by Yoko Tawada
It was raining. I went to rehearsal carrying my saggy umbrella that I’d bought very cheaply near the Gare du Nord. The director walked up to me and abruptly asked if I possessed a valid residency permit. He was transformed into Monsieur D., the unpleasant character in the play who insolently interrogated me. Arlette walked over to us and observed the situation like a street fight. “Do you have a residency permit?” “No.” “Do you have a passport?” “No.” Arlette raised her eyebrows. The face of the director vanished from my consciousness—I heard only his voice. “There were policemen here before. They were asking about you. They said they were coming back. It would be better if you went home right away.” At this moment Nadine ran into the rehearsal room: “They’re coming!” The director opened the back door of the room, pressed a key into my hand and pointed to the stairs. “Go into the very last room, where the props are stored. Then lock the door from inside and wait quietly until we come to get you. Don’t turn on the light.” I went down the stairs, crept along the narrow hallway, and opened the last door. Soon my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness and recognized shapes consisting of crosses, angles, corners, bars, and hooks. I was standing among props not currently in use.
After a long time the director tapped on the door. “Now you can come out. Where’s the key? Give it back to me.” In the rehearsal room, the others were waiting for us. They didn’t run to greet me, they didn’t hug me, they didn’t console me. All of them were paralyzed with their own worries. “We’ve been informed about your past. Starting tomorrow you can’t come anymore. Otherwise they’ll arrest you.” “What about my role?” “We’ll have to find someone else.” The director’s cheeks were purple; Bernard and Rosette hung their heads; Arlette walked nervously back and forth as if she wanted to start doing something else right away. And Nadine was staring out the window with an insulted expression, as if I had betrayed her.
I stopped in front of a shop window containing a large number of bottles. There was something trapped in them, perhaps people who had been transformed into liquid. The contents of the bottles were mostly white or gold, though in one bottle the liquid was a dull caramel color, in another green. An old man with a blue apron stuck his head out of the shop and asked me something. “Pardon?” He repeated the question. The third time around I understood he was asking me the name of my father. But why would a liquor store owner want to know my father’s name? I was getting nervous. He persisted. I shouted: “Ho Chi Minh!” Satisfied, the man gave a nod, pointed to the sky with one finger, and placed a heavy bottle in my hand. On the label I read: “Gorbatschow.” He laughed, and I laughed as well, but for no reason. Then I tried to give him back the bottle, which was shaped like a Russian church, but he said it was mine. “Why?” I held out the bottle to him. He pushed it back toward me, repeating that it was mine.
On the label beneath the name “Gorbatschow” was the word “Berlin.” The sound of this name made my body start to quake with fever and chills. I soon discovered that Monsieur Gorbatschow was a healer. After the first swallow, my blood awakened, my lungs immediately filled with pride, my temples flushed with fresh inspiration. Unfortunately there was no dance floor in the basement where these new ideas could manifest themselves. So I began tapping against the wall with two fingers that were meant to represent the legs of a dancer. They had neither a torso nor a mouth, just two legs dancing in the air. The Gorbatschow basement theater had no audience. Nonetheless, I held it in higher esteem than that ridiculous student theater. I was a born actress. I didn’t wish to follow the example of Tristana, who was poisoned by her own brown bitterness, or of Carol lying unconscious among overturned furniture. I didn’t want to drown like Professor Marie in a Mediterranean made of whiskey. I wanted to be like spirits rising up from the bottle to rescue a woman like Marie from her thoughts of suicide. I wanted to survive the war like Marion. The place of this survival was called the theater. What sort of play should be performed? I didn’t know the play Marion was staging between the cherry orchard and the magic mountain to sustain her during wartime. When the war was over, Marion stood on stage to receive the applause of the cheering audience. To her right was her husband, to her left her lover. She held them in her two hands like suitcases.
Gorbatschow caused a side effect that might detract from his fame. When I woke up, my bones had lost their density and my hair was hanging down lusterless. I felt an urgent need to ingest something, and frantically searched for the unknown food I was lacking. Meat perhaps? Marie had brought me “sweet and sour pork” from her favorite fast food restaurant, but that didn’t satisfy me. Chocolate perhaps? Even this black, magical item brought me no strength. In the end I just went on drinking Gorbatschow. At once I felt extremely motivated to do something, for example to read books, learn new vocabulary words, become prettier, and venture out into the city to attend a theater performance. But my engine wouldn’t start. I couldn’t even manage to get up and look out the barred window. I simply remained flat on the mattress Marie had found in a heap of trash on the street.
