Someone tickled me behind my ears, under my arms. I curled up, becoming a full moon, and rolled on the floor. I may also have emitted a few hoarse shrieks. Then I lifted my rump to the sky and slid my head below my belly. Now I was a sickle moon, still too young to imagine any danger. Innocent, I opened my anus to the cosmos and felt it in my bowels. Everyone would have laughed if I’d used the word “cosmos” in those days: I was still so small, so lacking in knowledge, so newly in the world. Without my fluffy pelt, I’d have been scarcely more than an embryo. I couldn’t walk very well yet, though my paw-hands had already developed the strength to grasp and hold. Every stumble moved me forward, but could you call that walking? Fog shrouded my field of vision, and my ears were echo chambers. Everything I saw and heard lacked contours. My life force resided, for the most part, in my claw-fingers and tongue.
My tongue could still remember the taste of my mother’s milk. I took the man’s index finger into my mouth and sucked on it, that calmed me. The hairs growing out of the backs of his fingers were like shoe brush bristles. The finger wriggled into my mouth, poking around. Then the man prodded me in the chest, challenging me to wrestle.
Exhausted from playtime, I placed both my paw-hands flat on the ground with my chin on top — my favorite position for awaiting the next meal. Half asleep, I licked my lips, and the flavor of honey returned to me even though I’d only tasted it a single time.
One day the man attached strange objects to my feet. I tried to shake them off but couldn’t. My bare paw-hands hurt, it felt as if the floor were stabbing them from below. I raised my right hand and then the left but couldn’t keep my balance and fell back down. Touching the ground made the pain return. I pushed off from the ground, my torso stretched far up and back, and for several seconds I stood upright. When I exhaled, I fell back down again, this time on my left paw-hand. It hurt, so I pushed the floor away from me again. After several more attempts, I was able to balance on two legs.
•
Writing: a spooky activity. Staring at the sentence I’ve just written makes me dizzy. Where am I at this moment? I’m in my story — gone. To come back, I drag my eyes away from the manuscript and let my gaze drift toward the window until finally I’m here again, in the present. But where is here, when is now?
The night has already reached its point of greatest depth. I stand at the window of my hotel room, looking down at the square below that reminds me of a theater stage, maybe because of the circular light cast by a streetlamp. A cat bisects the circle with its supple stride. A transparent silence settles over the neighborhood.
I’d taken part in a congress that day, and afterward all the participants were invited to a sumptuous feast. When I returned to my hotel room at night, I had a bear’s thirst and greedily drank water straight from the tap. But the taste of oily anchovies refused to leave me. In the mirror I saw my red-smeared lips, a masterpiece of the beets. I’d never eaten root vegetables voluntarily, but when a beet came swimming in my bowl of borscht, I immediately wanted to kiss it. Bobbing amid the lovely dots of fat floating on top — which at once awoke my appetite for meat — the beet was irresistible.
The springs creak beneath my bearish weight as I sit on the hotel sofa thinking how uninteresting the conference had been yet again, but that it had unexpectedly led me back to my childhood. The topic of today’s discussion was The Significance of Bicycles in the National Economy.
Anyone, especially an artist, can only assume it’s a trap to be invited to a conference. For this reason, most of the participants refused to say anything at all unless forced. But I willingly piped up — confidently, elegantly, unself-consciously, unceremoniously sticking my right paw high in the air. All the other participants in the assembly hall looked over at me. I was used to attracting an audience’s attention.
My round, soft upper body is encased in sumptuous white fur. When I press my raised right arm and rib cage slightly forward, hypnotically shimmering particles of light are released into the air. Yes, I was at the center of everything, while the tables, walls and even the people in the audience gradually faded and withdrew into the background. My fur’s gleaming white hue is unlike any ordinary white. It’s translucent, permitting the sunlight to reach my skin through the fur, and the light is carefully stored beneath my skin. This is the color my ancestors acquired, allowing them to survive in the Arctic Circle.
To make your opinion known, you have to first be seen by the session leader. This doesn’t happen unless you raise your hand quickly — more quickly than all the others. Almost no one can get his hand up in the air at a conference faster than me. “You seem fond of sharing your opinions”: I was once treated to this ironic bit of commentary. I parried with a simple response: “That’s how democracy works, isn’t it?” But that day I discovered it wasn’t free will thrusting my paw-hand into the air like that, it was a sort of reflex. I felt this realization like a stab in the chest. I tried to put aside the pain and get back into my groove, a four-part rhythm: The first beat was the session leader’s restrained “Go ahead.” The second was the word “I,” which I slammed down on the table in front of me. On the third beat, all the listeners swallowed, and on the fourth I took a daring step, clearly enunciating the word “think.” To give it some swing, I naturally stressed the second and fourth beats.
I had no intention of dancing, but my hips began waggling back and forth on the chair. The chair immediately chimed in, contributing cheerful creaks. Each stressed syllable was like a tambourine underscoring the rhythms of my speech. As if bewitched, the audience listened, forgetting their duties, their vanity, themselves. The men’s lips hung limply open, their teeth gleaming a creamy white, and from the tips of their tongues dripped something like liquefied carnality in saliva form.
“I think the bicycle is beyond all doubt the most excellent invention in the history of civilization. The bicycle is the flower of the circus stage, the hero of every environmental policy. In the near future, bicycles will conquer all the world’s major cities. And not just that: every household will have its own generator attached to a bicycle. You’ll be able to get fit and produce electricity at the same time. You can also get on your bicycle to pay your friends a spontaneous visit instead of first calling them on your cell phone or sending an e-mail. When we learn to utilize the multifunctional capacity of the bicycle, many electronic devices will eventually become superfluous.”
I saw dark clouds gathering on several of the faces. Putting even more power into my voice, I continued: “We will ride to the river on our bikes to do our laundry. We’ll ride our bikes to the forest to collect firewood. We won’t need washing machines anymore, and we won’t have to rely on electricity or gas to heat our apartments or cook our meals.” Several faces were amused by these fanciful proposals, displaying unobtrusive laugh creases, while others turned gray as stone. Not a problem, I cheered myself on, don’t let them intimidate you. Pay no attention to these bores. Relax! Ignore this fake audience, imagine yourself standing before hundreds of ecstatic faces and keep talking. It’s a circus. Every conference is a circus.
The chairman coughed dismissively, as if to show he had no intention whatever of dancing to my tune. Then he exchanged a knowing glance with a bearded official seated beside him. I remembered that the two men had entered the room side by side. That official, thin as a nail, wore a matte black suit even though he wasn’t at a funeral. He began to speak without first asking permission: “Rejecting automobiles and worshipping bicycles: this is a sentimental, decadent cult already familiar to us from Western countries. The Netherlands is a good example. But supporting machine culture is a matter of the utmost urgency. We must provide rational connections between places of employment and residential areas. Bicycles create the illusion that one might ride anywhere one likes at any time. A bicycle culture could exert a problematic influence on our society.” I raised my hand to contradict this line of argument. But the session leader ignored me and announced the lunch break. I left the room without a word to anyone and dashed out of the building like a schoolchild running onto the playground.
As a child, I was always the very first to run out of the classroom at recess, even when I was still in preschool. I would make a beeline for the far corner of the playground and act as if this tiny patch of earth held special significance for me. In reality, it was nothing but a shady, damp spot under a fig tree where brazen neighbors would sometimes secretly deposit their trash. No other child ever approached the spot, which was fine with me. Once one of my schoolmates hid behind the fig tree so he could sneak up on me as a joke. I threw him over my shoulder. It was an instinctual act of self-defense, I didn’t mean him any harm, but given my powerful build, he went flying through the air.
Behind my back, the other children called me “snout face” and “snow baby,” as I later learned. Someone tattled, otherwise I would never have heard these nicknames. My informant pretended to be on my side, but perhaps it filled her childish heart with pleasure to see my feelings hurt. Until then, I’d never asked myself what I looked like in my classmates’ eyes. The shape of my nose, the color of my fur made me stand out from the majority — it took hearing these nicknames to bring this home to me.
•
Next to the conference center was a tranquil park with white benches. I picked a bench in the shade. There was a plashing sound behind me, presumably a brook. The willow trees, elegant, cunning, and overcome with ennui, kept poking their thin fingers into the water, perhaps hoping it would play with them. Pale green shoots punctuated their branches. The earth beneath the soles of my feet crumbled, it wasn’t a mole at work, just the crocuses. The more impudent among them were doing imitations of the Tower of Pisa. The inside of my ear itched. No digging around in there! This was a rule I never broke, at least not back when I was still working at the circus. But the itching in my ear wasn’t caused by wax, it was because of the pollen and the songs of the birds that kept pecking out sixteenth notes in the air. Rosy spring with its unannounced arrival caught me unawares. What sort of trick had it employed to reach Kiev so quickly and surreptitiously, with such a large delegation of birds and flowers? Had it secretly been preparing its invasion weeks in advance? And was I the only one who hadn’t noticed, being preoccupied with winter, which had taken charge of my consciousness? I hate making small talk about the weather, so I often miss forecasts of major changes. Even the Prague Spring came as a complete surprise to me. When the name “Prague” occurred to me just now, the beating of my heart became palpable. Who knows, perhaps an even greater change in the weather is about to surprise me, and I’ll be the only one here who didn’t have the faintest idea what was coming!
The frozen earth melted and muddily wept. A slug of mucus crawled out of my itchy nasal passages, and tears pearled from the swollen membranes around my eyes. In a word: spring is the season of mourning. Some people say spring makes them young again. But a person who gets younger returns to childhood, a return not without its indignities. As long as I could feel pride at being the first to share my opinion at every conference, I was content. I didn’t waste time thinking about where this rapid hand gesture of mine had come from.
I had no particular urge to know things, but the spilled milk of knowledge refused to flow back into the glass. And as the milk’s sweet scent rose from the tablecloth, I wept for my spring. Childhood, that bitter honey, stung my tongue. It had always been Ivan who prepared my food. I had no memory of my mother. Where had she gone?
•
Back then I didn’t know yet what to call that part of my body. The painful tingling disappeared when I pulled away, it was really just a reflex. But it wasn’t possible for me to keep my balance long. I would fall back down again. And the moment my paw-hands came into contact with the ground again, the pain returned.
I’d hear Ivan shout “Ouch!” whenever he scraped his shin or a wasp stung him. So I understood that the expression “ouch” was connected with a particular feeling someone was having. I’d always thought it was the floor feeling pain — not me — so it was the floor that had to change — not me — to make the pain go away. How I struggled until finally I learned to stand upright!
•
After the official dinner, I came back to my hotel room and wrote up to this point. Writing wasn’t a familiar activity to me — weariness crashed down on my head, and I fell asleep at the desk. Waking up the next morning, I could feel that I’d grown old overnight. Now the second half of life is beginning. On a long-distance run, this would be the midpoint, the moment to turn around, to go back the way I’d come, the starting line my goal. The place where the pain began is where it will end.
•
Ivan would pluck a morsel of sardine from a can, grind it up in a mortar, add a shot of milk and place it in front of me. A custom-made repast. When I deposited a modest excretion, he’d immediately come running with his dustpan and brush to tidy up. He never scolded me; not even the faintest groan crossed his lips. For Ivan, cleanliness was always a priority. Every day he’d arrive with a dangling long hose and a special brush to clean the floor. Sometimes he’d point the hose at me. There was nothing I liked more than being sprayed down with ice-cold water.
Not often but occasionally Ivan would find himself without a task to perform. He’d sit down on the floor, put his guitar on his lap, pluck its strings with his fingers, and sing. A melancholy tune from some damp back alleyway would turn into a rhythmical dance number before finally plunging into an abyss of endless lament. All ears, I felt something awaken within me, perhaps my first longing for far-off lands. Distant places I’d never seen were drawing me to them, and I found myself torn between there and here.
Sometimes by chance our eyes met, and an instant later I would be in his arms. He would press my head into the crook of his neck, rubbing his cheek against mine. He tickled me, rolled my body back and forth on the floor, and threw himself on top of me.
•
Since returning from Kiev, I’d done nothing but sit in my room in Moscow, scratching away at my text without respite. My head bent over the letter paper I’d taken from the hotel without asking. I kept painting over the same period of my childhood again and again, I couldn’t seem to get beyond it. My memories came and went like waves at the beach. Each wave resembled the one before, but no two were identical. I had no choice but to portray the same scene several times, without being able to say which description was definitive.
•
For a long time, I didn’t know anything: I sat in my cage, always onstage, never an audience member. If I’d gone out now and then, I would’ve seen the stove that had been installed under the cage. I’d have seen Ivan putting firewood in the stove and lighting it. I might even have seen the gramophone with its giant black tulip on a stand behind the cage. When the floor of the cage got hot, Ivan would drop the needle on the record. As a fanfare split the air like a fist shattering a pane of glass, the palms of my paw-hands felt a searing pain. I stood up, and the pain disappeared.
For days and weeks, the same game would be repeated. In the end, I’d stand up automatically whenever I heard the fanfare. “Standing” wasn’t yet a concept for me, but it was clear what freed me from the pain, and this knowledge was burned into my brain together with Ivan’s command “Stand up!” and the stick he would hold aloft.
I learned expressions like “Stand up,” “Good,” and “One more time.” I suspect that the strange objects attached to my feet were specially made shoes impermeable to heat. As long as I was standing up on my back legs, it didn’t hurt, no matter how the floor glowed with heat.
After the fanfare had come to an end and I was standing steadily on two legs, it was time for the sugar cubes. First Ivan would carefully say the word “sugar cube,” and then he would put one in my snout-mouth. “Sugar cube” became my first word for the sweet pleasure that would melt on my tongue after the fanfare and the standing up.
