Facing the Bridge

by Yoko Tawada

  Coconut milk is like fluid undulating deep in the inner ear as it picks up sounds from the outside. Kazuko recently read something about the auditory sense having been created by water. If the liquid in your ears dried up, you would no longer hear. “Cock-and-bull, shuttlecock, half-crocked, three in a muddle, laughing from a puddle,” Kazuko sang to herself. The two girls sat beside her, one on each side, their eyes about to be absorbed into the darkness of the night. Perhaps they weren’t as anxious to make a profit as she’d thought; they didn’t even try hawking their wares to bespectacled men with cameras around their necks. Kazuko sipped at her coconut. You can’t tell from the outside whether there’s a lot of milk in a coconut or just a little, but if you drink slowly because you’re afraid to finish too fast, the milk seems to last forever. The girls were sixteen and had worked as street vendors for nearly five years now, ever since finishing school. Though slim as boys, their cheeks were plump and their eyes sparkled so that when they laughed they could have been twelve. It occurred to Kazuko that she might be seeing them through the same eyes as the people in Berlin who saw her and always thought she looked so young. The light turned green and a herd of motorbikes took off with a mechanical roar. “Big Sis is… twenty-five?” The question brought Kazuko back to herself. These kids, too, took ten years off her age. The natural accumulation they expected the years to leave on a face must be missing from hers. And they in turn lacked what Kazuko had been taught to see as maturity.

  There were always cyclos parked in front of the hotel. The drivers, vaguely taunting, yet eager for business, watched her walk in and walk out again. When she returned in the evening, they quietly observed. But as soon as she stepped outside and started down the street in the morning, the barrage of “Cyclo! Cyclo!” rained down with such force that their voices seemed like hands reaching out to grab her. Whenever Kazuko rode instead of walked, she felt as if the earth had been stolen from beneath her feet. If a certain Ms. F liked to stroll along the shore for hours without hearing human voices, on what she considered a small excursion within a larger journey, Kazuko was also Ms. F. Why, then, did she choose Vietnam rather than another jaunt to Norway? Lots of people never go anywhere on vacation except Scandinavia. They return again and again to the beauty they know.

  But as far as she could tell, no one walks far in Ho Chi Minh City. Seated in a cyclo, Kazuko searched in vain for pedestrians. Instead, she saw people pedaling bicycles, men squatting on the ground repairing sewing machines, whole families on motorbikes, women stirring vats of soup, their faces bathed in the rising steam. Sitting in a cyclo made her feel like a pile of dirt scooped up by a bulldozer. The driver’s feet were covered with a layer of dust—an outer hide, perhaps, to protect the skin beneath. His seat was so high up that when she turned around she was eye level with his crotch. The street was crowded but the cyclo slipped along with the lightness of a whirligig beetle skimming across the surface of the water, somehow managing to avoid its kin. The wind brushed her face like a caress. There were no streetlights, so no Walk/Don’t Walk commands. The frogs and beetles could move freely across the pond. Red plastic basins and chairs in the shops floated in and out of her field of vision and looked like toys. She remembered squatting in a sandbox clutching a shovel the same shade of red, and without warning, a hot liquid spilled out from between her thighs, making the sand bubble and turn dark.

  In the photograph, an American GI holds the upper half of a Vietnamese soldiers severed body in one hand like an old rag. The head of the Vietnamese soldier still has eyes, a nose, a mouth. The GI seems to be smiling. There’s no one in the War Museum, thought Kazuko. I’m not here either, that’s why it’s perfectly silent, a world too far beyond for sound to reach my eardrums. With the breath crushed out of her, she came to her senses and gulped in air. She was definitely in the War Museum, standing in front of a photograph, sensing people around her. The caption noted that a Japanese photographer had taken it. Kazuko gritted her teeth, clinging to her patriotism, hoping that neither the blond youth beside her, nor the one next to him, whose face she couldn’t see, nor any of the others looking at this image would fail to notice the Japanese name. She had nothing left to cling to but a twisted sort of pride. Nor could she understand the GI by reading his expression. Offering only light and shadow, the photo pushed her away.

