by Yoko Tawada
“If that’s true, why did they build a zoo?”
“Ah, that is indeed a contradiction. But inconsistency is mankind’s very nature.”
“Now you’re fudging.”
“You don’t have to worry about what’s natural and unnatural. Just live your life as you please.”
This question of what was natural robbed me of my natural ability to fall and remain asleep throughout the night. Would it have been natural if I had blindly taken Tosca’s teat into my mouth and sucked on it with all my strength? If warm fur without beginning or end had enveloped and never left me? Then I would have spent the first weeks of my life in a cave of maternal odors until the harshness of winter had passed. Ever since my birth, I’d had little to do with Nature. But was this reason enough to consider my life unnatural? I survived because Matthias gave me milk in a plastic bottle. Was that too not part of Nature in the broader sense? Homo sapiens is the result of a mutation, a monster. And just such a creature took it into his head to save an outcast baby polar bear. Was this not one of Nature’s marvels?
If everything had proceeded according to the natural order, I’d have found a maternal body at the center of our den. But at the center of the crate I grew up in, there was nothing. In front of my nose was a wall. Was my longing for the world beyond the wall not in and of itself proof that I was a Berliner? When I was born, the Berlin Wall was already part of history, but many Berliners still carried a wall around with them in their brains, separating the right and left halves.
There are people who feel contempt for a polar bear who’s never been to the North Pole. But the Malayan sun bear never visited the Malaysian Peninsula either, and the moon bear was never in Sasebo, where the soldiers wear collars just like hers. All of us know only Berlin, and this is no cause to despise us. We’re Berliners, that’s all. “Michael, what about you? Are you a Berliner like the rest of us?”
He smiled in embarrassment. “Actually I’m just a visitor here. Now that I’ve turned my back on life as a performer, I’m free to travel as I please. So I’m always on the road.”
“Where do you live?”
“Have you ever walked around on the moon?”
“Not yet. It must be delightfully cool there.”
“It’s too warm for you in Berlin. You might be tempted to complain about not having an air conditioner, but actually that’s for the best.”
“Why?”
“If it were as cool in your room as inside a refrigerator, and as hot outdoors as a desert at noon, you’d never be able to go outside again. You like to go outside, don’t you?”
“Yes, I love the outside air. There’s nothing better than outside,” I replied in a loud voice.
“One day you’ll be able to go all the way outside, just like me,” Michael said with a smile and disappeared. As always, he left without saying goodbye. Matthias too had disappeared one day without saying goodbye. I can’t remember any parting words from my mother Tosca either.
The next time he visited, Michael told me they were planning a meeting between me and a young female bear, assuming that the meeting with Tosca went well. Then I would see my father Lars as well. I wasn’t reading the newspaper as regularly as before. Michael said: “I don’t know what to think of this meeting with a potential partner. It’s actually rather impertinent of them to be testing your ability to integrate. That’s the main reason for the meeting. You aren’t emotionally disturbed!”
I sighed, and Michael stroked my shoulder consolingly. “Don’t think about it too much. They constantly feel as if they need to be keeping tabs on all the other animals.”
Michael was looking pale, much paler than Matthias at the end. Worried, I asked: “You aren’t sick, are you?”
“No, it’s only because something very unpleasant just occurred to me. My blood refuses to circulate in my body when my thoughts get stuck somewhere. My problem wasn’t the female sex, I never took much interest in it, but I wanted to have children and be very very close to them, and no one could understand this. And even before my punishment, I’m being tormented by all possible means.”
•
I was able to find words for everything, but the heat wave that summer left me mute. Each afternoon, I thought that finally the summer’s heat had reached its peak, but then the next day would be even hotter. When would the sun be satisfied with its accomplishments and stop plugging away? Michael now visited me only at night, when the temperature would have fallen slightly.
I asked Michael if he had come by bus or bicycle, since he’d once remarked that he hated sitting in cars. He shook his slightly lowered head and did not answer. I noticed that his pants pocket were flat, there couldn’t be even the tiniest wallet inside. He wasn’t wearing a watch either. From the top of his head to the tip of his toes, he was as smooth and elegant as a black panther.
