by Yoko Tawada
Rosa, the beautician, now fixed her eyes on Matthias, who sat there with his head down, clearly wanting nothing to do with her. Rosa planted herself in front of him and asked: “How about you? Would you like some makeup? In the TV studio all the men have themselves made up too. At least some powder. But today the filming will take place outdoors. So it’s up to you whether you’d like to be filmed with or without makeup.” Rosa held up one of her small, cream-colored containers, but Matthias looked in another direction and did not answer. “And you?” Rosa asked Christian in a seductive voice that was clearly out of place. He held out his cheek to her and said: “Please do powder me up. And Knut should have some powder too. The spectators of course expect a polar bear to be as white as snow, and as you see, Knut is unfortunately gray with dust.”
Rosa applied powder to Christian’s smooth skin and chattered away, repeating everything she’d heard: “They’re saying there’ll be more reporters than at a political summit.” Threatened by the pointy sound of the word “summit,” Knut hid behind the big cupboard, pressing his body against the wall. Christian got up and with his long arms extracted Knut, saying, “And then the star became a dust rag,” and patted him, releasing a cloud of dust.
Several journalists had already found their way into the room and were snapping photographs before the main event. “We had an agreement that this room would be off-limits to the press,” Matthias said indignantly, covering his face against the flashbulb attack. Knut had no fear of cameras, he gazed calmly at the lens a photographer was pointing at him. The photographer froze when he saw the two ripe, juicy blackberry eyes staring back at him. After a while the photographer recovered and asked: “Does Knut realize what a star he is?”
This question seemed to fray Christian’s nerves all over again. “That’s out of the question!”
Another photographer contradicted him, pursing his lips: “But just look how self-confidently he poses for the camera!”
“You’re just projecting your own ideas onto Knut and seeing things. He isn’t posing. Polar bears are generally uninterested in human beings.”
“But Knut is interested in Matthias.”
“Matthias isn’t just any human, he’s Knut’s mother.”
“Does Knut even care who his mother is? Whoever happens to be holding his milk bottle is no doubt important to him.”
“Not at all!” Christian told the journalist the story of a farsighted bear keeper named Susanna.
Susanna worked at a zoo in southern Germany, where she’d been given a newborn polar bear to look after and had successfully raised him. Jan (this was the bear’s name) grew quickly. Soon after his body weight passed the 110-pound mark, he injured Susanna while they were playing. He hadn’t meant any harm, he was still a child and in the excitement of the game forgot how thin human skin is. The experienced animal keeper was undaunted by the incident, but the zoo and the insurance company refused to allow her to touch Jan again.
Susanna couldn’t get over the pain of this separation. She quit her job and married a man who had courted her indefatigably and unrequitedly since they were in school. Four years later she gave birth to a daughter and one day visited the zoo pushing a baby carriage. From relatively far away she recognized Jan. It wasn’t the bear’s body — which had grown enormously — but the expression on his face that Susanna recognized at once. She stopped short, nailed to the spot as memories of the baby bear assailed her: the weight of Jan’s body wobbling in her arms in search of its center of gravity was there again. She felt the unexpected strength of his jaws as he bit firmly into the nipple of the milk bottle. She remembered the warmth of his body, and the ever-changing expression of his face between his gleaming eyes and the sucking mouth.
At just that moment a wind picked up the scent of her body and carried it over to Jan. He snapped to attention, sniffing at the air and climbing the slope of his enclosure with rapid steps to the topmost point of the rocky cliff. He extended his organ of smell as far as he could, longingly inhaling the wind. Since bears are nearsighted, he probably couldn’t recognize Susanna’s figure, but he was reunited with her scent. Christian’s story came to an end, and Rosa wiped the tears from her eyes.
