North Station Page 6
You go up to the first floor and open the study window. And, perching on the windowsill, stare fixedly at the branch where the owl is sitting. The owl is still as a statue, stuck fast to a branch of the tree. The light breeze fails to ruffle a single feather, not even a single one. Where had the young owl learned to hold so still, as still as the sleep of kitchenware, lying unused in the dead of night? As the owl was almost the same color as the tree, and largely concealed by a fretwork of twigs, it would have been difficult to pick out had you not been aware of its daily visits, the fact that it came to that tree at the same time each day and perched there for a while, facing your room. Keeping your eyes fixed on the owl, you get an old film camera out of one of the drawers. You point the camera at the owl, zooming in as close as possible, and take the photograph. You didn’t even enjoy photography as a hobby, never mind being skilled at it. It simply wasn’t your kind of thing. You didn’t even own a digital camera, like almost everyone else these days. But in that one vague yet revelatory moment, that moment, abrupt and specific as though in a dream, of wanting to breathe in being itself, to draw it deep inside yourself, being with the sluggish, ponderous mass of a whale, already regretting the inevitable disappearance of such a moment, its vanishing into the words of some abstract concept like every other fleeting inspiration, you photographed the owl that was there before you, then heard someone calling up from the floor below to say that dinner was ready. You open the bathroom window and lazily brush your teeth as you sit on the toilet, completely naked. The white froth of toothpaste bubbles and expands inside your mouth, dropping to the floor. A line from Walser’s poetry: “Night, the dream beetle crawls into my open mouth.”
In dreams, looking into a mirror is a hair-raising experience. The empty black holes looking back at you, so threateningly strange and ravenous. A river flows in bed, and on its bank stands a single tree. Its branches stretch out horizontally, and your wristwatch hangs from one of them, ticking. It will still go on telling the time when we have disappeared from the earth. We, now lying down, black-and-white bodies delving deeply into each other. Until we eventually transform into fossilized tree scarabs, with only our shells remaining.
The dream’s fade-out.
For a long time all I received in the mail were bills and advertising flyers. If I didn’t pay the bills on time they were sent to me again, printed in successively larger and more splendid type, seeming paradoxically like presents. One day I opened the mailbox and discovered an owl inside, watching me. Its round body was patterned with dappled shade, and you could see its eyes between tree branches, cast darkly down. It was the photograph of the owl, printed out and glued to the front of a postcard. The owl in the photograph had been enlarged into a clumsily pixelated version of itself, unnaturally inflated like an overstuffed specimen. There was a faint scratch on one corner of the photograph’s sleek surface, and the air between the branches was a dull purple, the color of dusk. On the back of the postcard was my address, a date stamp, and an airmail sticker. The sticker had been stamped with the post office’s seal, four neatly waving lines. Imprinted over the word “airmail,” it could double as the owl’s left wing, a modern hieroglyph denoting both distance and continuity.
The bed is beneath the sloping ceiling, in the shadows in the corner of the room. I drop my bag at the entrance and go straight to it, lying down without removing my shoes or coat. I curl up facing the wall, pulling my knees right up to my chest, and close my eyes in this position I know best, of slow intimate waiting. It is some time or other, some monsoon afternoon when the hot din of the sunlight and the radio is incessant. The bird seller passes through the alley, balancing a cage on the back of his bicycle. In this moment, some people will be buying a ferry ticket for a rendezvous with the dead. Others will be beginning to write an essay relating to dreams. But I want nothing to do with any of this, only sleep.
