Vaseline Buddha (19 page)

But the swans of Versailles reminded me of the fact that it wasn't really true that I didn't have anything against swans. I recalled the family of swans, consisting of a couple and two cygnets, that lived in a small pond in a little park in a small French town I once stayed in, where I took regular walks. But one day, the cob literally went crazy, and could no longer control its anger, and did not hide the fact. In the end, it bit both of the cygnets to death, after which it became even more vicious and attacked people, and even after people shut it up in a fence it escaped the fence and continued to attack people, and I was one of the victims.

At the time I chose to flee instead of getting into a ridiculous fight with the swan that suddenly came rushing at me, wounded me slightly by pecking at my buttocks, and again aimed at my
weak spot with its huge wings spread out, because it instantly occurred to me that our weapons were much too different—a fight between a swan, which could use nothing but its beak, and me, who could use both my hands and my feet, would be as ludicrous as a fight between a sea lion and a camel—for our fight to be fair. And what I felt after the somewhat awkward incident with the swan, which disappeared from the park soon after—I don't know if it was sent somewhere else or was executed—was a somewhat pleasant sensation, which was also the case when a puppy suddenly appeared from an open gate of someone's house while I was walking in an alley in the town sometime before that, and disappeared back into the gate after lightly biting my leg. Curiously, the puppy had a string with a blue balloon attached to it tied around its neck, and it was possible that the puppy did what it did to me because it was excited or angry over the balloon that a child at that house had hung on it for fun.

And what made it possible for me to leave France, which had made me break up with my girlfriend, were the dragonflies flying in the air over the Versailles Palace. No, perhaps that wasn't true, but I made an effort to think that it was. The dragonflies that flew around in confusion as if they owned the sky drained all my energy, and made me feel strangely uncomfortable, and, above all, dizzy. It seemed that my dizziness wouldn't subside even if I distributed my dizziness all around to the countless dragonflies flying dizzily in the air. I wanted to leave Versailles, and France, in order to get away from the dragonflies, but I couldn't do so right away, for I could get on a flight home only the day after.

And as a result, my ordeal in France continued for a little longer.
I stayed in a cheap Arab hotel at the foot of the Montmartre Hill, the owner of which looked as if he had walked right out of
The Arabian Nights
into reality, being big, with a long beard, and wearing a turban on his head, and looked so indefinably Arab, even when you considered the fact that he was Arab, thus looking like a non-Arab who was disguised as an Arab, but anyway, the inside of the hotel was even shabbier than its shabby exterior.

When night came, I barely managed to fall asleep, being extremely tired and trying to put up with the still-loud noise that came from a nightclub nearby, but soon woke to find, to my surprise, that my body was literally tilted to a side, that the lower part of my body was on the floor, and what was even more surprising was that the bed, too, was tilted along with myself. It was clear that the bed had tilted when one of its legs, temporarily fixed and barely supporting the bed, fell out.

Lying askew on the bed, watching the glittering light of the neon sign of a bar reflected by the window, and listening to the music to which some might be dancing, I thought that I didn't want to have any patience in a place that required great patience, and almost losing my patience, I had the vague thought that by making an issue of everything that could turn into an issue, you could stir up and raise an issue, and at the same time, either find or not find a solution to the issue. The various sounds that came in through the window didn't please me at all, and I thought that I had a good reason for not being pleased. The sounds were actually noises that tormented me, for I had experienced the horrors of noise more than the horrors of anything else, and had never been able to shake off my fear of noise. Several times, I'd felt an intense
urge to kill someone all because of noise. One day someone who lived right next door to me played, endlessly and desperately all afternoon, a hymn called “Faith, Hope, and Charity” on a brass wind instrument, either a trumpet or a saxophone, probably practicing for some kind of a church performance, which drove me nearly insane, and I had to, with great effort, keep myself from running over to strangle the person.

But when the noise from the nightclub subsided after a few hours and I tried to sleep again after temporarily fixing the bed leg, there was something else that kept me from falling asleep. Something seemed to be moving very quietly in the silence, and there was, in fact, something moving very quietly. At first, looking at the thing, hovering over the boundary between the circle of the faint light and the shadow created by the bedside lamp, I thought I was dreaming. But the thing, which appeared in the form of a shadow in the beginning, but soon cast off the shadow and revealed itself, gradually came toward me like some kind of a fluid movement being made on the floor, and the thing, which looked like a mouse in every respect, was none other than a mouse, and it was as real as the mirror hanging on a wall and the reflection of a mouse in the mirror. So there was no mouse that appeared before me, and I had not imagined a mouse, listening to the distinct sound made by mice running around busily or cautiously above the ceiling. (I already feel that I've forgotten how and why I've come to tell this story, but that won't really be a problem.)

I considered going down to the counter and waking up the Arab owner, who could be sound asleep, but then I had the feeling that he would, looking dazed as if he had been sleeping for
centuries under a spell and had woken up through another spell, tell me to just go back upstairs and quietly try to sleep, with a scolding look on his face, as if mice in the building were nothing to make a fuss about, as if it were only natural that mice lived with men, as if mice, too, had the right to use the room, as if people were surprised or terrified to see mice because they lacked understanding on the order of the world in which they had to coexist with other animals, so I remained where I was.

Looking at the mouse that was looking at me, I tried to think of it as something that was nowhere near a mouse, something that was infinitely far from being a mouse, something that wasn't a mouse, something that wasn't anything at all, and at last came to think of it as such, but at that moment—the mouse continued to stare at me, patting its face with its forepaws, as if trying to make me acknowledge the fact that it was indeed a mouse—I began to think that it was something close to a mouse, and in the end, I came to think once again that it was a mouse, and nothing other than a mouse. So recalling an anecdote about someone who was delighted to see mice on his bed before he died, I thought that this, in a way, was a delightful thing.

