a bookseller and the family she would eventually start could not surpass the happiness of this dog.
But not every dog can be so lucky. Would I even be chosen by you if I were a dog? What sort of dog should I become? How could I become a dog? There was a film where you play the role of a dog for a while. Or more precisely: you play the role of a woman who’s playing a dog. Unfortunately I never saw this film. Therefore I couldn’t learn from it. When it was drizzling, I would think a great deal about living as a dog. When the
skies were clear, my opinion would quickly change, and then it would seem that perhaps it would be better to study at the university.
C h a p t e r T e n
L e d e r n i e r m é t r o
The uniformed and jackbooted soldiers are speaking German. At the hotel reception desk, on the street, even in the theater, everywhere one finds them standing around saying, “I don’t speak French.” The voices arrive from far away. Behind the sound of this language, another life of mine was buried. Sometimes I was seized by an urgent desire to return to the GDR, to undo everything that had happened. If only I had acted differently then… If I hadn’t gone to that Russian band’s concert… If I hadn’t exchanged frivolous words with a stranger from Bochum… If I hadn’t drunk that vodka… But I could no longer return, for the GDR had long since ceased to exist.
When I came out of the métro station Odéon, I was encircled by a handful of men and women who looked like students. I wanted to run away, but I heard the sentence: “We’re from the university.” I nodded, since after all I wanted to go there myself. “We’re from a student theater and are looking for an Asian actress.” Two men, three women. One of the women began to explain an array of things to me with great enthusiasm: the university, communication, culture, solidarity, the theater, literature, politics. Her words joined hands to form a whirlwind that spiralled around me. This could be my first step toward entering the university, I thought, and so nodded quickly twice in succession. We went together to a café, where the woman placed a booklet in my hand. It was a somewhat crookedly stapled copy of the play. In the dramatis personae I found the Vietnamese name “Phuong Lien”; the rest of the names were French-sounding, like Arlette, Nadine, Rosette, and Bernard. One of the men introduced himself to me as the director. I couldn’t understand his name and lacked the courage to ask him to repeat it. “Actually, Lucas was our director, but he can’t come anymore. So now I’m directing.” The name of the director who would no longer be coming was easy for me to retain. Why couldn’t Lucas come any longer? Immediately I began to think about this absent person although I didn’t even know him.
Every evening at seven I went to rehearsals that took place in a small, moldy space. The others attended seminars at the university during the day. I would have liked to ask them questions about their studies, but never found the right moment to do so. During every rehearsal there would be one fifteen-minute break when everyone hastily lit their Gauloises and drank pitch-black coffee, speaking twice as fast as they did on stage. The contents of their conversations, along with their individual facial expressions, were obscured by the thick cigarette smoke. I loved the smell of the Gauloises, but was afraid of the name as it reminded me of an old tiger. I preferred not smoking to uttering the name at a kiosk.
My lines consisted of short sentences in which the words were placed next to each other without anything holding them together. People probably thought this was how immigrants talked. I expended little effort learning my lines by heart, but it took a lot of courage for me to speak the lines aloud. The first sentence of the day I would utter with my eyes closed as if leaping off a cliff. The moment I finished the sentence, everyone would jump in to correct my pronunciation. My words had never before attracted so much attention as they did here at these rehearsals.
I screamed, “Leave me alone!” without meaning it at all. That’s only what my lines said. My lips burned hotly all the same. Speaking meant wrenching one’s mouth wide open or pursing the lips to form a narrow passage for air and forcing the breath out violently or rubbing the consonants against the mucous membranes of the throat or discovering new sinus cavities behind the nose. Especially difficult for me was the art known as aspiration. When I forgot it at the necessary point, I would be criticized at once. I didn’t understand the rule, I thought it should be possible for people to peer into my head and see the caesuras I was inwardly placing.
At first I kept my new job as an actress secret from Marie. I ended up telling her two weeks later as she was looking worried watching me prepare to go out. “It’s a student group, but they have a rehearsal space. And all of them have a good heart for good things,” I added, as though I needed a justification. “That’s wonderful. What sort of story is the play?” Marie asked. I couldn’t tell her the plot of the play because I didn’t understand it yet. So I simply began to recite my lines. Marie burst out laughing, and I felt hurt—it had never occurred to me that my lines might be comical.
