Memoirs of a Polar Bear

by Yoko Tawada

  •

  The sun set, and when sleep made its entrance, I was allowed to visit the world of ice. Every time, I could recognize an evolution that progressed with each passing day. Nothing there was in the red or in the black — there was only progress. There was no industry, no hospital, no school. There were only words exchanged between living beings. “I’ve started writing your biography,” I said to Tosca, who sneezed in surprise.

  “Are you cold?”

  “Very funny. I have a pollen allergy. Here at the North Pole, no flowers bloom, but there’s still pollen in the air, and I can’t stop sneezing. It’s uncanny, having pollen without flowers.”

  “I’ve written up to the period just after your birth. Your eyes weren’t open yet. Your mother and you weren’t alone, there was a third shadow.”

  “My father wanted to live with us, but my mother couldn’t stand him. She used to snarl whenever he came within sight of us.”

  “Isn’t that normal for a mother bear?”

  “Maybe it was normal once, but even Nature changes over the course of history.”

  Mama-lia’s voice was terrifying, and I found myself feeling afraid of her, even though I knew perfectly well I was in no danger.

  Humans can roar too, to intimidate others. At first they use words that mean something; after a while, however, all you hear is a bellowing that has grown out of speech, and a person being roared at has no other choice but to roar back. This thought made me suddenly remember how my father left us and went to Berlin. With the sixth sense of a small child, I felt the tiny thorn in my mother’s voice just before she started shouting. I began to cry at the top of my lungs to distract her. She tried to calm me and forgot my father. But then he said something else that grated on her nerves. My mother gave him a sharp look and, with an edge to her voice, said something, and my father answered explosively as if he wanted to flip the dining table upside down.

  This memory suddenly assailing me might well have been an invention on my part. My mother and I never talked about my father. She left the house early every morning. By the time I got back from school, she would be home already. She was a beautiful woman, but her eyes would be shriveled up in the morning, and in the afternoon her cheeks sagged. I often felt the urge to study her face more intently, but she would turn away from me quickly and busy herself with housework. On the back of her shirt, the garish printed pattern on the smooth, cold polyester resembled a tarantula, twitching along with the movements of my mother’s hands. But why am I writing about myself? “What was your father proud of?” I asked Tosca.

  “He sometimes liked to tell people he came from the same country as Kierkegaard. That made him very proud. My mother would laugh and say: How nice to come from a small country — if I were to start counting off all the cultural luminaries born in mine, I’d never finish.”

  “That was a bit mean.”

  “My mother was highly intelligent and infinitely inquisitive. That’s why she went into exile and wrote an autobiography. But I can’t write at all — I always have to ask humans for help.”

  “Accepting help from others is also a skill. Let me write about your life!”

  In the interior of my head, a thick fog had gathered. Which way should I go?

  “What’s the matter?” someone asked. It was neither Tosca nor my mother. “Have you fallen in love?”

  Finally I pried my eyes open and saw before me the face of my husband, at first grinning but then showing signs of worry when I didn’t respond. “Who are you running around with? You’re always so busy! It’s not like you have time for an affair. Is it someone from the circus?”

  “Now you’re talking garbage — let’s go rehearse.”

  “This whole time I’ve been telling you my ideas for the performance, but you weren’t listening.”

  “My thoughts wandered . . . all the way back to my childhood.”

  “Again? Maybe we should take a walk instead.”

  “Not the worst idea. Let’s clear our heads.”

  Pankov came toward us, from the direction of the front gate. We probably looked exhausted — that was the only explanation I could think of for the benevolent tone in which he addressed us. “Tosca is a consummate actress, she always shines onstage. I am confident that your number will be a success.”

  The moment Pankov left, my husband whispered: “He’s being ironic, right? How could we possibly be successful? I’m going back to the library. Here at the circus, no ideas come to me — the feeling of being penned in is unbearable. I don’t understand how I’ve been able to spend my entire life here.”

  Markus exited my field of vision, and I sat down cross-legged in front of Tosca’s cage. The feeling of being penned in at the circus was hard for me to understand, since everything you could think of was here, and everything was always returning to the circus: one’s childhood, the dead, friends. What good would it do me to look for anything elsewhere?

  I went on sitting cross-legged there, silent and immobile in front of Tosca. She got bored, lay down on her back and played with her own hind claws. I felt warm breath at the nape of my neck, turned around, and found Honigberg standing behind me. “Are you alone?” he asked with a grin.

  “Can’t you see there’s two of us? If I count you, that makes three.”

  “Has Markus taken off again? You’re always all by yourself. Aren’t you lonely?”

  “Don’t come too close. Your shoes are filthy. How’d you get them so dirty?”

  “I’ve been to the place where no one’s allowed to go.” His relentless grinning gave me the creeps.

  •

  I remember that there’d been a swampy field surrounding the circus. Coming home from a secret visit, I often found a map made of dirt on my shoes. Once, a stain horrified me because it looked like a stepped-on moth. On the other shoe, I could make out its shadow. With a handful of weeds, I tried in vain to wipe my shoes free of insects. The mud was viscous and foul-smelling; perhaps it contained carnivore droppings. This thought made the mud on my shoes suddenly appear holy to me, and I no longer wanted to scrape it off. The lions — which I had never seen before except in picture books — lived right in my neighborhood here in the circus, and as proof of this I was wearing their scat!

