by Yoko Tawada
•
It wasn’t the three bears who showed up the next day, though, it was Wolfgang, wanting to see how I was doing in the new apartment.
“How are we today?” he asked.
“I feel like the little girl in a bear book for children.”
“Which bear? Winnie-the-Pooh? Or maybe Paddington?
I didn’t know either of these bears. “I mean Lev Tolstoy’s The Three Bears!”
Wolfgang said: “I’ve never heard of that one.”
There was a curtain of ice between Wolfgang and me. Ice appears to be a solid material, but it quickly melts on contact with body heat. I placed my arm on Wolfgang’s shoulder jestingly but firmly. He broke free with remarkable deftness and speed, arranged his face in a rectangular configuration, and said: “I’ve brought you some paper and a fountain pen. We want you to continue your work. Please begin as soon as possible so that the work will be completed as soon as possible. We assure you that you will receive payment from us for your work.” Wolfgang’s mouth smelled of lies. There are different sorts of lies, and each one has its own smell. This particular lie smelled of suspicion: Wolfgang was probably reporting not his own thoughts but the words of his boss. Wolfgang was a liar, but fortunately he was still a young liar. His smell revealed that he was still a child, and a smell cannot lie. I gave him a playful shove, and when he didn’t react, I gave him another one. He pursed his lips and shouted, “Stop that!” but then could no longer suppress his childish desire to wrestle with me. I threw him to the ground, being careful not to crush him. While we were playing, the smell of the lie disappeared from his body.
Soon my stomach was contracting with hunger. Paying no more attention to Wolfgang, I ran into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. No more salmon, I knew it. Wolfgang came in behind me, glimpsed the refrigerator’s empty shelves, and exclaimed: “Oh! I guess I shouldn’t have been worried that you wouldn’t like the salmon.” He probably thought he could conceal his shock behind an ironic tone.
The next day, he visited me again, although I hadn’t asked him to. Blinking frenetically, he stammered, “How are we today?”
“Not good.” I hadn’t mastered the smile technique and often gave the wrong impression.
Wolfgang looked at me, frightened, and asked: “You aren’t well? What’s the matter?”
“My hunger is making me sick.”
“I don’t think hunger is an illness.”
I’d thought as much. I can’t actually get sick. Someone told me once that illness was a traditional form of theater practiced by office workers, who were allowed to put on these performances only on Mondays when they didn’t want to come to work. I’d never been sick in my life.
“What did you do last night?”
“I sat at my desk but couldn’t write.”
An ice-cold glint flashed in Wolfgang’s eyes. “Take your time! No one is forcing you to work so fast that you lose your inner peace.” Wolfgang was smelling of lies again, I shuddered involuntarily.
“Hunger isn’t the best friend of poetry. Let’s go shopping.”
“I don’t have any money.”
“Then we’ll open a bank account for you. Our boss already made the suggestion.”
On the way to the bank, we passed two giant elephants standing at the side of the road. They were made of a gray substance, perhaps concrete.
“Is there a circus here?”
“No, that’s the entrance to the zoo.”
“Animals made of concrete live behind the gate?”
“No! Many real animals live in the zoo. They live on large properties surrounded by fences.”
“Even the lions, leopards, and horses?”
“That’s right. You’ll find more than one hundred different species here.”
I was flabbergasted.
What we did in the bank after this was surely not criminal, but afterward I had a bad conscience. We went into a building that bore a mysterious logo. Wolfgang whispered something to the man at the window, and they spoke for a little while in hushed voices. Then the man produced a paper with a magic spell on it. I stamped the shape of my paw-hand on the page instead of a signature and opened my first bank account. They said it would be one week before my ATM card was ready. Wolfgang showed me how to get money out of an ATM with a card. I noticed that he spread his thighs unnecessarily wide when he stood before the machine. Next he showed me a supermarket that had been built in the tunnel beneath a railway overpass. At the very back of the store, where the coldest goods were displayed in the brightest light, was the smoked salmon. “I won’t be able to visit you for the next few days because I’ve been given a very important assignment. I’ll be back in a week. Then we can go pick up your ATM card together. This ration of salmon will have to last until then. Don’t eat too much!”
I ate the entire armful of salmon Wolfgang had bought me that same evening. During the days that followed I ate nothing at all but fortunately felt no hunger.
“You shouldn’t eat so much Canadian salmon!” Wolfgang cautioned me in a measured tone of voice when he opened my refrigerator door the next week. I gasped because it was clear that on the inside he was berating me and would have liked to start screaming at the top of his lungs. But he kept his voice under control and spoke calmly, meticulously avoiding all discriminatory language. I felt like a circus performer who’s made an acrobatic error in front of her audience. My thoughts kept circling senselessly around the question of why I shouldn’t eat too much Canadian salmon. “What’s wrong with Canada?”
Wolfgang appeared to be frantically looking for an image that would explain the problem in simple terms. “Canada isn’t to blame for the expensive salmon that find their way there. The problem is they’re eating up your savings. It’s important to save money.” I didn’t understand what exactly he meant by that, but I did note that the word “Canada” sounded beautiful and cool.
