Memoirs of a Polar Bear

by Yoko Tawada

  When I heard the words “polar bear,” I thought not only of the problem bear I’d tried to integrate into that old wild-animal ensemble, but also of a bear I’d seen in a theater production for children. She was an actress, and if I wasn’t mistaken, her name was Tosca. Probably I’d been given a ticket by a professional connection and went to the show to pass the time. I’d never heard of Tosca, but when I took my seat in the theater I heard the couple next to me talking about her.

  Though she’d graduated from ballet school with top honors, Tosca hadn’t been able to land a role in a single production, not even in Swan Lake, as everyone had expected. And so she was regularly performing for children. Her mother was a celebrity who’d emigrated from Canada to Socialist East Germany and had written an autobiography. The book was long out of print, and no one had ever read it, so it was really more of a legend.

  I was sitting in the first row and caught my breath when the gigantic white soft body appeared onstage. I’d never seen anything like it: a soft, feather-light living mass that made me feel its weightiness, its warm flesh.

  In this play for children, Tosca had no spoken lines, but sometimes her jaws moved. I stared at her mouth and soon found it difficult to breathe as it became clear to me that she was trying to speak. I couldn’t understand her. The stage lighting was no doubt avant-garde for that period: the curtains, simulating the Northern Lights, constantly dispatched mysterious waves of light in our direction. The color of Tosca’s fur changed along with the light, shifting from ivory to hues of marble and hoarfrost. During the performance, our eyes met a total of four times . . .

  •

  To our surprise, the nine polar bears formed a union only a week after their arrival. The demands they presented to Pankov were anything but demure, and when he ignored them, they began a tumultuous strike.

  These polar bears could deliver political speeches in fluent German. From their mouths I learned new terminology that no doubt had its origins in the labor movement. None of their demands seemed exactly typical for bears. The overtime pay; the monthly paid leave for women; a cafeteria serving fresh meat and seaweed from the Baltic; shower facilities with ice-cold water; air-conditioning; and a library for the use of all circus employees. Even though we humans could have used showers and a cafeteria, we’d never have had the courage to confront Pankov with such demands. Our days and nights were filled with such frantic labor that we had long since forgotten the very terms of our contracts.

  Pankov was red-faced with fury when the union representative read out the list of demands. “Shower facilities? A cafeteria? Are you nuts? You can go wash outside somewhere, and eat as much of your weird seaweed as you like, I don’t care. But none of that has anything to do with me. How dare you even think of organizing a strike here! Our country is the Land of the Workers. That’s why we don’t have strikes here! Get it?”

  Deep inside, Pankov was a man of the Middle Ages; he didn’t think bears possessed human rights any more than slaves. But remnants of a weakness for the life of the mind could still be discerned in him: he rejected all the bears’ demands, with the exception of promising to build a small library. These bears had come from a great nation and weren’t accustomed to making compromises with small countries like ours. The most familiar form of approach to them were military invasions. They had no intention whatever of ending the strike or of thanking Pankov for the library.

  When I knocked on Pankov’s door to give him a bottle of illegal vodka, he’d already been living under siege for ten days. He looked like a wilted houseplant. When he saw the vodka in my hand, he gave a feeble smile. Then he pulled out two glasses that looked like they were meant for holding toothbrushes, and poured the vodka. We raised our glasses, I pretended to drink, and Pankov really did toss back the spirits. He temporarily recovered his strength, and I took advantage of this interlude to tell him about Tosca. Hearing the words “polar bear” immediately sobered him up again, so he poured himself another big glassful and swallowed it. I waited a few seconds and then suggested that we invite Tosca to join us and put together a show with her. “If I can conjure up a beautiful number with Tosca, the skepticism of our visitors from the Kremlin will instantly melt away, even if the strike proves as eternal as Siberian frost. Don’t worry, the Russian politicians will never notice that Tosca is not from the Soviet Union but from Canada.”

