The Woman Who Borrowed Memories: Selected Stories Read online

  The rain had stopped, and the weather was chilly and clear. He put on his boots and a warm coat, left the house, and took a bus out to where the city came to an end. Day after day, he wandered around in the borderland where the buildings thin out and lose themselves in arbitrary ugliness. He returned to the area every morning and walked incessantly, occasionally resting on a bench or in some café by a railroad crossing or a factory. The impersonal, undefined environment was perhaps a preparation for his meeting the other, perhaps a challenge. Spring came closer, a work in progress, much like the area he wandered through, as muddy and melancholy in every way. He didn’t know what he felt for the one he expected, for the one he made a place for and opened himself up to—at times he was an enemy, at times a friend. In the cafés, he sometimes ordered two cups of coffee, which was also a challenge. Sometimes someone tried to speak to him, more often here than in the city. When that happened, he would immediately stand up and leave.

  In these unpopulated, half-built, discarded outlands, he felt he could see the city’s discharge, the wave of dirty foam that flows over the rim and settles. Letters and words had also been flushed out; he could see them everywhere in signs, posters, placards. Every fence and wall, even the trees, carried black words that pursued him. But he didn’t read them. Chalk and knives and tar had written words that screamed at him and drove him on down a gauntlet between fences and walls and trees all bearing the impress of the written word. He walked in circles and found distance and space nowhere, balance nowhere. He had begun to think of himself in the third person, “he.” He wanders here, waiting, he is waiting for me, walking among these horrible words and these great fields lined with wooden houses and rubbish tips. He walks quickly past the people he encounters and waits only for me to see him and take him under my wing. He passes long murals of barracks and streets and crossroads, again and again, and they are all alike, ceaselessly and sadly repeating, like lost time.

  The last snow melted. One day he walked through a thin grove of birches somewhere between two highways, and there, finally, he stood to the side. In a state of great joy, he stood ready to walk on, but now it was not only his hands that felt alive but also his head, his stomach, all of him. His whole body burned with an enormous unused power. Behind the copse of trees by the highway, he could see large black letters. He wanted to read them and understand them, and he started walking, just then I started walking. I wanted to move on, and I started to walk, faster and faster, I hadn’t known I could feel like this. I was mad with joy and impatience and I knew there wasn’t much time and there was too much to do. I looked back one single time, and there he came, running, stumbling across the marshy ground, stoop-shouldered, his mouth agape as if he were calling to me to wait. I had no time for him, because he was only one person but I was seeing him. I did not reach out to him, I’m sure I didn’t, but he threw himself forward toward my hand and grabbed it, and before I had time to despise him it was too late—we were just one person, a single figure standing stock-still beneath the birches, waiting.

  Translated by Thomas Teal

  THE STORM

  SHE WAS awakened by a banging ventilator and lay still and listened, noticing how the storm altered the light patterns on the ceiling. The shadow of the water pipes was an unchanging cross above the head of the bed, but again and again new reflections of swaying streetlights swept across the ceiling, and sometimes the lights of cars, though there weren’t many of those at this time of night. The skylight had been covered with snow for several weeks, and for several weeks he hadn’t called. That meant he would never call again. Now the door to the washroom started to bang, and she got up to close it. Without turning on the light, she walked into the front room facing the street.

  The wind came in gusts and swept snow across the windows in hard, hissing blows, but it wasn’t snowing. Above and beyond the storm she heard a heavy, hammering noise that she couldn’t figure out. Occasionally it stopped and then resumed. Maybe roof tiles, maybe something else. The night was restless and strange, and so was the room where she listened and waited, all of it submerged in the dark, greenish radiance that surrounds a diver in the ocean. She watched as the wind-sculpted drifts on the rooftops swirled upward like smoke. The snow and the sky above the city shared the same dark light. Something is going to happen, she thought, they’ve been talking about it on the radio all day. Let it come. I’m so sick and tired of being sick and tired and just waiting, and most of all I’m sick and tired of myself.

