by Yoko Ogawa
“Come on,” he said, taking my hand and gently leading me inside. The door clicked shut behind us.
The ceiling was low and there were no windows except for a circle of glass at the very top of the steeple—all in all, it was a cold and dusty room. The floorboards creaked, and from time to time my heel got caught in the space between them. The sole source of light was a single bulb that hung from the ceiling, too weak to illuminate the whole space. There was no wind, but it swung slightly on its cord nonetheless.
First, I went over to examine the clock. It seemed much larger here than it appeared when seen from below. There was a space between the face and the mechanism so that it was possible to touch the arrow-shaped hands—hands so sturdy I couldn’t have moved them had I wrapped my legs around them to weigh them down.
The churchyard below looked tiny, and I felt dizzy realizing the distance to the ground. The clockworks clicked relentlessly; the smell of oil filled the room.
“Have a seat over here,” he said, indicating a table and chair in the middle of the room. They were the sole furnishings, old and plain but carefully maintained.
“How do you like it?” he said, looking around at the room as he unceremoniously added my broken typewriter to the pile.
He seemed to be in a good mood, looking perhaps happier than I had ever seen him.
“Well?” He was determined to get my opinion of the room, but I could manage nothing more than a smile and a nod as I stared at him. “I was sure you’d like it,” he said, manifestly pleased.
I am unable to relax if I don’t have a typewriter. Things seem out of balance. I was obviously upset when I first realized I’d lost my voice, but my anxiety was even greater now at having lost my typewriter.
Why doesn’t he start repairing it? I said to myself. But I had no way of communicating the thought. I looked around for my pad and pen, but there was nothing. I regretted having left them at home, but he had taken them from my pocket as we were leaving.
“You won’t be needing these,” he’d said. “I’ll have it fixed in no time.”
I gave him a tap on the shoulder and pointed to my typewriter, sitting atop the heap. But he paid no attention and instead took out his stopwatch and began polishing it with a scrap of velvet. I wasn’t sure whether he’d failed to understand what I was asking or whether he was trying to signal that the repairs could be done quickly so there was no need to hurry.
We heard voices talking below us, and the sound of children’s laughter. People were apparently beginning to gather in the church. Choir practice perhaps, or a bazaar. Though the church was right beneath us, the sounds that came from inside might have been coming from some distant quarter of the town.
He seemed to be content to go on polishing the stopwatch no matter how long I waited, and I found myself amazed that he could spend so much time on such a small object. Nothing escaped his attention as his fingers found their way into each groove in the crown, each link in the chain, each line in the mark engraved on the back of the case.
“The intermediate class has a test today, so I have to give this a good polishing. Come to think of it, you weren’t very fast on the speed tests when you first started. You turned in some awful manuscripts,” he said, without looking up. If he would not look at me, it was pointless to shake my head or point my finger or bite my lips or even smile, so I sat there with a blank expression.
I looked around the room again. The space that was not occupied by the clockworks was filled with typewriters stacked as high as my head. How many were there? I had no idea. But I was certain I had never seen so many in one place before.
They came in all shapes and sizes—some looked massive and heavy, while others appeared to be as fragile as toys. Some had square keys, others round ones. A few were attached to wooden bases. Some were obviously expensive models, while others appeared to be cheaply made. They were stacked helter-skelter, one pressing tightly against the next. The ones at the bottom of the stack were half crushed, with keys and levers bent out of shape, and even the ones that had escaped this fate were badly rusted.
Were they all waiting here to be repaired? But there were too many. It would be better to get rid of those that were no longer usable. Or so I thought as I rose and moved toward the pile—and as I did, I suddenly realized something. I wondered why I hadn’t noticed it before. I was not myself perhaps, stunned at the sight of so many typewriters. Of course! I could simply use one of these machines, and then I would be able to talk with him as I always had.
I chose the newest, least damaged one I could find, but no matter how hard I pressed the keys, they would not move. The ink ribbon on the one next to it was crumpled and twisted, half of the levers on the one after that were broken, and the roller had come off the one after that one. No matter how many typewriters I tried, it was always the same. None was in working order. Still, refusing to give up, I tried to pull a likely looking machine from the middle of the pile, but as soon as I did, the whole mountain began to creak and threatened to collapse.
“They’re all useless,” he said, still staring at the stopwatch. “Every last one of them.”
At that moment I noticed something that should have been quite obvious: there was no paper anywhere in the room. Not a single sheet of typing paper, nor even a scrap fit for a note. There was no point in hunting for a working typewriter if there was nothing to type on.
Once I realized there was no means to get them out, words seemed to proliferate wildly inside me, filling my chest and suffocating me.
Fix one, quickly!
Unconsciously, my fingers began to move as though tapping out these words. But with nothing to strike, they just fluttered in the air. I went to the pile, retrieved my broken typewriter, and placed it in front of him again, unable to stand the trapped feeling a moment longer.
