Numberless chimneys stuck out from the tile rooftops. Some of them were short and fat, others looked emaciated. I took one of the broad streets that began at the Gare du Nord and walked straight ahead without looking around so that anyone watching me would think I knew where I was going. Only the five-armed intersections made me uncertain. Here I could no longer say what “straight ahead” meant.
The sky’s curtain was slowly being closed, and the wavy pattern of the cobblestones darkened. Who had taken so much time to arrange these stones so precisely? How could they fit so neatly together? At the point where the pattern of waves gave way to a pattern of snake scales, it began to rain. I stopped in my tracks and looked back: the cobblestones had vanished, replaced by a dull asphalt street. I walked on. High-heeled footsteps approached from behind and overtook me. I saw nothing of the woman’s face, only her tense back. Several others overtook me as well: a man who was pulling up the collar of his summer coat and walking bolt upright as if he might otherwise lose his head; an older woman who showed me her lonely-looking back—perhaps she’d just lost her poodle.
The dark, wet window frames made me think of rings beneath weary eyes. I didn’t have the courage to show someone the slip of paper and ask directions. People flitted past, hurrying toward their unknown destinations.
A shop window filled with old miniatures depicting dogs attracted my attention. I pressed my nose up against the glass to get a better look at the miniatures and etchings. I’d never seen many of the breeds before, yet I realized for the first time in my life that I loved dogs. If I were a dog, I would immediately feel safe in any city.
The wet streets shone black as the snout of a healthy dog. Would the night eventually just swallow me up? I kept walking. The bright neon advertisements of the restaurants blurred together in the moist air.
Randomly turning into an alleyway, I found a shop whose plate-glass window displayed pink, light blue, and yellow umbrellas beneath glaring lights. Behind the counter, two saleswomen were arguing. One was much older than the other. Perhaps she was the other one’s mother. There was a period when my older sister, too, argued with my mother on a daily basis. My mother didn’t like my sister’s lover. The argument reached its climax when my mother learned that my sister was pregnant. But then the argumentative phase gradually ended. When you get a high fever, your cold will soon be over—these were the words of wisdom my sister shared with me.
In another alleyway, two women stood wearing net-like stockings that reminded me of mosquito netting. One woman, whose dress was brown, had golden hair, while the other, who had chestnut brown hair, wore a golden chain. Both of them were attentively observing the passers-by on the boulevard and didn’t even notice I was standing in front of them. Soon a man turned off the boulevard and approached the women with a wobbly gait. This rather fat man, who had drawn his cap down until it all but covered his eyes, pulled some money out of his breast pocket and shook the bills before the nose of the chestnut-haired woman. To my surprise, she smiled at him, took his arm and led him into the darker part of the alley. I followed them and watched them go up the stairs of an old two-story building. Soon the light went on in one of the rooms. Apparently, the woman was renting rooms for the night. I had a few banknotes as well. Ai Van said I could easily live on this money for several days. Therefore it seemed excessive for this woman to be asking so much money for a room in this run-down building. My teacher always told us that it was a basic human right to be able to sleep beneath a roof and between four walls. Earning money by renting rooms, he said, was one of Capitalism’s most grievous transgressions. If this was how people here lived though, I certainly wouldn’t succeed in reeducating them overnight. It was already too late to look for the apartment of Ai Van’s sister. Because of the mosquitoes I definitely didn’t want to sleep outdoors. Here one could apparently get a room using sign language. I went back to the spot where the blond woman was still standing. She was so good-looking she ought to have been in the movies. Maybe she hated cameras, just like me. And who can say which is a better profession? I took out my banknotes and shook them before the nose of this woman, who was at least ten centimeters taller than me. She opened her large eyes even wider and batted her elegant, curved eyelashes. Although I hadn’t done anything different than the man before me, the woman was so surprised she nearly froze. Impatiently I grabbed her by her bare upper arm, making her flinch and take a step back. I pointed in the direction of the old building where the other woman had disappeared with the man, and nodded at her, smiling. She glanced quickly at my banknotes and assumed a pensive expression. Then she searched for something between my eyes and my mouth. She appeared to find whatever it was she was looking for as her frozen face relaxed a little. I took her by the hand and pulled her toward the entrance of the building.
