* * *
During the break, I was in line for the toilet when I felt a presence at my side. I turned to find her, the woman from earlier, standing next to me. Seeing her up close, I realized that she must be in her seventies, if not even older. I found myself staring at her, unable to turn away. Despite her lined, weathered face, there was something delicate and birdlike about her.
“On the street earlier,” she said, “you called out to me, didn’t you?”
“Pardon?”
She lowered her voice: “There are more lavatories upstairs.”
I stared at her.
“Come with me,” she said, walking away, and I could sense from her gait the tacit but full expectation that I would follow her, which, after glancing at the people ahead of me, I did. We went up the stairs, the two of us side by side—I made an effort not to walk behind her—and glancing down at her bag, I saw that it contained not vegetables but books and papers, and a yellowed newspaper. Suddenly, she stopped and looked up at me.
“Well? Don’t you need to use the toilet?”
“Yes, yes, of course. Thank you.”
Inside, the facilities were very clean. And completely empty. No sign of a graffiti anywhere. When I came back out, she was gazing out the window at the esplanade below. I noticed several ornate rings on her fingers, each ring a different color.
“Few come to the third floor,” she said, turning to me. “The library is here. Not much to look at, and the books are outdated, but it’s a good place to work. No one will interrupt us. We can talk there.”
She started walking, not glancing back to see if I was behind her.
“I didn’t call out to you in the street!” I protested, following her down the corridor. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, it seemed to me that I had admitted to something else: that I had been thinking about calling out to her. In general, I was loath to approach strangers in the street, even to ask for directions, and in the past I had wandered around, lost, on more than one occasion, rather than seek help from passersby. It was my Danish upbringing, I suppose.
“I was lost, yes, and I saw you in front of me,” I went on, not liking the plaintive note in my voice. I was sure I hadn’t called out to her. In any case, calling out to someone was not something done unconsciously, like mistyping a letter or worrying a loose thread on a sweater or a blanket. It would have required a concentrated effort, a drawing out of the lungs, a physical exertion—hardly something one could do without being fully aware of it.
We came to the end of the corridor and entered the library. She led me past the shelves and stopped at a table in the corner. A thin layer of dust covered everything. On the opposite wall hung a clock whose hands were stopped at 4:22. We seemed to be the only ones there. “Sit down,” she said. Once we were facing each other across the table, she started talking.
“At first, I thought it was my husband, who’s been dead for some time now. When I turned around, there was no one there.” She let a silence pass. “And then, earlier today, when I heard you tell the woman at the desk that you were registering as a two-language student, I recognized your voice. It was you who had called out to me.”
“But I didn’t…”
“Despite what you may think, I still have all of my mind. Don’t be fooled by my age. Even as a child, I heard things. Voices, conversations. Like putting my ear up against a wall. The funny thing is, I hear them less often now than when I was younger. So when someone addresses me, I listen.”
I thought about Fumiko, and what I had seen this morning. The old woman across from me heard things that hadn’t been said and I saw people who weren’t there. We were made for each other.
She went on: “You and I are not like the others taking the entrance exam. Most of them are coming from an applied-languages degree. It’s much easier to do three languages than two. They simply have to translate into French, whereas two-language students have to translate in both directions. We’re also graded on a different point system.”
“Are we the only ones?” I asked.
“There are also three-language students pursuing an economics specialization who are graded differently.”
She had misunderstood me, but I let it go at that.
“Having two languages rather than three,” she went on, “is the surest sign that one has fallen into translation rather than chosen, from the outset, to specialize in it. Are you sure you want to do this? Translating into your B language is harder than you imagine. Much harder than translating into your own language.”
Little did she suspect that English wasn’t my language (though it had, for almost as long as I could remember, existed alongside my Danish).
“It’s not a whim for me,” I told her.
“No, I didn’t think it was.”
I was about to ask her why she had brought me here, to the library, when she suddenly stood up.
“Our break is almost over. We should go back downstairs.”
