The Ends of the Earth

by Willemsen, Roger; Lewis, Peter;

  The skyscrapers opposite are rooted in the ground like the chitin carapaces of extinct insects, lit from within. In the lifts that race up and down, there are cut flowers and Julio Iglesias endlessly crooning ‘Amor, Amor, Amor’. Yes, he’s here, too. You can’t get away from love.

  It’s beautiful and awful at the same time, for while the tearjerking song maunders on about love, the couples themselves seem loveless, and the masseuses, who are all booked up long past midnight, could sing you another, quite different song about love. I run into one of them in the lift. She’s snorting dismissively, rubbing her arms and shaking her head. Something to do with one of her clients.

  After midnight on the vast, empty square in front of the new City Hall, in the middle of the mussel-shaped piazza with its atmosphere of Mussolini-esque Roman bombast, a girl is standing, all alone, taking pictures of the full moon with her mobile. Who for? Is there anyone among the thirty million inhabitants of Greater Tokyo who’s incapable of looking up at the night sky this evening? Someone who’s ill, maybe? Or in prison? Or working underground? Maybe a subway conductor or a bar hostess or a bridegroom in a subterranean banqueting hall in one of the large hotels? Or perhaps the moon is being e-mailed direct from the display of her mobile beyond the country’s borders, maybe even across the ocean to Europe, where the moon hasn’t actually risen yet, but where it will now appear, eight hours too early, on the screen of somebody else’s mobile?

  This young woman could send the picture to her lover and text him: There you go, my darling, once more I’m sending you the moon that you’ll be sleeping under yourself in a couple of hours’ time. Amor, Amor, Amor … The girl lets out a little giggle that bubbles back off the marble walls. As I draw closer, she quickly moves off, the moon safely tucked away in her pocket. The place couldn’t be more deserted.

  I can’t think of another city where the daylight dawns so greyly as it does over Tokyo, the only city that starts out as anthracite and whose concrete surfaces then gradually – ever so slowly – brighten and grow lighter, becoming mouse-grey, then dust-grey, then flannel-grey, then pale and then bright. Grey walls reflect back the grey light, with the early morning mist lathering in even more subtle gradations; even the steam from the air-conditioning units mingles in. The first things you can make out are the news tickers on the outsides of buildings, then the characters chiselled into the façades, and finally billboards and banners.

  Three days later I can say: the sky was always beautiful. Not a cloud remained, and all cares were confined to my dreams. At four o’clock in the afternoon, the employees could be seen through the windows of their offices preparing to do their physical exercises. At three in the morning, the only lights still burning in the large hotels were those of the jet lag patients. Up to 4 a.m., they are the only ones awake. At six I went downstairs to have breakfast, where I had a plate of spaghetti followed by some French Toast with my cup of Century Instant Coffee.

  Meanwhile, what’s happening out on the streets? All the alleyways, bridges, trains, shops, pavements, entranceways and transport arteries of all kinds are crammed with sixteen-year-old girls, all the same height, all with the same pallor, and all the same age. It’s as if there’d been some cosmic pollination, some Golden Shower raining down on the city one day that impregnated millions of women simultaneously, who then all gave birth in the same instant to little girls who grew into identical little skirts, shoes, and blouses.

  These novices’ voices all ring out when they encounter their peers, their millions of friends, down in the courtyard. One of them is wearing a beret, another a baseball cap made from sandpaper. Little ladies in sailor suits are also there, along with ones sporting the uniforms of the major department stores. Together, they disappear into a café with a Western-style façade, the Bread Restaurant, where you serve yourself at the counter from baskets containing fifteen different types of bread: sesame bread, pumpkin bread, onion bread, seaweed bread, algal bread, bread bread.

  Other girls are still busy out on the street, distributing paper napkins printed with adverts or hanging around between tiled walls, dressed in Black Forest costumes with starched aprons and neat white bows tied round their backs, handing out free samples of Indian curry to passersby.

