by Неизвестный
Relying on the imaginary conduit created by the telephone line, she watches the movement of his head, the only clues available to her.
“An Other,” she mutters, then corrects it to, “The interior of an Other.” She walks to the stereo in her own room. “Maybe. Maybe not.”
In her record cabinet she has an Erik Satie, a present from him. But she takes out Saint-Saëns’s Third Symphony instead. The stereo components he has assembled for her are smaller than his. She places Saint-Saëns on the turntable and sets the needle. It begins with a low melody that suggests a dark, desperate passion. She feels as though she is suddenly being abducted. To where? Yes, to inside herself. This symphony drags her with a fury into the depths of herself. The phone conversation that has just concluded is distant now—the man, his illnesses, everything about him hangs motionless like a star in the heavens, and she is brought face to face with the subterranean tempest that is her own interior. From inside her the first movement of the Saint-Saëns raises a blackly swirling storm. Unexpectedly the music thunders out, and spurts of blood or lava gush out, whether from Saint-Saëns or from herself she cannot say. Her entire body gyrates with sensations that are either joy or torment. And in the very lowest regions an immeasurably deep tempest coils like a serpent. So long as this music continues, she will not be able to be free of it, will not be able to return to life in human society. But it doesn’t matter. This is what she is.
This is the kind of woman I am, she says to him.
I know that; I’ve heard it so many times.
No, I’m talking about what I’m like inside.
I’ve heard that, too. You’re like a tempest, right?
But do you understand what I’m feeling now? Can you feel it exactly as I’m feeling it? To call it a storm—that’s just an expedient. It’s something that I can only try to describe in words like “tempest.” It’s indescribable, dark, fierce, pathetic, an incredible yearning. Even if you were here listening to this music with me, you couldn’t comprehend what it opens up inside me. I could never make you understand it in a million words.
When the symphony ended and she stopped the record, she felt the kind of exhaustion that follows after a violent shock has passed through the body.
At some point in her life she had started listening to every word that emerged from the lips of anyone she conversed with. It was not some strategy she had adopted, but a habit she had unconsciously developed. Even as she strolled the paths of conversation alongside those who spoke with her, she was careful not to miss a single word that went into the forging of those paths. By paying close attention to the process of selection whereby one particular word was chosen over any other, she came to know her speakers very well. While it was true that everyone let slip an occasional discordant word, even those words—or, rather, those very words themselves—revealed something about that person’s internal workings and served as the means by which she understood them thoroughly. In short, by tracing back each separate word that emerged from an individual, she was able to experience the interior that was the source of those words.
Her aim in speaking with others was to get to know them even better than they knew themselves. Her antennae were extended into realms of which others were not even aware.
But even these abilities ran into a solid wall of resistance in the presence of her rapacious feelings for this man.
He phoned to complain of a new malady, and again her spirits soared. This was a new clue about him.
Just as words emerge from a person’s interior, sickness comes from the same source.
Even though he was young, his back had begun to ache. She strongly recommended that he be tested at an orthopedics ward, and it was decided she would meet him there.
When she reached the front door of the hospital, the dazzling whiteness of the newly constructed building made her hesitate for a moment. It had been a long time since she had set foot in a medical facility. The image of hospitals she carried in her mind was of places black and dismal and rife with shadows, with walls and corridors and ceilings and doors painted in terminal colors, as if they had been infected by the patients who passed by them. But here she was surrounded by shiny, polished colors; the entire building was dominated by a feeling of smoothness so overpowering it seemed likely that she would slip and fall if she were not careful, or that a patient might drop the illness he had carried in with him.
She noticed him sitting on a sofa in the first-floor waiting room, his back to-ward her. She had quickly glanced around and scooped him up with her eyes from among the crowd of waiting patients. Only the spot where he sat seemed to have a halo of life hovering over it.
“How is it? How’s your back?” she asked, beaming.
He was holding the examination forms that the receptionist had given him, and he seemed just to be waiting for her to arrive before he hurried up to the orthopedics ward. He stood up as soon as she spoke to him.
“What’s wrong with your back?” She continued to press him as they walked side by side through the meeting hall on the first floor. She had to be careful not to smile.
“I can’t describe it,” he responded dourly and would not look at her. They stood beside one another on the wide steps of the escalator leading to the second floor.
“Try to describe it anyway.” She noticed a cluster of dandruff flakes on the back of his navy blue blazer and brushed them off with her hand, muttering to herself about men who live alone and pay no attention to their backs.
“Well, let’s see,” he said. Since she was older than he, whenever she badgered him he tried to comply and answer.
Apparently they had at least an hour’s wait in the corridor outside the orthopedics ward. A godsend seemed within her grasp: she could spend that time asking him anything she wanted about his afflictions.
“I fell down skiing when I was a child. Ever since then my back hurts sometimes.” He lit a cigarette.
“Really? You ski? I didn’t know that.”
“I tried it for only a little while.”