  Outside, old tanks were lined up in a row, each tank designed to shut out the world save for the one element that faced out, a space popping up from the iron shell used to fire at people. Metal belts for legs created a perfect harmony between the two tasks of moving the tank forward and crushing everything in its path. Just being in the presence of these monsters, who forbade her from calling to them, who might have been machines or living things, was enough to make Kazuko shudder. She couldn’t bring herself to look closely at the display. Even if she wanted to, it seemed her brain would harden and her senses turn to styrofoam. “Chotto, sumimasen,” someone said from behind. Though the language was Japanese, the way the voice wavered on “sumi” sounded American. She turned to see a man in his mid-thirties with hair the yellow of a Japanese rose hanging down past his shoulders, and eyes the pale green of young bamboo. “Suddenly, I feel sick. I’m going to lie down here. Please wet this for me.” He proceeded to lie down beside one of the tanks and close his eyes. Holding the towel he had handed her, Kazuko stood watching his body fold down like a collapsible chair until he was flat on his back. Something strange is going on here, she thought. Japanese-speaking Americans don’t suddenly faint when a Japanese person is conveniently around to help them. Of course she didn’t know whether he was actually American, not that it mattered anyway, and surely there would be no danger in dampening his towel. The moisture made the cloth so shapeless that even when she smoothed it out it wasn’t square. Apparently the man hadn’t lost consciousness, for he had both palms planted firmly on the ground. Kazuko folded the amorphous cloth and placed it on his forehead. A stillness fell over the entire area. Kazuko moved away and knelt down to wait with her legs properly tucked under her. She didn’t want to look at the tanks, so she gazed up at the sky. Not a single plane flew overhead. The man slowly pulled himself up. He sat in silence for so long she wondered if he had lost his Japanese until he finally came out with, “I don’t feel so bad anymore. Thank you,” leaving Kazuko with the impression that perhaps it was she who no longer felt sick. “James is my name,” he said.

  After the freedom of traveling on her own, the idea of joining up with another person seemed almost unbearable. When he suggested going to see a pagoda, the three Chinese characters used to write stupa flashed into her mind, but before she could follow the characters wherever they might take her, she had to decide what to do. “All right. Let’s see the pagoda together. But after that I’m going on alone,” she announced as she climbed into a cyclo. James hurriedly stepped up into a cyclo parked behind hers. When she saw the temple’s name, Kaifuku-ji, Kazuko sat down on a bench and wrote, “His spine exploded overhead, the fragments bursting in midair. Lighter than dust, they crossed the sea. What happened to them after that, no one knows.” The final “no one knows” was for atmosphere. Kazuko was fond of the wild little mutts stumbling around on wobbly legs, always playing around her, getting underfoot. Wherever she looked there were dogs. They neither howled at her, nor bounded over with wagging tails and eyes bright as shell buttons. They were simply small, and everywhere. Women were holding bunches of incense sticks in both hands like bouquets of long stemmed flowers, whipping them through the air, the fumes stinging her eyes and throat. Blinking furiously, she caught sight of James who seemed about to cry. Then whirling smoke enveloped her and the painful teardrops that bathed those green eyes faded from view. After a while the cloud thinned and gradually electric lights began to appear, pika-pika chika-chika, until she felt as if she were sitting in an arcade. The light bulbs seemed to be playing by a set of rules she didn’t understand. Every other one went out, then every other two in triple time. Or so she thought until the whol
e thing changed. Diamonds, triangles, spinning around, look right, look left, then turning off. But this, too, was followed by an entirely different pattern. At the very center of all this illumination sat a statue of the Buddha. “This is like an arcade,” Kazuko whispered to herself, though she was aware that someone who understood Japanese was now standing beside her. She hastily prayed that she wouldn’t get pregnant. The main hall of the temple was so smoky she escaped into an alcove off to the side where she saw several Buddhas cradling babies. The infants were pieces of wood wrapped in red cloth tied with string, and six women in light summer dresses who all looked about twenty clasped their hands reverently before the altar. James had followed her but stopped short at the threshold. If these wooden slats swaddled in scarlet were what’s born to Buddhas, then what about her parents who brought her into the world, and her grandparents and great-grandparents before them—what did they look like as new-borns? Kazuko wondered as she wandered dizzily back to the smoke-filled main hall. Seven papier-mâché figures with splendid beards appeared. Each was three times the size of a normal person and leaning slightly forward, staring down at her. Were these saints who had crossed the sea from China, or merchants? Whoever they were, once they arrived they must have copulated with great diligence to have produced so many descendents. Because Kazuko was a full-time tourist, she didn’t want children. She possessed a passport that took the place of ancestors, and visas replaced offspring, but with no steady job her money always disappeared. Outside, she sat down on a bench and wrote in her notebook: “That night in her dream when the ship carrying her ancestors turned into smoked sardines.” Then she said good-bye to James, who stood there with dried tears beneath his eyes and his hair in a tangle, and climbed into a cyclo.