In the corridor, human sounds were percolating. Rosa quickly took her leave, and in her place stood a man in a suit. Knut had seen him once before and remembered that this man was called “Director.” And behind him was another man who had something bearlike about him. The director shook Christian’s and Matthias’s hands, glanced at his own wristwatch, and said: “Knut will be made available to the public between ten-thirty and two o’clock, then there’ll be a press conference. Correct?” His gaze wandered through the small, simply laid-out room. With surprise, he asked: “Where’s our ambassador who’s going to put a stop to climate change?” Matthias walked reluctantly over to the cupboard and called into the narrow space between cupboard and wall: “Knut, come out!” Knut had no desire to come out, and pressed his rear end against the wall. “Knut’s all worked up,” Matthias explained in a low voice, almost absentmindedly: “Let’s leave him in peace.”
The floor creaked beneath the director’s every weighty step until he stopped, ready to probe the secret world behind the cupboard with his own eyes. His nasal cavities were overgrown with black hair, and this sight frightened the little bear. Did he need that much hair in his nose to protect himself from the dirt in city air? The director didn’t notice that he was being perceived by Knut not as a person but as bunches of nose hair, and spoke in a gentlemanly voice: “I’m proud of you. The future of our institution rests on your shoulders.” His bearish companion cast a glance behind the cupboard. His face crumpled, he was unable to keep his delight to himself and uttered a bit of superfluous commentary: “So incredibly adorable, this Knut. Almost as cute as my kid.”
Christian stuck one arm behind the cupboard and with professional calm extracted Knut. He held up the bear at eye level for the two visitors and turned him around so he could be observed from every angle. Then the veterinarian in him withdrew the animal and turned his back on the visitors with the words: “We have to clean his ears.” He pulled a blue handkerchief from his pocket and tried to clean the bear ears with it. Knut twisted his upper body around to box Christian’s ears, but the doctor was quick: he got his face out of the way just in time. Then he commented on the attack just as charmingly as if Rosa had still been in the room: “I’m good at ducking when I’m about to get my face slapped, because I practice with my wife.”
“Please let me take a photograph of the minister and Knut. Sir, would you mind holding Knut’s hand?” Christian gently took Knut’s paw-hand and gave it to the bearish man, who carefully took hold of it and smiled at his constituents through the camera’s lens. The flashbulbs flashed and flashed without cease.
“We’re ready. The team from the New York Times has arrived, as well as journalists from all over the world: Egypt, South Africa, Colombia, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, and so on.” The excited voice of a young man slipped through the crack of the door. The two gentlemen left the room, followed by half the journalists. The other half stayed in the room and continued to take flashbulb photographs of Knut.
Raising both arms, Matthias shook his head and shouted: “I’m sorry, but you have to leave the room now! If Knut is stressed out, he won’t want to play in front of the visitors later. He doesn’t know the enclosure, everything’s new and much too upsetting to him today.” His voice was trembling faintly, and at once his eyes returned shyly to the floor. Why did he usually speak so softly, while other men bellowed? What was an enclosure? Knut’s heart leapt at the thought of going outside, no matter where.
The last journalists left behind a “Good luck!” on their way out. Knut noted several odd gestures: One pressed all four fingers against the thumb of the same hand. Another pretended to spit on someone else’s shoulder.
When silence returned to the room, Christian asked Mat
thias whether his wife and kids were coming. Matthias shook his head, or at least Knut thought that’s what he saw and felt calmer.
Matthias snapped to when Christian tapped him on the shoulder. He wrapped Knut in the wool blanket and picked him up. In Matthias’s arms, Knut left the familiar room, left the building, inhaled the smell of other animals, entered a strange building and then a room in which apparently he was to await his grand entrance. Matthias tried to peek outside, but the light was blinding. Knut stretched out his neck; his eyesight was only good enough for him to vaguely make out a large stone slab, and everything else was blurry. Knut heard a colorful mix of voices, there was probably a large crowd of people behind the slab of stone.
Matthias fashioned a sled out of the blanket, set Knut on it and pulled the bear behind him. Knut found this so entertaining that he forgot about the presence of the enormous audience. He also forgot that he hadn’t mastered any art that might be presented on a stage. The sled was pulled to a slightly raised area of the rock where one could look out into the distance. A monstrous cry of delight rose up from far away, where a large number of Homo sapiens were gathered. The nearsighted bear was unable to make out the individual faces.
