Memoirs of a Polar Bear
Page 7
“Where do you want to go?”
“I’d like to have a look at a department store.”
The building that was called a department store was a somewhat sadder version of the supermarket. There were fewer goods for sale per square foot than in a supermarket, and hardly any visitors. A salmon grill. A flowered bedsheet. A large mirror. A ladies’ handbag made of something like sealskin. We came to an area of the store with no customers at all. Loud music was trying to fill the empty space. A gramophone stood on a pedestal, and right beside it, a life-size, black-spotted white dog made of plastic. You could see his image on each of the phonograph records, which I found pathologically excessive. Wolfgang said, “a Dalmatian,” adding with a proud expression on his face, as if he’d just made an extraordinary discovery: “You know what? Dogs can look so different, but they’re all still dogs. Isn’t that baffling?”
I wanted to respond that I had already read this very same idea in “Investigations of a Dog,” but I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t want Wolfgang to think that I had gone and read a book yet again.
The department store didn’t just absorb my attention, it consumed my strength, even though I wasn’t looking for anything. I found no products I wanted to own. In the end, weariness overcame me, and all that remained was the feeling of being a loser. Next to the department store was an amusement park. I proposed that we pay it a visit. I realized right away that Wolfgang didn’t want to, but, as if exacting my revenge, I didn’t let up and kept sullenly and stubbornly insisting.
We sat side by side on a bench in the amusement park. Wolfgang asked me if I’d watched television.
“Yes, but it was boring. All you could see were panda bears.”
“Why do panda bears bore you?”
“Since they’re born wearing such impressive makeup, they don’t make any effort to be interesting. They neither master any stageworthy tricks nor write autobiographies.”
Wolfgang burst out laughing, which wasn’t typical.
A bone-thin woman walked past, a leather leash rolled up in her hand. But it wasn’t a dog walking in front of her, it was a tall man. Wolfgang got us ice cream in two ridiculously small paper cups. A single swipe of my tongue consumed all the vanilla ice cream. Then this same tongue gave voice to my deepest desire: “I want to emigrate to Canada!”
“What did you just say?”
“I want to emigrate. To CA-NA-DA!”
A bit of ice cream fell from Wolfgang’s tongue-spoon. “Why pick such a cold place?”
“I know you find it comfortable here, but do you really still not understand that it’s much too hot for me?”
Wolfgang’s eyes filled with tears, making him look like a dog. In general, dogs tend to run around like mad in search of their lost pack-mates. They howl plaintively — not out of love, but in existential fear, believing they can survive only in groups. I’m not egotistical, but I prefer to remain alone because this is the more rational, practical choice for effective foraging.
I took my taciturn leave of Wolfgang, looking forward to continuing my work in peace. I urgently wanted to return to my childhood gramophone memories. But what came into my head in the end was the gramophone I’d just seen in the department store, and next to it, to add insult to injury, was that snotty Dalmatian, behaving as if his inclusion went without saying — and he wasn’t even a real dog. The department store had replaced my recollection with a name-brand product.
Writing an autobiography means guessing or making up everything you’ve forgotten. I thought I’d already sufficiently described the character Ivan. In reality, I could no longer even remember him. Or rather: I was starting to remember him all too clearly, which could only mean this Ivan was now nothing more than my creation.
My memory lived in my arm’s movement. It surprised me during that conference. Every time I tried to imagine Ivan’s face before me, the painted face of Ivan the Foolish in a children’s book appeared.
New misgivings about my work began to germinate in me. Instead of concentrating on my autobiography, I picked up a book that I didn’t have to write myself, thank goodness, since someone else had already written it. I was reading to avoid writing, but perhaps it was more forgivable if I reread a book I’d read before instead of starting a new one. The dog in the story “Investigations of a Dog” was occupied with the present, he chose griping and brooding over cobbling together a plausible childhood. Why can’t I write the present? Why do I have to invent an authentic-sounding past? The author of the dog story never wrote an autobiography. Instead he enjoyed being now a monkey, now a mouse. During the day he assumed human form and went about his professional business. At night he bent over his writing. Once I was in Prague for a conference. The name Kafka was never mentioned. This city, too, experienced a spring later on, but Kafka lived long before, even before it was winter. He didn’t know life in our country, but he did know what I mean when I say that no one can ever act entirely according to his own free will.
