E-Book, Englisch, 128 Seiten
Horie The Bear and the Paving Stone
1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78227-438-4
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 128 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-78227-438-4
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Toshiyuki Horie (born 1964) is a scholar of French literature and a professor at Waseda University. He has won many literary prizes, including the Mishima Yukio Prize, Akutagawa Prize (for The Bear and the Paving Stone), the Kawabata Yasunari Prize, the Tanizaki Jun'ichiro Prize and the Yomiuri Prize for Literature (twice).
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AT SOME POINT, I GOT LOST. The mountains were gloomy, the sun just about to set, and I’d suddenly emerged on to a path that was covered in a strange kind of undergrowth, hard like artificial grass, jutting out at sharp angles, yet somehow soft at the same time. There was the faint smell of animals. I thought I could feel their body heat—maybe there was an animal trail nearby. Stumbling across this path was surely a stroke of luck, and though my legs had become numb with fatigue, they could probably keep me going. If worse came to worst, I could light a fire and spend the night right here. The very next moment, however, the ground started to move beneath me, like a carpet of giant black caterpillars, and I lost my footing. I fell on to my bottom, and the ground started to undulate, poking into me. Shocked and frightened, I got up and set off running blindly through the trees, forgetting how tired I was. The next thing I knew I was at the top of a slightly elevated outcrop. Breathing heavily, I looked down at what had, until a few hours previously, been a kind of paradise. The soft jet-black path had swollen into a rocky fortress. I strained to see better, and discovered that the path was actually a countless number of bears, standing on their hind legs, huddled together in formation. They seemed to be moving as one, making their way into the mountains. What’s going on? Had I been walking on the backs of those bears? Running on a carpet of their hair, thick with bitumen, here and there matted in hard clumps? I was covered in sweat, but I’d lost my towel while I was running, so I couldn’t dry off. I stood there dumbfounded while the bears jostled their way into the distance. Just then, a breeze carrying a fishy tidal smell came wafting from the middle of the sea of black ursine bodies, where a solitary, slightly unbalanced triangular island now appeared. I was wheezing from the exertion, and this thick, warm, salty air was blocking my airways. My throat started to hurt. I wanted some water. I wanted something cool. I looked around, and my eyes fell upon a spring sputtering out of a crack in the rock face just beneath me. Unsteadily, I crouched down and scooped some up in my hands, lifting it to my lips. Immediately, there was a gloopy sweet taste in my mouth, followed by a chill that stung the back of my throat and sent sharp, stabbing pains to the molar that I’d been too lazy to take care of. I cried out. I forgot about my thirst, about the carpet of bears, and lay down on the ground. It was all I could do to endure the intense pain in my mouth.
Through the hole in the wooden shutters, a diamond of soft sunlight shone on to the unglazed tile floor. The air in the room was fresh and clean—in fact, it was almost cool—but my body was burning up. I was also thirsty, and my right molar ached, just like it had in the dream. I wasn’t sure if this was because of how I was lying on the sofa bed—with my face squashed against the back of the sofa because the bed part wouldn’t open out—or because of the dream itself, which had been eerily vivid. I looked at the clock on the table. It was already half past nine. I hadn’t heard Yann leave. I got up slowly and went to the bathroom, found some aspirin in the medicine cabinet—who knows how long they’d been there—and tossed a couple of tablets into a cup of water. I watched as the bubbles rushed noisily to the surface. I drank the medicine down, and it stung my tongue. Praying for relief from the pain, I turned the shower on and got under a lukewarm spray.
From the small top-hinged window, I could see a fence of wooden posts pounded into the ground at random intervals. There was no barbed wire between them, just a single thick wire that drooped untidily, like a telephone line. Apparently the nearest neighbours, who owned the vast shrub-filled land, lived on the other side of some far-off hills. There really wasn’t any sign of anyone else living around here at all.
The bathroom had been built by the previous owner, a DIY buff. The floor tiles were uneven, and so water easily overflowed the drain and wet the whole bathroom floor. Still waking up, I tried my best to control the flow. My towel got soaked, and it made me think of the black carpet of bears in my dream.
