Where Europe Begins

A GUEST

1

One winter afternoon — I had an ear infection — I walked through an underground passage that led from a subway station to a street with many shops. I had a three o’clock appointment with my ear doctor, whose office was at the end of the street. How late was it? I wondered. Just before the entrance to the passage I’d seen a clock mounted on the side of a kiosk. The clock was missing the numbers three and seven. Beside the clock stood a man who was just taking the missing numbers from his tool kit so as to affix them to the clock’s face. The woman inside the kiosk shouted to him how nice it would be to be able to see the correct time again. All at once it seemed strange to me that the numbers were arranged in a circle, since ordinarily numbers are always written from left to right.

As I entered the artificially lit passage, I realized I’d forgotten to check what time it was. It was flea-market day in the passage. The people standing on either side of the aisle inspecting the items offered up for sale looked to me as though they’d come from a dream. Their voices echoed as if from a great distance, and their bodies lacked contours. The night before I had dreamt of a flea, or of a market. When I woke up because of the pain in my ear, I felt as though there was a flea leaping about inside. I remembered a story in which a young woman develops an earache during a coach ride. I can’t remember if she was the main character in the story or whether it was only her pain that made me think of her as a heroine. The young woman’s mother and lover pour water into the painful ear, shift her head back and forth several times, then pour the water back out. When they do so, a damp flea leaps out of her ear. The woman faints, and her mother screams for help, while her lover seizes the flea — his prey — between his fingertips and pops it into his mouth.

The flea market was like an illustrated encyclopedia. The ground was crowded with small objects made of copper, colored glass, rubber, beech wood, paper, nylon and other materials. On the wall of the passage, which bore several years’ worth of posters advertising concerts and demonstrations, a number of jackets and coats were displayed for sale. They had been thoroughly cleaned, some of them even ironed and fitted out with new buttons, but I realized that their previous owners had left behind invisible traces on the clothing. These traces were frightening. It wasn’t some contagious illness I was afraid of, but rather the stories of lives unknown to me. A dark gray jacket, for example, which I noticed straight off, reminded me of a neighbor whose life remained a mystery although I’d known him for ten years. He wore a similar jacket, the left pocket of which was pulled slightly out of shape. What did he always carry in it? Every morning he left his apartment, and returned every evening at six o’clock. I knew only the name of the bank he worked for, nothing more. Every so often I noticed, emanating from his apartment, the smell of singed hair.

A hoarse voice addressed me from the left, polite and threatening at once. I shouldn’t just look at the jacket, I should try it on. It’s true it was a man’s jacket, but it would be just right for me. I said nothing and, making no move to touch the jacket, stayed where I was. A short while later a gaunt-looking man with a guitar case appeared. He stopped before the jacket, placed the case on the ground beside him and without the slightest hesitation tried the jacket on. Apparently he was not at all afraid of its former owner. At the time I didn’t yet know that even jackets fresh from the factory already have life stories unknown to me and are not like blank paper. The traces are well hidden, but sometimes one can discover them by accident. Once I purchased what appeared in the store to be a perfectly ordinary radio, but at home that night when I turned it on, it emitted a strange noise. The sound resembled the hoarse scream of a male voice. Then there was a brief scratching sound. I inspected the radio with my magnifying glass and discovered in one of the buttons a splinter of fingernail. It was embedded like a fossil in the black plastic. Probably someone working on the assembly line had been attacked by a machine and lost a fingernail, or even a whole finger. The attack was probably classified as an accident. During the quality control check, the finger had been discovered and removed, but no one had noticed the fingernail. I dug it out with my pocketknife and buried it in the garden. Since then, there have been no more inappropriate sounds from my radio.

At a flea market, no one tries to hide the traces hidden in an object. The stuffed animals with their somewhat squashed faces observed me ironically, furiously or disdainfully. Paperback novelettes with faded covers still bore coffee stains and greasy fingerprints from their first readers. The books can never forget their readers, though the readers have no doubt forgotten all about the books’ contents. Even more than the traces on these objects, the order in which the items were arranged fascinated me. An iron and a candlestick stood side by side, as though there were some relation between them. I was even able to think how this proximity might be deciphered: the iron produces heat and the candlestick light. Each takes the place of the sun, which from the underground passage is never visible.

The interior of my ear is never illuminated by the sun either. It doesn’t want to be illuminated, not even by the ear doctor’s artificial light. For eardrums can receive sounds only in the dark. How late was it? Would I still be able to get to the doctor’s on time? A pair of ice skates and a clock lay side by side, as though challenging me to guess their relation. I stood before them until I had found a solution: ice skates and clock — both turn in circles. When the skaters twirl on the ice, their skates have to turn with them. When ice skaters twirl, they look like the dolls in music boxes, which you wind like a clock.

At the end of the passage I discovered a book between a black umbrella and a sewing machine with a treadle. I don’t know why this book in particular drew my attention. I picked it up, and noticed its slight warmth in the palm of my hand. On the book’s cover I saw letters that were written not from left to right, but in a circle. I asked the man who was standing there hawking his wares in what language the book was written, since I don’t know of any language whose letters are arranged in a circle. He shrugged his shoulders and said it wasn’t a book, it was a mirror. I refused to look at the thing he was calling a mirror.

Maybe it isn’t a book, I conceded, but I would still like to know what’s going on with this writing.

The man grinned and replied: To our eyes, you look exactly like this writing. That’s why I said it was a mirror.

I rubbed my forehead from left to right, as if rewriting my face.

2

The ear doctor, Dr. Mettinger, had his door half open and was waiting for me in his consulting room. Like all the other doctors who have treated me in this city, he wanted to speak with me alone behind closed doors, as though I had an illness of which no one else should hear. I stopped just before the threshold, unable to take another step, although I was already fairly accustomed to being alone in a room with a strange man, for in this city even the vegetable and fish shops have doors that separate them from the life of the street. I stared at the silver door handle sticking out of the white, smooth door. Surely it will be cold if I touch it, I thought, and then the warmth of my own hand will feel unpleasant. It will be slippery in my moist hand and refuse to let me grip it. The doctor's assistant, observing me from her post at the reception desk, called to me that I was standing in front of the correct room. But I wasn’t at all interested in whether it was the right or wrong room.