Matthias gently pushed Knut to the ground, raised his fluffy bear arms, and petted his exposed belly. Knut felt the desire to play rise up in him, he freed himself from Matthias’s grasp, spun around and raised his rear end to get to his feet. He kept pouncing brashly on Matthias’s hand. During one such offensive, his claws briefly sank into the back of Matthias’s hand, and the delicate human skin bled a little. But Matthias gave no cry of pain, he just went on playing cheerfully. For a moment, Knut remembered Susanna’s story, and felt frightened that he might lose Matthias. But he soon forgot these worries when he was wrapped tightly in the wool blanket and had to disentangle himself. Someone in the audience shouted: “He looks like a sausauge in a croissant!” Knut didn’t want to be a sausage. For the moment his opponent was not Matthias but the blanket, whose strategies he had studied closely in recent days. Victory was just a snout’s length away, and whether it was as a sausage or as some other species of buffoon, he would surely triumph. Knut gave the blanket a kick, bit into its fabric flesh and fought valiantly. Just as the blanket was about to concede defeat, Matthias picked it up and tried to wrap Knut up in it again. Matthias was apparently fighting on the blanket’s side, and his betrayal was making it impossible for Knut to declare victory. It took a while before Knut was finally able to liberate himself from the blanket and run away. He stumbled, however, and spun once around like a wheel. The audience laughed in unison — Knut had brought people together by falling down. At this moment Knut understood something important, something a talented clown must grasp early in the course of his life. Or was this knowledge that had been inscribed in his genes?
•
The next day, the director of the zoo came into the room with a pile of newspapers, borne like a sacrificial offering on outstretched arms. “Yesterday more than five hundred journalists visited us. The minister said he was pleasantly surprised. Who’d have thought we’d get so much attention?”
The afternoon passed without Christian putting in an appearance, maybe he had the day off. Matthias sat on the chair, silent and withdrawn. He looked exhausted. As soon as the director left the room, Matthias wrapped himself in the blanket and lay down in a corner of the room as if he were sick. Knut took this as a declaration of war — after all, it was his blanket Matthias had commandeered. Joyfully he pounced on Matthias, opening his mouth wide to provoke him, pretending to bite his arms, and scratching at the fabric of his shirt, but Matthias did not respond. Worried, Knut stuck his snout into Matthias’s beard to check whether the man underneath was still breathing. Finally his half-dead friend opened his mouth and said: “Don’t worry. It’ll take more than that to kill me.”
•
Every day, Knut devoted two hours to public service. It was his responsibility to play with Matthias in the enclosure. Rapturous excitement kept bubbling up in the audience, whose faces formed a wall behind the moat. If there hadn’t been a barrier, they would have thrown themselves at Knut. At first Knut felt pity for these poor humans who couldn’t join in his games because they were trapped on the other side. In his body, he felt their burning desire to touch the little bear and hold him in their arms.
Knut soon ascertained that it was his own movements eliciting the audience’s joyful exclamations. By experimenting a little, he discovered which poses particularly delighted the human beings and which did not. The crowd’s raucous cheers grated on his nerves; its thunderous roars gave him an earache. For this reason, he learned to manipulate the audience’s excitement level. He would gradually allow the crowd’s enthusiasm to increase and then, just before the climax, let it sink again, postponing the shrieks of delight. Then he would start from the bottom again, elevating the mood in increments. The little bear began to enjoy this divine omnipotence. The ebb and flow of the audience’s excitement was in his hands.
•
Although the morning sun had not yet cleared away the darkness, Matthias was there already, wearing a new jacket. Out of breath, he said: “Knut, starting today, we can go for walks in the zoo. We’ve been given official permission.” Knut didn’t know what sort of game “walks” were that Matthias was so looking forward to. The door was opened, the bear legs followed Matthias’s heels, which strode outside with long steps. It wasn’t the public enclosure he was already familiar with. From all directions, the wind brought unknown smells, but there wasn’t anyone about.