•
Suddenly Ivan stood beside me, looking down at my text from above. “Ivan! How are you? How have you fared since the old days?” These are the questions I wanted to ask, but my voice failed me. As I breathed deeply in and out several times, Ivan’s figure silently vanished. He left behind his familiar body heat and a faint burning sensation on my skin. I found it hard to go on breathing normally. Ivan, dead within me for so many years, came back to life because I was writing about him. An invisible eagle clutched my heart in its talons, I couldn’t keep breathing, and it occurred to me that I should immediately drink some of that transparent holy water to rid myself of the unbearable pressure. At the time, it was difficult to get good vodka in the city, since most of it was exported as bait for foreign currencies. The superintendent of my shabby apartment building was proud of her connections and the occasional luxury products they netted her. I knew she sometimes had a bottle tucked away in her cupboard.
I hurried out of my apartment, rolled down the stairs, and ambushed the concierge, asking whether she happened to have any of that elixir in her apartment. A peculiar smile appeared on her face, resembling Sumerian cuneiform writing. Indecently rubbing her index finger and thumb together, she asked: “Have you perhaps received some . . .” Irritated, I replied: “No! I don’t have any foreign currency on me!” Now that I’d exposed her sweet, titillating secret, which she’d wanted to share with me surreptitiously, with my use of the loveless, insipid designation “foreign currency,” she felt insulted and turned her back on me. Quick, get her in a chatty mood!
“You have a new hairstyle. It looks great on you.”
“Oh, do you mean this disgusting mop? I slept on it wrong last night.”
“And your new shoes? They’re marvelous.”
“What, these shoes? You noticed them? I didn’t buy them new. A gift from my relatives — I like them.”
Although my compliments were obviously just awkward attempts at flattery, the superintendent was willing to acknowledge my good intentions. Like a fat, hairy worm, her gaze crept back toward me.
“You hardly ever drink. Why are you suddenly so interested in my vodka?”
“I was remembering my childhood — even though honestly I’d forgotten all about it for years — and now I find it oppressive. I’m having trouble breathing.”
“Did you remember something unpleasant?”
“No. I mean, I don’t know yet whether it will be unpleasant or not. For the moment it’s just a breathing problem.”
“You shouldn’t drink to forget. Otherwise you’ll end up like that poor district magistrate who used to live above you.”
I remembered the day when something heavy crashed down on the cobblestones in front of the building, sounding much heavier than a man’s body. I heard the sound once more and was covered in goosebumps.
“You ought to keep a journal if you’re interested in stockpiling your experiences.”
Her suggestion surprised me — it was so intellectual, it didn’t sound like her. I prodded a bit, and she admitted that last week she’d read Sarashina Nikki, a masterpiece of Japanese diary literature from the Middle Ages, in Russian translation. Her good connections had made it possible for her — despite the modest edition of fifty thousand copies that had sold out in advance via subscription — to get her hands on a copy. The pride she took in being socially so well connected was no doubt the only reason she’d read the book.
“You must have the courage to write, like the author of this diary!”
“But I thought a diary was for recording the day’s events. I want to write to call back to mind something I can no longer remember.”
The superintendent listened to me and then casually made one more suggestion: “So write an autobiography!”
•
There were reasons why I had given up my stage career to spend my valuable time at paralyzingly boring conferences. Back when I was still the shining star of our circus, we were asked to put together an evening’s program with a dance company from Cuba. Originally the idea had been for us to take turns performing without truly producing a synthesis. But our collaboration developed in an unforeseen direction. I fell in love with the South American style of dancing and wanted to master it and incorporate it into my repertoire. I had them give me a crash course in Latin American dances and rehearsed assiduously. Too assiduously. After hours and days spent vigorously shaking my hips, my knees were in such bad shape that I was incapable of performing acrobatics of any sort. I was unfit for circus work. Ordinarily they would have just shot me, but I got lucky and was assigned a desk job in the circus’s administrative offices.
I never dreamed I had a gift for office work. But the personnel office left no talents of their workers unexplored if they could be employed and exploited to the circus’s advantage. I would even go so far as to say I was a born office manager. My nose could sniff out the difference between important and unimportant bills. My inner clock was always right on schedule — I could be punctual without so much as glancing at a watch. When it was time to calculate a paycheck, I never had to wrestle with numbers, for I could read in people’s faces what wages they should receive. If I wanted, I could get my boss to approve any project at all, regardless of how utopian it sounded. My mouth mastered the art of premasticating difficult-to-digest material and then communicating a persuasive plan.
There was plenty for me to look after in the service of our circus and the ballet: the preparations for foreign tours, publicity, advertisements for job openings, all the usual administrative paperwork — and, chiefly, attending conferences.
I was perfectly content with my new life until I began to write my autobiography. Suddenly I lost all desire for conference-going. When I sat in my room licking the tip of my pencil, I wanted to go on licking it all winter long, not seeing anyone, just working on my autobiography. Writing isn’t particularly different from hibernation. Perhaps I made a drowsy impression, but in the bear’s den of my brain, I was giving birth to my own childhood and secretly attending to its upbringing.
I was sucking absentmindedly on my pencil when a telegram arrived with the news that I was to participate in a panel discussion the next day. The topic would be Working Conditions Among Artists.
Panel discussions are like rabbits — usually what happens during such a session is that further sessions are declared necessary — and if nothing is done to prevent this, they multiply so quickly and become so numerous that it is no longer possible to provide a sufficient number of participants, even if we all devote most of each day to these sessions. We’ve got to think of a way to end this proliferation of panel discussions. Otherwise our bottoms will be squashed flat from all the sitting, and all our organizations and institutions will collapse beneath the weight of our derrieres. There are ever larger contingents of people who use their heads primarily to think up plausible excuses for why they can’t possibly show up for the next panel discussion. The excuse virus has been spreading faster than a dangerous flu. And then everyone’s real and fictitious relatives are all having to die several times over, so that their funerals can serve to excuse absences. I have no relatives I can condemn to fictional death. My physical makeup makes me immune to influenzas of every sort, and so I’m left without excuses. Time passed, and I kept getting lost in the pages of my appointment book, which had been attacked by a mildew of obligations.
Besides the sessions and conferences, I had to attend formal receptions, look after the official guests of the circus, and take part in business luncheons and dinners. These duties made me ever plumper, and this was the only positive development in my new life. Instead of dancing on the stage, I sat in comfortable chairs in conference rooms, and afterward soiled my fingers with oily pierogi, ate heavy borscht, shoveled glistening black caviar into my mouth, and accumulated a fortune in body fat.
I might have gone on living like that if spring hadn’t caught me unawares and shaken me to my core. Now I lay there like a person who’s fallen from a tall ladder. When I climb up to the roof to check the tiles in early spring, I’m not thinking that the house might suddenly cave in beneath me; a flawlessly structured republic, a heroic self-portrait in bronze, a stable mood, without ups and downs, a regular life rhythm: suddenly it was all on the brink of collapse, and I hadn’t suspected anything. There’s no point sitting patiently in a sinking ship, it’s better to jump in the ocean and make use of your limbs. It was the first time I’d ever turned down a conference invitation. I was afraid of being annihilated on account of saying no: those who refuse to fulfill their duties lose their right to exist. But my desire to go on writing my autobiography was by that point already three times the size of my fear of having my existence destroyed.
It felt strange to be writing an autobiography. In the past, I’d used language primarily for exporting an opinion. Now language remained at my side, touching soft spots within me. It felt as if I were doing something forbidden. I was ashamed of what I was doing and didn’t want anyone to read the story of my life. But when I saw the pages swarming with letters, I felt an urge to show them to someone. Perhaps the pride I felt was like that of a toddler eager to show off a stinky masterpiece. Once I dropped in on the superintendent just as her granddaughter was showing the grown-ups her freshly produced brown dumpling. It was still steaming. At the time I was shocked, but now I can understand the little girl’s pride. That excrement was the first thing the child had ever produced without outside help, and there was no reason to take offense at the pride she displayed.
But to whom should I show my work? There was something shady about the superintendent. Admittedly the friendship she showed me was to a considerable extent sincere, but it was her job to spy on the building’s inhabitants. I had no parents, and my colleagues were out of the question, since they all avoided me whenever possible. I had no friends.
Then I remembered a man they called “Sea Lion.” He was the editor of a literary journal. When my stage career was still in full bloom, he had been one of my fans and would often visit me backstage with a lavish bouquet of flowers.
Sea Lion looked more like a seal than a sea lion, but his nickname was Sea Lion, so that’s what I’ll have to call him, since over the years I’ve lost track of his real name. Supposedly he came down with a raging fever the first time he saw me onstage. He claimed to be hopelessly in love with me. After he’d visited me backstage who knows how many times, he confessed his desire to share my pillow. But he already knew that nature had made our bodies incompatible.
I, too, was convinced on first glance that our bodies could never conjoin in sexual union: his was moist and slippery, while mine was dry and rough. Everything in the region surrounding his beard was splendidly built, while the tips of his four limbs looked pathetically weak. By contrast, my own life force was concentrated in my fingertips. He had been bald since birth, while I was thickly furred everywhere from my head to my most intimate zone. We would never have made a good couple. Nevertheless we once wound up kissing. It felt as if a tiny fish were wriggling around in my mouth. Sea Lion had an ungainly row of teeth, but that bothered me least of all, since I instantly recognized his true masculinity in the fact that he had no cavities. This I truly appreciated. When I asked why he didn’t have any rotten teeth, he replied that he never ate sweets. I, on the other hand, found them irresistible. What would I use as a metaphor for the best part of my life if there were no longer any sweets?
I hadn’t seen him in quite some time, though he kept in touch: now and then he would send me his latest catalog, in which his office address was printed. I plucked up my courage and decided to pay him a surprise visit without contacting him in advance.
The offices of his firm, which was called North Star Publishing, were located at the southern edge of town. From the outside there was no indication that anything like a publishing house might be located here in this building. A young man stood in the lobby, smoking a cigarette. Sternly, he asked what business I had there. I had scarcely gotten out the words “Sea Lion” before he told me to follow him, walking ahead of me like a robot down the hall. To either side, peeling wallpaper hung down like burned skin. We penetrated ever deeper into the building’s interior, and at the end of the hallway reached a green door behind which was a room with no windows. The ceiling was low, and the manuscripts piled up in enormous stacks were yellowed.
Sea Lion looked at me and flinched as if I’d slapped him in the face. “What are you doing here?” he asked coldly. Only at that moment did it occur to me that there is nothing in the world more dangerous than a former fan. Too late. I — a miserable former circus star — stood there defenseless before the bloodthirsty publisher, clasping my virginal work. Many times in the past I had danced atop a gigantic ball, ridden a stunt tricycle and a circus motorcycle. But publishing an autobiography was a far more dangerous acrobatic feat.
Carefully I opened my bag, took out the sheets of letter paper covered with writing, and placed them on the desk without a word. His gaze lingered quizzically upon my nose. When he glimpsed the written characters in my manuscript, he adjusted his glasses and began to read. His glasses had round lenses, and he read with his back bent over the manuscript. He read the first page, then the second. The more he read, the more delightedly his eyes gleamed, or maybe I just imagined that. After he had read through several pages, he stroked his beard and opened his nostrils very wide. “You wrote this?” he asked, his voice trembling. I nodded. He knit his brows, then set an expression of weariness on his face like a mask. “I’ll keep the manuscript here. Honestly I’m somewhat disappointed that it’s so short. Perhaps you’d like to keep writing and bring me more next week.”
I said nothing, and my silence appeared to make him cocky. “And can I say one more thing? Don’t you have any better paper to use? Did you steal this from a hotel? Poor thing! Take mine, if you like.” He presented me with a stack of Swiss letter paper with the Alps as a watermark, adding a notepad and a Mont Blanc fountain pen.
I hurried home and wrote on a sheet of this freshly acquired fancy paper: “When I stood on two legs, I already came up to Ivan’s navel.” I scraped the metal point of the fountain pen across the paper’s delicate plant fiber structure. It felt just as good as scratching my itchy back.
•
One day Ivan appeared riding a strange contraption. He rode in a circle a few times, got off, and then pressed the object, which he called a “tricycle,” between my legs. I bit at the handle of this new vehicle, made of a material that was even harder than the grayish bread Ivan sometimes threw me, fell off, and sat down on the floor to inspect the tricycle. Ivan let me play for a while, then placed the thing between my legs again. This time I remained sitting in the saddle and was given a sugar cube as a reward. The next day, Ivan placed my feet on the pedals. I pressed into them as he indicated with his hand, and the tricycle rolled forward a little way. Then I was given a sugar cube. I pedaled and got sugar. More pedaling, more sugar. I didn’t want to stop, but after a while Ivan took the tricycle away from me and went home. The next day, our game was repeated, and on the days after that, until one day I began to climb onto the tricycle of my own free will. The riding lessons didn’t seem hard once I’d grasped the basic principles.
I did also have one awful tricycle experience. One morning Ivan showed up reeking — a nauseating mixture of perfume and vodka. Feeling crushed and betrayed, I hurled the tricycle at him, but he skillfully ducked out of the way and started shouting at me, his arms whirling through the air like a pair of wheels. This time there was no sugar for me; he pulled out his whip. Even after this, it was a long time before I understood that there were three sorts of actions. Performing actions in the first category got me sugar. The second category got me nothing: neither sugar nor a whipping. For third-category actions, I was copiously rewarded with lashes. I would sort new actions into these three categories the way a postal clerk sorts letters.
