Memoirs of a Polar Bear

by Yoko Tawada

  This same book said that Eskimos believed that polar bears plugged up their anuses when it was time to hibernate.

  “How about having Tosca put a cork in her butthole onstage and then shoot it into the air with a fart?”

  “Hmm, tasteful. Why don’t you perform that one yourself?”

  A few Eskimos report having seen polar bears pushing ice floes around with their snouts while swimming in the sea. This was presumably a clever hunting strategy, allowing them to approach their quarry undetected. I thought of Tosca and the way she immediately started pushing the ball around when I placed it in front of her.

  “What if you get into a baby carriage and let Tosca push you around with her snout?”

  This idea struck me as not half bad. “But are these the roles the audience expects of us? With me as the baby and Tosca as the mother? Should I really let her mother me?”

  “The founders of the Roman Empire were suckled by a she-wolf. All heroes capable of earth-shattering deeds were adopted and nursed by animals.”

  “How about a musical? At the beginning we’ll show my childhood, with me drinking bear’s milk, and in the end I’ll be the Empress.”

  “Excellent idea. But maybe you’ve forgotten: we’ve come to the library to look for an idea that can be staged quickly. I don’t think that in a matter of days we can write and compose a musical.”

  We went on reading. Several Eskimos report that polar bears press snow into their wounds to stop the bleeding: a beautiful image, but not really suitable for the stage.

  Many Eskimos believe — the book claimed — that polar bears are left-handed. It could be interesting if Tosca were to go into a classroom set up onstage and write words on the blackboard with her left hand. From Pankov’s point of view, the most important audience members were the Russians, so Tosca would have to write using the Cyrillic alphabet. I had a feeling that Cyrillic script might be too much for the left hand of a polar bear. My husband replied: “But Chinese ideograms are much more complicated than Cyrillic script, and in China the panda bears are capable of writing ideograms — or at least the simplified characters mandated by Communist reformers.”

  When I told Pankov about the literate panda bears, he gnashed his teeth in envy and claimed that was just propaganda: pro-panda propaganda disseminated by the Chinese government in an effort to justify their writing reforms. I asked him what made it propaganda. Was it the message that even bears can write if there are fewer brushstrokes in the characters?

  “What was his answer?”

  “He just kept insisting that pandas can’t write. Regardless how simplified the ideograms, written characters are written characters, and panda bears are panda bears. But I asked myself what we would do if the pandas did in fact turn out to be naturally more intelligent than we were. Probably the best we could do would be to conceal this fact from our Kremlin guests.”

  “You can’t compare the intelligence of different sorts of animals. Besides, the circus stage isn’t the place to demonstrate one’s intelligence. And in any case feeling envious of the pandas and their brains won’t do us any good. Every bear species has its own strengths. It isn’t the point of a circus to demonstrate the national IQ. By the way, do you remember the children’s story The Three Bears?”

  As always, I was surprised by Markus’s sudden change of topic. “It could look sweet and interesting if the bear were to do banal things onstage such as humans perform every day: sit down at the table, place a napkin on her lap, open a jar of jam and spread the strawberry jelly on a slice of bread, drink cocoa from a mug, and so on.”

  My husband remained in a good mood for quite some time, and even the insolent tone adopted by the librarian who shooed us out of the building before closing time didn’t bother him.

  “Who’d have thought it? I actually like spending time at the library. Doing research and collecting ideas for choreography are activities far better suited to me than ordering dangerous animals about onstage.”

  His cheeks looked sunken, his eyes were encircled by shadow. His hair had already taken on the whiteness of hoarfrost, while his eyebrows had grown too bushy. He no longer had to grapple with live bears: this thought filled him with relief, opening the floodgates within him, and the years that had been dammed up inside him all this time now flowed back out, causing him to age drastically in the space of a few days.

  The next morning we got an early start practicing scenarios with Tosca that were borrowed from everyday life. She could effortlessly open a jar of jam, but smearing the jam on the bread proved impossible for her. It wasn’t that she lacked dexterity, it’s just that she preferred to take all the jam out of the jar at once, using her tongue. I couldn’t think of any trick that might get her to do what I wanted, and she couldn’t be talked into it either, since we lacked a common language.