“Were you ever in Canada?” I asked him.
“No.”
“Do you know what sort of country it is?”
“A very cold one.”
When I heard that, I wanted to move to Canada right away.
The adjective “cold” has such an appealing sound. I’d give up anything to experience such cold, for Ice Queen beauty, for shivering jouissance. The ice-cold truth. Acrobatic marvels that give you cold feet. A talent that makes all your competitors blanch and tremble as if frozen. Rationality honed sharp as an icicle. Cold has a broad spectrum.
“Is it really that cold in Canada?”
“Yes, it’s incredibly cold there.”
I dreamed of a frozen city in which the walls of all the buildings were made of transparent ice. Instead of cars, salmon swam through the streets.
I lived with my windows open wide day and night. To me, Berlin was a tropical city. Some nights, the heat held me in its grip and wouldn’t let me fall into sleep. Although it was February, the temperature rose to above freezing. I made up my mind once and for all to emigrate to Canada. Since I already had a successful experience with exile under my belt, surely it would be possible for me to go into exile a second time.
One week later I went to the bank, accompanied by Wolfgang, to pick up the new ATM card for my checking account. I pushed the hard, rectangular card into the slot in the machine, pressed the number 1 four times (that was my PIN), and watched the machine spit out banknotes. Then I pressed the number 2 four times. “What are you doing? You’ve already got your money,” Wolfgang said in a low but razor-sharp voice. I wanted to know whether the machine might spit out something else, something more interesting, if I put in a different code.
The second time I visited the supermarket, my nose was immediately confounded by all the many smells. I couldn’t remember where the salmon was. This supermarket was selling far too many absurd, unnecessary items instead of offering only what mattered — the
salmon. I asked Wolfgang for an explanation of every product that interested me. “What’s that? Can you eat that?” There were so many things I’d never seen before. The animal world is not without its culinary oddities, for example animals who prefer to eat leaves that have been stripped from their branches, roots dug up from the soil, or windfall apples. But this is nothing compared to the curiosities beloved by human beings: the grease they smear on their cheeks, the thick liquid they color their claws with, tiny little sticks they probably use to pick their noses, bags for temporarily storing things that will later be thrown away, the paper they use to wipe their bottoms, the round plates made of paper for throwing away, and the notebooks for children with a panda bear on the cover. All these products smelled strange. My paws started itching the moment I touched them.
I was sick of smelling the supermarket odor and just wanted to get back to my study, where my autobiography awaited me. When I said this to Wolfgang, he was relieved.
My desk wasn’t to my liking anymore, it now seemed too low to me — too low for writing a proper autobiography. If the manuscript paper could lie right in front of my nose, close enough to soak up a nosebleed if necessary, I would be able to sit there calmly, letting the memories come as they would. Perhaps the solitude was weighing on me, though I’d been the one who’d asked Wolfgang to leave the room.
For days, I saw neither hide nor hair of him. Perhaps the bank account had been intended to take the place of a love affair. Money was wired to my account, I withdrew it, went shopping, and ate what I had bought. Then I’d come calling again, an impetuous lover ringing the doorbell, and my beloved would appear in the form of banknotes. I couldn’t eat them, so I went to the supermarket and exchanged them for salmon. I ate and ate and ate, and it was never enough. I could clearly feel part of my brain regressing a little more each day. At night I tossed and turned, and then when morning arrived I couldn’t heave myself out of bed. My limbs were as weak as noodles, my mood poorly lit. It was a degeneration. I wanted to do something to stop it. I dreamed of rehearsing a new number in bitter cold to reap the audience’s thunderous applause.
•
I left the house. With an ear-splitting roar, a motorcycle flew by, right in front of my nose. I too had owned a motorcycle once, many years before, one made specially for me. The sound of its motor frightened me so badly that at first I kept my distance. I was quite good by then at riding my tricycle, but not a bicycle. So they made me a three-wheeled motorcycle that couldn’t tip over. Ivan kept playing a tape of motor noise in front of my cage so I’d get used to it. Yes, I was in a cage. The word “cage” offended my sensibilities. I lost all desire to keep writing.
I tossed my pen aside and went downtown. The woman walking in front of me had on a fur coat. She looked as if she’d slipped into a pile of dead foxes. Through walls made of glass I could see not only the wares laid out for display in the shops but also what was on the plates of the guests in a restaurant. The boredom of the passersby was apparently considerable, since they scrutinized every product in the shop windows and every plate in the restaurant if the windows were big enough. If they were bored enough to take an interest in the meals being consumed by restaurant patrons they didn’t know, surely they would find a story about a child in a cage exceptionally diverting.
Diagonally across from the bank was a bookstore. The bookseller’s white sweater had recently caught my eye several times. On this day, I ventured to go into the shop because at first no one was visible inside. As I stood there dumbfounded amid the high shelves, it almost scared me out of my wits when a voice at my back asked whether I was looking for any book in particular. The white sweater was standing right behind me. Since it was blocking the exit, I couldn’t beat a retreat.
