by Yoko Tawada
•
In one week’s time I succeeded, with some difficulty, in writing up to here, then went to visit Sea Lion again. He greedily read through my manuscript, never forgetting to keep an indifferent expression on his face. When he reached the end, he delivered a brusque bit of commentary: “If we ever happen to have a gap in our production schedule, we can publish your text.” Then he once again placed a bar of Western chocolate in my paw-hand and quickly turned away, as if to conceal his thoughts from me. “As a matter of principle, we do not pay our authors honoraria. If you need money, try getting accepted into the Writers’ Union.”
•
One day I flew to Riga to participate in a conference. Right away I noticed that several of the participants kept glancing surreptitiously in my direction — not out of distrust, which I was used to, but differently. Something was wrong with the air I was breathing, or had I missed something? During the break between two sessions, the conference-goers gathered in little whispering groups. When I approached one of these groups, they quickly switched into Latvian, and I couldn’t understand a thing. I fled to the corridor and stood at the window. A man wearing glasses came up to me with a chummy air and disclosed: “I’ve read your work!” Another man, overhearing this, came to join us, faintly blushing. “I find what you write so fascinating. I’m so looking forward to the next installment.” A woman who appeared to be his wife sidled up to him, smiling at me and whispering to her husband: “What a stroke of luck, getting to chat with the author in person.” In no time, a hedge of people had sprouted all around me. It gradually dawned on me that Sea Lion had already printed my autobiography in his magazine without informing me. I found this unforgiveable.
The conference ended earlier than expected, and all I wanted to do was run down to the bookstore in the main shopping district to ask for a copy of the magazine. The salesman said that the issue was sold out, assuming I was referring to the journal’s most recent issue, the one everybody was talking about. Surveying me from my forehead to my knees, he gave me a tip: “In the theater across the street they put on Chekhov’s The Seagull every night. The actor who plays the role of Treplev just bought a copy of the magazine. He’ll be on tonight.”
I hurried from the bookstore over to the theater and knocked so violently on the glass door, which was locked, that a crack appeared in it. Fortunately no one witnessed this, with one exception: a young man with a contorted face on a poster. He winked at me with his right eye. No one but me saw this.
There was a park right next door. I drank a cup of kvass and passed some time with the help of the newspapers pinned up on the exterior of the kiosk like wallpaper. Exactly one hour before the start of the performance I returned to the theater. “I have to speak with Treplev,” I told the woman at the ticket counter. “The performance begins in one hour. You can’t speak with any of the actors now.” A blunt refusal without any folderol. I couldn’t think of anything better to do, so I bought a ticket for the performance, went back to the park, and drank another cup of kvass. An hour went by, and I proudly entered the theater through the big door in front and took my seat in the audience. All of this was a novelty. My work at the circus had occupied my entire being, and I had never managed to go visit some other stage, and certainly not from the perspective of an audience member. Besides, the theater world was separated from the world of the circus by as thick a wall as the one dividing East and West. It was a grave error, however, on my part to reject the theater the way a child disdains a particular vegetable without ever having tried it. There were many things I could have learned from the theater, for example how to vary the tempo in the course of a program, or how to combine melancholy and humor. If I had understood this back when I was still performing on the circus stage, I would have allowed myself frequent outings to the theater.
The performance was delectable. The part I found the most appetizing was the dead seagull on the stage.
When the play was over, I slipped backstage to the dressing room, where it stank of powder. In front of the mirrors fastened side by side along the wall, various colorful cosmetics lay strewn about. The actors hadn’t yet returned. I discovered the magazine I was looking for, picked it up, and flipped hastily through its pages until I found the piece I had written. It was even adorned with a title. I couldn’t remember having given it a title or being asked to give it one. It was no doubt Sea Lion who had dreamed up the cheesy headline: “Thunderous Applause for My Tears.” In his impudence, he had added: “Part One.” Without asking the author’s permission, he was advertising the next installment! Apparently his high-handedness knew no bounds.
