“But you’re fine, you’re already healthy.”
“I’m not in the least healthy. I read in a magazine that when new muscle tissue forms, the amount of female hormones in the body decreases, which results in a reduced rate of depression, but that’s a lie. It just gets harder to breathe, because of the hysterical lump. Besides, I have the feeling that without you here I’m gradually forgetting all my words.”
My mother glanced me up and down.
“How did you get such an Asian face?”
“What are you talking about, Mother? I am Asian.”
“That’s not what I meant. You’ve started to have one of those faces like Japanese people in American movies.”
I looked around the room. There were no mirrors. That was why my mother hadn’t noticed her own scales.
“What do you use my room for now?”
Instead of answering, my mother asked, “Why don’t you cut your hair? They say the god of death can grab hold of long hair.”
I was eager to see my old room again.
When I opened the door to my old, beloved room, there was a smell of mildew. The window was gone. On the floor, stuffed animals were lying in their own entrails, like corpses on a battlefield. Several wooden boxes were stacked up along the wall. I opened them and found diapers. Underneath were bibs. All were moldy.
“What’s this?”
“Your old baby clothes.”
“Why don’t you throw them away? They’re full of scales — I mean, mold.”
My mother had never thrown anything away. She always used to say a person who had grown up in the war years could never bring herself to throw something out.
She picked up a bib and stroked it as if it were a precious thing. “You were still breastfeeding at the age of five. Even in front of guests you would ask for milk and cry; I didn’t know what to do.”
I had no memory of my mother’s breast. I wondered when I had last touched her.
“I spoke to a doctor, and he laughed and told you, ‘That’s not what girls are supposed to want.’ Then, I don’t know what you were thinking, but you took the china toy you were holding and threw it in his face as hard as you could. You injured him, and he was so angry he scowled like the prince of hell and shouted, ‘I’II pull your tongue out!’”
I didn’t remember any of this.
In the corner of the room stood a rusty birdcage with some thin white bones lying scattered inside. That must have been my pet rat that had died ten years earlier.
“Those are Kuma’s bones. You remember, your pet rat?” my mother said gaily.
“Why don’t you just throw them out?”
“But what if she came back?”
“Who’s going to come back? I’m never coming back again, that’s certain.”
“But my daughter might still come back. She’s pursuing her career, and then she’ll come back.”
“I’m not coming back, ever. Even if I came back, I would be somebody else already.”
“Who are you?”
“What are you talking about? It’s me.”
“How can you say that, how can you throw words around like that?” She suddenly squatted down and began to cry.
“But what else am I supposed to call myself?”
“Oh, when did you start speaking like this.” My mother continued to cry. She sounded like a broken flute.
“Mother, stop thinking about the past. Let’s be practical and think about the future.”
“What future? When is that?”
“You should stop crying, it makes you grow scales.”
“I have nothing to wait for but death. You have a job, you have friends, but I threw away everything to bring you up.” My mother seemed to have shrunk, about to drown in her clothes.
“Mother, I don’t have a job.”
“But you always wrote so much about work in your letters.”
“I made it all up. You talk about my career, but it’s all I can do to earn enough for food.”
“You don’t need a career, it’s all right. Why do you want to go on living in a place like that? Come back home. Don’t go back there!”
Just then a fly appeared. My mother took aim with a fly swatter and smashed it against the wall. My mother hates everything that flies through the air.
“Oh, it’s time for my training,” she said, glancing at the clock. The clock had no hands. She sat down at the bicycle loom and began to pedal. The pedals caused chains to move, the chains moved cogs, these moved other cogs, and soon a mechanical-sounding music began to play. The strange thing was that none of the notes had pitch or length, they were simply born in the distance like a desert whirlwind, they wrapped themselves around me and sucked me in. I began to spin round and round. I felt drunk and sick to my stomach as if after a wild celebration, but when I tried to vomit, nothing came up but laughter. It was so much fun I couldn’t help it. With every revolution, I became one year younger. There was no longer any front or back, and I couldn’t see. My knees grew soft, my heels grew soft, I could no longer stand. My lips and anus grew hot. I was crying like an infant, the shrieks of a dying child being sucked into its mother’s vagina. Howling, I vanished into the dark hole of the whirlwind. With the last of my strength, I cursed my mother: “Death to the women with scales!”
Suddenly my body was covered with scales and I fell into my own vagina, the dark hole of the whirlwind.
9
I wasn’t really an interpreter. Sometimes I pretended to be one, but really I was just a typist. Now that I had lost my tongue, I could no longer even pretend to interpret. My work was limited to hammering out words whose meanings escaped me. After half a day’s typing, my back felt like a turtle’s shell. By afternoon, my neck wouldn’t turn, and by evening my fingers were cold. Still I went on striking the keys of the cheap mechanical typewriter. When I struck the keys, the arms of the letters flew up like the arms of drowning people. By midnight I was unable to see. Still I went on blindly. I kept receiving more and more assignments since typists who translate the voices of ghosts into written words have become a rare commodity. Of course I had no time for sleep. Sometimes I fell asleep with my head on my typewriter. When I woke up I would continue.
One could say I had given the woman my life along with my tongue. Every evening I listened for her voice and wrote down her words. So of course I couldn’t understand anything Xander was saying. Indeed, I couldn’t remember whether I’d ever understood the things he said.
Xander wasn’t really a German teacher, he was a carpenter. Anything that could be made of wood he would make for me. The desk and the chair I could never get up from were made by Xander. To keep me from falling out of the chair when I fell asleep, Xander attached my heels to its legs with thick nails.
My energy, though, was nearing its limits. My eyeballs shrank with exhaustion, and the sound of my pounding heart echoed painfully within my skull. When I had to vomit, a greenish fluid came up from my empty stomach. Xander felt sorry for me and made me a bed.
The bed was a wooden box just my length with a lid that shut. Once the lid was on, it was pitch black inside and I couldn’t see a thing. I couldn’t hear anything, either. So no one would disturb me as I slept, Xander fastened the lid with nails.
My wooden box was a four-legged bird covered with scales that was called Sarcophagus. With me inside, this bird began to run about clumsily, as if its feet were stuttering, and once its speed increased, the bird’s body became hot and hard, and finally it raised its hook-shaped neck and took off into the sky.
Looking down at the earth from above, we headed for the realm of the dead.
Seven-tenths of the globe is covered with water, so it isn’t surprising that one sees different patterns on its surface every day. Subterranean water shapes the earth’s surface from below, the ocean’s waves eat away at the coastline, and human beings blast holes in mountainsides, plow the valleys for fields and fill in the ocean with land. Thus the shape of the earth is constantly changing.