The Naked Eye Read online

  You can’t look into other people’s heads, a thought that often occurred to me when I strolled down the Boulevard Saint-Michel. In the anonymity of daylight, I was gradually losing my fear of wandering around the city. Earlier I’d avoided large, bustling, festooned streets like the Boulevard St. Germain. Now it frightened me more to walk down a tiny street, the rue Serpente for example. Someone might peer into my head, for instance when I stopped in the used bookshop where you could buy cheap back-issues of film magazines. Several times already I’d entered this shop and sat down on the floor beside the low bookshelf to examine one magazine after another, flipping through them as if obsessed, feverishly pursuing your image.

  Between emerging from the métro and disappearing again into the darkness of a movie theater, I would see women whose real-life roles I was unable to determine. They made a point of giving off an air of eroticism, for the very possibility of appearing prudish would have been enough to render them suspect, even antisocial. The length of their skirts was chosen with diplomatic precision: two centimeters longer than might count as indecent, and two centimeters too short to risk the stigma of prudishness. When the evening sun chanced to shine down on a round, white table in a café, turning it into a dazzling mirror, even one of these upstanding bourgeois ladies might get swallowed up by the mirror, never to return. In this looking-glass world, such a lady might eat pears with legs and hairy skin, gigantic Adam’s apples and calluses on their heels. In return, she would receive payment from her customers in a currency that no longer existed. While the bill was being settled, her labia would flush as red as the flag that used to stand on the podium during Party meetings. Neither her husband nor her lover would have the slightest idea.

  What would Tuong Linh say if he saw the images being projected in the cinema in my head? Sometimes he gave me a worried look, the unasked question trembling on his lips. I would stand behind him and place my hands on his shoulders the same way I had seen you do. Tuong Linh would lean back a little and ask me if I had studied the pamphlets from the language school. “No, not yet.” “Why not? You’ve got to take some action yourself I’d gladly do everything for you, but first of all I don’t have the time, and secondly it’s better for a person to take responsibility for his own life.” He would then take my hands, which were still lying on his shoulders, and remove them.

  The next day I read through the information from the language school with the help of my dictionary. There was a beginners course listed that started four times a year. A form was attached that one could fill out to apply for the next course. I wrote down the name “Thu Huong” and felt as if I was doing this for some other person.

  A woman who resembled Séverine’s friend worked at the reception desk of the language school. She picked up my form, gave me a friendly smile, and said she needed to see my passport. I gasped. My passport was still in the pouch hanging around my neck, but anyone who looked at it could see I didn’t have a visa. Plus it contained my real name. “Oh, I forgot my passport at home!” I quickly left the building. “No problem, just bring it with you when you come back!” the woman called after me.

  In the evening I told Tuong Linh what had occurred. “We have to get you a visa. Until we do, you can’t even go to school.”

  C h a p t e r E i g h t

  S i c ’ é t a i t à r e f a i r e

  One Wednesday Tuong Linh came home early, at seven. “I have to talk to you.” Outside a dog was howling. Tuong Linh’s tongue quickly twirled about, though the individual syllables issuing from his lips remained upright and stiff. “At first I had the idea I would marry you in Vietnam and then return to Paris. As my spouse, you could enter France legally and remain here. Returning to Vietnam, however, could prove difficult for me, even if it were only for a wedding. As you know, my family left the country under complicated circumstances. I’d like to avoid even the slightest danger. Therefore, I thought of Thailand. What would you think of having a wedding in Thailand and returning to Paris with a marriage certificate?” “But when we leave France they’d check my passport and see I’ve been living here without a visa.” “Yes, that’s the problem,” Tuong Linh sighed. “I don’t want to violate any laws, though sometimes the law strikes me as such a heap of nonsense. I’m not planning to do anything harmful to mankind in any way. On the contrary. And nonetheless my actions would be punishable by law. The people who thought up these statutes were surely not thinking about us. And so we’re not going to think about them either.”

