Memoirs of a Polar Bear

by Yoko Tawada

  Yet another day passed without our making any progress. Secretly all day I was just waiting for sundown. I quickly ate a piece of stone-hard dark bread with cheese, gulped down a mug of black tea and brushed my teeth at breakneck speed. “Are you going to bed already?” My husband was staring at me with astonishment. In his right hand, he held the box with the Go set in it, and between the fingers of his left, he’d skillfully wedged both a bottle of vodka and a pack of cigarettes.

  “My brain is full of knots today, probably it’s a rope we can’t jump.” I didn’t want to spend the evening with him, since I neither drank vodka nor played Go. For these things, he had Pankov’s secretary.

  •

  A snowfield extended between me and the jagged horizon. I spread a piece of hide on the hard, snowy ground and sat down. Tosca followed, placing her chin in my lap and closing her eyes. She had no voice. The ice goddess had lost her voice after going several thousand years without speaking. I could read her thoughts, they were as clear as if they’d been written in soft pencil on drawing paper.

  “It was pitch black. I was an infant, I was freezing cold and pressed against my mother. She was tired, and ate nothing. Until we came out of the hole one day, I saw nothing, heard nothing. Later I asked my mother if I’d been born premature. She answered that it was perfectly normal for a baby bear to be born early. What sort of woman was your mother?”

  Her question surprised me and brought me back to the present; I’d been feeling like a bear child. Now it was my turn to talk — the human being’s turn.

  For as far back as I can remember, I lived alone with my mother. She told me my father was living by himself in Berlin. I didn’t know Berlin, but still couldn’t get the city out of my mind. I can remember the pattern of the wallpaper in our apartment quite well, but not the face of my father.

  Once I saw my parents’ wedding photo. Or at least it seems to me I can remember the white gloves and the hem that melancholically drooped from the bottom of my mother’s gown. From my father’s breast pocket, a rose hung its head. It’s possible my father lived with us at the beginning of my life. This is only a vague inkling, not a solid memory. I don’t know when or why my father quarreled with my mother and left us.

  My mother worked in a Dresden textile factory. One day she was transferred to another factory in the Neustadt district and wanted to move with me to a new apartment on the edge of town that was just as far away from her new workplace as the old apartment had been. From the new place, she would have a direct bus connection to work, she explained, but I instantly sensed she had another reason. Perhaps the move had something to do with the neighbor my mother sometimes conversed with in whispered tones. In any case, I was against the move and protested. I didn’t want to be separated from a mouse that lived in the basement. My mother said: “Moving often brings good luck. New places, new animals!” She only said that to placate me, but by chance it turned out that she was right. The famous Circus Sarrasani had set up camp half a mile from our new apartment.

  •

  I awoke from my dream and saw my husband’s back. Soon the sun would rise. He turned around and asked me what I’d think about dancing with Tosca onstage.

  “Did you go on thinking about the act all night long?”

  “No, it just came to me as I was waking up.”

  “Dancing isn’t my forte, but maybe it’s worth a try.”

  During the day I couldn’t speak with Tosca about our dreams because we lacked a common language. But now and then something in her eyes or gestures showed she’d just remembered our conversation from the night before.

  When I stood facing her and took her paws, I thought how odd we must look as a dancing couple, considering that she was twice my height. The record player Pankov had provided for the rehearsal was of even worse quality than I’d feared. I stumbled while attempting to fish the melody of “La Cumparsita” from its crackling background and stepped right on Tosca’s foot. Fortunately I was light as a feather to her, so it didn’t hurt. She bent down and licked my cheek, which possibly tasted of breakfast jam. The music abruptly stopped, and I heard my husband messing around with the record player, muttering: “That’s odd. Could it be any more kaput?” Cautiously I touched Tosca’s belly. There was a firm layer of thick fur, and beneath it, a soft layer of short, fine hair. Touching her brought back the memory of my first tango lesson. A female voice hummed a tango melody inside me while giving instructions: “Back step, back step, come to the cross, side step!” What was the owner of the voice called? “Turn to the left and back step.” I obeyed the voice and danced. Tosca looked at me, faintly puzzled, but when I tugged at her arms, she took a step forward without hesitating. When I pushed against her, she took a step back. “Come to the cross, side step, forward step.” It was an aerial acrobat who had taught me the tango. Her mother was from Cuba. As we danced, I fell down, and our lips met.

