by Yoko Tawada
Thanks to television, I was already familiar with the elevator as a device, but it was my first time riding in one. When its metal doors opened again before me, I was standing before another world — and didn’t know if it was real or a projection.
The room was already crammed with guests, who were chatting with one another. Their voices buzzed around my brain like swarms of bees. The sweet smell of charred meat streamed through the room. I couldn’t see through the crowd. Everywhere, packed into shirts and trousers, were backs, bellies, and buttocks! Maurice pulled me through the crowd, making for an unknown destination. All at once a man was standing in front of us. His face was flushed, his suit elegant and cold. I tried to find out what made this man so interesting. His smile drilled itself into my eyes, and he kissed me on the cheek. The guests around us applauded — apparently I was being observed. Maurice wished him a happy birthday and handed him a box with a big ribbon fluttering on top. There was a photograph on the wrapping paper, a picture of me! The man thanked us, hastily kissed our cheeks again, and entrusted the present, still wrapped, to a young man who stood beside him ready for service. Then I was given a glass two-thirds full of a yellowish liquid. The birthday boy clicked glasses with me, there was a glass-clear ringing in the air. All the men in the room abruptly raised their glasses and shouted “Prost!”
I gazed deep into the liquid. Tiny bubbles clung to the inner wall of the glass, gradually pulling away from it and rising to the surface until they reached the outside air and burst, disappearing. I wanted to go on watching the bubbles, but Maurice took the glass away from me, whispering that it was better I didn’t drink the champagne. He went and got a different glass for me. I took a sip and was satisfied with the apple I tasted in it.
The man had neither a robust loudspeaker body nor an especially powerful voice, but every time he opened his mouth, all the other mouths in the room closed, and all the ears listened attentively. The man must be a star, I thought, and felt envy creeping up within me. I too had been a star once and each day had a large audience cheering on my every move, no matter how small. At the time, calling forth the attention of a million humans, I felt strong enough to blow away the clouds, or make a rainstorm pour down on the entire globe, or summon the sun with a wave of my hand, or rebuff a stormy wind. I wanted to turn back time and have that power in my grasp again.
At some point the esteemed gentleman disappeared in the press of people, but focusing my ears, I was able to hear exactly where in the crowd he stood. Around him, the guests formed several circular waves. The innermost circle listened to him in silence, while the wider circles distorted his words and transported them ever further out from the center.
Making his way behind me, a man pushed me a little, causing my nose to briefly press against Maurice’s chest. I smelled his butter scent from back in the old days. Suddenly the joy of being reunited with him took hold of me — somewhat belatedly but still with tremendous force. Spontaneously I licked his cheek. He pulled his face aside for show, but in reality he was enjoying the situation, otherwise he wouldn’t have explained to the man watching us enviously: “Different species, different customs. There are many ways to kiss.”
The smell of roasted meat drifted from the direction from which humans were now streaming, each with a plate containing a minuscule bit of food. Maurice read my face and whispered: “Wait just a little while longer. We can go get some food too, but not just yet.” I waited for a very long time, then could no longer endure it and inconspicuously took a step in the direction in which my sense of smell was leading me. Maurice stopped me, looking worried. “I’ll go get food for you. Wait for me here.” I couldn’t understand why he was so worried.
While I was waiting, several men came up to me and said they’d seen me on TV. One of them cautiously touched my fur.
Finally Maurice returned with a plate on which a piece of meat — as puny as half a dead mouse — was arranged beside three little potatoes and a dollop of applesauce. In the newspapers I’d often enough read about the city’s precarious financial situation. To be sure, the zoo also suffered from shortages, but this appalling poverty that we were invited to taste here with our own tongues quite surpassed my idea of hard times. When I looked down at my plate, it was already empty. “You can’t gorge yourself here,” Maurice whispered to me. Insulted, I went out on the terrace alone and looked at the black watery surface of the big lake. The moon trembled between the waves.
