Fear and Trembling

by Amélie Nothomb

  We veered neither to port nor to starboard. She was steering me into the bathroom. I told myself that she probably wanted someplace to talk about what happened yesterday. I was wrong.

  “This is your new job,” she declared in a calm voice.

  With an assured expression of professionalism and efficiency, she informed me of my new task. My responsibilities were, as necessary, to replace the roll of “clean, dry toweling” when it had been used up, and to replenish the stock of toilet paper in each stall. She entrusted me with the precious keys to a storeroom in which these marvels were housed, safe from the covetous looks of the employees of the Yumimoto Corporation.

  Then this delicate creature picked up a toilet brush and began to explain with convincing seriousness how it was to be used. I would never have imagined I would ever see the elegant Fubuki holding such an instrument, let alone pass it on to me as if it were a royal scepter.

  Somehow, in my amazement, I managed to ask a question.

  “Who am I taking this job over from?”

  “From no one. The cleaning women come in at night.”

  “Have they handed in their resignations?”

  “No, but you must have noticed that their nightly cleaning duties are not really enough. During the course of the day we often run out of towels, or discover that one of the toilet-paper rolls is empty, or even that one of the toilet bowls is stained. It’s embarrassing, especially when we have people visiting from another company.”

  I asked myself which would be more embarrassing for an employee: to see a toilet bowl stained by one of their own, or stained by someone from another company. I didn’t have the time to consider fully this question of etiquette because Fubuki evidently felt I had been told everything I needed to know.

  “From now on, thanks to you, we will no longer endure any further inconvenience,” she concluded with a sweet smile.

  And she left. I was alone, dumbstruck, my arms hanging limply by my sides. The door opened again. It was Fubuki. Like an actor with a perfect sense of timing, she had returned to give me one last piece of information.

  “I meant to tell you. Your work also includes the men’s bathrooms.”

  LET ME RECAPITULATE. As a child, I had wanted to become God, then, having decided this was beyond my reach, I chose to become Jesus. Finally I settled on becoming a martyr.

  As an adult, I renounced my religious ambitions, returned to the land of my early childhood, and looked for work as an interpreter in a Japanese company. Alas, that was too much to hope for. I was brought down a notch and became an accountant. But now there was no stopping the lightning speed of my decline. I was given the position of doing nothing at all. I should have guessed that nothing at all was still too good for me, for at last came my final assignment: lavatory attendant. My career was in the toilet.

  This inexorable trajectory might have been cause for ecstasy. I’d heard it said that a singer whose range was so great that she could sing from soprano to contralto possessed an enormous talent. Well, I too had achieved that vast range—from heavenly choir to the sound of a toilet flushing.

  Once my disbelief had subsided, I felt a strange sense of relief. I had lost the fear of falling any further.

  FUBUKI’S THINKING COULD probably be summarized as follows: “You want to follow me to the bathroom? Fine. You can stay there.”

  I stayed.

  Anyone else in my situation would have quit. But not if they were Japanese. Fubuki thought she had found a way of forcing me to resign, and hence lose face. Cleaning bathrooms was not deemed honorable in the eyes of the Japanese, but it was less dishonorable than losing face.

  I had signed a year’s contract, which expired on January 7th, 1991. It was now June. I would survive. I would do what a Japanese would have done.

  By so doing I was not escaping the law that dictated that any foreigner wishing to integrate themselves into Japanese life must honor the customs of the empire. The inverse of this law does not hold true at all: those Japanese who take offense when outsiders fail to adhere to their code are unfazed by their own departures from other people’s conventions.

  I was conscious of this imbalance and yet bowed to it wholeheartedly. I wondered if it stemmed from my childhood. I had been awestruck by the beauty of my Japanese universe when I was young, and as an adult I continued to draw upon its emotional reservoir. The contemptuous horror of the system was stripped bare to me, and I saw repudiated that which I had most loved, yet I remained faithful to it. I did not lose face.

  For seven months I maintained the bathrooms of the Yumimoto Corporation. Strangely, I did not feel as if I had hit rock bottom in my life. The job was far less anxiety-provoking than verifying expense reports. Forced to choose between working at a calculator and counting out rolls of toilet paper in the storeroom, I would have chosen the latter, without hesitation. Far better to convert the absence of paper into the presence of paper.

  _______

  LAVATORY CLEANLINESS AND mental hygiene go hand in hand. To those who will inevitably find my submission shameful, I need to say that never, not once during those seven months, did I feel humiliated.

  The moment that I accepted Fubuki’s assignment, I entered into another dimension—a universe of pure derision. Reflexively, I knew that in order to cope during these seven months I would need to change my set of values. I had to turn my life upside down.

  Through some mysterious process in my immune system, this reversal happened instantaneously. In a flash everything inside my head changed: dirty became clean, shame became glory, the torturer became the victim, and what was sordid became comic.

  Let me emphasize the comic. The restroom period of my life was one of the funniest I have ever experienced—and there have been plenty of other funny periods. In the mornings, while the subway was carrying me toward Yumimoto headquarters, I already felt like laughing at what lay ahead for me on that day in my little kingdom. I had to struggle to stifle my hilarity.

