by Yoko Tawada
With great effort, we continued the show until it was time for it to end. Christian looked at us pensively when we returned, and said: “If things continue at this rate, Knut’s body weight will reach 110 pounds by next week already.” Since Matthias didn’t respond, he continued: “We agreed on 110 pounds as the upper limit a long time ago. Yesterday I was thinking that possibly we could raise the limit to 130. But now the audience has seen you bleed. Besides, it’ll be no time at all before Knut weighs 130 pounds. Sooner or later, you’ll have to say goodbye. Maybe this is exactly the right moment.”
Christian spoke calmly, but in the end his voice cracked despite his best efforts, and he wiped moisture from his eyes with the back of his hand. Matthias placed his arm on Christian’s shoulder. “If it were death separating us, that would be bad. But it’s not death driving us apart, it’s life. I’m happy that we were able to get this far together.”
Then he turned to me and asked: “You’ll write me an email now and then, right?” At that moment I heard a monstrous voice and was terrified until I realized the voice was coming from Christian. He was sobbing.
That same day, I moved into a cell. There was a bed of straw in the middle, and next to it Matthias installed our old computer. Then he patted the bed all over to make sure it was all right. Through the bars of the gate in front, I could see the stone slab where our daily show took place. At the back of the cell was a small hatch through which my food could be passed to me. Matthias checked the doors and gave detailed instructions to the humans standing by silently. Then he himself lay down in my future bed, shut his eyes and lay there like a dead man. After ten seconds he leapt to his feet and left the room without looking at me.
After that day, Matthias never came to see me again. In the morning and at night, my food was served to me through the hatch. The staff taking care of me changed often, as I could tell by the smell, but neither Matthias nor Christian was ever among them.
•
Every morning when the gate was opened, I would go out into the enclosure, where, off in the distance, I could see the audience, now much smaller than before. At night, when I smelled food, I would withdraw to my room. The computer still stood beside my bed, but I couldn’t remember how to turn it on. In one corner of the bed sat that boring stuffed animal that had accompanied me ever since I was an infant. It looked depressed.
I lost all desire to entertain the visitors by playing for them. The only advantage of being outside was that the sun, when it was shining, would clear my head and warm my back. It soothed the pain. I would tuck all four limbs under my belly and not move from the spot. “Knut looks sad.” A small girl’s voice rode a wind horse to reach my eardrum. “He doesn’t have anyone to play with.” Children recognized my condition at a glance, while any number of adults thoughtlessly wisecracked. Their statements reeked of their cynical entrails; their humanity was deployed only when discussing their fellow Homo sapiens.
“Just look at those terrifying claws. He injured a zookeeper with them.”
“Full-grown, even Knut is dangerous. He’s a wild animal, not a dog.”
“He doesn’t look cute anymore.”
My mother left me in the lurch right after I was born: I thought up this phrasing after Matthias abandoned me. As long as he was with me, I didn’t feel the urge to probe the secret of my birth.
It was a male Homo sapiens who raised me, and it’s rare for such a thing to work, it was almost a miracle. It was a while before I understood this miracle to be my own life story. Matthias was a true mammal, far more so than many of his sort, because he gave me suck: he fed me not only milk but part of his own life. He was the pride of all mammals.
Matthias wasn’t even a distant relative, let alone my biological father. As the white wolf had once pointed out, Matthias and I bore no resemblance to one another. From our buttocks to our faces, we were different. The wolf was proud of the fact that the members of his family looked as alike as photocopies. But I revere Matthias for having suckled and cared for a creature like me who was not at all similar to him. The wolf devoted himself only to the expansion of his own family. Matthias, on the other hand, gazed far into the distance, all the way to the North Pole.
