Yoko Tawada - Where Europe Begins

When I went to the bakery to buy breakfast rolls, I saw Rosa. I called her name, although I didn’t have anything in particular to say to her. She groaned before I could utter another word and gave a nervous smile. She pressed her paper bag of rolls against her chest and turned her back on me. As she left the bakery she said to me — though I hadn’t asked — that she had no time today.

I’m under time pressure. I’m not going to have a minute of calm all week, since I have so much on my hands. But next week I’ll give you a call, she shouted from the street into the bakery where I was still standing. Why did she want to call? Besides, it wasn’t possible to call me. She was gone before I could tell her I didn’t have a telephone.

6

I undressed, lay down and closed my eyes.

Whenever I felt ill, I would simply lie like this for several days, rather than going to a doctor or buying medicine. I was afraid of taking medicine, even home remedies like hot currant juice with honey to ward off colds. Fighting an illness seemed to me to show a lack of respect. Once it arrived, there was nothing to do but cooperate and accept it.

Sometimes I tried to see the voice, too, as an illness and behave accordingly. But — unlike with other illnesses — I didn’t want it to leave me for good one day.

When night fell, I tried to locate parts of my body with which I could perceive the voice. I didn’t think I was feeling it on my eardrum like an ordinary voice. Especially when I was lying down it came to me in a surprising way. First it stroked my neck cautiously. This tended to go on too long for my taste, and I was also afraid it might elegantly strangle me. I never understood what it wanted from me, if it wanted anything at all. Nor could I ask it any questions, since it couldn’t hear. It was a voice without ears.

Sometimes I allowed it to caress me for hours, my belly, the soles of my feet, my nose, breasts, fingertips, thighs. Fortunately I was not obliged to show any reaction, the voice did not expect this of me. I didn’t have to formulate a single sentence, and was able to transform myself into pure tactile sensation, a sense of touch without language. Not only spoken language, but body language as well had become superfluous. I felt liberated from the gaze of others as well, for it was a voice without eyes.

To my surprise, however, when I went outside I realized I was not liberated from every gaze. This time I met Rosa in front of the post office. She asked if I wanted to come over for a cup of tea because she wanted to show me her new apartment which she’d only just moved into. I had never found the furnishings of apartments particularly interesting, though it occurred to me that I could write an article for the magazine about this since the furnishings of an apartment not only pose financial and practical problems, but also have a religious aspect.

That would be very nice, I said. Though at once I felt guilty. There was something inhuman about being interested only in things I could observe like an ethnologist.

The moment I entered the apartment, Rosa peered deep into my eyes, as though she wanted to see exactly what sort of reflection her apartment made in them. Right away I was required to decide whether or not I found her apartment attractive, which was impossible for me to do since I can’t form an opinion of an apartment I don’t live in. All the same, Rosa seemed to want to read some judgment in my eyes. Perhaps it was an exercise for her: seeing her own apartment with a stranger’s eyes and assigning it grades that would later help her improve it. Perhaps for her this apartment was something like a self-portrait: the furniture, posters, rug, writing implements, stereo joined together to illustrate her personality. But why did she want me to see it?

I kept running into a wall of questions as to the point of it all. For me, my apartment had the function of a skin. No one could observe it from the inside. I always found it unpleasant to see people in my apartment, and even more unpleasant when they observed it with curiosity. My apartment doesn’t want to be given a grade, otherwise it cramps up. I want it to be all but invisible. It isn’t there to be shown off, nor to represent any sort of accomplishment. It cannot be either attractive or ugly, since it isn’t there to be looked at in the first place. Rosa asked me hesitantly what I was up to these days. She couldn’t imagine me having a professional career or a relationship that took up a great deal of time.

I’ve been listening to a voice that does not resonate in any body, I replied.

Rosa came closer.

What sort of voice?

The voice of a woman.

Rosa was immediately disappointed with my answer. Not wanting to be impolite, though, she made a joke instead of showing her disappointment directly.

I keep hearing a woman’s voice, too, one that tells me all the times I keep doing something wrong. But I know perfectly well whose voice it is.

7

I placed a classified ad in a newspaper. Anyone who read the ad was supposed to get the impression that for sentimental reasons an old woman was looking for an old novel she had enjoyed reading sixty years before. That this old woman was willing to pay one hundred marks for a book that had value neither for a passionate lover of literature nor a book collector might have seemed somewhat unusual. So at first I was afraid my request would be an odd bird fluttering garishly away between the neat columns of classifieds, and that a few readers would call me up just out of curiosity. But when I read other advertisements on the same page, I realized how inconspicuous mine was. For example, one woman wrote that she was prepared to pay two hundred and fifty for a goldfish that resembled her dead son. And a wealthy man was looking for a woman with only one ear, for purposes of marriage. In comparison, my desire to purchase an old novel for one hundred marks was relatively modest. More precisely, I wanted not the novel but the book. The novel didn’t interest me. I wanted to own the book in order to lock the voice from the tape behind the bars of the printed letters.

A few days later a student called me and said he had the book I was looking for but unfortunately couldn’t sell it to me because it was connected with certain personal memories that were very important to him. If I really wanted to see the book, though, he would visit me and bring it with him.

Three days later he appeared. The book’s title page had a dark red color that struck me as familiar. Hadn’t I once known someone who wore a shirt with a similar color? The title page bore no heading. The book’s owner explained that the title had no doubt stood on a separate leaf which had probably become detached from the book and eventually gotten lost. In the middle of the page stood a drawing of a clock. It was missing not only its hands, but also two numbers: three and seven. The book was much thinner than I had imagined it. How could a novel that refused to come to an end live in this little book? I told my visitor I’d been looking for this book for a long time, and until now I’d known only its title, author’s name and contents. I didn’t mention the tapes. It would have been difficult to explain why I was so eager to own the novel as a book when I already had the tapes in my possession.

So what is it you do in this city? the owner of the book asked me. I looked at him for the first time. His lips kept moving after he’d finished his sentence.

Usually I sit at the window and listen to the voice of a woman.

As soon as I said the word “voice,” I immediately remembered that I hadn’t wanted to mention the tapes. But the man didn’t ask any more questions. Instead he looked at my fingers, which were trembling. I placed the coffee cup, which I’d been trying to lift, back on the table.