•
Apparently the heat didn’t bother the zoo’s visitors. Day after day, ever more spectators gathered before my enclosure. Not just on weekends — even during the week, these human bodies formed a double wall without a single gap. Since I made an effort every day to look attentively at their faces, I gradually became farsighted. I saw very small children stuffed into their strollers. They stuck their hands out in front of them and cried with the voice of a cat in heat. The faces of the mothers standing behind the strollers taught me how many different sorts of mothers there could be: one looked exhausted and severe, another as empty as a blue sky, and a third clung to her own gaiety.
On that day, I saw four strollers standing side by side. The four mothers were equal in height, as if all stamped out with the same template, and the cheerfulness in their faces appeared copied from one another. Suddenly I realized that there were only three living children and that the fourth stroller held only a stuffed animal with my face. Where was the child? I shuddered and couldn’t tear my eyes away from the mother with the stuffed animal. Atop her head, a tuft of hair stuck up like an antenna. The collar of her blouse was crumpled. She was beaming just as I’d imagine a happy mother would. Did she know her child was just a stuffed animal? Was that all right with her?
The stuffed animal in the stroller could be my departed twin brother. I couldn’t remember him, but I’d read in the paper that my brother had died four days after we were born. Since that day, my dead brother had ceased to grow. Perhaps he’d remained a baby and was now wandering around the zoo in the form of a stuffed animal in a stroller. Would he go on roaming around like this for years or even decades?
•
Finally the heat let up a little, and the word “autumn” even occurred to me. At breakfast I accidentally spilled some milk. The staff placed old newspapers on the floor. Right in front, I saw a large photograph of Michael. Because of my farsightedness, I could no longer read the tiny print of the newspaper very well. With effort I made out the words beneath the photo. Michael was dead. The date was too small to decipher.
But that evening he visited me again, as if nothing had happened. I must have misunderstood the newspaper article. It’s always best to pose a dicey question directly to the person involved, but in this case I didn’t know how to formulate it. Michael asked whether I’d met my mother yet.
“No, not yet. But there are rumors that the meeting will take place soon.”
“You’d better decide in advance what you’d like to ask her. During the meeting itself, you’ll probably be too excited to know what to ask. That would be a shame.”
“What would you ask your mother if that were possible?”
“Hmm, probably I’d ask how she’d have raised us if our father hadn’t been there. He was very poor and forced us to become successful pop musicians. I thought he was only thinking of the money, but that wasn’t the most important thing to him. When he was young, he wanted to be a musician too, he even played several instruments. His older brother had made fun of him. To the brother, it was clear tha
t my father could never be a musician. The hatred between the brothers drove my father mad.”
“Why did you say goodbye to the stage?”
“I thought we could survive all the changes in our environment if we’d only change our bodies and our thoughts. But I don’t have an environment anymore. So there’s nothing left to do.”
I asked myself whether I still had an environment. No one visited me in person any longer except Michael. I was the only one who made use of the large terrace with its swimming pool, but it didn’t really constitute an environment for me. When I looked up at the sky, I was overcome by a desire to travel far away. I had never been properly outside, but I was nonetheless convinced that our earth is enormous — otherwise the sky wouldn’t be so large.
•
Winter approached from far away with slow, heavy boot-soles. If there were no far away, the winter would lose all its cold in the Berlin heat. One day a cold wind would finally blow even here where I was. There must be a distant place where the cold can protect itself from the city’s heat and survive. That’s where I want to be.
•
The visitors to the zoo turned up in wool coats, and some of them wrapped thick scarves around their necks and even put on gloves. They stood patiently behind the fence, watching me, their noses red with cold.
Recently a visitor tossed a pumpkin into my enclosure. It was an amusing present. It rolled across the stone and fell into the water, but it didn’t drown: to my astonishment, it knew how to swim. I jumped into the water after it and pushed it around with my snout. After a while I started nibbling at it, feeling a mild hunger, and discovered that it didn’t taste half bad. Then I went on playing with the pumpkin, which now was missing a chunk.
“Isn’t Knut cold? He’s taking a bath outside!” a child said in surprise.
“He’s never cold. He comes from the North Pole.”
That adult voice was lying. I don’t come from the North Pole. I’ve read several times in the newspaper that I was born in Berlin. I also often read that my mother was born in Canada and raised in the GDR. Still, people kept saying I was from the North Pole, probably because of my snow-white fur.