  For polar bears, national identity has always been a foreign concept. It’s common for them to get pregnant in Greenland, give birth in Canada, then raise the children in the Soviet Union. They possess no nationality, no passport. They never go into exile and cross national borders without a visa.

  Like a drunkard clutching at a straw as he drowns in a vodka sea, Pankov clung to my words. He instructed his secretary to call the children’s theater, then fell snoringly asleep on the sofa before hearing the results. The secretary made all the necessary arrangements by telephone to invite Tosca to be an artist-in-residence. She didn’t have a role at the moment and was bored. The artistic director of the children’s theater immediately authorized her to work in our circus.

  Later I learned that all this information had been altered if not falsified outright. It wasn’t true that there hadn’t been any suitable roles for Tosca. She could have had a role, but she hadn’t liked it. She’d protested, and a dispute with the theater had ensued. An East German playwright had crowbarred Heinrich Heine’s epic poem Atta Troll into a children’s play in which Tosca was to play the role of Atta Troll’s wife, the black bear Mumma. Tosca said she had nothing against playing Mumma. She’d even consider it an honor to paint her body black, allow a bear tamer to place her in chains, and perform an obscene dance in the marketplace. But she was unwilling to accept the plot in its current form. Her husband (and dancing partner) had longed for freedom and liberated himself from the bear tamer’s chains. Tosca was offended by the assumption that Mumma was less noble-minded because she didn’t also strive for freedom. Was it subservience to present one’s art on the street — art created using one’s own body — and to demand payment for this? Was a Hanseatic merchant more respectable than a street artist, even though he too worked for money? And what about the prima donna of the Soviet ballet in Leningrad who exposed large portions of naked skin for her audience?

  There was something else too that troubled Tosca: Mumma was raising her child on her own, as had always been the norm among bears. But a mother bear biting off and eating one of her youngest son’s ears out of love was something that could never happen in nature. Tosca felt that the playwright should revise this passage. She was also put off by the mocking tone in which the narrator spoke of the success Mumma enjoyed in the capitalist city Paris and the white bear she took as a lover. What do you have against Paris? What do you have against polar bears?

  The director and dramaturge both found it inappropriate, if not unforgivably impertinent, for an actor to criticize the content of a classic work. The dramaturge felt this to be an affront to his dignity, and the director burst into tears and complained to the theater’s administration. The artistic director was equally outraged when he heard about Tosca’s audacity, but worker protection laws prevented him from firing her. Just as he was stamping in rage, the query arrived from the circus, asking about Tosca’s availability for a residency.

  Tosca accepted the invitation at once, overflowing with joy. But when she arrived at the circus, transported in a splendidly ornate cage with large wheels, her first disappointment awaited. When her vehicle passed the quarters of the nine polar bears, they immediately began to heckle her: “Strike-breaker! Scab!”

  When Tosca set eyes on me, a flash of recognition lit up her face. She tried to rise to her feet, but the ceiling of the cage was too low. I walked over to her, she gazed at me and sniffed my breath. I thought I saw a sort of affection in her eyes.

  That night I couldn’t fall asleep for a long time, just like when I’d gotten my first puppy as a child. At fi
ve in the morning I woke for the last time from a shallow sleep and couldn’t stay in bed any longer. I pushed the wagon cage into the rehearsal space and sat down on the floor in front of Tosca. She regarded me with curiosity and pressed her paws against the bars as if she wanted to join me. Time stood still, I didn’t move. When I was certain that Tosca was completely calm, I opened the cage. She slowly stepped outside, sniffing at my body here and there, licked the palm of my hand when I showed it to her, and finally rose up effortlessly on her hind legs. She was at least twice my height. At that moment I realized how small the brown bears were. I placed a sugar cube on my hand, and Tosca returned her front legs to the earth to sweep the sweetness from my palm with one swipe of her tongue.

