The Naked Eye (New Directions Paperbook)

by Yoko Tawada

  I got up without knowing what direction to go. My feet were cold. On the desk I saw a pair of sharp scissors. What did Jörg cut with such big scissors?

  “What would you like to eat?” “Pho.” “What?” “A certain kind of noodle.” “What kind?” Since I was unable to explain in Russian that one must boil long thin rice noodles in water, add lime, raw bean sprouts, lemongrass, chili peppers, and the herb ngò gai, and then pour broth over the top, I summarized the cooking process: “Soup, noodles, and raw vegetables, mixed together.” Jörg left the house while I fell back into bed hoping that sleep would undo everything that had happened.

  When I woke up again, dinner was on the table, the food exactly as I had described except that the various ingredients were served separately. The noodles were thick and dull, smeared bloody with tomato sauce. Globules of fat floated on the surface of the soup, which tasted salty. There was also crumpled-up iceberg lettuce and hard tomatoes with mayonnaise. My uncle sometimes ate rice with mayonnaise. This was a Japanese product with a strange name: “Cupid Mayonnaise” or something like that. And indeed the image of the ancient god Cupid, who is said to have driven other gods and human beings into a state of infatuation, was depicted on the plastic tube. My father, who despised his brother, said to me: “All that illiterate cares about is acquiring foreign products and showing off.” My uncle was not illiterate, but he was in the habit of saying that reading weakened male potency. “That isn’t true, Uncle. Have your ears forgotten the voice of Ho Chi Minh? Did he not say to all the children of our land that reading and writing were the most important things to prepare one for life? He must have said this. I learned it at school.” Unfortunately the President died three years before I was born, and so my own ear never experienced his voice.

  I began to eat the lettuce with the white plastic fork. The taste of mayonnaise reminded me of the word pregnancy.

  Jörg’s bed was much too large in proportion to the room, which made me feel confined. I left the bedroom and went into the kitchen, where Jörg was producing a blubbering sound. “Would you like some coffee?” “No thank you. How did we get across the border?” “In my car.” “Didn’t the border police say anything?” A small, fat-bellied machine in one corner was spitting brown liquid into its own transparent belly. This liquid was supposed to be coffee even though it looked thin and meager. “You were disguised as the stuffing of the passenger seat. The policemen couldn’t see you. Don’t you know about TTT, Trabi Transport Technique? Are you sure you don’t want any coffee?”

  “No! I don’t want any weak coffee!” If you wanted to offer me coffee, I thought, you would have to import Vietnamese coffee beans and then patiently roast them. You would have to roast them and roast them until they had a majestic black aroma.

  Jörg said nothing, he turned his back to me and drank his coffee without milk or sugar. Surely some Western European company had deceived South American laborers and bought these coffee beans from them for a few coins. I secretly wished the spirits of the underage workers who had died on the coffee plantation would appear to Jörg in the night and torment him. When Jörg finished his coffee, he put on his leather jacket and left the house. The door made such a heavy, dull metallic sound when it shut that I thought it couldn’t possibly be opened again for the next ten years.

  Outside, the dusk was gathering. In the strangers’ apartment across the way someone had turned on the light, though it wasn’t possible to see into the room since the curtains with lace trim that reminded me of women’s underwear blocked off the lower half of the windows. On the windowsill was a white porcelain statue of a fat, naked child. The child smiled diplomatically, sticking his penis out in my direction. The word “Belgium” was written on the little pedestal he stood on.

  Usually I wasn’t afraid of shadows. But when the shadow of a car swept across the bedroom wall, it sent a chill down my spine. When the shadow was gone, the uneven bits of wall that remained behind were more clearly visible than before. The wall resembled pubescent skin with countless tiny blisters. Squeezing them beneath my fingernails would release the smell of mayonnaise. The wall was as perfectly rectangular as the window and ceiling, but perhaps would feel slightly warm to the touch, like human skin.

