Fear and Trembling

by Amélie Nothomb

  To Fubuki, I wanted to say:

  “Stop it! Do you honestly believe this ridiculous performance is going to attract him? You’re more seductive when you’re treating me like a decaying fish. Pretend that he is me. Talk to him as if you were talking to me. Tell him that he’s mentally unbalanced, worthless. At least you’d get a reaction.”

  There was also something I longed to whisper to her:

  “Fubuki, wouldn’t it be a thousand times better to stay unmarried than tie yourself down with some creep? What would you do with a husband like that? And how can you feel ashamed of not marrying one of these men, when you’re so sublime, so Olympian? They’re almost all shorter than you. Don’t you think that’s a sign? You’re too long a bow for any of these pathetic little shooters.”

  When an eligible bachelor had departed, my superior’s face took less than a second to switch from simpering to stony coldness. Sometimes she’d look up and catch my mocking eye, then pinch her lips with hatred.

  WORKING FOR ONE of the companies that did business with Yumimoto was a twenty-seven-year-old Dutchman named Piet Kramer. Although not Japanese, he had reached a level in the hierarchy equal to that of my fair torturer. As he was about six feet two, I thought that he was a potential match for Fubuki, and indeed, when he came to our office she threw herself into her nuptial display, frenetically twisting her belt backward and forward.

  Kramer was a good man, and nice-looking. He was all the more suitable as a possible match because he was Dutch. Quasi-German origins made his membership in the white races less of a hindrance.

  “You’re lucky to work with Miss Mori. She’s so kind!” he said to me one day.

  This declaration amused me. I decided to make use of it by passing it along to Fubuki—with an ironic smile.

  “That means he’s in love with you,” I added.

  She looked at me in astonishment.

  “Is that true?”

  “Definitely,” I assured her.

  She was thoughtful for a few moments. This is what she must have been thinking: She’s white and she knows the white people’s customs. I can trust her for once. But, whatever happens, she mustn’t know.

  She affected indifference.

  “He’s too young for me.”

  “He’s only two years younger than you. According to Japanese tradition that’s the perfect gap for you to be an anesan niôbô.”

  Anesan niôbô means “older-sister wife.” The Japanese think the ideal marriage involves a woman with slightly more experience than the man, so that she puts him at ease.

  “I know, I know.”

  “In that case, what is wrong with him?”

  She didn’t reply. She seemed to go into a trance.

  A few days later, Piet Kramer’s arrival was announced. Fubuki was thrown into a state of panic.

  It was terribly hot. The Dutchman had taken off his jacket and his shirt displayed gigantic rings of sweat under his armpits. I saw Fubuki’s face change. She forced herself to speak normally, as if she hadn’t noticed anything, but her words sounded unnatural because in order to get the sound out of her throat she had to throw her head forward. The woman who was always so beautiful and so calm looked like a guinea fowl on the defensive.

  While engaged in this pitiable spectacle, she was surreptitiously watching her colleagues, hoping against hope that they hadn’t noticed anything. Alas, how could you tell if anyone had seen? More to the point, how could you tell if anyone Japanese had seen? The faces of Yumimoto’s managerial staff expressed the impassive goodwill typical of meetings between two friendly companies.

  The saddest part of it was that Piet Kramer hadn’t noticed the commotion, nor had the slightest sense of the internal crisis agitating the kind Miss Mori. Her nostrils were palpitating. It wasn’t difficult to guess why. She was trying to discern how far the Dutchman’s axillary opprobrium extended.

  It was then that the poor man unwittingly but fatally compromised his chance to contribute to the expansion of the Eurasian race. Seeing a blimp in the sky, he ran over to the bay window. The speed of his movement released into the surrounding atmosphere a fireworks display of olfactory particles, which were dispersed around the office by the draft created by his displacement. There was no doubt about it: Piet Kramer’s sweat stank.