  Pankov sat in a corner of the rehearsal room, watching us. I hadn’t noticed him come in. “The two of you are no good at dancing, but the way you stand face to face is artistic, like a painting. Hahaha. If the tango is too hard, maybe you should play cards instead.”

  My husband gave a whistle. “What about having them play Go?”

  “Is that the Japanese checkers you’re always playing to pass the time?”

  “Exactly. We use white and black stones to play, exactly the right colors for our cast of characters. Ten polar bears — the white stones — locked in battle against ten black stones. We can borrow ten sea lions to represent them.”

  “Then the white stones will eat the black stones, leaving us in the red. Besides, why Go and not chess? The Russians will think we have something against chess because so many world-famous chess players are Russian. Avoid ambiguous references! By the way, we’re going to have a visit today from a young director who has something important to tell us. Can you join us for the conversation? Apparently he used to work with Tosca. Maybe he’ll have some good ideas for us.”

  The young director was named Honigberg and had been part of the casting commission for the Swan Lake production. Despite his support of Tosca, the commission voted not to give her a role. To this day he felt guilty about not having been able to get her accepted. At the time, he was working in the provinces as the choreographer of a ballet company. Exasperated with the conservative members of the commission, he kept trying to get them to understand Tosca’s magical talent. He’d even gone so far as to blurt that he could no longer stand by and watch a genius being forced into the shadows where she would quickly be forgotten, while Tosca’s untalented former classmates like Ms. Magpie and Mr. Fox were being catapulted into successful stage careers.

  The oldest member of the jury had informed him — it was meant as a warning — that sturdily built female bodies were not in keeping with contemporary tastes. “For male dancers, a compact body is de rigueur, but where the ladies are concerned, the audience still expects to see delicate fairies floating through the air.” Honigberg, appalled at his colleague’s festering spirit, paid Tosca a personal visit at her home, surprising her with a somewhat overhasty proposal: “There’s no point staying in this country for you. Let’s escape to West Germany together! We can go to Hamburg and work with John Neumeier. It’s surely a splendid place to work.” Tosca was taken with his suggestion, but her elderly mother, who’d had an unusual past, was against the idea. West Germany, she said, was like heaven: nice to dream about, but you don’t want to end up there too early. Tosca’s mother had been born in the Soviet Union, had emigrated to West Germany, and then continued on to Canada, where she married her husband and gave birth to Tosca. Then at the request of her Danish husband, she’d moved to the GDR. She was all exiled out. “If you really want to go to Hamburg, I won’t stand in your way. But we’ll probably never see each other again. Take a copy of my will with you!” Tosca opted out of exile, found a position at the children’s theater, and awaited her come
-what-may. Then the query from our circus arrived. When Honigberg heard that ­Tosca had shifted her allegiances to the circus, he decided to bid farewell to the hopelessly outdated Literary Theater art form and seek the future of the stage arts beneath the big top. He wanted to become Tosca’s personal artistic director. “I’m like a teenager who’s run away from home. I have nothing left, no place to sleep, no bread to eat. Could I sleep here in the circus and share your meals? I’ll help out with the production and won’t ask for a fee.” Honigberg was confident, self-assured, as though it were his right to be accepted by us.

  Pankov and Markus glanced skeptically at Honigberg’s too-tight jeans; I, on the other hand, felt no need to subject his legs to interpretation. Just the chance of finding out more about Tosca made him interesting to me. “What plays has Tosca appeared in?” I asked, trying to make my voice sound friendly. He replied with a significant smile but said nothing.

  The next day, we gathered in front of Tosca’s cage for a small consultation, three chairs arranged in a circle.