Among the men standing in a circle on the terrace was one who spoke uninterruptedly in a clear voice. I gathered that he was discussing a television talk show that had been broadcast the day before. Jokingly, the man imitated one of the participants, though at first I thought he was trying to impersonate a falcon. “I just can’t accept the way every married couple keeps adopting children. Like it or not, today we have same-sex couples too. So far so good. But if they too adopt children and exert influence over them, these children will later adopt children of their own, and someday not a single child will be born in this country. There will only be adopted children.” Laughter. The expression on the performer’s face shifted back from professionally mimed grotesquerie to his own: “I couldn’t believe it. The person who’d been saying this was still young but already had a chair-of-the-department haircut. But wait, here’s the best part: A gray-haired, elegant lady got up. She was probably in her early eighties. She said in a calm voice: ‘But almost all the parents whose children go on to live in same-sex partnerships are heterosexual. They’re the ones who produced these homosexual children. So if you want to prevent this, you should outlaw straight marriage.’” A few of the men trumpeted with laughter, others grinned. “But I’m not sure how many in the audience understood the lady’s words. So many people are blockheads, impervious to irony, humor, and innuendo. And yet it’s so important for minds to constantly be stretched and turned in all directions. I started clapping right in front of my TV screen, I wanted to show what respect I had for her. It was the author of that book . . . What was the title again?”
I didn’t have the courage to join their circle, so I stayed where I was, in an armchair off to one side. From there I observed all these unfamiliar buttocks in their snug-fitting trousers. They were firm and toned. Nothing at all like my own posterior, as saggy as worn-out overalls. I felt too ashamed to get up again. The armchair next to mine was free, but no one wanted to sit down. So I sat there, slowly slipping down into my fur, until a stranger wearing a snow-white sweater approached: “Are you okay?” he asked in a gentle voice. Unfortunately there was something catlike about his face, but it was nonetheless quite handsome. I stared at him, enchanted, while he introduced himself: “Michael.” It wasn’t entirely clear to me whether I should also say my name or perhaps instead tell him what I’d like to eat. I decided on the latter course of action: “Boiled potatoes with parsley would be good, but mashed potatoes with lots of butter would be even better.” Michael laughed, and a deep shadow appeared between his long lashes and the relatively high cheekbones. “I can’t tolerate most foods, so usually I avoid eating anything at parties. Even at home I find it difficult to eat. I know this makes me look unattractively gaunt. When I was little, people were constantly telling me how cute I was. Then came puberty, my body shot up explosively, and I was horrified when people told me I’d lost my charm. I no longer had an appetite, I lost weight, and had no way of returning to what I’d been.” His cheeks were like deep troughs, while his full lips still gleamed as red as blood.
“Were you sad when they said you were no longer cute?”
“I felt lonely and abandoned. All I could think of were cheap phrases from TV soap operas, like: ‘No one loves me!’ And during the worst of it, my mother left us.”
“Did she die?”
“No. She ran away.”
Maurice returned, his cheeks red. “It’s time to go home.” It wasn’t a suggestion, it was an order. Maurice ignored Michael as if he weren’t even t
here, he didn’t even say hello. When I looked back longingly, Michael replied in a consoling voice: “I’ll visit you soon. I know where to find you.” His voice had a quality only a bee can achieve with her honey. I was salivating.
Maurice took me by the paw and dragged me through the crowd, out of the suite, out of the hotel. In the elevator, he placed his arm around my shoulder. I didn’t want to go home. In the limousine I said to Maurice: “I’d like to go to another party with you soon.” He gazed at me with pity and stroked the fur on my chest.
•
The next day, the sunlight rebounded off the stone slab more brightly than usual, almost blinding me. I stretched, taking my time, consciously positioned myself in the light, stuck out both my arms in front of me like an Olympic swimmer, and dove into the water. There were only three people in the audience, but they applauded enthusiastically. At first I swam on my back, then I flipped over and switched to a breaststroke. A branch was floating on the water in front of me. I tested its consistency with my teeth. Then I held it in my mouth and started swimming in earnest. Shaking my head, I observed how the branch disturbed the water. Slowly the audience grew. Already there were ten humans standing there pointing cameras at me. Suddenly seized by a burning desire to play, I whipped the branch back and forth, and with a whooshing sound, glass-clear drops of water struck round holes in the air. I whirled the branch around, dove underwater with it, held my breath and stayed there until I couldn’t possibly stand it any longer. Then with a great flourish I popped to the surface again. Jubilant applause. I dove down again, this time trying to swim as far as I could while still holding my breath, then emerged in a far-distant spot, shaking my head so hard the water flew in all directions. There were already more than thirty humans standing behind the fence. I floated on my back, my sky covered with camera lenses.
