Yoko Tawada - Where Europe Begins

What new neighbor do you mean?

Martina said she hadn’t seen any new neighbor.

When I was about to return to my apartment, Martina’s boyfriend arrived to pick her up. With his appearance, the oppressiveness in the air vanished. I took a long deep breath. At the same time I missed my tape so badly that I immediately said goodbye to them and went back to my apartment with the typewriter.

I couldn’t type a thing that day, nor for many days after, because the voice from the tape recorder became louder and louder, until eventually it drowned out the clacking of the machine. Several times a day I turned off the tape recorder, but it kept turning itself back on.

Don’t you want me to write?

For the first time I asked the voice an audible question.

Or do you have something against written characters?

No answer came. I placed my hands on the pause button of the recorder to silence it. Then my radio clock automatically began to speak. I couldn’t understand the technical connection between the two machines. News.

I couldn’t bear the voice of the clock radio very long, either, though not because I didn’t want to hear any other voice but that of the tape player. On the contrary, the radio briefly liberated me from the voice of the novel. From the radio, new voices entered my apartment: the voices of politicians, the voices of dock workers, the voices of men of letters… but I didn’t listen for long. I kept returning to the voice of the novel and wasn’t sure whether or not I really wanted to escape from it.

5

It was my birthday.

On my desk, ten thin, aching fingers entwined. They had grown out of a tiny hand that, as I realized after a moment, belonged to me. The windows were closed, as is often the case in dreams. But this couldn’t have been a dream. Normally in my dreams nothing seems odd to me, nor am I missing anything. Now I was missing all sorts of things. First I poked around a bit with a bent forefinger trying to find my right ear, but I couldn’t. Where was my right ear? Had it fallen off the desk?

Where do right ears belong?

In your loins of course, right ears belong in your loins, a voice said to me. I looked for my left ear. It wasn’t where it was supposed to be, either. The air was like a mass of kneaded wheat flour. No, it wasn’t that the air was heavy, but the voice of a woman had stopped up my ears and kept my eardrums from vibrating.

This voice has plugged up all the holes, I said aloud, for I wasn’t sitting alone in the kitchen, I had two companions, Gudrun and her sister. They were busy stirring a bowl of something and didn’t hear what I said.

We’re almost done, Gudrun said and gave me a worried glance. Vaguely I remembered having invited ten people to a party. Only I could no longer remember what the occasion was . Gudrun and her sister had arrived an hour early, with no explanation. I was afraid to ask why. Perhaps they already knew I was incapable of receiving guests. Neither of them scolded me when they saw I hadn’t yet begun my preparations.

Where’s the salt? Gudrun or her sister asked.

I don’t have any.

Why don’t you have salt?

Gudrun and her sister have almost the same voice so it’s impossible for me to tell which one of them is speaking if I don’t see their lips. They were talking about how they had too much on their hands these days. One of the two said she couldn’t wait for things to calm down around her. That’s all she wanted, nothing else interested her any more. Four eyes gazed at me, awaiting my reply. It was as if they wanted to test whether I knew what calm was. And in fact I realized for the first time that, although I knew the meaning of the word “calm,” I couldn’t really imagine what it might be. I tried to picture a situation in which someone lacked calm. It didn’t work. Then I tried to imagine the exact opposite. That didn’t work either.

•

If you absolutely have to have salt, I’ll go borrow some from my neighbor. That would be OK.

A week ago I had plenty of salt. I gave my neighbor too much salt, that’s why I don’t have any left.

I heard two women’s voices laughing, then I went to my neighbor’s apartment and asked whether he could spare some salt. He gazed at me for a moment, and suddenly asked if I’d be interested in working on a project with him. He said he’d give me more details next time. Today he had neither time nor salt for me.

When you yourself were out of salt, I gave you some of mine, I said. To my surprise, my voice came out sounding querulous. A tone I had known only from other women. The neighbor laughed.

Now you sound just like my mother. Don’t be like that. Otherwise our project will be a failure.

He laughed again and closed the door.

I had always found it unpleasant to have guests in my apartment. They filled up my rooms with strange sentences I would never have formulated in such a way. Today I found the sound of these sentences particularly unbearable. Sometimes I tried to follow only the sense of the conversation so as not to hear the sounds of the language. But they penetrated my body as though they were inseparable from the sense.

Once, a violent conversation started among a group of people. It was like a wind sock that kept spinning faster and faster. Finally the wind sock swallowed up the people. They were talking about sports, the names of athletes, strikes, matches, points, attacks, kicks. All those present were compelled to speak to defend themselves against the others’ words.

At midnight the guests began to dance to disco music. I couldn’t hear the music, but saw the wine glasses vibrating. Apparently it was very loud. No one was allowed to miss a beat. The guests weren’t dancing at all, they were speaking to one another. When someone stuttered, the others spoke more quickly so the interruption wouldn’t be noticed. The rhythm was set by a computerized drum set, just like in disco music. The people breathed, as it were, mechanically, rather than taking irregular breaths whenever they felt like it. My heartbeat and my sighs were ridiculously soft, no match for the powerful speakers. In these black refrigerators, the mass of sounds is frozen. There weren’t any speakers in my apartment, and there wasn’t any music playing. People were talking. I wanted to transform myself into a stone. Wanted to become a stone like a misplaced comma, to interrupt the clatter of conversation.

Rosa was the only one who paid attention to me. She tried to include me in the conversation as though this were her special task. But I didn’t want anyone to talk to me.

Rosa always spoke in an assured tone of voice, a tone whose existence predated that of Rosa, one which belonged to the city. She had learned it by heart at home or at school, though to this day I am unable to understand how a tone can be learned by heart. Maybe she learned each figure of speech and line of argument in connection with a particular tone. When she spoke in this studied tone, it was rarely possible to object to what she said, for every objection one might make sounded feeble, unnatural, even senseless. I wanted to become a stone and hurl myself against this way of speaking. Then it would either shatter or show a different face.

Does a tone have more than one face? Does a face have more than one tone?

I didn’t know anything about Rosa beyond the fact that she had a throat illness which was not apparent when you spoke with her. Her girlfriends had mentioned this throat illness to me several times.

I don’t know how this night ended. When I woke up, there was no longer anyone sitting in my apartment. I wasn’t even sure whether or not I’d really had guests the night before. Outside a faint dawn bathed the asphalt streets. A few drops of water trickled down the windowpane, as if they wanted to wash away the guests’ last fingerprints.