I’d driven to this remote farmhouse in Normandy, speeding along gently undulating country roads lined with low trees, passing bare fields of freshly harvested wheat and pastures of cows grazing under layers of cloud. It was pure happenstance that I was here. I’d been visiting Paris after many years. I had some work I needed to do, and as a result, I spent most of my days alone. I’d wanted to see friends I used to hang out with, but most had proper jobs now and I was hesitant to get in touch during the heavy period just before their summer holidays. Eventually, I managed to get most of my work done, and found myself with a bit of free time. That was when I thought of Yann, who was a perpetual freelancer, unbound by a company schedule. I hadn’t heard anything from him for two years, so I tried ringing him at his parents’ home. His father, whom I’d met on several occasions, answered the phone. His voice became animated when I introduced myself. He remembered me well. We chatted for a while, then I asked if he knew how I could reach Yann as he never replied to my letters. His father laughed, saying that Yann never wrote to his parents either. Then he told me that Yann had left Paris two years ago and had put down anchor in a small village in Normandy.
“I’ve never visited, so I don’t know what kind of house it is,” he said. “It sounds like it’s really in the sticks, though.”
He gave me Yann’s number and advised me to call late as otherwise he probably wouldn’t be there. I knew that Yann worked part-time a few months a year, and used the money he earned to travel and take photos, but I hadn’t expected him to move out of his studio in the Paris suburbs—it’d been perfect for him. I waited until much later that night before ringing, only to get the answering machine on every try. I finally left him a message with my hotel phone number, and early the next morning Yann called, his voice sounding quite like his father’s, just a little higher.
“I’m sorry,” he began. “I got all your letters. They were forwarded to me. I should have replied, but there’s been a lot going on.” And then he told me he was going to Ireland the next morning and would be there for twenty days.
I only had two weeks before I needed to head home, so if we were going to meet, it had to be today.
“I’d like to go and meet you in Paris right now,” Yann said, “but I need to sort out my travel plans and stuff. If it’s OK with you, how about we meet somewhere outside Paris? Caen, maybe? It takes about two hours by train. I can drive there in about ninety minutes, if I put my foot down. We’ll have something to eat, and this way we’ll at least get to see each other.”
If we missed this chance, we probably wouldn’t meet again for several years. I didn’t have any plans that afternoon, and a two-hour train ride to spend the day with a friend didn’t seem like a bad idea. The only work I still had to do was a synopsis of a novel that might be translated, but I could do that anywhere. In fact, a change of scene could even boost my productivity. I didn’t bother checking out of my hotel, and just packed a rucksack. I went to the station and bought a ticket, then I called Yann to let him know when I’d be arriving.
It was the weekend, and the train was crowded. I read for a while, but then a tall student joined me in my compartment. We exchanged a few words, and before long he was telling me about his hometown, Villedieu-les-Poêles—it turned out that he was on his way there. Ville means “town”, dieu means “God”, and poêle means “pan”, so I asked him if this was a town where God had fried something in a pan. He chuckled, then explained that poêle can refer to copper products in general, and that the town had been at the heart of France’s metalwork industry for centuries. Even though there were no copper mines in the area, it had become famous as the place where the bronze for the country’s church bells was cast. As we were talking, a little boy who’d been poking his head into every compartment in the carriage took an interest in us, and without hesitation sat himself down. He was called Iywan, an old Norman name, and once the ice was broken, he started talking to us as if we were old friends. We ended up talking with him for a long time, answering every question he asked. We played a game where we were supposed to guess who he was thinking about. He’d give us hints that didn’t make any sense and sit there laughing to himself, and then change the subject completely and start talking about school. He declared proudly that he had a computer and that he took three different sports classes a week. He also said he wasn’t interested in regular girls—only filles de passion. He then blushed, and I made a mental note that this word was now in the vocabulary of primary school children in the countryside. When I told him I was from Japan, he looked shocked, and asked me, repeatedly, why my eyes weren’t slanted upwards. I...