•
With this, I concluded the new section of my autobiography and brought my manuscript to Sea Lion. Outside a brisk wind was blowing, but inside his publishing house the air was stuffy, it smelled like the cold smoke of Soviet cigarettes. On his desk I saw plates filled with bones, probably the bones of chicken wings, and behind them sat Sea Lion, skillfully operating his toothpick like the beak of a little bird. As dessert, I served him my manuscript with its thickly clustered letters. He gobbled it right up, gave a hoarse cough, yawned, and said: “This is much too short. Write more.”
His arrogance set my teeth on edge. “How much I write is my business — not yours. What’s in it for me if I write more?” My erstwhile circus star pride had suddenly returned. Sea Lion was nonplussed, apparently he hadn’t reckoned with my making any demands. With nervous fingers he opened one of the drawers, pulled out a bar of chocolate, handed it to me and added a bit of commentary: “This is an excellent product of the GDR. I don’t eat sweets, so you can have it.”
I didn’t believe a word he was saying, since the color of the packaging that sheathed the chocolate like metallic armor gleamed in a way that didn’t look East German. No doubt Sea Lion had gotten hold of the chocolate through his West German connections. I could report you! But I gave no sign of having seen through him and instead broke the chocolate bar in half, wrapper and all. An attractive, pearly black cocoa skin was revealed. But unfortunately I found the taste rather too bitter. “You’ll get more if you keep writing. Though to be honest, I’m not even sure you have anything more to say.” Sea Lion put the Busy Publisher mask back on his face and let his mind crawl into his paperwork.
Irritated by his cheap provocation, I rushed home and hurled myself at my desk. Annoyance is an easily combustible power source that can be extremely useful in the production of a text. It gives you energy you’d have to generate elsewhere. Rage is a sort of fuel that can’t be found in the forest. For this reason I’m grateful to anyone who enrages me. Apparently I was writing with too much force in my fingers. The point of my fountain pen gave out under the pressure and bent. The mountain-blue Mont Blanc blood spilled out, staining my white belly. It was a mistake to have taken off all my clothes because of the heat. An author should never sit down at her desk naked. I washed, but the ink stain remained.
•
I learned to wear a girly, lace-trimmed skirt — or rather, to endure it. At least I stopped ripping it off when they put it on me. I also let them adorn my head with large bows. Ivan said I had to put up with them since I was a girl. I couldn’t swallow his argument, though I was capable of swallowing his sugar cubes ad infinitum. Various bits of fabric were tied around my head, and this too bothered me less and less, and even the terrifying spotlight beams stopped confusing me. I never lost my composure, even when I beheld a seething mass of people before me. The fanfare announced my arrival, and I would ride my tricycle steed onto the brightly lit stage. A lace-trimmed skirt encircled my hips, and atop my head fluttered a large bow. I got down off the tricycle, held out my right paw-hand to Ivan for a handshake, then I clambered onto a ball and balanced on top of it for a while. Amid the thunderous applause, I would catch a glimpse of sugar in the palm of Ivan’s hand, bubbling up like water from a spring. The sweetness on my tongue and the billowing clouds of joy rising up from the pores of the spectators intoxicated me.
•
In one week’s time I succeeded, with some difficulty, in writing up to here, then went to visit Sea Lion again. He greedily read through my manuscript, never forgetting to keep an indifferent expression on his face. When he reached the end, he delivered a brusque bit of commentary: “If we ever happen to have a gap in our production schedule, we can publish your text.” Then he once again placed a bar of Western chocolate in my paw-hand and quickly turned away, as if to conceal his thoughts from me. “As a matter of principle, we do not pay our authors honoraria. If you need money, try getting accepted into the Writers’ Union.”
•
One day I flew to Riga to participate in a conference. Right away I noticed that several of the participants kept glancing surreptitiously in my direction — not out of distrust, which I was used to, but differently. Something was wrong with the air I was breathing, or had I missed something? During the break between two sessions, the conference-goers gathered in little whispering groups. When I approached one of these groups, they quickly switched into Latvian, and I couldn’t understand a thing. I fled to the corridor and stood at the window. A man wearing glasses came up to me with a chummy air and disclosed: “I’ve read your work!” Another man, overhearing this, came to join us, faintly blushing. “I find what you write so fascinating. I’m so looking forward to the next installment.” A woman who appeared to be his wife sidled up to him, smiling at me and whispering to her husband: “What a stroke of luck, getting to chat with the author in person.” In no time, a hedge of people had sprouted all around me. It gradually dawned on me that Sea Lion had already printed my autobiography in his magazine without informing me. I found this unforgiveable.
The conference ended earlier than expected, and all I wanted to do was run down to the bookstore in the main shopping district to ask for a copy of the magazine. The salesman said that the issue was sold out, assuming I was referring to the journal’s most recent issue, the one everybody was talking about. Surveying me from my forehead to my knees, he gave me a tip: “In the theater across the street they put on Chekhov’s The Seagull every night. The actor who plays the role of Treplev just bought a copy of the magazine. He’ll be on tonight.”
I hurried from the bookstore over to the theater and knocked so violently on the glass door, which was locked, that a crack appeared in it. Fortunately no one witnessed this, with one exception: a young man with a contorted face on a poster. He winked at me with his right eye. No one but me saw this.
There was a park right next door. I drank a cup of kvass and passed some time with the help of the newspapers pinned up on the exterior of the kiosk like wallpaper. Exactly one hour before the start of the performance I returned to the theater. “I have to speak with Treplev,” I told the woman at the ticket counter. “The performance begins in one hour. You can’t speak with any of the actors now.” A blunt refusal without any folderol. I couldn’t think of anything better to do, so I bought a ticket for the performance, went back to the park, and drank another cup of kvass. An hour went by, and I proudly entered the theater through the big door in front and took my seat in the audience. All of this was a novelty. My work at the circus had occupied my entire being, and I had never managed to go visit some other stage, and certainly not from the perspective of an audience member. Besides, the theater world was separated from the world of the circus by as thick a wall as the one dividing East and West. It was a grave error, however, on my part to reject the theater the way a child disdains a particular vegetable without ever having tried it. There were many things I could have learned from the theater, for example how to vary the tempo in the course of a program, or how to combine melancholy and humor. If I had understood this back when I was still performing on the circus stage, I would have allowed myself frequent outings to the theater.
The performance was delectable. The part I found the most appetizing was the dead seagull on the stage.
When the play was over, I slipped backstage to the dressing room, where it stank of powder. In front of the mirrors fastened side by side along the wall, various colorful cosmetics lay strewn about. The actors hadn’t yet returned. I discovered the magazine I was looking for, picked it up, and flipped hastily through its pages until I found the piece I had written. It was even adorned with a title. I couldn’t remember having given it a title or being asked to give it one. It was no doubt Sea Lion who had dreamed up the cheesy headline: “Thunderous Applause for My Tears.” In his impudence, he had added: “Part One.” Without asking the author’s permission, he was advertising the next installment! Apparently his high-handedness knew no bounds.
I heard a miscellany of sounds in the corridor, then smelled actors’ sweat, intermingled with the scent of roses. Actresses and actors alike twitched their hips when they saw me standing in the middle of their dressing room. I held up the magazine and announced: “I am the author of ‘Thunderous Applause for My Tears’!” It sounded like a clumsy excuse but nonetheless it was effective: the shock disappeared from the actors’ petrified faces and was replaced with the glow of reverence. This change took place first around the mouth, gradually rising up to reach the forehead. Their eyelashes began to flutter coquettishly. Please, please, please, do take a seat! They offered me a scrawny little footstool. The moment I shifted part of my weight onto it, the thing began to creak violently, threatening collapse. I decided I could do without a seat. “May I ask for your autograph?” It was Treplev who asked this. His body odor was composed of soap, sweat, and sperm.
That evening I flew back to Moscow and, ensconced in familiar bed-smell, realized that now I had become an author, a career development that could no longer be reversed. Sleep eluded me, even a bowl of warm milk with honey didn’t help. As a child I was constantly under pressure and always had to go to bed early so I could get up again at the crack of dawn to start my training. There had been a phase before my childhood began, one in which no clock ever ticked. I gazed at the moon, felt the sun’s rays on my fur, and observed the gradual alternation of bright and dark, a series of tiny shifts. Falling asleep and getting up were not my own private concerns, they were the work of Nature. When my childhood began, Nature came to an end. Now I want to find out what happened to me before childhood.
I lay in my familiar bed and stared at the ceiling, where I discovered a prawn that in truth was only a stain. The narrow face of Treplev appeared, although it bore no similarity to the prawn. In the days, weeks, months, and years to come, he will act upon the stage, fall in love, and sooner or later die. And me? I’ll die before him. And Sea Lion? He’ll die even before me. After the death of all living creatures, all our unfulfilled wishes and unspoken words will go on drifting in the stratosphere, they will combine with one another and linger upon the earth like fog. What will this fog look like in the eyes of the living? Will they fail to remember the dead and instead indulge in banal meteorological conversations like: “It’s foggy today, don’t you think?”
When I woke up, it was almost noon. I surprised Sea Lion at his desk. “Please give me the current issue of your journal!”
“We don’t have any copies left. Sold out!”
“You printed my autobiography.”
“That’s certainly possible.”
“Why didn’t you send me a contributor’s copy?”
“You know how the mail gets censored these days. I meant to hand-deliver a copy to you, but you can see how busy I am, and the copy I set aside for you disappeared somehow. You don’t have to read the text again. You know what you wrote, don’t you?” Not a drop of guilt showed in his face. And why should it? He was right: I didn’t have to read my own text.
“By the way, make sure you turn in the second installment by the beginning of next month at the latest. Don’t miss the deadline!” he said and cleared his throat.
“Why did you announce it as a series without asking me first?”
“What a shame it would be if a life story as gripping as yours remained incomplete!” His flattering remark briefly soothed me, but then I remembered that he’d done something unforgiveable.
“You know perfectly well that it is part of my physical constitution to be incapable of tears. Why the inane title?”
Sea Lion rubbed his hands together as if choosing the right dough to knead into a new loaf of falsehoods. I stayed on the offensive. “Don’t just randomly title the thing on a whim! At least give some thought to the meaning of the words. Tears belong to human sentimentality. To me, ice and snow are everything. You can’t just thaw them out and turn them into tears.”
Sea Lion grinned and wagged his beard. Apparently it had just occurred to him how he could turn matters to his advantage. “You hear the word ‘tears,’ and right away you assume it’s your tears that are meant. But the world doesn’t revolve around you. It’s not you who should be shedding tears, it’s the reader. Instead of crying, you should be meeting your deadline.”
I let myself be intimidated by his insolent words, which left me feeling like an eared seal with regressed limbs despite the fact that I possessed a powerful gripping and running mechanism that made me a formidable opponent. Sea Lion spit his final words in my direction: “Are you done reciting your lines? Then go home! I’ve got work to do.”
Instead of slapping his face, I stuck out my tongue at him, which was recalling a certain sweet flavor. “By the way, that West chocolate you gave me wasn’t half bad. Do you have connections in the West?” Sea Lion, breaking character, pulled a bar of chocolate from his desk drawer with nervous fingers and tossed it to me.
As soon as I shut the door of my apartment behind me, I sat down at my desk. I was still furious, and the desire to write clamped down on my ankle like a trap, refusing to release me. Even as far back as the Middle Ages, there were men like Sea Lion who placed traps in the woods to catch bears alive. They would put flowers on a bear and make him dance in the street. The masses delighted in these performances, and would applaud and throw coins. Knights and artisans, perhaps, viewed the bear with contempt, seeing him as a street entertainer flirting with the crowd — flattering, submissive, and dependent. The bear, meanwhile, had quite different goals in mind: he wanted to enter into a state of ecstasy along with his audience, or else use his dancing and music to commune with spirits and ghosts. He didn’t know who the masses were or what it meant to flirt.
•
Already as a child I’d started performing every day, but I never learned what other acts were being presented. Sometimes I heard a lion roar, but I never saw a lion performing onstage.
In addition to Ivan, several other people worked for me. One of them brought me ice cubes and scattered them on the floor, another cleared away my dishes. When I was asleep, they would converse in hushed tones and creep around on tiptoe so as not to wake me. This made me laugh, because even when I was sleeping, I could always tell right away if a tiny little mouse at the far end of the room started polishing her snout with her velvet gloves. The bodies of Ivan and the other men had such a strong smell that even in sleep my nose couldn’t possibly overlook their presence.
My sense of smell was the most reliable of all my five senses and has remained so to this day. When I hear a voice, this doesn’t always mean the bearer of the voice is present. A gramophone or radio can produce a voice as well. My eyesight can’t be trusted. A stuffed gull or a human being dressed in a bearskin are nothing more than facades designed for deception. But with smells, I’m not so easily fooled. I can smell whether a person smokes, likes to eat onions, has on new leather shoes, or is menstruating. The scent of perfume cannot cover up a sweaty armpit or the smell of garlic. On the contrary: It underscores these other smells, apparently unbeknownst to human beings.
A snowfield blanketed my field of vision. Far and wide, no other color but white. My stomach was empty, hunger stabbed at it from the inside, and soon I caught the scent of a snow mouse. I couldn’t see the mouse, it was in the middle of digging an underground tunnel. The tunnel wasn’t so deep, I pressed my nose against the snowy ground, following the mousy scent, which was in motion. I couldn’t see a thing, but it was easy to pinpoint the mouse’s location. Here it is — time to pounce! I woke up. The white surface before me wasn’t a snowfield, it was a blank manuscript page.
•
My retinas have no difficulty recalling my first press conference. Every few seconds they were stabbed by flashbulbs. Ivan turned to stone in his suit, which was baggy at the shoulders and chest. Unlike at an ordinary circus performance, there were only ten people in the audience. “So listen, this is a press conference,” Ivan said, inserting this disconcerting new word into my ear. We obediently took our places side by side on the podium. The flashbulbs assailed us once more like a sudden downpour. On the other side of Ivan sat his boss, whose hair odor and finger movements — they seemed at once cowardly and sadistic — made my hackles rise. One step closer, and I’d have bared my fangs at him. Apparently he noticed my antipathy and kept his distance.