One tropical day followed another. Within my roasting brain cells, the scraps of thought refused to cohere. In a land of snow and ice, I could have cooled my head and felt fresh again. I want to emigrate to Canada! I’d already escaped from the East to the West. But how can one escape from the West to the West? One day, though, I was waylaid by the correct answer to this question.
While out for a walk, I discovered a landscape covered with snow and ice. It was locked up inside a poster. Other posters hung beside it on the wall, and I realized I was standing in front of a movie theater. Without hesitation I looked for the entrance and bought a ticket as casually as if I did this every day, even though it was my first time at the movies. A Canadian film showed me life at the North Pole. Arctic hares, silver foxes, white carnivores, gray whales, seals, sea otters, orcas, and polar bears. Life there struck me as unimaginable, but at the same time I knew that this was the daily life of my ancestors.
On my way home, I took the shortcut through a dimly lit alleyway behind the train station. Five teenagers were standing around, and one of them was using a spray can to scrawl mysterious symbols on the wall. I was curious, so I stopped and observed them without commentary. The smallest one noticed my presence and tried to shoo me away. “Get out of here!”
I just can’t stand it when someone tries to exclude me from a group. Stubbornly, I refused to retreat even a single step. The other four youths one by one became aware of me. One of them asked where I was from. “Moscow.” Suddenly all five boys jumped on me as if “Moscow” were a code word signifying “Attack!” I didn’t want to injure these young, skinny humans with their soft, naked scalps, but I had to defend myself. So I distributed gentle blows with an open paw. The first boy fell on his bottom and, unable to get up again, gaped at me in surprise. The second one flew through the air, got up again, clenched his teeth and tried to ram me, but went sailing through the air once more, light as a feather. The third took a knife out of his jacket pocket and wanted to stab me. He approached, I bided my time, stepping to one side only at the very last moment, then turned around and pushed him — he slammed into a parked car, lost all self-control and hurled himself at me, his lip split open. I slipped aside again and gave him a gentle nudge from behind. He fell down, quickly got up — but this time, he took off. His friends were long since out of sight.
Homo sapiens is sluggish in its movements, as if it had too much superfluous flesh, but at the same time it is pathetically thin. It blinks too often, particularly at decisive moments when it needs to see everything. When nothing’s happening, it finds some reason for frenetic movement, but when actual danger threatens, its responses are far too slow. Homo sapiens is not made for battle, so it ought to be like rabbits and deer and learn the wisdom and the art of flight. But it loves battle and war. Who made these foolish creatures? Some humans claim to be made in God’s image — what an insult to God. There are, however, in the northern reaches of our E
arth, small tribes who can still remember that God looked like a bear.
On the ground lay a leather jacket of good quality. I took it home with me as a present for Wolfgang.
As if on cue, Wolfgang showed up the next day.
“I found a leather jacket on the street, and it’s too small for me. Do you want to try it on?”
At first Wolfgang glanced indifferently at the jacket, then his face froze. “Where did you get this jacket? Don’t you see the swastika?”
There was in fact a sort of cross painted on the jacket. I was horrified. Had I beaten up a team of Red Cross workers? Quickly I hunted for an excuse: “They attacked me first. It was self-defense.”
Fumes of rage were emanating from Wolfgang’s face. Probably it was all a misunderstanding, I wanted to get it unknotted as quickly as possible. “Really, I hardly touched them. If necessary, I’ll go see them and apologize. They misunderstood me. I said ‘Moscow,’ and the whole group attacked me. Is ‘Moscow’ a code word?”