  “She has no difficulty at all standing on two legs. This ability is probably rooted in her genes.” I heard the voice of my husband, apparently he’d been watching us the whole time through the crack of the door.

  “What are you doing up so early, Markus?”

  “Tosca inherited her abilities from her mother. Her mother was a circus star.”

  “I don’t think you can inherit things like that,” I replied absentmindedly.

  With a gesture that swept my opinion to one side, my husband went on: “Why not? It took so-and-so many thousands of years before humankind could walk on two legs. But it only takes us a year to learn this. In other words, the results of the training have been inscribed in the genetic code and passed on.”

  In the course of the afternoon, an arch-shaped bridge was delivered, constructed of massive iron rods. We had it assembled and placed in the rehearsal room. Tosca put one paw on the bridge and carefully, one step at a time, climbed up it, stopping when she reached its peak. Then she sniffed the air all around her, extending her neck as far as she could and swaying her snout slowly back and forth. It might have been a scene in a theatrical performance. “This scene here is already a work of art fit for the stage!” my husband said, nodding in satisfaction, and suddenly Pankov was standing beside him with a proud expression on his face. “Sooner or later the nine polar bears will give up their ridiculous strike and come back to work as nicely as you please. Then we’ll have all of them stand in a row on this bridge. It’ll look fantastic! I had this fake bridge built to bear at least ten thousand pounds. I even have a name for it: the Bridge to the Future. Pretty swell, right? When it’s a hit, please don’t forget that the name was my idea.”

  In the afternoon, Markus brought a blue rubber ball he used for training the seals. Tosca sniffed at the ball, then gave it a shove with her snout, and when it started rolling, she ran after it light-footedly. As a reward for this, she received a couple of sugar cubes from me and then repeated the game.

  It was too easy — and for this reason almost frustrating — to rehearse a new scene with Tosca. I didn’t have to teach her anything. I only had to get her to repeat the things she’d done out of curiosity, and then combine them into sequences. All I had to do was figure out how to make certain that Tosca really would repeat certain things during the performance. This would guarantee enough of a show to make our audience happy.

  Relieved, Markus and Pankov went and got a crate of beer to celebrate, but I wasn’t satisfied yet. Pushing a ball around with her snout wasn’t really in keeping with the divine aura of Polar Bear Tosca. Any second-rate actor could ascend the Bridge to the Future and gaze longingly into the distance. No, there would be no embarrassing overacting with Tosca. Wasn’t there a refreshing idea that would shake the audience awake? I smiled self-ironically, because my ambition had suddenly returned.

  At that time, the first tentative signs of a depression had been making their appearance, much as they had shortly after my first wedding. Back then, no one in our country spoke about depression. I secretly called it “my tristesse.” My first tristesse arrived when I had given birth to my daughter and was spending most of my time, like any other mammal, nursing my baby and changing her diaper. On the side, I had to help my first husband with his paperwork, do his laundry, and iron his costumes. I had given up my career as a wild-animal trainer and for a while was just the housewife of the circus. The vacuum I felt inside me was not without weight. On the contrary. Every time I briefly stopped moving my hands, pausing in my work for a few seconds, the vacuum in my chest swelled up, stifling me. During the night I would turn over in bed every five minutes because the vacuum had settled in my chest and I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to stand onstage again beneath a shower of spotlights, my eardrums split in two by the crowd’s applause. Above all, I wanted to work with animals again. It seemed to me that if I kept playing housewife, the world would soon forget all about me. Moved by this worry, I’d immediately said yes to the risky offer to try an act with predators and had entrusted my little daughter to my mother’s care.

  And then, after I married my second husband, Markus, that old tristesse returned. Only performing onstage could punch a hole in the dismal sky, surprising the audience with a bright, sunny blue.

  •

  Markus, concerned, asked what was wrong — it had been quite a while since I’d last uttered a word. “The sky is so triste,” I said.

  “Your Anna has been with your mother all this time, you never see her. Is that really all right for you?”