Behind wire netting, tiny birds flew back and forth, wearing jackets the color of egg yolk. Knut already knew their voices, and their smell too, but this was the first time he was seeing them. In front of the mesh, sparrows landed. They pecked at the grains lying scattered on the ground. Then they flew off again. The sparrows were free, they could go wherever they wanted. But the beauties in the aviary had no freedom at all.
“Birds from the African continent live here. Look! Aren’t they pretty? In countries where red and yellow flowers bloom all year round, bright colors like this count as camouflage. The residents of industrial nations, on the other hand, all wear gray, which,” Matthias explained, “is also a sort of camouflage.”
Knut took a better look at the birds. His own coloration struck him as out of place. He felt ashamed. Matthias wasn’t brightly dressed either, but at least he was wearing blue, green, and brown. Only his underwear was white. But Knut was dressed in white from head to toe. The tropical birds would think he was only wearing underwear, and for this they would despise him. Knut would have liked to have on a brown sweater and blue jeans.
They twittered without pause, these saucy little birds. It sounded like: “Little bear, little bear, taking a walk in his underwear!” Maybe Knut was just imagining it. He rolled on the ground to give some color to his arms and shoulders. Then he lay on his back and rubbed an itchy spot against the ground, which felt incredibly good. “What are you doing?” Matthias shouted, picking Knut up. “Look how dirty you are. We haven’t even visited the hippopotamus yet, and already you’ve perfected your mud technique? How did that happen?”
Knut suddenly saw the familiar stone slab before him. “That’s the enclosure where you always play.” Marveling, Knut stared at this familiar place that he was seeing from a new angle. The cheers of the visitors were activated in his memory. So this was the other side, the reverse of the stage. But what did that mean, the reverse? Knut felt his brain cells begin to twitch. The gray matter revolved slowly around its axis and something from the middle flew out. What was that just now? Knut gazed up at the sky, something was different from before. If he could just view everything from above, he would never again be startled by a change in perspective. “Knut, what are you looking for? Polaris? Soon the sun will rise higher. Then there won’t be any stars left in the sky, just the sun. Let’s keep going.”
Knut followed Ma
tthias, walking along a fence that soon came to an end. In its place was a dividing wall made of wooden poles and straw. Behind it, wire netting was stretched, and through this Knut saw white dogs sitting in a circle. Their narrow faces had an aristocratic plasticity, and their bony, thin legs gave a somewhat weak impression. Just like Knut, they were dressed all in white, so they too were members of a species that ran around in underwear. “Come over here, Knut, from here you can see better: it’s the Wolf family from Canada.” Knut ran over to Matthias, who was beckoning. A glass wall separated the wolves from the visitors. One of the wolves, apparently the head of the family, immediately bared his teeth when he saw Knut. The skin around his nose drew back in sharp folds. He growled, got up, and came closer. The female lying beside him rose and followed, and then came the rest of the family. They formed a triangle as if they wanted to become a single gigantic animal. With this method, even though no individual among them looked particularly imposing, they could bring down a giant. Knut was covered with gooseflesh at this thought and retreated between Matthias’s pant legs. “Don’t worry! Behind the glass wall is a deep moat you can’t see from here,” Matthias said. And indeed they stopped, probably at the moat that Knut couldn’t see. “The wolf isn’t your favorite, is he? I can see that. Wolves always stick together. If you aren’t part of their clan, they immediately see you as the enemy. They’ll kill you just for not being one of them. It’s not that they have bad intentions, it’s just a habitual behavior pattern. Polar bears are strong enough to be loners, you won’t understand the wolf mentality.”
A bit farther ahead, Knut discovered an empty enclosure with a terrace made of stone slabs. “This is the domain of the moon bear. She’s still asleep. Maybe she’s jet-lagged. She’s an Asian bear, just like that one over there, the Malayan sun bear.” In Africa, elegantly dressed birds sing songs, in Asia the bears are asleep, and in Canada dangerous wolves lead peaceful family lives: this was Knut’s modest takeaway from his morning walk.