  I woke to my own screams, though I’d been neither sleeping nor dreaming. Three legs were growing out of my abdomen. Two of them were already familiar to me, but the third was muscular and hairy. When I screamed again, the third leg vanished. I remembered my uncle standing on a tall ladder once to repair the roof. It was a particularly hot summer day, and he was wearing shorts. Where in the world was Jörg?

  A lamp by the bed resembled a giant mushroom. I hunted around for the switch, touching the shade and the stem as well, but nothing happened.

  On the bed lay a saggy pillow. If I put my head on it, my head would sink deeper and deeper without stopping, it would sink through the mattress down to the floor, or even deeper—deeper and deeper, into the cellar, on and on until my head was buried in the earth.

  Suddenly I was back on top again, or more precisely, I was on a stage, sitting on a cushion. Some three hundred young East German Party members sat in formation before me, listening with great concentration. Why did I have to sit alone on a cushion on the floor while everyone else had chairs? It must have been a cultural misunderstanding. In Japan or Iran, people might sit on the floor during a Party assembly, but not where I was from, and not in China either! But now it was our task to overcome these minor cultural differences and unite for the sake of peace on earth. I had been commissioned to speak about the violence of Capitalism. Unfortunately, I could not remember the contents of my speech because my cushion was distracting me. This cushion must have been a different manifestation of Jörg—for reasons unknown to me he’d been transformed into this pillow. He’d be unable to breathe if I sat on him with all my weight. So I tried to keep my hips in the air by contracting the muscles in my upper thighs. This position required a gymnastic exertion. At the same time I was trying not to press too hard, or else liquid micro-homunculi might get squeezed out of my vagina. What would the audience say if I gave birth to such creatures? “You speak well, but in reality you are nothing more than a treacherous housewife who desires foreign currencies and spits out children like interest rates!” It had already occurred to me that I might become the target of such reproaches. In Vietnam I was a model student, but no one here would believe that. People would immediately think I was voluntarily offering feminine charms as a commodity. Our neighbor, Thailand, is constantly misunderstood and abused, and all of us suffer from these prejudices. Even the Japanese are partly responsible. Why did they export the word “geisha”? Perhaps they didn’t have a choice, perhaps one hundred years ago they ran out of things to export. But we still pay the price today as potential geishas. “A capitalist country is always forced to export something, even if it is unprofitable and requires great sacrifices. The case of Japan most clearly demonstrates the contradictions inherent in capitalist economics, but soon other countries will be affected as well!” This is how, for the moment, I ended my speech. Self-praise is no virtue, but I was pleased to have ended my argument on such a strong note. No applause could be heard. Perhaps the audience was expecting me to say more about Vietnam. “In our country, many were sacrificed like laboratory rats to develop new weapons for the imperialist wars.” A deathly silence reigned in the hall. The back of my neck was damp with cold sweat. The overpowering silence was unfortunate, as now the breathing of the pillow could be heard. In order to induce the audience to start laughing loudly, I tried to tell a joke: “By the way, according to the Chinese calendar I’m a rat. One of my teachers who speaks German recommended that I describe myself in Berlin as a mouse and not a rat, since the rat is widely despised in Germany. And so, esteemed comrades, let’s say we were the mice in military experiments, not rats!” No one laughed. The hush was oppressive, and my breath hung heavy in my lungs.

  The two young men who’d picked me up from the air
port entered through the door at the back of the auditorium. They thrust their hips from side to side as they walked, like models at a fashion show, and turned around to display the name “Lee” on their butts. Lee jeans were so expensive that not even a whole month of my father’s salary could have covered two legs. And of course at home we had many more legs than two to clothe. A classmate once told me the story of how the Lee company was founded. Once there was a Chinese man named Lee. He lived in a small village on the Yellow River and had such skillful fingers that he could even sew on buttons for ants. Out of boredom he emigrated to America and founded a company under his name.