  At first, my husband was skeptical of the young man, this homeless Honigberg, but in the course of the conversation, both men gradually relaxed their muscles. Markus claimed that the development of children’s theater was responsible for the destruction of the modern stage, since so much of what made theater interesting was diverted to the children’s theaters, leaving nothing behind for the adults. Honigberg agreed, saying that the circus was the true seat of art, since it did not exclude children. The result of this exchange between the two men was the beer that the two began to drink even though the sun still stood high in the heavens. I asked them not to smoke in front of Tosca. “Then we’ll continue our conference outside. Beer without a cigarette is like a meat dish without salt.”

  Change of scene. We sat down beside the laundry area where the circus employees’ linens fluttered in the breeze as though butting into our conversation. Honigberg answered my questions listlessly, but still in reasonable detail, recounting how Tosca was discriminated against because of her figure and language.

  I imagined Tosca’s sufferings and suffered along with her, thinking: “How wretched is the life of the stage artist!” No matter what torments she may have suffered in the course of her career, she will be judged by her audience solely on the basis of her latest performance. Everything else remains unseen, unless of course the artiste becomes famous enough that an author writes her biography. If Tosca were human, of course, she could write an autobiography and have it printed at her own expense. But as an animal, she is doomed to have the pain-filled, female life journey she has embarked on as a bear forgotten after her death. Unfortunate creature, thy name is bear! I was alone with my thoughts. The two men formed a unit and fell away. The more they drank, the more solid their manly bond.

  “Tosca on a bulldozer — how about that?”

  “She can wear a helmet and carry a pickax.”

  “Let’s drink to the lady workers of the world!”

  Even the darkness that had placed a gentle cap upon each of our heads couldn’t deter the two men from continuing to sit there drinking. I went in and took a shower to wash their words from my body. It was only nine when I went to bed.

  “My mother wrote her autobiography.”

  “That’s fantastic.”

  “Many stones lay in her path. She stumbled often and fell down seven times, but she got up again eight times. She never gave up writing.” Tosca’s voice was as clear as a thin, transparent sheet of ice. “I, on the other hand, can’t write anything at all.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “My mother already described me as a character in her book.”

  “Then I’ll write for you. I’ll write your life story so you can escape from your mother’s autobiography.”

  When I made her this promise, I didn’t realize it would be too difficult for me to keep. I woke at four and right away asked myself how I could possibly write Tosca’s biography when I’d never written anything at all besides a few simple letters. Next to me, my husband was snoring, and I thought of a locomotive. I slipped stealthily out of bed, went to the empty dining hall and sat down at a table. Propping up my chin, I let my thoughts drift, and my eyes drifted too. Soon they landed — on a pencil stub lying on the ground. What was this if not fate? I had been born as a human being so I could write Tosca’s biography! All I lacked was decent paper. In our country there was a permanent paper shortage, even in the circus. Sometimes an odyssey through the entire town was required to find a roll of toilet paper. In the dining hall I looked behind each of the shelves and eventually found an old list the cleaning crew had left behind. The back of the sheet was blank.

  I should have been grateful to have found any paper at all for my debut as a writer, but still I felt ashamed. In other places, even a tomcat could find the paper he needed to write his autobiography. Admittedly, the backs of his manuscript pages were just as written-upon as mine, but the text they held was far more interesting than the cleaning staff’s notes. Man needs paper. The pages don’t have to be all that big, and preferably not as huge as the snowfields on which polar bears write their lives. For me, one sheet of paper a day would suffice — that was as much as I could fill in a day without writing myself into the ground. I ironed smooth the cleaning list with my hand, then picked up the dwarf pencil, and began writing Tosca’s biography in the first person.

  •

  When I was born, it was dark all around me, and I heard nothing. I pressed myself against the warm body beside me, sucked sweet liquid from a teat, and fell back asleep. I’ll give this warm body the name Mama-lia.