The bottle was soon empty. If I were to return to the shop and utter the magic words “Ho Chi Minh,” perhaps the man would give me another Gorbatschow. No, I’d better just go to the movies and visit my temple, my Pantheon, my pagoda. My feet, however, automatically chose the street which contained no movie theater but only the shop in question. Today, the man who had given me the Gorbatschow wasn’t behind the counter; instead it was a saleswoman with a long, narrow throat. She wouldn’t give me anything. I would have to pay. What did a Gorbatschow cost? I didn’t really want the bottle, but felt it was urgently necessary to find out the exact price.
While I was observing the saleswoman from the sidewalk, a boy appeared out of nowhere, grabbed two bottles of wine and ran away. The saleswoman jumped out of the shop and sprinted after him with unexpected speed. I went into the shop and found the bottle I was looking for on the shelf behind the cash register. No price tag was visible. I took down the bottle and rotated it 180 degrees. If I had found the price, I would have waited for the saleswoman’s return and paid the amount in question. But since I couldn’t find one, I took the bottle with me and went home.
I was happy while I was drinking, and I understood that the word happiness contained a chemical significance. A few days later I discovered the miniature edition of Gorbatschow, which I could afford to buy with my pocket money. I placed each empty bottle in the garbage can on the street so Marie would be none the wiser.
Whenever I walked down the steps leading to the métro, the passers-by lost their colors. Even the columns and posters withdrew into the mood of a black and white film. I walked back up the steps, trying to imagine the steps covered with a bright red carpet. I wished to keep ascending, to rise up higher and higher.
C h a p t e r E l e v e n
P l a c e V e n d ô m e
I ascended the gray steps. My body was being marinated in some kind of painful fluid and had grown heavy. My head was spinning. At some point I had begun to make a habit of letting my belly hang down as I climbed stairs, like a pregnant woman. But my child had been buried long ago, without my ever having seen it. What I carried in my womb was no longer a child, it was something different.
The last métro must have long since reached its sleeping place. The last passenger had already departed—the only thing drifting about in the banquet hall was cold cigarette smoke. Was Plato at the party again? What did he talk about this time? Did he speak French, in other words, was the conversation dubbed or were there subtitles? The philosopher went home with Professor Marie Leblanc. Along the way, the two of them had a passionate discussion on the relationship between aggression and boiled eggs. Your erotic appeal consisted of your intelligence. By Indochina at the latest this was clear to me. The banquet had long since ended. Between the plates smeared with sauce, knives, forks, and spoons lay scattered. Here and there stood empty or half-empty wineglasses. I began to collect the leftover red wine from several glasses into one glass. When t
his glass was full, I drank it down. Even without a mirror I knew what this looked like. The film Place Vendôme had already shown me. At the time, your weary body was surrounded by money and diamonds that belonged to other people. You wandered about in the splendid hall of a financial institution. In this film you owned neither a rubber plantation nor a theater. You only possessed a few diamonds whose origins were sketchy. These stones reflected an immeasurable radiance, but since they did not have birth certificates, nobody wanted them.
In the morning I felt like vomiting, and crept secretly out of the basement so Marie wouldn’t notice. On the street I saw a group of children and a woman with a fresh-baked baguette under her arm. I threw up at the side of the road. A student walking by made a face. She was holding a bottle of Evian. The transparent plastic container glittered in the morning sun. Suddenly I wanted to drink pure water. Not the usual tap water from the bathroom of a movie theater I generally drank to quench my thirst. I followed the student in the hope that she might throw away her bottle without having finished it. I imagined rescuing the bottle from the garbage and loudly gulping down the radiance of the water. The student was carrying a briefcase in her other hand, and a brown handbag hung from her shoulders. She walked past several métro stations and bus stops and, not pausing at the gate with the placard reading “Sorbonne,” walked tirelessly on. My legs were already quite weary. In front of a café, three Vietnamese-looking young men sat at a table talking. When the word “Doimoi” struck my ear, I forgot the Evian bottle and remained standing at the café. After hesitating for a moment, I sat down at the next table. The men glanced at me questioningly as I studied the menu. I decided to give up my movie that day and ordered an espresso. It seemed ridiculously disproportionate that the same sum that allows one to sit for two entire hours bathed in the image of your face could purchase only a miniscule cup of coffee. The prices of goods had nothing to do with logic. Ho Chi Minh hadn’t taught me that—my own experience did.