* * *
“Read the whole thing first, then underline any words you don’t know. Cross out what you can’t figure out from context. Try to translate the sentence without using those words. They tend to take off fewer points for omissions than for mistranslations.”
That was what she had told me before we parted ways in the common lounge, which was shared by the different faculties. Students sat around in scattered groups, talking and smoking, despite the prominent no-smoking sign. I was tempted to point out that an omission was itself a mistranslation, but I said nothing. It was the prospect of dealing, for a change, with someone else’s thoughts—and temporarily escaping mine—that had drawn me to translation. My very fate depended on my admission to the school of translators and interpreters. As she walked away, I found myself wondering if she had already taken the entrance exam in the past. She seemed to know her way around a little too well, and yet, at the same time, I couldn’t help but feel that she didn’t belong here at all, just as a ghost no longer belongs to the place he continues to haunt.
During the exam, I followed her advice, crossing out any words that I couldn’t figure out, translating what was around them, and in doing so the meaning, more than a few times, revealed itself to me. (A sentence from a book I’d read, then forgotten, came to me: “La mort brillait par son absence.”) When it was over, I sought her out among the students outside the auditorium, but she had already finished her exam and left. I went so far as to go up to the third floor, which was no longer empty—there were even a few people sitting at the tables in the library—as though we had been there during a momentary lull in activity. I dreaded returning to my silent apartment, finding everything exactly as I had left it—window open, the rooms plunged in darkness—but it had been a grueling day, and I was exhausted. In any case, I had nowhere else to go. The results would be mailed out in June, which seemed impossibly far away. I wondered if I would ever see her again. I didn’t know her name and she hadn’t asked for mine.
In the declining light, I walked to the subway station, the one I would have gotten off at if I hadn’t lost my sang-froid. It wasn’t far from the Dauphine campus. Though the evening rush had started, the platform was completely deserted. I seemed to be the only one waiting for the train. Where was everyone? Then I remembered: I was at the terminus. I had dawdled too long, and my fellow exam takers had all gone home by now. I made my way to the far end of the platform where the tunnel started. Standing near the edge, I leaned forward a little and peered into the shadows, as I had seen the man with one leg do earlier. Sometimes, if the tunnel was straight and short enough, it was possible to make out the distant lights of the next (or previous) station. But this being the end (or beginning) of the line, there was nothing to see, no station glowing in the distance. Beyond a certain point, it was hard to make out anything at all. The darkness stretched away forever, like time itself.
A cramped and cluttered room at the Cité U, across the street from the RER station. At night, when the traffic dies down, I can hear th
e slow, familiar hiss of the train pulling in. Lying next to me in the dark, she somehow knows to position herself at the outermost edge of my view so that I have to turn my head to see her. But it doesn’t matter, I know she’s there.
I felt something, a sudden chill. I glanced around, but there was no one else on the platform. Everything looked the same as it had a moment ago. For several long minutes, I remained without moving, overcome by a sort of tremulous longing. Ever since her death, I had been unable to shake the idea that I was waiting for something. Some kind of sign. A message. At the same time, I worried that when she finally sent me one, I wouldn’t know how to interpret it. Anything could be a message, but most things weren’t. There was a little ritual we had, something she used to say to me in the morning after spending the night in my room. Turning her back to me, she would ask, “Is it still you?” To which I would always answer—like someone giving a code word—“It’s still me.”
II
BEFORE FUMIKO
Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost
1. The Mirror
She was the star pupil, extroverted, the teacher’s favorite; I was in my third year, unsure of myself, my life and everything in between. I met her in an Ibsen module at Copenhagen University. She always sat in the front row and spent the hour diligently taking notes, or giving answers before anyone else could during the tutorial sessions. I too knew the answers but I didn’t say them out loud; instead, I waited for someone else to speak. More often than not, she was that person. When she spoke, her “e,” “a” and “æ” vowels were a little too crisp, a little too clean-sounding, like the rigsdansk of some bygone TV presenter.