A large oval mirror hung in the room. The mirror seemed to show me precisely what the woman, too, saw when she looked at me: a shy, scrawny girl. Only her eyes gleamed as if caught in a high fever, and her lips burned apple-red. Was this really me? In high school I was one of the girls who made a sturdy, mature impression. No one ever told me I was thin or looked childish. The mirror also showed the woman standing behind me. A dramatic curve descended from the back of her neck over her breasts and hips down to her thighs. A masterful brushstroke. When I turned to face her, she no longer resembled a two-dimensional work of art but rather was living matter heavy with flesh. She asked me something. I recognized the word “Papa.” Perhaps she thought I was looking for somewhere to stay together with my father. I said in English, “Only for me.” I always claimed not to know any English. But if I were to drum up every English word I knew, perhaps I could actually speak a little English. Was the woman afraid that without my father I wouldn’t be able to pay for the room? I pressed my banknotes, which had grown somewhat moist with my sweat, into her hand. Then I had to squeeze her hand shut, because the woman was just staring at me and ignoring the money. Apparently there was something wrong with my face.
The woman sat down on the bed, and I sat down beside her. She seemed to be waiting for something. I tried to think what else one should do when renting a room. I couldn’t think of anything. Perhaps she was just lonely. A bit of fuzz clung to her hair above the ear. I reached out my finger to remove it. The woman flinched as if she were afraid of me. What about my body could be so intimidating? Even if we were to quarrel and come to blows, she would be the victor. And above all: What would we quarrel about?
I remembered my great aunt who had died two years before. During the last months of her life she was afraid of things no one else could see. When I asked her what frightened her, she would say: “A soldier without legs came to see me” or “The bones buried beneath the kitchen sob at night.” Once she poured cold water on herself and said her dress was on fire. She also told me that in the forest there was a charred tree stump from which headless children were born. The word “imagination” meant nothing to her, and a different word, “hallucination,” was something she’d never heard. When I embraced her and stroked her cheek, her flesh would relax. She would then repeat “Thank you, thank you, thank you” and grow a little calmer.
This woman, too, young as she was, probably suffered from hallucinations like my great aunt. Out of pity I placed my arm around her neck and drew her to me. At first she tried with hesitant fingers to push my belly gently away from her. Then her fingers groped for my spine and read Braille. She asked me something I didn’t understand. Maybe the meaning of the question was unimportant anyway. I couldn’t comfort my great aunt with words either. Instead, one had to say yes to every question and calmly pet her. I nodded to the woman and stroked her cheek. For some reason I couldn’t fathom, she pulled down the zipper of her dress, slipped out of this shell, and opened the hooks of her undergarments. Then she took my hand and pressed the tips of my fingers against her nipple, which felt like the toe of a cat. There was a tiny fissure at its center. Perhaps this fissure was where the mother’s milk came out. I couldn’t remember whether I too had a fissure like this. The woman seemed to have read my thoughts in my face. She unbuttoned my blouse with trembling fingers. My skin looked flat, inexpressive, shut off. Once her fingers began speaking to it, though, my skin began to open up, not just my nipples, but my whole body.
Suddenly I felt the inner wall of my stomach burning with hunger. I thought of the red of prawns shimmering through moist rice paper, or the white of steamed fish one carefully unwraps from a bamboo leaf The woman asked me a question. As an answer, I placed my hand on my belly. The woman nodded without giving the impression she was about to get me some food. Instead, she stuck her fingers under my belly. At the same time I saw her lips in close-up, her wet teeth gleaming between them. From her mouth drifted a smell like lemongrass, making me dizzy. I lay down on my back, and the woman’s skin blocked my vision. The white, warm skin melted on my tongue, but I didn’t bite any off. I was in a round space, perhaps within a sphere. There was one fixed point on the inner wall of this sphere: the place where my temple touched hers. Both were as hard as stone, thoughtful, not melting together, waiting for something new. I was dreaming of peas. The peas were as hard as stone before they grew astonishingly soft in a pot of boiling water. I dreamt of oysters with lemon juice, eating them with a sobbing sound, my fingers taking on their fragrance.