  No one in the enormous office could have failed to notice it. As for Kramer’s boyish enthusiasm about the blimp, which was a commonplace sight, no one seemed to find it endearing.

  By the time the malodorous foreigner left, my superior’s face was drained of blood. Matrimonial hopes were about to deteriorate even further. Mister Saito made the first dig.

  “I couldn’t have stood it a minute longer!”

  By saying this he had authorized everyone to malign their visitor. The others lost no time in making the most of it.

  “Don’t whites realize that they smell like corpses?”

  “If we could only get them to realize how badly they stink, we’d have a fantastic market for really efficient deodorants in the West!”

  “We might help them smell a bit better, but we can’t stop them sweating. They’re made like that.”

  “Even the women sweat.”

  They were ecstatically happy. The thought that what they were saying might upset me didn’t occur to them. At first I was flattered. Perhaps they didn’t think of me as white. I quickly set myself straight. If they were talking like this in front of me it was simply because I didn’t count.

  Not one of them guessed the significance of this episode for their colleague. Had no one noticed the Dutchman’s armpits, she might still have deluded herself, closing her eyes (and nose) to this congenital defect in her potential fiancé.

  She knew now that nothing would be possible with Piet Kramer. To have had the least contact with him would have been worse than losing her reputation; it would have meant losing face. She could count herself lucky that apart from me no one knew the designs she had had on the bachelor. And I didn’t count.

  Her head held high and her jaws clamped shut, she went back to work. From the terrible stiffness of her features, I could tell just how much hope she had placed in this man. And I had had something to do with it. I had encouraged her. Without my meddling, she might not have considered him seriously.

  So if she was suffering, it was largely because of me. I should have taken pleasure in this. I took none.

  TWO WEEKS AFTER I had left my position in accounting I committed my greatest blunder of all.

  It had begun to seem as if I had again been forgotten about within the walls of the Yumimoto Corporation. This was the best thing that could have happened to me, and I was beginning to enjoy myself. From the unimaginable depths of my lack of ambition, I could conceive of no happier fate than sitting at my desk, contemplating the passage of seasons, and gazing upon the face of my superior. Serving tea and coffee, regularly throwing myself into the view out of the window, and not touching my calculator were all activities that more than fulfilled my fragile need to find a place within the organization.

  After all, I deserved the situation I was in. I had gone to some trouble to prove to my superiors that my best intentions would not necessarily prevent me from being a disaster. Now they understood. Their unstated though universally approved policy was something along the lines of: “Don’t let her do anything anymore!” And I had shown that I was up to these new expectations.

  This sublimely fallow period could have lasted until the end of time, had I not committed that blunder.

  One fine day we heard thunder in the distance. Mister Omochi was shouting. The rumbling came closer. We all started looking at each other apprehensively.

  The door to the Accounting Department gave way like an outdated dam under the pressure of the vice-president’s bulk surging in. He stopped in the middle of the room and howled like an ogre demanding lunch.

  “FUBUKI-SAN!”

  We knew then who was to be sacrificed to satisfy the appetite—worthy of Baal—of the
Obese One. The few seconds of relief experienced by those temporarily spared were followed by a collective shiver of sincere empathy.

  My superior immediately stood up and stiffened. She looked straight ahead, toward me therefore, but without seeing me. Magnificent as ever, she contained her terror and awaited her fate.

  For a moment I thought Mister Omochi was going to take out a saber hidden between two rolls of fat and slice off her head. Had it fallen toward me I would have caught it and cherished it to the end of my days.

  That cannot happen, I reasoned to myself. Those methods belong to another age. He’ll do what he usually does: summon this latest victim to his office and give her the dressing-down of the century.

  What he did was far worse. Perhaps he was in a more sadistic mood than usual. Perhaps it was because his victim was a woman, a very pretty woman. He did not give her the dressing-down of the century in his office. He did it right there, in front of the forty employees of the Accounting Department.