North Station
My silk moth, my moonwalker, my inkpot, my meadow tree, my sleepyhead, my evening light, my scatterbrain, my reverse counter.1
He, seized with tension, will kiss the woman before the train arrives. But how? She keeps her eyes downturned, flustered and awkward as melted wax dripping messily from a candle, and holds herself perfectly still; the clock on the platform has just passed midnight. Their bodies are angled in the direction from which the train will come; both are so incredibly on edge that if a blind and disoriented pigeon were to nose-dive in front of them, they would mistake it for a passing train—the train they will have missed, the train they will have failed to catch. His mind is taken over by the memory of a city one summer in the 1970s, when the scent of seltzer was strong in the air and the hot, humid streets swam when he looked down on them from the balcony. The memory of the rattan bed and its thin blanket, the tiled bathtub, and the enormous rusted tap shaped like a cross. The woman’s address was all he knew of her; and the woman lived in that city. When she had first handed him the scrap of paper onto which she had written her address, at the time when their fate—which would eventually leave them each remembered by the other as no more than an address—had just been set in motion, he felt the memory of that city, which he’d thought he had long forgotten, rise up inside him as a damp rainbow, accompanied by a single cry. Like an aged peacock winging wearily up above the treetops, some early morning in India. When he spent a week lodging on an unfamiliar balcony, battling clouds of mosquitos and sleep thin yet sticky as a swamp, the footsteps of the woman as a young child might have passed through the alley directly below him. Had she appeared again after all this time, here in this place, waiting for the last train? It was barely a day since his first sight of her, and confusion still gripped him; still, he was tormented by the illusion of having been pursuing her all this time without knowing it, and of the various cities he’d since traveled through—ever since the one he hadn’t at the time known was hers—having been for ages in this long pursuit, as he fumbled after the footprints of the woman he had unknowingly left behind.
Now the backdrop that frames the woman’s head and shoulders is a night festooned with spiderwebs, a corner of this world knitted from disordered electric wires, awaiting the train’s departure. The train ticket in the woman’s pocket gives wordless testament to this world. Externally, it is the world of the platform’s information board, where the train times flash up, of the enormous round clock whose minute hand inches forward with a click, of billboards for beer and french fries, and of the lit balconies lining the rail tracks. That world, patient as the hunched elderly. A world of pipes, ducts, and conduits. A world of pipes that grope their way forward in the darkness, electric wires and water pipes and measuring instruments and fiber-optic cables and transmitters, existing for the sake of drainage, ventilation, and the night strolls of ladybugs, a place for a pigeons to roost or a guiding device for the blind. But upon closer inspection it revealed its connection to the world of the bathhouse’s mini radio, which had played Telemann in the mornings, of the glasses and wallets and pen nibs he’d lost, the various addresses that had been given him, the cities and countless streets to which those addresses had silently pointed, the secret alleys and neighbors whose faces he hadn’t known. Now, this hour, fragments of all the trivial worlds, all the scenes of his life he’d swept past with such indifference, captured his consciousness, invading his memory in one great rush. As everything that makes up life and lifestyle, they were the origin of all the countless memories, thoughts, and impressions he’d ever jotted down, casually, even unconsciously, the secret museum of every inspiration his life had ever known. They were the eyes of the innumerable totality of objects simultaneously fixing him with their stares. And, at the same time, it was an incredibly simple action, formed from a single melody, nothing other than the sleep of the world. From a single melody where both the eyes and the mind are closed. Closing one’s eyes, an action of surrendering oneself to the world, and the peacock shade beneath shuttered eyelids. The act of sleeping, the conscious awareness of it, came so close to som
ething pure and absolute as to provoke an internal cry: “For god’s sake stay like this!” Just as he, looking up at the platform clock this very moment, longed to command time to stop in its tracks.
The woman has her cold, firm hand resting on the platform bench, and his own palm presses gently down on it. Rigid in these positions, they both face the direction from which the train will come. How he’d longed for a single night’s worth of sleep on the woman’s balcony. Once again, he recalls the rattan bed. The depth and warmth of that night of mosquitos, that night of fog, that sour smell hanging low over the ground . . . He was lying down. Drinking in the soft snuffle of the woman’s breathing, with his face, his own sleep, buried in the nape of her neck. Each gust of wind produced a furious crackling from the tarp stretched over the balcony. He thinks he can hear rain. He is lying down on the fold-up bed beneath the tarp with his clasped hands resting on his stomach, his senses half-open to the foreign language drifting up like the low hum of insects, the clamor of the market and the smoke from the mosquito coil, the strong warmth of unfamiliar spices rising from the kitchen. If he could somehow find himself back there again, perhaps he would fall asleep after shouting “stay like this!” out loud. Sleeping, he will fly through the distant streets as he clings to the woman’s bosom, and her eyelids and the night will tickle his sleeping toes.