Come in, Dr. Mettinger said in a peremptory tone. At this, my legs began to march like the legs of a robot. I didn’t feel the sort of fear people in this city call claustrophobia. It wasn’t the room’s enclosedness that troubled me, but rather the strange quiet within it. Unlike the underground passage where I’d seen the flea market, the room had neither sounds nor voices nor superfluous objects, and there was no trace of any of the patients who had been treated here. Since I spent a moment occupied only with gazing around me, Dr. Mettinger withdrew his right hand, which he had been holding out to me.

Have a seat, Ms…

He broke off his sentence and sat down himself at his desk to look for the insurance certificate where he could check my name. As he attempted to pronounce it, I tried to find the best place to put my chair. I didn’t want to sit too close to Dr. Mettinger, and pushed the chair a little to the right so I could sit diagonally opposite him. Then I fixed my eyes on his white coat, exactly the way I fix my eyes on a white sheet of paper before I begin to write. I told him I had an earache. As though there were a flea in my ear, I wanted to add, but instead said:

There’s a flea living in my ear.

I beg your pardon? Dr. Mettinger asked, looking startled. For a moment, the muscles of his face forgot to hold the individual pieces of flesh together. Dr. Mettinger was not a fat man, but now his flesh appeared superfluous and useless. Why was he startled? Perhaps I had mispronounced the “1” in the word “flea,” and Dr. Mettinger had heard an “r.” My tongue surreptitiously probed my hard palate to check whether I’d really said an “1.” I can distinguish between these two sounds only with my tongue, not with my ears, for my sense of touch is more highly developed with respect to the foreign language than my hearing. My doubt over whether I’d pronounced an “1” vanished again as the doctor asked me where I’d gotten the idea that a flea might be living in my ear. I answered that I knew from a story that such things could happen. He got up abruptly, strode to the window, and shifted a vase of flowers a little to the left so that the sun could shine directly on his desk.

Excuse me, it was a little too dark for me, even though the weather today is splendid, he said in a friendly voice and picked up his big fountain pen. The expression “the weather today is splendid” bothered me for some reason. The fountain pen began writing on a sheet of paper; it was thicker than my thumb and had a middle section that looked like a golden ring.

How long have you had the earache?

I told him I’d woken up in the middle of the night because of a burning sensation in my left ear. On Dr. Mettinger’s desk lay three stacks of paper that reflected the sun’s glare. The letters vanished in the strong light. While Dr. Mettinger was taking notes, I remembered that the night before I had dreamt of a fire on a sheet of paper. One by one the letters went up in flames, and only the ones containing an enclosed space — like O, P, D, Q and R — remained unharmed. So I hadn’t dreamt of the flea or the market after all; I had been mistaken, and only now realized what my dream had really been about.

Dr. Mettinger informed me that he would have to examine my ear. As he spoke, he gazed attentively into my eyes, as if searching for something, though I couldn’t imagine what.

Yes, I said uncertainly and turned to the side so he could see my painful ear better.

Uncover the ear, he said in a tone both severe and apprehensive. I pushed back my hair to expose the ear, realizing as I did that my ears were protected by my hair. I hadn’t been out with exposed ears at all. How then was it possible for someone to have put something inside my ear that caused me pain? Dr. Mettinger took an instrument that resembled a small telescope or spyglass from a drawer. Then he gazed into my ear with it and held his breath. After a while he began to groan, laid aside his spyglass and said:

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.

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.

Quite the contrary, I eventually came to take great pleasure in it, I said in an intentionally cheerful tone, which did nothing to change Martina’s dour expression. She looked at me, but it was clear she hadn’t understood what I’d said. I suggested she always wear her Walkman when she went out so her ears would be protected. She took the Walkman from her desk drawer and tried it to see if it still worked. I asked her whether she’d spoken with our new neighbor yet.

What new neighbor do you mean?

Martina said she hadn’t seen any new neighbor.

When I was about to return to my apartment, Martina’s boyfriend arrived to pick her up. With his appearance, the oppressiveness in the air vanished. I took a long deep breath. At the same time I missed my tape so badly that I immediately said goodbye to them and went back to my apartment with the typewriter.

I couldn’t type a thing that day, nor for many days after, because the voice from the tape recorder became louder and louder, until eventually it drowned out the clacking of the machine. Several times a day I turned off the tape recorder, but it kept turning itself back on.

Don’t you want me to write?

For the first time I asked the voice an audible question.

Or do you have something against written characters?

No answer came. I placed my hands on the pause button of the recorder to silence it. Then my radio clock automatically began to speak. I couldn’t understand the technical connection between the two machines. News.

I couldn’t bear the voice of the clock radio very long, either, though not because I didn’t want to hear any other voice but that of the tape player. On the contrary, the radio briefly liberated me from the voice of the novel. From the radio, new voices entered my apartment: the voices of politicians, the voices of dock workers, the voices of men of letters… but I didn’t listen for long. I kept returning to the voice of the novel and wasn’t sure whether or not I really wanted to escape from it.

5

It was my birthday.

On my desk, ten thin, aching fingers entwined. They had grown out of a tiny hand that, as I realized after a moment, belonged to me. The windows were closed, as is often the case in dreams. But this couldn’t have been a dream. Normally in my dreams nothing seems odd to me, nor am I missing anything. Now I was missing all sorts of things. First I poked around a bit with a bent forefinger trying to find my right ear, but I couldn’t. Where was my right ear? Had it fallen off the desk?

Where do right ears belong?

In your loins of course, right ears belong in your loins, a voice said to me. I looked for my left ear. It wasn’t where it was supposed to be, either. The air was like a mass of kneaded wheat flour. No, it wasn’t that the air was heavy, but the voice of a woman had stopped up my ears and kept my eardrums from vibrating.

This voice has plugged up all the holes, I said aloud, for I wasn’t sitting alone in the kitchen, I had two companions, Gudrun and her sister. They were busy stirring a bowl of something and didn’t hear what I said.

We’re almost done, Gudrun said and gave me a worried glance. Vaguely I remembered having invited ten people to a party. Only I could no longer remember what the occasion was. Gudrun and her sister had arrived an hour early, with no explanation. I was afraid to ask why. Perhaps they already knew I was incapable of receiving guests. Neither of them scolded me when they saw I hadn’t yet begun my preparations.