  You could not imagine a more humiliating fate for any human being, and certainly not for a Japanese, and especially not for the proud and sublime Miss Mori, than this public pillorying. The monster wanted her to lose face; that was clear.

  He approached her slowly, savoring the sway his destructive power held over her. Fubuki didn’t move so much as an eyelash. She was more beautiful than ever. Then his fleshy lips began to quiver and he produced from them a volley of seemingly endless ranting.

  Tokyoites have a tendency to speak at supersonic speed, particularly when they are telling someone off. The vice-president was also short-tempered and loose-jowled, and the combination of it all loaded his voice with such a scoria of fatty rage that I understood almost nothing of what he was actually saying.

  However it did not require familiarity with the Japanese language to grasp the essential point: a terrible punishment was being inflicted upon a living creature, and it was happening a few steps from me. It was an abhorrent spectacle. I would have done anything to make him stop, but he did not stop—the supply of invective in his guts proved inexhaustible.

  What crime could Fubuki have committed to deserve this? I never actually found out. I knew her abilities, her enthusiasm for work, and her professional demeanor, and they were all exceptional. Whatever wrongs she might have done had to have been venial. Even if they were not, the least Mister Omochi could have done was recognize how invaluable an employee this exceptional woman was, and temper his rage.

  It was pointless to wonder what my superior’s error might have been. Probably nothing for which she would have reproached herself. Mister Omochi was the boss. He was well within his rights, if he so wished, to use any pretext to sate his sadistic appetites on an employee. He didn’t need a reason.

  I was suddenly struck by what I was actually witnessing. He was raping Miss Mori, and if he had succumbed to this act of beastliness while being watched by forty people, the exhibitionism only amplified his pleasure. I wondered if someone that fat—he weighed at least three hundred pounds—was physically capable of having sex with a woman. As if in compensation, his bulk made him all the more potent at yelling, at making this beautiful creature’s frail silhouette tremble not from passion but with terror.

  I saw Fubuki’s body yield. She had always held herself erect, a monument of pride. If her body was abandoning her, that was evidence enough of sexual assault. Her legs gave out. She slumped into her chair.

  I can’t have been the only one to realize the nature of what was happening. I sensed profound discomfort in the others around us. They averted their eyes, concealing their shame behind their files or their computer screens.

  At this stage, Fubuki was hunched over, her slender elbows resting on her desk, her tightly balled fists against her forehead. The vice-president’s verbal machine gun shook her frail back at regular intervals.

  I was somehow not sufficiently unwise to let myself do what, in other circumstances, would have been a normal reflex: to intervene. There is no doubt it would have aggravated the situation—for both the sacrificial lamb and for me. And yet I cannot pretend I felt proud of myself. Honor sometimes means doing something very unwise. Be-having like an idiot is better than dishonor. To this day I blush for having chosen sensible restraint over common decency. Someone should have done something; and since there was no chance the others would have put themselves at risk, it should have been me.

  I know Fubuki would never have forgiven me for it, but she would have been wrong. The worst thing about the whole ghastly episode was the way the rest of us meekly watched, and did nothing. Our submission to absolute authority was abject.

  It seemed to me that as time went on Mister Omochi’s screams became more intense, proving, if further proof were even necessary, the hormonal element of the scene. His energy recharged tenfold by the spectacle of his own desire, the vice-president was becoming increasingly brutal. His shouting gathered strength, its physical impact overwhelming his victim.

  Toward the end came a painfully poignant moment. Perhaps only I and Mister Omochi heard it—a frail voice, a child’s voice.

  “Okoruna. Okoruna.”

  It was the plea a little girl would make to her enraged father.

  “Don’t be angry. Don’t be angry.”

  This sad supplication was what a gazelle, torn to pieces and half devoured, might say to a lion, begging for its life. I knew this was a stunning departure from the dogma of submission, from the ban on defending oneself from anything that comes from above. Mister Omochi seemed a tiny bit disconcerted by this unfamiliar voice, but it didn’t stop him. In fact, something about it seemed to give him greater satisfaction, and he began screaming even more loudly.

