A few weeks later Sasha showed me a teacup and said that she’d discovered the “dragon” symbol on it. Indeed, the cup did bear this sign. Sasha had seen it in a shop and immediately bought it. For the first time in her life, she could read. Then I wanted to teach her some more characters. She’ll always be illiterate, since she can’t read the letters of the alphabet, but now she can read one character and knows that the alphabet isn’t the only system of writing in the world.
Next to the bus stop was a small shop in which Sasha sometimes bought Sonia a bar of soap. Sonia loves soap, or, rather, she loves the packaging it comes in. The packaging was misleading: the paper on the outside was painted with butterflies, birds or flowers even though all it contained was soap. Very few products have pictures on the package that aren’t immediately connected in some way to their contents. Sonia always unwrapped the soap right away when Sasha gave her some, then wrapped it up again.
Once the box the soap came in bore a phoenix on which the word “soap” was written in fine print that Sonia of course couldn’t read. Sonia understood only the picture of the phoenix and the contents: soap.
Only because there is such a thing as written language, I thought to myself, could they paint a phoenix on the box instead of a piece of soap. What else could fix the meaning of its contents, the soap, if the letters weren’t there? Then there would be the danger that the soap might, in the course of time, turn into a phoenix and fly away.
Once, in the supermarket, I bought a little can that had a Japanese woman painted on the side. Later, at home, I opened the can and saw inside it a piece of tuna fish. The woman seemed to have changed into a piece of fish during her long voyage. This surprise came on a Sunday: I had decided not to read any writing on Sundays. Instead I observed the people I saw on the street as though they were isolated letters. Sometimes two people sat down next to each other in a café, and thus, briefly, formed a word. Then they separated, in order to go off and form other words. There must have been a moment in which the combinations of these words formed, quite by chance, several sentences in which I might have read this foreign city like a text. But I never discovered a single sentence in this city, only letters and sometimes a few words that had no direct connection to any “cultural content.” These words now and then led me to open the wrapping paper on the outside, only to find different wrapping paper below.
THE TALISMAN
In this city there are a great many women who wear bits of metal on their ears. They have holes put in their earlobes especially for this purpose. Almost as soon as I got here, I wanted to ask what these bits of metal on people's ears meant. But I didn’t know if I could speak of this openly. My guidebook, for instance, says that in Europe you should never ask people you don’t yet know very well anything related to their bodies or religion. Sometimes I thought these bits of metal — especially when I saw one in the form of a scythe, bow or anchor — might be a sort of talisman.
At first glance, the city doesn’t strike me as particularly dangerous. Why, then, do so many women wear talismans on the street? Certainly it can get a bit spooky at times walking around the city alone. It’s just that too few people live here. Even during the day I’ve often walked home from the train station without seeing anyone at all.
If these bits of metal are supposed to be a talisman, why are they so popular among women? I didn’t know the name of the evil force these women were trying to protect themselves from with this talisman’s help. They never revealed its name to me, and I still haven’t made a concerted effort to find out what it is. Where I come from, people say you should never utter the name of a dangerous being aloud. If you do, this being will really appear. It has to be named indirectly. For example, you can simply replace its name with “it.”
Gilda, a student who also lived in my building, always wore a triangular piece of metal on her ear. The first time we had a real conversation, she told me that a fifty-five-year-old librarian at the university had just committed suicide the day before. Up until her death, this librarian had fought to keep computers from being installed in her department. The woman couldn’t have been intelligent, Gilda said, or she would have understood that computers are merely tools, not monsters. But apparently the computers weren’t the cause of her suicide. She’d been suffering from severe depression for years. She’d lived alone, Gilda said, fingering her little triangle of metal.
“What is the meaning of that piece of metal?” I asked. She looked at me in surprise and asked whether I meant her “earring.” The word “ring” had an unsettling effect on me. Gilda replied indifferently that the earring was simply a piece of jewelry and had no meaning at all.
As I had supposed, Gilda was reluctant to discuss the earrings significance. Instead she told me that highly educated women had holes put in their ears at a relatively late age, whereas working-class women started wearing earrings as girls.
I had read in a book that there are cultures in which part of the sexual organ is cut away during the initiation rite. A different part of the body can be substituted, however; the feet, for example, or the ears. In this case not the earring itself but merely the perforation of the earlobe would be significant.
But why was Gilda always so nervous? One day she placed two porcelain dogs on her windowsill. She refused to put the pots of flowers I’d given her there. These dogs were to sit on the windowsill all day long and stand guard over her apartment, like the stone dogs where I come from that guard the Shinto shrines. Gilda said she often had the feeling, when she was alone in the apartment, that a strange man was coming into her room through the window.
Once she knocked on my door in the middle of the night and said there was something wrong with her computer. I was really quite surprised she’d woken me up for this, since she knew I didn’t know the first thing about computers. But soon I understood what the matter was: Gilda claimed there was an alien being living inside her computer and producing sentences. She kept discovering sentences in her essays that she definitely hadn’t written herself. But she refused to give me any examples; she said the sentences were indecent. I advised her to attach a talisman to her computer to make the evil force leave and keep new ones from coming. I used the term “evil force” because I didn’t know what else to call it.
The talisman Gilda selected wasn’t at all what I’d had in mind; I’d imagined something like a doll made of reeds or a piece of snakeskin. But Gilda went to a health food store and purchased three stickers. Each sticker bore an image that was no doubt intended to epitomize the evil force: a car, a nuclear power plant, a gun. And above each image stood the words; No thanks.
It struck me as overly polite to express gratitude while rejecting an evil force, but perhaps the word “thanks” was simply intended to avoid provoking the opponent’s aggression.
Gilda pasted the stickers on the front of her computer, next to the screen, and appeared satisfied with them. A week later she bought three more stickers and put them on her bicycle, the refrigerator and the door of her apartment.
But I don’t think she was completely reassured. Her computer, it’s true, was now clean, but as if to make up for this, she began to feel as though an alien being were forcing its way into her body. She bought herself a sweater with a big tiger’s head on it. Everyone who approached her had to brave the tiger’s fierce gaze. Gilda also bought herself a jacket made from the skin of a dead animal. She wore tight pants printed in a leopard-skin pattern and a belt studded with several triangular bits of metal. It wouldn’t have surprised me if she’d put on a mask with a lion’s face.