Where’s the salt? Gudrun or her sister asked.

I don’t have any.

Why don’t you have salt?

Gudrun and her sister have almost the same voice so it’s impossible for me to tell which one of them is speaking if I don’t see their lips. They were talking about how they had too much on their hands these days. One of the two said she couldn’t wait for things to calm down around her. That’s all she wanted, nothing else interested her any more. Four eyes gazed at me, awaiting my reply. It was as if they wanted to test whether I knew what calm was. And in fact I realized for the first time that, although I knew the meaning of the word “calm,” I couldn’t really imagine what it might be. I tried to picture a situation in which someone lacked calm. It didn’t work. Then I tried to imagine the exact opposite. That didn’t work either.

•

If you absolutely have to have salt, I’ll go borrow some from my neighbor. That would be OK.

A week ago I had plenty of salt. I gave my neighbor too much salt, that’s why I don’t have any left.

I heard two women’s voices laughing, then I went to my neighbor’s apartment and asked whether he could spare some salt. He gazed at me for a moment, and suddenly asked if I’d be interested in working on a project with him. He said he’d give me more details next time. Today he had neither time nor salt for me.

When you yourself were out of salt, I gave you some of mine, I said. To my surprise, my voice came out sounding querulous. A tone I had known only from other women. The neighbor laughed.

Now you sound just like my mother. Don’t be like that. Otherwise our project will be a failure.

He laughed again and closed the door.

I had always found it unpleasant to have guests in my apartment. They filled up my rooms with strange sentences I would never have formulated in such a way. Today I found the sound of these sentences particularly unbearable. Sometimes I tried to follow only the sense of the conversation so as not to hear the sounds of the language. But they penetrated my body as though they were inseparable from the sense.

Once, a violent conversation started among a group of people. It was like a wind sock that kept spinning faster and faster. Finally the wind sock swallowed up the people. They were talking about sports, the names of athletes, strikes, matches, points, attacks, kicks. All those present were compelled to speak to defend themselves against the others’ words.

At midnight the guests began to dance to disco music. I couldn’t hear the music, but saw the wine glasses vibrating. Apparently it was very loud. No one was allowed to miss a beat. The guests weren’t dancing at all, they were speaking to one another. When someone stuttered, the others spoke more quickly so the interruption wouldn’t be noticed. The rhythm was set by a computerized drum set, just like in disco music. The people breathed, as it were, mechanically, rather than taking irregular breaths whenever they felt like it. My heartbeat and my sighs were ridiculously soft, no match for the powerful speakers. In these black refrigerators, the mass of sounds is frozen. There weren’t any speakers in my apartment, and there wasn’t any music playing. People were talking. I wanted to transform myself into a stone. Wanted to become a stone like a misplaced comma, to interrupt the clatter of conversation.

Rosa was the only one who paid attention to me. She tried to include me in the conversation as though this were her special task. But I didn’t want anyone to talk to me.

Rosa always spoke in an assured tone of voice, a tone whose existence predated that of Rosa, one which belonged to the city. She had learned it by heart at home or at school, though to this day I am unable to understand how a tone can be learned by heart. Maybe she learned each figure of speech and line of argument in connection with a particular tone. When she spoke in this studied tone, it was rarely possible to object to what she said, for every objection one might make sounded feeble, unnatural, even senseless. I wanted to become a stone and hurl myself against this way of speaking. Then it would either shatter or show a different face.

Does a tone have more than one face? Does a face have more than one tone?

I didn’t know anything about Rosa beyond the fact that she had a throat illness which was not apparent when you spoke with her. Her girlfriends had mentioned this throat illness to me several times.

I don’t know how this night ended. When I woke up, there was no longer anyone sitting in my apartment. I wasn’t even sure whether or not I’d really had guests the night before. Outside a faint dawn bathed the asphalt streets. A few drops of water trickled down the windowpane, as if they wanted to wash away the guests’ last fingerprints.

When I went to the bakery to buy breakfast rolls, I saw Rosa. I called her name, although I didn’t have anything in particular to say to her. She groaned before I could utter another word and gave a nervous smile. She pressed her paper bag of rolls against her chest and turned her back on me. As she left the bakery she said to me — though I hadn’t asked — that she had no time today.

I’m under time pressure. I’m not going to have a minute of calm all week, since I have so much on my hands. But next week I’ll give you a call, she shouted from the street into the bakery where I was still standing. Why did she want to call? Besides, it wasn’t possible to call me. She was gone before I could tell her I didn’t have a telephone.

6

I undressed, lay down and closed my eyes.

Whenever I felt ill, I would simply lie like this for several days, rather than going to a doctor or buying medicine. I was afraid of taking medicine, even home remedies like hot currant juice with honey to ward off colds. Fighting an illness seemed to me to show a lack of respect. Once it arrived, there was nothing to do but cooperate and accept it.

Sometimes I tried to see the voice, too, as an illness and behave accordingly. But — unlike with other illnesses — I didn’t want it to leave me for good one day.

When night fell, I tried to locate parts of my body with which I could perceive the voice. I didn’t think I was feeling it on my eardrum like an ordinary voice. Especially when I was lying down it came to me in a surprising way. First it stroked my neck cautiously. This tended to go on too long for my taste, and I was also afraid it might elegantly strangle me. I never understood what it wanted from me, if it wanted anything at all. Nor could I ask it any questions, since it couldn’t hear. It was a voice without ears.

Sometimes I allowed it to caress me for hours, my belly, the soles of my feet, my nose, breasts, fingertips, thighs. Fortunately I was not obliged to show any reaction, the voice did not expect this of me. I didn’t have to formulate a single sentence, and was able to transform myself into pure tactile sensation, a sense of touch without language. Not only spoken language, but body language as well had become superfluous. I felt liberated from the gaze of others as well, for it was a voice without eyes.

To my surprise, however, when I went outside I realized I was not liberated from every gaze. This time I met Rosa in front of the post office. She asked if I wanted to come over for a cup of tea because she wanted to show me her new apartment which she’d only just moved into. I had never found the furnishings of apartments particularly interesting, though it occurred to me that I could write an article for the magazine about this since the furnishings of an apartment not only pose financial and practical problems, but also have a religious aspect.