  An eternity later, either because the monster had tired of his toy, or because this invigorating exercise had whetted his appetite for a double futon-mayonnaise sandwich, he left.

  A deathly silence fell over the accounting department. No one except me dared look at Fubuki. She remained prostrate for a few minutes, then struggled to her feet and fled without saying a word.

  I KNEW SHE had gone where women go when they have been raped—where there is flowing water, where you can be sick to your stomach, where you can be alone. In the offices of Yumimoto the place that best filled these requirements was the bathroom.

  I simply had to go and comfort her. It was no good trying to reason with myself, or remember all the humiliations she had inflicted on me, the insults she had thrown in my face. My ridiculous compassion dictated. “Ridiculous” is the right word. It would have been a hundred times smarter to have intervened between Mister Omochi and my superior. That, at least, would have been courageous. Whereas what I did was thoughtless.

  I ran to the women’s room. She was standing in front of one of the sinks, crying. I don’t think she saw me come in. Unfortunately, she did hear me speak.

  “Fubuki, I’m so sorry. I’m with you with all my heart. I’m on your side.”

  I was already moving toward her, stretching out an arm that quivered with comforting intentions, when she turned to me with a look of incredulous anger.

  Pathological fury made her voice unrecognizable.

  “How dare you? How dare you?” she screamed.

  I can’t have been having one of my intelligent days. I tried to offer an explanation. I touched her arm.

  “I didn’t mean to upset you. I only wanted to … say I was your friend.”

  In a paroxysm of hatred, she threw off my arm so that it whirled like a turnstile.

  “Will you be quiet? Will you leave?”

  I stayed rooted to the spot, dumbfounded.

  She walked toward me with Hiroshima in her right eye and Nagasaki in her left. Had she had the right to kill me, she would not have hesitated to exercise it.

  I finally understood, and ran out of the bathroom.

  BACK AT MY desk, I spent the rest of the day simulating busyness while analyzing my stupidity, vast subject for meditation that it was.

  Fubuki had b
een humiliated from head to toe before her colleagues. The only thing she had been able to hide from us, the last bastion of honor she had been able to preserve, had been her tears. She had had the strength not to break down in front of us.

  And I had gone and watched her cry. It was as if I had wanted to drink the final full measure of her shame. She could never have believed what I did was based on kindness, though misguided kindness.

  An hour later, she sat back down at her desk. No one so much as looked at her. She, however, stared at me. Her dried eyes bored into me with hatred. I could read clearly what they were telling me: “You’ve got it coming to you.”

  Then she went back to work as if nothing had happened, leaving me to interpret at leisure my sentence.

  It was clear she believed my behavior had been an act of pure revenge. I knew there was no doubt in her mind that my sole objective had been retaliation for the way she had mistreated me in the past, to pay her back for what she had done to me.

  I longed to tell her she was wrong, to say, “Okay, it was stupid and thoughtless, but I beg you to believe me. I had no other motive than my good, well-meaning, and stupid humanity. Yes, it’s true I resented what you did to me, but when I saw you being humiliated, all I felt was simple compassion. You’re perceptive enough to know that no one in this entire company—no, on this entire planet—respects and admires you, holds you in such awe, as much as I do.”

  I will never know how she would have reacted had I actually said this to her.

  THE FOLLOWING DAY. Fubuki greeted me with an expression of magisterial serenity.

  She’s recovered, she’s feeling better, I thought.

  “I’ve got a new assignment for you. Follow me,” she announced in a controlled voice.

  I followed her out of the room. I was already worried. My new appointment was not in the Accounting Department? Where was she taking me?

  My apprehension grew sharply when I realized that we were heading for the bathroom. It can’t be, I thought. We’ll turn right or left at the last minute and head toward some office.