“The circus is a top-notch form of entertainment for the working classes because . . .” The boss had no doubt intended to enrich this skim-milk speech with a bit more semantic butterfat, but he was immediately interrupted by one of the journalists, who asked: “Have you ever been bitten by a wild animal?” The boss didn’t have an answer ready. So then it was Ivan’s turn to have questions thrown at him. They fluttered down from above like colorful confetti, confusing him.
“Is it true that you speak bear language?”
“Is it just a superstition to think a bear can rob a person of his soul, and then he’ll die before his time?”
Ivan murmured incomprehensible words like: “Hmm, uh, I mean to say, well, beg your pardon, in a word, uh, but that doesn’t mean . . .” Despite his poor answers, lengthy articles about us appeared over the following weeks, not just here, but in Poland and the GDR as well.
•
I have to admit: my life changed because I’d made myself an author. Or to be precise, it wasn’t exactly me who did that, I was made an author by the sentences I’d written, and that wasn’t even the end of the story: each result gave birth to the next, and I found myself being transported to a place I hadn’t known existed. Writing was a more dangerous acrobatic stunt than dancing atop a rolling ball. To be sure, I’d worked myself to the bone learning to dance on that ball and actually broke some bones rehearsing, but in the end I attained my goal. In the end I knew with certainty that I could balance on a rolling object — but when it comes to writing, I can make no such claims. Where was the ball of authorship rolling? It couldn’t just roll in a straight line, or I’d fall off the stage. My ball was supposed to spin on its axis and at the same time circle the midpoint of the stage, like the Earth revolving around the sun.
Writing demanded as much strength as hunting. When I caught the scent of prey, the first thing I felt was despair: would I succeed in catching my prey, or would I fail yet again? This uncertainty was the hunter’s daily lot. When my hunger grew too strong, I was incapable of hunting. All I wanted to do was stop — before the hunt — at a first-class restaurant for a three-course meal. I also wanted to make sure my limbs were adequately rested before each big hunt. My ancestors had spent entire winters slumbering in their sheltered caves. How pleasant it would be to withdraw once a year until spring came to wake me. A true winter knows no light, nor sound, nor work. In the big city, winter shrank and shriveled, and the dimensions of life grew narrow too.
•
The memory of my first press conference remained sharp in my mind as if painted there, it hadn’t faded at all, but I can scarcely remember the period that came afterward. One work after another. For ten years I labored without pause in a burning frenzy that was proof against winter. Everything that burdened or hurt me was instantly transformed into fodder for my career. That’s why I couldn’t remember anything.
My repertoire grew ever broader, my vocabulary ever larger, but I never experienced a greater or more illuminating surprise than the first time I grasped the true meaning of the performing arts. I kept having to learn new routines, which made me feel like a factory worker who, even after being given a new, more challenging task, still finds it monotonous, not a source of pride. “Performing in a circus can feel like assembly-line work,” I once asserted at a conference on the topic Working Class Pride.
•
Sea Lion read my new manuscript and said: “It would be better if you skipped the political criticism — your philosophy is boring. What your readers want to know is how you mastered the high art of stagecraft without losing your wildness, and what that felt like. Your experiences are important, not your thoughts.” I don’t know exactly why, but his commentary made me furious, and on the way home I went into the government-run market hall, bought a jar of honey, and ate the entire thing right up, scooping it out with a shovel-hand. After that I stopped writing anything political, though I’m not entirely sure what’s political and what isn’t.
•
You might assume that I was born with acrobatic talent, that I trained hard to perfect my abilities and then proudly displayed the results to my audience. This interpretation is completely false. I never chose a profession, and there was never any question of my having talent. I rode the tricycle and was given sugar cubes as a reward. If I’d hurled my tricycle into the corner instead, I’d have gotten nothing to eat, just a whipping. Ivan had no choice either. Even the pianist, who was independent of the circus and played for us only occasionally, had probably never stopped to ask himself whether he happened to feel like playing the piano at a given moment. Day after day, all of us were stuck in a dead end, doing the minimum necessary for survival, which entailed maximal challenges. I was not a victim of Ivan’s violence. None of my movements on the stage was superfluous or unnecessary: in other words, nothing I did was the result of external violence.
In life, we don’t have a choice, because everything we are capable of is still not very much compared with life itself, not nearly as much as we imagine. And if we don’t get this not-very-much exactly right, we will not survive. This fundamental principle can’t be terribly different even for spoiled young people in a prosperous society.
If my physical abilities, or Ivan’s prodding, or the audience’s interest had subsided even a little, all our artistry and stagecraft would have been for naught.
•
My text, which had so quickly appeared in print thanks to my publisher’s unorthodox approach to his métier, attracted the attention of readers in other countries who knew Russian. A Slavist named Eisberg who lived in Berlin translated the first installment of my autobiography into German and published it in a literary magazine. This translation was euphorically reviewed in a German newspaper of no small importance. The mailbox of the publishing house was soon filled with letters from readers asking when the next installment would come out. At the same time as the first part was published in Berlin, the second part appeared here in Moscow. The original and its translation began to play a fugue, though as far as I could see, it was more like a game of Cat and Mouse than a sublime musical form. As the mouse being pursued, I had to run faster and faster so the cat wouldn’t catch me.
It couldn’t have been Herr Eisberg who published my text illegally. Probably Sea Lion had sold Eisberg the translation rights without informing me. In this way, my text was transformed into West German currency that vanished in the depths of Sea Lion’s pocket. After my superintendent painted a picture of this scenario for me, I visited Sea Lion and demanded an explanation. He said he knew nothing about it. His skin was so thick you could never see if he was lying or not. He turned his back on me, and even allowed himself an insolent bit of commentary: “If you have enough time to manage your translation rights, you ought to be able to write more installments!”
His words forced their way into my stomach and turned it — all I wanted was to retch them out again. A cruel idea occurred to me for taking my revenge; it was heinous, but I couldn’t resist. From a phone both I called the superintendent of the building where North Star Publishing had made its nest and told him Sea Lion was hiding a large amount of foreign currency. Probably the super already knew about it, he might even have been in on the deal. But he had to consider the possibility that this anonymous phone call had come from the secret police, wanting to test his loyalty. For this reason, he couldn’t afford to ignore the call. Otherwise he would be running a large risk of winding up in a penitentiary himself. And so he first informed Sea Lion and then denounced him to the police. All of this, by the way, being speculation on my part. When the police searched Sea Lion’s office, they did not find so much as a smuggled chocolate bar, much less foreign banknotes.
Later I heard a rumor about a lady in Odessa who had purchased a snow-white Toyota from a Greek visitor to the spa. Her neighbors were surprised, wondering where she’d gotten all that Western currency. Shortly before this, Sea Lion had been spotted in Odessa. An eyewitness reported that Sea Lion had snuck into the lady’s villa, carrying a large duffle bag. Already the scenario was taking shape in my head: Sea Lion had gotten his hands on a large amount of Western currency thanks to the sale of my translation rights, and then used them to buy his concubine in Odessa a car.
It was a great misfortune for me that Herr Eisberg was a talented translator. He turned my bearish sentences into artful literature that soon was praised in a celebrated West German newspaper. Admittedly there were no literary critics lauding my autobiography for its lyricism. All the praise was based on different criteria altogether, criteria I didn’t understand.
At the time there was a protest movement in West Germany against the exploitation of circus animals. The movement’s spokespersons argued that taming wild animals for the circus violated their human rights. According to the protesters, animals in the Eastern Bloc countries were even more oppressed than those in the West. Here in the East, a book appeared with the title Tamed with Love, written by one Dr. Aikowa. Her father was a zoologist. Perhaps this was one reason why she succeeded in teaching Siberian tigers and wolves to perform onstage without the use of whips or other threats. Most of the book was made up of interviews in which the author described her loving treatment of animals. Her book provoked a number of Western journalists. “Wild animals would never take an interest in the stage if human beings did not compel them by force. Aikowa is just trying to justify her circus, which is nothing but a pseudo-artistic endeavor by which Socialism intends to keep scooping up Western cash.” This was more or less the opinion expressed by these aggrieved journalists. They discovered my autobiography as something that might be used as proof of the Socialist abuse of animals.
It wasn’t long before the bureau responsible for such matters took note of my book’s reputation in the West. One day Sea Lion informed me by telegram that my autobiography could not be continued. I was annoyed with Sea Lion, but as far as the future of my writing was concerned, I had no qualms. I would simply go on writing, even if Sea Lion didn’t want to print what I had written. Perhaps I would even find a better publisher. Enough of those poisonous, barbed words Sea Lion was always using in his attempts to extract ever more lines of text from my paw-hands. No more taking anyone else into account — it was time for me to withdraw and enjoy some one-on-one time with my pen.
My life became as quiet as a fireplace long after the flames have gone out. It used to be I couldn’t so much as go to the store for a few cans of food without being accosted by a fan. Now no one approached me. Even amid the bustle of the farmers’ market, no one met my eyes. All the eyes flew away from me like mayflies, I couldn’t catch a single one. I was delighted when the postman brought me a letter from my employer, but all it said was that I shouldn’t return to the office until the situation improved. I was being relieved of my task of overseeing the project with the Cuban musicians; someone else had been assigned to it. I also stopped receiving invitations to conferences.
Sea Lion’s journal couldn’t possibly have held some sort of national literary monopoly, but for some reason no other magazine contacted me. The entire literary establishment had decided to give me the cold shoulder. My gall rose at this thought, and I slammed my fist down on the desk. It was a spontaneous reaction, but afterward I noticed I’d been holding a ballpoint pen. Too late.
The pen’s neck was broken, its head lodged in the wooden flesh of my desk, while its body remained behind in my hand.
Formerly, symbolic acts had just seemed silly to me, for instance I couldn’t have cared less about a two-legged author snapping his fountain pen in half to protest censorship. But now I myself had destroyed my pen. I would have expected a writing implement to lend me security in times of crisis, but in the end it proved just as fragile as a newborn’s arm.
•
One day I received a letter from a domestic organization calling itself Alliance for the Promotion of International Communication. It was an odd-sounding request: “Wouldn’t you like to participate in a project to plant orange trees in Siberia? It’s very important for us to have a celebrity like you associated with this undertaking. This will help us draw a great deal of public attention to our work.” Me? A celebrity? The words were like rose petals agreeably tickling the inside of my ear. Without hesitation I agreed to participate.
That same day, a few hours later, I wanted to take out the trash, and when I opened my apartment door, I saw the superintendent standing right in front of me. She asked how I was. It sounded like an excuse, but I had no idea what she might be hiding. “I’m planning to work in Siberia,” I replied proudly and told her about the flattering invitation. The superintendent’s eyebrows twisted with pity. “The point of this project is to grow orange trees in the cold,” I added, wanting to eliminate any possible misunderstanding. My words brought her nearly to tears. She clutched her shopping bag firmly to her chest and excused herself, saying she unfortunately had to go now, since she had an urgent errand.
I was naïve and optimistic enough to believe that oranges could grow in Siberia. After all, they harvest kiwis and tomatoes in the Israeli desert. So why not oranges in Siberia? Besides, if anyone was a good fit for Siberia, it was me. Cold weather was my passion.
From then on, the super avoided me. Every time I came out of my apartment, she would quickly leave the stairwell and hide behind her apartment door. Glancing up from the sidewalk in front of our building, I observed her on several occasions watching me from between her curtains. Once, when I needed something from her and knocked on her door, she pretended not to be home.
Mold started to grow in my ears because no one ever spoke to me. The tongue is not only for speaking; you can also use it to eat with. Ears, on the other hand, exist only for the purpose of hearing voices and sounds. All my ears ever heard was the screech of the streetcar, so they began to rust like the wheels of a neglected tram. I missed human voices. Then it occurred to me to buy a radio, so I went to an electronics shop. But the salesman told me that all the radios in the country were sold out. I was almost happy to hear this, out of defiance. Even if I’d been able to purchase a radio, it would probably have been of such poor quality that I would scarcely have been able to distinguish its sounds from those of the screeching streetcar. On the way home, I stopped at a stationery shop to pick up some letter paper. I told the owner about the oranges-in-Siberia project, and was treated to this reaction: “I’m so sorry to hear that. But surely there’s a way to get out of it.” Perhaps I really should have been concerned. When I was about to go back upstairs to my apartment, the super slid out of her apartment and without a word handed me a slip of paper bearing the name and address of a man I didn’t know. At once I understood that this man was my salvation, but swift action is not my forte. Another week passed without my doing anything at all.
A new week began. A postman arrived panting, his cheeks bright red, to deliver a registered letter. It was an invitation to an international conference that was to take place in West Berlin. The letter was written in a cold, acerbic style, which made me all the more astonished to learn that the organizers were offering an honorarium of ten thousand dollars for my participation. I must have misunderstood, I thought, and read the letter a second time, but the exact same thing was written there in black and white: “ten thousand dollars” and “West Berlin.” Why were they paying so much? It was also strange that the money was to be sent not to me personally but to the Writers’ Union in my country. Later it slowly began to make sense to me. Without the offer of money, I couldn’t receive a permit to travel abroad. It took me less than two weeks to assemble all my documents, including an airplane ticket from Moscow to Berlin-Schönefeld.