  “I’m out of ideas. Back in a minute, I’m going for a smoke,” my husband said, and left me alone with Tosca. He’d been smoking more and more, and taking ever more frequent sips of vodka. I looked wistfully at Tosca. She lay on her back like a baby, like my daughter Anna when she was small. My thoughts drifted to Anna, I wondered how she was, whether she’d made any friends at school.

  The next day Markus returned to the library, this time alone. Even though we didn’t know yet what our show was going to look like, I could still get started rehearsing Tosca’s entrance and exit with her, elements whose importance is underestimated by laypersons. I strode into a corner of the rehearsal room, taking care never to turn my back to her. On the ground were balls, a bucket, and stuffed animals. Tosca hurried over to me and sniffed at various of my body parts, paying particular attention to my rear end, but also to my mouth and hands. I thought I’d have to suppress a laugh, but found it was far more than laughter I needed to suppress.

  My husband hadn’t yet returned for lunch, and my stomach was growling. I asked Tosca to go into her cage and wait for me there. At that very moment, Pankov’s secretary came into the room, bringing a piece of equipment, apparently some sort of weird tricycle.

  “I thought you might be interested in this tricycle for small bears. We just got it as a gift from a Russian circus. It’s a hand-me-down and not in perfect condition, but it still works,” she said. The tricycle was solidly built, and I sat down on it, but couldn’t make the pedals move. Tosca was watching me enviously from her cage. The tricycle was obviously too small for Tosca. I’d have to ask Pankov to have a tricycle specially built for her and then listen to a lecture about being over budget.

  With my knees up near my ears, I sat on the tricycle, thinking back on the days when I used to deliver telegrams by bicycle. My current wages were certainly not high, but my memory of that period bore the heading “Poverty.” Later on, all the financial reports in the GDR were black and gleaming. Being in the red, someone told me, was an attribute of capitalism and not relevant to our way of life.

  Every day, riding between the Telegraph Office and my clients’ doors, I’d practice bicycle tricks. When I increased my speed to cut a sharp curve without stepping on the brakes, my ankles just grazed the earth racing past beneath me. Centrifugal force held an erotic attraction for me. Sometimes, wanting to rise into the air, I would pull the handlebars up to my chest until the front wheel left the ground. There I would be, cruising along on just my back wheel, filled with euphoria, even pride. Or I would lift my butt off the seat, slowly shifting my weight onto my wrists and raising my hips up high until eventually I felt that I could take both feet off the pedals simultaneously to execute a headstand on the moving bike. I was spontaneous, courageous, fearless. Acrobatics was my dream — I wanted to jump over a rainbow and ride a cloud.

  I saw the black flame in Tosca’s pupils flicker. Everything around me was filled with light, so bright it blinded me and made the line dividing the wall from the ceiling disappear. I still felt no fear of Tosca, but there was something frightening in the atmosphere
surrounding her. I’d entered a realm where it was forbidden to set foot. And there, in darkness, the grammars of many languages lost their color, they melted and combined, then froze solid again, they drifted in the ocean and joined the drifting floes of ice. I sat on the same iceberg as Tosca and understood every word she said to me. Beside us floated a second iceberg with an Inuk and a snow hare sitting on it, immersed in conversation.

  “I want to know everything about you.” It was Tosca who said this to me, and I could understand every word. “What were you afraid of when you were little?” Her question surprised me — no one had ever asked me about my fears. I was a famous trainer of wild animals, afraid of nothing. But in fact there was something that frightened me.

  As a child, I sometimes felt behind my back the presence of insects. One late-summer dusk, I was playing alone in the front hall of my apartment building when I sensed that someone was standing behind me. I turned around and saw an old beetle, its feelers rolled halfway up. Its legs were so thin as to be almost invisible, it was all they could do to drag the unwieldy carapace along with them. I was no longer sure whether the legs were the main part of the insect and its back only a sort of luggage, or whether the hard shield also had blood flowing through it, assuming insects had blood at all. I just wasn’t sure. The knapsack with school books on my back was a carapace shielding me from attackers. I’d kept it on so long it was growing into my flesh. Like plants sending out their roots beneath the earth, my veins without my noticing grew out of my back and into my knapsack. If I were to take it off now, my skin would come off too and bleed.