  Five women, myself included, worked in the Import-Export Division of the Yumimoto Corporation, and there were hundreds of men. Fubuki was the only woman to have reached managerial status. That left three other female employees, none of whom worked on this floor. My territory consisted only of the restrooms on the forty-fourth floor. Therefore the ladies’ room was, so to speak, the private domain of my superior and myself.

  Incidentally, my restriction to the forty-fourth floor proved—as if more proof were necessary—the perfect inanity of my appointment. If toilet-bowl stains (what those in the military so eloquently call “skid marks”) were such an embarrassment for visitors, I didn’t see how they could prove any less offensive in the bathrooms on the forty-third floor.

  I didn’t point this out. I would undoubtedly have been told that I was quite right. The bathrooms on that floor would have been added to my jurisdiction. No, I was content with the forty-fourth floor.

  Not everything about my inversion of values existed purely in my mind. Fubuki was deeply humiliated by what she probably interpreted as my obtuseness and inertia. She had been banking on my quitting. By staying, I was calling her bluff. My dishonor was thrown right back into her lap.

  This was never communicated in words. I did, however, have some proof of it.

  One day I came across Mister Haneda in person in the men’s room. This meeting made quite an impression on both of us: on me because it was difficult to imagine God in such a place; and on him because he was probably not aware of my new assignment.

  After the tiniest hesitation he smiled, clearly thinking that, given my legendary kookiness, I had somehow gone into the wrong bathroom by mistake. He stopped smiling when he saw me remove the empty towel roll and replace it with a fresh one. He didn’t dare look at me again.

  I had thought this chance meeting might change things. Mister Haneda was too good a chairman to question the orders given by one of his subordinates, particularly if that subordinate were the only female manager in his division. Nevertheless, I ha
d reason to believe that Fubuki was asked to explain what I was doing in there.

  The next day, in the ladies’ room, she spoke to me in a measured voice.

  “If you have any grounds for complaint, speak to me about them.”

  “I haven’t complained to anyone.”

  “You know very well what I mean.”

  Actually, I didn’t know exactly what she meant. What should I have done to not look as if I were complaining? Run straight out of the bathroom to let Mister Hanada think I really had made a mistake?

  Whatever the case, I loved the way my superior had put it—“If you have grounds for complaint… ”—especially the “if.”

  Two other people were authorized to get me out of the bathrooms: Mister Omochi and Mister Saito.

  It should go without saying that the vice-president couldn’t have cared less what happened to me. Indeed, he seemed downright enthusiastic about my new assignment.

  “It’s good to have a job, isn’t it?” he would say cheerfully, when we met in the bathroom, and without a trace of sarcasm. He probably believed that cleaning bathrooms would give me the fulfillment I needed, the kind of fulfillment that only honest work can provide. The fact that a creature as inept as myself had finally found its place in society was, in his eyes, a positive event. He must also have been relieved that he was no longer paying me to sit around doing nothing.

  Had anyone pointed out to him that my position was humiliating, he would have exclaimed, “You think it beneath her dignity? She should count herself lucky for working for us!”

  In Mister Saito’s case things were very different. He seemed profoundly disturbed by this whole situation. I had begun to notice that he had grown terrified of Fubuki; she emanated forty times his power and authority. Nothing in the world would have given him the courage to impose his opinion.

  When he came across me in the men’s room, a nervous little grin crept over his sickly face. My superior had been right when she had insisted upon Mister Saito’s humanity. He was good-hearted, if pusillanimous.

  The most embarrassing moment came when I met Mister Tenshi. His face changed completely when he walked in the bathroom. After the first rush of surprise had passed, he turned orange.

  “Amélie-san—” he whispered.

  He stopped, realizing that there was nothing he could say. He walked straight back out, without having performed any of the functions for which the place was intended.

  I never saw him there again. Mister Tenshi had found a way of manifesting his disapproval of my fate—by boycotting the rest rooms on the forty-fourth floor. He went to the forty-third floor. Angelic though he might be, he was still made of flesh and blood.

  I soon realized that he had spread the good word to those around him; no one from Dairy Products used my men’s room anymore. And I gradually noticed an increasing disaffection for it on the part of the other departments.

  Bless Mister Tenshi. This boycott constituted a veritable revenge on Yumimoto. The employees who chose to relieve themselves on the forty-third floor wasted precious company time waiting for the elevator or taking the emergency stairs. In Japan, this is known as sabotage, and it is one of the most serious crimes one can commit, a crime so despicable that they use the French word for it. Only a foreigner could dream up a word for such base behavior.

  This solidarity moved me. The word “boycott”—which originates from the name of an Irish landowner—suggests masculinity. And the blockade on my kingdom was exclusively masculine. There was no “girlcott.” In fact, Fubuki seemed more fanatical than usual about using the rest rooms. She started to brush her teeth there twice a day; her hatred for me was having a beneficial effect on her oral and dental hygiene. She so resented me for not resigning that she would use any pretext she could to sneer.