  There was something that made me feel afraid: the giant. He came to us from someplace and tried to force his way into our cave. Mama-lia bellowed at him — her voice was a strong arm expelling the giant, but eventually her voice grew hoarse, and already a giant leg was planted right in front of me. Mama-lia shrieked, a piercing sound, and the giant, excited, started barking. “What’s the matter? What are you doing up?” my husband’s voice asked. He was standing behind me. Quickly I covered the freshly written sentences with my left hand.

  “What are you writing?” He sounded astonished.

  “Nothing.”

  “I’m thirsty, let’s have tea.”

  An intern arrived with a large thermos filled with black tea. I tried to unscrew its old-fashioned top, but I couldn’t get it open — the air inside had cooled, exerting suction. I held the thermos tightly in my left hand, bending over as I labored to uncap it, as if I were trying to twist a gigantic screw into my own chest. My right hand had been transformed into an eagle’s talons.

  “Is everything all right? Should I open the stupid thermos for you? Or maybe we should have Tosca open it onstage!”

  “That’s not a bad idea. Let me ask in the office if they can get us a new thermos to use in the show.”

  “I’ll come with you. Is Honigberg up yet?”

  We visited the trailer that served as the main office and asked if we could have a new thermos bottle to use in rehearsals. The man whose face was the embodiment of circus administration replied at once: “Out of the question. There’s a severe shortage of thermos bottles in this country at the moment. In recent years, thermos production hasn’t been able to keep up with demand. We can’t even replace the ones that get broken. So of course you can’t have one to use onstage.”

  Pankov walked into the room holding a big stack of paper in both arms. “You still don’t have an idea for the polar bear show? What a hopeless pair of long-distance runners.” He disappeared again right away — apparently he really did have a lot to do.

  For once I sensed a certain human warmth in Pankov’s commentary: my husband, however, detected ice-cold criticism. He jumped out of the office trailer, sat down on a wooden crate, and wrapped his arms around his lowered head. Even though of the same species, it seemed he’d lost his ability to interpret th
e emotions of his fellow humans. It wasn’t only the bears’ thoughts that had slipped beyond his reach. Or had my skin become too thick to feel Pankov’s coldness?

  Markus looked as if he never wanted to get up again. To shift his train of thought, I began to tell an old story: “I must have told you at some point that my debut was a donkey routine. What if I try the same thing with Tosca?”

  As if he’d been waiting for me to speak these very words, Honigberg turned up just then in his pajamas, and said: “A donkey routine? How delicious! Please do tell us your story.” Honigberg sat down right beside Markus, who seemed pleased and remarked oddly: “Were you asleep all this time? I was worried. I thought: Perhaps the fellow’s run off.” Markus placed his hand on Honigberg’s shoulder.

  •

  I owe my breakthrough as a circus performer to censorship. I was only twenty-six and not particularly hardworking, in fact I was as lazy as a donkey. What I mean is that it was lucky that our circus poster was subjected to rigorous scrutiny by the culture police (as we called them) and rejected. There was a young clown named Jan. Everyone used to say that the circus director relied on this young man for any decision requiring a precise understanding of numbers and letters. At the time, I was responsible for keeping the equipment and premises clean as well as caring for the animals and children. One full moon night, I was out searching for a moonstruck child who’d sleepwalked out of bed, and spotted a flashlight beam in the office trailer. I thought the child must have picked the trailer as a hiding place, so I tiptoed to the windowsill — and heard Jan’s voice, sounding different, more self-possessed than usual. I also heard the voice of the director agreeing with Jan or asking for further clarification. In any case, the two spoke as if they were on an equal footing. Although I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, I couldn’t tear myself away. Jan was explaining like a teacher to his charge: “When they ask you about the intention behind the poster, make sure to emphasize that we intentionally placed this important sentence right in the center: ‘The circus is art that comes from the lives of the people.’ A quote from Lunacharsky.” Jan’s voice sounded almost overbearing, while the circus director seemed almost timid, asking: “Will we even manage to attract an audience with such a stuffy-sounding slogan?”