  I concealed my soiled shoes behind a bucket on the veranda. My mother, who couldn’t risk missing the five-o’clock bus to work, had to get up before four a.m., and at nine p.m. she would close her eyes beneath the covers. I listened, wanting to be sure she was breathing slowly and deeply. Then I snuck out on the veranda to investigate the condition of my shoes. The gooey earth had turned the leather stony and yellow. I put them on and tried walking a little way. With every step, the stiff leather scoured my heels like sandpaper. I had no choice but to adopt a bow-legged gait to minimize the pain. In this way, I became an iguana. Cold-blooded animals like reptiles and insects had always aroused my hatred. I took off the shoes and my undergarments as well. My thighs and belly were covered with snow-white fur. The moon glanced out from sooty clouds, illuminating my bare loins.

  I woke from my slumber to see Tosca — curled up, asleep, her left arm was her pillow — and, her mirror image, I lay in the same position. My skirt was obscenely rumpled, no longer even covering my thighs completely. I tugged it straight and gave my hair a quick combing with the finger-comb. At this moment my husband strode up to me imposingly, having apparently just returned from the library.

  “Were you sleeping?”

  “So it seems.”

  “Was someone with you?”

  “Who?”

  Beside the hem of my skirt I saw a footprint. Someone with dirty shoes must have stood there.

  The following weeks brought several surprising bits of news. First, Honigberg announced that he was joining the union. There was a labor law that prohibited the union from barring entrance to anyone based on ethnic differences, so
the polar bears were forced to accept Honigberg, the dodgiest Homo sapiens of all, into their union.

  One day after joining, he proposed to the union leadership that the circus be incorporated. But he wanted the change to be a secret, necessitating double-entry bookkeeping, since the circus had an obligation to open its books to the government. But, under his plan, members of the circus community could develop their own free-market economy. When stock prices went up, expensive stage sets could be purchased: an attractive new stage would drive up ticket sales and profits. The next season, he insisted, was sure to be a hit; what a shame it would be to give these profits away to government officials. The officials would just squander the profits like water, shoveling caviar down their gullets in Western-currency-only restaurants and bathing in vodka. The money shouldn’t just be dumped out like water, instead we should freeze it for the sake of investing sensibly in the future of our stage. Of course, the entire profit wouldn’t be invested. Every stockholder would be able to buy a transistor radio with his dividends, or honey, or other products. The nine polar bears, who at first did not understand Honigberg’s explanations, were eventually delighted with his plan and wanted to buy stocks at once. Pankov, too, accepted the proposal . . . but my imagination was not powerful enough to divine the young man’s actual intentions.

  “What’s he up to?” When we were alone, Honigberg was all my husband ever wanted to talk about these days. If I failed to look interested enough, he would dig in his heels. “Come on, tell me what you think.” I felt like a mouse trapped in a corner, and tried counterattacking with a question of my own: “Why can’t you get this infantile young man out of your mind? Don’t you have any vitality of your own left?”

  “Just as I thought.” His bloodshot eyes gleamed as if I’d just confirmed his insinuations. “How do you know so much about his vitality? I’ve known it for a while now. You’re having an affair with him.”

  “When could I possibly have had time for an affair? And you’ve been right next to me this whole time.”

  “But I can feel when a period of time has a hole in it, even on days we spend fully occupied. You use this hole to meet secretly with someone.” Perhaps my husband was already halfway to madness by then.

  I myself was dimly conscious of being in love — but not with Honigberg. That was unthinkable. I wasn’t trying to hide anything from anyone; I myself didn’t know whom I was in love with. When I was a child and kept going to the circus every day, I never suspected I was in love with the circus. I kept my visits to the circus a secret from my mother, but not because I wanted to conceal my infatuation. I just didn’t want my mother to keep me away from the lions because of my dirty shoes. There were other things I hid from her too: for example, that I never managed to make any friends, or that my teacher had said I was very talented, especially in the natural sciences. “Why did you keep all these things a secret from your mother?” Tosca asked me.

  “I don’t know. A child’s instincts. For a woman to find the friend with whom she’ll willingly share her stories, she might have to grow to adulthood.”

  One day, my secret visits to the circus came to light. I’d been afraid my mother would scold me for my dirty shoes, but that didn’t happen. Instead, she calmly instructed me to buy a ticket and go in through the main gate. Those who used the circus’s rear entrance, she said, would wind up backstage among the artistes.

  I’d never heard the word “artiste” before. The word inflamed my imagination. Any fire my mother was trying to keep me away from always inspired my burning interest.