Wolfgang sat down with a sigh and explained to me that according to recent statistics, most neo-Nazi attacks were carried out against Russian Germans as pale as me, as opposed to people with dark skin or black Ottoman hair. Those with radical right-wing leanings, he said, feared individuals who looked like them but were nonetheless different.
“I don’t look like them,” I protested.
“Maybe not. But a name like Moscow can stir up feelings, sometimes even rage.”
Wolfgang called the head of KAOS and then informed the police. Later someone showed me a newspaper article about an author in exile being assaulted by right-wing extremists. Since I hadn’t been injured at all, the article didn’t say that the victim had been hospitalized with serious injuries, which would have made the story more newsworthy. I hadn’t gotten so much as a scratch, but the fact is nonetheless that I — a female — had been attacked by five men, justification enough for Wolfgang and his friends to ask the Canadian embassy whether Canada would accept me as a political refugee since it was too dangerous for me to remain in the Federal Republic of Germany. I suspected KAOS of wanting to get rid of me because I was eating too much salmon and writing too little. “So now we sit back,” Wolfgang said in a rosy voice with lots of thorns, “and wait to hear from the Canadian embassy.”
•
My longing for this ice-cold land remained as powerful as ever, but an unexpected worry sprang up within me. At first it seemed insignificant, expressing itself only hesitantly in the question: Would I have to learn English? Had all the effort I’d put into learning German been in vain? I hoped it won’t confuse me to be suddenly writing my life in several languages at the same time. Another worry that now surfaced seemed even more threatening than the first: Everything I’ve already committed to paper is safeguarded from loss, it’s been saved. But what about the events awaiting me in the new world? I can’t learn the new language as quickly as life moves forward. Something that can disappear is called “I.” Dying means not being here any longer. I never was afraid of death before, but having begun my autobiography, I now felt frightened: I might die before I finish writing my life.
My ancestors were no doubt unacquainted with insomnia. Compared to them, I ate too much and slept too little. My evolution was clearly a regression. I pulled out the bottle of vodka that I kept in my hiding place behind the desk for sleepless nights. In Moscow, I’d needed my good connections to get hold of a bottle of Moskovskaya, but in West Berlin you can buy it at every train station kiosk. I held the bottle to my snout like a trumpet, and, as if blowing a fanfare, quenched my thirst. At some point I could no longer remove the bottle from my face. When I tried to pull it off, it hurt. It had grown into me. I was a unicorn and saw a polar bear approaching me, and my terror threw me into the ice-cold water. The polar bear stood there with no prey in his mouth, panting in irritation. I knew him, he was my uncle. Why did he want to eat me? “Dear uncle,” I said in a friendly voice, but he bared his teeth at me and roared. Oh, that’s right, he didn’t understand my language. No wonder. In the water, I felt safe, the water was my element. Beside me, another unicorn was swimming. She whispered to me: “You can’t afford to be drunk. Watch out! The orcas are coming.”
“What nonsense. There aren’t any orcas here,” yet another unicorn replied.
“Yes there are. They’re all emigrating because there’s nothing left to eat in their native countries.”
“Let’s run away together!”
So the three of us swam north, shoulder to shoulder. We dove down into the ice-blue waves and popped back to the surface, we thrust our heads into the sea between bobbing ice floes, then jumped back out again. It was “beastly good fun” — as young people liked to say in those days — to cruise the ocean with friends. Knocking my head against drift ice didn’t hurt a bit. I soon relinquished my vigilance. Then something breached the surface: at first it looked like a small, harmless ice floe, but it turned out to be a gigantic iceberg with only its tip visible. My horn struck the colossus with a cracking sound and broke right off. No matter, I thought aloud, the horn was merely decorative, but soon I was forced to realize that without the horn I had lost all equilibrium. My body spun around its spine and got sucked down into a whirlpool. Help! I need air! I saw many newborn seals struggling with their little hands. Apparently they were drowning just like me. I would have liked to make a snack of them if I hadn’t been so caught up in my own drowning.