  “Are you there?” my mother asked. “I have to go take care of something. You can have dinner alone.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To the doctor.”

  “To the dentist?”

  “No, the gynecologist.”

  I ran outside when I heard the word “gynecologist.” I still hadn’t had a chance to take off my schoolbag. I ran in the direction of green surface, the familiar landscape around our house was no longer visible, there was a smell of dark green. The color green smelled green. Everything red smelled red, it smelled of blood and red roses. The color white smelled of snow, but winter still loitered at a distance, the snow would remain out of my reach for a long time yet. I stopped, unable to go on running, breathing like a bellows, both my hands propped on my knees. On the crown of my head, a tiny aviator with silk-thin wings alighted. I brushed it away, and it flew off but then at once came back again, returning to land on exactly the same spot. I reached out my hand, blindly grasping for my prey. Before my eyes, I slowly opened my fist, in which the powdery-dry remnants of wings glimmered in the cold light. The insect’s belly was no longer there. Had it been flying without its torso when I caught it? Or had its belly disappeared into thin air when I squeezed too tightly? Who knows, perhaps even the hairs on my head were nothing more than insects. Each hair was a terribly thin, long animal that had clamped its teeth into my scalp to suck the blood from my head. I began to hate my hair and plucked out strand after strand of it.

  On the back of my left heel, I discovered a birthmark I’d never seen before. I touched it cautiously — and it turned into an ant. I was all eyes, trying to read the face of the ant. Beneath my focused gaze, the tar-black mask expanded: it had neither eyes nor mouth. My bladder was suddenly full, I stood up and opened my legs wide. The exit path for the urine grew warm, but nothing came. I stared at the ground with its ant-body punctuation. Ants everywhere! Nothing but ants! When I finally understood this, something hot passed through my urethra, bubbling and running down the inside of my thigh. The ants were getting a shower, but this only seemed to strengthen their life force, and they began to climb up my legs, following the path of the urine. Help! Help!

  I laid my head in Tosca’s lap and sobbed. Finally, at my age, I’d found a friend in whose lap I could weep over a terrifying memory. The tears tasted like sugarcane, it would have been a shame to stop crying too quickly, so I raised my voice and recommenced bawling at the top of my lungs. “What’s wrong with you?” asked a voice on a completely different wavelength from Tosca’s. The night-table lamp came on, and I saw my husband’s plaid pajamas. Presumably I’d just been dreaming.

  “Did you have a nightmare?”

  The situation to me was more embarrassing than anything else, I quickly wiped my tears away with my fingers. “As a child, I was afraid of insects. I just dreamed about that.”

  “Insects? You mean like ants?”

  “Yes.”

  My husband laughed using his entire upper body, even his pajamas crinkled with laughter.

  “You aren’t afraid of lions and bears, but you’re scared of ants?”

  “Yup.”

  “Do worms scare you too?”

  “They really do. But spiders are the worst.” I was alert now and knew I wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep quickly, so I told him about horrific spiders.

  At the time, I knew a boy in my neighborhood named Horst. Unlike other boys, he smelled refined — though I couldn’t say exactly what he smelled of. “There’s an orchard behind the train station. Let’s go steal some fruit.”

  I didn’t care whether he was lying or not, I found the idea exciting and followed him. There really was a hidden orchard in which numerous apples were ripening blood-red. Their branches formed a ceiling that was low enough for our robber hands to reach. When I stood on tiptoe and tried to pluck a large, gleaming-red apple, a spider suddenly descended on its thread elevator right in front of me. A grimace — or, no, it was the pattern on its back, but it looked like a face, and it was screaming so loudly it hurt my eardrums, I thought, but no, that’s my own voice! The owner of the orchard heard my screams, hurried over and found a girl lying unconscious on the ground. He tended to me. When I recovered my senses, he brought me home without a scolding. A few days later, Horst suggested another prank. This time he wanted us to steal sweets from an emporium’s warehouse. The main impediment was a watchdog kept chained to the warehouse door. The dog pulled back his upper lip and gave a warning growl. His language was unambiguous. I said to Horst, “He’ll bite if we try to pass. Let’s go home!”