When dusk fell, the voices of the visitors became ever fainter, and soon birds were supervising the zoo’s acoustic design with their twittering. At this hour, human voices could be heard only in isolation, and by the time the sun had set behind the high-rise, all beaks had fallen silent. Around midnight I would sometimes hear the old wolf howling. He wasn’t my best friend, but on lonely nights I’d have been glad for the chance to converse even with him.
The night grew deeper, without musical accompaniment. Something sent a shiver down my spine, I turned around and saw that the dusty screen of the computer was glowing from the inside. From the beginning that piece of equipment had stood there like a family altar, but I’d long since forgotten its existence. I almost collapsed when Michael appeared on the screen. “You had a good day today, didn’t you?” he asked casually, as if there were nothing to be surprised about. But I couldn’t manage to conceal my stupefaction.
“Have you been watching me all this time?”
“Yes.”
“Where were you? Hidden among the visitors? Unfortunately I can’t distinguish the faces of individual people behind the fence. They’re too far away. I can try to discern if a person is a man, a woman, or a child — but it’s only guesswork, based on the general mood and blurry outlines.”
“I wasn’t with the visitors. I was standing on a cloud watching you.”
“You’re nuts!”
“Have you read today’s newspaper? They’re planning a meeting between you and your mother.”
“My mother? Matthias?”
“No, Tosca.”
For a moment I tried to imagine a conversation with my biological mother, but my attempt was instantly derailed: instead of Tosca, all I could think of was a child’s drawing of two silent snowmen standing side by side.
“Michael, since you know so much, I’d like to ask you something. Why do people think my mother was neurotic?”
Michael stroked his smooth chin, on which not even the shadowy trace of a razor could be seen. “That’s not an easy question. I’m not sure if my answer is right, but what I think is that zoo people consider the circus something unnatural. In the circus, dolphins and orcas turn somersaults and toss balls back and forth, and that might still be acceptable, but it goes too far when a bear rides a bicycle. A bear doing a thing like that suggests that she’s emotionally disturbed. That’s how these people think, based on their quite particular notion of freedom.”
“Did my mother ride a bicycle?”
“I’m not exactly sure. Maybe she danced on a ball, or walked a tightrope. In any case, she did appear onstage in an act that wouldn’t have been possible without rigorous training. I don’t know if they forced Tosca to do this, or if she just inherited something her ancestors had learned. Like I did.”
“Did you work in a circus too?”
“No, not a circus, but something not so different either: I started performing onstage — singing and dancing — at the age of five. When I was barely able to stand on two legs, already I was training hard. I sang love songs without knowing what they meant. I quickly rose to stardom, and then my star just kept rising. When I entered puberty, people suddenly stopped finding me attractive. One friend told me that I’d been robbed of my real childhood and that I should fight to get it back.”
“Did they force you to dance and sing?”
“In the beginning, yes. But after a while it was me putting myself under pressure, and I couldn’t help it, because I liked performing so much — it was like being high every time I went onstage.”
“Was it the same for my mother? Is that what made her ill?”
“I don’t think so. When you see her, you can ask her yourself. Now I have to go home.”
After Michael’s visit, I fell into a deep, carefree sleep. When I woke up again, the inside of my eyelids was a luminous pink. After breakfast I ran out to the play area, as thoughtless and gay as a child. Matthias was no longer here, but his smile still shimmered in my brain. On the other side of the fence, a large number of visitors were already awaiting me with their cameras at the ready. The wind brought me the scent of the director. I used my right hand to steady myself against the naked tree — the only tree in the enclosure, growing out of a crack in the rocky ground — and with my left, I waved to my old acquaintance. He waved back. Then it started. Like an athlete doing warm-up exercises, I moved my shoulders up and down and turned my head to both sides. In the course of the afternoon, the number of visitors increased. During the hottest part of the day it sank somewhat, but in the late afternoon the audience grew again. The humans stood pressed tightly together, two or three rows deep, staring fixedly at me.