  Fubuki may have thought she was torturing me but in fact I was delighted to be given so many opportunities to admire her tempestuous beauty in this our own personal gynaeceum. No boudoir was ever more intimate than the women’s room on the forty-fourth floor. When the door opened, I knew it had to be her, given, as I’ve said, that the other three female import-export employees worked on the forty-third floor. Our little space was like the stage for a play, a place for two tragic actors to meet several times a day to enact the next episode of their fight to the death.

  GRADUALLY, THE DISAFFECTION for the men’s bathroom on the forty-fourth floor became a little too flagrant. I hardly saw anyone there anymore—just one or two twits who didn’t know better, plus of course the vice-president. I imagine that it was the latter who took offense at the situation and alerted the authorities.

  My position must have posed a real tactical problem for the higher-ups: interventionist though they were, they could not actually force their employees to relieve themselves on their own floor rather than on the floor below. On the other hand, they could not tolerate this act of sabotage. They had to do something. But what?

  Naturally, I was deemed responsible for their infamous behavior.

  “This can’t go on. You’ve disrupted everything around you once again,” Fubuki told me one day in a fearsome voice.

  “What have I done now?

  “You know very well.”

  “I swear that I don’t.”

  “Haven’t you noticed that the men no longer dare to use the bathroom on the forty-fourth floor? They’re wasting time by using the one on the forty-third floor. Your presence here embarrasses them.”

  “I understand. But I didn’t choose to be here. You know that.”

  “The insolence! If only you were capable of behaving in a dignified way, these things wouldn’t happen.”

  I frowned.

  “I can’t see how my dignity fits in to all this.”

  “If you looked at the men who come to use the bathroom the same way you look at me, their attitude would be easily explained.”

  I burst out laughing.

  “I don’t look at them at all!”

  “In that case, why are they so embarrassed?”

  “It’s quite normal. Just having a member of the opposite sex there is enough to intimidate them.”

  “And why do you not draw the obvious lesson from that observation?”

  “What lesson would you have me draw?”

  “Not to be there anymore!”

  My face lit up.

  “Are you relieving me of my men’s room duties? Oh, thank you!”

  “I didn’t say that!”

  “Then I don’t understand.”

  “As soon as a man comes in, you go out. You wait until he’s left before you go back in.”

  “Fine. But if I’m in the ladies’ rest room, I won’t be able to tell whether anyone’s in the men’s bathroom. Unless—”

  “Unless what?”

  I put on my most stupid, wide-eyed expression.

  “I’ve got an idea! All we have to do is put a surveillance camera in the men’s bathroom, and a monitor in the ladies’ room. That way, I’ll always know when I can go in there!”

  Fubuki looked at me in consternation.

  “A camera in the men’s bathroom? Do you ever think before you speak?”

  “Of course the men can’t know they’re being watched,” I went on ingenuously.

  “Be quiet! You’re an idiot!”

  “Let’s hope so. Imagine if you’d given this job to an intelligent person!”

  “What right do you have to answer me back like that?”

  “What have I got to lose? It would be impossible to give me a more lowly position.”

  I’d gone too far. I thought Fubuki was having a coronary. She looked at me with daggers in her eyes.

  “Be careful. You don’t know what might happen.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I repeat: be careful. And find a way of not being in the men’s bathroom when someone comes to use it.”

  She left. I wondered whether she was bluffing.

  JUST IN CASE, I obeyed my new orders. Actually, I was relieve
d not to have to spend so much time in a place in which, during the space of two months, I had been given the distinct privilege of discovering that there was absolutely nothing refined about the bathroom habits of the Japanese male. Japanese women live in fear of making the least sound in a bathroom stall. Japanese men pay no attention to the subject whatsoever.

  Even though I was spending less time in the men’s room, I noted that employees from the Dairy Products Department had not resumed their use of the forty-fourth floor bathroom. Spurred on by their leader, their boycott continued.

  Relieving oneself had become a political act.

  Any man who still used the facilities on the forty-fourth floor was in effect saying: “My submission to authority is total and absolute, and I don’t care if foreigners are humiliated. They don’t belong at Yumimoto anyway.”

  Any man who refused might have expressed this opinion: “Respecting my superiors does not prevent me from being critical of some of their decisions. Furthermore, I think that we would benefit from putting foreigners in positions of responsibility in which they might be useful to us.”

  An ideological debate was raging at the Yumimoto Corporation.

  EVERY EXISTENCE CONTAINS its primal trauma, an event dividing life into a before and an after, a trauma so great that even the most furtive memory of it is enough to make an individual freeze in irrational, incurable, animal terror.

  The ladies’ room had a lovely bay window. I spent hours standing before it, pressing my forehead against the glass, imagining again and again throwing myself into the view, letting the feeling of falling permeate my body until I was giddy. That is why I was never bored for one minute in my job.

  I was right in the middle of a mental defenestration when a new drama erupted. The door opened behind me. It could only be Fubuki; and yet here was not the quick clean sound my torturer made when she opened the door. It was as if the door had been pushed in. The footsteps were not those made by her delicate pumps but heavy and thunderous, those of a yeti in rut.