I heard someone hurriedly unlocking the door from outside. The woman leapt up; in the doorway stood a man whose well-groomed brown hair hung down like the ears of a dachshund. The woman quickly covered us with the wool blanket while arguing hot-headedly with the man. Then she wrapped the sheet around her, got up and chased him out the door after hurling a few more explosive words in his face. From the floor I retrieved my neck pouch, which contained the money and my passport, and got dressed, while the woman, who had gotten dressed in two seconds, waited for me impatiently. Then she grabbed me by the wrist, ran out of the room and hurried down the steps. We rushed down the alley in the opposite direction to the boulevard. This was a network of dark but pleasant-smelling alleys. Eventually we arrived at the entrance to a building that looked charred. The woman didn’t even have to hunt around for a light switch as her toes could clearly see the steps that led down to a basement. In the basement room the light switch was broken, but through the barred window one could see a little light reflecting off the cobblestones. Between the stacks of cardboard boxes with writing on them stood an animal with horns and a rusty bicycle. The woman sat me down on a box and pointed to the numerals eight and two on her watch. Then she left.
An old floor lamp exactly my height stood beside me. The lamp had a cable that vanished in a dark corner—a good place for an overlooked electrical outlet, but what good was an outlet for a lamp with no bulb? A deformed leather handbag at the base of the lamp was cracked and hard. Opening its metal navel wasn’t easy. I held the bag upside-down. A crumpled, dried-up handkerchief fell out followed by lipstick, a ballpoint pen, and a flyer advertising a movie. The title of the film was Zig zig, and the date was already ten years in the past. This was the first time I saw your name. And this was the one film I was never able to see, even later. A long time passed before I understood that it wasn’t necessarily important whether or not one has actually seen a film.
The woman was called Marie. She left the basement every evening and returned around two in the morning. When I sat alone in the basement, I felt like a hostage abducted by terrorists. The worst thing about these terrorists was that in reality they weren’t making any demands and thus would never release me. Of course I wasn’t locked up—I had unlimited freedom and could leave the basement if I wished.
Marie was not an abductor, she was my protector. She protected me by ignoring me. She acted as if she were unable to see me, or as if I were a wildflower that just happened to be growing in her garden. If only I’d been able to exchange just a few words with her. I couldn’t understand her language, and she even seemed to be withholding it from me. When she returned from work, she would install herself in her favorite corner like a work of art for the world to see but was nonetheless unapproachable. I wouldn’t have felt so useless if she had, for example, forced me to join her in her nocturnal perambulations. Or she could have threatened me with her knife and forced me to sell pears. Indeed, she possessed a double-edged knife, but she only used it to peel apples. I missed the sense of being bound to other people. Of course it wasn’t right to offer up one’s body—a gift from our ancestors—as goods for sale. And in any case the desire to provide a service as a way of earning money was a capitalist malaise. I remained behind in the basement, isolated and useless. If I’d had a child of my own, I’d at least have had a task. Perhaps this was the reason other people produced children. The child in my uterus had at some point vanished into thin air. Or the child existed from the very beginning merely as Jörg’s phantom pregnancy.
During the day I walked around the city so as not to have to sit behind bars. The streets drove me on without a goal from one corner to the next, no armchair waited to receive my weary limbs. Be still, I said to the pavement beneath my feet, but it kept flowing on and on like a conveyor belt, and I was the automobile tire. I remembered the shoes called Ho-Chi-Minh sandals that were made from old tires. If I were to wear them here, they would be seen as a symbol not of frugality but of a ceaselessly increasing velocity.
