by Yoko Tawada
One day, after all the visitors and Christian too had left the room, Matthias sat down on the floor, exhausted, his head drooping and his arms around his knees, without first putting Knut back in his crate. Knut placed his paws on Matthias’s knees, worriedly sniffing at his beard, lips, nostrils, and eyes. “Say, are you worried? I’m not a mother bear who’s been shot, lying on the ground. Don’t worry! I’m perfectly all right. No bullets, just flashbulbs — I’m not so easy to do in,” Matthias said, his face filled with creases Knut was unable to interpret.
•
Knut grew more and more each day, while poor Matthias continued to shrink. Knut suddenly had the thought that perhaps the milk came from Matthias’s body, that he was being painfully squeezed dry day after day. The more Knut drank, the smaller and more dehydrated Matthias became.
The number of visitors increased at an alarming rate, though not every journalist was granted an audience. Sometimes Matthias was nervous, seeking refuge in a corner of the room, where he would lean his shoulder against the wall, his head down. He’d have liked best to be invisible. Most of the visitors diligently jotted down Christian’s words while casting expectant glances in Matthias’s direction. Finally they would approach the recluse and beg him for permission to take his picture. For some reason, the media weren’t satisfied with just photographing Christian. Matthias would listlessly pick up the milk bottle, cradle Knut against his chest with his other hand, and stare balefully into the camera lens. Knut would feel the trembling of these delicate human fingers, hear the oceanic sounds emanating from Matthias’s entrails — and Knut’s abdomen would take up the tune, rumbling in harmony.
Matthias’s eyes were sensitive to light, even the gentlest flashbulb set him blinking. Knut’s eyes, on the other hand, were impervious to blinding flashes. Even when several rounds of flashbulbs were fired into them in quick succession, the soft darkness of his pupils remained unchanged.
The name of the first visitor was Journalist, and the second was called Journalist too. So it wasn’t surprising when the third proved to be Journalist as well. Soon Knut understood that there were many journalists, while both Matthias and Christian were unique.
But what was behind this mysterious ritual of the photographs? One of the journalists spoke of the bear cult among the ethnic minority groups Ainu and Sami. When Knut thought of a bear cult, he imagined a ritual in which humans stood in a circle around a bear, photographing him with flashbulbs to freeze the moment for all eternity.
“You’ve already been working all day long. You even spend the night with Knut. That would be too much for most people.”
Matthias responded impassively to these words of praise spoken by Christian. “How can I give Knut milk every five hours if I don’t spend the night here?”
“But what does your wife say? Mine starts threatening me with divorce if I so much as stay late every other day.”
Knut thought Matthias was at his side day and night. But at some point the little bear realized that his two-legged companion would sometimes slip stealthily out of the room. First the evening milk was consumed, then the hour of sleep arrived, when no more Homo sapiens voices could be heard, but in their place, the voices of all the animals grew ever louder. As if emboldened by this animalistic atmosphere, Matthias removed his guitar from the black case that had waited beside his desk and took the instrument outside with him. Knut wanted to wake up and follow him, but sleep held him back. His little ursine ears remained awake while the rest of his body was in dreamland.
Knut heard the guitar strings being plucked. This reassured him: Matthias couldn’t have gone very far off if he could still hear him.
When Matthias came back to the room and took Knut out of his crate, the guitar was nowhere to be seen, which was disappointing. “Even before you arrived, I couldn’t go right home after work. I would play my guitar in front of the bear enclosure. At home, my family would be waiting for me, but I didn’t want to go. Can you understand that? Probably not.” Matthias didn’t talk much when there was another human nearby, but alone with Knut, he would openly talk about himself.
One day Knut discovered the guitar case wedged between the desk and the wall, and scratched at it with his growing claws. Matthias always let Knut play with whatever he liked: spoons, buckets, brooms, dustpans. But he kept Knut away from this sacred musical instrument. No matter how zealously Knut attempted to insert his claws and fangs under the cover of the guitar case, the magic box refused to open. The small aluminum key required to open it lay in a drawer. If Knut had been given a chance to touch the guitar, he would surely have played the most enchanting music with his teeth. Even Matthias with his pathetically thin fingernails managed to make the notes ring out. How stunning the instrument would sound if Knut were to play it with his magnificent claws!