We were the only Asians, two dark spots among the bright blond heads of varying shades, and I wondered if she had also been adopted by Danish parents, as was the case of most Asians in Denmark, brought up to think of themselves as Danish. The only thing Asian about us was our birth and, of course, our appearance. Over the years, I had met a number of others like me: the first when I was fourteen, during a class trip to Paris; the second in my first year of university; another was presented to me at a Friday Bar by a mutual friend; and a fourth, an adoptee from Norway, had been a kollegium floormate. Mette Honoré, Helle Nielsen, Mia Kjærsgaard, Unn Fahlstrøm. With each one, things had never gone beyond the initial conversation, an exchange of backgrounds. I hadn’t given any of them much thought since our respective encounters, but I didn’t forget their names, which all belonged to Korean-born Scandinavian girls.
At first glance, Ditte seemed to fit the same mold. On the last day of class, I found her waiting for me in the corridor outside the auditorium. Up to then, she had behaved as if I wasn’t there, though she must have noticed me the same way I had noticed her. In the tone of someone who has rehearsed her words beforehand, she asked me if I wanted to get a beer at the cafeteria. As we walked in silence, I thought I knew what was coming. After all, I had been through this before with other adoptees. Like them, she was surprised when I told her that I had been born in Japan, not Korea. I wasn’t her first adoptee, but the ones she had met thus far had been girls. I was, in a manner of speaking, her first boy. I learned that we had arrived in Denmark at the ages of five and six months, respectively. We were both a year younger than our fellow students, who had, in the Danish tradition, taken a sabbatical year to work or travel.
Was she really all that different from the other Korean girls I had met? That was what I found myself thinking, during our third outing, as I glanced at her shadowy profile next to me in the darkness of a cinema at Scala. Now I wonder if it wasn’t so much Ditte herself as how alike I thought we were that drew me to her. (Or perhaps that is the essence of attraction: a longing to see something of oneself in another.) Like looking into an enchanted mirror: when I looked at her, I saw a Dane who looked like me. I remember, one night, we lay facing each other and gazed wordlessly into each other’s eyes until Ditte broke the spell by bursting into laughter. In bed, she was very clear about what she wanted, what she didn’t want, how she felt and how she wanted to feel, with the same thoroughness she had shown in the classroom. Her scent, the consistency of her hair, the color of her nipples—everything about her was at once strange and familiar. When she told me that she had never used deodorant because she didn’t have to, I knew exactly what she was talking about. I had never bought a stick of deodorant in my life, though I had carried one around and even pretended to use it, all through my upper-secondary years, so that I wouldn’t stand out among the other kids at my boarding school. A look of recognition seemed to dawn in her gaze when I told her about my constant need to prove myself when meeting new people. In retrospect, I’m not sure what these shared moments of understanding and complicity meant to her. Did they mean anything at all?
We were together for almost four months, during which time we explored Copenhagen as if for the first time, with new eyes. Before, I had never noticed all the busts, bas-reliefs and other three-dimensional representations scattered throughout the city, which we baptized “the city of statues” because the statues outnumbered the inhabitants, joked Ditte. She had grown up in Esbjerg, in west Jutland, and spent part of every summer on Fanø where her parents had a summer home overlooking the Wadden Sea. I had grown up in the Whiskey Belt, just north of Copenhagen, my summers punctuated by fishing trips with my father to the Faroe Islands. She loved salted black licorice, the typical Scandinavian kind. Before bed, I would steal mine from the cabinet where my mother kept it in a glass jar shaped like a Swedish Dalecarlian horse. We both loved having øllebrød for breakfast; observing the sky on bright summer nights when dusk seems to go on forever; watching old Danish television dramas like Jeg kan ikke vente til mandag! and Olive og Tom.