During the night, the temperature plummeted. Michael never wore a coat when he came to see me, perhaps he didn’t own one. This night he wore, as always, a white blouse with a lace-trimmed collar beneath a black, skintight suit. His socks were white, his shoes black leather. “You look so gorgeous with your black hair,” I said.
“I have a hankering for white fur, that’s why I came to visit,” he replied in a jesting voice. “But you mustn’t tell anyone I visit you. Wouldn’t want to tip off the paparazzi.”
“I don’t read the newspaper anymore. It’s full of lies.”
“Some of the things they’ve written about you are degrading,” Michael said indignantly.
I nodded and said: “They write horrible things about you too!” I hadn’t meant to say that to him, but it was too late. Michael’s face froze. It was a long time before he could respond to me.
“I’m sure there wasn’t anything about me in the paper.”
“Yes there was. They said you were dead.”
•
The yellowish-green hues of the pumpkin resembled the autumn leaves the wind had brought to my terrace. How many days had passed since Michael’s last visit? He’d stopped coming, and I didn’t know how to measure the time. Since it grew colder every day, I was relieved at the thought of having survived the summer. But this relief scarcely alleviated my pain and sorrow. I didn’t know what I still had to look forward to. The day when I would see my parents again? The day I would meet my future wife? I’d have far preferred to go to another party with Maurice rather than get married. I didn’t want to have a girlfriend, start a family. I wanted to go out again!
I was waiting for the day when winter would so intensify that I could plunge into the season of ice. Winter was the reward for all those who’d survived the purgatory of summer. I wanted to lie dreaming of the North Pole in chilly air, wanted to see a snowfield before me, a field that — unlike newsprint covered with gossip and lies — would gleam an immaculate white. The North Pole had to be as sweet and nourishing as mother’s milk.
•
The damp air hung so heavy in the sky that I didn’t know whether to cry or laugh aloud. I noticed a disturbance in my throat. Also, my spinal chord felt strangely cold and sodden. I thought I was about to faint. My mood was moist and dark, but with a coating of euphoria. This feeling had weighed on me all day long, and in the course of the afternoon it grew unbearably thick. A wet wind licked my skin, wanting to taste the flesh and then the marrow in my bones. Behind the sky’s gray membrane, a fluorescent lamp gleamed. The weak light confused all of us: me and the objects around me. The fence and the stone slab displayed the wrong colors, as though they no longer knew if they were experiencing a dawn or a dusk. I looked up. Something darker than the air was fluttering in between. It was a snowflake. It’s snowing! Another flake. Snowing! And another. Snow! The flakes danced here and there. Snow! At first the snow looked surprisingly dark, despite the fact that it was just a white crystallization. It’s snowing! How wondrous it was, the way this brightness in motion instantly appeared dark. Snowing! The flakes spin as they fall. Snowing! One more flake. Snow! And another. Snow! There was no end to it. I couldn’t stop looking up. To either side of me, the little white leaves flew past like autumn leaves in a storm. The snow was a spaceship, it lifted me up and flew off as fast as it could in the direction of the skull — the cranium of our earth.
Copyright © 2014 by Yoko Tawada
Translation copyright © 2016 by Susan Bernofsky
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Originally published by Claudia Gehrke Konkursbuch as Etüden im Schnee
Manufactured in the United States of America
First published as a New Directions Paperbook Original (ndp1362) in 2016
Design by Erik Rieselbach
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Tawada, Yoko, 1960– author. | Bernofsky, Susan, translator.
Title: Memoirs of a polar bear / Yoko Tawada ; Translated by Susan Bernofsky.
Other titles: Etüden im Schnee. English
Description: First edition. | New York : New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016022379 (print) | LCCN 2016024407 (ebook) | ISBN 9780811225786 (alk. paper) | ISBN 9780811225793 ()
Subjects: LCSH: Polar bear—Fiction. | Emigration and immigration—Fiction. | Human-animal relationships—Fiction. | GSAFD: Allegorical fiction.
Classification: LCC pt2682.a87 e8813 2016 (print) | LCC pt2682.a87 (ebook) | DDC 833/.92—dc23
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016022379
eISBN 9780811225793
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation
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