  There’s something cult-like about the orderliness out on the street. Even those unfortunates with the social function of ‘beggar’ are all lying in a neatly-arranged line of cardboard boxes. Some of the boxes have ‘Made in the Philippines’ printed on them, while others just say ‘Enjoy’ or ‘Bananas’. Inside, you can see the beggars lying on their backs, staring at the roof of the box. There’s no writing there. Even good order can make you sad, and leave you feeling isolated.

  Four days have passed and I’ve barely spoken four sentences. It’s considered impolite to look a stranger in the eye. You could be invisible and hardly notice. Julio Iglesias is still singing away in the lift; little by little, he’s singing me to my knees. As darkness falls, the girls and boys – the lovers, the piners and yearners – start to assemble at the Hachiko, the monument to the faithful imperial dog. Faithful? Fewer than 5 per cent of all animals are monogamous. But come what may I’m sitting pretty here, with a grandstand view of the fulfilled and the frustrated lovers alike, and wishing I was one of them.

  So, it’s back to the twentieth floor of the hotel, where I stick myself to the plate glass window of the room like an autumn leaf. Night falls with all its promises, but at the moment all I can call to mind are those that have not been fulfilled, and never could be. The people, the moods, the atmospheres, and all the fleeting and incidental things simply aren’t there. The coat tail caught in the car door is missing, and the spoon that misses the mouth.

  The following evening, my fear of loneliness takes on a physical dimension. It feels like agoraphobia. You start issuing orders to your head, but they only succeed in making it do the exact opposite. You say to yourself: look, you’re among other people here. But the only mental image you can conjure up is of yourself as a stranger who’s becoming odder by the moment, yet who only appears that odd from one person’s point of view, namely your own.

  On the third evening, I picked up the receiver and called Hamburg.

  ‘Christa,’ said the voice at the other end, though it sounded like ‘basta’.

  ‘Christa, it’s me,’ I said, as nonchalantly as I could.

  Her voice took on the same cadence as mine: ‘Oh, it’s you!’ Evidently she’d been expecting someone far more interesting. All the same, it had only been a couple of weeks since I’d been sitting on the floor of her tiny flat in Altona listening to her and her Terry Callier records, and as the music rhapsodized about love, she held forth about all the unforeseen pitfalls of producing a documentary film. Her story was so long-winded that I had plenty of time to study her face as she spoke, that generous, freckled face with the broad forehead, the too-wide mouth and the I-could-tell-you-a-thing-or-two expression. Due to my silence, at the end of the evening she called me a good listener, which I hadn’t been at all.

  Her documentary was about the ‘Doomsters’, people who predict the end of the world and who respond in a number of different ways: sometimes with panic, sometimes esoterically, sometimes conspiratorially, and sometimes even competently and rationally. That evening, Christa had been wearing a sleeveless bodice, so that for the first time I’d been able to see her broad shoulders. Her skirt was stretched three hands’ width over each of her muscly thighs, and her feet had clearly not seen the insides of shoes for that whole summer.

  She talked and talked, and her subsidiary self, the professional Christa, kept slipping the whole time into the jargon of her line of work. Time and again, the talk was of ‘you try your level best …’, ‘and so on, and so forth …’, ‘so I said, you look like it’, and ‘no way, that was a complete non-starter!’

  She wasn’t always like this, just when she was around her world of work. I asked her:

  ‘Do you still believe in your film?’

&n
bsp; ‘No, not one hundred and ten per cent.’

  She went over to the window and gazed out silently at the night, which in that instant was not illuminated by any nearby source of light.

  I reached for the next bottle of Soave and asked ‘Shall we be sinners and crack this open?’

  She turned to me, her face registering lukewarm interest. Then, looking at the bottle, she said:

  ‘Why should alcohol be a sin, anyhow? Are grapes sinful?’

  ‘Sure, lay them down for a few years and then drink them, and they are right enough, aren’t they?’