  There was a light in the same two windows at the hospital, the ones always lit at four in the morning. The Christmas trees at the filling station were lit, but they were shaking their branches in the storm as if terrified and trying to tear themselves free. She stared at them for a long time, and when they finally blew down, at almost the same moment, and were swept across the street, their lights winking out, she cried out in relief. It was cold in the room, which faced the full force of the storm. It no longer came in gusts. Now the wind pressed in on the city from the sea in a single continuous roar, a rising and implacable mass of sound. Power, she thought, how I love power! The onslaught was so violent that she stepped back from the window. What a storm! What a night!

  What is night? Sleeping till the next day; trying to sleep away your tiredness so you can face what you don’t want to face; hiding yourself in a cautious little death for which you’re not to blame—for hours that seem like seconds when you wake up. She walked back and forth between the windows and thought, Call! Call me and ask me if I’m frightened. She watched the storm tear the snowdrifts on the street into spirals and press the snow against the façades of the buildings like great outstretched hands. The greenish light had grown darker. And dreams, what are they? They dig up your fear and display it, enlarged by cruelty. There is no rest, there is no comfort!

  A large object flew past her window and struck the side of the building with a crunch, then flew on—wherever, whatever. The wind was like a great groaning, a scream. Neon lights burned here and there across the city like colored inscriptions in stone, worn almost away, and the snow rose up from the ground everywhere and from all the streets like an enormous curtain. She could no longer see any lights at all, and there was nothing she could do but listen and wait. So it goes, she thought. Thus it will be one day when everything cracks and falls and there is nothing more to remember and hold fast to, and we will have to rethink everything from top to bottom, if we have time. It won’t matter if we’re strong or weak, and nothing will make an impression on anyone. Everything will be erased and extinguished.

  The city was empty, no people and no cars. The temperature had fallen. Her window was a whirling greenish wall of snow, and she stepped back slowly into the room. The storm had gone beyond reason and imagination, merely a powerful, uninterrupted shuddering. This shuddering was universal—in the windowpanes and the walls that protected her, in the air around her and in her teeth and her gut. She moved farther back, against the wall. Right now, she thought, right now I can see that everything is utterly simple. I know what I want. Everyone is standing like this in their rooms tonight. They’ve woken, all of them, and don’t dare go near their windows and don’t dare go back to bed. They realize that it’s not merely a question of living and enduring but rather of something else entirely, but they don’t know what.

  How can a storm of tropical strength find its way to a land of snow, a dreary, dependable land where we light Christmas trees to appease the darkness? Windowpanes shattered in well-built stone houses over the few short hours of the visitation, and sheet-metal roofs were carried away in several areas near the harbor. The storm flew into her violently opened room in an explosion of ice-cold air that was thicker than flesh. It pressed her against the wall and pressed against her eyes and eardrums and into her mouth, while all around her the room fell to pieces like the wings on a dragonfly. No truths applied and nothing had a name that could be used and recognized. She crept toward her bedroom on hands and knees. The only thing that matter
ed was getting to her bed—her bed by the wall below the water pipes—and hiding in it. She felt the doorjamb with her hands. The floor was covered with snow and shards of glass, and when the storm let go of her, she fell headlong and felt as if she’d broken. She crept on, reached the bed, and crept in under the covers and drew them around her, tight against the wall with her knees drawn up to her chest. Now she heard the storm again and noticed she was cold and realized that something important had happened to her, something that had seemed significant and simple. But she couldn’t remember what it was.

  The telephone rang for a long time before she realized what it was and lifted the receiver in the dark.

  “It’s me,” she said. “No, I wasn’t asleep.” She listened attentively, staring at the ceiling, which was no longer a ceiling. The window frames had become a black and arbitrary geometry. She lay beneath a grillwork of broken beams, and above them was a firmament of dark light that rose higher and higher in unbroken eddies of snow. “Don’t explain,” she said. “Don’t say the same thing over and over again, it doesn’t matter.” She straightened her body in the bed. Slowly, disdainfully, she stretched out her legs and thought, It’s not a bit hard to be strong. “It doesn’t matter,” she said again. “If you’ve had an insight and then lost it, don’t worry about it. You’ll remember it in the morning.” She put her arm under her head and turned on her side. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, of course I’m frightened. Do that. Call me in the morning.” They said good night. She hung up the phone and fell asleep.