I heard a miscellany of sounds in the corridor, then smelled actors’ sweat, intermingled with the scent of roses. Actresses and actors alike twitched their hips when they saw me standing in the middle of their dressing room. I held up the magazine and announced: “I am the author of ‘Thunderous Applause for My Tears’!” It sounded like a clumsy excuse but nonetheless it was effective: the shock disappeared from the actors’ petrified faces and was replaced with the glow of reverence. This change took place first around the mouth, gradually rising up to reach the forehead. Their eyelashes began to flutter coquettishly. Please, please, please, do take a seat! They offered me a scrawny little footstool. The moment I shifted part of my weight onto it, the thing began to creak violently, threatening collapse. I decided I could do without a seat. “May I ask for your autograph?” It was Treplev who asked this. His body odor was composed of soap, sweat, and sperm.
That evening I flew back to Moscow and, ensconced in familiar bed-smell, realized that now I had become an author, a career development that could no longer be reversed. Sleep eluded me, even a bowl of warm milk with honey didn’t help. As a child I was constantly under pressure and always had to go to bed early so I could get up again at the crack of dawn to start my training. There had been a phase before my childhood began, one in which no clock ever ticked. I gazed at the moon, felt the sun’s rays on my fur, and observed the gradual alternation of bright and dark, a series of tiny shifts. Falling asleep and getting up were not my own private concerns, they were the work of Nature. When my childhood began, Nature came to an end. Now I want to find out what happened to me before childhood.
I lay in my familiar bed and stared at the ceiling, where I discovered a prawn that in truth was only a stain. The narrow face of Treplev appeared, although it bore no similarity to the prawn. In the days, weeks, months, and years to come, he will act upon the stage, fall in love, and sooner or later die. And me? I’ll die before him. And Sea Lion? He’ll die even before me. After the death of all living creatures, all our unfulfilled wishes and unspoken words will go on drifting in the stratosphere, they will combine with one another and linger upon the earth like fog. What will this fog look like in the eyes of the living? Will they fail to remember the dead and instead indulge in banal meteorological conversations like: “It’s foggy today, don’t you think?”
When I woke up, it was almost noon. I surprised Sea Lion at his desk. “Please give me the current issue of your journal!”
“We don’t have any copies left. Sold out!”
“You printed my autobiography.”
“That’s certainly possible.”
“Why didn’t you send me a contributor’s copy?”
“You know how the mail gets censored these days. I meant to hand-deliver a copy to you, but you can see how busy I am, and the copy I set aside for you disappeared somehow. You don’t have to read the text again. You know what you wrote, don’t you?” Not a drop of guilt showed in his face. And why should it? He was right: I didn’t have to read my own text.
“By the way, make sure you turn in the second installment by the beginning of next month at the latest. Don’t miss the deadline!” he said and cleared his throat.
“Why did you announce it as a series without asking me first?”
“What a shame it would be if a l
ife story as gripping as yours remained incomplete!” His flattering remark briefly soothed me, but then I remembered that he’d done something unforgiveable.
“You know perfectly well that it is part of my physical constitution to be incapable of tears. Why the inane title?”
Sea Lion rubbed his hands together as if choosing the right dough to knead into a new loaf of falsehoods. I stayed on the offensive. “Don’t just randomly title the thing on a whim! At least give some thought to the meaning of the words. Tears belong to human sentimentality. To me, ice and snow are everything. You can’t just thaw them out and turn them into tears.”
Sea Lion grinned and wagged his beard. Apparently it had just occurred to him how he could turn matters to his advantage. “You hear the word ‘tears,’ and right away you assume it’s your tears that are meant. But the world doesn’t revolve around you. It’s not you who should be shedding tears, it’s the reader. Instead of crying, you should be meeting your deadline.”