Matthias was always beside me, devoting his days to my care even though he had a charming wife at home, and even though his own adorable children — to whom he had given his genes — were waiting for him. He didn’t do it because I was cute. Billions of worried eyes were watching me in those days. If I had died, the greenhouse gasses in the sky would have formed a giant, steel-hard layer that would have lowered itself upon the city like a lid on a pot, and then, what with the boiling steam, the temperature would have drastically risen, and all the inhabitants of the city would have quickly been cooked through. At the North Pole, all the ice floes would have melted, the polar bears would have drowned, and the green meadows would have vanished beneath the rising sea. But because the miracle worker Matthias had succeeded in making milk flow from his fingertips to feed the wunderkind, the North Pole was saved and thus the rest of the world as well. The little bear was saved, and so it became his duty to save the North Pole from further dangers. He would have to pore over all the philosophical and holy writings, which human beings in the past had indefatigably produced, to find an answer. He would have to swim, crossing the icy sea with its floes to reach the answer. An expectation as huge as the sky lay upon his shoulders, weighing many tons.
It sounded like a heroic tale, but I was nothing more than a helpless creature. I lay there, pathetic as a skinned rabbit. On TV I saw myself as a newborn. My eyes were still squeezed shut, my ears, not yet able to hear, hung down limply, and my four unstable limbs couldn’t even lift my belly off the ground. Why had this child been sent into the world? Wouldn’t it have been better if he had stayed on in his mother’s womb? The TV viewers must have asked themselves this question. If it had been possible, I’d have denied that this was me.
The question of why Tosca refused to nurse me did not occur to me so clearly formulated for a long time. My mother no doubt had her reasons, incomprehensible to me. Children in general cannot understand what goes on in their parents’ heads. It’s pointless to speculate. This is one of the basic principles of Nature. What I wondered instead was why mammals were created in such a way that they cannot survive without their mothers’ milk. A newborn bird, for example, can survive without his mother if his father brings him tasty worms to eat. But mammal children must drink milk. That’s what defines a mammal. No substance other than milk can nourish them. This is one reason, perhaps, why we’re always forced to remember our milky pasts and can never be as free as the birds.
The other thing I couldn’t understand was why only females could produce milk. If my father Lars could have suckled me, my life would have gone in a different direction. As it was, Tosca was forced to assume all the responsibility.
The circus protests against every injustice in Nature. The magician makes his bowler hats give birth to doves. The acrobat leaps from one branch to the next even though he wasn’t born a monkey. The wild-animal tamer forces creatures afraid of fire to jump through a flaming ring. And Matthias made milk flow from his fingers. At some point I watched the performance of an East Asian circus on television. Water sprayed from the fingertips of the women, who were dressed up as pheasants, just like a fountain. What a glorious theatrical accomplishment! And Matthias achieved at least that much. To be sure, it wasn’t long before I saw through his trick with the milk bottle, but my astonishment and respect for him remained undiminished. There can be no magic without tricks. And Matthias did not merely provide me with milk. Ceaselessly he worried about me, asking himself whether I wasn’t too cold or too hot, or whether I might injure my head on the sharp corner of some object. He stopped going home and for a while spent every night with me, providing round-the-clock care. When I was being weaned, he prepared complicated weaning meals day after day.
He gave me the feeling that I could never be abandoned. He washed my body in a tub and dried me with a towel. After the time-consuming cooking process, he would patiently wait until I’d finished my meal. He never rushed me. He collected the scraps of food I scattered everywhere, and cleaned the floor. He sat beside me when I watched TV and explained to me about the humans who turned up in the programs. He jumped into the cold water to teach me how to swim. He read to me from the newspaper every day, and one day he disappeared without saying goodbye.
Newspapers kept being delivered to my cell. Matthias had no doubt arranged for this. For the most part, it would be one of those free Berlin city papers with lots of photos and not much text. Most of the articles were incomprehensible in terms of content, while others were heartrendingly sad. I never found an article that made me happy. Nonetheless, I couldn’t stop reading once I’d stuck my snout into a piece of printed matter.