  About seven o’clock the wind died and the snow drifted down over the city, onto streets and roofs and down over her bedroom, which was completely white and very beautiful when she awoke.

  Translated by Thomas Teal

  THE WOLF

  THERE had been silence for far too long. She gathered herself for a comment, a polite show of interest that might save them for several more minutes. She turned to her guests and asked in English if Mr. Shimomura wrote for children too. The interpreter listened earnestly, made a slight bow, which Mr. Shimomura repeated. They spoke together softly, quickly, almost whispering, hardly moving their lips. She looked at their hands, which were very small with narrow, light brown fingers—tiny, beautiful paws. She felt like a large horse.

  “We are sorry,” said the interpreter, also in English. “Mr. Shimomura does not write. He never writes. No, no.” He smiled. They both smiled. He bowed his head gently and apologetically and gazed at her steadily. His eyes were absolutely black.

  “Mr. Shimomura draws,” the interpreter added. “Mr. Shimomura would like to see some dangerous animals. Very savage, if you please.”

  “I understand,” she said. “Animal drawings for children. But we don’t have many dangerous animals. And those we have live farther north.”

  The interpreter nodded, smiling. “Yes, yes,” he said. “That is very amiable. Mr. Shimomura is pleased.”

  “We have bears,” she said uncertainly, and suddenly couldn’t remember the English word for wolf. “Like dogs,” she went on. “Large and gray, in the north.”

  They looked at her attentively and waited. She tried to howl like a wolf. Her guests smiled politely and continued staring at her.

  “There are no dangerous animals in the south,” she repeated sullenly. “Only in the north.”

  “Yes, yes,” the interpreter said. They were whispering again. Suddenly she said, “Snakes. We have snakes.” Now she was tired. She raised her voice and said “Snake” one more time, made a creeping, wavy gesture with one hand and hissed.

  Mr. Shimomura was no longer smiling. He laughed, soundlessly, his head thrown back. “Anaconda,” he said. “Schlange. Very good.” Then turned off the laugh abruptly. The overweight cat jumped down from its chair and walked out into the middle of the floor.

  “I,” she said, with some growing panic, “I am quite old, and I don’t actually know much about either children or animals.”

  Perhaps she could have asked or felt her way toward the world where he sought and drew his animals. Perhaps she might have discovered something new and important. It was even possible that they were looking for roughly the same thing—the dark, the wild, the shy, and the lost security of being little. She couldn’t know. She lifted the coffee pot and said, “Please?”

  The two of them gave a little dancing bow, rising halfway to their feet in a consummate gesture of grateful refusal.

  The interpreter said, “Mr. Shimomura thinks that you write beautifully. He has a present for you.”

  She undid the silk ribbons. Beneath several layers of brittle rice paper lay a thin wooden box that had been pieced together with the utmost precision. Inside was a fan with a painted picture of a foot-stamping warrior showing his teeth.

  “How beautiful!” she said. “Tack. Thank you ever so much, you shouldn’t have! I have always admired these paintings that . . . And the box is exquisite . . .”

  “She likes the box,” the interpreter said.

  Mr. Shimomura bowed deeply. She used the fan to fan the cat, which laid back its ears and went its way.

  “Fat cat,” said Mr. Shimomura in his own English and laughed benevolently.

  “Yes,” she said. “Very fat.”

  The interpreter stood up and said, “This has been very interesting. Now Mr. Shimomura would like to see savage animals. Please. We depend on your kindness.”

  He opened the door for her and they walked into the chilly silence, past a row of tall brown cabinets with glass doors. A threadbare fox contemplated the ceiling from the top of one cabinet.