One of the three Vietnamese men lived in Paris, the other two were tourists. They casually ordered six open-faced sandwiches and a bottle of Beaujolais. The travelers were excitedly talking about a “Condom Café” that had opened in Saigon the year before. I had no idea what that could be. “And Monsieur Kentucky with his chickens has arrived in Saigon as well.” They laughed softly, lighting one cigarette after the other. I became nervous, even a little irritable, to hear them speaking of a Saigon that was unknown to me.
After a while the one Vietnamese man who lived in Paris got up and said he had to go, that he needed to stop by the Goethe Institute. “Where? What are you doing there?” “They’re planning a concert with a Vietnamese musician who lives in Cologne, and they want to use a photo I took for the posters and programs. I’ve shot a lot of portraits of this musician.” “We’ll come with you—we’re just bored tourists. Just please don’t expect us to speak German on top of everything else. French is already too much for us.” The two of them laughed in a carefree way, and with elegant motions of their fingers placed banknotes on the little plate the waiter had brought the bill on.
“Were you ever in Berlin?” one of the tourists asked the photographer. “Yes, of course, three times now. After 1989 the city changed completely.” “As much as Saigon?” “It’s hard to say. In Berlin you no longer know where you are, and Saigon you simply can’t recognize.” I quickly paid for my espresso and ran after the three men.
They went into a building that aroused my curiosity. I waited outside in front of an advertising pillar. When they came out half an hour later and vanished around the next corner, I entered the building. In its entrance hung posters announcing films that would be shown. In vain I sought your name.
“Are you looking for the library?” a woman behind me asked in German. I panicked, lost my footing, and was caught by two sturdy arms. “Are you looking for the library?” the voice asked in French. I had an odd feeling that I’d understood the question the first time. I nodded, although I didn’t know what I would do at the library. The woman took my hand and drew me after her like a child: a ticklish sensation I hadn’t felt for years. “What book are you looking for?” Colorful books of various sizes lined the room. The titles on their spines were made of letters with square shoulders that lacked hooks, roofs and tails. “What subject are you interested in?” “Indochina,” I replied spontaneously, since no other word occurred to me at that moment. The woman seemed delighted with my answer; she pulled my hand further back through the shelves until we were standing in the section of less colorful books. “Indochina, Indochina, Indochina…” the woman repeated under her breath while her fingers scurried over the spines. After a while she groaned with disappointment. It seemed embarrassing to her that she couldn’t give me a book. “Come back next week,” she said. “I’ll have a book for you.”
It was absurd to return to the Institute since the entire episode concerning my search for a book about Indochina was a lie. Plus I couldn’t read German. Upon further reflection, however, peering at illegible books was better than sitting alone in the basement with Gorbatschow. During the day I didn’t feel prepared to go to the movies. In the evening I could escape to your latest film, but Marianne, the woman you play in this movie, was no help to me. She remains limp on the sofa amid empty wine bottles. A plump, gentle man touches her thighs. She doesn’t respond, sinking silently into a slumber that will not refresh her.
I was astonished that even in this helpless creature I could recognize your traits as I knew them from your other films. It was as if all the directors had come to an agreement beforehand so that an umbrella character could emerge to link together the different roles. As if you had already written a screenplay for your life when you were a child and later only accepted roles that fit into it. As if you had always been controlling the making of these films from behind the scenes with invisible threads.
A thin young woman with a narrow face and long hair is changing clothes in her office. As she is standing in her underwear, Marianne appears, catching her by surprise. The young woman observes the intruder skeptically. Perhaps she senses that Marianne once had a love affair with the man who is now her lover. Marianne speaks into her unprotected naked skin—not a reproach, not words of scorn, not a threat. On the contrary, Marianne confides a secret to the young woman so she won’t fall into a trap. The woman doesn’t listen.