Sometimes I saw policemen on the street. What would happen if I were to describe my situation to them and ask for help? “I let down the East Berliners who were expecting me to give a speech. I illegally crossed the border between East and West. A woman played the role of a would-be suicide to stop a train for me. From there, I traveled to Paris without a ticket. I borrowed money from a Vietnamese woman and never went to see her. I am living in a basement without paying rent. Yesterday I stole a rose from a flower vendor.” If I were to tell my story freely, the policemen wouldn’t help me, they’d arrest me. Candor is incompatible with freedom. Is a person any more able to find his way home from inside a prison? What would my relatives and above all my teachers and friends have to say about this? They would no doubt start collecting money right away so that my parents could come visit me in Paris. But what a shame it would be if their first trip to Paris was to see a jailbird. Besides, they would be utterly unable to help me here. In Saigon my father knew influential politicians—connections of no use to us in Paris. When I was younger, I never needed to keep any secrets. As long as I was honest, industrious, and modest, loved my friends, teachers, and family, nothing bad could happen to me. This security was now long gone. I had become a criminal without ever having had any intention of doing wrong, and without having so much as killed a bug. Someone once told me that in Paris one could place international phone calls even from a normal telephone booth. Was there also a direct line to the realm of the dead? I would have liked to call Confucius and Ho Chi Minh and ask them what to do.
If a policeman thought me suspicious, he might stop me and ask to see my passport. I always carried my passport with me, but I had no visa for France. Fortunately my Asian features did not make me conspicuous. This city was full of Asian-looking women. Most of them were in the habit of glancing into shop windows to check the quality and prices of handbags and dresses for sale. Sometimes, to my surprise, I caught a glimpse of my own mirror image, which always horrified me. You could tell from my body language that I had no intention of buying anything in the display window. Whenever a saleswoman looked at me through the glass door, trying to figure out what brand name might be of interest to me, I would hurry away. In my eyes, these brand names were simply crooked letters, pictograms whose meaning I could not discover. Anyone could see at a glance that I had no right to be here.
To escape the agitation of the streets, I sought refuge in movie theaters. One could linger here for hours for little money. In the dark there was no danger of being observed by a policeman. My first film was Polanski’s Repulsion. On the poster for this film I discovered the name of the actress printed on the old flyer for Zig zig. This was why I could walk right up to the ticket window and courageously pronounce the film’s title. Repulsion had been made twenty years before, and so my very first time seeing you was at a temporal remove.
The movie theater was even darker than the basement, though there was something reassuring about the space. On the screen strangers played out their lives for me to see. I couldn’t imagine myself as a character living in Paris. For the first time, however, I could truly picture my own body in various positions. For instance, the first time I lay in bed in Bochum staring at the walls. I learned this from the bedroom scenes in Repulsion. It wasn’t just me lying in bed, it was you.
Marie usually returned to the basement much later than I did. When I came back from the theater, I would rewind an invisible roll of film inside my head to watch the movie again from the beginning. My mental cinema boomed with a dull percussive sound. The characters fell silent. I saw the protagonist hurrying somewhere with long strides. Her fingers kept trying to remove something invisible from the wing of her nose. A skinned rabbit was stuffed in her handbag. Behind her armoire, a crack opened in the wall. A strange construction site in the middle of the busy street might have been a pedestrian island. An old neighbor woman wearing so many layers of clothing she appeared spherical stood at the door of the building with a hat and a dog. Three street musicians the size of children were playing accordion, clarinet, and drum. As they played, they slowly walked backward.
When I heard Marie’s footsteps, all the images in my head vanished and I would greet her at the basement door. She would turn her face away from me as if in embarrassment, murmuring a few words I couldn’t understand. Once I placed a delicate-scented rose I’d stolen in the city in the place where she slept. Marie ignored both me and the rose, her strong perfume stinging my nostrils like the scent of lilies in sickrooms that irritate the patients’ mucous membranes and cause nightmares. A perfume war between the lily and the rose. Marie hid behind the scent of the lily. Since the night of the misunderstanding we hadn’t touched each other. I felt that Marie was trying to keep me at a distance from her profession and had nothing else to offer me.