Knut couldn’t remember when music had begun for him. By the time he realized that he could hear, he was already living amid an endless series of notes that went on without pause. This music, which had already begun before his birth, would not cease when he was dead. The guitar music was only part of the zoo’s complex of sounds. At some point Knut came to recognize several sequences of notes that were repeated daily: the clatter with which Matthias removed a pot from the kitchen cupboard was followed by the sound of two rubber surfaces being pulled apart (the refrigerator door opening), and after this an ascending melody could be heard: the milk being poured into the pot. As the meal was prepared, ever more musicians joined in: powder was shaken into a bowl, a spoon stirred it, striking against the interior of the metal bowl with a clacking sound, and to conclude, the spoon struck three decisive beats against the edge of the bowl. Thus ended the little symphony entitled Baby Food for the Little Bear. Not tears but saliva bore witness to the audience’s enthusiasm. He could remember a certain sequence of sounds if it was repeated often enough. There was a beginning and an end. Knut could distinguish Matthias’s footsteps from those of everyone else. Whenever Matthias left the room, the bear metamorphosed into a listening ear. He couldn’t settle down until Matthias returned.
Matthias began to spend the night out more and more often. A deplorable habit. In the evening, he would give Knut his last portion of milk, push him into a corner of the crate with his stuffed animal, cover him with a wool blanket, and then disappear, taking his guitar and leather shoulder bag with him. Only at dawn would he return.
During the Matthias-less nights, another man would be on milk duty. Knut was no longer a baby, the milk didn’t have to come from his mother Matthias. This other man had fleshy cheeks and unusually warm hands. Knut liked the fact that this man smelled faintly of butter. Knut could eat his fill without Matthias; he could even pass a pleasant evening without him. But there was always a hint of fear. Really it ought to have been reassuring for Knut to have not just a single man but hundreds of them able to provide him with milk, but something in Knut was fixated on Matthias still. Whenever he heard Matthias coming, he would scratch the inside of his crate as if possessed.
“Hey, cut it out! What are you doing? You’ve ripped the photograph of your parents. I went to a lot of trouble to get you this picture of Tosca and Lars. It was hanging here even before you were able to see. Don’t you understand? These are your parents!”
The photograph hung in shreds. Matthias had to throw it in the wastepaper basket. Knut was horrified, because he had never looked at the photograph properly. Too late. How could he know that this scrap of paper represented his parents? Christian noticed that Knut seemed more agitated than usual and said to Matthias: “Maybe Knut feels lonely because he misses the photograph. Why don’t you have someone take a picture of you holding him in your arms, giving him milk from the bottle? I think foster parents are more important than biological parents, anyhow. I’m sure the journalists have already taken a picture of you holding Knut to your breast like the Madonna with the Christ child.”
“Don’t make fun of me. For the f
irst time in months, I can permit myself to go home at night — my family is satisfied with me again,” Matthias said, stroking Knut’s head. The word “family” had an unsettling effect on the little bear, as if it would later bring him misfortune.
•
Every morning Knut heard the twittering of the birds who rejoiced as darkness withdrew and the sun arrived to start its shift. These winged beasts were harried, fearful of not finding any breakfast. Sometimes the weaker among them were attacked by stronger birds and fled shrieking across the sky. Knut couldn’t see them, but their sounds were vivid enough that he could imagine their routine dramas.
•
Now and then, particularly cheeky birds came and looked right into Knut’s room. All of them were referred to as birds, even though the only thing they had in common was wings. The sparrow, a brown mixture of modesty and agitation, the blackbird with her unassuming humor, the magpie’s painted mask, and the pigeon, who lost no opportunity to repeat her favorite motto: “Really? How interesting. I had no idea!” Knut heard countless avian voices and thought the world outside must be teeming with birds. Why didn’t Knut, Matthias, and the mouse have wings? If there had been wings on Knut’s back, he’d have flown straight to the window to look outside.