“I should think so. You never struck me as a sportsman. No, you mustn’t ever get involved in sports. You were born an invalid, after all.” She realized the remark was peculiar, but she made no attempt to retract it, and he did not try to challenge it. That was the nature of the relationship that had developed between them.
“This time, though, it seems to hurt a little differently.” He apparently had accepted the fact that having come ailing to a hospital, there was nothing to do but talk about his illness.
“How is it different?” She was insistent. She had come so far with him. But she was not tormenting him with her questions: she was the one in agony. There was no way she could escape this agony if she could not find out just how his back hurt him.
“It’s a throbbing pain.”
“Where?” She started to lift up the tails of his blue blazer, but since others were watching, he stopped her. Patients were jammed together in the sofas that lined the corridor.
“Right around here.” After he pushed her hand away, he placed his own hand on his back near the waist.
“Where?” She ducked her head and gazed searchingly at his back. He must be talking about the flat, fleshless crevice between his slender waist and his buttocks.
“It’s so bad I can’t walk.”
“But you walked here, didn’t you?”
“I just had to endure it.”
“Endure it? How much endurance did it take?”
“I told you I can’t describe it.”
“Don’t try to fool me. Anybody can say he can’t describe it.”
“But it hurts!” He would say no more after that outburst.
“For one thing, I have no idea how much pain you’re in. For another thing, I have no idea how much you’ve had to endure the pain. There isn’t any way I can understand that until somebody invents some kind of machine to measure what goes on inside a person’s feelings. So I don’t know who’s in more pain—the person who screa
ms that he’s in pain, or the one who quietly endures. Does the man who screams have no threshold of endurance, or does he cry out because he’s suffering infinitely more pain than the man who puts up with it? Does the man who grits his teeth remain silent because he has the ability to bear up against excruciating agony, or can he endure because he really isn’t in all that much pain . . . ?”
She went on in a low voice, even though in reality she wanted to shout her questions to the whole world.
“I’m sorry.” She realized what she was doing. “And you in so much pain.” In fact she was in pain inside, too. It was a pain that would probably not subside until the world provided some answers to her questions.
She looked around at the patients. Unlike other social gathering places, here each individual was crouched inward, focusing only on himself. It was obvious at a glance that some were invalids, while others on the surface looked no different from someone who might be seated beside you on a train. But all of them were equally turned inward now. Probably because their illnesses lay inside. There was just one woman, a plump, red-faced house wife, who was playing noisily with two young children: that single spot in the building seemed to be suspended in midair. She looked as though she had gone insane. What was she doing here? Was she waiting here for a husband or relative or girlfriend? Everyone else in the corridor seemed to be submerged in thought and indifferent to the vibrant clamor. They were thinking that since they had to wait here, there was nothing else for them to think about except that they had to wait here.
Finally his name was called. She stood up to go into the examination room with him, but he motioned for her to remain, so she sat back down on the sofa. He vanished behind the thin cream-color plastic door, leaving her with the impression that he had disappeared from the planet. The substance of the pain he bore had been snatched away from her on the opposite side of that fiercely hygienic door. She had come here with the intention of being present as the doctor examined him. The thing she most wanted to know was being stolen away from her by the doctor at this very moment. She wanted to become a doctor herself and grope her way through his organs and bones and muscles one by one, until she could lay her bare hands on the illness tucked deep inside.
He came back out, carrying his blue blazer over his arm and an examination chart in his hand.
She sprang to her feet. “How did it go?”
Uh was all he said. It was that same whining voice that sounded like an ugh over the telephone.
“Is it bad? Or nothing to worry about?” She walked beside him down the corridor.
“I have to have a blood test and then some X-rays.” That must be why he had removed his jacket.
“They’re going to take your blood? I’d like to watch. I wonder what color it is?” Her eyes widened.
“Stop it. You’re too greedy,” he said peevishly.
“I’m too greedy? You figured that out, did you?”
“I’ve never met a woman like you.” He gave a quick chortle and hurried to the room for the blood test, where again he disappeared behind a door.
When he came back out, his right sleeve was rolled up, and he held a piece of cotton against the inner part of his forearm. Blood trickled from beneath the white cotton. Her eyes locked onto it.
“They found out once when I had a blood-precipitation test that I have unusually thin blood.” The remark came out randomly as he walked toward the X-ray room.
“Unusually thin?” Again she looked at the bloodied cotton ball against his arm.
“Yes. They tell me that’s just the opposite of a healthy person’s.”
“I’m sure it’s beautiful thin blood.” She narrowed her eyelids and tried to picture the color of the fresh blood that coursed through his white body. There must be some correlation between the whiteness of his skin and the viscosity of his blood.