One day Marie came home with a book which she pressed into my hand while saying a few words in an encouraging tone of voice. The book was yellow with a large black-and-white photograph on the cover. At first I didn’t recognize the woman in the picture. The word Ecran was printed in round letters on the cover next to two mysterious numbers: “78” and “73.” Had Marie bought the book from a peddler on the street, or had a customer given it to her? I was surprised to discover a scene from Repulsion in the book: the main character, Carol, in the process of writing something on the surface of a mirror.
I remembered a situation I’d almost forgotten. I was standing outside, leaning against the cinema’s wall as if drunk when Marie walked by and looked at me questioningly. I pointed to the poster I was leaning against. With the seriousness of a child learning to read, Marie read aloud each of the names on the poster: director, actors, actresses. When she read your name, I nodded.
At the time I didn’t know that Ecran was a magazine and not a book. The books I’d read as a schoolgirl had been similarly bound and were as thin as this journal. Ecran became my first language textbook. All night long, my hot temples refused to sleep. With the help of this book, I would learn the language, then I’d study philosophy at the university, join the Party and rise among its ranks. Eventually the Party would come to power and I would become a leader. I would give an apartment to every person who lived in a basement, and I too would move into such an apartment, perhaps together with Marie. We would look out our big window at a big walnut tree in which spirits liked to linger. Fresh water free of bacteria would flow out of the faucets at any time of the day. The water might smell a little like a swimming pool, but even the odor of the chlorine would seem pleasant to me as it would remind me more of my summer vacations as a child than of a hospital. In the mornings, Marie would use the subway pass distributed free of charge at the factory to ride comfortably to work, where she would don a blue uniform that she didn’t have to wash herself but could simply drop off at the laundry department after work. In the evenings she would always come home on time since working overtime was illegal. Without a care in the world, she would hop in the bathtub. Of course, it would be much more fun to bathe in a large bathhouse with all our friends. But it would be fine with just the two of us as well. We would no longer eat with plastic forks and knives from plastic plates held on our laps, but instead would sit at a table and use bamboo flatware. The rats and mice that tormented us in the basement would not be found in our new apartment. They would willingly go live in the forest. Then again, I wasn’t quite sure whether they did in fact come from forests or had always lived in basements. If the latter, public basements would be created for the rodents so they wouldn’t have to live out in the wild.
When the sunlight shone past the window bars the next morning, I caught the glimmering light in the open book in my hands. Between pages eleven and twenty-five were sixteen photos of you: four close-ups of your face, and twelve scenes from various movies. This was the day I consciously began addressing you in the second person, although I didn’t know you yet and you remained utterly unaware of my existence.
Out of your many faces I constructed a single face, and this one face differed from all the others I saw in the city. Other women’s eyes could never quite capture my gaze; their noses appeared to have been artificially constructed, their mouths randomly affixed. Incidentally, I always forgot to include myself when I thought of these “other women.” My person vanished in the darkness of the movie theater, and all that remained was my burning retinas reflecting the screen. There was no longer any woman whose name was “I.” As far as I was concerned, the only woman in the world was you, and so I did not exist.
Two shop windows, a mirror, a bicycle.
A piano, a bed, a wheelchair.
A doll, two wine glasses, an empty sky.
A dining table, wind, a pistol.
Three scenes were reproduced on each page as in a comic book, but without any sort of plot connecting them for these scenes were taken from different films. Most of them I hadn’t seen.
Page fifteen. Top: you are standing in front of a shop window with a woman who is showing off her healthy teeth. Center: you are writing on a mirror in an invisible script that probably isn’t simple mirror-writing any longer for the script has been reversed three times now—first in the mirror, then in the film, then in the photograph. Bottom: you are sitting on a bicycle, about to ride off. An old man is standing beside you, trying to hold you back. In the background one sees a shabby courtyard. Your lush, luminous hair is fluttering in the imaginary wind as if you are already pedaling through the fields.