“Do you have an autobiography?”
“By whom? If you don’t mind my asking.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
The white sweater indicated a shelf off to one side behind him, saying, “All of these are autobiographies!”
I was apparently now capable of improvising a brief conversation in German.
It was disappointing to know how many fat autobiographies already existed. They filled the ten stories of this bookshelf from top to bottom without leaving a gap. Apparently an autobiography was the sort of text that got written by anyone capable of holding a pen.
“All in German!?”
“What’s so strange about that?”
“Must one write in German? I must learn German.”
“Not necessary. The language you’re speaking at the moment is what we call German.”
“I can speak — that’s in my nature. But reading and writing . . .”
“Then we should pay a visit to that shelf over there. We have a large selection of language textbooks. Would you like to have one with explanations in English?”
“No, Russian. Or Northpolish.”
“I think I actually do have a textbook written in Russian.”
My German textbook was more economically priced than a large package of salmon, but unfortunately harder to digest. The book’s author explained in great detail — like the assembly instructions for a piece of machinery — each linguistic component, such as verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc. But it was unlikely that these explanations would enable the book’s readers to build a machine themselves. At the back of the book, I found a section with the heading “Applied Grammar”; it contained a short story that one was supposed to read. I devoured it like the salmon, forgetting all about grammar.
•
The protagonist was a mouse. Her form of gainful employment: singing. Her audience: the people. On the vocabulary list I found the word Volk, which corresponded to the Russian narod.
There had been times when I was convinced that the word narod meant more or less the same as “circus audience.” Later, at numerous conferences and assemblies, I came to realize that this supposition had not been correct, but I remained unable to define the term exactly, though my lack of knowledge was never conspicuous.
As long as the mouse went on singing, the Volk gave her its full attention. No one aped her, no one giggled, no one disrupted her concerts by making mouse noises. This is just how my own audience behaved, too, and my heart leaped as I remembered the circus. Every member of my audience was capable of walking on two legs or riding on three wheels. Nevertheless they gaped at me as if I were performing a miracle. And in the end they generously applauded. But why?
The second time I visited, the bookseller came up to me right away, gave a dry cough and asked whether the language textbook had been helpful. “I didn’t understand the grammar, but the short story was interesting. The story of the mouse singer Josephine.” My answer made him laugh.
“The grammar is superfluous if you understood the story.” He plucked another book off the shelf. “This is a book by the same author. Among other things, he wrote several stories from the point of view of animals.” When our eyes met, something seemed to occur to him that he found puzzling. Hurriedly he added: “What I mean is that this literature is valuable as literature, not because it was written from a minority perspective. In fact, the main character is never an animal. During the process by which an animal is transformed into a non-animal or a human into a non-human, memory gets lost, and it’s this loss that is the main character.” To me, his lecture was too much side salad without a main course. I couldn’t follow, but I didn’t want him to notice. So I lowered my eyes and pretended to be having profound thoughts about the book. After a while, a question finally occurred to me: “What’s your name?” My question caught the man off guard. “Oh, sorry! I’m Friedrich.” He didn’t ask mine.
I opened the book the way you might break a loaf of peasant bread in two. My nails were too long to make it easy to flip through a book’s pages. In earlier years, I’d attempted to trim them but wound up spilling a lot of blood. Now I just let them grow. From the open page of
the book, a title containing the word “dog” leaped out at me. In all honesty, I couldn’t stand dogs: cowardly, deceitful creatures who would innocently scamper up to me from behind, only to sink their teeth into my ankle at the first opportunity. I would have gone on avoiding all dogs if this animal hadn’t been contained in the title rolling melodiously off Friedrich’s tongue: “Investigations of a Dog.” A dog, then, could possess an inquiring mind. This revelation took the edge off my bias against the species. Friedrich showed me another story from the book, the subject this time was an academy. “You might find this story even more interesting than the one about the dog.” A happy schoolteacher would no doubt look exactly the way Friedrich looked at this moment.
I bought the volume of stories and right away read “A Report to an Academy.” Unfortunately I must confess I found this ape story interesting. But my interest might be attributed to various causes, it might even have been prompted by rage. The more I read, the more unbridled my rage became, and I couldn’t stop reading. The ape was of a tropical nature — cause enough for me to find this ape tale unpalatable. It struck me as the pinnacle of apishness to not only want to become human but to tell the story of one’s own transformation. I imagined an ape aping a human being, and my back immediately started to itch unbearably, as though lice and fleas were dancing the twist in my fur. The ape narrator apparently believed he had written a success story. But if you asked me, I’d lose no time telling you I don’t consider it progress to walk on two legs.
I felt sick to my stomach remembering how, as a child, I’d learned to walk on two legs. And I didn’t just learn to do this, I even wrote and published a text about it. Probably my readers thought my apish report had been written in support of evolutionary theory. If I’d read the ape’s report earlier, I’d have written my autobiography in a completely different way.