Why won’t you fix it? What’s wrong with it? I can’t stand it if I can’t talk to you.
I held tight to his shoulder, trying with all my might to convey this feeling to him through the expression on my face.
His hands stopped moving and he let out a long sigh. Then he wrapped the stopwatch in the velvet cloth and set it on the table.
“Your voice will never come back.”
I had no idea why he was telling me this. The problem now was not my voice but the typewriter.
You can’t repair it?
I tapped at the keys at random, but the levers still refused to move.
“Your voice is trapped inside this machine. It’s not broken, it’s just been sealed off now that it no longer has a purpose.”
Sealed…sealed…sealed…The word spun meaninglessly in my head.
“It’s an extraordinary sight, don’t you think?” he said. “Every one of these is a voice. A mountain of voices wasting away here, never again able to make the air tremble. And today, yours joins them.” He picked up my typewriter with one hand and tossed it back where it had been resting. It sounded like a heavy door slamming shut—closing off my voice.
Why? Why are you doing this?
My lips moved but no sound emerged.
“You don’t seem to understand. There’s no point in trying to talk anymore.”
He put his hand over my mouth. His palm was cool and smelled vaguely of metal, no doubt from the stopwatch.
“You’ll forget you ever had a voice,” he continued. “You may find it annoying at first, until you get used to it. You’ll move your lips as you just did, go looking for a typewriter, a notepad. But soon enough you’ll see how pointless it is. You have no need to talk, no need to utter a single word. There’s nothing to worry about, nothing to fear. Then, at last, you’ll be all mine.”
The hand that had been resting over my mouth slid down to my chin and then to my throat, where he took his time caressing every hollow, as though making sure that the voice that had once been there was, in fa
ct, gone for good.
I wanted to cry out as loudly as I could, to push him away and run from the room. But I simply stood still, tensing my body. The sensation of his fingers on my throat was like a strand of wire being wrapped around me again and again.
“Do you know why I became a typing teacher?” he asked, his hand still at my neck.
I don’t know. I don’t understand anything.
I shook my head back and forth, but his hand stayed in place.
“And you don’t need a voice to type,” he said, closing his hand more tightly around my throat. The tips of his fingers sank into my skin. Perhaps he was trying to wring out any last bit of my voice that remained.
“In the classroom, you were all silent. Not one word while you were typing, while every nerve was concentrated in your fingers. There are rules to govern the fingers, but not the voice. That was the one thing that bothered me. But the fingers! They moved with nothing but the sound of tapping to accompany them, according to my instruction, rapidly and precisely. Glorious, wasn’t it? The end of the hour always came too soon. The fingers were lifted from the keys. And then you would begin to talk about anything you wanted to. Someone wants to eat cake on the way home. Someone else knows a good bakery. By the way, are you free on Saturday? What about a movie? It’s been ages. How utterly boring. And the fingers that had been obedient a moment before have lost their coherence, are reduced now to fastening a purse or fixing a hairdo or clinging to my arm.”
But what could be more natural? I say what I want to say, move my fingers as I want to move them. You only give orders in the class.
“I was glad that I was able to erase your voice. Did you know that an insect will fall silent if you cut off its antennae? It will just sit there, as if frozen, and even refuse to eat. The same as you, really. When you lost your voice, you lost the ability to make sense of yourself. But don’t worry. You’ll be staying right here. You’ll live among the fading voices trapped in these typewriters, and I’ll be here with you, giving you instructions. Nothing too difficult. In fact, it will be a bit like learning to type.”
He released me at last. I sat down, rested my head on the table, and drew in a deep breath. My throat throbbed.
“The intermediate class is about to begin. I’d better be going down.” He slipped the stopwatch into his inner pocket. “The test today involves typing a medical article. Quite difficult, in fact, which should make it fun. But you wait here and keep quiet.”
He closed the door behind him. I could hear the sound of a heavy lock turning and his footsteps receding. Then I was alone…
* * *
. . .
I realized that the woman in my novel had also become trapped in a tight place. At this point, I gathered up the pages I’d written that day, secured them under a paperweight, and turned off my desk light. I had imagined that the two of them, bound by a warmer and more ordinary affection, would wander off to search for her voice at a typewriter factory or in a lighthouse at the end of a cape or in a morgue or in the storage room of a stationer’s, but somehow things had ended up like this. It happened quite often that my writing went far astray from what I’d imagined before I started, so I went to sleep without worrying any more about it.
The next morning, when I woke up, the calendars had disappeared.
* * *
. . .
There were only three or four of them in the house, and they were all advertisements, so I was hardly attached to them. Nor was R as upset over calendars as he had been about photographs. Of course, the loss would cause some inconvenience to begin with, but one could always find other ways to count the days.
I burned them in the little incinerator in the garden. They caught fire easily, and they left behind just the wire spirals that had bound the pages.