  The next day, Kazuko took a bus to the Cao Dai Temple in Tay Ninh. She felt like standing with someone in the shade of the fruit trees where they could press their sweaty bodies together, reaching up now and then to tickle each other’s lips, wet with fruit juice, laughing all the while, so she regretted not having asked James the name of his hotel before they had parted. But being a tourist, she was obligated to go sightseeing every day. It was her duty to visit every famous place whether she wanted to or not, and under no circumstances was she permitted to criticize even the fake sites recently invented by travel agents. If a certain Ms. G considered meeting a boy whose skin she could touch to be the high point of a trip abroad, then Kazuko had a minor complaint for Ms. G. The task of the tourist was to express amazement and delight at scenery and cultural artifacts, and to pay for the privilege of seeing them. To go looking for love on top of that would be like eating a homemade lunch in a fancy restaurant. Dogs were everywhere here, too, sniffing around the bus stop. She could have watched the puppies play forever; boarding the bus now seemed like a terrible bore. Shed made up her mind to go, though, so she couldn’t stop now. As the bus, packed with some thirty foreign tourists, rolled indecisively on and on along the edge where the city seemed to turn into village but never quite did, Kazuko looked out the window at primary-and middle-school children walking by and wanted to wave to them. A boy on his bicycle read a book as he steered with one hand. Its front wheel wobbling, the bicycle teetered down the narrow strip between cars and rice paddies. Without his book the boy might have peddled faster, but since time spent in between places is a part of life, too, reaching one’s destination isn’t necessarily the most important thing. If he swerved to the right, he would fall into a paddy field. But if he veered to the left, the bus carrying Kazuko and the other tourists would run him over.

  A yellow church stood in the middle of what looked like a college campus. Perhaps “church” wasn’t the right word for the Cao Dai Temple, but its rocket-shaped tower reminded Kazuko of one. What really bothered her about the church was its color—a yellow that weighed on her skin, mocked old age, and evoked neither comfort nor nostalgia. No sunflower or egg yolk hue. There was a category of people referred to as “yellow,” though no color seemed more alien to Kazuko. And here it suddenly leaped out at her like a visitor from outer space. Not that she was frightened—she just didn’t see how she could ever empathize with such a shade. Cao Dai, a mixture of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism blended with the thought of Victor Hugo, was a religion with two million believers, most of whom lived in Vietnam, her guidebook said. Inside, rows of pillars towered over her. Something was wrapped around them, and because whatever it was looked friendly enough, she walked over for a closer look. Dragons, perhaps. That’s certainly what they appeared to be from a distance. But up close she realized they couldn’t be dragons because they didn’t seem to have heads. Maybe the things started out as dragons made of ice cream and then were exposed to the yellow of the sun for so long that they melted, leaving only the remnants of their original shape. Bodies covered with red, white, and black scales mingled with swirling clouds and streamed down the yellow pillars like mud. Kazuko had stopped taking the pill since the day she left home. To see if the dragons had heads or not, she would have to circle around the pillars. However the worship service was underway on the first floor, forcing the tourists to retreat upstairs. She couldn’t see the heads. These were not dragons. They were more like memories of dragons. On the second floor a group of girls stood in a corner singing a song that suggested the very image of Central Asia. The four girls frowned and threw the tourists occasional dirty looks. Tourists know what a nuisance they are, always barging into other people’s lives. That’s why Kazuko felt so uncomfortable no matter where she traveled, but as a tourist she simply had to endure the embarrassment until the end of the trip. Still, as no one had forced her to become a tourist, “endure” wasn’t really the right word, though the fact that she had chosen this life didn’t mean she could leave it behind whenever she pleased. Even if she wanted to, she couldn’t quit in the middle of sightseeing. This looks like a Muslim mosque, she thought as she gazed down at the two hundred or so believers seated in ten rows on the floor below. The human figures looked like a part of the geometrical patterns embedded in the floor. The reds, blues, and yellows the believers wore could have been taken straight out of a mail-order catalog. Wondering what made this seem essentially different from a mosque, Kazuko realized that about two-thirds of the praying figures were female. Voices began to chant in a monotone that had no relation to the singing upstairs; on certain beats, the faithful simultaneously pressed their foreheads to the floor.