It wasn’t easy to keep thinking up new games. I throttled my brain, hoping to squeeze new ideas out of it, but this made my body temperature rise unpleasantly. My desire to show the audience a new game was impertinently strong, as were the expectations of the viewers, especially the children. The adults weren’t always curious right from the start, I had to coax the interest out of them. When I succeeded, I observed with satisfaction how these stiff human bodies softened, their faces glowing.
On this day I had only a single crackpot idea — in any case, better than having no idea at all: I imagined what it would be like if the stone slab were covered with a layer of ice, and I went sliding across it. “Oh, look, Knut’s practicing walking on ice!” a small boy shouted. “Maybe he’s homesick for the North Pole,” a male, grown-up voice replied.
“Will Knut go back to the North Pole someday?” a girl’s voice asked, sounding sad. I thought of the figure skaters I’d seen and admired on television. I wanted to be like them, to wear a short skirt and perform an icy dance. I wanted my chest to glitter with jewel dust like theirs. Or was it just ice splinters and water vapor? Ice dancers can glide forward while sliding back. I wanted to try that too, but for some reason it didn’t work. I fell on my backside and heard the audience roar with laughter. Practice makes perfect. I decided to work more on this the next morning.
The summer with its tormentingly hot days — on which I couldn’t really do
anything but sit in the shade waiting for sundown — dragged on and on. I closed my eyes three-quarters of the way, hoping to see a snowfield if only in my brain. Instead, an expanse of water there began to swell. I could smell that the water was made of melted ice. There wasn’t a single tiny ice floe upon this water, which glittered blue blue blue all the way to the horizon. “Oh no, Knut is drowning!” a child screamed. Horrified, I abruptly returned to my senses and quickly breast-stroked back to terra firma. It had been a long time now since my grandmother had appeared in my dreams.
Michael’s visit was soon a regular part of the evening routine I spent all day looking forward to. “You give your audience pleasure.” He seemed to be watching me all day long.
“I enjoy it.”
“I used to enjoy being onstage too, even though at the beginning I was forced to perform. As a child, I thought it was normal not to get any dinner if I didn’t do well in my song and dance training.”
“Matthias never forced me to do anything.”
“I know. When I look at you, I’m glad there’s a new generation now. But you still aren’t free. And you don’t have any human rights. Any moment they feel like it, human beings can kill you.”
Michael told me about a certain Mr. Meier who specialized in animal law. He sued the director of a zoo in Saxony for putting a newborn sloth bear to sleep after his mother refused to nurse him. The regional public prosecutor’s office rejected the claim on the grounds that a bear raised by humans could later develop a personality disorder, the disastrous consequences of which could be only be averted by prophylactic euthanasia. After this decision, all the humans involved considered the issue settled. It wasn’t yet clear that Mr. Meier loved not animals but animal rights. There are men who catch fish as a hobby. There are men whose hobby it is to hunt deer. Mr. Meier was after a very different sort of quarry: he hunted laws. He sued the Berlin Zoo for not putting their baby polar bear to sleep after he was rejected by his mother. A bear raised by humans, he argued, would lack the ability to find his way in bear society. It would be better if a problem bear of this sort did not exist. When it came right down to it, a bear in this situation should be shot to avert disastrous consequences. If the zoo in Saxony was innocent, it meant the Berlin Zoo must be guilty. It was illogical to declare both zoos innocent. This was Mr. Meier’s line of argument. I felt frost skittering down my spine, then a commotion tumbled through my brain, and a column of heat rose from the top of my head. “Human beings hate everything that is unnatural,” Michael explained. “They think that bears must remain bears. It’s just the same way some people think that the lower classes must remain poor. They would consider anything else unnatural.”