  I was surprised to learn my husband had been thinking about my daughter.

  “Why don’t you go visit her?”

  “I don’t have the time. You know the bus is on a ridiculous schedule. I can’t let myself think about her. That won’t help anything.”

  •

  After German reunification, people might be criticizing my parenting style, but at the time there were many mothers who had no choice but to leave their children in the hands of official caregivers and visit them only on weekends. Some professions even forced women to go for months on end without seeing their children. No one held this against them. We were unfamiliar with maternal love — it wasn’t even a myth. The churches in which the Virgin Mary held her child in her arms as a model to us all had been shuttered. When the suppression of religion came to an end, the myth of maternal love rose like a fata morgana from the horizon of the border. It pained me that after 1989 Tosca was so harshly criticized for having rejected her son Knut. Some said that Tosca had relinquished her son to strangers because she was from the GDR. Others wrote in their newspapers that Tosca had lost her maternal instincts while working in a circus known for its animal abuses, under typical Socialist stress levels. Invoking “stress” in this context struck me as misguided. There was no stress before 1989, only suffering. Equally misplaced was the notion “maternal instinct.” With animals, childrearing is a matter not of instinct but of art. It can’t be very much different for humans or they wouldn’t keep adopting children of different species.

  •

  Maybe it was my fear of the next tristesse installment that so inflamed my ambition. “I’m not satisfied with just presenting some ordinary act with Tosca on the bridge or with the ball. We have to offer the audience something completely new, something that has never before existed in the circus world!” I slammed these intentions down on the table without concealing my ambition. Pankov stopped pouring the beer down his gullet and remarked that perhaps we could find some new ideas in books about ethnology or collections of myths. People in the circus generally tried to avoid giving much of an intellectual impression, risking as they did attention from the secret police. Besides, they were afraid of spoiling their audience’s appetite with intellectual displays. With his ill-tempered vulgarity, Pankov was trying to make everyone forget he held a PhD in anthropology.

  My husband and I got the day off for research. Pankov wrote us a letter of introduction and sent us off to a public library since our own new library didn’t yet exist. We immediately found several reference books about the North Pole and immersed ourselves in them, forgetting both our objective and ourselves.

  For a long time, polar bears had no co
ntact with human beings and had no way of knowing how dangerous these small two-legged creatures were. It was reported that one polar bear’s curiosity had driven him to approach a small airplane that had landed in his territory. The amateur hunter got out of the airplane, took his time aiming his rifle, and shot the bear dead. It would have taken a miracle for the bullet to miss its mark. Polar bear hunting became a popular sport, as it required neither technical skills nor the willingness to take risks. To be sure, a person who wished to derive actual profit from bears was obliged to capture them alive, and this did require some skill. Despite all efforts to the contrary, some bears died of the anesthesia, and others during transport. In 1956, the Soviet Union outlawed polar bear hunting, but the U.S., Canada, and Norway refused to stop. In 1960 alone, more than 300 polar bears were killed by amateur hunters.

  I gasped with animalistic fury. My husband was probably hoping to calm and relax me when he said: “What if you dress up as a cowboy and pretend to shoot at Tosca? A sound effect, Tosca falls to the ground and plays dead.”

  “I’m afraid it might just look silly. But then what?”

  “Suddenly Tosca gets up again and devours you. In other words, the victim of human violence rises from the grave and in the end conquers the evildoer.”

  “That won’t work. A circus audience isn’t looking for Socialist moral realism. Let’s try to find a mythological plot instead.”

  “So let’s read some books about Eskimos!”

  We read that the Eskimos — which is what we called the Inuit people in those days — possessed a great deal of knowledge about polar bears, but that scientists generally refused to accept it. The most frequent justification for this refusal was the absence of scientific proof.

  “We aren’t scientists — it’s OK for us to believe the Eskimos.”

  “Agreed. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a zoologist. Now I’ve finally found a good reason to be glad that didn’t happen.”