•
And this news too reached me in the form of a newspaper article: Matthias is dead. He died of a heart attack. At first I didn’t understand what that meant. I read the article through several times. Suddenly a thought struck me like a stone: I can never see him again. Of course it was perfectly possible that I’d never have been able to see him again even if he’d remained alive. But I would have gone on thinking now and then: Maybe I’ll see him again after all. This “maybe” is what human beings call hope. My “maybe” was dead.
Matthias had first fallen ill with renal cancer, I read, and then had suffered a heart attack. He died instantly, even though the heart attack was his first. Why hadn’t he come to visit me before his heart was fatally attacked? He could have mixed some of his saliva into my food as a sign — that would have meant a lot to me. He could have hidden amid the throng of visitors and called out my name — I would have heard him.
The newspaper offered a hodgepodge of tidbits. None of them could nourish me, but since I had no other source of information, I nibbled my way through them day after day down to the last corner.
One day I read the opinion that Matthias’s death was all my fault. I was a changeling, this human wrote: the devil had replaced a proper child with me. There were people who tried to open his eyes, but he refused to return to his own proper child and instead stayed with Knut, whom he took for his one true child. Matthias, the writer said, had been possessed by the devil.
I didn’t know of any animal called Devil, since this species was not represented at the zoo.
In another article, a journalist claimed I’d sucked out Matthias’s life force. Possibly he was referring to the milk I’d imbibed each day.
Matthias’s funeral was said to have been a private, closed ceremony for family and friends. I wasn’t invited. I don’t know what exactly humans do at a funeral ceremony. Maybe the humans who were close to the deceased are able to feel his presence once more during the ceremony. No one had been closer to Matthias than me, but I wasn’t invited, and the reasons for this remained forever obscure to me.
I read an interview with Christian, who said: “Matthias had a lot of stress.” Once again, the humans were talking about stress. Stress was the explanation they gave for why my mother rejected me and also for Matthias’s death, but I didn’t know of any animal called Stress. At least not at our zoo. This must have been an imaginary animal the humans thought up, as if there weren’t enough real animals. I felt a need to discuss this with the sun bear, but ever since my separation from Matthias, I was no longer allowed to go for walks in the zoo and I no longer spoke with anyone.
Since I was being kept away from the other animals, I paid ever more attention to the sounds made by plants. The rustling leaves of the trees, for example, calmed me, although I couldn’t interpret their language.
Outside in the play area, hot air shimmered even in the shade. Every movement, no matter how slight, made my temperature rise, and I was about to explode. So I had no choice but to go swimming. When I got into the water, the spectators shouted in delight and pointed their cameras at me. I still didn’t know why. In the water, I soon felt bored again. Apparently the visitors also found it less than thrilling to observe my boredom. The number of visitors had fallen off dramatically in recent weeks.
One rainy morning, my unpopularity had grown to such an extent that only a single visitor stood behind the fence watching me. He stared at me without once averting his gaze, even when he clumsily opened a black umbrella. A faint breeze brought his smell to me — a smell I knew. Who was this man? I stretched my nose out as far as I could, eagerly sniffing, and inhaled the odor deeply. It was Maurice, the night shift substitute. Back then, he’d read a bit to me from his collection of books. I waved my snout in the air, and he raised his hand and waved back.
•
After Matthias’s death, a whole series of disruptive events followed. I wanted to wrap myself in the black woolen blanket of grief and brood over my clutch of sorrows until they hatched and flew away, but it wasn’t possible. Instead I had to defend myself tooth and claw against the world’s malice. One of the main problems concerned inheritance — not that I believed I had any claim at all to Matthias’s estate. How could I be entitled to someone else’s money if I didn’t even receive a share of the profits I generated for the zoo? The dispute was not between the zoo and me, but between two zoos. They were feuding over me, but I wasn’t even called to testify. All I could do was follow the trial in the newspaper and hang my head lower each day. The zoo in Neumünster, to which my father Lars belonged, had sued the Berlin Zoo, which was making a pretty penny off me. The Berlin Zoo, the suit charged, should pay the Neumünster Zoo 700,000 euros of its profits. I lost my appetite when I saw a caricature in which my body was drawn in the shape of a euro sign. Another article reported on the toxic chocolate that had been sent to me as a gift.