I appeared in three scenes. In the first, I was surrounded by women who were asking me questions, and I struggled to answer them. Then I remained alone on stage and spoke a broken monologue. In the second scene, a burly man in a suit approached me, grabbed me by the collar, and asked me questions. This man, whose name began with a “D,” was being played by the director as this character only appeared once. In the last scene, I had to lie on the floor the whole time. The others tried to wake me, but I remained motionless, probably dead. After this, the play ended happily without me.
I had never visited a theater house in Paris, though the setting was familiar to me from the films in which you played the role of a stage actress. I particularly liked you when you were working at a theater. The screen in the cinema was a naked illusion that immediately drew me into its space, while I could measure, accept, and enjoy my distance from you when you were standing on a stage. Once I took a walk in Montparnasse to find the theater where you worked in the role of Marion Steiner.
Strangely, I began to develop a hatred for the burly man in the suit, Monsieur D., who grabbed me by the collar every day and bared his teeth. I knew it was only a play, yet it was all I could do to keep my arms from violently shoving him away. “You must look intimidated and paralyzed and keep mute,” said this man, suddenly switching into the role of director. I felt annoyed at his tone of voice and simply looked away. “You acted better in the beginning. Why can’t you do any better now?”
After the rehearsal, Nadine and Rosette sometimes asked me whether I wasn’t cold in my thin clothing or what plans I had for the evening. Only Arlette acted as if I didn’t exist. She quickly changed her clothes, lit her cigarette, and went to join the men. The director usually brought her home on his motorcycle. I thought she was in love with him until one day I surprised Arlette and Nadine in the women’s bathroom. They were standing there half undressed, caressing one another’s breasts, drawing circles upon them with their palms. Later I was no longer sure if I wasn’t remembering this scene from one of your movies.
Once, we had a visitor. He stood with his arms crossed and his lips closed, observing the rehearsal from beginning to end. He occasionally scratched his right thigh as if he’d been stung there by an insect. The visitor was a university professor and had recently returned from the U.S., the director told us later. After the rehearsal, the professor came up to me and said I’d done a wonderful job. I realized that it had been a long time since anyone had praised me.
Once I happened to run into Nadine at the movies. The film’s story was set in a theater house. Lukas, the theater’s artistic director, is hiding in the basement because he is of Jewish descent and this is World War II. You are playing the director’s wife, Marion Steiner.
Marion continues her work as a stage actress. In the evening she sits in the office, wrestling with mountains of paperwork to keep the theater above water. With a pale, overworked face she opens the door to a little room. There stand two of the women who work for her, in the act of tasting each other’s lips. One of them becomes hysterical, begs Marion to forgive her, weeps. Presumably this woman worships Marion but consorts with another woman who is easier to handle. And even the new male actor who’s just been hired appears to worship Marion, but nonetheless chases after other women. Only on stage does he dare to declare his love to Marion: day after day with exactly the same words.
In this film your face appears narrow and pale. It no longer has the vitality and body temperature of your face in Indochine. Indochine was also made twelve years befo
re. The more recent the film, the younger you look. As Marion, you appear to be a fragile bridge between the girl Carol in London and the mature woman Eliane in Indochina.
Nadine was sitting right behind me. I didn’t notice her until the film was over when she spoke to me. She invited me for an ice cream and asked me if I selected the movies I went to see according to their subject matter or by director. I immediately replied: “The actress is important.” Nadine laughed, gave an embarrassed cough, and told me about a lecture that might interest me. She was currently attending a seminar on media art that was hosting a public lecture the next week. I should come, she said.
The lecture was being given by a young academic whose head motions reminded me of a canary. It was difficult for me to follow what she was saying. During the lecture, she showed slides with scenes from several films. My eyes were riveted when I saw you in one of them. You were dressed in white and inserted into an exotic landscape. Mississippi Mermaid, Africans, and Touche pas à la femme blanche were the titles of these films, I later learned. “Exotisme” and “orientalisme” were the only words in the lecture I definitely understood. As for the rest, I couldn’t say what I did or didn’t understand, but when the concluding words were spoken and the discussion began, I suddenly raised my hand and asked: “And Indochine? What about Indochine?" I myself couldn’t comprehend how I had suddenly become so impertinent as to ask a question at a university. The face of the lecturer beamed as if I’d put my finger right on the crux of the matter. She talked and talked until the audience became restless. I understood not a single word of her response, but this no longer mattered.