Memoirs of a Polar Bear

by Yoko Tawada

  The next day, Wolfgang surprised me. Right away I told him about the ape, who was still on my mind. Wolfgang’s reaction was a look of horror. “Write your own text if you’ve got the time to be reading other people’s books! An author who does nothing but read is lazy. Reading books is robbing you of the time you could be using to write.”

  “But this way I can learn German. I’ll write in German, and you can save time. No more translations.”

  “No, that’s out of the question! You have to write in your own mother tongue. You’re supposed to be pouring out your heart, and that needs to happen in a natural way.”

  “What’s my mother tongue?”

  “The language your mother speaks.”

  “I’ve never spoken with my mother.”

  “A mother is a mother, even if you never speak with her.”

  “I don’t think my mother spoke Russian.”

  “Ivan was your mother. Have you forgotten? The age of female mothers is over.”

  I was confused because Wolfgang didn’t smell of lies, in other words he was saying something he believed to be true, but I couldn’t trust him. It was surely his boss’s idea to impose Russian on me so his translator could twist my text to suit his political purposes. Bees can turn the nectar of flowers into honey. Nectar already tastes sweet in and of itself, but the deep, overpowering flavor of honey comes about through the process of fermentation set in motion by disgusting fluids disgorged from those insects’ bodies. My knowledge, by the way, comes from handouts I received at a conference on The Future of Beekeeping. Wolfgang and his friends wanted to add their bodily fluids to my autobiography and turn it into a different product. To escape this danger, I would have to write directly in German. And this time I would supply the title.

  Wolfgang said he didn’t want to keep me any longer from my writing and left the apartment. I watched him from my window. Only when he had disappeared on a bus did I leave the house to pay a visit to my bookstore. This time, there was a customer in the store. He stood in a corner with his back to me. His hair was of a deep black hue that drew my gaze. Friedrich registered my presence and raised his eyelashes, making his eyes appear larger, while his lips assumed the shape of a friendly smile. “How are you? It’s cold today,” he said.

  I always feel myself being thrust back into loneliness when someone tells me it’s cold on a hot day. It isn’t good to talk so much about the weather — weather is a highly personal matter, and communication on the subject inevitably fails.

  “‘A Report to an Academy’ was entertaining, but I couldn’t follow the ape’s line of thought. It’s ridiculous the way he imitates human beings.”

  “But did you ask yourself whether this was a voluntary choice on the ape’s part?”

  “He couldn’t help it. That’s what he writes. He had no other way out.”

  “Precisely. I think that’s what the author was getting at. Even we human beings didn’t become as we are voluntarily — we were forced to change in order to survive. There was never a choice.”

  At this moment the unknown customer, who until then had been immersed in a book, turned around and carefully used his fingertips to correct his eyeglasses.

  “The brand name Darwin proves a bestseller yet again! Why do women paint their faces? Why do they lie? Why are they always jealous? Why do men go to war? The only answer to all these questions is: that’s what evolution wanted. It justifies everything. But I can’t think of a single reason why it should be good for the planet for noxious Homo sapiens to produce offspring. Can you, Friedrich?”

  The voice of the one thus addressed cracked as he cried out: “My brother!” The black-haired man and Friedrich embraced warmly, but they immediately noticed when I tried to slip out of the store so as not to disturb them. Bookseller Friedrich ushered me back into the store and introduced me to his brother: “This is the author of ‘Thunderous Applause for My Tears.’” I was astonished. All along, Friedrich had known who I was!

  Friedrich was the main reason I visited his bookstore so often. The male members of the species Homo sapiens appealed to me a great deal. They were soft and small and had fragile but adorable teeth. Their fingers were delicately constructed, the fingernails all but nonexistent. Sometimes they reminded me of stuffed animals, lovely to hold in one’s arms.

  One day a woman lay in wait for me in the store. She was an acquaintance of Friedrich’s, was called Annemarie, and belonged to an organization that worked in support of human rights. She wanted to interview me, to speak with me about the situation of artists and athletes in the Eastern Bloc. I replied that human rights weren’t a primary concern of mine. She looked first disappointed and then, a second later, horrified.

  I began to realize that my fate and the fate of human rights were inextricably entwined. Still, I didn’t know the first thing about them. The concept of human rights had been invented by people who were thinking only of human beings. Dandelions don’t have human rights, and neither do reindeer, raindrops, or hares. At most a whale. I remembered a text I had once read for a conference on the topic Whaling and Capitalism. It averred that larger mammals enjoyed more rights than smaller animals, like mice for example, and attributed the discrepancy to the tastes of a certain group of people, who valued larger things more than small ones. And among the mammals that are not vegetarians and don’t live underwater, we polar bears are the largest. Apart from this theory, I couldn’t think of any other reason why people kept chasing after me to give me human rights.

  Annemarie had already left the shop. I stood empty-headed between the shelves, withstanding Friedrich’s piercingly solemn gaze only with great difficulty. “Don’t you have a new book for me?” Friedrich handed me a book. “Here, Atta Troll, that’s one for you. A positively bearish text.” The name Heinrich Heine was written on the cover. I opened the book at random to one of the few pages with illustrations and beheld a black bear lying with front and back legs outstretched. He was so attractive that I couldn’t bring myself to put the book down. When I went to pay, Friedrich touched my paw-hand tenderly and said, “Your hand is cold. Are you cold?” My smile tasted bitter.