He was swallowed up behind the door of the X-ray room. She paced aimlessly up and down the corridor. Several different examination rooms had been clustered together, making it a simple matter to make the rounds of the entire floor. The alienation she had felt from the sparkling slipperiness of the new building when she first came in had largely subsided. In fact, the wards were decorated with chains of red flowers; a large plant that resembled a palm tree had been set out in the center of the second-floor meeting hall; and flower arrangements had been provided in each room. The whole building had been made whitely, inorganically bright, as if in the hope of neutralizing the diseases that people carried so protectively inside themselves.
She walked in front of the receptionist’s office outside the X-ray room. Through the receptionist’s glass windows, she could see into the dark X-ray chamber. She crouched down and thrust her head forward, struggling to see into the room. She could make out the faint reflection of the man’s naked upper torso and head. The X-ray machine must be pointed at his ailing back. He had to change postures and positions over and over again. They seemed to be taking pictures from a variety of angles. In that dark room packed with imposing metal instruments designed to peer into the interior of the human body, he looked as though he was being forced to perform some sort of ridiculous gymnastic movements. He bent over at the waist, twisted his torso, leaned forward, leaned back, lay on his side—in the course of these twists and turns, for even a fleeting moment would his illness bare its flat, expressionless face?
Several days later a large envelope was sent to her address via registered mail. In response to her eager request to see his X-rays, he had come up with some pretext and gotten permission to borrow them from the hospital. They seemed to have taken scores of pictures that day, but he had sent her only three—one taken directly from behind, one at an angle from behind and one straight on from the side. All were of only the waist area of his body. She first examined the picture taken from behind. Seen in this manner, his bones appeared surprisingly slender. His vertebrae were stacked one upon another like jewels, culminating in the gem of his tailbone. It lay in the spot where there were vestiges of a tail from the time when human beings were animals. His pelvis, too, looked surprisingly small, as though it belonged to a child.
She lined up the three photographs beside one another, narrowed her eyes and studied them one by one, then stepped back and took them all into her field of vision. The internal structure of the body she knew so well from without emerged grayly and dimly before her. These diagrams, with their white cross-stripes and black caverns—the more carefully she examined them, the less she was sure what they signified. Even so she waited; waited in the hope that somewhere in the depths of those translucent slides that purported to display the human body, a flat, expressionless face would make its appearance.
He had enclosed a letter. —As I told you on the phone the other day, they can’t say anything for certain, as you can see from the enclosed. They can’t determine the source of my back problems from these photographs. They tell me it’s called “back pain.” And that’s it.
Back pain, she muttered, and smiled to herself. They had searched for the cause of his back pain and had given it the name of “back pain.” If the back was having problems, anybody could come up with a name like “back pain.”
Through the photographs, she blankly turned her eyes upon his interior. They can’t say anything for certain. The words came back to her like an echo.
TAWADA YŌKO
Although Tawada Yōko (b. 1960) was born and raised in Tokyo, she has lived in Germany since 1982, received a master’s degree in German literature from Hamburg University in 1990, and writes in both Japanese and German. Her story “The Bridegroom Was a Dog” (Inumuko iri, 1993, trans. 2003) won the Akutagawa Prize, and in 1996 Tawada was awarded Germany’s Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, given to outstanding foreign writers. Her collection Where Europe Begins (Yoroppa no hajimaru tokoro, 1988) contains stories written in both German, as was the title story, “Where Europe Begins” (Wo Europa Anfängt), and Japanese.
WHERE EUROPE BEGINS (WO EUROPA ANFÄNGT)
Transl
ated from German by Susan Bernofsky
1
For my grandmother, to travel was to drink foreign water. Different places, different water. There was no need to be afraid of foreign landscapes, but foreign water could be dangerous. In her village lived a girl whose mother was suffering from an incurable illness. Day by day her strength waned, and her brothers were secretly planning her funeral. One day as the girl sat alone in the garden beneath the tree, a white serpent appeared and said to her: “Take your mother to see the Fire Bird. When she has touched its flaming feathers, she will be well again.” “Where does the Fire Bird live?” asked the girl. “Just keep going west. Behind three tall mountains lies a bright shining city, and at its center, atop a high tower, sits the Fire Bird.” “How can we ever reach this city if it is so far off ? They say the mountains are inhabited by monsters.” The serpent replied: “You needn’t be afraid of them. When you see them, just remember that you, too, like all other human beings, were once a monster in one of your previous lives. Neither hate them nor do battle with them, just continue on your way. There is only one thing you must remember: when you are in the city where the Fire Bird lives, you must not drink a single drop of water.” The girl thanked him, went to her mother and told her everything she had learned. The next day the two of them set off. On every mountain they met a monster that spewed green, yellow and blue fire and tried to burn them up; but as soon as the girl reminded herself that she, too, had once been just like them, the monsters sank into the ground. For ninety-nine days they wandered through the forest, and finally they reached the city, which shone brightly with a strange light. In the burning heat, they saw a tower in the middle of this city, and atop it sat the Fire Bird. In her joy, the girl forgot the serpent’s warning and drank water from the pond. Instantly the girl became ninety-nine years old and her mother vanished in the flaming air.