You’re pregnant.
The doctor’s face turned red. I assumed he was furious. A foreigner like me simply showed up at his office, rather than going to a gynecologist, and forced him to make a diagnosis outside his area of expertise. I remembered that this city was full of people who specialized in a particular field and wanted nothing to do with anything else. I couldn’t explain to Dr. Mettinger why I’d gone to him and not a gynecologist. Both of us remained silent until I discovered a calendar hanging beside the window. On this calendar, all the days of the year were marked, even this day in December, but there was not a single day on the calendar on which I could have become pregnant. It took me a moment to realize this. The calendar looked strange to me all at once: the dates were arranged in such a way that every month formed a square. Ever since I’d stopped working in an office, I realized, I no longer thought of a month as being square, but rather like a moon, a circular motion which gave my body its orientation. It was no longer important to me whether a day was a Sunday or a Monday.
The numbers on the calendar had to break free of the rows of weekdays, form circles and sketch out moons.
Please look again to be sure if I’m really pregnant; it really isn’t possible. Could you have confused a flea with an embryo?
Dr. Mettinger took up his spyglass again and this time poked it deeper into my ear.
What do you see? I asked in a severe tone to overcome my unease.
I see a stage in a theater, he said now in a childish voice.
Try to say more precisely what it is you see. I heard him inhale deeply and then say: I see a building near a harbor, an officer and several women.
The doctor’s assistant called to him from outside that he had an important phone call, but he didn’t hear her voice.
What do the women standing there look like?
I asked a few more questions, although my curiosity was abating, for I suspected the doctor of being an inexperienced theater-goer; by the time the women entered, he would see only old, familiar, boring pictures. His voice became somewhat higher as he reported:
The women have on long dresses, silk, what do you call them, oh, that’s right, kimonos, and one of them has a knife in her hand. Now she’s just plunged it into her belly, a red stain is forming on the white silk, getting bigger and bigger.
I groaned and simply pushed his hand away.
Dr. Mettinger, that is Madame Butterfly, what you describe is not original.
He turned red, and his lips twitched to seize on words which might still be said. But I didn’t wait any longer and left his office without saying goodbye.
3
The book I’d bought at the flea market was not a book at all, but rather a box containing four cassette tapes. I ought to have realized this when I saw the circle of letters on the cover. The text turns in a circle, rather than being read from left to right. “A Novel,” I read on the title page. Under these words stood the title and the author’s name in tiny, indistinct letters.
I inserted the first cassette into my tape recorder and pressed the button. A female voice began to read from the novel. After a while, I realized I had entered its landscape. Although the plot did not interest me at all, I walked into the novel the way one might mistakenly go into a house that has neither doors nor walls. I hadn’t noticed a threshold where I might have paused to consider whether or not I wanted to go in. I began to be afraid of the voice and turned off the tape recorder.
Why couldn’t I take pleasure in this voice? After all, I had been looking for a text whose letters would disappear as they were read, like the many novels I read as an adolescent. In those years I went to the neighborhood library almost every day, picked some novel or other and found a seat in a corner of the reading room. My reading was always the same: for the first half hour, I had to struggle against a wall of words. It was strenuous work, but I didn’t lose patience, knowing that sooner or later I would gain entrance to the novel. I read and read without knowing why I should be interested in what I was reading and where the novel was taking me. Soon the speed of my reading increased and the letters vanished before my eyes, as during a train ride. When the train accelerates soon after departure, the trees closest to the tracks disappear, and one sees only the distant landscape.
It’s been years since I last read a novel in which I could make the letters disappear. This probably has nothing to do with me, but with the city: the only books here are written in a foreign script. As long as I’ve lived here I’ve been unable to enter novels. I read and read, but the alphabet never vanishes before my eyes, but rather remains like iron bars or like sand in salad or like the reproduction of my face in the window of a train at night. How often my own reflection in the glass has kept me from enjoying a nocturnal landscape. Even when there was nothing much to see, I would have liked to gaze into the darkness, not at my own mirror image.
Why had it never occurred to me that a tape recording could be the magic means for erasing the letters in a novel? Finally I had succeeded in eliminating the alphabet. I should have been happy.
I turned the tape recorder back on, this time trying to listen to the voice without losing my distance from it. But I couldn’t. Either I heard nothing at all, or I was plunged into the novel.
As I turned off the machine, furious, the doorbell rang. It was my new neighbor, who had moved into the building approximately a week ago. I recognized him by the sunglasses that hid his eyes. He asked whether I had a little salt. This was the second time a man had asked me for salt in this city. The first time, a man sitting at the table next to me in a restaurant where only a few tables had salt shakers had asked:
Have you got salt?
He had a cello case and a folding music stand next to him. With his eyes closed, he shook the salt shaker over his salad plate. I thought I could hear the grains of salt falling on the leaves. The man was not afraid to act with his eyes closed. I have often noticed that people carrying musical instruments around with them are not afraid of certain things. I saw on the leaves of his salad white grams of salt which for a moment glittered strangely but soon became transparent.
I filled a teacup with salt for my neighbor and gave it to him. He asked whether I had a visitor. His lips were smooth and slightly moist, though his skin was dry.
No, no one’s visiting, I replied, noticing at the same time a voice coming from my kitchen. It was the voice from the tape recorder, which I had already turned off.
I don’t have a visitor, but sometimes it happens that there is suddenly a woman here and… I don’t mean a woman, but actually just a woman’s voice. Because the voice can get in anywhere and …
A woman? he asked suspiciously.
No, a voice, not a woman.
He didn’t ask any more questions. When I had said goodbye to the neighbor, I returned to the kitchen. The tape recorder was running on its own. I sat down on the chair and pretended the voice wasn’t bothering me. I tried to think about the man in sunglasses. “Sunglasses,” “professionally,” “how old,” “thin,” “salt,” “lips,” “tennis shoes”… The questions had to be formulated, and they would have to be asked when I saw him again. But I had no idea what I wanted to know about him, what I wanted to think about him, what it was even possible for me to think, for the voice from the tape recorder forced me to return to the novel. The plot was boring, but the voice wouldn’t let me go. It determined the temperature of the room in which the novel was set. It determined the smell of the main character’s skin. And the figure’s gaze was determined by it.