  The next morning I had nothing but reproaches for him. “You sold me an indigestible book!”

  “There are reasons for that. The author may have twisted things around to avoid being attacked by his enemies.”

  “What wolf do you suppose was after him?”

  “The censor, for one thing.”

  “Zen sir? I don’t understand.”

  “Censor. The sensor of power. Didn’t you ever hear about censorship in the Soviet Union?”

  I searched around in my brain for this concept but found only confusion. “Is that why writers write such complicated sentences?”

  “Even when the author writes as simply as possible, it can still appear complicated to the reader.” Friedrich picked up the book, leafed through it, and said: “You’ve got to read these lines! You won’t regret having spent your money on this book.”

  The lines he was pointing to declared that Nature can’t have bestowed any rights on human beings, since rights aren’t natural.

  Friedrich said: “If human beings want to possess human rights, they have to give animals animal rights. But how do I justify the fact that yesterday I ate meat? I lack the courage to think this thought through to the end. My brother, by the way, became a vegetarian some time ago.” His gaze was prodding me for a response.

  “I can’t become a vegetarian,” I said quickly, although I knew that my ancestors and distant relations got by without meat. They ate primarily vegetables and fruit, and only occasionally a brown crab or fish. I remembered a conference on capitalism and meat-eating at which I was asked why I killed other animals. I didn’t know how to respond.

  •

  Sometimes I lashed out, which I feel ashamed of today. I can hear our teacher urging her charges on: “Now let’s
all dance together in a circle!” It was impossible for me to join this circle. The teacher took me by the paw and led me into the circle. Similar situations repeated themselves several times, and eventually the teacher stopped including me and left me alone. I stood in a corner of the room and observed the goings-on. One day a child asked the teacher why I wasn’t participating. She replied that it was because I was egotistical, and in that same moment she received such a shove that she fell right on her bottom. It wasn’t me — it was a muscular reflex that moved me to violence. Terrified by my own actions, I jumped out the fourth floor window, landing uninjured on the ground. Then I took off running in a random direction. No one could catch me. Since that day I was on the books as a problem child. I was seen as athletic but antisocial. I was to be shipped off to a special institute for talented children, since athletic ability was considered a valuable asset in our country. The so-called institute they brought me to was a cage. No ray of sunlight reached me there. A damp, dismal feeling returned to me as I remembered the cage. In front of the cage stood Ivan. My time in kindergarten seems to have preceded my first meeting with him.

  •

  Someone knocked at the door, my autobiography paused. It was Wolfgang, accompanied by a man I didn’t know. As I then learned, he was the leader of the citizens’ initiative KAOS. He had apparently been tipped off to the fact that my German sufficed for casual conversation.

  “How are you?”

  His question, which he posed with an artificial smile, sounded like a test. His last name was Jäger, which I knew meant “hunter.” In my ears, the name sounded cruel and sly. He had a gentlemanly face. His white beard make him look like an officer. Men with this sort of visage sometimes sat in the front row at the circus.

  “How is your autobiography coming along? Are you making good progress?”

  Hearing this question made me defiant. I was afraid he was going to steal my opus.

  “I am making slow, difficult progress,” I said. “The language gets in my way.”

  “The language?”

  “Well, to be specific: German.”

  Herr Jäger shot Wolfgang a reproachful look. I could sense that he was seething, but his voice remained calm and reserved as he said to me: “I thought we had communicated quite clearly that you are to write in your own language, since we have a fantastic translator.”

  “My own language? I don’t know which language that is. Probably one of the North Pole languages.”

  “I see, a joke. Russian is the most magnificent literary language in the world.”

  “Somehow I don’t seem to know Russian anymore.”

  “That’s impossible! Write whatever you want, but in your own language, please. And you needn’t be concerned about making a living. As long as you keep writing, we’ll keep paying your bills.” His face had a smile stretched across it, but the odor streaming from his armpits was one of cunning deceit. Human beings are constantly trying to sell me their generosity, the better to manipulate me. I wanted to ask Wolfgang for help, but all I saw of him was his back. He appeared more interested in the window than in me.

  “I’m quite certain your autobiography will be a bestseller.”

  This visit by these two men made my pen go limp. Of course, the image of a pen standing up vertically or not strikes me as unduly masculine. As a female I am more inclined to say: The smaller the newborn text, the better, because then it has a better chance at survival. Besides, I require absolute silence. A mother bear gives birth to her children in a dark cave, all alone. She tells no one about the birth, uses her tongue to lick her offspring, which she can hardly see, and then feels the sensation in her breast when the newborns begin to suckle. No one may see her young: they are smelled and touched but never seen. Only after the children have reached a certain size does the mother leave the cave with them. It can happen that their father, half-starved, catches sight of these small animals and eats them up without knowing they are his own flesh and blood. A classic theme. The ancient Greeks wrote about similar cases. In my opinion, father polar bears ought to take a lesson from the penguins, with both parents incubating the eggs in shifts. For a penguin dad, eating the eggs would be unthinkable. He sits on the eggs, waiting day and night for weeks in raging snowstorms for the return of his wife, who’s off looking for food.

