Yoko Tawada - Where Europe Begins

A hoarse voice addressed me from the left, polite and threatening at once. I shouldn’t just look at the jacket, I should try it on. It’s true it was a man’s jacket, but it would be just right for me. I said nothing and, making no move to touch the jacket, stayed where I was. A short while later a gaunt-looking man with a guitar case appeared. He stopped before the jacket, placed the case on the ground beside him and without the slightest hesitation tried the jacket on. Apparently he was not at all afraid of its former owner. At the time I didn’t yet know that even jackets fresh from the factory already have life stories unknown to me and are not like blank paper. The traces are well hidden, but sometimes one can discover them by accident. Once I purchased what appeared in the store to be a perfectly ordinary radio, but at home that night when I turned it on, it emitted a strange noise. The sound resembled the hoarse scream of a male voice. Then there was a brief scratching sound. I inspected the radio with my magnifying glass and discovered in one of the buttons a splinter of fingernail. It was embedded like a fossil in the black plastic. Probably someone working on the assembly line had been attacked by a machine and lost a fingernail, or even a whole finger. The attack was probably classified as an accident. During the quality control check, the finger had been discovered and removed, but no one had noticed the fingernail. I dug it out with my pocketknife and buried it in the garden. Since then, there have been no more inappropriate sounds from my radio.

At a flea market, no one tries to hide the traces hidden in an object. The stuffed animals with their somewhat squashed faces observed me ironically, furiously or disdainfully. Paperback novelettes with faded covers still bore coffee stains and greasy fingerprints from their first readers. The books can never forget their readers, though the readers have no doubt forgotten all about the books’ contents. Even more than the traces on these objects, the order in which the items were arranged fascinated me. An iron and a candlestick stood side by side, as though there were some relation between them. I was even able to think how this proximity might be deciphered: the iron produces heat and the candlestick light. Each takes the place of the sun, which from the underground passage is never visible.

The interior of my ear is never illuminated by the sun either. It doesn’t want to be illuminated, not even by the ear doctor’s artificial light. For eardrums can receive sounds only in the dark. How late was it? Would I still be able to get to the doctor’s on time? A pair of ice skates and a clock lay side by side, as though challenging me to guess their relation. I stood before them until I had found a solution: ice skates and clock — both turn in circles. When the skaters twirl on the ice, their skates have to turn with them. When ice skaters twirl, they look like the dolls in music boxes, which you wind like a clock.

At the end of the passage I discovered a book between a black umbrella and a sewing machine with a treadle. I don’t know why this book in particular drew my attention. I picked it up, and noticed its slight warmth in the palm of my hand. On the book’s cover I saw letters that were written not from left to right, but in a circle. I asked the man who was standing there hawking his wares in what language the book was written, since I don’t know of any language whose letters are arranged in a circle. He shrugged his shoulders and said it wasn’t a book, it was a mirror. I refused to look at the thing he was calling a mirror.

Maybe it isn’t a book, I conceded, but I would still like to know what’s going on with this writing.

The man grinned and replied: To our eyes, you look exactly like this writing. That’s why I said it was a mirror.

I rubbed my forehead from left to right, as if rewriting my face.

2

The ear doctor, Dr. Mettinger, had his door half open and was waiting for me in his consulting room. Like all the other doctors who have treated me in this city, he wanted to speak with me alone behind closed doors, as though I had an illness of which no one else should hear. I stopped just before the threshold, unable to take another step, although I was already fairly accustomed to being alone in a room with a strange man, for in this city even the vegetable and fish shops have doors that separate them from the life of the street. I stared at the silver door handle sticking out of the white, smooth door. Surely it will be cold if I touch it, I thought, and then the warmth of my own hand will feel unpleasant. It will be slippery in my moist hand and refuse to let me grip it. The doctor's assistant, observing me from her post at the reception desk, called to me that I was standing in front of the correct room. But I wasn’t at all interested in whether it was the right or wrong room.

Come in, Dr. Mettinger said in a peremptory tone. At this, my legs began to march like the legs of a robot. I didn’t feel the sort of fear people in this city call claustrophobia. It wasn’t the room’s enclosedness that troubled me, but rather the strange quiet within it. Unlike the underground passage where I’d seen the flea market, the room had neither sounds nor voices nor superfluous objects, and there was no trace of any of the patients who had been treated here. Since I spent a moment occupied only with gazing around me, Dr. Mettinger withdrew his right hand, which he had been holding out to me.

Have a seat, Ms…

He broke off his sentence and sat down himself at his desk to look for the insurance certificate where he could check my name. As he attempted to pronounce it, I tried to find the best place to put my chair. I didn’t want to sit too close to Dr. Mettinger, and pushed the chair a little to the right so I could sit diagonally opposite him. Then I fixed my eyes on his white coat, exactly the way I fix my eyes on a white sheet of paper before I begin to write. I told him I had an earache. As though there were a flea in my ear, I wanted to add, but instead said:

There’s a flea living in my ear.

I beg your pardon? Dr. Mettinger asked, looking startled. For a moment, the muscles of his face forgot to hold the individual pieces of flesh together. Dr. Mettinger was not a fat man, but now his flesh appeared superfluous and useless. Why was he startled? Perhaps I had mispronounced the “1” in the word “flea,” and Dr. Mettinger had heard an “r.” My tongue surreptitiously probed my hard palate to check whether I’d really said an “1.” I can distinguish between these two sounds only with my tongue, not with my ears, for my sense of touch is more highly developed with respect to the foreign language than my hearing. My doubt over whether I’d pronounced an “1” vanished again as the doctor asked me where I’d gotten the idea that a flea might be living in my ear. I answered that I knew from a story that such things could happen. He got up abruptly, strode to the window, and shifted a vase of flowers a little to the left so that the sun could shine directly on his desk.

Excuse me, it was a little too dark for me, even though the weather today is splendid, he said in a friendly voice and picked up his big fountain pen. The expression “the weather today is splendid” bothered me for some reason. The fountain pen began writing on a sheet of paper; it was thicker than my thumb and had a middle section that looked like a golden ring.

How long have you had the earache?

I told him I’d woken up in the middle of the night because of a burning sensation in my left ear. On Dr. Mettinger’s desk lay three stacks of paper that reflected the sun’s glare. The letters vanished in the strong light. While Dr. Mettinger was taking notes, I remembered that the night before I had dreamt of a fire on a sheet of paper. One by one the letters went up in flames, and only the ones containing an enclosed space — like O, P, D, Q and R — remained unharmed. So I hadn’t dreamt of the flea or the market after all; I had been mistaken, and only now realized what my dream had really been about.