The clock is wound for a long time, rattling in his ears. A huge wheel clatters over the cobbled, tree-lined street and, in the wake of that autumn, leaves flush red and die. “What is that attitude of the November leaves, so passionately in thrall to the wind? They do not cry out loud, do not whimper to themselves. What should it be called, that which is neither whispering, murmuring, dancing, singing, laughing, nor giggling, neither trembling nor kissing their wind, feeling the contact as a sweet relief?” The leaves depart their melancholy home, was how it had sometimes occurred to him while overcome with sorrow or absorbed in thought. He understands the gestures, the speech of the leaves. He understands the language of their sadness! But the proper name for it eludes him, and so he begins again. “The leaves of the trees do not cry out loud. It is not that they whimper. They do not whisper, do not murmur . . .” The road stretches out ahead, and the wheel clatters on. Fixed direction and uniform vibration, and one decisive word, which refuses to reveal itself even after a whole life spent wandering in search of it. It’s not certain exactly from what point, but he has long accepted it as a part of his life. “I will go to my grave without knowing what it is birch leaves do. I know what it is, but I can’t put it into words,” and he recalls again the words of that exile and depressive Kurt Tucholsky, who killed himself! “I can’t put it into words. The word won’t come to me.” At that, it seems as though he really can hear the sound of the birch leaves, quivering in the wind in some distant wood—though woods and the like are entirely removed from the place where the two of them actually are, a platform in the middle of the huge train station—and he cannot help but strain to listen. As a youth, he had always been somewhat envious of those who killed themselves. Especially during those frequent periods when he felt his mind grow strong and sharp, the writings of suicides had been his only support. Surely those who did not kill themselves could not speak about freedom, or humanity’s absolute condition. Because, however you interpreted it, they had compromised, chosen conformity. He had at one time pondered whether, like Tucholsky, who had died from an overdose of sleeping pills while exiled in Sweden, he had not long since arrived at the point of being unable to say or write anything, had been rejected by everyone and banished from their sight, and thus been brought to a pathological state from which it was impossible to return.
Yet another memory seized him, of a clock in the classical style, bulky yet elegant. He had seen it in the display case of a secondhand store, next to some chipped teacups, a rusted manual typewriter that looked more like a sewing machine, public school textbooks from decades ago, a 1960s photo album that was never going to sell, and a rather poorly-bound edition of Tucholsky’s essays—that’s right, Tucholsky again! He leaned in close to the store window and, as he peered inside, a handful of pigeons landed on some breadcrumbs scattered on the pavement opposite, where a police boat was docked by the bank of the canal. As this was somewhat out of the ordinary, several passersby were milling around expectantly, thinking that the police must be fishing something out of the water; after a while, when nothing had happened, they dispersed, disappointed. He straightened up, and walked on past the secondhand store. He directed his steps along the canal-side path, a place of swans and mud. A long time ago, having moved here after retirement and sought out the best route for a regular stroll, he marked on a map in colored pencil the course he had settled on. The route went through the old alleyways of the canal area, which boasted a cluster of used book and other secondhand shops. In the distant past, when mass production had yet to catch on, craftsmen and artisans had had shops stretching the entire length of the alley. He stopped on the corner between a glassblower’s workshop and a leather bookbinder’s. Bicycles and the wind swept on ahead of him, and the bright clarity of children’s voices soared up from the cemetery, into the winter sky’s chill blue. His eyes followed that ascent. There, his memories swelled and expanded, outpacing his present. Running on ahead of Tucholsky and the swans, of the woman’s sleeping lips, all the way to the north station, and to the woman’s house.
