by Yoko Tawada
…because it belonged to you. I never threw it away because I thought the past must be preserved. Can you still remember what it is?” Yellowed pages covered in writing from top to bottom. A childish script. Russian. “Don’t you recognize it?” he asks. I read the mysteriously familiar lines: “Dear comrades in Berlin, today I would like to tell you about our country, the history of our country, how it was destroyed and how it nevertheless has remained whole because we have all applied ourselves seriously to reading and writing, just as our former President Ho Chi Minh always emphasized in his speeches.”
I dropped the sheets of paper in horror. Jörg’s lips were poised to laugh, then suddenly froze when he saw me. He wanted me to laugh along with him, to laugh at my own youthful folly, my inhibited infatuation with a pipe dream, wanted me to flush it from my head and fall into his arms so as to become part of his living room, which was dominated by the color of natural wood and the black of digital technology. On the large, flat screen, a healthy and relaxed-looking moderator with a colorful necktie was speaking.
Canada sounds like an ordinary noun that might mean, for example, something like “happiness.” The entire world should become Canada, according to Jörg. Sasha is free as long as he is exposed to mortal danger in the Black Sea. Once he arrives in France, he is no longer free. The authorities decide what will become of this small, unimportant refugee. He is not allowed to remain in France. Canada takes him. What good news. He is given a new passport which helps him forget everything that happened to him during his childhood. Go to Canada! Canada is a promise. Sasha, though, doesn’t want to be sent off to this compulsory happiness—he wants to stay in France and wait for Sandrine or, failing that, return to Kiev. “Are you mad?” “I expected more from freedom,” Sasha says and slits his wrists. His hands would have drowned in a small washbasin in the hotel room if Gabrielle hadn’t come.
“That’s just stupid, he never learned what to do with freedom,” Jörg remarked. “Naïve Sasha thinks he can immediately get everything from us for free. It’s what everyone from over there thinks, and it really gets on my nerves,” Jörg continued. “Why should Sasha get everything when I still haven’t gotten anything?” Now Jörg’s competition is the champion swimmer.
Tango in Sofia. So that is Sofia. My second time seeing the movie, I recognized the city by its Alexander Nevsky Cathedral. The business travelers sit together in a ballroom, toasting Russian-Bulgarian friendship. Alexei and Sandrine are dancing the tango with its nostalgic bourgeois footwork. Their son observes his dancing parents with a thoughtful look because he knows something. The second time around, I too know what he knows. A tango is always being danced for the last time, in Sofia, in Indochina, and elsewhere.
“Ho Chi Minh no longer exists, like Honecker,” said Jörg. He was attempting to wrap cilantro, bean sprouts, and shrimp in rice paper. A friend of his who’d spent a lot of time in Southeast Asia had taught him to make spring rolls. He wanted to do something nice for me. “Don’t roll everything up together! You’re getting it all mixed up!” His spring rolls were making me more furious than grateful. “And stop talking about my childhood!” These last words I actually didn’t say out loud. I quietly left the house. My legs only knew a single direction. The tickets were always made of the same gray recycled paper. I knew exactly how the movie ended, since I’d already seen it twice. It ended with a text containing the name “Gorbachev.” His name put an end to the years of imprisonment. My life, too, had once almost ended with a quite similar name. I knew that the film was trying to end with a period, a bit of punctuation with some finality about it, not wanting to let us down with a comma. But then again, why not let us down? This third viewing was necessary for me because I wished to study a few important images more closely without Jörg’s commentary. For example, Sandrine’s shoes. She leaves the hotel in Sofia with her son, gets into a taxi in which Gabrielle is already waiting for her. In the taxi, Gabrielle gives Sandrine a new French passport and a capitalist coat. Sandrine puts it on, gets out of the taxi, and with her son walks down the sidewalk leading to the entrance to the French embassy. Sandrine shows the Bulgarian guard her passport; the guard finds nothing suspicious about it, though his eyes pursue her from behind. Something isn’t right about this woman, he thinks, but he has nothing to fix his suppositions on. Finally his gaze reaches her shoes, a kind of lace-up boot. The boots must have counted as Communist footwear, for the guard suddenly gives a shout and runs after her. Stop! Stay right where you are! Sandrine keeps going, running faster and faster, lurching and stumbling, but she doesn’t fall down because her son is holding her firmly and running beside her while Gabrielle blocks the guard’s way.