That would be very nice, I said. Though at once I felt guilty. There was something inhuman about being interested only in things I could observe like an ethnologist.

The moment I entered the apartment, Rosa peered deep into my eyes, as though she wanted to see exactly what sort of reflection her apartment made in them. Right away I was required to decide whether or not I found her apartment attractive, which was impossible for me to do since I can’t form an opinion of an apartment I don’t live in. All the same, Rosa seemed to want to read some judgment in my eyes. Perhaps it was an exercise for her: seeing her own apartment with a stranger’s eyes and assigning it grades that would later help her improve it. Perhaps for her this apartment was something like a self-portrait: the furniture, posters, rug, writing implements, stereo joined together to illustrate her personality. But why did she want me to see it?

I kept running into a wall of questions as to the point of it all. For me, my apartment had the function of a skin. No one could observe it from the inside. I always found it unpleasant to see people in my apartment, and even more unpleasant when they observed it with curiosity. My apartment doesn’t want to be given a grade, otherwise it cramps up. I want it to be all but invisible. It isn’t there to be shown off, nor to represent any sort of accomplishment. It cannot be either attractive or ugly, since it isn’t there to be looked at in the first place. Rosa asked me hesitantly what I was up to these days. She couldn’t imagine me having a professional career or a relationship that took up a great deal of time.

I’ve been listening to a voice that does not resonate in any body, I replied.

Rosa came closer.

What sort of voice?

The voice of a woman.

Rosa was immediately disappointed with my answer. Not wanting to be impolite, though, she made a joke instead of showing her disappointment directly.

I keep hearing a woman’s voice, too, one that tells me all the times I keep doing something wrong. But I know perfectly well whose voice it is.

7

I placed a classified ad in a newspaper. Anyone who read the ad was supposed to get the impression that for sentimental reasons an old woman was looking for an old novel she had enjoyed reading sixty years before. That this old woman was willing to pay one hundred marks for a book that had value neither for a passionate lover of literature nor a book collector might have seemed somewhat unusual. So at first I was afraid my request would be an odd bird fluttering garishly away between the neat columns of classifieds, and that a few readers would call me up just out of curiosity. But when I read other advertisements on the same page, I realized how inconspicuous mine was. For example, one woman wrote that she was prepared to pay two hundred and fifty for a goldfish that resembled her dead son. And a wealthy man was looking for a woman with only one ear, for purposes of marriage. In comparison, my desire to purchase an old novel for one hundred marks was relatively modest. More precisely, I wanted not the novel but the book. The novel didn’t interest me. I wanted to own the book in order to lock the voice from the tape behind the bars of the printed letters.

A few days later a student called me and said he had the book I was looking for but unfortunately couldn’t sell it to me because it was connected with certain personal memories that were very important to him. If I really wanted to see the book, though, he would visit me and bring it with him.

Three days later he appeared. The book’s title page had a dark red color that struck me as familiar. Hadn’t I once known someone who wore a shirt with a similar color? The title page bore no heading. The book’s owner explained that the title had no doubt stood on a separate leaf which had probably become detached from the book and eventually gotten lost. In the middle of the page stood a drawing of a clock. It was missing not only its hands, but also two numbers: three and seven. The book was much thinner than I had imagined it. How could a novel that refused to come to an end live in this little book? I told my visitor I’d been looking for this book for a long time, and until now I’d known only its title, author’s name and contents. I didn’t mention the tapes. It would have been difficult to explain why I was so eager to own the novel as a book when I already had the tapes in my possession.

So what is it you do in this city? the owner of the book asked me. I looked at him for the first time. His lips kept moving after he’d finished his sentence.

Usually I sit at the window and listen to the voice of a woman.

As soon as I said the word “voice,” I immediately remembered that I hadn’t wanted to mention the tapes. But the man didn’t ask any more questions. Instead he looked at my fingers, which were trembling. I placed the coffee cup, which I’d been trying to lift, back on the table.

See this?

He turned the book over and drew my attention to the greasy fingerprints on its back cover.

That doesn’t bother me, I replied, without quite knowing why he was showing me the marks. I opened the book.

When I stared at the two open pages, my eyes were incapable of reading even a single sentence. He asked again:

Did you see the fingerprints?

I closed the book, inspected the marks on its back cover and tried to discover what was special about them. The man’s name was Simon. Although I hadn’t asked him, he told me his name.

Go on reading. After all, you wanted to read the book. I can stay here until you’re finished. But, as I said, I can’t sell you the book, because of the fingerprints.

Once more I studied the form of the five fingertips visible on the red paper. Simon laughed and showed me his right hand. His middle finger was missing.

I read the novel before I lost my middle finger working in a factory, and this is the only image my finger left behind. I don’t even have a photograph of it. That’s why I don’t want to sell you the book.

I opened the book again. It seemed to me as if the voice became quieter when the book was open. I didn’t have the courage to ask Simon whether he, too, could hear this. I couldn’t even ask whether he heard the voice at all. He sat there calmly and went on saying:

Take your time and read the book, all of it. I’ll stay here until you’re finished.

•

An hour passed without my having read anything. I recognized individual letters, but couldn’t make words out of them, as if the book were written in a language I didn’t know. It got dark. I couldn’t bring myself to part from the book; every time I opened it, the voice lost its strength. I wondered if I should ask Simon to visit me every day with the book. But sooner or later he’d have to go home.

Although I couldn’t read the book, I kept flipping through it. I had to be careful not to flip too quickly or too slowly. Otherwise, Simon might have noticed I wasn’t reading at all. Simon sat on a kitchen chair. From time to time he lit a cigarette and smoked with eyes half closed. He held the cigarette between his thumb and ring finger. He held his index finger in the air, pointing meaninglessly in some direction. At some point Simon silently walked over to the sofa, lay down and fell asleep. I closed the curtains and covered his body with a woolen blanket. There were no more street sounds any longer. It was a night with a greenish full moon.

