Yoko Tawada: Where Europe Begins

We stopped at the red light and the woman took my arm. Several people were standing on the other side of the crosswalk, but none of them were looking at us. Even when no one is staring openly I tend to feel I’m being glanced at now and then, but today there was not even that. I felt invisible.

The woman’s place was not far from the hotel. It was a basement apartment in an old gray building whose windows had iron bars like a prison.

The woman went down the pitch-black stairway in front of me, saying, “The light isn’t working, so be careful where you step.” The door wasn’t locked. From inside came a smell that seemed familiar, but at first I couldn’t place it. The woman groped for matches and lit a candle. The outlines of a chair and a table appeared against the darkness. It was somewhat lighter outside, and now and then we could see a pair of shoes pass by. The ceiling was low. I looked into the next room and saw a narrow bed. Something moved on the table. It was a black rat and had exactly the same face as the one I’d kept as a child.

“It’s called Bear, that rat,” the woman said. That had been the name of my rat, too — in Japanese, Kuma . The familiar smell was from the rat. The woman took several candles out of a drawer and lit them. With each new candle, the number of my shadows increased by one. Finally several shadows, dark ones and light ones, lay flickering in layers. I looked at the floor. The woman cast no shadow.

She put her hand on my shoulder and asked, “What would you like to drink?” Then for the first time she smiled. “Oh, of course, you can’t talk.” She had gone from saying, “you don’t understand,” to “you can’t talk.” It seemed I was now mute. The woman poured red wine into a glass and handed it to me. I had never seen so red a wine before: it was the color of blood. “Go ahead and start without me. I’m going to take a shower first.” She took off her clothes. The scars on her face extended all the way down her back. They say that if over a third of your skin is burned, you will die, but this woman’s burns appeared to cover far more than a third of her body. Only her breasts were pure white and reminded me of an infant’s buttocks. The woman brought over a large washtub, climbed into it, and gingerly poured cold water from a pitcher over her shoulders. The water trickled down her breasts to her stomach, divided at her legs, and came together again at the bottom of the tub. The water dripping from her pubic hair played the xylophone. I was shivering with cold. The woman filled the pitcher again and repeated the process, but it looked less like a shower than a snake shedding its skin. The water slipped off her body like a transparent skin. “Unless I do this, I can’t forget the bad things. Instead of screaming out loud, I freeze the screams and rinse them from my skin.”

When the tub was full of water, the woman wrapped herself in a robe without first drying herself off or putting on underthings. She took a piece of cheese out of the refrigerator and placed it on the table. Suddenly rats came scurrying from all corners of the room. I couldn’t tell which were rats and which were shadows.

“Come, little ones, aren’t you hungry?” The woman cut the cheese into cubes and fed them to the rats. The rats took the cheese with their pink front paws and, silently gnawing, devoured it. When they had had enough, they wiped their mouths with their paws and groomed the fur on their backs. The woman sliced bread for me and held it out wordlessly. The bread was dry as coal. The woman didn’t eat anything herself. “I don’t need to eat any more,” she said.

I gazed at her, trying to understand, but the burnt half of her face, the other half and the third face made of bone beneath her skin gave me the impression I was sitting across from three different people. I began to feel dizzy.

“I don’t know how many months it’s been since I last sat down to a meal with anyone. I don’t like people, usually,” she said. She cut another slice of bread and held it out to me. I took it and ate it too, but it was like eating ash and my hunger remained. The room was cold.

She placed her palms on mine. “You live alone too, don’t you? Living alone isn’t a bit lonely. But you can’t go around telling people that. You’d be killed in a minute. Not that there are many things you can safely go around saying. They’re all deeply envious, you know.”

From far off came the sounds of someone practicing the saxophone, not very well.

“So at some point I just stopped talking. That was why I gave up my job at the office. You can’t very well not talk in an office. At the hotel I could work perfectly well without saying a word, but for some reason once I stopped talking, the most terrifying things started to leap into my eyes. You should be careful of your eyes, too.”

In each of the woman’s eyes reflected the flame of a candle. The flames wavered and swam out of her eyes like red tropical fish and began to dance about her ears. When I looked carefully, I saw that they were not flames but earrings in the shape of red tropical fish.

When the tropical fish glittered, they were reflected in the skin of her face and divided into drops of light. One of the fish slid down her shoulder and began to run about on the table. I screamed soundlessly. But it was only a rat that had stolen the earring and was running away with the earring held between its jaws. Dragged along by the rat, the earring got caught on a candlestick and knocked it over. Then one by one the candles fell over. The woman didn’t move. The room grew as dark as if a curtain had fallen. I groped around for a candle. Night had fallen, and outside the window the streets were silent.

“Are you afraid of the dark?” I heard the woman say. “If you aren’t afraid, leave it dark.”

Now that I’d gotten used to not speaking, it was easy to get used to blindness as well. Only, perhaps because the flames had gone out, it was much colder now.

“Are you cold? The landlord turned off the heat a month ago. I don’t get cold any more so it doesn’t matter, but if you are, you’d better get into my bed. We can talk there.”

She stood up, gripped my shoulder, and propelled me toward her bedroom. It was so dark I couldn’t even make out the shapes of things. The wool blanket she pulled over me when I’d gotten into bed smelled of mildew.

The woman’s outline gradually appeared in the shape of a keyhole. There was a burnt smell. I felt I had to escape, but on the other hand I was warming up and becoming sleepy.

“It isn’t true that you don’t have to suffer any more when you’re dead. Dead people long for human contact even more than when they were alive.” She slipped her hand under the blanket and placed it on my breast. My body turned to stone.

“Now close your eyes,” she said. I closed my eyes and saw a desert. I felt as if I’d been tied up and couldn’t move.

“Stick out your tongue. Let me lick it.”

The bed turned into a sled that was being pulled across the sand by black rats. The rats grew wings and became bats. Drawn by bats, the sled flew up into the sky. So this is what it feels like to die, I thought, and suddenly I was terrified and tried to scream, but a big hand covered my mouth. “Don’t scream. You’re mute, don’t you remember.”

I couldn’t breathe and pushed the woman away. She simply collapsed to the floor, almost too easily. I sat up and looked down at her. I felt as strong as a five-year-old boy.

The woman said, “I don’t want to be dead all alone.” She threw herself on the floor and sobbed. When I heard her sobbing, the strength went out of my knees and my eyes burned as if hot pokers had been stuck into them. I got out of bed, knelt on the floor and stroked the woman’s back. Her back was hard and cold like a turtle’s shell, but when I stroked it, it gradually became soft and warm.