The images of the night vanished, I woke up and suddenly felt afraid of setting off for Canada. I forced myself to sit down at my desk, but was not yet in control of all my senses and let my gaze drift out the window. On the street, a boy was riding very slowly on a strange bicycle that resembled a dachshund. When he tugged hard on the handlebars, the front wheel rose up in the air, and the boy was riding on only the back wheel. He rode in a circle for a little while, then let the front wheel return to Earth. Then he turned around, still riding, so that in the end he was sitting backward. Clearly he was in training for the circus stage, even if he didn’t know when or even if he would ever be allowed to perform. Then he fell over on his side as if a wicked, invisible hand suddenly had given him a shove. His bare knees turned red. But no pain could keep him from continuing. He got up and for his next number attempted a headstand on the moving bike. The words “steering wheel” occurred to me — that’s it, a steering wheel is just what I need to steer my destiny. For this, I’ll have to keep writing my autobiography. My bicycle is my language. I won’t write about the past, I’ll write about all the things that are still going to happen to me. My life will unfold in exactly the way I’ve set it down on the page.
•
At the airport in Toronto I was given a warm-hearted welcome by an icy wind. I knew how I could present a scene in which I was met at the airport by strangers, but that would have repeated the scene in Berlin which I had already written. How is an author to avoid repetition when one and the same scene keeps repeating itself in her life? How did others who emigrated to Canada write about their lives? When faced with such questions, the best recourse is to visit a good bookstore.
“The literature of migration is over there.” Friedrich pointed me to a shelf that still bore its old label, Philosophy. There was such a large selection I couldn’t decide which spine to touch first. Friedrich recommended three books to me, and I bought all three of them.
According to the first book, the Canadian state treated new immigrants well from the moment they arrived. For each newly naturalized citizen, a ceremony was organized at Town Hall at which the mayor himself appeared, shook the hand of each new citizen, and presented a bouquet. I copied out this passage.
In the next scene, the book’s narrator was attending a language school. The thought of this new language was weighing heavily on my mind. German was still new enough to me, I didn’t need an even newer language. A photo in the book showed a classroom in the language school, filled with flim
sy, rickety chairs. I thought it might not be worth emigrating if it meant cramming my bottom into a narrow little chair to study more new grammar. And then the author wrote that the classroom was well heated, in fact almost so much so that you might worry about the waste of energy. But all such worries were ill-founded, the narrator explained, for Canada has an unlimited energy supply at its disposal. What a terrifying thought! I was fed up to my pointy snout with this book, so I threw it into a corner and picked up the second one. The author of this book had traveled by boat from the south of the New Continent to the north and secretly snuck into Canada. “I arrived at night, in the dark, in a small, deserted fishing village. I was freezing cold, so I took off my heavy, sea-water-soaked clothing and wrapped myself in a fishing net. The smell of seaweed filled my nose.” The cold, soaked clothing and the smell of seaweed were so much to my liking that I greedily copied out this passage. But this author didn’t stay on the beach for long either, the next day he went straight to the authorities, and later he too wound up in a language school. I shut the book and opened the third one approximately in the middle, I wanted to land right in the middle of life. Awaiting me there, I found a first encounter, longing, a first kiss: I was immediately drawn in.
•
I enrolled in a vocational training school. At first the only goal I had in mind was learning English. In those days I enjoyed speaking with anyone and everyone, and wasted no time worrying about what others might think of me. In the course of the weeks I spent there, I was increasingly struck by the fact that I was the only one in my class with a snow-white appearance. A feeling of inferiority blossomed like a poisonous flower. No one was insulting me, and probably no one paid any attention to my coloration, but the mirror showed me a pallid face and whispered that I looked unhealthy and sad. I began spending time after class beside a lake at the edge of town, lying in the sun and awaiting the brown miracle, but my nature would not allow any color to stick to me. In my class there was a boy named Christian who made a pleasant impression on me. He asked whether there was something troubling me. Instead of answering his question, I suggested we go swimming together on Sunday. He immediately agreed without making me aware of the slightest barrier.