  There was a Japanese painter known as “Heron” among his circle of acquaintances. Tuong Linh wasn’t a close friend of his, but they’d known each other a long time. His real name was “Hiroo.” I wasn’t sure if this was his first or last name. Everyone just called him “Heron.” He occasionally sold Japanese passports to people who needed them. Tuong Linh had a miniature Heron had painted hanging in his bathroom. Heron didn’t sell many paintings, so he couldn’t live off his art. Therefore he sometimes approached tourists to sell his pictures. When this didn’t work, he would find people cheap places to stay on the outskirts of town. Heron would accompany the people there, and on the way he would skillfully remove their passports from their pockets and then sell them. Tuong Linh warned Heron not to keep pursuing this passport business, but Heron only shrugged and replied: “Yeah, I know. I’ll be stopping soon anyway. A new time is coming in which passports will no longer have any value. Then I’ll get into the internet business.” Heron had studied art for years, but was unable to find a gallery interested in him, so he had no patrons. Nor could he find a rich woman to support him. A Japanese restaurant where he worked for a time fired him after he dropped his glasses into the hot oil sizzling with tempura. The plastic frames melted, a poisonous cloud rose from the pan, filling first the kitchen and then the entire restaurant. When I asked Tuong Linh jokingly if Heron was a member of a band of yakuza, he laughed and replied: “No. Perhaps most of the Japanese people in films are yakuza or samurai. Heron is an ordinary painter—he has ten fingers on each hand.”

  And so I could use the passport of a Japanese woman that Heron would be glad to sell me to leave France without a visa and travel to Thailand. There I could marry Tuong Linh and return to France as his wife with my own passport. Tuong Linh was satisfied with this plan. “What does such a passport cost?” I asked. “Don’t worry. Your entire life depends on it, so how could it possibly be too expensive?”

  It was the first time I’d ever been to Charles de Gaulle Airport. This place would bring me luck, for I’d heard that President Charles de Gaulle had spoken out against the use of force during the Vietnam War.

  I myself never made Heron’s acquaintance. Tuong Linh said I was better off not knowing much about him. Two weeks later Tuong Linh came home with a red Japanese passport on which a chrysanthemum bloomed. I’d heard that the Japanese make a tempura out of chrysanthemum blossoms that has a delicate, bitter flavor. I needed to learn by heart the name in the passport. It was both written in Chinese ideograms and transliterated. It made me nervous that I couldn’t read the ideograms. If I’d been born before colonization, I would have been able to read them. Then I also could have been able to read Confucius in the original. Ho Chi Minh was not opposed to the introduction of the apparently simpler alphabetical writing system as he thought it preferable to illiteracy. Though I did wonder why there were fewer illiterates in China than in various other countries in which the alphabet was used.

  On one of Tuong Linh’s days off, we went to the Galeries Lafayette together to buy me a dress, a pair of shoes, and a handbag. “All right, now listen,” Tuong Linh explained, “the main thing to look for is the brand names. It has to be obvious where the things come from.” “Which brands are desirable?” “This one, for example, with the fat, crooked letters. This is the distorted monogram of a fashion designer.” I picked out a light blue dress with a colorful collar and a gold chain-shaped belt and tried on both of them in the fitting room. Tuong Linh nodded and said to my reflection: “You
look like a Japanese woman.” I looked uneasily at my reflection, trying to ascertain whether my eyes were now sparking with capitalist consumer desires.

  At the airport there was an artificial silence as if I were in a hospital ward before a major operation. Once, I had been operated on as a child. An old land mine had exploded near me on a school outing in the countryside. I was so shocked by the noise that for a while I didn’t feel any pain. Only later did I see a piece of metal glittering in my thigh. I was brought to the hospital. I wasn’t afraid of the operation, though I felt sick to my stomach. This is exactly the way I felt on the day of our flight to Thailand. I saw the checkpoint for passports in front of me, ran into the bathroom, and threw up. At the sink, a red-headed woman was changing her baby’s diaper. She didn’t even look at me, although she must have heard my retching from the bathroom stall. Perhaps vomiting was nothing special for her. Tuong Linh wasn’t with me as we’d decided to go to the airport separately. He was a Vietnamese man with a French passport, while I was supposed to be a Japanese tourist. We had arranged to meet at the official taxi stand in front of the Bangkok airport.