  The huge windows that lined the walls should have let the sun stream in but didn’t, at least not directly. Faint rays, like the light you see on a summer evening after wakening from too long an afternoon nap, gently bathed the interior. A large triangle was painted in the center of each window and an eye, complete with lashes, was painted within each triangle. Kazuko remembered the old man who ran her neighborhood electrical appliance store back in Japan, his eyes resembling the switches on the appliances he sold. Like a tourist with a standing-room ticket for the Viennese Opera, or for a single scene only at the Kabuki-za in the Ginza, Kazuko peered down at the service while snapping photos. A crowd of amateur photographers gathered around her. Cameras draw cameras. A Japanese man climbed the stairs, camcorder in hand. Japanese men have more stability with their shoes off than on. When German men pad down the wooden floor of an Asian corridor in white socks they look half dressed. A large head floated before her. So she was right about these creatures wrapped around the pillars after all. What a relief. These vaguely smiling dragons transported her back to childhood. Her reverie was broken by a voice behind her telling her what she already knew. “They’re dragons.” She turned around to see James standing there. He didn’t crack a smile the day before, but today his mouth, rimmed with wisps of scraggly beard, was spread in a mocking grin. The hair on his face must have grown overnight. His red lips looked almost lewd. “So we meet again. Tourists collect in the same places,” said Kazuko, to which James replied, “A community bound by fate,” with an affected bow. His socks, once white, were now gray and the nail of hi
s slightly protruding big toe peeked through a hole. Without putting on a show for the tourists, the believers continued to pray, their cloth-swathed backs revealing no sign of either pretentiousness or irritation. Cameras clicked on and off in turn, their flashes scattering down from the balcony. “We must be an awful bother to them,” Kazuko murmured, meaning “we tourists.” If these people were truly devout, outsiders would be a disturbance; if they welcomed spectators, didn’t this mean their religion wasn’t real? The confusion in Kazuko’s mind could basically be broken down to such thoughts, but then a yellow dragon stuck its head in, waggling its cream-colored tongue, and devoured all her question marks. With her brain wrapped in an ambiguous yellow mist, Kazuko returned to the bus. James, too, retreated to his in silence.