He, too, is living in the city, and at the same time in another, five hours away on the express train. Now and then he would go to an even more distant city, where he stayed at the house of an acquaintance. That house, where he had stayed in his university days, he now remembers without name or countenance, only as a room, that attic room with its unusually low ceiling, a bathroom below the landing, the sofa he had used as a bed, the incomparably quiet hours he’d spent there. There, in the house of his acquaintance, he had almost always been alone, and thus even more keenly aware of his immediate environment, its light and temperature and airflow. The light that never shone with the same color or degree of brightness twice in any given day, the wind that had seemed always to have blown in from the golden hills of early autumn, and the long interior hours, each totally unique, of days when he didn’t have lectures, their constant subtle shifts like the colors of a sunset, their atmosphere of gentle repletion like the feeling of having just eaten a meal of warm potatoes, hours he had spent writing letters. Outside the window, the narrow roof and sloping walls stood with their backs to him, square and rectangular windows facing out into the wind. The memory of those stained old walls. Walls that had originally been painted a deep yellow, but had faded over time and grown patches of mold-green moss. Walls which still, now and then, when rays of winter sun sliced down between the clouds, were momentarily revived, glittering brightly as though scoured by a lithographer’s chemicals, each individual brick given its own color and shading, fragrant orange or chest-tingling rose, glossy olive or fresh pea-green, rain-damp charcoal or the murky sheen of tar. And the poems that he had read there, limbs folded into the long, narrow alcove of the bathroom window. Their stanzas followed the wind out of the open window, to whirl around the confusion of chimneys and television antennae that made up the aerial forest, then disappear off toward the gray-shrouded city center. When was it that he had last kissed a woman so ardently, his lips as passionate as when they pronounced poetry? In that city or this, at the house of his acquaintance or on the platform in the north station, while waiting for the train. On the window seat where he read poetry, in the shadow of the walls, or on the path by the canal. Outside the door or inside it. Or a woman who had just crossed the threshold. Embracing a blazing heart, and longing for it to stay like that. Like water boiling in a teakettle, a whistle resounded in his chest. According to the timetable the train would arrive within the next few minutes. It would be the last train of the evening.
Who would have first used the expression “to capture someone’s heart”? A hunter, perhaps, who would know deeply how it feels to captur
e a beating heart, a living thing, how the one doing the capturing finds himself captivated, in thrall to the sense of his own omnipotence? Like capturing a fawn or kit still warm from its mother’s heat. Someone who, like the hunter, introduces himself into his victim’s eyes at such an early stage. Who deploys his imagination to render in his mind’s eye that state of utter despair to which the lack of any exit, the terrible clarity of this fact, gives a paradoxical sweetness. Who reproduces this state through what we call a verbal expression. In such a way, the expression would have been born not through those who are captured, but through those who do the capturing. Since the victim has no time for song. And because, in depicting the emotional state of suffering, the one who stands outside it as opposed to being gripped by its claws has the freedom of objectivity, is better able to use his imagination to turn such grim fatality into song. Such is the work of sprites; using a song to hold sway over the heart. Carnivorous sprites, who have dwelled inside human beings since time immemorial, are the ones who sing the heart. They are suffering’s only surviving witnesses, its only interested parties. The sprites who create suffering, and who thus eventually learned to feel empathy, were able to experience suffering for themselves through their own songs, and, moreover, wished to do so. To capture the heart, to rattle the heart, to steal the heart away—for him, such expressions strongly evoked long-held carnivorous habits, human being as predator. Right in front of his eyes, a young woman is waiting for the train, a young woman who, as a predator lusting after his flesh and blood, is fated to empathize with him as her potential victim and end up made pregnant with his song. Young women of a certain type were both recurring characters in his life and predators who preyed on him, and even now he remembers them well. The frighteningly young mother and the coquettish nurse; the music teacher who, despite her cold, unfeeling exterior, would frequently fall into a depression; an accountant with a stutter, who danced slowly as though underwater; women who had been both unlucky boss and innumerable harem, big-hearted jailer and a bashfully-blushing actress in a suggestive play; lesbian, nymphomaniac, and nun, all at the same time. The one thing that had remained common throughout was that these “young women” acted like enzymes, reawakening a song for him through their own unconscious singing of it. And so, unbeknownst to themselves, those women were both his sprite and his song. His song was indebted to his women, his Eurydices. Ultimately, his so-called “self ” was equally dependent. His heart produced a quavering tune in line with their vibrations and, in accordance with this wavelength, thousands of verbal expressions performed his existence. His so-called self knows nothing of the process by which these expressions are made, knows them only in their outward-facing guise. Those expressions that ultimately come from women, of which a single decisive word could inform him of the truth, a truth he knows and understands but is unable to put a name to, and thus will die in a state of ignorance. “Young lovers do not cry out loud, do not whimper to themselves. What should it be called, that which is neither whispering, murmuring, dancing, singing, laughing, nor giggling? They do not tremble, do not kiss the wind and feel the contact as a sweet relief . . . I will go to my grave without knowing what it is.”