•
I hardly had any luggage with me, as it was to be such a short trip. The airplane smelled of melting plastic, and sitting in it didn’t make me feel any calmer, as the seat was built along narrow lines. The plane landed at Berlin-Schönefeld, and I was met by policemen who appeared to have been waiting for me the entire time. They got into a van with me and took me to a train station, where they deposited me in a dainty little train headed for West Berlin. When the border guard came through, I showed him all the paperwork I’d been given. The train was strangely empty, and landscapes empty of human beings flew by outside. They were deformed by the thick glass of the window. A fly bumped against my forehead, or wait, not a fly, a sentence: “I am going into exile.” Suddenly I grasped my situation. Someone had devised this escape for me, to save me from a danger I hadn’t known existed. Red plastic spectacles appeared before my eyes, it was a woman, still young, perhaps twenty or so. She asked me something, and I answered in Russian: “I don’t understand.” Then the spectacles asked in shaky Russian if I was Russian. Of course not, but how was I supposed to explain to her what I am. While I was hunting for the words, she said: “Oh, I see, you’re a member of an ethnic minority, is that it? I wrote a term paper about the human rights of ethnic minorities, and it’s the first time I got a good grade. It was a really wonderful experience. Long live minorities!” The plastic spectacles sat down next to me while I was still wrestling with the confusion in my head. Was my clan part of an ethnic minority? It’s certainly possible that we are fewer in number than the Russians, at least in the cities, but high up in the North, many more of our sort exist in Nature than Russians. “Minorities are fabulous!” the spectacles exclaimed, apparently having skidded into some sort of manic state. She wouldn’t leave me alone, kept bombarding me with questions, such as where I was going and whether I had any friends in West Berlin. I chose not to answer these questions so typical of a spy.
The plane trees that just a moment before had been jogging through the landscape with impressive speed now tottered like rickety old invalids with canes. The train crept into a gigantic cathedral, gave a screech, and stopped.
The station was a huge circus tent. A few doves were sitting on high perches, cooing. I knew these doves had emerged from a magician’s bowler. An iron donkey loaded up with suitcases passed close beside me. A blinking magic slate kept announcing new circus numbers. Now a colorfully dressed woman appeared, her thighs exposed. The microphone announced the names of the stars to the audience. Someone whistled behind my back, and a proud dog dressed like a human being made his entrance. On the counter lay a pile of sugar cubes — the classic reward for stage artists.
My nose, which had been straying through the air, disoriented, suddenly had a bouquet of flowers pressed to it, there was a smell of nectar, and a word of greeting reached me through the flowers: “Welcome!” A number of hands were thrust in my direction: a swollen hand, a bony hand, a thin hand, hand, hand, hand, hand, hand. I shook hands like a politician, giving each of these unfamiliar hands a self-important squeeze.
I had never before seen such a lavish bouquet. What was it for? It wasn’t as if I’d just displayed any particular artistry. Was exile like a sort of tightrope walking, a feat worthy of reward? Admittedly it was a challenge to pull off such a stunt without rehearsal or support, but I wasn’t finding it so terribly difficult. The woman with dyed red hair who’d handed me the bouquet probably wanted to say something to me, her mouth was moving as if in speech. But no words came out. In her place, a young man with appetizing baby fat said: “I apologize, but I’m the only one who speaks Russian. My name is Wolfgang. A pleasure to meet you.” Beside him stood a sweaty man grasping a banner in his right hand and a plump valise in the left. The banner read: Citizens Initiative KAOS — Keeping Authors Out of Siberia. All of them were wearing neatly ironed jeans and well-polished leather shoes, no doubt a sort of uniform for this initiative.
I had no clue what they were discussing among themselves. One of them took his leave, then another departed as well, there were ever fewer of them, and in the end only Wolfgang and I remained. “Time to go.”
To the left and right, buildings towered up in various heights, much smaller than the ones in Moscow. Some of the buildings reminded me of tastefully decorated cakes. The cars gleamed in the sunlight, I could even see my shape mirrored in their metal surfaces. Male and female legs in this city were clad in blue jeans. The wind offered me charred mammal flesh, coal, and sweet perfume.
Wolfgang stopped in front of a building and walked up the stairs. This freshly painted building, I thought at once, must contain my apartment. When I opened the refrigerator, a heavenly landscape of pink salmon appeared, cut into paper-thin slices and sealed in transparent plastic. I tried a slice right away, and it wasn’t bad, though it had a smoky aftertaste. Perhaps the fisherman smoked too many cigarettes while he was working. It took a while before this smoky flavor started to taste good to me. Wolfgang looked around and said: “Beautiful apartment, no?”
The apartment didn’t interest me particularly. All I wanted to do was crawl into the refrigerator and stay there. Wolfgang noticed that I couldn’t take my eyes off the salmon, and laughed. “As you see, we did some serious shopping for you. That’ll have to last you for the time being.” As soon as he left, I quickly devoured the entire supply of salmon.
I stood at the open door of the empty refrigerator, enjoying the cold air. I pulled out a drawer in the bottom section. It was filled with attractive little ice cubes. I put them in my mouth and gnawed on them.
The kitchen soon began to bore me; I went into the next room, which had a television and a chair. I placed my rump carefully on the chair, gradually shifting my weight onto it, and right away there was a cracking sound. The chair lost a leg. Beyond this room was the bathroom, just as small as in the changing room of the traveling circus. I took an ice-cold shower and strolled out of the bathroom without drying myself off. At once, a large puddle appeared in the hall. I shook the water from my body, lay down in the bed, and suddenly had to laugh as a fairy tale popped into my head: Three bears cook some buckwheat porridge and go out for a walk. While they’re gone, a little girl who’s lost her way comes into the house, eats all the porridge, breaks a chair, lies down in bed, and falls asleep. The three bears come home, find the empty pot, the broken chair, and a sound-asleep girl. The girl wakes up, jumps out of bed in fright, and runs away. The three bears stand there, indignant and speechless. I was now in this girl’s position. What was I to do when the three bears returned from their walk?
•
It wasn’t the three bears who showed up the next day, though, it was Wolfgang, wanting to see how I was doing in the new apartment.
“How are we today?” he asked.
“I feel like the little girl in a bear book for children.”
“Which bear? Winnie-the-Pooh? Or maybe Paddington?
I didn’t know either of these bears. “I mean Lev Tolstoy’s The Three Bears!”
Wolfgang said: “I’ve never heard of that one.”
There was a curtain of ice between Wolfgang and me. Ice appears to be a solid material, but it quickly melts on contact with body heat. I placed my arm on Wolfgang’s shoulder jestingly but firmly. He broke free with remarkable deftness and speed, arranged his face in a rectangular configuration, and said: “I’ve brought you some paper and a fountain pen. We want you to continue your work. Please begin as soon as possible so that the work will be completed as soon as possible. We assure you that you will receive payment from us for your work.” Wolfgang’s mouth smelled of lies. There are different sorts of lies, and each one has its own smell. This particular lie smelled of suspicion: Wolfgang was probably reporting not his own thoughts but the words of his boss. Wolfgang was a liar, but fortunately he was still a young liar. His smell revealed that he was still a child, and a smell cannot lie. I gave him a playful shove, and when he didn’t react, I gave him another one. He pursed his lips and shouted, “Stop that!” but then could no longer suppress his childish desire to wrestle with me. I threw him to the ground, being careful not to crush him. While we were playing, the smell of the lie disappeared from his body.
Soon my stomach was contracting with hunger. Paying no more attention to Wolfgang, I ran into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. No more salmon, I knew it. Wolfgang came in behind me, glimpsed the refrigerator’s empty shelves, and exclaimed: “Oh! I guess I shouldn’t have been worried that you wouldn’t like the salmon.” He probably thought he could conceal his shock behind an ironic tone.
The next day, he visited me again, although I hadn’t asked him to. Blinking frenetically, he stammered, “How are we today?”
“Not good.” I hadn’t mastered the smile technique and often gave the wrong impression.
Wolfgang looked at me, frightened, and asked: “You aren’t well? What’s the matter?”
“My hunger is making me sick.”
“I don’t think hunger is an illness.”
I’d thought as much. I can’t actually get sick. Someone told me once that illness was a traditional form of theater practiced by office workers, who were allowed to put on these performances only on Mondays when they didn’t want to come to work. I’d never been sick in my life.
“What did you do last night?”
“I sat at my desk but couldn’t write.”
An ice-cold glint flashed in Wolfgang’s eyes. “Take your time! No one is forcing you to work so fast that you lose your inner peace.” Wolfgang was smelling of lies again, I shuddered involuntarily.
“Hunger isn’t the best friend of poetry. Let’s go shopping.”
“I don’t have any money.”
“Then we’ll open a bank account for you. Our boss already made the suggestion.”
On the way to the bank, we passed two giant elephants standing at the side of the road. They were made of a gray substance, perhaps concrete.
“Is there a circus here?”
“No, that’s the entrance to the zoo.”
“Animals made of concrete live behind the gate?”
“No! Many real animals live in the zoo. They live on large properties surrounded by fences.”
“Even the lions, leopards, and horses?”
“That’s right. You’ll find more than one hundred different species here.”
I was flabbergasted.
What we did in the bank after this was surely not criminal, but afterward I had a bad conscience. We went into a building that bore a mysterious logo. Wolfgang whispered something to the man at the window, and they spoke for a little while in hushed voices. Then the man produced a paper with a magic spell on it. I stamped the shape of my paw-hand on the page instead of a signature and opened my first bank account. They said it would be one week before my ATM card was ready. Wolfgang showed me how to get money out of an ATM with a card. I noticed that he spread his thighs unnecessarily wide when he stood before the machine. Next he showed me a supermarket that had been built in the tunnel beneath a railway overpass. At the very back of the store, where the coldest goods were displayed in the brightest light, was the smoked salmon. “I won’t be able to visit you for the next few days because I’ve been given a very important assignment. I’ll be back in a week. Then we can go pick up your ATM card together. This ration of salmon will have to last until then. Don’t eat too much!”
I ate the entire armful of salmon Wolfgang had bought me that same evening. During the days that followed I ate nothing at all but fortunately felt no hunger.
“You shouldn’t eat so much Canadian salmon!” Wolfgang cautioned me in a measured tone of voice when he opened my refrigerator door the next week. I gasped because it was clear that on the inside he was berating me and would have liked to start screaming at the top of his lungs. But he kept his voice under control and spoke calmly, meticulously avoiding all discriminatory language. I felt like a circus performer who’s made an acrobatic error in front of her audience. My thoughts kept circling senselessly around the question of why I shouldn’t eat too much Canadian salmon. “What’s wrong with Canada?”
Wolfgang appeared to be frantically looking for an image that would explain the problem in simple terms. “Canada isn’t to blame for the expensive salmon that find their way there. The problem is they’re eating up your savings. It’s important to save money.” I didn’t understand what exactly he meant by that, but I did note that the word “Canada” sounded beautiful and cool.
“Were you ever in Canada?” I asked him.
“No.”
“Do you know what sort of country it is?”
“A very cold one.”
When I heard that, I wanted to move to Canada right away.
The adjective “cold” has such an appealing sound. I’d give up anything to experience such cold, for Ice Queen beauty, for shivering jouissance. The ice-cold truth. Acrobatic marvels that give you cold feet. A talent that makes all your competitors blanch and tremble as if frozen. Rationality honed sharp as an icicle. Cold has a broad spectrum.
“Is it really that cold in Canada?”
“Yes, it’s incredibly cold there.”
I dreamed of a frozen city in which the walls of all the buildings were made of transparent ice. Instead of cars, salmon swam through the streets.
I lived with my windows open wide day and night. To me, Berlin was a tropical city. Some nights, the heat held me in its grip and wouldn’t let me fall into sleep. Although it was February, the temperature rose to above freezing. I made up my mind once and for all to emigrate to Canada. Since I already had a successful experience with exile under my belt, surely it would be possible for me to go into exile a second time.
One week later I went to the bank, accompanied by Wolfgang, to pick up the new ATM card for my checking account. I pushed the hard, rectangular card into the slot in the machine, pressed the number 1 four times (that was my PIN), and watched the machine spit out banknotes. Then I pressed the number 2 four times. “What are you doing? You’ve already got your money,” Wolfgang said in a low but razor-sharp voice. I wanted to know whether the machine might spit out something else, something more interesting, if I put in a different code.
The second time I visited the supermarket, my nose was immediately confounded by all the many smells. I couldn’t remember where the salmon was. This supermarket was selling far too many absurd, unnecessary items instead of offering only what mattered — the salmon. I asked Wolfgang for an explanation of every product that interested me. “What’s that? Can you eat that?” There were so many things I’d never seen before. The animal world is not without its culinary oddities, for example animals who prefer to eat leaves that have been stripped from their branches, roots dug up from the soil, or windfall apples. But this is nothing compared to the curiosities beloved by human beings: the grease they smear on their cheeks, the thick liquid they color their claws with, tiny little sticks they probably use to pick their noses, bags for temporarily storing things that will later be thrown away, the paper they use to wipe their bottoms, the round plates made of paper for throwing away, and the notebooks for children with a panda bear on the cover. All these products smelled strange. My paws started itching the moment I touched them.
I was sick of smelling the supermarket odor and just wanted to get back to my study, where my autobiography awaited me. When I said this to Wolfgang, he was relieved.
My desk wasn’t to my liking anymore, it now seemed too low to me — too low for writing a proper autobiography. If the manuscript paper could lie right in front of my nose, close enough to soak up a nosebleed if necessary, I would be able to sit there calmly, letting the memories come as they would. Perhaps the solitude was weighing on me, though I’d been the one who’d asked Wolfgang to leave the room.