  I managed to get away before midnight, disentangling myself from the web of images she was spinning for herself, images that simultaneously over- and underestimated her self-worth, professional and sentimental images, bourgeois stereotypes and loose ends, such as the imaginings that came fluttering after the word ‘sin’. Even so, the loose ends remained just that. Besides, her voice had something so calm, so nocturnal about it, and her gaze occasionally lingered so long, unthinkingly, on my own that she suddenly gave a start and snapped out of the spell.

  And that was just how her voice sounded now.

  ‘Why are you calling? Any special reason?’

  ‘No, nothing special,’ I replied. ‘I was just thinking of you.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘I found a quotation for you. Listen: “Anyone who still has their own world must be prepared to have it perish alongside them.”’

  There was a pause.

  ‘And that made you think of me, did it?’

  ‘Yes, it did.’

  ‘Because of the film?’

  ‘Amongst other things.’

  ‘I don’t get it at all.’

  We chatted more freely and calmly than that time in her flat. There were more loose ends, free evaluations, spontaneous conjunctions, while with many sentences we almost seemed to physically touch one another. In fact, we were truly conversing for the first time.

  After we’d been speaking for twenty minutes, Christa had to leave the house.

  ‘What a shame,’ I said.

  ‘Same here. Where are you?’

  ‘In Tokyo.’

  She didn’t hesitate for a moment:

  ‘Would you like to ring me again tomorrow?’

  I promised I would. The next morning, I started clearing away the working day that lay between me and her voice. If only because of how much I was looking forward to it, by all rights the phone call should have gone badly, but in fact she picked up and said:

  ‘I’m all yours.’

  ‘Christa!’

  ‘Are you still in Tokyo?’

  ‘The very place. And it’s strange.’

  ‘As in nicely strange?’

  ‘No, strangely strange.’

  She didn’t need any run-in or warm-up. She was right into the thick of things straight away.

  ‘What can you see from your window?’

  I went and stared down at the city. Cars were moving off in batches from the green traffic lights and there was someone sleeping on a footbridge, and over there a businessman carrying a briefcase and a helium balloon. Some office windows weren’t just lit, you could also see people behind them, hunched over their work or doing physical jerks.

  ‘Go on, let’s go out onto the street!’

  So I led her to Shinjuku; we had something to eat there, walked through a park full of red terracotta busts, and visited a Pachinko arcade.

  ‘Now show me somewhere special!’

  I took her to the Hachiko monument.

  ‘What kind of people come here?’ she wanted to know. ‘Lovers,’ I said, ‘It’s a meeting place for lovers.’

  ‘Happy lovers?’

  ‘Happy and unhappy.’

  ‘I think I’ve got to know most about Japan from its pornography,’ she remarked.

  ‘And you a woman, too!’

  ‘Well, I did make a documentary about it.’

  ‘Why, though?’

  ‘I’m fascinated by secret worlds, things behind closed doors. The USA and Japan are the most perverted countries. Americans are so prudish that things can’t be too filthy for them in private, while the Japanese are so degenerate that they like things as childish as possible in the privacy of their own homes. You don’t think so? What about their fascination for women in glasses, nurses, schoolgirls and innocent lambs, then? The Japanese are obsessed with innocence, aren’t they?’

  ‘That’s true, but they’re also hung up on ritual, on staged setups: they love role-playing, mock rapes, the danger of being caught. They do it in public places and in limousines, but the key thing is that it all has to look like some great act of passion.’

  ‘Shamefully shameless.’

  ‘What are you wearing?’ I asked her.

  The windows of my room went right down to the floor; I stood there in the darkness above the ravine of the street. But in actual fact we were listening, from our opposite ends of the earth, to the space between us – our cocoon. I pictured her in front of me, her kind face, broad shoulders, her dark blonde mane of hair and her large hands, absentmindedly fiddling with something or other.

  ‘It’s nice talking to you on the phone,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, it does me good,’ she replied, and we just let the ensuing silence hang there.

  ‘It feels like we’re two strangers who’ve fetched up in the same train compartment and struck up a conversation.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘Maybe that’s what we should do sometime, then: go on a railway journey lasting days, and never leave the train, just sit there opposite one another in our compartment,’ I suggested.