Knut felt liberated whenever Matthias plucked him from his crate. But he was no longer satisfied with the minor freedoms he experienced, for more and more he sensed the existence of “outside.” He wanted to leave his room. “You’re getting cheekier by the day,” Matthias said, but that wasn’t true. It was just that Knut couldn’t keep his limbs still when the outside world was tugging at them. He scratched at the door as if he’d lost his mind — Matthias didn’t know what to do, so he scolded. Knut tried to stop speculating about the world outside. But that wasn’t really possible, without actually making its acquaintance and being disappointed by it.
One method that allowed his soul access to the outside did satisfy him: listening. The heard world was so commodious, so rich in colors, that the seen world was no match for it. This was perhaps the power of music of which the Homo sapiens sometimes proudly spoke. Christian revealed that at home he played the piano. A hobby, he called it. “But when I play for too long, my family puts in earplugs and hides in the farthest corners of the house. What about your family?” Christian addressed this question to his colleague with the guitar.
“I’ve never really felt like playing the guitar at home. I don’t really think my family would mind, but I prefer to play alone. It’s not so much about the music as a way of enjoying the solitude.”
Knut almost choked when he heard the word “family.”
Knut loved birdsong and guitar music, but there was one sort of music he found intolerable: the church bells on Sunday. Already at the first stroke he would cover his head with his arms to protect himself. Holding his breath, he would wait for the last of the ringing to subside. “Are you a heathen?” Christian asked, and laughed with a sound like a coin striking a stone floor. Then with a more serious face, “Oh, of course — bears!” he added: “They were once worshipped by the Teutons, along with wolves, and to establish itself, the church was forced to combat them. Church bells still ring today to drive out the inner bears from our hearts.”
“Is that true?” Matthias asked in a rather skeptical voice.
“I’ve read some articles on the subject,” Christian replied offhandedly. His attention had already wandered off elsewhere and he quickly packed up his things to go home.
Matthias and Christian showed up for work on Sundays too, though the obligatory medical examination Christian performed on Knut always went much faster than usual. Matthias, too, would try to leave around lunchtime. After this, the new man who smelled faintly of butter was in charge. “Maurice, I’m leaving everything in your hands and going home. You know about giving Knut his milk in the late afternoon and then putting him to bed. After that you can go home or wherever else your heart desires, but you must return by 2:00 a.m. at the latest to be on time for the next feeding.” Matthias spoke in an agreeably businesslike tone, while the new man, Maurice, gazed at him dreamily, almost as if infatuated. Apparently he found Matthias’s face pleasing. But Maurice must not have listened carefully enough, for he never left the room, not even between the early-evening milk hour and the next feeding at two in the morning. Any time Knut woke up for a moment, he found Maurice in the room. Often he sat curled in a corner of the room reading a book. When Knut didn’t want to go back to sleep, Maurice would lift him out of the crate to play-wrestle. Slowly, gently Maurice forced Knut to the ground and then petted his belly and ears so thoroughly that his entire body grew warm.
“Now we’re tired. Enough sports. I’ll read you something. What do you want to hear?” Maurice offered Knut the choice of Oscar Wilde, Jean Genet, and Yukio Mishima. Unfortunately Knut couldn’t pronounce the names of any of these authors, but it didn’t matter, for no matter which of the books Maurice read from, it always turned into a pleasant lullaby that tugged Knut back into slumber.
•
Maurice came ever more frequently, even on a non-Sunday he might show up in Matthias’s place and stay until well past two in the morning. After even Maurice had gone home, and the room was free of Homo sapiens, Knut would suddenly hear animalistic, celebratory noises from outside, as if all the creatures had been waiting for just this moment.
Maurice came regularly, but sometimes it happened that instead of him an unfamiliar man would show up to look after Knut. This man smelled similar to Maurice. Knut was never able to find out his name.
When Knut listened closely to all the sounds of the night, he would feel sharp but beguiling stimuli in his body. Most of the night voices inspired not fear in him but a sort of respect. In each voice, he heard something like a tautly strung bow: every animal must constantly attend to his own life with the utmost care, making full use of all his abilities and intelligence, otherwise his chances for survival would be nil.