For days, I saw neither hide nor hair of him. Perhaps the bank account had been intended to take the place of a love affair. Money was wired to my account, I withdrew it, went shopping, and ate what I had bought. Then I’d come calling again, an impetuous lover ringing the doorbell, and my beloved would appear in the form of banknotes. I couldn’t eat them, so I went to the supermarket and exchanged them for salmon. I ate and ate and ate, and it was never enough. I could clearly feel part of my brain regressing a little more each day. At night I tossed and turned, and then when morning arrived I couldn’t heave myself out of bed. My limbs were as weak as noodles, my mood poorly lit. It was a degeneration. I wanted to do something to stop it. I dreamed of rehearsing a new number in bitter cold to reap the audience’s thunderous applause.
•
I left the house. With an ear-splitting roar, a motorcycle flew by, right in front of my nose. I too had owned a motorcycle once, many years before, one made specially for me. The sound of its motor frightened me so badly that at first I kept my distance. I was quite good by then at riding my tricycle, but not a bicycle. So they made me a three-wheeled motorcycle that couldn’t tip over. Ivan kept playing a tape of motor noise in front of my cage so I’d get used to it. Yes, I was in a cage. The word “cage” offended my sensibilities. I lost all desire to keep writing.
I tossed my pen aside and went downtown. The woman walking in front of me had on a fur coat. She looked as if she’d slipped into a pile of dead foxes. Through walls made of glass I could see not only the wares laid out for display in the shops but also what was on the plates of the guests in a restaurant. The boredom of the passersby was apparently considerable, since they scrutinized every product in the shop windows and every plate in the restaurant if the windows were big enough. If they were bored enough to take an interest in the meals being consumed by restaurant patrons they didn’t know, surely they would find a story about a child in a cage exceptionally diverting.
Diagonally across from the bank was a bookstore. The bookseller’s white sweater had recently caught my eye several times. On this day, I ventured to go into the shop because at first no one was visible inside. As I stood there dumbfounded amid the high shelves, it almost scared me out of my wits when a voice at my back asked whether I was looking for any book in particular. The white sweater was standing right behind me. Since it was blocking the exit, I couldn’t beat a retreat.
“Do you have an autobiography?”
“By whom? If you don’t mind my asking.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
The white sweater indicated a shelf off to one side behind him, saying, “All of these are autobiographies!”
I was apparently now capable of improvising a brief conversation in German.
It was disappointing to know how many fat autobiographies already existed. They filled the ten stories of this bookshelf from top to bottom without leaving a gap. Apparently an autobiography was the sort of text that got written by anyone capable of holding a pen.
“All in German!?”
“What’s so strange about that?”
“Must one write in German? I must learn German.”
“Not necessary. The language you’re speaking at the moment is what we call German.”
“I can speak — that’s in my nature. But reading and writing . . .”
“Then we should pay a visit to that shelf over there. We have a large selection of language textbooks. Would you like to have one with explanations in English?”
“No, Russian. Or Northpolish.”
“I think I actually do have a textbook written in Russian.”
My German textbook was more economically priced than a large package of salmon, but unfortunately harder to digest. The book’s author explained in great detail — like the assembly instructions for a piece of machinery — each linguistic component, such as verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc. But it was unlikely that these explanations would enable the book’s readers to build a machine themselves. At the back of the book, I found a section with the heading “Applied Grammar”; it contained a short story that one was supposed to read. I devoured it like the salmon, forgetting all about grammar.
•
The protagonist was a mouse. Her form of gainful employment: singing. Her audience: the people. On the vocabulary list I found the word Volk, which corresponded to the Russian narod.
There had been times when I was convinced that the word narod meant more or less the same as “circus audience.” Later, at numerous conferences and assemblies, I came to realize that this supposition had not been correct, but I remained unable to define the term exactly, though my lack of knowledge was never conspicuous.
As long as the mouse went on singing, the Volk gave her its full attention. No one aped her, no one giggled, no one disrupted her concerts by making mouse noises. This is just how my own audience behaved, too, and my heart leaped as I remembered the circus. Every member of my audience was capable of walking on two legs or riding on three wheels. Nevertheless they gaped at me as if I were performing a miracle. And in the end they generously applauded. But why?
The second time I visited, the bookseller came up to me right away, gave a dry cough and asked whether the language textbook had been helpful. “I didn’t understand the grammar, but the short story was interesting. The story of the mouse singer Josephine.” My answer made him laugh.
“The grammar is superfluous if you understood the story.” He plucked another book off the shelf. “This is a book by the same author. Among other things, he wrote several stories from the point of view of animals.” When our eyes met, something seemed to occur to him that he found puzzling. Hurriedly he added: “What I mean is that this literature is valuable as literature, not because it was written from a minority perspective. In fact, the main character is never an animal. During the process by which an animal is transformed into a non-animal or a human into a non-human, memory gets lost, and it’s this loss that is the main character.” To me, his lecture was too much side salad without a main course. I couldn’t follow, but I didn’t want him to notice. So I lowered my eyes and pretended to be having profound thoughts about the book. After a while, a question finally occurred to me: “What’s your name?” My question caught the man off guard. “Oh, sorry! I’m Friedrich.” He didn’t ask mine.
I opened the book the way you might break a loaf of peasant bread in two. My nails were too long to make it easy to flip through a book’s pages. In earlier years, I’d attempted to trim them but wound up spilling a lot of blood. Now I just let them grow. From the open page of the book, a title containing the word “dog” leaped out at me. In all honesty, I couldn’t stand dogs: cowardly, deceitful creatures who would innocently scamper up to me from behind, only to sink their teeth into my ankle at the first opportunity. I would have gone on avoiding all dogs if this animal hadn’t been contained in the title rolling melodiously off Friedrich’s tongue: “Investigations of a Dog.” A dog, then, could possess an inquiring mind. This revelation took the edge off my bias against the species. Friedrich showed me another story from the book, the subject this time was an academy. “You might find this story even more interesting than the one about the dog.” A happy schoolteacher would no doubt look exactly the way Friedrich looked at this moment.
I bought the volume of stories and right away read “A Report to an Academy.” Unfortunately I must confess I found this ape story interesting. But my interest might be attributed to various causes, it might even have been prompted by rage. The more I read, the more unbridled my rage became, and I couldn’t stop reading. The ape was of a tropical nature — cause enough for me to find this ape tale unpalatable. It struck me as the pinnacle of apishness to not only want to become human but to tell the story of one’s own transformation. I imagined an ape aping a human being, and my back immediately started to itch unbearably, as though lice and fleas were dancing the twist in my fur. The ape narrator apparently believed he had written a success story. But if you asked me, I’d lose no time telling you I don’t consider it progress to walk on two legs.
I felt sick to my stomach remembering how, as a child, I’d learned to walk on two legs. And I didn’t just learn to do this, I even wrote and published a text about it. Probably my readers thought my apish report had been written in support of evolutionary theory. If I’d read the ape’s report earlier, I’d have written my autobiography in a completely different way.
The next day, Wolfgang surprised me. Right away I told him about the ape, who was still on my mind. Wolfgang’s reaction was a look of horror. “Write your own text if you’ve got the time to be reading other people’s books! An author who does nothing but read is lazy. Reading books is robbing you of the time you could be using to write.”
“But this way I can learn German. I’ll write in German, and you can save time. No more translations.”
“No, that’s out of the question! You have to write in your own mother tongue. You’re supposed to be pouring out your heart, and that needs to happen in a natural way.”
“What’s my mother tongue?”
“The language your mother speaks.”
“I’ve never spoken with my mother.”
“A mother is a mother, even if you never speak with her.”
“I don’t think my mother spoke Russian.”
“Ivan was your mother. Have you forgotten? The age of female mothers is over.”
I was confused because Wolfgang didn’t smell of lies, in other words he was saying something he believed to be true, but I couldn’t trust him. It was surely his boss’s idea to impose Russian on me so his translator could twist my text to suit his political purposes. Bees can turn the nectar of flowers into honey. Nectar already tastes sweet in and of itself, but the deep, overpowering flavor of honey comes about through the process of fermentation set in motion by disgusting fluids disgorged from those insects’ bodies. My knowledge, by the way, comes from handouts I received at a conference on The Future of Beekeeping. Wolfgang and his friends wanted to add their bodily fluids to my autobiography and turn it into a different product. To escape this danger, I would have to write directly in German. And this time I would supply the title.
Wolfgang said he didn’t want to keep me any longer from my writing and left the apartment. I watched him from my window. Only when he had disappeared on a bus did I leave the house to pay a visit to my bookstore. This time, there was a customer in the store. He stood in a corner with his back to me. His hair was of a deep black hue that drew my gaze. Friedrich registered my presence and raised his eyelashes, making his eyes appear larger, while his lips assumed the shape of a friendly smile. “How are you? It’s cold today,” he said.
I always feel myself being thrust back into loneliness when someone tells me it’s cold on a hot day. It isn’t good to talk so much about the weather — weather is a highly personal matter, and communication on the subject inevitably fails.
“‘A Report to an Academy’ was entertaining, but I couldn’t follow the ape’s line of thought. It’s ridiculous the way he imitates human beings.”
“But did you ask yourself whether this was a voluntary choice on the ape’s part?”
“He couldn’t help it. That’s what he writes. He had no other way out.”
“Precisely. I think that’s what the author was getting at. Even we human beings didn’t become as we are voluntarily — we were forced to change in order to survive. There was never a choice.”
At this moment the unknown customer, who until then had been immersed in a book, turned around and carefully used his fingertips to correct his eyeglasses.
“The brand name Darwin proves a bestseller yet again! Why do women paint their faces? Why do they lie? Why are they always jealous? Why do men go to war? The only answer to all these questions is: that’s what evolution wanted. It justifies everything. But I can’t think of a single reason why it should be good for the planet for noxious Homo sapiens to produce offspring. Can you, Friedrich?”
The voice of the one thus addressed cracked as he cried out: “My brother!” The black-haired man and Friedrich embraced warmly, but they immediately noticed when I tried to slip out of the store so as not to disturb them. Bookseller Friedrich ushered me back into the store and introduced me to his brother: “This is the author of ‘Thunderous Applause for My Tears.’” I was astonished. All along, Friedrich had known who I was!
Friedrich was the main reason I visited his bookstore so often. The male members of the species Homo sapiens appealed to me a great deal. They were soft and small and had fragile but adorable teeth. Their fingers were delicately constructed, the fingernails all but nonexistent. Sometimes they reminded me of stuffed animals, lovely to hold in one’s arms.
One day a woman lay in wait for me in the store. She was an acquaintance of Friedrich’s, was called Annemarie, and belonged to an organization that worked in support of human rights. She wanted to interview me, to speak with me about the situation of artists and athletes in the Eastern Bloc. I replied that human rights weren’t a primary concern of mine. She looked first disappointed and then, a second later, horrified.
I began to realize that my fate and the fate of human rights were inextricably entwined. Still, I didn’t know the first thing about them. The concept of human rights had been invented by people who were thinking only of human beings. Dandelions don’t have human rights, and neither do reindeer, raindrops, or hares. At most a whale. I remembered a text I had once read for a conference on the topic Whaling and Capitalism. It averred that larger mammals enjoyed more rights than smaller animals, like mice for example, and attributed the discrepancy to the tastes of a certain group of people, who valued larger things more than small ones. And among the mammals that are not vegetarians and don’t live underwater, we polar bears are the largest. Apart from this theory, I couldn’t think of any other reason why people kept chasing after me to give me human rights.
Annemarie had already left the shop. I stood empty-headed between the shelves, withstanding Friedrich’s piercingly solemn gaze only with great difficulty. “Don’t you have a new book for me?” Friedrich handed me a book. “Here, Atta Troll, that’s one for you. A positively bearish text.” The name Heinrich Heine was written on the cover. I opened the book at random to one of the few pages with illustrations and beheld a black bear lying with front and back legs outstretched. He was so attractive that I couldn’t bring myself to put the book down. When I went to pay, Friedrich touched my paw-hand tenderly and said, “Your hand is cold. Are you cold?” My smile tasted bitter.
The next morning I had nothing but reproaches for him. “You sold me an indigestible book!”
“There are reasons for that. The author may have twisted things around to avoid being attacked by his enemies.”
“What wolf do you suppose was after him?”
“The censor, for one thing.”
“Zen sir? I don’t understand.”
“Censor. The sensor of power. Didn’t you ever hear about censorship in the Soviet Union?”
I searched around in my brain for this concept but found only confusion. “Is that why writers write such complicated sentences?”
“Even when the author writes as simply as possible, it can still appear complicated to the reader.” Friedrich picked up the book, leafed through it, and said: “You’ve got to read these lines! You won’t regret having spent your money on this book.”
The lines he was pointing to declared that Nature can’t have bestowed any rights on human beings, since rights aren’t natural.
Friedrich said: “If human beings want to possess human rights, they have to give animals animal rights. But how do I justify the fact that yesterday I ate meat? I lack the courage to think this thought through to the end. My brother, by the way, became a vegetarian some time ago.” His gaze was prodding me for a response.
“I can’t become a vegetarian,” I said quickly, although I knew that my ancestors and distant relations got by without meat. They ate primarily vegetables and fruit, and only occasionally a brown crab or fish. I remembered a conference on capitalism and meat-eating at which I was asked why I killed other animals. I didn’t know how to respond.
