Memoirs of a Polar Bear Read online

  ALSO BY YOKO TAWADA FROM NEW DIRECTIONS

  * * *

  The Bridegroom Was a Dog

  Facing the Bridge

  The Naked Eye

  Where Europe Begins

  contents

  I THE GRANDMOTHER: AN EVOLUTIONARY THEORY

  II THE KISS OF DEATH

  III MEMORIES OF THE NORTH POLE

  Landmarks

  Cover

  Title-Page

  Table of Contents

  Frontmatter

  Start of Content

  Copyright

  I

  THE GRANDMOTHER:

  AN EVOLUTIONARY THEORY

  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 pal
ms 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.