I stood for a while on the balcony looking at the moon. The shadows on its surface could be read neither like numbers nor letters. They resembled no signs known to me. Once I had thought the cycles of the moon determined my sense of life, but now it was a flat shape. Through the window I could already see the first light of dawn. I kept turning pages in the book, playing the role of a passionate reader, although Simon had long since fallen asleep. He wouldn’t have checked to see if I was still reading in any case. He just wanted to give me a chance to see the novel with my own eyes.

When Simon woke up, I had to tell him I hadn’t made any progress reading the book because my eyes couldn’t make words out of the letters. I didn’t know if Simon understood me or not. He only repeated that he would stay until I finished reading the book. He stayed all day. Once he left the house without saying anything, and I thought he wasn’t coming back. But half an hour later he returned with a large plastic bag from which he produced vegetables, bread, cheese, wine and cigarettes. He stayed the next day, too, and the days thereafter.

I had laid the book open on the table in front of me.

The voice from the tape player became weaker every day, but I still couldn’t make any progress reading. My abdomen began to ache. I didn’t know whether or not the pain had anything to do with the disappearance of the voice. At times I hoped Simon would leave the apartment with the book so the voice would return. But just as often I hoped Simon would never leave, so that the book, too, would remain. But then the pain in my abdomen would remain as well, and I might have to go to the doctor. I imagined an ear doctor or gynecologist might be able to invent some reason for my pain.

8

Where are you going? my neighbor asked, not even bothering to say hello first, when I ran into him on the stairs.

I wanted to run down to the pharmacy for some painkillers. For several days now — I wasn’t sure how long — I hadn’t left the apartment, since Simon brought me everything I needed. But the painkillers I wanted to get myself without his knowing; I had never before taken pills of any sort, and it seemed to me almost like a crime.

The neighbor’s question had a threatening ring to it. I couldn’t answer. For a moment the two of us stood there silently on the stairs. His eyes were hidden behind his sunglasses. His dark red shirt looked familiar to me. After a while he extracted a small metal object from his trouser pocket and held it up before my eyes. It was a key. When I tried to seize it, he quickly returned it to his pocket. I started down the stairs and heard him say behind me in a commanding tone: Come see me tonight. I have to talk to you. Seven o’clock.

It had been a long time since I’d spoken with anyone except Simon. I no longer felt the need to visit acquaintances to confirm my acquaintance with them, nor to make the acquaintance of people I didn’t yet know. Whether or not I knew someone no longer had any importance. The author of the novel was the only person whose acquaintance I’d have liked to make. I looked in the phone book and discovered thirteen women with her name. I could have called up all thirteen and asked each of them whether she’d written the novel. This would have been worth the effort if I’d known for certain that one of the thirteen was the author, but it was unlikely that the author and I lived in the same city. Actually I didn’t really want to meet her. I wasn’t interested in the person who had written this boring novel. What aroused my interest was my suspicion that the speaker on the tape was in fact the author. The only series of books-on-tape I knew was called “The Authors Read,” and the reader on the tape seemed too unprofessional to be a trained actress. But I kept thinking about the voice’s owner. I wanted to find her, to hear what the voice sounded like when it came from a body, not an electrical apparatus.

I told Simon about neither my tapes nor my neighbor. Simon probably took me for a lonely woman with no friends in this city who occupied herself only with reading and writing. In reality, I was able neither to read nor write. I sat at my desk, upon which lay a book and a stack of manuscript pages, and did nothing. Since Simon had moved in, I hadn’t been able to write anything at all. It was strange for me to have gone so long without writing. From time to time I distinctly felt the urge simply to set down letters on a sheet of paper, but this urge vanished as soon as I glanced at the open book. I lost my way among its letters as if in a forest. Perhaps I needed the voice from the tape recorder to be able to write again.

When I wasn’t at my desk, I sat with Simon at the window, watching the people who passed by the building. Most of their faces were uninteresting, but a few of them I observed attentively because they could be connected with a particular number. For example, I said to Simon, a boy walking past looked like three, not because he walked stooped over so that his spine formed the shape of this number; nor because he might have answered three out of five questions on his last quiz in school. The mouth of the boy was shaped in such a way as if he were about to pronounce the word “three,” but this wasn’t the reason either. I didn’t tell Simon what the reason was. Simon said I saw the city as a clock, perhaps because I had lost all sense of time.

But I was still able to tell time, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to appear at my neighbor’s door at exactly seven o’clock.

You’re punctual. That’s a good sign, he said, and grinned. He was wearing the dark red shirt. Soon the color of the wool shirt assumed a certain autonomy and began to float back and forth in my field of vision. I could see nothing else but this color, and suddenly it occurred to me why it looked so familiar. It was the color of the book Simon had brought me, the color of the novel.

The neighbor offered me a cup of tea. His voice now was soft and indistinct. The threatening tone in which he’d spoken a few hours before was gone. Since I didn’t know what to say, I asked him what profession he was in. He blinked. This time he wasn’t wearing his sunglasses. His eyes had no shape, they consisted of a continual opening and closing.

He replied that he was currently unemployed. The business he’d founded together with his girlfriend had gone bankrupt, though he now had a plan that might well be successful. He’d had his telephone cut off so his girlfriend couldn’t call him any more, for there was nothing he found more unbearable than her voice. After he had thoroughly and maliciously described his girlfriend, he suddenly asked if I meditated often. Caught off guard, I replied:

Yes, no, I mean, if I say yes it already means no.

I never spoke the word “meditation” aloud, since meditation described, comprehended and presented as such wasn’t meditation at all. I meditated only in an overcrowded subway, or in a department store in front of a display table heaped with sale items. I meditated standing up and with open eyes. I meditated often. The idea of achieving a state of calm or even discovering one’s true nature through meditation was utterly foreign to me. Rather, I would lapse into meditation when I was fascinated by large crowds of people or mountains of industrial products. They fascinated me because when I looked at them I felt certain I could just as easily do without them.

I told the neighbor everything I could think of on the subject of meditation. He put on his sunglasses and listened. I didn’t have the impression he understood what I was saying. He didn’t ask any questions, either. Perhaps my words lacked all importance to him. After a while he asked whether I talked in my sleep.

How should I know? In any case, I’ve never been woken up by my own voice, only by that of another woman.