Page eighteen. Top: you and a second woman your age who bears a magical resemblance to you are standing side by side in front of a piano. Both of you are positioned with your hips pointing back behind you, but your faces are turned stalwartly ahead. Perhaps this is part of a dance step that has been fixed in place in the photograph. Both of you are wearing large summer hats. On the piano one sees a large sheet of music and a black metronome. It isn’t clear if this apparatus would also appear black in a color photograph. Center: you are standing with your hair pinned up wearing white undergarments. Behind you stands a man who is no doubt trying to close the hooks of your bra. One can only guess, for the picture has cut off both people at the chest, transforming them into two torsi. The man’s tight-fitting shirt looks like a thin skin through which one can feel the warmth of his flesh. Bottom: you are seated in a wheelchair surrounded by two men and a woman. You are wearing a wool jacket and a long skirt, and a striped blanket lies on your lap. A scarf frames your pale face. Have you been frozen, or are you just frustrated?
Page twenty-one. Top: in your arms you are holding a bald baby doll with hollow eyes. Your throat is encircled by a piece of jewelry that reminds me of a collar for dogs. Have you ever been a dog? Center: you are standing beside a dark-haired woman and clinking glasses with her. Your makeup draws the outside corners of your eyes and lips slightly upward. Only at this point did I notice that to the right of each picture the title of the film was indicated. Zig zig: this still was from a film I’d never seen. I only knew that in this film you were called Marie. Bottom: you rest your cheek against the shoulder of a man wearing a dark sweater.
Page twenty-four. Top: two transparent water jugs, four glasses of white wine, two plates. You are sitting at a table with a young man whose face is repeated in a mirror. The man is holding a fork in his hand and is looking at you while you intertwine your fingers and lower your eyes. Center: you are standing out-of-doors with a man. In front of you, the shoulders of other people are visible. A strong wind is blowing from the front, shaping your hair into a mane. Bottom: with both hands you are holding a pistol in front of you. Your blouse clings to your skin. Behind you is a wall with cracks in it.
Between the pages of photographs there were other pages with a text in two voices. The voice printed in boldface said little, and almost always ended with a question mark, so this person must have been filled with despair during the conversation. The other voice never asked a question and spoke in larger blocks of text.
If only I had a dictionary! A few days later I saw a man in the city wearing a Russian shirt, a rubashka, offering yellowed books for sale. I stopped short, catching a glimpse of the Cyrillic characters on his table. Between Bakunin and Kropotkin lay a French-Russian dictionary. When I saw the price penciled inside its cover, no higher than the price of a crepe, I couldn’t help laughing in delight. The man looked at me angrily as though I’d insulted him.
My life and Marie’s intersected only once a day. During the daytime I studied my textbook Ecran in the basement, which protected me from the sun’s brutal spotlight. Marie slept until noon, got up silently and then went to buy us two crêpes, bananas, or Chinese food from a snack bar. In the late afternoon, I would make my way to one of the cinemas while Marie hurried off to work.
I looked up every single word in the dictionary as I read the dialogue in Ecran. So my progress was slow. The voice printed in boldface: “Ask—very—original—for—begin: how—are—you—begun—in—cinema? You—?—fifteen—years—, I—think.” This annoyed me. I discovered that the bold voice often said “you” but spoke the word “I” only once in nine large pages, while the voice printed in large blocks of delicate script very often began a sentence with “I.”
When I happened to walk past a stationers and saw pens, envelopes, and glue in the window, I would imagine writing a letter to my parents. In the letter I would write that I was studying at a university in Paris and therefore couldn’t come back home yet.
A long time had passed since I’d given Jörg my letter. Had he really sent it?
I lacked the opportunity, courage, and expertise to make serious inquiries as to how one went about getting admitted to the university. Instead of taking steps in this direction, I continued to stay curled up like a shrimp on a piece of cardboard in the basement, waiting for it to be late enough for me to go to the movies once more. Perhaps one could tell just by looking at me that I had thought too long and hard about becoming a student: One time I was given a student discount at the theater box office without even having asked for it.