The woman who brought me to the library was named Frau Finder. The glasses on her face I had never seen before. The two outer pointed edges of the frames, inlaid with tiny gemstones, curved diagonally upward. These flamboyant glasses seemed at odds with the unpainted, warm-hearted impression the woman otherwise made. In the eyes of Frau Finder, who wore these glasses, I at last became a person who was permitted to touch books without having to run away. When Frau Finder asked me a question, I renounced my freedom to tell a lie. It had been a long time since I’d attempted to answer questions without lying. Speaking without lying felt like sitting on a chair that was missing a leg. I was even having to lie to Marie as she couldn’t accept my relationship with Gorbatschow. Frau Finder wasn’t horrified at all by my ignorance of German and my poor French. She kept looking for books about Indochina. She even asked her niece, who was studying in Cologne, to look in the university library. “Were you born in Vietnam?’’ she asked me, and I couldn’t lie. “Yes. I also lived in Germany. Only for a year, in Bochum.” “Is that so?” Out of joy, Frau Finder’s mouth became an oval. “I’m from Essen, that isn’t far from Bochum.” She showed me where Essen was on the map on the wall. The left edge of the map ended with “Aachen.” Paris wasn’t on the map. At the right edge I saw the final stop, “Zittau.” Moscow was surely much farther to the east.
I visited Frau Finder once a week. I also attended three film screenings at the Institute. But these films were inaccessible to me because there was no one in them I could speak to.
One day Frau Finder rushed to meet me with a serious expression on her face and asked me if I could return the next
afternoon at three—someone wanted to see me. It occurred to me that I had once told Frau Finder of my dream of working at a theater. No doubt she’d found a theater group for me. The next day I showed up at the Institute early, at 2:30 p.m. In front of the building a man stood smoking. A face from a frozen picture rose up and thawed, overlapping with his face in recognition. “Now I’ve got you,” said the voice of this man in the language that was inseparable from it. I watched his cigarette burn out on its own. Frau Finder came out and rapidly explained everything to me: One day this man had seen a classified ad in the Bochum newspaper saying that a Vietnamese doctor in Paris had lost a Vietnamese woman who under complex circumstances had traveled via East Berlin to Bochum in 1988. Anyone who knew her was requested to get in touch with him. Jörg immediately sent a letter written in English to Paris and then received a photograph of me from Tuong Linh. Jörg traveled to Paris, visited the young doctor, and exchanged information with him, though neither of them could get anywhere with their investigations. Jörg didn’t give up; he kept visiting Paris during every vacation. He hoped to be able to locate me with the help of his own two legs and visited Vietnamese restaurants, boutiques, language schools, and the embassy. At some point he gave up inwardly, but his legs could no longer stop wandering through Paris. A few days ago he happened to pass by the Institute, wandered in out of curiosity, and started speaking with Frau Finder. She told him she knew a Vietnamese woman who used to live in Bochum.
Jörg was still carrying around the very same briefcase made out of leather that looked like the skin of my parents. He pulled a train ticket out of his case and said: “I’ll buy a ticket like this for you, too.” Frau Finder translated everything Jörg said slowly, one sentence at a time. Often I didn’t understand her French, though it still felt reassuring to me to be told everything twice. The ticket read “Paris/Bochum.” The printed letters made the name “Paris” appear like some far-distant city. Then the distinctive smell of an airport suddenly overwhelmed me; someone set off an alarm. A passport official appeared with a policewoman beside him. “My name is Megumi Yamada. I don’t know you,” I said quickly to justify myself Jörg’s face distorted in a grimace. “What’s wrong with you?” No, this is Jörg, and he isn’t wearing the uniform of a customs official; I’m not a criminal but rather a library patron. Frau Finder knows me to be an upstanding individual. My only problem is that I no longer have a passport. This is the only blemish on my character. How could I be arrested on such ridiculous grounds? “What’s wrong with you? Is everything all right?” “I don’t have a passport.” Jörg burst out laughing. “You don’t need to show a passport anymore. All you need is a ticket. That’s all they check nowadays.” “Even if I travel to Moscow?” “Well, for Moscow you would still need a passport. But why in the world would you want to go to Moscow?” “The Soviet government will bring me home.” “The Soviet Union no longer exists. Don’t you know that?” “Yes, I know, but what other country am I supposed to travel through to get home?” “If we both go home together, there’s no country between here and there.” “Where is here? Where is there?” I wasn’t speaking any longer, I was braying. Frau Finder suggested that the three of us go out for scallops. First she would close the library, turn off the lights, and shut the windows. She announced these things with a dutiful expression. I was somewhat reassured that she was treating the turning off of lights as something just as important as the conversation that was to take place between Jörg and myself.