I let myself be intimidated by his insolent words, which left me feeling like an eared seal with regressed limbs despite the fact that I possessed a powerful gripping and running mechanism that made me a formidable opponent. Sea Lion spit his final words in my direction: “Are you done reciting your lines? Then go home! I’ve got work to do.”
Instead of slapping his face, I stuck out my tongue at him, which was recalling a certain sweet flavor. “By the way, that West chocolate you gave me wasn’t half bad. Do you have connections in the West?” Sea Lion, breaking character, pulled a bar of chocolate from his desk drawer with nervous fingers and tossed it to me.
As soon as I shut the door of my apartment behind me, I sat down at my desk. I was still furious, and the desire to write clamped down on my ankle like a trap, refusing to release me. Even as far back as the Middle Ages, there were men like Sea Lion who placed traps in the woods to catch bears alive. They would put flowers on a bear and make him dance in the street. The masses delighted in these performances, and would applaud and throw coins. Knights and artisans, perhaps, viewed the bear with contempt, seeing him as a street entertainer flirting with the crowd — flattering, submissive, and dependent. The bear, meanwhile, had quite different goals in mind: he wanted to enter into a state of ecstasy along with his audience, or else use his dancing and music to commune with spirits and ghosts. He didn’t know who the masses were or what it meant to flirt.
•
Already as a child I’d started performing every day, but I never learned what other acts were being presented. Sometimes I heard a lion roar, but I never saw a lion performing onstage.
In addition to Ivan, several other people worked for me. One of them brought me ice cubes and scattered them on the floor, another cleared away my dishes. When I was asleep, they would converse in hushed tones and creep around on tiptoe so as not to wake me. This made me laugh, because even when I was sleeping, I could always tell right away if a tiny little mouse at the far end of the room started polishing her snout with her velvet gloves. The bodies of Ivan and the other men had such a strong smell that even in sleep my nose couldn’t possibly overlook their presence.
My sense of smell was the most reliable of all my five senses and has remained so to this day. When I hear a voice, this doesn’t always mean the bearer of the voice is present. A gramophone or radio can produce a voice as well. My eyesight can’t be trusted. A stuffed gull or a human being dressed in a bearskin are nothing more than facades designed for deception. But with smells, I’m not so easily fooled. I can smell whether a person smokes, likes to eat onions, has on new leather shoes, or is menstruating. The scent of perfume cannot cover up a sweaty armpit or the smell of garlic. On the contrary: It underscores these other smells, apparently unbeknownst to human beings.
A snowfield blanketed my field of vision. Far and wide, no other color but white. My stomach was empty, hunger stabbed at it from the inside, and soon I caught the scent of a snow mouse. I couldn’t see the mouse, it was in the middle of digging an underground tunnel. The tunnel wasn’t so deep, I pressed my nose against the snowy ground, following the mousy scent, which was in motion. I couldn’t see a thing, but it was easy to pinpoint the mouse’s location. Here it is — time to pounce! I woke up. The white surface before me wasn’t a snowfield, it was a blank manuscript page.
•
My retinas have no difficulty recalling my first press conference. Every few seconds they were stabbed by flashbulbs. Ivan turned to stone in his suit, which was baggy at the shoulders and chest. Unlike at an ordinary circus performance, there were only ten people in the audience. “So listen, this is a press conference,” Ivan said, inserting this disconcerting new word into my ear. We obediently took our places side by side on the podium. The flashbulbs assailed us once more like a sudden downpour. On the other side of Ivan sat his boss, whose hair odor and finger movements — they seemed at once cowardly and sadistic — made my hackles rise. One step closer, and I’d have bared my fangs at him. Apparently he noticed my antipathy and kept his distance.
“The circus is a top-notch form of entertainment for the working classes because . . .” The boss had no doubt intended to enrich this skim-milk speech with a bit more semantic butterfat, but he was immediately interrupted by one of the journalists, who asked: “Have you ever been bitten by a wild animal?” The boss didn’t have an answer ready. So then it was Ivan’s turn to have questions thrown at him. They fluttered down from above like colorful confetti, confusing him.