  In each glass box sat a man in uniform. The line I was standing in shrank more rapidly than the others. It was my turn. A blond, uniformed man looked at my passport and chortled in Japanese “Kon-nichiwa!” I tried to remain calm. Surely this was the only Japanese sentence he knew. My supposition was correct, for he flipped through the passport and asked me in English how long I had been in France. “Ten days,” I said in French. He exclaimed playfully, “Oh, how splendid, you speak French!” “No,” I replied dully. Then he took a list out of a folder and glanced at it without interest. “What is your name, please?” he asked, his voice deeper. “Megumi Yamada,” I replied fluently, as I had practiced often enough. The man picked up the telephone receiver, pressed a button, and started to speak with someone in a low voice. Tuong Linh had already warned me about this phone call. “Sometimes they act as if they are calling headquarters with this ridiculous plastic telephone in order to glean some crucial piece of information. I think the thing is just a prop. Or else they’re ordering coffee for their break. Just don’t make any unnecessary remarks about this. During a passport check in Moscow, a friend of mine once said to the man in uniform who was talking a long time on the phone, ‘My greetings to the gentlemen in the Kremlin!’ He got into a lot of trouble, and they searched him thoroughly, down to his earholes.” The telephone call was lasting a long time. There was no more spit left in my mouth. When I coughed, two uniformed women appeared out of nowhere and gestured for me to go with them.

  We walked down an endless corridor. Above our heads was a series of meaningless signs, arrows and letters, among other things the images of a little man and a little woman. I would never have suspected that in the middle of the crowded airport there could be a deserted corridor with numbered doors. We entered a room with a gray metal table and four folding chairs. The view from the window was a gray expanse. I didn’t know if it was the wall of the next building or the sky. One of the women sat down across from me and the other beside me. “Do you speak French?” “No. Yes. No. Yes, a little.” “Is this your passport?” “Yes.” “Do you know a Japanese man named Hiroo?” “No.” A few questions followed that I didn’t understand. I could have said I didn’t understand them. The two women were speaking to me politely as if I were their customer. In capitalism perhaps every person is a customer, even a prisoner. Then the women left the room to get something. I didn’t even have the strength to get out of my chair to see if the door was locked. Tuong Linh surely must have noticed my absence at the gate by now, and had boarded the airplane alone.

  The women returned with a man who was apparently Japanese. He was constantly wiping drops of sweat from his forehead although the air in the room was chilly. On his handkerchief I saw the brand name Tuong Linh had showed me at the department store. The Japanese man asked me questions in Japanese. I didn’t respond. I quietly started to sob. Soon the Japanese man fell silent, too, and looked away. He was probably an ordinary businessman, perhaps a neighbor of one of the uniformed women.

  I was taken somewhere by car and locked up in an attractive room. Ai Van and Jean had once suggested I play the role of a woman who’s lost her memory in a car crash. It wasn’t a bad idea. In any case it seemed easier to me to feign memory loss than to act out some other identity. I decided to shut myself away in the cell of oblivion and bar the door from within. My Vietnamese passport was in my suitcase, which I’d checked in. I hoped Tuong Linh would collect it from the conveyor belt in Bangkok and take it with him along with his own.

  I tried to erase all the names I knew from my memory. “Tuong Linh” above all, then “Hiroo,” who was apparently now a wanted man. The name “Ai Van” was even more dangerous, for she knew much more about me than the others. “Jean” was a common name which therefore meant next to nothing, and “Charles” was also a name shared by many men, including de Gaulle, my guardian spirit, who hadn’t watched over me after all. The names of my family members were buried so deep inside me that I first had to dig them up to be able to erase them. Every morning I would recheck the list of names in my head and cross out any that had risen from my dreams to join the list.