  “All penguin marriages are alike, while every polar bear marriage is different,” I wrote in Russian and demonstratively placed the manuscript page on my desk so Herr Jäger would see it right away if he visited unannounced. As expected, Herr Jäger and Wolfgang showed up again several days later and immediately found the sentence I’d left for them. Wolfgang translated it into German and exclaimed euphorically: “Weltliteratur!”

  Herr Jäger took my paw-hand and said: “Do keep writing. The faster, the better! Later there’ll be time to cut and refine. The greatest possible error is to think too much and write too slowly.” Apparently he meant to encourage me with these words.

  “Before my exile, I had a lot to write about. The topics kept multiplying like maggots on a corpse. But now that I’m here, I’ve lost all connection to what I used to be. It’s as if the thread of my memory has been cut. I can’t find a way forward.”

  “Probably you aren’t yet acclimated.”

  “It’s unbearably hot here. I can’t stand the heat.”

  “But it’s winter, and your hands are cold.”

  “They’re supposed to be. It’s a waste of energy to always keep the tips of one’s hands and feet warm. The main thing is that my heart stays warm.”

  “Maybe you’ve caught a cold.”

  “I’ve never been sick in my life. Just a bit exhausted sometimes.”

  “When you’re exhausted, you can watch television, for example.” Herr Jäger concluded his visit with this helpful suggestion and set off for home accompanied by Wolfgang. In their sagging shoulders, I discerned mild disappointment.

  The moment the two of them had left my field of vision, I turned on the television. A woman who reminded me of a panda bear stood before a colorful patchwork map speaking in a high-pitched voice. Tomorrow, she said, it would be three degrees colder. Her voice sounded dramatic, as though this difference of three degrees would have an impact on world politics. I changed the channel and found myself looking at two panda bears. Two politicians stood outside their cage, shaking hands. I found these panda bears meddling in human politics improper. But then it occurred to me that I, too, was involved in politics, so in that sense I was no better than these pandas. Locked in my invisible cage, I am living proof of human rights violations, and I’m not even human.

  I turned off the television, which wanted to go on torturing me with boring images. On the dark screen, the blurry figure of a corpulent woman appeared. This was me: a woman with narrow shoulders and a low forehead. Because of her pointy snout, she wasn’t as cute as the pandas. I began to knead my inferiority complex like a yeasty dough. This activity was familiar to me from childhood. But then a pair of sparklers lit up in my eyeballs.

  Yes, that’s exactly how it used to be. There was someone to comfort me. When was that?

  •

  I was the only girl who was white and sturdily built; all the others were slender and brown. They had stubby noses and wide foreheads. I could see their pride in their shoulders. “I envy the other girls. They look beautiful,” I said with coquettish sentimentality, “I want to be like them.” Then the human being in question said: “They’re all brown bears, and in case you don’t know yet: not every bear is a brown bear. Stay just the way you are. Besides, given the wildness of your character, you could attract a large audience if you were to pursue a career on the stage.” He stood there holding a broom in his hand. He was one of the many workers who cleaned the daycare centers and schools. They were always there, but I never learned their names. No one ever called them by name. During the day, they worked anonymously, and in the evening
s they probably lived with their families, using only their first names. I thanked the man — one of the countless workers — for his words.

  I was a strong girl and could toss my playmates around like nothing, and one day, when I was yet again flinging some kid into the air, the child called me an ugly name that surprised me. Suddenly I noticed that all the children except me wore the exact same kerchief tied around their necks. I did not belong. Unlike them, I didn’t live with my parents. Perhaps that’s why the stage became my home, and that’s where my life unfolded. I was free, I received applause and experienced such ecstasy I nearly fainted.

  •

  Wolfgang visited me unaccompanied. Against my better judgment, I couldn’t resist showing him my fresh-baked manuscript, so steaming fresh. Wolfgang read it through without taking off his jacket or sitting down. When he had read the last sentence, he plopped his body down into a chair like a heavy sack and said: “At times I felt so desperate I went back to biting my fingernails. It was a terrible task, trying to keep you motivated. Your creativity is back. I’m so relieved!”

  “Do you think it’s good?”

  “Absolutely! Just keep writing. The neckerchief episode is sure to be a hit. All the other children belonged to the Young Pioneers — all except you. When I was growing up, we had an organization called the Scouts. My friends were all members, and they all had the same kerchief tied around their necks. I envied them; I wasn’t allowed to participate.”

  “Why couldn’t you participate?”

  “My mother was against it. She said it was an ideology, and I didn’t understand what she meant.”

  “What sort of ideology?”

  “I’m not sure exactly. Maybe something like self-sacrifice. Sacrificing yourself for the fatherland, say. My mother said they shouldn’t plant ideas like that in children’s heads.”

  “That was her opinion?”

  “Yes. What was your mother like?”

  “The weather’s so beautiful today. Let’s go out.”