“Is it true that you speak bear language?”
“Is it just a superstition to think a bear can rob a person of his soul, and then he’ll die before his time?”
Ivan murmured incomprehensible words like: “Hmm, uh, I mean to say, well, beg your pardon, in a word, uh, but that doesn’t mean . . .” Despite his poor answers, lengthy articles about us appeared over the following weeks, not just here, but in Poland and the GDR as well.
•
I have to admit: my life changed because I’d made myself an author. Or to be precise, it wasn’t exactly me who did that, I was made an author by the sentences I’d written, and that wasn’t even the end of the story: each result gave birth to the next, and I found myself being transported to a place I hadn’t known existed. Writing was a more dangerous acrobatic stunt than dancing atop a rolling ball. To be sure, I’d worked myself to the bone learning to dance on that ball and actually broke some bones rehearsing, but in the end I attained my goal. In the end I knew with certainty that I could balance on a rolling object — but when it comes to writing, I can make no such claims. Where was the ball of authorship rolling? It couldn’t just roll in a straight line, or I’d fall off the stage. My ball was supposed to spin on its axis and at the same time circle the midpoint of the stage, like the Earth revolving around the sun.
Writing demanded as much strength as hunting. When I caught the scent of prey, the first thing I felt was despair: would I succeed in catching my prey, or would I fail yet again? This uncertainty was the hunter’s daily lot. When my hunger grew too strong, I was incapable of hunting. All I wanted to do was stop — before the hunt — at a first-class restaurant for a three-course meal. I also wanted to make sure my limbs were adequately rested before each big hunt. My ancestors had spent entire winters slumbering in their sheltered caves. How pleasant it would be to withdraw once a year until spring came to wake me. A true winter knows no light, nor sound, nor work. In the big city, winter shrank and shriveled, and the dimensions of life grew narrow too.
•
The memory of my first press conference remained sharp in my mind as if painted there, it hadn’t faded at all, but I can scarcely remember the period that came afterward. One work after another. For ten years I labored without pause in a burning frenzy that was proof against winter. Everything that burdened or hurt me was instantly transformed into fodder for my career. That’s why I couldn’t remember anything.
My repertoire g
rew ever broader, my vocabulary ever larger, but I never experienced a greater or more illuminating surprise than the first time I grasped the true meaning of the performing arts. I kept having to learn new routines, which made me feel like a factory worker who, even after being given a new, more challenging task, still finds it monotonous, not a source of pride. “Performing in a circus can feel like assembly-line work,” I once asserted at a conference on the topic Working Class Pride.
•
Sea Lion read my new manuscript and said: “It would be better if you skipped the political criticism — your philosophy is boring. What your readers want to know is how you mastered the high art of stagecraft without losing your wildness, and what that felt like. Your experiences are important, not your thoughts.” I don’t know exactly why, but his commentary made me furious, and on the way home I went into the government-run market hall, bought a jar of honey, and ate the entire thing right up, scooping it out with a shovel-hand. After that I stopped writing anything political, though I’m not entirely sure what’s political and what isn’t.
•
You might assume that I was born with acrobatic talent, that I trained hard to perfect my abilities and then proudly displayed the results to my audience. This interpretation is completely false. I never chose a profession, and there was never any question of my having talent. I rode the tricycle and was given sugar cubes as a reward. If I’d hurled my tricycle into the corner instead, I’d have gotten nothing to eat, just a whipping. Ivan had no choice either. Even the pianist, who was independent of the circus and played for us only occasionally, had probably never stopped to ask himself whether he happened to feel like playing the piano at a given moment. Day after day, all of us were stuck in a dead end, doing the minimum necessary for survival, which entailed maximal challenges. I was not a victim of Ivan’s violence. None of my movements on the stage was superfluous or unnecessary: in other words, nothing I did was the result of external violence.