The bottom of the incinerator was filled with ashes. They formed a soft mass, which, when nudged with the poker, rose up in a cloud. As I watched the ashes, it occurred to me that the disappearances were perhaps not as important as the Memory Police wanted us to believe. Most things would disappear like this when set on fire, and they could be blown away on the wind with very little regard for what they might once have been.
Smoke rose from the gardens of the houses nearby and was soon absorbed into the low-hanging clouds. The snow had stopped, but the morning was cold as usual. The children wore their school backpacks over heavy winter coats. The neighbor’s dog studied the scene from his doghouse with sleepy eyes, only his muzzle protruding out into the snow. People had gathered in the street and were talking in small groups.
“I haven’t seen your old friend recently.” The man who had once made hats spoke to me over the fence. “Is he all right?”
“He was ill for a while, but he’s feeling much better,” I told him. For a moment I worried that he knew the old man had been picked up by the Memory Police, but I quickly realized that did not seem to be the case.
“Who wouldn’t be under the weather with the cold going on and on like this?”
“Not to mention the fact that there’s almost nothing in the market to buy, and you have to wait in long lines for the little they do have.” The woman from a house across the street had joined us. “A half hour out shopping in the snow chills you to the bone.”
“A few days ago my grandson said he wanted some custard to soothe his swollen tonsils, but I couldn’t find any no matter how hard I looked.” This was the man who worked at the town hall and lived in the house next to mine.
“Custard is a luxury nowadays. You need eggs, and the chickens won’t lay because of the cold. I waited an hour the other day and they would sell me only four eggs.”
“I went to five different grocers before I could find a head of cauliflower, but the only one they had left was brown and shriveled.”
“And the butcher shops get a little emptier every time you go in. In the old days, you could barely see the ceiling for all the sausages they had hanging there, but now it’s just one or two scrawny things and they sell those by half past ten.”
Each one in turn told of his or her trials finding enough to eat.
“But it’s not just food. Fuel for the stove is getting scarce, too. The other night I ran out completely and it was so cold I couldn’t stand it. My knee has started to ache as well, so I knocked on a neighbor’s door to ask if she could put me up, just for the night, but she turned me away without so much as an excuse.” This was the woman two houses down from mine.
“You can’t expect anything from them. They act as though they’ve never seen you when you pass in the street, and they’re rude when you go to collect for the neighborhood association. You can never tell what they’re thinking.”
They were talking about the house next to mine where they kept a dog. I didn’t know much more myself, except that the owners were a young couple in their thirties who both worked and apparently had no children.
Since the topic had shifted to complaining about these neighbors, I wanted to go back inside but, lacking an excuse to leave, I occupied myself by knocking the snow from the top of the wall with the fire poker and nodding. The dog barked, as though he’d realized that they were speaking ill of his masters.
“Still,” began the ex-hatmaker. “I wonder if spring will ever come.”
The rest of them nodded in agreement.
“Perhaps it never will again,” murmured the woman with bad knees.
The former hatmaker zipped up his jacket as far as it would go. I continued my work with the poker.
“In any normal year, the winds would have shifted by now and trees would be budding out. The color of the sea would be lightening. It seems strange to have so much snow on the ground this late.”
“Though perhaps not all that strange—we get these odd years now and then.”
“But it’s not that simple. Think about it. With the calendars gone, no matter
how long we wait, we’ll never get to a new month…so spring will never come.”
The old woman rubbed her knees through her woolen leggings.
“Then what’s going to happen?”
“If spring never comes, does that mean summer won’t either? How will the crops grow when the fields are covered with snow?”
“I’m not sure I could stand cold like this going on forever. We’re already low on fuel.”
And so the complaints circled back to the beginning. One after the other, we let our anxieties bubble up. An even colder wind blew down the street as a muddy car rumbled past.
“Don’t worry. It’s no good overthinking this. Calendars are just scraps of paper. Be patient. It will all work itself out.” The former hatmaker seemed to be reassuring himself as much as the rest of us. But we nodded in agreement.
* * *
. . .
In the end, however, it was the old woman’s prediction that turned out to be accurate. No matter how long we waited, spring never came, and we lay buried under the snow along with the ashes of the calendars.
We decided to celebrate the old man’s birthday in the secret room.
“Now that the calendars are gone, there’s no way to know when it really is, so please don’t make a fuss,” he told us. But birthday parties have been a tradition in this house since long before I was born, and even if we couldn’t recall the exact date, I knew that his came around every year just as the cherry blossoms were budding out. I was quite certain that time was fast approaching. I also thought that a party would be good for R, who had spent so many dull days hidden away.
I went to the market every day for a week in order to assemble the ingredients for the festivities. As the neighbors had said, the shelves in the stores were poorly stocked, there were lines here and there, and it was particularly difficult to get anything of good quality or a bit out of the ordinary. Still, I patiently made the rounds to every corner of the market.