•
Sometimes I lashed out, which I feel ashamed of today. I can hear our teacher urging her charges on: “Now let’s all dance together in a circle!” It was impossible for me to join this circle. The teacher took me by the paw and led me into the circle. Similar situations repeated themselves several times, and eventually the teacher stopped including me and left me alone. I stood in a corner of the room and observed the goings-on. One day a child asked the teacher why I wasn’t participating. She replied that it was because I was egotistical, and in that same moment she received such a shove that she fell right on her bottom. It wasn’t me — it was a muscular reflex that moved me to violence. Terrified by my own actions, I jumped out the fourth floor window, landing uninjured on the ground. Then I took off running in a random direction. No one could catch me. Since that day I was on the books as a problem child. I was seen as athletic but antisocial. I was to be shipped off to a special institute for talented children, since athletic ability was considered a valuable asset in our country. The so-called institute they brought me to was a cage. No ray of sunlight reached me there. A damp, dismal feeling returned to me as I remembered the cage. In front of the cage stood Ivan. My time in kindergarten seems to have preceded my first meeting with him.
•
Someone knocked at the door, my autobiography paused. It was Wolfgang, accompanied by a man I didn’t know. As I then learned, he was the leader of the citizens’ initiative KAOS. He had apparently been tipped off to the fact that my German sufficed for casual conversation.
“How are you?”
His question, which he posed with an artificial smile, sounded like a test. His last name was Jäger, which I knew meant “hunter.” In my ears, the name sounded cruel and sly. He had a gentlemanly face. His white beard make him look like an officer. Men with this sort of visage sometimes sat in the front row at the circus.
“How is your autobiography coming along? Are you making good progress?”
Hearing this question made me defiant. I was afraid he was going to steal my opus.
“I am making slow, difficult progress,” I said. “The language gets in my way.”
“The language?”
“Well, to be specific: German.”
Herr Jäger shot Wolfgang a reproachful look. I could sense that he was seething, but his voice remained calm and reserved as he said to me: “I thought we had communicated quite clearly that you are to write in your own language, since we have a fantastic translator.”
“My own language? I don’t know which language that is. Probably one of the North Pole languages.”
“I see, a joke. Russian is the most magnificent literary language in the world.”
“Somehow I don’t seem to know Russian anymore.”
“That’s impossible! Write whatever you want, but in your own language, please. And you needn’t be concerned about making a living. As long as you keep writing, we’ll keep paying your bills.” His face had a smile stretched across it, but the odor streaming from his armpits was one of cunning deceit. Human beings are constantly trying to sell me their generosity, the better to manipulate me. I wanted to ask Wolfgang for help, but all I saw of him was his back. He appeared more interested in the window than in me.
“I’m quite certain your autobiography will be a bestseller.”
This visit by these two men made my pen go limp. Of course, the image of a pen standing up vertically or not strikes me as unduly masculine. As a female I am more inclined to say: The smaller the newborn text, the better, because then it has a better chance at survival. Besides, I require absolute silence. A mother bear gives birth to her children in a dark cave, all alone. She tells no one about the birth, uses her tongue to lick her offspring, which she can hardly see, and then feels the sensation in her breast when the newborns begin to suckle. No one may see her young: they are smelled and touched but never seen. Only after the children have reached a certain size does the mother leave the cave with them. It can happen that their father, half-starved, catches sight of these small animals and eats them up without knowing they are his own flesh and blood. A classic theme. The ancient Greeks wrote about similar cases. In my opinion, father polar bears ought to take a lesson from the penguins, with both parents incubating the eggs in shifts. For a penguin dad, eating the eggs would be unthinkable. He sits on the eggs, waiting day and night for weeks in raging snowstorms for the return of his wife, who’s off looking for food.
“All penguin marriages are alike, while every polar bear marriage is different,” I wrote in Russian and demonstratively placed the manuscript page on my desk so Herr Jäger would see it right away if he visited unannounced. As expected, Herr Jäger and Wolfgang showed up again several days later and immediately found the sentence I’d left for them. Wolfgang translated it into German and exclaimed euphorically: “Weltliteratur!”
Herr Jäger took my paw-hand and said: “Do keep writing. The faster, the better! Later there’ll be time to cut and refine. The greatest possible error is to think too much and write too slowly.” Apparently he meant to encourage me with these words.
“Before my exile, I had a lot to write about. The topics kept multiplying like maggots on a corpse. But now that I’m here, I’ve lost all connection to what I used to be. It’s as if the thread of my memory has been cut. I can’t find a way forward.”
“Probably you aren’t yet acclimated.”
“It’s unbearably hot here. I can’t stand the heat.”
“But it’s winter, and your hands are cold.”
“They’re supposed to be. It’s a waste of energy to always keep the tips of one’s hands and feet warm. The main thing is that my heart stays warm.”
“Maybe you’ve caught a cold.”
“I’ve never been sick in my life. Just a bit exhausted sometimes.”
“When you’re exhausted, you can watch television, for example.” Herr Jäger concluded his visit with this helpful suggestion and set off for home accompanied by Wolfgang. In their sagging shoulders, I discerned mild disappointment.
The moment the two of them had left my field of vision, I turned on the television. A woman who reminded me of a panda bear stood before a colorful patchwork map speaking in a high-pitched voice. Tomorrow, she said, it would be three degrees colder. Her voice sounded dramatic, as though this difference of three degrees would have an impact on world politics. I changed the channel and found myself looking at two panda bears. Two politicians stood outside their cage, shaking hands. I found these panda bears meddling in human politics improper. But then it occurred to me that I, too, was involved in politics, so in that sense I was no better than these pandas. Locked in my invisible cage, I am living proof of human rights violations, and I’m not even human.
I turned off the television, which wanted to go on torturing me with boring images. On the dark screen, the blurry figure of a corpulent woman appeared. This was me: a woman with narrow shoulders and a low forehead. Because of her pointy snout, she wasn’t as cute as the pandas. I began to knead my inferiority complex like a yeasty dough. This activity was familiar to me from childhood. But then a pair of sparklers lit up in my eyeballs.
Yes, that’s exactly how it used to be. There was someone to comfort me. When was that?
•
I was the only girl who was white and sturdily built; all the others were slender and brown. They had stubby noses and wide foreheads. I could see their pride in their shoulders. “I envy the other girls. They look beautiful,” I said with coquettish sentimentality, “I want to be like them.” Then the human being in question said: “They’re all brown bears, and in case you don’t know yet: not every bear is a brown bear. Stay just the way you are. Besides, given the wildness of your character, you could attract a large audience if you were to pursue a career on the stage.” He stood there holding a broom in his hand. He was one of the many workers who cleaned the daycare centers and schools. They were always there, but I never learned their names. No one ever called them by name. During the day, they worked anonymously, and in the evenings they probably lived with their families, using only their first names. I thanked the man — one of the countless workers — for his words.
I was a strong girl and could toss my playmates around like nothing, and one day, when I was yet again flinging some kid into the air, the child called me an ugly name that surprised me. Suddenly I noticed that all the children except me wore the exact same kerchief tied around their necks. I did not belong. Unlike them, I didn’t live with my parents. Perhaps that’s why the stage became my home, and that’s where my life unfolded. I was free, I received applause and experienced such ecstasy I nearly fainted.
•
Wolfgang visited me unaccompanied. Against my better judgment, I couldn’t resist showing him my fresh-baked manuscript, so steaming fresh. Wolfgang read it through without taking off his jacket or sitting down. When he had read the last sentence, he plopped his body down into a chair like a heavy sack and said: “At times I felt so desperate I went back to biting my fingernails. It was a terrible task, trying to keep you motivated. Your creativity is back. I’m so relieved!”
“Do you think it’s good?”
“Absolutely! Just keep writing. The neckerchief episode is sure to be a hit. All the other children belonged to the Young Pioneers — all except you. When I was growing up, we had an organization called the Scouts. My friends were all members, and they all had the same kerchief tied around their necks. I envied them; I wasn’t allowed to participate.”
“Why couldn’t you participate?”
“My mother was against it. She said it was an ideology, and I didn’t understand what she meant.”
“What sort of ideology?”
“I’m not sure exactly. Maybe something like self-sacrifice. Sacrificing yourself for the fatherland, say. My mother said they shouldn’t plant ideas like that in children’s heads.”
“That was her opinion?”
“Yes. What was your mother like?”
“The weather’s so beautiful today. Let’s go out.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“I’d like to have a look at a department store.”
The building that was called a department store was a somewhat sadder version of the supermarket. There were fewer goods for sale per square foot than in a supermarket, and hardly any visitors. A salmon grill. A flowered bedsheet. A large mirror. A ladies’ handbag made of something like sealskin. We came to an area of the store with no customers at all. Loud music was trying to fill the empty space. A gramophone stood on a pedestal, and right beside it, a life-size, black-spotted white dog made of plastic. You could see his image on each of the phonograph records, which I found pathologically excessive. Wolfgang said, “a Dalmatian,” adding with a proud expression on his face, as if he’d just made an extraordinary discovery: “You know what? Dogs can look so different, but they’re all still dogs. Isn’t that baffling?”
I wanted to respond that I had already read this very same idea in “Investigations of a Dog,” but I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t want Wolfgang to think that I had gone and read a book yet again.
The department store didn’t just absorb my attention, it consumed my strength, even though I wasn’t looking for anything. I found no products I wanted to own. In the end, weariness overcame me, and all that remained was the feeling of being a loser. Next to the department store was an amusement park. I proposed that we pay it a visit. I realized right away that Wolfgang didn’t want to, but, as if exacting my revenge, I didn’t let up and kept sullenly and stubbornly insisting.
We sat side by side on a bench in the amusement park. Wolfgang asked me if I’d watched television.
“Yes, but it was boring. All you could see were panda bears.”
“Why do panda bears bore you?”
“Since they’re born wearing such impressive makeup, they don’t make any effort to be interesting. They neither master any stageworthy tricks nor write autobiographies.”
Wolfgang burst out laughing, which wasn’t typical.
A bone-thin woman walked past, a leather leash rolled up in her hand. But it wasn’t a dog walking in front of her, it was a tall man. Wolfgang got us ice cream in two ridiculously small paper cups. A single swipe of my tongue consumed all the vanilla ice cream. Then this same tongue gave voice to my deepest desire: “I want to emigrate to Canada!”
“What did you just say?”
“I want to emigrate. To CA-NA-DA!”
A bit of ice cream fell from Wolfgang’s tongue-spoon. “Why pick such a cold place?”
“I know you find it comfortable here, but do you really still not understand that it’s much too hot for me?”
Wolfgang’s eyes filled with tears, making him look like a dog. In general, dogs tend to run around like mad in search of their lost pack-mates. They howl plaintively — not out of love, but in existential fear, believing they can survive only in groups. I’m not egotistical, but I prefer to remain alone because this is the more rational, practical choice for effective foraging.
I took my taciturn leave of Wolfgang, looking forward to continuing my work in peace. I urgently wanted to return to my childhood gramophone memories. But what came into my head in the end was the gramophone I’d just seen in the department store, and next to it, to add insult to injury, was that snotty Dalmatian, behaving as if his inclusion went without saying — and he wasn’t even a real dog. The department store had replaced my recollection with a name-brand product.
Writing an autobiography means guessing or making up everything you’ve forgotten. I thought I’d already sufficiently described the character Ivan. In reality, I could no longer even remember him. Or rather: I was starting to remember him all too clearly, which could only mean this Ivan was now nothing more than my creation.
My memory lived in my arm’s movement. It surprised me during that conference. Every time I tried to imagine Ivan’s face before me, the painted face of Ivan the Foolish in a children’s book appeared.
New misgivings about my work began to germinate in me. Instead of concentrating on my autobiography, I picked up a book that I didn’t have to write myself, thank goodness, since someone else had already written it. I was reading to avoid writing, but perhaps it was more forgivable if I reread a book I’d read before instead of starting a new one. The dog in the story “Investigations of a Dog” was occupied with the present, he chose griping and brooding over cobbling together a plausible childhood. Why can’t I write the present? Why do I have to invent an authentic-sounding past? The author of the dog story never wrote an autobiography. Instead he enjoyed being now a monkey, now a mouse. During the day he assumed human form and went about his professional business. At night he bent over his writing. Once I was in Prague for a conference. The name Kafka was never mentioned. This city, too, experienced a spring later on, but Kafka lived long before, even before it was winter. He didn’t know life in our country, but he did know what I mean when I say that no one can ever act entirely according to his own free will.
One tropical day followed another. Within my roasting brain cells, the scraps of thought refused to cohere. In a land of snow and ice, I could have cooled my head and felt fresh again. I want to emigrate to Canada! I’d already escaped from the East to the West. But how can one escape from the West to the West? One day, though, I was waylaid by the correct answer to this question.
While out for a walk, I discovered a landscape covered with snow and ice. It was locked up inside a poster. Other posters hung beside it on the wall, and I realized I was standing in front of a movie theater. Without hesitation I looked for the entrance and bought a ticket as casually as if I did this every day, even though it was my first time at the movies. A Canadian film showed me life at the North Pole. Arctic hares, silver foxes, white carnivores, gray whales, seals, sea otters, orcas, and polar bears. Life there struck me as unimaginable, but at the same time I knew that this was the daily life of my ancestors.
On my way home, I took the shortcut through a dimly lit alleyway behind the train station. Five teenagers were standing around, and one of them was using a spray can to scrawl mysterious symbols on the wall. I was curious, so I stopped and observed them without commentary. The smallest one noticed my presence and tried to shoo me away. “Get out of here!”
I just can’t stand it when someone tries to exclude me from a group. Stubbornly, I refused to retreat even a single step. The other four youths one by one became aware of me. One of them asked where I was from. “Moscow.” Suddenly all five boys jumped on me as if “Moscow” were a code word signifying “Attack!” I didn’t want to injure these young, skinny humans with their soft, naked scalps, but I had to defend myself. So I distributed gentle blows with an open paw. The first boy fell on his bottom and, unable to get up again, gaped at me in surprise. The second one flew through the air, got up again, clenched his teeth and tried to ram me, but went sailing through the air once more, light as a feather. The third took a knife out of his jacket pocket and wanted to stab me. He approached, I bided my time, stepping to one side only at the very last moment, then turned around and pushed him — he slammed into a parked car, lost all self-control and hurled himself at me, his lip split open. I slipped aside again and gave him a gentle nudge from behind. He fell down, quickly got up — but this time, he took off. His friends were long since out of sight.