  The two men in jeans took the seats reserved for them in the first row. As I’d suspected, they were spies. They had already rolled up their sleeves and were waiting for a suitable moment to attack. When I began to speak about Doimoi politics, they climbed onto the stage and started stabbing my cushion with their knives. Blood spurted out, and I heard Jörg scream. The two spies explained to me in a brotherly tone: “He’s a spy from Bochum. He wanted to rape you politically.” Staring at the blood, I called Jörg’s name longingly, as if he were my lover.

  Someone was caressing my hair. Beside me lay Jörg. “What’s the matter? Did you have a bad dream? Don’t worry. No more bad things can happen here.” He spoke sympathetically, like a brother consoling his much younger sister. Something similar had happened to me years before. Jörg’s breath smelled of toothpaste with artificial lemon flavor. Then he covered my mouth with his so that my breath began to flow backward. The first time I ever ate duck tongue, I had a similar experience. My father’s family came from the South. One of his sisters, who owned a restaurant in Saigon where she served, among other things, Chinese specialties, put a piece of duck tongue in my mouth and exhorted me, “Try it!” I was still young and didn’t know whether or not I should bite into the duck tongue. Perhaps it was still alive. The tongue would begin to speak in two voices if I bit it in half; the taste would be as bitter as blood. If I tried to swallow the whole piece without chewing, I would be unable to breathe. And if I spat out the tongue, the grown-ups would laugh at me. What was I to do?

  Jörg wasn’t in the room. It was pitch black, and I couldn’t hear the breath of any living creature. If I were to get up, leave the bed and wander around, I might never find the bed again—my lifeboat. I decided to shut my eyes and wait until the morning cast its rectangular, intact light into the room.

  Every morning Jörg snapped shut his leather briefcase demonstratively and left for the university. When he came home late in the afternoon, he read Russian books with the help of a dictionary. After sundown he would order pizza and salad for us by telephone, sit with me for a moment, watch a few minutes of television, and then leave the house again. I was usually lying in bed by the time he returned, and would listen to the rustling of his shirt and trousers in the dark. I wasn’t certain it was really Jörg. The one who was either Jörg or someone else would then crawl into bed. He smelled of old sofa, cigarettes, hair tonic, and carnations.

  The first week, Jörg showed me department stores and restaurants, though I liked neither the heavy silverware on the white tablecloths nor the squeaky-clean panes of the shop windows. It was as if my tongue were paralyzed. Everything I ate tasted of fat and salt. The products in the department stores looked like collections of glittering trash. Every time Jörg spoke to me, the same question came out of my mouth: Why had he brought me here? Jörg took refuge in adjectives, saying to me: “We’re going to a good department store, you’ll see, a good one,” “It’s an inexpensive restaurant,” or, “We’ll go shopping at a nice shoe store.”

  A long, narrow pair of scissors was on the desk. On the blades, two angular little men could be seen, standing there hand in hand. Before a man whose name was probably Jörg climbed on top of my body at night, I held the scissors in readiness against my chest, blades closed and with the tip pointing to the sky. In the dark, the man couldn’t see the scissors. He flung himself on top of me, and the scissors pierced his flesh. I could feel the blades piercing the space between his ribs. Perhaps their tips were already poking out of his back. His eyes swelled and popped. Then the heavy body fell beside me, sapped of its strength. It seemed as if there might be peace in the room for a while. Peace to the world: My work was completed. Suddenly it struck me that my hands felt sticky. Surprised, I realized that under conditions of very low light, human blood could look black.

  A person’s face looks strange when viewed from too close up. The eyes and eyebrows grow together, behind them a dark hollow opens up, the shape of the nose vanishes, the nostrils turn blacker, while the enamel surface of the teeth takes on a cannibalistic brightness.