Quickly Sandrine and her son leap onto the grounds of the French embassy. The old laced boots that can no longer hold the body of the woman upright stay on her feet. Sandrine faints at the foot of a curving staircase with a red carpet. The next day Sandrine sleeps in an automobile as it crosses the border.
“You’re still never quite present when I talk to you," Jörg sighs. “Where were you today? At the movies. Again? Why do you go to see the same film a hundred times in a row? I don’t know. And you still haven’t bought yourself new shoes.”
So what? Why should I? You should think of your appearance. Just look at those…
… disgusting broken sandals made of automobile tires. Surely you’ve noticed by now:
It was nothing other than
misery there,
nothing other than
a hideous fraud! Realize this
and finally
forget
the images of the past. Yes. I will forget them, but to do that, I’ll have to poke my eyes out with the second hand of the clock.
C h a p t e r T h i r t e e n
D a n c e r i n t h e D a r k
Selma lived in Berlin for three years before emigrating to the U.S., where she was later condemned to death. Emigrating from Prague to Berlin wasn’t difficult. She visited an aunt who owned a flower shop in a district called Pankow, then didn’t leave Berlin a week later as she promised to do when she first crossed the border, but instead stayed on for a month, and then another month, and then a year, and so on. At first she helped her aunt in the shop and the kitchen, then she got a job in a warehouse where she checked the deliveries. Later she got a room in a shared apartment. This three-bedroom apartment was already occupied by Selma’s cousin and a young couple. In front of the dark-brown building there was a little garden with thin grass and flashy buttercups. Sometimes a neighbor woman would be standing there with her little dog. The dog would bark at Selma, his voice sounding threatening, though he was hardly larger than a tomcat. The woman with the dog was delicately built, her almost gray hair that used to be blond was tied in the back, and she wore tinted glasses. Selma learned from her cousin that this woman was blind. Selma’s roommates secretly referred to her as the “lady with the lapdog.” One evening in 1988, a foreign girl had been attacked near Alexanderplatz by a group of teenagers. The lady with the lapdog, who coincidentally was walking beside the girl, had tried to stop the youths. They then attacked her as well. The girl later died of a stab wound, while the woman was blinded.
On the street where Selma lived, there were several grand villas, most of them empty. Their windows, though, were always clean, the gardens well tended. This quiet street led to a larger road which was the scene of normal everyday life. A row of gray apartment buildings with a supermarket in the middle, and beside it a parking lot and a bus stop where an overcrowded bus stopped every ten minutes.
On Saturday, Selma wanted to go to a café at the far end of the street that had just opened two weeks before. She knew that young people who looked like actors went there to drink café au lait. She wanted to sit among them. She knew she was too shy to speak to a stranger, but it was still her dream to work in a theater. When she left the house, the blind woman was standing on the grass with her dog. The dog barked and jumped at Selma because he wasn’t leashed. The
blind woman asked her forgiveness, held the dog by its collar, and asked Selma if she had time to help her read some letters. The social workers hadn’t come by for a week—supposedly they all had the flu. Selma couldn’t say no; she climbed the steps to the building together with the woman. The blind woman’s apartment was on the uppermost floor. There was no name plate on the door. The apartment smelled of tropical fruit, but there was no fruit on the table, just a heap of letters that was larger than the dog. It had surely been more than a week since the social workers’ last visit. Perhaps no one had ever come to see her, Selma thought and picked up a letter from the top of the pile. A French stamp was on the envelope. The woman moved comfortably about the kitchen, put on water for coffee, and asked Selma to sit down at the table. That’s a lot of letters, do you really want me to read all of them to you? I’d like to help you, but it will take a long time to read all of them. The blind woman shook her right hand in negation and said that actually there was only a single letter she was eager to find and read. Then she asked Selma where she was born. Selma thought she could discern a very faint, unfamiliar accent in the woman's speech. In Prague, Selma replied, and then asked the woman the same thing. She smiled, relieved, as if she’d been waiting the whole time for this question, and replied proudly: in Saigon. Selma asked again: Where? In Saigon. Selma fell silent, embarrassed, observing the woman's European-looking face. One could have blond streaks dyed in gray hair, but were these eyes, nose, and cheeks Vietnamese? Then it occurred to Selma that perhaps this woman was a descendant of French nationals who had remained behind in Vietnam. Are you of French descent? No, all my ancestors were from Asia. I spent ten years living in Paris that were not my fault. Fault? It wasn’t what I wanted, I mean. I thought Paris was wonderful, but it was a misunderstanding if not an accident. After my eye operation failed I moved to Berlin. Did you have the operation in Paris? No, in Bochum, but I didn’t want to stay there. Berlin was my point of departure. How do you mean? The blind woman got up as if she didn’t want to talk any more, and with perfect aim poured the boiling water into the filter cone. The dark liquid slowly dripped into the glass pot.