  “Are you saying you’re afraid of this little dog?” Horst spat in disgust and began to advance.

  “He’ll bite!” By the time I got the words out, the dog had already sunk his teeth into the boy’s calf and was shaking his head without letting go. Horst’s screams are engraved on my eardrums forever.

  Later Horst and I happened once to walk past the warehouse. On that day, the dog was in a good mood and wagged his tail at us. His eyes invited me to stroke his head. Without hesitation, I walked up to him and patted him between the ears. Horst stared at me, aghast.

  The thoughts of animals were written clearly on their faces as if spelled out with an alphabet. I found it difficult to understand that this language was not just illegible to other people but in fact completely invisible. Some people even claimed that animals didn’t have faces at all, just snouts. I didn’t put much store in what’s known as courage. I would just run away when an animal hated me, that’s all, and conversely, I could easily tell when an animal loved me. Mammals were easy to understand. They neither put on makeup nor engaged in playacting. An insect, on the other hand, frightened me because I couldn’t get a sense of its heart.

  My husband listened to me attentively this entire time. When I’d finished speaking and fell silent, he said melancholically: “I no longer understand the feelings of animals. It used to be I could sense them precisely, like an object I was holding in the palm of my hand. Do you think I’ll ever regain that?”

  “Of course you will! Right now you’re just spinning your wheels, but sooner or later you’ll be back in peak form.” I turned off my bedside lamp, as if to extinguish my bad conscience.

  •

  The next day, Tosca and I once more practiced coming onstage,
bowing, and exiting. From time to time Tosca looked deep into my eyes and seemed to be alluding to something. Apparently it wasn’t just in my imagination that we’d spoken: we really were entering a sphere situated halfway between the animal and human worlds.

  Around ten in the morning, Pankov showed up. His beard was still smeared with yolk from the soft-boiled egg he’d eaten at breakfast. He asked how our rehearsals were going.

  “The jam didn’t work,” I said, “so now we’re trying it with honey.”

  “Aha. And what’s this honey number supposed to look like?”

  “We’re going to attach wings to Tosca’s back so she’ll look like a bee. She transports the nectar from the flowers to the bees’ hive and produces honey. In the next scene she’ll turn into a bear and gobble the honey up.”

  A dark cloud covered Pankov’s face. “Can’t you just put together a straight acrobatic number? Dance on a ball! Jump rope — play badminton! Don’t you know that with difficult-to-interpret productions, people can accuse us of secretly engaging in social criticism?”

  To calm Pankov down, I asked him to order a ball for Tosca. A tricycle would have been too expensive, but maybe a ball wasn’t too much for him. Besides, for badminton we would have needed not just the shuttlecock but two racquets as well. It could have proved difficult to get a racquet custom made for a bear. And jump ropes? I found a rope, but fortunately Tosca was incapable of jumping over it. I was against the idea from the start, anyhow: Tosca’s hind legs were too delicate in relation to her weight. Jumping rope might injure her knees. I knew that the Russian circus employed several poodles who could jump rope, but my voice involuntarily rose: “If we start imitating the Russians, we’ll never have a future of our own!” My husband pressed his index finger to his lips, whispering: “The ears of the secret police are in every wall.” We knew for a fact that bugging devices had been installed somewhere in the circus.

  •

  My husband and I slept and ate in our circus trailer, and our office was in a trailer, too. For rehearsals, we used a large room in an auxiliary building. There were colleagues who liked to rent a small room in town and didn’t sleep at the circus. My husband and I were true circus people: we lived entirely on the grounds of our circus as if unwilling to be parted from it even for a second. In all honesty, I was afraid — a fear I concealed — that this husband I knew so well might suddenly seem like a stranger to me if I saw him outside the circus. More than the physical intimacy we shared, it was the bears who brought us together so intensely.