  “Savage?” said Mr. Shimomura.

  “No,” she said.

  Mr. Shimomura gazed at the fox for a long time. He was very serious. A man in a white coat came hurrying down the corridor. She stepped in his path and said, “excuse me, but I’ve a foreign gentleman here who’s interested in animals . . .”

  He stopped and looked at the floor and said, “I see. Animals. And how can I . . . ?”

  “Dangerous native animals,” she explained. “Is there any chance . . . ?”

  “I’m in entomology,” he said.

  “Of course!” she said. “How silly of me. Bugs are far too small.”

  He looked at her. “That depends,” he said. “Of course I don’t know what you’re after . . .”

  “No,” she said quickly. “In this case we need something completely different.” She smiled and bowed slightly and the man in the white coat continued down the corridor. Mr. Shimomura had opened his sketch pad and was studying the fox with his little black eyes wide open. His profile was spare, not sculptural, only a severely drawn line, his nose hardly more than a muzzle. Only his hair spilled out in vital, almost violent profusion, like coarse, black grass. He turned to her and said, “No, no.” He closed his sketchbook and waited.

  They walked up the curved stairway, floor after floor, and into the uppermost hall, which was full of skeletons. Some of them were huge and hung from the ceiling. They were equipped with black teeth and terrible, gaping jaws. Above her was the skeleton of an elephant. Without its trunk and its tusks, it had a resigned, all too human face.

  “No,” said Mr. Shimomura.

  “Yes! No!” she shouted. “I’m so sorry . . .” She walked up to a glass case containing a large, bright yellow crab, put on her glasses, and read aloud to hide her confusion and the silence between them. “ ‘Japanese Giant Spider Crab, Macrocheira kaempferi. Normal habitat: water deep enough that wave action will not hamper its movements.’ You see?” she said. “Japanese.”

  He smiled and bowed. They went back down the stairs. Deep, she thought. Deep enough that it doesn’t feel the waves. It just walks along with its ten long legs and nothing gets in its way because it’s so enormously huge.

  On the next floor down they saw hundreds of animals that infinite patience and great artistry had captured in characteristic poses. They had the lassitude of death in their pelts and plaster in their jaws, but they strode across moss or sand or ro
ck in the manner of their species, and not a single one of them was a dangerous animal.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  “Please,” Mr. Shimomura reassured her. For one moment his hand touched her arm. In a lovely gesture, his hands expressed the misfortune that cannot be remedied, not even with amiability. They walked on.

  And then they came to the wolf.

  It was as moth-eaten as the fox, but it looked angrier. Mr. Shimomura opened his sketchbook and she stood behind a pillar so as not to disturb him.

  They were alone. The great hall was filled with an even, white light from the snow outside. There didn’t seem to be any bears, only a lot of roundish seals with cotton in their eyes and, farther along, in glass cases, petrified shadows with long, thin legs—probably deer. He doesn’t like stuffed animals, she thought. And he’s leaving tomorrow. If only my knees weren’t so stiff today.

  Now Mr. Shimomura was standing beside her. He moved as quietly as he spoke. With a regretful gesture, he handed her his sketch pad. He had drawn the wolf with only a few lines—deliberate, brutal, tremendously sensitive lines. It was a very good drawing. Suddenly she wanted to show him a living wolf.

  They waited for the ferry. She had been very anxious about the silence, but Mr. Shimomura didn’t seem to care about her any longer. He walked around on the little strip of beach below the dock, picking up small stones and bits of charcoal and studying them closely. He must be freezing in that thin little coat, she thought. And no hat. His drawing of the wolf had given her a timid respect for him, more than what one feels for everything foreign. Her insecurity was also somewhat dampened by her concern that he wasn’t warm enough.

  A small motor launch with a cabin drew up to the dock. It was called the Högholmen.

  “Doesn’t the ferry run anymore?” she said.

  “Only the staff boat,” the driver said. “And we only go three times a day.”