  The flesh of my buttocks was still stinging from Jörg’s fingernails burning into my flesh. His heavy body, which I couldn’t even push to the side a little, was crushing me. I stuck out my index finger and poked him in the eye. He gave a brief cry, jumped up, and ran into the bathroom, cursing. I followed him. He was examining his red eye in the mirror. I picked up the iron candlestick and slammed it into the back of his head. He sank slowly to his knees like an accordion being compressed, until finally he was flat on the floor. I blew into his ear to blow him up like a rubber doll. The moment he got up again, he kicked me in the chest. I fell backward, struck the back of my head against the wall and collapsed. Jörg grabbed me by the ankle, lifted it easily into the air and held me upside-down. Then he opened the lips of my vulva with his fingers and stuffed everything he could find inside: the toothbrush, the electric razor, the little bottle of eye drops, the comb. Only the nail scissors slipped from his hand. I grabbed them and stabbed his instep.

  I soon became bored with sexual relations because it was always just the two of us and the scenery never changed. From the window I sometimes observed strangers leaving the building with serious expressions on their faces, hurrying off somewhere. “Don’t you have any friends? Is there no one at all who takes an interest in you?” I asked Jörg, which made him look at me in surprise. The very next day he brought a man his age home with him. When I said to him in Russian that it was a pleasure to meet him, he looked embarrassed and replied in English that unfortunately he didn’t speak Vietnamese. Jörg laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. Jörg told me that hardly anyone in this city spoke Russian. I was just as disappointed by this fact as when I’d heard there was no international airport. “This is Mark,” Jörg re-introduced me to the man and began to drink cans of beer with him and chat.

  Mark promised to bring his new girlfriend with him the next time he visited; she was originally from Moscow. According to the explanations Jörg gave me later, Mark was very successful in his studies of economics but had no talent for languages. Although he’d once started to learn Russian, he couldn’t even distinguish this language from others when he heard it spoken aloud. If a person looked Vietnamese, he would automatically hear Vietnamese. Faces looked different, but all foreign languages were the same to him in their incomprehensibility.

  Mark’s girlfriend was named “Anna,” but she bore no resemblance to the Anna in my old Russian textbook. The new Anna didn’t tell me in Russian how many brothers and sisters she had or where she was born. She didn’t ask me in Russian how I was or what I would be doing next Sunday. Instead, she spoke German. I thought this Russian-less Anna should be called Anne instead of Anna. But what was I, who no longer spoke at all?

  Jörg and I had a date with Mark and Anna at a pizzeria. Women and men in their early 20s were standing around. A few of them were waiting for their “fresh baked” pizza from the microwave, others were kissing or smoking. There was a slot machine with pictures of tomatoes in its windows.

  Now and then Mark would give me a charming smile, while Anna never looked at me and remained immersed in conversation with Jörg. Coming from Anna’s mouth, the German language sounded colorful and vivid. Listening to her I felt as if I were walking through hilly landscapes. The pizza tasted like old paper with a tomato flavor. The dark-
red carbonated beverage tasted like sore-throat medicine. I would much rather have drunk fresh water with lime and sugar. A wave of sentimentality washed over me, perhaps because I was having my period. While we cut the pizza into little bits and ate them, I surrendered to a vision of Vietnamese spring rolls with fresh herbs, which made me salivate. Joylessly finishing my pizza, I still had nothing to say and sat there silently, my back hunched. Jörg must have felt sorry for me—he suddenly started to speak Russian. He asked Anna if she knew about the Trans-Siberian Railroad extension passing through Bochum. This railway line once provided a direct link between Moscow and Paris. Anna’s face brightened: “Yes, I know. Don’t the tracks run beside Sieben Planeten?” “There was a coal mine there,” Mark added. “Do you know the American film in which a boy whose father is a poor miner sees the light from Sputnik in the sky one night and later becomes an astronaut?” “I’ve never seen an American film,” I replied. Anna gave me a disgusted glance. “I like Tarkovsky,” I added in protest. Anna laughed. Her face began to glow with amicability, and later she even bought me an ice cream.

  Sieben Planeten, Seven Planets: these were the first two German words I consciously learned. When I thought of the planets in the cosmos, I was temporarily released from all my fears. This was a new discovery for me: Imagining an enormous distance without fear. So if I felt afraid, it must be due to things being too close.