Ask Simon whether you’ve talked in your sleep. Don’t forget to ask him soon, because he can’t stay with you much longer. Perhaps it’s already too late. He may already have left. The neighbor’s fingers were bony and conspicuously long. I noticed this when — after finishing his tea — he placed his hands on the table.

How did you know he’s been staying with me and that his name is Simon? I asked, trying not to move any part of my body.

The clock showed exactly ten o’clock. Cautiously I asked the neighbor what his name was, for he didn’t have a name plate on his door. It had only just occurred to me that I didn’t know his name. He said, grinning, that his name was Z.

That can’t be your name. You can’t expect me to believe your name is an abbreviation of zero just because it’s zero minutes after ten.

Then I have a different name, he said, sounding exhausted, but didn’t say what it was.

The next morning Z was still there. His face was now completely different. The shape of his eyes was distinct, and he didn’t blink as often. The flesh of his stomach had grown overnight. I realized I was afraid of him. When I asked him whether he would prefer to drink coffee or tea, he replied:

I never drink tea.

But I clearly remembered him drinking tea once because he had put salt in his tea by mistake. I just couldn’t make up my mind when this had occurred.

•

I went into the kitchen to make coffee. I tried to avoid putting an unpleasant suspicion into words. But I couldn’t get past the ridiculous question of whether this was the same man I had visited the day before. Hadn’t we both been in his apartment yesterday? Why had we woken up in mine? Where was Simon? Perhaps it wasn’t important whether he was the same man as the one from yesterday or not. In any case, I hardly knew him. I knew only that he was my neighbor and that he wanted me to call him Z. No one can really have the name Z, but anyone can ask people to call him anything. So the name Z was not a way to recognize him.

But where was Simon? And where was his book? It no longer lay on my table. The water was boiling in the kettle I’d purchased at a department store. A thermos bottle, two pots and three soup ladles lying near the kettle presented themselves to me. I tried to put these objects together in my head to paint the picture of a kitchen that held a comfortable place for me. But it didn’t work. Individual objects kept hovering out of context before my eyes. What was the point of this kettle, these bowls and these forks? What was that round metal shape, this wooden rectangle? Why had I assembled them in this room? I sat down on the kitchen chair where Simon had often sat. For the first time I noticed the flower-patterned wall, an unpleasant sight. How long had I had this wallpaper? Why had I never tried to take it down? To my surprise, the kettle had the same pattern as the wallpaper. I drew the conclusion that both were manufactured by the same company. If I had seen the kettle at the flea market beside a fountain pen, I might have seen a different relationship between the objects. A kettle and a fountain pen each have an entrance through which something can go in and — unlike the human ear — an exit through which it can come out again. There was still an early-morning light outside. In the glow of the kitchen lamp, white coffee cups gleamed dimly. I remembered that in the novel a scene like this one had been described to express a certain emotion on the part of a character. I hated that part of the text. Fortunately, I could no longer remember the emotion that was being described.

Both the voice of the novel and the book were gone. They had both lost all importance for my life, but all the same I had the unfamiliar feeling that I could no longer feel at ease without them.

At breakfast, Z said to me that he wanted to go on observing Martina. I was surprised he knew her. He also knew I was using her typewriter.

She doesn’t interest me, I said.

That doesn’t make her uninteresting, he replied calmly.

What’s so special about her?

My voice was loud. He grinned out of one side of his mouth.

Nothing at all. She has a problem that probably affects millions of women. We have to take an interest in such problems if we wish to be successful.

9

At three in the afternoon, Z left my apartment. I stood empty-handed at the window and realized my hands needed something to hold on to. For example, the keys of the typewriter, a book or the hands of another person. Since the day Simon first came to visit me, I hadn’t written a single word, not even a letter. I wanted to write again, but didn’t know what. My fingers kept searching for the keys.

I went to Martina’s apartment to ask whether she could lend me her typewriter for a little while.

She opened the door red-eyed and told me that a bus driver had shouted at her the day before. Until then she’d been doing quite well. She’d been walking around with her Walkman as usual and when she got on the bus she noticed that the bus driver was opening and closing his mouth like a goldfish, turning redder and redder. Surprised, she took off her headphones. As soon as she did so, a sharp voice pierced her ears.

Can’t you read? Are you illiterate?

Martina still didn’t understand what he was talking about. If he’d asked if she couldn’t hear, she’d have understood, but not if she couldn’t read. Then an older woman standing behind her took Martina by the back of her jacket and pulled her out of the bus. She pointed her index finger at a sign affixed to the bus.

After 7:00 p.m. show all passes when entering bus, the woman read to her in a loud, clear voice like an elementary school teacher. Martina said quietly: I know how to read.

This made the bus driver even angrier:

Everyone who breaks laws is illiterate. I don’t mean that all illiterates are law-breakers, but every law is written down somewhere, that’s for sure, and…

After this incident Martina spent three days in bed without eating.

You ought to shield your eyes as well, then nothing can happen to you. For instance, you could always hold a book in front of your face, I said to comfort her.

Martina didn’t say anything. After a while she went into the kitchen, placed her hands on the handle of the kettle and began to cry. When the palms of a person’s hands touch something warm, it sometimes happens that the person’s feelings melt and spill out of her mouth. I knew there was a similar scene in the missing novel. The scene involved a woman who cried several times during the novel. I was glad I couldn’t remember her life story any more.

I visited our new neighbor the day before yesterday, Martina said all at once. He said he used to study psychology. Maybe he can help me.

Martina blew her nose, which made her appear to be smiling. I stood up because I didn’t want to hear anything more about the neighbor. It wasn’t clear to me why he had told Martina about his studies.

The typewriter’s over there. You can go on writing your novel, Martina said in a disinterested voice, gesturing with her chin in the direction I was already looking. Immediately, I was filled with hatred for the word “novel.”

I’m not writing a novel, I said, horrified, and Martina looked at me in surprise.

That evening it began to rain. I sat at the typewriter, hitting the Z key over and over. I found the shape of this letter unappealing, but my fingers insisted on typing, and since I couldn’t think of a single sentence, I had no choice but to keep typing the same letter again and again.

Why haven’t you come? I told you to come, I said aloud. Suddenly it occurred to me whom I was talking to. Simon was gone, and Z wasn’t in the apartment either. There was nothing to stop the voice from returning. Without it, I thought, I would never be able to formulate a sentence again.