  The nausea didn’t stop choking my consciousness. Apparently this feigned loss of memory was putting a strain on my stomach. When food tasted like ketchup or mayonnaise, I vomited on the spot. I no longer trusted things I had to swallow. I would have simply liked plain boiled potatoes on my plate. Whenever I chewed, I heard a grating voice in my temples: “You’ll feel better if you vomit everything up again.” “You don’t have to swallow these bitter things alone. We share everything.” “The truth is always smeared with ketchup. Lick it up!”

  Who were these people who were trying to squeeze me out like a tube? Their weapons were hypnotism and drugs. One man who visited me every day seemed warm despite his lab coat, whereas the ones who had probably been sent by the police made me shiver. Their fingers, pale beneath the neon lights, were constantly taking notes when I wasn’t speaking. Sometimes they shouted at me. I couldn’t understand their language and would reply simply, “Correspondance! Correspondance!” repeating a word I’d found at the airport. It was difficult to remain silent when they spoke to me so loudly and roughly. I wanted to speak, but not like them. Otherwise I’d have made myself vulnerable to attack. Eventually the word “correspondance” was beaten to death, and I started saying “Déclaration! Déclaration!” This, too, was a word I’d found at the airport. I armed myself with these found words, for the words that belonged to me were too fragile. Life before the airport no longer existed for me. My first and only words came from the place from which I hadn’t been able to fly.

  In my imagination, I walked another twenty or thirty times down that airport corridor, accompanied by the two women. What had I done wrong? Why had they suddenly found me after leaving me in peace for eight years? I looked around as if I was trying to impress the last jewels of the free world on my memory. “Bureau for Found Objects” was printed on one door. How I would have loved to go into that room. Instead, we went into a room with a number on the door.

  Two Vietnamese people were sent to talk to me. At first I trembled, but to my surprise their words didn’t touch me at all. I could turn a deaf ear to the Vietnamese sentences as if they were a distant lullaby whose meaning was known to me but which no longer had access to my feelings.

  Much more dangerous were the questions thrown at me by the man in the white lab coat. He would wait for a moment if I was distracted by some sound. Then he would quickly ask a question as if pouring water into the ear of a sleeping person. “Yesterday you were half asleep and mentioned an important name. Do you know who it was?” Caught off guard, I tried my best not to look startled, but he’d already seen my agitation. “Don’t worry. This name is of no use whatsoever to the police, but to me it’s helpful. Surprisingly, it was neither your own name nor the name of one of your friends or family
members. It was the name of an actress.” The man laughed heartily. “And coincidentally she happens to be an actress I myself have worshiped for thirty years. I’ve seen almost all her films. I also own many of her videos. Would you like to see some?”

  In this film your name is Catherine Berger. This first name happens to be the same as yours. It must feel strange when your name is identical to that of the character you play. If I were to reveal my real name now, it would appear to me like the name of a fictional character.

  Catherine is sitting in a taxi, her face reflected in the rearview mirror above the driver’s seat. Like strings of nerves laid bare, she rides between flashy advertisements, hectic pedestrians, and threatening facades. Probably she can no longer bear this city after having spent several years in a cell.

  A glimpse back into a past time is depicted in soft blurry colors. Catherine Berger and another woman share a cell that looks like a train compartment for two. She eats lunch in a gigantic dining room where over one hundred women are eating. It would look exactly like a girls’ boarding school if the women were younger. Most of them have reached the age of maturity, and a few look really quite old. Catherine Berger and her cellmate appear to have developed the sort of friendship otherwise reserved only for men in the military. There are no men in this institution. Or rather only one: Catherine Berger sometimes receives visits from a polite, well-dressed man. I assume it is his task to defend her juristically. One day she asks him for something and he throws a fit. He refuses, arguing with a swift tongue, and then flees. “She wanted him to give her a child so that when she was released she’d have someone to give her life meaning,” the man in the lab coat remarked.