Perhaps a part of me already knew it couldn’t last, the theory of compatibility that I had constructed like scaffolding around us, and whose fragile symmetry I marveled at in secret. We were too alike, I remember thinking; it wasn’t normal to be this close to someone in so short a time, like skipping to the end of a book one has been reading too fast from the start. But the mirror at last reflected someone back at me. Around that time, I had a strange dream. In it, Ditte was my sister, the two of us separated at birth, and though I knew such a thing to be impossible—my blood was Japanese, hers was Korean, after all—I woke in the dark with an erection, my heart beating like a tam-tam. I was alone in my bed; Ditte had gone back to her hall of residence at some point during the night without waking me. When we saw each other again, I made the mistake of telling her about my dream. Though I had left out the part about my erection, bewilderment and disgust clouded her face, as if I had laid bare some unspeakable fantasy. She asked me if that was how I had always seen her. The thought of an incestuous relationship with a long-lost sister had never crossed my mind, I said, but Ditte refused to believe me.
Things were never the same after that. One day, she informed me of her intention to spend the weekend in Esbjerg, where her parents still lived. We had often talked about going together, but the trip had never materialized. The following night, I received a phone call; in the background I heard voices, music, as though she was calling me from a party. She seemed distracted or irritated by something. We ended the conversation without saying goodbye. I eventually learned that she had left me for her thesis supervisor, who also happened to be my thesis supervisor. After that, I couldn’t walk past certain places—the statue of Adam Oehlenschläger near the zoo in Norske Allé, the skating rink in Nørrebro Park, even the oil tanks at Prøvestenen—without being reminded of her. The worst was going to see my thesis supervisor. I couldn’t be sure, but it seemed that the man had no idea. He was out of shape, dark-haired (for a blond Dane), and his chin receded a bit. Other than his vast and bottomless intelligence, his daggerlike wit, his impressive list of publications, what could she possibly see in him? And that was when I realized that I had never really known her, any more than I had known the adopted Korean girls before her. She had become a name to add to the others. All this tim
e, I had thought of her as a mirror, a strange and beguiling reflection, but it would seem that she had been drawn to me because I was different, a change from all the Danes she had previously dated.
2. An Error of the Deutsche Bahn
My father, who had always wanted me to join him in the textile business, didn’t understand why I had to go to France to study Danish literature. I explained to him that it was because I was expanding my research to English literature. To that effect, I had applied for an Erasmus grant. He was still puzzled, I could tell, the morning of my departure. Why not go to England, then? he seemed to want to ask at the station, where he had come to see me off. But England was even farther away, so what was the point in asking? His expression said it all. Nevertheless, he accepted the situation with equanimity and good faith. I think he suspected, on some level, that my departure had nothing to do with English literature or Danish literature. (I had never told him about Ditte. Was it because I thought he wouldn’t understand?) He didn’t say it, but I knew he was lonely since the death of my mother. At least he still had his business, which designed and manufactured high-end blankets and shawls made from Faroese wool. He was far from helpless, I told myself as my train pulled out of Copenhagen Central and his silhouette grew smaller and smaller.
I had planned to fly to Paris, but my father had insisted that I take the train, though it meant transferring to the Deutsche Bahn, whose trains used a different voltage and, consequently, a different system of fail-safes which my father considered inferior to those used in Denmark. Anything, in his eyes, was better than flying. He had started on about the superiority of electric over diesel, which led to a comparison of cab-signaling and inductive systems, the merits and shortcomings of each … until I finally relented and let him buy me a first-class ticket at full price. I had to switch trains in Frankfurt, and the Thalys car I boarded was empty except for a girl, who happened to be in my seat. She was gazing out the window, chin cupped in the palm of her hand and tears streaming down her face. With her short brown hair and olive-complexioned skin, she reminded me of a Velázquez I’d seen at the SMK. I chose a seat at random, a few rows away but facing her so that she remained visible to me through a gap between the seats. In that manner, I watched her as she continued to gaze, unseeing, at the passing scenery and occasionally blinked her wet eyes.
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