What an incredibly tedious novel, I said aloud, but it didn’t help. As if chained down, I sat on the kitchen chair listening to the voice. After the first side of the tape was finished and the tape player turned itself off, the voice went on speaking in my head. I could no longer recognize the words, but the voice itself became clearer and clearer.
That night I made myself a cup of tea and by mistake put salt in it. I had to dump out the tea in the sink. I gazed for a long time into the hole of the drain where the brown spiral of tea was being sucked. I don’t know how long I stood there looking at the hole without making a new cup of tea. I was no longer able to measure time, for time passed more quickly when the voice inside me sped up. When it spoke in staccato, time stuttered. Sometimes it stopped, and I took deep breaths so as not to suffocate. At twelve o’clock the voice suddenly vanished. The very same moment, my radio alarm turned on automatically. The news. I ran over and switched the radio off.
4
Once the voice from the tape recorder had taken possession of my life, I became sensitive to every sound from a machine. I noticed, for example, that my typewriter clacked in an irregular rhythm, although the distance between the characters was constant. Only between words did it leave a particularly large space in which a whole character might have fit. But the typewriter fell silent not only between words but at other points as well, and when I listened to the sound while typing I could no longer understand the meaning of the words.
Ty pew r ite r!
The music of this clacking produced a text different from mine, words incorrectly divided in a stumbling rhythm.
At the time, I regularly wrote short articles that were published as a series in a Japanese women’s magazine. When the editor first called me up to ask whether I could write something about holidays in Germany, I immediately said no. I’m not an ethnologist, and have never occupied myself with this sort of topic. The editor said she wasn’t looking for scholarly essays but just everyday observations easily understood by her readers. I wound up taking the job for financial reasons. But as soon as I started working on the first article I realized what a difficult task it was. The first topic was birthdays, which are perhaps the most important holidays of all, since even people who try to ignore Christmas like to celebrate their birthdays.
There was a lot for me to write about, since there are many phenomena that interest me, but I was unable to explain any of them. For example, I wrote how a neighbor of mine — although she was already twenty-two years old — was visited on her birthday by her mother, who then hugged and kissed her as though she’d just been born. So the readers of the women’s magazine wouldn’t get the wrong idea, I added that it was often considered normal here in Germany to kiss one’s mother. Even adults are permitted to kiss their mothers, celebrate their own birthdays and receive birthday presents from their mothers. The difference between childhood and adulthood wasn’t as clearly demarcated in Europe, I wrote, and then crossed it out. Since I’m not an ethnologist, I wasn’t sure I was qualified to make such a statement. If I were an ethnologist, I might have known why birthdays here are so important.
Why do people celebrate birthdays? Because they’ve lived another year without dying? Here, too, I didn’t attempt an explanation, but instead wrote that you weren’t allowed to congratulate a person before the actual day of the birthday since this brought bad luck. Then suddenly an explanation for the celebration of birthdays occurred to me. Perhaps people celebrate their birthdays because this is a day when they can distinguish themselves from everyone else. Unlike everyone else, they have a special relationship to this day. People here, I wrote, were in search of ways to distinguish themselves from other people.
Three minutes later I realized many people share the same birthday and crossed out the previous sentence. It also occurred to me that people here like to talk about their zodiac signs. But a sign doesn’t belong to a single person; everyone shares his sign with approximately a twelfth of mankind. Thus my supposition that birthdays distinguish people from others couldn’t be right. In the end, I wrote: People here like to celebrate their birthdays and talk about signs of the zodiac, especially late at night after a long discussion about politics.
I was dissatisfied with my first article since I hadn’t been able to explain any of what I described. The editor, however, said I didn’t have to explain anything at all, since there was usually no explanation for superstitions. I promised to write about Christmas the next time, and then about German Unification Day.
Because I didn’t have my own typewriter, I often visited Martina, a student who lived across the hall. In a sort of ritual I asked her every time whether by any chance she could work without her typewriter for a few hours. I never saw her writing anything. Nor had she ever mentioned anything about some paper she was working on. Whenever I came to her apartment, she said she wasn’t working at the moment because she lacked the necessary calm. Except for a salt shaker on the table, all the objects in her apartment looked as though they’d never been touched. Martina once explained to me that she hardly ever used anything in her apartment since she often slept elsewhere. Nevertheless, I could not understand why her apartment looked like a hotel room that nobody’s slept in for months, a hotel room no longer in use because the traces of some unfortunate incident cannot be removed.
Today her alarm clock began to jangle the very moment I was about to pose the usual question. Instead of turning it off, she closed her eyes. I could see her lips moving. It looked as though she were counting numbers soundlessly. After a while she walked over to the alarm clock with deliberate slowness and pressed its button. Finally the clock was silent.
Although I hadn’t said a word, she gave me a horrified look, as though I’d reproached her. With both embarrassment and pride she then answered a question I hadn’t asked. It was an exercise. She was practicing enduring sounds that seemed to announce catastrophe without being overcome with hysteria or panic.
Once a week Martina went to a therapist. Every sound that leapt into her ears — an alarm clock ringing, the squeal of car brakes, even the voices of strange children on the street — made her think she was no longer able to protect herself from anything.
What do you want to protect yourself against?
Martina did not answer my question. Instead she answered a question I hadn’t asked:
No, I don’t want to.
I said nothing, and Martina told me that a few days before she’d been on her way to the subway station and just before she reached the entrance she’d heard a little girl shout: Papa, c’mon!
Martina couldn’t see her because the little girl was standing in one of the tunnels at the bottom of the stairs. Martina only heard the voice, and was unable to go down. Then she went home again. She no longer had the strength to visit the girlfriend with whom she’d had a date. The girl’s voice had plunged into her ears like an invisible hand grenade and then had exploded silently inside her body. After this incident Martina didn’t leave her apartment for three days and didn’t talk to anyone.
Carefully I hinted that I, too, had once been possessed by a voice. She had no way of knowing I was describing my current situation. She didn’t seem at all interested in the situations of other people. But it wasn’t all that bad to be possessed by a voice.