  She thought of the boy on his bicycle who read as he pedaled. On the way back, the bus stopped at the Cu Chi Tunnels, which were dug during the Vietnam War. A cut-away view was on display near the entrance to the museum. Work spaces, kitchens, and sleeping quarters were connected by narrow corridors totaling some 200 kilometers in length. The man who provided this information didn’t have scars on his cheeks but laughed as if he did. There was nothing caustic about his lightheartedness—no dark shadows or wounded sentiment. His smile exuded goodwill yet seemed to hide a store of anger within. “The reason why the passageways are so narrow in places was so the Americans, whose bodies are shaped differently from ours, wouldn’t be able to crawl through,” the man continued. There was a burst of laughter. He had lingered slowly over the phrase “bodies are shaped differently from ours” as if carefully searching for the right words. Kazuko thought of James, and looked for him in the crowd. As most tour buses bound for the Cao Dai Temple make a stop at the Cu Chi Tunnels, she figured he must be here somewhere. She spied several men with hair about the same color as his. The tunnel pursed its lips, warning people to keep out. The guide brushed away earth and fallen leaves to reveal a metal lid that looked like a manhole leading into the sewers, but the lid was barely the size of a large dictionary. While she was wondering how a human being could ever fit through, the cover suddenly opened and a soldier in a faded uniform stuck his head out and grinned. He nimbly slipped out and hopped to his feet. Applause crackled like a bonfire as a fireworks display of flashes and strobe lights brightened the air. Enveloped in a shadow the color of his fatigues, the soldier held the lid in one hand, his face wreathed in smiles. A young American placed one of his large Adidas sneakers over the entrance to the Cu Chi Tunnels, saying he might be able to fit a leg in, maybe. Kazuko felt so stiff inside she couldn’t even take her camera out of her bag. Though she didn’t have any firsthand knowledge of World War II, she still couldn’t imagine herself standing in front of an air raid shelter with a smile on her face, clutching a bamboo spear. Unlike Vietnam, Japan started a war of aggression, which left a residue of guilt; I’ll never be able to look back on World War II proudly, with a sense of humor like these Vietnamese, she thought, feeling as though she alone had been snipped out of the picture with scissors and thrown into the wastebasket. The stinging deep within her eyes hurt so bad she couldn’t keep them open. “This way seems a little too tight for you folks, so let’s try the entrance for tourists, shall we?” the guide suggested, still beaming. Comparing the flesh on her belly and hips to the soldier’s sinewy body, Kazuko realized she couldn’t claim to look Vietnamese after all. The mouth of the Cu Chi Tunnels had been torn open and widened by force, the walls reinforced with cement to let tourists peek in. Yet the original earthen surface of these passageways was not for show, but to protect the people inside. Kazuko could initially walk bent over, but the tunnel quickly narrowed and before she knew it she was squatting, waddling like a duck. When her thigh muscles hurt too much she lowered onto all fours. The notion of inching along, her bottom thrust in the face of some unknown tourist behind gave her pause, but in a space that allowed no other way of moving, crawling soon seemed natural. Every so often openings dug into the ceiling let in light from above; crouching below she could peer through them at an angle and see the sky. Suppressing the need to escape, she crept forward. When the light disappeared, the darkness would worm its way deeper into her cheeks with every inch until she reached the next opening. Even if there was room enough to get through, with the sheer closeness pressing down on her spine as her field of vision closed like a wilting flower, where would her body go? Something inside her crumbled and she would soon unleash a wail as if possessed by some spirit. A force not her own was losing control, filling her yet utterly alien to her, making her want to scream. It was no use telling herself there was no danger, there was nothing to fear, for words like “fear” or “danger” existed in a different dimension. She was only aware the shriek about to escape from her lips. And once her voice was free of its cage, she might not be able to capture it again. A dampness that was neither the tunnel wall nor her own skin clung to her like a fishnet and she could no longer move. It was a frigid numbness, a sense of loathing about to explode; it was her mistrust of everything around her. This clammy web she was caught in could not be real; if she chanted a magic spell it would surely disappear. But nothing came to mind. Not even “dark.” She was not trapped, she would eventually get out, she could go back as well as forward, she was not going to suffocate, she could not possibly die here. None of these reassurances had any effect. And then, by a route as yet unknown to Kazuko, two words materialized: “all right.” ALL RIGHT. The words were suddenly on her tongue then reached out to enshroud her shoulders and belly until her whole body was covered and the fishnet melted and disappeared. She climbed out of the tunnel, her blouse soaked with sweat and sticking to her skin. The muscles in her thighs ached. When American war-planes spied even a wisp of smoke from a cooking fire wafting up from the tunnel’s mouth, they would attack, the guide explained. More bombs were used in Vietnam than in World War II. Back at her tour bus, Kazuko saw two other buses lined up waiting. James was leaning against one of them. His bangs were plastered to his pale, sweaty forehead, and his white clothes were so wet you could see the color of his skin. “Did you go in the Cu Chi Tunnels?” she asked. “I gave up at the entrance,” he replied, without cracking a smile.