Z one

Z ither

Z ero

I typed the letter Z separately from the rest of the word. Gradually the keys of the typewriter began to feel lighter. I left the Z out:

one

ither

ero

I couldn’t stop typing:

inc

enith

ygote

ephyr

ealot

ombie

ed

I typed and typed, not noticing that the door had opened. Z stood there, coughing. When he took my hands, they lost all desire to type.

For some reason I can’t seem to write anything at all today, I said before he had time to ask.

10

The next day the voice of the novel returned to me.

As if in a trance, I typed an endless chain of Z-less words. Then I took a new sheet of paper and typed a row of Zs. When I tore up the page and threw it into the wastepaper basket, I heard a woman’s voice behind me. At first I thought someone was talking on the street. Then I realized it was the voice of the novel, for I heard it not with my eardrums but with some other part of my body I was unable to localize. When I closed the lid of the typewriter, the voice became more distinct. I slipped into bed and turned out the light. I remained lying there — don’t know how long — and didn’t notice when the door opened and Z appeared beside my bed.

Are you sleeping?

The voice disappeared when Z spoke, and my sense of hearing was immediately restricted to my eardrums.

No, I’m not asleep.

What are you doing if you aren’t sleeping?

I went on lying there like a stone and gave no answer. I was afraid that Z, too, had heard the woman’s voice and would call me a traitor. But why? Why shouldn’t I listen to the voice? Z scrutinized my face like a doctor looking for a mark on my skin. I myself could not feel my own body, though gradually I was able to perceive the voice again. It was as if the room contracted when it spoke more quickly. When the voice grew louder, the room expanded and then existed only as the voice. In this room created by the voice, I could not find my own body. The room was empty and had neither walls nor furniture. It consisted only of a voice. Didn’t it resemble the apartment I’d wished for?

Time passed. I awoke from the sleep that was not sleep and saw that an alarm clock and Z were lying beside me. I had never before seen anything in such extreme proximity. Z, who woke up shortly afterward, picked up the clock and shook it like a salt shaker. Then he asked me once more if I was asleep. When I said no, he asked why I was lying there like a stone. I sat up and found my arms and head much heavier than before. I could hear the voice only in my head. On the small table next to the bed lay a stone. I picked it up and shook it several times, the way you shake a salt shaker. The stone made a strange sound. Was it hollow on the inside? Z stood up and started walking back and forth in the room. I said to him:

I’ve always wanted to become a stone. Besides, I’m still sick.

Z smiled as if in relief Most likely he’d thought I was bored with him. I wasn’t really sick, but since otherwise it wouldn’t have been acceptable for me to imitate a stone, I decided to be sick. It occurred to me that I might really be sick.

I have an ear infection. I keep hearing a woman’s voice. It’s because of the infection, you see.

Z grinned, took my hand and said:

I know. I know everything. But we’ll have to be thrifty with our speech and use our heads. Don’t tell anyone you’re sick. Don’t call your illness “ear infection.” “Ear infection” sounds ridiculous. You mustn’t ever say anything ridiculous about yourself. Don’t talk with other women about the voice. I’ll tell you next week where our work goes from here. I have to go away for a week to collect the materials for the project. In the meantime, don’t speak to anyone. Stay here alone until I come back. I told you right from the start that I’m planning a project. And this project can be completed only with your help.

The next day I went downtown to buy a typewriter. Since I couldn’t visit Martina any longer, I needed one of my own. I would have to turn in another article for my series in the Japanese magazine soon. The deadline was approaching, and I felt as if I would be able to write again. Moreover, now that Z was gone, the voice had returned as well.

I went to a big department store downtown. While I was comparing various typewriters and studying the brochures, I remembered what Martina had said to me. She thought I was writing a novel. My hatred for the word “novel” flared up again. Of course “novel” is only a sort of product label, like “typewriter,” and a book has to be called “novel” or “stories” or “poems,” since if you can’t categorize it in some way it’s impossible to decide on the size of the print run, the target audience, marketing strategies and price. Therefore the word was very important. I hated it all the same.

How nice it would have been if the voice hadn’t belonged to a novel. I couldn’t understand why it had picked something so boring to attach itself to. Perhaps the voice found it satisfying not to have to live in a short text. Most readers don’t like to read short texts because they have so little time. They would rather go for a walk in a long novel and not have to change. The short texts would go for a walk inside their bodies, which they would find exhausting.

When I came home with the new typewriter and began to type, I suddenly felt quite attracted to the word “ethnology.” It no longer surprised me that I couldn’t manage to take an interest in romances or adventure novels. I would much rather write short reports on the inhabitants of this city. And if I didn’t succeed, I would write nothing but single letters of the alphabet.

I wrote the letter Z ten times on a sheet of paper and then destroyed it. When I stared at the second white sheet, I suddenly felt as if I would now be able to write something I had never before written.

11

Martina sat, eyes closed, on the floor of her apartment.

Inhale deeply three times, Z’s voice said. Although Martina’s eyes were closed, you could tell by her expression that she was trying to meet his eyes. Whenever he looked at her, she smiled. I had never seen her face so radiant.

And exhale slowly seven times.

Z’s powerful voice pierced my ears as well. Martina inhaled and exhaled according to his instructions. Z took her arms and moved them slowly, first to the left, then to the right, and finally above her head. Rigid and yielding at the same time, like a doll, she assumed various positions. She seemed to be convinced of some idea I knew nothing about. After a while the room grew dark. Martina’s bare arms and chest gave off a faint glow. In the background one could see the shadow of the curtain.

I feel better, she said. I lay like a trough beside Z. Although he’d forbidden me to do so, I had opened my eyes just a crack and was watching Martina. Z explained something to her in a gentle voice. Martina began to move as though she were quickly taking off a shirt that was much too tight and clung to her skin. She threw the piece of clothing she’d removed in my direction. In reality she wasn’t wearing anything at all. My supine body received the invisible clothing. It didn’t hurt, it didn’t make me happy. I went on lying there as Z had instructed me and tried to breathe as little as possible. It wasn’t difficult to do, as I felt like a stone.

That wasn’t bad, Z said to me in a business-like tone after the first of his consultations. I hadn’t understood what I was doing with Martina, and couldn’t ask. Perhaps I didn’t want to know.