Whoever owns the father also owns the son and thus also the son’s property: one newspaper claimed there was a law establishing this ownership structure. In another paper, a journalist wrote that modern society must reject so outdated a law. However that might be — whether in truth or allegedly — the Neumünster Zoo claimed that I was in fact its property. The Berlin Zoo relented and offered to pay the Neumünster Zoo 350,000 euros, but not a cent more. At least, this was the state of affairs as best as I could tell from these various reports.
Though it would never have occurred to me to consider myself a source of financial gain, not only had more tickets been sold for admission to the zoo, but the Knut merchandise had proved quite profitable as well. Untold thousands of stuffed animals with my face on them had been sold as sacrificial stand-ins. There was a tiny Knut made of hard material, a middle-sized Knut, a fluffy Knut, and even a Knut of exaggerated proportions. Apparently every time the shelves of stuffed animals were emptied, a truck would drive up to the rear entrance to deliver a fresh load of these clones, and they were all called Knut. Imagining this huge pile of Knuts, I wanted to shout at the top of my lungs: “There’s only one real Knut here — me!” But no one was listening. Knut was for sale not only as a stuffed animal, but also as a keychain, coffee mug, t-shirt, polo shirt, sweater, and DVD. On TV I learned there was even a CD of Knut songs. There were decks of playing cards — my head replaced that of the king — and even a teapot with a handle shaped like me. Notebooks, pencils, tote bags, backpacks, plastic cell phone cases, wallets: I was everywhere.
All the tabloids reported on humans steadily increasing their wealth, building magnificent villas, going to parties dressed all in black, red, and gold velvet and silk, and being photographed with jewels in their ears. I wasn’t interested in money, but there was one article that shook me awake: a man had been arrested on suspicion of corruption, but had then paid 100,000 euros in bail and was temporarily released. I vaguely remembered something Matthias had once explained to me: you could buy your freedom, at least for a certain length of time. Could I too pay to leave my cell and experience freedom?
Early in the morn
ing, it was still reasonably cool outside in the play area, but after the sun had reached its peak, the cruel heat grew more intense by the minute, tormenting me. Thinking about the Knut merchandise and the court cases involving me caused my organ of cognition to overheat until it hurt. I covered my head with my arms and tried to breathe quietly. Behind the fence I heard someone say: “Look! The financial crisis has gotten so desperate that it’s even giving Knut a headache.”
•
One day the playing card of my morale was finally turned over, and a lucky number appeared. During breakfast I suddenly caught the scent of a familiar man, it was Maurice again, and I discovered a letter on my breakfast tray. Impatiently I opened the envelope and read that a mayor was inviting me to a private reception. Maurice would come the next evening to pick me up. The zoo was making an exception in allowing me to go on this outing because the invitation had been extended by a person of importance to the zoo, but still this was a private event and as such had to be treated confidentially. The reception was to take place in a suite in a luxury hotel that stood directly on the shore of one of Berlin’s lakes. The spacious terrace on the seventh floor afforded a lovely view of the water. A limousine would pick up first Maurice and then me from the zoo and bring us directly to the reception.
•
Maurice and I got out of the limousine. I don’t know whether it was the sight of the lake nestled in its green surrounds or the already setting sun, but for the first time in ages I felt I was finally breathing fresh air again, cooling and refreshing me. In front of the hotel entrance, two doormen stood in fir-needle-green uniforms. They had playfully wrapped and decorated their torsos with strips of leather. I almost smiled at them, but their eyes, observing us, were stern and forbidding. Otherwise I might have asked: Are you real policemen or actors?
Maurice took my right paw and led me through the empty vestibule. A monstrous chandelier hung from the ceiling, bathing the room in yellow light.