  By the time we’d finished, we’d been on the line for an hour and a half, and had made a firm arrangement to meet up. One evening ten days from now, I’d be waiting at Dammtor station in Hamburg, ready to set off into the wild blue yonder on a train journey – with Christa if she turned up, and without Christa if she’d thought better of it in the meantime. But the one thing we’d agreed on was that if we did end up travelling together, it wouldn’t be about getting to any particular place, but about experiencing the train journey in each other’s company.

  ‘But you ought to let me know what I should pack,’ she said.

  Then we left one another to silently contemplate our options and agreed not to call one another again before our departure.

  From this moment on, I got on just fine with Tokyo. On Sunday afternoon, I strolled through Roppongi and found what I was looking for: the cold leftovers of the night, women who’d stayed overnight in the arms of disinterested men. Recent American swing was in the air, interspersed with snatches of lounge music, while now and then came a twanging of strings from the doorways of Chinese Dim-Sum restaurants, ascending and descending the pentatonic scale. Brasseries exhaled the smell of mopped floors.

  Standing alone at a crossroads between the nut sellers and the newspaper vendors was a twenty-year-old girl with dyed chestnut brown and bobbed hair. In front of her stomach she held a sign inscribed with Japanese characters, with an English translation underneath: ‘Slave’. Was she some kind of artist? Or a prostitute? She was carrying a book of photographs of Audrey Hepburn under her arm. Shamefully shameless. It was summer, and my cheerful anticipation at meeting Christa was casting a glow of goodwill over everything I saw.

  So, one evening a week or so later found me standing, armed with tickets, a small travel bag and a bottle of champagne in a plastic bag, on the long-distance platform of Dammtor station in Hamburg. A quarter of an hour before the train was due to leave there was no sign of Christa; ten minutes to go and she still wasn’t there. But five minutes before the train arrived, she appeared at the top of the escalator with a large suitcase and rushed to meet my embrace.

  We drank the champagne in our sleeping car berth to Paris. We kissed a bit to make it clear what the deal was, and then once more after Christa had slipped on her pale blue pyjamas in the wet room and chosen the top bunk; this meant that I could
kiss her while I was still standing up, and make her head sink down into the pillow. Later, lying on my back and staring into the blue glow cast by the night light, in my mind’s eye I could picture her lying on her back too and staring into the blueness of the night, as we were lulled to sleep by the rocking and rattling of the train. In the morning, the conductor rapped on the door with his square socket key, and moments later, Christa’s brown feet were dangling in front of my eyes. Looking at her, I felt an immense holiday mood wash over me.

  In Paris, we left the Gare du Nord to go and have breakfast on the Place Napoléon III, where we ordered pastries from the cabinet, coffee and citron pressé and sat blinking at the sunlight and the traffic. Christa dragged her pullover over her head, rubbed sun cream onto her bare arms, donated her croissant to a beggar, called Paris the ‘City of Lovers’ and shot me a challenging look.

  The next train left the station heading south. Once again, we sat opposite one another at the window seats and settled in for our journey, which would take us right across France.

  ‘It’s all about the journey, not the destination,’ she said sententiously.

  ‘But we don’t know where we’re going anyhow.’

  We gazed into each other’s eyes or out at the landscape, or looked through our eyes reflected in the compartment window at the landscape, or conversely through the landscape at our eyes. We didn’t need to say much. It was enough that we were undertaking this journey together for the same good reasons.

  So why were we doing it? In order to dive into that gap that corresponded to the air space in which we’d met during our telephone conversation. It wasn’t about places, or trading places. It was about the journey itself in all its unfathomable fleetingness. The scenery flitted past: old mail depots, a station buffet, a forecourt, a monument, a drinking fountain for those waiting for connecting trains. Behind the stations, settlements fanned out, and behind the settlements intermediate landscapes, which we only ever sped past, but which were always full of people in transit, comers and goers and people still en route to some-where or other.