The next day a woman I had never seen before came for a consultation with Z. Although I couldn’t see the woman’s face because of the way my body was positioned, I realized at once that she felt Z’s gaze all over her body and was enjoying it like a sort of shower. Soon she, too, began to move in the same way I’d already observed with Martina, as if she were pulling off a piece of clothing and tossing it in my direction. It didn’t hurt, just felt strange, as if I’d been sent to some other place, even though I was still in the room with the woman and Z. In this other place, I wasn’t lonely, just alone. There were a number of voices there. Not only the voice of the novel, but many other voices as well surrounded my body. After the woman left the room, Z placed one hundred marks on my desk and without a word left the apartment.

The next day a third woman arrived. She had a hoarse voice that was not hers but belonged to a different, older woman. She was possessed by this stranger’s voice and suffered from it as if from an illness. It was as if she was unable to assemble the words she wished to speak, and therefore spoke quite poorly. No wonder: when there’s always another voice interrupting, you immediately forget how you wanted to end your sentence. When the woman sat down in front of Z and closed her eyes, Z looked at her until her expression melted. Everything was strangely still. Then she took off an invisible garment and threw it on my body. An hour later the woman had a high, clear voice that instantly aroused my pity.

What a lovely stone, she said to Z as she was leaving, meaning me. For years I had dreamt of becoming a stone.

One day Rosa came for a consultation. I didn’t know how Z advertised his services. Sometimes women I knew came, sometimes women I didn’t know. But no one recognized me because I had plastered my face with light-gray, concrete-like paint. My nose and mouth looked like two hillocks, and my eyes were holes. On my cheeks, Z wrote the numbers three and seven. When the women arrived, they generally gave my face a brief glance and acted as if they hadn’t seen anything.

That looks like a clock made of stone, Rosa said when she saw me.

When she met me at the bakery the next morning, she said hello in a friendly voice and told me that her sore throat had disappeared when she started going to meditation. I was so surprised to hear the word “meditation” that I was unable to answer.

I can also sleep well now that I’m in meditation. I used to hear a piercing voice in my dreams all night long. Now it’s gone, and I’ve found my way back to my true self.

The next day I brought this up with Z and asked him not to use these expressions.

Why do you use words like that?

What words do you mean?

“Meditation,” for example.

What’s wrong with it?

Don’t you get goose bumps on your lips when you say it? I don’t mean there’s anything wrong with meditation, but the word …

Z didn’t listen. He was convinced he could liberate these women from their sleepless nights and illnesses. He thought he knew what methods and words could best help him reach his goal.

12

More and more women came for consultations. Almost every day I had to lie down next to Z and remain motionless for two or three hours. I tried not to listen to Z’s voice. Nevertheless, individual sentences or groups of sentences sometimes sprang into my ears. Then it was impossible to keep my body still. My fingers tapped lightly on the floor, or my belly quivered. Z didn’t seem to notice his sentences displeased me. He gained immediate control over each of the women, who were overcome with a mixture of fear and respect whenever Z spoke or stared at them in silence. At first the women hid the fact that they were strangely shaken. They sat there with disapproving expressions on their faces until their fear took over. Once they told him something, trembling and sometimes even weeping, they calmed down. But the flesh of their faces remained stiff. I never heard anyone laugh in Z’s presence.

Once it became too much for me. I began to laugh, quietly but perceptibly, when I heard Z tell a woman he could liberate her by killing the voice of her mother. This voice, he said, lived in the woman’s body and was consuming all her strength. When the woman nodded obediently, I couldn’t help laughing. Fury and pleasure released my petrified stomach muscles. Then I had to speak to fight back the fear that suddenly filled me.

I wouldn’t kill the voice of the mother. I would sleep with it. That would be incest in its most beautiful form.

The woman looked at me, horrified, as though she’d seen a stone that could speak. Z immediately turned on the tape recorder. Meditative music erased the disharmony I had created in the atmosphere of the room.

After the woman had left, Z offered to start paying me two hundred marks per day instead of one. Apparently he saw my laughter as a kind of blackmail.

But what do you need me for? You can go on playing your game without me. I quit, I said, without even stopping to think about the money.

No, I can’t do it alone. I need a body to receive the leftover voices, otherwise the therapy won’t work, he replied.

I’m not a garbage can.

But for you, if I understand correctly, these voices are not garbage.

I said nothing.

You can earn money and help these women at the same time. That’s not such a bad thing, is it? he said gently, placing his hand on mine.

I had never before thought about wanting to help women. I couldn’t explain why the whole idea seemed so absurd to me. And I wasn’t convinced the women felt better after their consultations. It’s true most of them said they felt much better after the treatment, but to me they looked as if Z had broken one of their bones.

This bone might be a tiny, insignificant one, perhaps so tiny no one even knows it exists. Its location and function are possibly unknown, and no one has tried to find it. Nevertheless, one can clearly see when this bone has been broken.

Sometimes I even see a woman walking down the street in broad daylight with a broken bone. She can be well-dressed or wearing heavy makeup, she can be in good spirits or seated in the protective armor of an automobile, but still I can see she’s had this particular bone broken. Which doesn’t necessarily mean she’s been treated by Z. I see too many women with broken bones for this to be possible. There must be many many people performing the same service, though to this day I don’t know exactly what it is Z does. He speaks with women, or stares at them in silence. That’s all I can make out.

When I wake up in the middle of the night, I often feel the need to write something down. I sit at my desk and hold my fingers above the typewriter until I can remember the clattering sound I once knew. It’s no longer possible for me to write something about a particular subject. Often I even have difficulty putting together coherent sentences.

When I am incapable of writing even a sentence, I simply type the words that occur to me of their own accord. I divide them up incorrectly:

Maga z ine

Fro z en

Reali z ation

When I look at the page the next day, I find only a series of meaningless words and no longer know what it was I wanted to notate. Writing these broken words is the only activity that calms me. Then I pick up the full page and hold it in my hand, satisfied, as if I’ve notated something important.

Un z ip

Pri z e

Hori z on

Sei z e

Ha z y

Mesmeri z e

Recogni z e

Ga z e

Da z z led

Z ig z ag