Once, Knut had the pleasure of hearing a series of lectures on the subject of darkness by Dr. Owl. Dr. Owl’s rhetorical style was too abstract, too dispassionate, but Knut was nonetheless impressed by the wisdom of those creatures who have mastered the art of living in darkness. The nocturnal laments of a monkey who was being bullied by his fellow simians taught Knut the cruelty of animals who live in packs. Sometimes Knut would hear the leader of the mice endlessly gossiping. What she had to say might have been summarized in a single sentence that went something like this: “When your attention flags, you will be caught and eaten.” Was there an animal who could devour Knut? Knut listened attentively as two aroused tomcats fought over a female. Both of them wanted to have sex with her. Why were they fighting over this one female cat? Knut pondered whether it made any difference with whom one had sex. He didn’t understand the animal world. The prickly monologue of the hedgehogs made an unapproachable impression, but they weren’t trying to injure him, they just wanted to communicate their worldview. Knut always listened, regardless of what there was to hear. The subtle differences between the individual voices and the combination of these differences gave each night its own unique color, and to Knut this appeared magical.
Soon Knut could differentiate between the melodies that poured from the guitar in the evening. One was a composition that imitated a buzzing bee — as the little bear listened, his back itched. There was another piece of music in which Knut heard ice floes knocking against each other, followed by watery sounds like dripping and spraying. Matthias revealed to Christian that the itchy bee piece was called “El Abejorro” (bumblebee) and was composed by Emilio Pujol, while the ice floe music, “Miller’s Dance,” was by Manuel de Falla. Knut had no idea what sort of dance the Miller family liked best, but listening to the piece made him want to shake his hips.
Knut enjoyed these evening concerts, but he didn’t like them to go on for too long, otherwise he got bored and just wanted Matthias to come back. This wasn�
��t just out of a childish desire to have a playmate — Matthias’s absence pierced him painfully.
The pain made it possible for him to remember the sequence of melodies. Matthias would always end by playing one particular sad tune. Then he would come back with a satisfied face, put his guitar away, pick up Knut and press the bear’s cheek against his own.
“That sounded pretty sad — I mean, the music you just played. What was it?” Christian asked this question when he unexpectedly turned up one evening. Matthias didn’t answer, he just grinned a little, like someone who has his reasons. The sadness in the music restored Matthias’s joie de vivre. The melody made Knut euphoric too, because it signaled Matthias’s imminent return.
Absence — an unendurable span of time — became ever more familiar to him. He pressed his body against the worn stuffed animal, because there was no one else anywhere near him. It was annoying that the cloth animal had only cotton in its head. It never reacted, no matter how hard Knut shoved it into the corner. Matthias would immediately shove him back, or else pretend he was about to toss the little bear up in the air. Even Christian, who was never really up for a game, would at least show some reaction: When Knut squeezed his hand, he would squeeze back. When Knut bit his hand, he would yell and screw up his lips and eyes. This drowsy stuffed animal, on the other hand, never showed any sort of reaction at all — it could bore you to tears. For Knut, boredom meant helplessness, tristesse, abandonment. You there, tedium personified, you just sit there with your boneless body and don’t answer, no matter what I ask. Is there nothing in the world that interests you? Knut never received an answer. You really are good for nothing, you stuffed animal you!
When would Matthias show his face again? How unendurable Knut found this question, or maybe it wasn’t the question, it was just the time he spent waiting, he thought. Once time began to exist, it was impossible for it to end on its own. It was intolerable how slowly the window recaptured the brightness it had lost at sundown. When with time his patience was at an end, Knut would finally hear the footsteps. He heard the door of the room being opened. Matthias bent over the crate, picked Knut up with his hands, rubbed his human nose against the bear snout, and said, “Good morning, Knut!” At that moment, the thing Knut had been perceiving as “time” melted away. Because starting with this moment, he no longer had any time to think about time. He had to sniff everything in the room, ingest foodstuffs, busy himself with various games. Time didn’t begin to exist again until Matthias left.