Do you know what I find so charming about this building? The radiator pipes, which sometimes play percussion. Do you like listening to them too? The woman waited for Selma’s response. Selma was listening. She knew the sound, her roommates sometimes complained about it. This building is in need of renovation! There are holes everywhere! How can they ask so much rent for a hole in the wall that’s full of holes!
You know, vision is a gap, a crevice—it isn’t that you have a view through this gap, rather, vision itself is this gap, and at the point where it is you can’t see anything at all. It no longer bothers me to be blind. The only problem is that people immediately want to start telling me their life stories when they hear about my blindness. I don’t want to hear any more life stories, I don’t want to hear much of anything, not even music interests me anymore, the only interesting things left are sounds, if that.
If I could see, I would work in a factory. The sound of a screw that falls to the floor and rolls back and forth, tracing a semi-circle. Thin metal plates that are being bent create hauntingly fluctuating sounds. A hammer strikes the head of a nail. The water gushes out of a big faucet and strikes the bottom of a bucket. A forklift drives between wooden crates. An oversized sliding door opens with a grating sound. Factory labor is inhuman, Selma replied, I don’t want to work in a factory, I want to work in a theater. Even the theater is inhuman, the woman replied calmly, and continued: still, I enjoy going to the theater, and enjoy the movies even more, especially now that I can concentrate on the voices and the finger movements of my friend. My friend Kathy, you see, translates the images into finger language and taps them on my palm. My hand is my screen, and Kathy’s fingers are the authors. I have no doubt that she changes things in the story she doesn’t like. In a film without images, most people are merely footsteps. They ramble through sleepless nights, are chased, race through alleyways, descend spiral staircases, or hide in basements. Sometimes Kathy draws an open circle in my hand like the letter “C,” or her finger draws a straight line and then a semicircle, which is the letter “D.” I cannot see the face of the woman who is dancing, at least not the way a policeman can see and identify a face. Faces that look like passport photos no longer mean anything to me. I would like to see the dance, I mean, the strange, meaningless motions that people make.
And where does Kathy live? Selma asked out of curiosity. She had never before seen the blind woman in the company of anyone at all. I don’t know where she is now. But when I go to the movies, the woman said, she always sits beside me.
Copyright © 2004 by Yoko Tawada
Copyright © 2004, 2009 by konkursbuch Verlag Claudie Gehrke
Translation copyright © 2009 by Susan Bernofsky
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
An excerpt of The Naked Eye first appeared in the journal Two Lines.
First published as New Directions Paperbook (NDPII39) in 2009
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tawada, Yoko, 1960-
[Das nackte Auge. English]
The Naked Eye / Yoko Tawada: translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-811-22350-8 (e-book)
I. Bernofsky, Susan. II. Title.
PT2682.A87N33I3 2009
895.6’35—dc22
2009000610
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation
80 Eighth Avenue, New York, NY 10011