Homo sapiens is sluggish in its movements, as if it had too much superfluous flesh, but at the same time it is pathetically thin. It blinks too often, particularly at decisive moments when it needs to see everything. When nothing’s happening, it finds some reason for frenetic movement, but when actual danger threatens, its responses are far too slow. Homo sapiens is not made for battle, so it ought to be like rabbits and deer and learn the wisdom and the art of flight. But it loves battle and war. Who made these foolish creatures? Some humans claim to be made in God’s image — what an insult to God. There are, however, in the northern reaches of our Earth, small tribes who can still remember that God looked like a bear.
On the ground lay a leather jacket of good quality. I took it home with me as a present for Wolfgang.
As if on cue, Wolfgang showed up the next day.
“I found a leather jacket on the street, and it’s too small for me. Do you want to try it on?”
At first Wolfgang glanced indifferently at the jacket, then his face froze. “Where did you get this jacket? Don’t you see the swastika?”
There was in fact a sort of cross painted on the jacket. I was horrified. Had I beaten up a team of Red Cross workers? Quickly I hunted for an excuse: “They attacked me first. It was self-defense.”
Fumes of rage were emanating from Wolfgang’s face. Probably it was all a misunderstanding, I wanted to get it unknotted as quickly as possible. “Really, I hardly touched them. If necessary, I’ll go see them and apologize. They misunderstood me. I said ‘Moscow,’ and the whole group attacked me. Is ‘Moscow’ a code word?”
Wolfgang sat down with a sigh and explained to me that according to recent statistics, most neo-Nazi attacks were carried out against Russian Germans as pale as me, as opposed to people with dark skin or black Ottoman hair. Those with radical right-wing leanings, he said, feared individuals who looked like them but were nonetheless different.
“I don’t look like them,” I protested.
“Maybe not. But a name like Moscow can stir up feelings, sometimes even rage.”
Wolfgang called the head of KAOS and then informed the police. Later someone showed me a newspaper article about an author in exile being assaulted by right-wing extremists. Since I hadn’t been injured at all, the article didn’t say that the victim had been hospitalized with serious injuries, which would have made the story more newsworthy. I hadn’t gotten so much as a scratch, but the fact is nonetheless that I — a female — had been attacked by five men, justification enough for Wolfgang and his friends to ask the Canadian embassy whether Canada would accept me as a political refugee since it was too dangerous for me to remain in the Federal Republic of Germany. I suspected KAOS of wanting to get rid of me because I was eating too much salmon and writing too little. “So now we sit back,” Wolfgang said in a rosy voice with lots of thorns, “and wait to hear from the Canadian embassy.”
•
My longing for this ice-cold land remained as powerful as ever, but an unexpected worry sprang up within me. At first it seemed insignificant, expressing itself only hesitantly in the question: Would I have to learn English? Had all the effort I’d put into learning German been in vain? I hoped it won’t confuse me to be suddenly writing my life in several languages at the same time. Another worry that now surfaced seemed even more threatening than the first: Everything I’ve already committed to paper is safeguarded from loss, it’s been saved. But what about the events awaiting me in the new world? I can’t learn the new language as quickly as life moves forward. Something that can disappear is called “I.” Dying means not being here any longer. I never was afraid of death before, but having begun my autobiography, I now felt frightened: I might die before I finish writing my life.
My ancestors were no doubt unacquainted with insomnia. Compared to them, I ate too much and slept too little. My evolution was clearly a regression. I pulled out the bottle of vodka that I kept in my hiding place behind the desk for sleepless nights. In Moscow, I’d needed my good connections to get hold of a bottle of Moskovskaya, but in West Berlin you can buy it at every train station kiosk. I held the bottle to my snout like a trumpet, and, as if blowing a fanfare, quenched my thirst. At some point I could no longer remove the bottle from my face. When I tried to pull it off, it hurt. It had grown into me. I was a unicorn and saw a polar bear approaching me, and my terror threw me into the ice-cold water. The polar bear stood there with no prey in his mouth, panting in irritation. I knew him, he was my uncle. Why did he want to eat me? “Dear uncle,” I said in a friendly voice, but he bared his teeth at me and roared. Oh, that’s right, he didn’t understand my language. No wonder. In the water, I felt safe, the water was my element. Beside me, another unicorn was swimming. She whispered to me: “You can’t afford to be drunk. Watch out! The orcas are coming.”
“What nonsense. There aren’t any orcas here,” yet another unicorn replied.
“Yes there are. They’re all emigrating because there’s nothing left to eat in their native countries.”
“Let’s run away together!”
So the three of us swam north, shoulder to shoulder. We dove down into the ice-blue waves and popped back to the surface, we thrust our heads into the sea between bobbing ice floes, then jumped back out again. It was “beastly good fun” — as young people liked to say in those days — to cruise the ocean with friends. Knocking my head against drift ice didn’t hurt a bit. I soon relinquished my vigilance. Then something breached the surface: at first it looked like a small, harmless ice floe, but it turned out to be a gigantic iceberg with only its tip visible. My horn struck the colossus with a cracking sound and broke right off. No matter, I thought aloud, the horn was merely decorative, but soon I was forced to realize that without the horn I had lost all equilibrium. My body spun around its spine and got sucked down into a whirlpool. Help! I need air! I saw many newborn seals struggling with their little hands. Apparently they were drowning just like me. I would have liked to make a snack of them if I hadn’t been so caught up in my own drowning.
The images of the night vanished, I woke up and suddenly felt afraid of setting off for Canada. I forced myself to sit down at my desk, but was not yet in control of all my senses and let my gaze drift out the window. On the street, a boy was riding very slowly on a strange bicycle that resembled a dachshund. When he tugged hard on the handlebars, the front wheel rose up in the air, and the boy was riding on only the back wheel. He rode in a circle for a little while, then let the front wheel return to Earth. Then he turned around, still riding, so that in the end he was sitting backward. Clearly he was in training for the circus stage, even if he didn’t know when or even if he would ever be allowed to perform. Then he fell over on his side as if a wicked, invisible hand suddenly had given him a shove. His bare knees turned red. But no pain could keep him from continuing. He got up and for his next number attempted a headstand on the moving bike. The words “steering wheel” occurred to me — that’s it, a steering wheel is just what I need to steer my destiny. For this, I’ll have to keep writing my autobiography. My bicycle is my language. I won’t write about the past, I’ll write about all the things that are still going to happen to me. My life will unfold in exactly the way I’ve set it down on the page.
•
At the airport in Toronto I was given a warm-hearted welcome by an icy wind. I knew how I could present a scene in which I was met at the airport by strangers, but that would have repeated the scene in Berlin which I had already written. How is an author to avoid repetition when one and the same scene keeps repeating itself in her life? How did others who emigrated to Canada write about their lives? When faced with such questions, the best recourse is to visit a good bookstore.
“The literature of migration is over there.” Friedrich pointed me to a shelf that still bore its old label, Philosophy. There was such a large selection I couldn’t decide which spine to touch first. Friedrich recommended three books to me, and I bought all three of them.
According to the first book, the Canadian state treated new immigrants well from the moment they arrived. For each newly naturalized citizen, a ceremony was organized at Town Hall at which the mayor himself appeared, shook the hand of each new citizen, and presented a bouquet. I copied out this passage.
In the next scene, the book’s narrator was attending a language school. The thought of this new language was weighing heavily on my mind. German was still new enough to me, I didn’t need an even newer language. A photo in the book showed a classroom in the language school, filled with flimsy, rickety chairs. I thought it might not be worth emigrating if it meant cramming my bottom into a narrow little chair to study more new grammar. And then the author wrote that the classroom was well heated, in fact almost so much so that you might worry about the waste of energy. But all such worries were ill-founded, the narrator explained, for Canada has an unlimited energy supply at its disposal. What a terrifying thought! I was fed up to my pointy snout with this book, so I threw it into a corner and picked up the second one. The author of this book had traveled by boat from the south of the New Continent to the north and secretly snuck into Canada. “I arrived at night, in the dark, in a small, deserted fishing village. I was freezing cold, so I took off my heavy, sea-water-soaked clothing and wrapped myself in a fishing net. The smell of seaweed filled my nose.” The cold, soaked clothing and the smell of seaweed were so much to my liking that I greedily copied out this passage. But this author didn’t stay on the beach for long either, the next day he went straight to the authorities, and later he too wound up in a language school. I shut the book and opened the third one approximately in the middle, I wanted to land right in the middle of life. Awaiting me there, I found a first encounter, longing, a first kiss: I was immediately drawn in.
•
I enrolled in a vocational training school. At first the only goal I had in mind was learning English. In those days I enjoyed speaking with anyone and everyone, and wasted no time worrying about what others might think of me. In the course of the weeks I spent there, I was increasingly struck by the fact that I was the only one in my class with a snow-white appearance. A feeling of inferiority blossomed like a poisonous flower. No one was insulting me, and probably no one paid any attention to my coloration, but the mirror showed me a pallid face and whispered that I looked unhealthy and sad. I began spending time after class beside a lake at the edge of town, lying in the sun and awaiting the brown miracle, but my nature would not allow any color to stick to me. In my class there was a boy named Christian who made a pleasant impression on me. He asked whether there was something troubling me. Instead of answering his question, I suggested we go swimming together on Sunday. He immediately agreed without making me aware of the slightest barrier.
We lay beside the lake, our bodies wet, showering in the tiny, gentle particles of light cast by the evening sun. Christian was also pale like me, and it was inexplicable to me that I had never before noticed this. I told him of my distress, and he told me the story of the Ugly Duckling. Christian was proud of the town of his birth, Odense, which was also home to the author of this fairy tale. A strange gaiety came over me, our eyes met, and I laid my paw-hand on his head. He slowly bent down and pressed his snout-nose against my breast. While we were flirting, the sun descended the last few steps and disappeared into the basement. The three of us lay there together: Christian, me, and the night.
Christian said he didn’t want to marry me in a church because as drugs go religion was outdated. We celebrated our marriage within our own four walls. Just like that I got pregnant and gave birth to twins: a girl and a boy. The boy died before he had been given a name. I named the girl Tosca.
•
While I was copying out these passages from the book, I entered the story being told as its protagonist. I wanted to adopt what was being told as my own life story and live it myself, down to the last punctuation mark. I read every sentence aloud and copied it down, but at some point I stopped looking at the pages — a voice from inside the book was whispering the story to me. I listened and wrote. This activity cost me a great deal of my life force.
•
My husband and I graduated from the vocational school, adding the crowning achievement of finding work with a watchmaker (him) and as a nurse in a doctor’s office (me). My husband soon joined the Tradesmen’s Union, engaged himself politically, and never got home in time for dinner. On weekends, instead of resting, he would fight even harder for the workers’ cause. Our daughter Tosca grew up raised by me alone. She was a cheerful creature, a source of joy, but she sometimes also brought me embarrassment. She would dance and sing on the street, and when passersby would enthusiastically applaud, she would refuse to stop. One day my husband surprised me with a suggestion: “Let’s flee to the Soviet Union.” An incurable disquiet crept into me. It had cost me so much effort, so much suffering, to leave my native land behind me. What would happen if I were to be recognized there as a traitor? When my husband learned of my worries, he stopped talking about emigrating. I was relieved and thought that the topic of exile had been settled once and for all. My love for Canada was great, though I don’t want to overemphasize this love, since I also loved the United States, or at least the pancakes that were produced there. One week later, I realized I had underestimated my husband’s tenacity. He approached me with a different proposal: “Let’s flee to East Germany! They don’t know anything about your past there. We’ll submit our applications as Canadians and say we want to contribute to the creation of an ideal state. I love Canada as much as you do, but the entire first world is at an impasse. I already told you that my mother in Denmark lost her job because she participated in a leftist demonstration. She came with me to Canada and was soon murdered here by her neurotic lover. If we stay here, we’ll have to keep slaving away and will never earn any more than we do now. We won’t be able to give Tosca a first-class education. She’s extraordinarily talented. In the East, she would receive specialized training for free. She can become a figure skater or a ballet dancer.” When I heard that, my decision to go to East Germany with my family was virtually assured.
•
Out of relief, I sighed, threw myself into bed and let my ear sink into the soft pillow. I lay there like a croissant, embracing Tosca, who had not yet been born. She was still a part of my dream as I gently slept. One thing was certain: one day my daughter would stand on a theater stage, dancing the lead in Tchaikovsky’s Polar Bear Lake. Later she would give birth to a son who would look so adorable that everyone would immediately want to cuddle him. I would call him, my first grandchild, Knut.
•
I gaze out at the wide field: not a house, not a tree, everything is covered in ice all the way to the horizon. With the first step I take, I realize that the ground is made of ice floes. My feet sink along with the floe I’ve just stepped on, already I’m up to my knees in ice-cold water, then my belly is wet, then my shoulders. I have no fear of swimming, and the cool sensation of the icy water is rather pleasant, but I’m not a fish and can’t stay in the water forever. There’s a surface I took to be an edge of the mainland, but the moment I touch it, the entire thing tilts to one side and disappears into the sea. I stop looking for the mainland — just a substantial chunk of ice will do. After several disappointments I finally find an ice floe sturdy enough to bear my weight. I balance on top of it, staring straight ahead, feeling the ice melt away from second to second beneath the warm soles of my feet. This ice island is still as large as my desk, but eventually it will no longer be there. How much longer do I have?