  Even after my mother had learned of my visits to the circus, I didn’t want to give them up. I would take off my shoes en route and hide them in a bush. It was strangely disconcerting, and at the same time exhilarating, to cross the swampy field barefoot. It tickled a little, maybe the ghosts of the underworld were licking the soles of my feet. Amid the smell of unknown animals, I crept into the labyrinth of circus trailers, and let my nose guide me. Suddenly I saw in front of me a horse’s face. The horse stared at me without blinking. His long eyelashes gave him a gentle look. The odors rising from the earth were suffocatingly sweet, my chest was tightly constricted, and I could hear my heart pounding. Was this a sexual stirring? The horse’s ears flicked, and I heard footsteps.

  Someone gave me a little shove from behind: a clown with a painted white face. It appeared to have been a while since his face paint was applied: The white coat had cracks in it, accentuating deep laugh lines that weren’t currently laughing. The star-shaped tears, no longer crying, were smudged. It was unclear whether the clown was a woman or a man, and for this reason, I couldn’t think what to say. And so I quickly made a bow by way of apology and ran off. Since then I have seen many clowns, but that first clown remains forever preserved in my memory.

  The next day I visited the horse again to admire the size of his nostrils. This time the clown approached me slowly and cautiously, holding up an index finger vertically before his lips. Today the clown wore makeup only around the eyes; his lips were thin, and around his mouth I saw freshly shaved skin with a bluish tinge. He was apparently making an effort not to frighten me. I felt paralyzed with insecurity, but nonetheless waited as he approached. “Do you like horses?” he asked, standing so close that I could feel his body heat. I nodded, and he went over to a trailer and beckoned me to follow.

  The scent of hay tickled the little hairs in my nose, and then it filled the barn of my lungs. “The hay has to be chopped up and fed to the horses,” the clown said. He took an armful of hay, placed it on the huge chopping block and hacked away at it rhythmically with his rusty knife. He tossed the chopped hay in a bucket and we returned to the horse with this freshly cut fodder. “What do you think? Wouldn’t you like to play Take Care of a Horse? If you come back at the same time tomorrow, you can chop the hay and feed the horse yourself.”

  And so it came to pass that every day after school I would hurry to the circus to perform my duties. Soon I was even allowed to use the curry comb, and to cart dung to the compost heap. I was motivated and unpaid.

  While I was attending to the horse with my delicate child arms, the clown would practice doing headstands on the back of a chair or wiggling his hips while balancing on a ball. Now and then the thought floated into my vicinity that perhaps he was exploiting me, but even if that was true, it didn’t bother me. I developed my own economic theory: all losses immediately turn into gains when you touch a horse.

  Soon other people began to say hello to me. To be sure, I was an illegal worker who’d been secretly smuggled in through the back door. But I felt accepted at the circus, which certainly wasn’t the case at school. It was a long time before the clown asked me: “So what’s your name, anyhow?” Till then, he’d just used “Hey, you” — either civilian names meant nothing to him or he’d thought he would be responsible for me if he knew my name.

  “My mother sometimes calls me Bar as a joke, since my name is Barbara.”

  “That’s good. Bar as in Bear.”

  Back home, I told my mother there was a bear hidden in the name Barbara. She raised her eyebrows. “How ridiculous. Do you think I’d name you after an animal? Who’s been telling you such rubbish?” I was forced to confess my daily visits to the circus. My mother was not surprised — she seemed to have suspected as much all along. She told me to always be home by sundown and gave me permission to go on playing circus employee.

  When I curried the horse, my spirits rose with every stroke of the comb. The horse had a funny sort of hair that tended to remain pleasantly dry even though its body would sweat. The flesh beneath the hair was trustworthy and firm, emanating a reassuring warmth. The desire that arose in my hand while I was combing crept up my wrist to enter my body and swim in my womb like a carp. “When you were a child, the horse was much bigger than you. You gazed up at it, and now standing like that is coming back to you again,” Tosca said. Her eyes and nose were three blac
k dots in the snowy landscape. If you connected the three points, it made a triangle. Tosca’s white body was perfectly camouflaged in the snow, I couldn’t see it, I spoke blindly to the triangle’s invisible midpoint: “Sometimes I think it doesn’t get me anywhere to think back on my childhood.”

  “My mother believed that we have to find our way to the time before childhood,” Tosca replied.

  “I’d love to read your mother’s autobiography.”

  “Unfortunately it’s out of print. At the North Pole, all the books are out of print, and all the printing presses have melted, so it’s no longer possible to print a new edition.” Tosca rose melancholically to her feet. Her chest was thin, making her elegant neck appear even longer and her front legs even shorter than they were. Tosca was about to depart, leaving me behind. “Wait!” I shouted.

  “What’s wrong? Did you have a nightmare?” It was Markus, acting as if he had no idea what to do because he couldn’t understand my condition. Meanwhile I knew he’d started spreading rumors about me, saying I was crazy and constantly under attack by hallucinations and nightmares. Maybe he was hoping in this way to conceal his own weak nerves and pathological jealousy. Pankov stood there too and said: “I hear you’re refusing to attempt the fire act. Has your passion for the stage been extinguished?”

  “Extinguished?” I replied. “I’m not the one on the point of a burn-out, it’s my husband, and the fire singeing him is Jealousy. Can’t you save him? I can’t take his heat, that’s why I keep running out into the snow. In a snowy landscape, I can recognize Tosca right away by the three black dots.”