Yoko Tawada: Where Europe Begins

Finally the clouds vanish entirely and the world becomes visible below. It is a sea of fire.

“Coffee or tea?” A ghost stewardess flies up to me, holding two pitchers. The distinction means nothing to me since I have no tongue. The stewardess is carrying a baby on her back. The baby is hungry and crying for milk. I also want milk, not tea or coffee. Xander’s voice says, “The smell of warm milk makes me sick to my stomach.” At this moment, milk as white as paper begins to flow out of the stewardess’s pitchers; it puts out the battle fires that have engulfed the planet, mixes with the ash, soaks into the earth and disappears. When all the fires have been extinguished, no milk is left. I hear the woman’s voice saying, “I never once got any milk.” She was born the year World War II came to an end.

Finally we leave the ruins behind us and the desert’s wrinkles begin.

“Meat or vegetarian?” asks a second ghost stewardess. It makes no difference if I eat the skeletons of grasses or the corpses of quadrupeds. After a war, everything you eat tastes of ash.

In the desert someone builds a factory in which the woman, now dressed in work clothes, has sex with a handsome man. Behind him, an even more handsome man is waiting his turn. And behind him stands a man twice as handsome as the last, and so on, all of them in a long, long line. But when the five o’clock bell rings, the woman takes off her work clothes and rushes home.

The sun flees behind the globe. In the darkness, my scale-covered bird increases its speed. On the earth below, the light of a candle can be seen. When all the inhabitants of the city have fallen asleep, a single person, the woman, sits awake. One by one the hairs on her head turn into writing brushes and begin composing letters. The envelopes bear no addresses. I try reading the letters with my telescope, but the moment each one is finished, a policeman wearing pajamas comes in to take it away. Not for purposes of censorship. This country has no such laws. There is no paper in the bathrooms, so everyone uses letters instead. And afterwards they are illegible. Every time a policeman comes out of the bathroom, he gives a yawn and shoots at the woman with his pistol as if activating the shutter of a camera. More and more holes appear in the woman’s head, but she never falls down. She appears to be a mechanical writing doll.

“Is it you?” Deep within my ear I hear Xander’s calm voice. The woman’s voice answers for me, shouting, “Yes, it’s you,” and then she chokes with laughter. Apparently Xander can’t hear her.

Xander’s voice grows hard. “You’ve stopped speaking the language I taught you, haven’t you?” The woman laughs herself into a coughing fit.

“You kissed a dead person.”

The woman continues to laugh. I start to cry, but of course neither voice nor tears come.

“You gave a dead person your tongue.”

All at once I realize that the scale-covered bird called Sarcophagus is, in fact, the woman. I push open the lid and climb out.

Sky and earth have come to an end, and before me lie desolate grasslands full of slender blades swaying in the air. I remember having felt this way when I first left my mother’s womb.

With all my strength, I embrace the cold body of the scaly bird. In my arms, each of its scales becomes a wind chime that rings. Sharp, gentle, bitter, soft notes penetrate my bones, and now my bones, too, begin to ring. This ringing gradually gives rise to a strength which belongs to no one.

Then Xander catches up to me on his motorcycle and knocks me over. I fall backward and hit the back of my head on the asphalt of the highway.

“You think everything’s fine as long as you’re all right? Don’t you care about rescuing her? What that woman needs is an umbrella and love.”

A gray rain mixed with factory smoke begins to fall. The scale-covered bird screams in pain. I open my umbrella above its head. The rain soaks my hair and makes the hair so heavy it tears at the roots and pulls them out. It wasn’t the light that made my hair so thin, it was the rain.

“This is a nude bathing establishment, so please remove all scales,” a supervisor admonishes through a megaphone. I see a large number of naked men and woman bathing in the gray rain and stretching out in the middle of the highway. Only the heretic women sit wrapped in shawls at the edge of the road.

Xander places a heavy kitchen knife in my hand and says, “Strip off their armor, make them naked and free so they can love life.”

I concentrate as if taking an exam, trying to understand Xander’s words.

“You ought to be able to understand the word for love as easily as you understand the word for umbrella. Only barbarians don’t understand it.”

I nod and strike at the scales with the knife. At once the wind chimes fall silent and tumble to the road — shriveled, blood-smeared plums.

The scaly bird is dead, but the knife can find no peace, it dances wildly through the air and stabs my right eye. The eyeballs surface bursts like the skin of a plum, and a soft red substance, a surprising amount of it, comes streaming out.

10

Only adolescent girls are unable to put on makeup without a mirror. Adult women can do without. The location of the skin can be determined by touch. You just put out your hand and feel where this world ends: that’s where my skin is. The skin is a membrane separating this world from the other one. I apply a special makeup until my skin becomes transparent. Of course it isn’t enough to rub the creme into the skin of one’s face, since when the face becomes invisible, the body appears to have been beheaded. So I’m careful not to miss a single spot.

When my skin has finally become transparent, the figure of the dead woman appears behind it.

I always put on makeup before going to bed.

Since I never leave the house, I get puzzled questions: “Don’t you have a sweetheart?”

But I have no time to go out because I sleep so much.

Every evening, the woman visits this world through my skin. I can’t see her because the lamp is broken and the room is dark. I can’t hear her either. I can only feel my bones become a conduit for her trembling. Then I hold my breath and concentrate on this vibrato of bones. It is a sound that cannot be transformed into music, an oscillation that can never become a note.

By morning, the woman is gone. I remain lying in bed a long while. By the time the reverberations have died down and I start to wonder if I shouldn’t get up, it’s already dark out. I get into the bathtub, carefully put on makeup and then go back to bed.

“What do you do for a living?”

The first thing everyone always wants to know is what I do when I’m not sleeping, what sorts of exams and theses I have to my name as if they wanted to reserve a place in my curriculum vitae for the date of my death. There ought to be a curriculum vitae whose first line is the date of death.

Since I have no tongue, I cannot be an interpreter, cannot translate what the woman says into words that can be easily understood. Since I have forgotten the letters of the alphabet, I can no longer be a typist either. The letters all look the same to me, like rusty nails twisted into shapes. For this reason, I can no longer even copy down poems written by others. And of course I am farthest of all from being a model, since in photographs I am completely invisible.

I am a transparent coffin.

Once upon a time there was a monk who saw the reflection of a monk in a pond and leapt into the water to embrace it. The pond lay at the edge of a small forest. The temple lay at the other end of the forest. A narrow path led from the temple through the forest to the pond. There was also a second path that led from the temple to a village. This path was seldom used. The monk arose each morning at five, cleaned the rooms of the temple, studied the sacred texts and spent his afternoons working in the garden. There he planted vegetables and grain, which sustained him. In the evenings he continued his studies of the sacred texts. When he stayed awake too long, it sometimes happened that he fell asleep still seated at his desk.