Before I knew it the mouse had been joined by two others of its kind. They came closer when I stayed still and stepped back when I stirred or made a sound. As if that were how mice dealt with people. The mice, which had a lot of time on their paws, looked as if they planned to stay up the night with me. It didn't seem like such a bad thing to spend a strange night, staying up with mice. I felt that doing so would require a game we could play together. Depending on the circumstances, I could play around
with the mice, or play with them. But although they looked as if they planned to stay up the night with me, they didn't seem to have prepared a game we could play together while staying up the night, and I didn't know what we could do together, either.

Anyway, it occurred to me that with nothing else to eat in the room, there was nothing but my body that the mice could easily choose as their food and be pleased to eat. It was only at that moment I realized that there was a problem between the mice and me that had to be resolved.

I had no particular grudge, hostility, or fear toward the species of animals called mice, and thought that mice, too, were just doing what they were supposed to do in this world into which they had simply had the misfortune of being born as mice, and thought briefly about the persecution and suffering inflicted upon them by men, and the revenge they took on men, and thought that I could give them a part of my body as an offering of sorts, but I couldn't allow that while sitting still, watching a part of my toe being torn off. And at that moment I recalled a story I seemed to have heard from someone. In the story, a man wakes up from sleep to find a mouse sitting on his forehead, about to gnaw on his nose. I wasn't sure if it was a story I had heard from someone, or one that I had imagined myself, but it seemed that something like that might happen if I fell asleep.

I turned off the light again to think calmly and properly about the things I could do with the mice, but I couldn't come up with anything suitable. Nevertheless, I acted as if I wouldn't just sit still, but for some reason, I just sat still. And the mice stayed still, instead of closing the distance between us in the darkness, through which the light from the outside faintly shone, as if they, too, were trying to come up with something suitable. I stared intently at the mice that made me nervous, growing more nervous, while at the same time, making the mice nervous as well.

As I thought about myself and the mice, keeping still in the darkness in somewhat different positions, it occurred to me that the history of the wretched and complete banishment of wild animals, which lost their homes and were driven into literal wilderness, has never been properly dealt with, neither in human history nor animal history, and I felt a kind of guilt about the animals that humans have doggedly driven out. (In this way, I was thinking indirectly about the mice in the darkness which, facing the crisis of banishment, overcame the crisis with wisdom.)

When I turned the light back on in the room, the mice were still in the same spot. It was plain that they hadn't learned to fear men. Or they might have learned to forget to fear. Perhaps they were in the process of evolving from a wild animal into a pet. One of them was primping, again with a gesture characteristic of rodents, sitting balanced on its hind legs and rubbing its face with its somewhat daintily small forepaws. I thought, That's the way mice sit, and the posture they take when they make themselves up, and it's no different from the way women make themselves up. But the mouse wasn't making itself up in that posture to win my approval.

I felt as if the mice were warning me not to fall asleep unguarded, or trying to teach me some sort of humor or sorrow I didn't know, which only they knew, but I just couldn't understand what they were trying to say. So I thought, They don't look like they're carrying daggers, but they could be carrying daggers, only because the expression, carrying daggers, came to my mind while I was looking at the mice. And that made me see just how ridiculous I was in dealing with the mice.

It was a very strange thing to watch a mouse primping in your hotel room in the middle of the night, so I tried to look at it through the eyes of someone looking at it in a strange way, but it wasn't all that strange. (What in the world! There's nothing in this world that's all that strange.) And yet, looking at the strange mice, I thought that they were driving me nearly insane, and before that, thought that I was slowly going insane, which I'd been thinking for a long time, and thought about insanity, and briefly thought about Nietzsche while thinking that perhaps insanity was an ultimate state of being that could be reached by the potential within the self, and wondered what Nietzsche, who probably had a philosophical thought about everything, and must, in my opinion, have had a philosophical thought about green frogs in a pond or screws as well, thought of these animals called mice, and it occurred to me that perhaps Nietzsche felt something unique, different from (or along with) terror or fear, or in other words, what people generally feel about the rodents called mice, but I didn't know what it was that he felt.

I wanted to leave the situation as it was, for it was possible that I may never again have such an experience with mice anywhere. The mice went around the room quite freely now, as if they knew how I felt. It seemed that if I reached out my hand, they would rub themselves against it instead of biting it. In any case, the mice didn't grow more loathsome the more I looked at them or anything. At
that moment, however, they began to flee because of the sound of loud footsteps of someone walking down the stairs outside the room. The mice disappeared into a hole somewhere, and did not reappear. They seemed to fear not me, who was in front of them, but someone invisible, someone whose footsteps only they could hear. Or perhaps they didn't really have a good time in my room and went to another room with a hole in it. Only then did I realize that I hadn't made any attempt to chase away the mice, and it seemed that it was I, not the mice, who had wanted to play. But I didn't know how to play with mice, and thought that as a result I'd made the mice waste their precious time. Nevertheless, I felt that the night I spent with the mice in an Arab hotel in Paris, the city of romance, was at least a little fantastic, although it wasn't very romantic.

Having gotten almost no sleep because of the mice, I got up in the end and saw that there was a plate at every corner of the room. A plate of rat poison, no doubt. It was clear that the clever mice hadn't even looked at the poison, so old and stiff that it couldn't possibly appeal to them. It seemed that there should be a notice on the wall for guests, who didn't know anything, that said, Beware not to eat the rat poison, but you may, if you really want to. In the end, I left the hotel at dawn after staying up the night with the mice that the Arab perhaps kept as pets, or that lived in comfort and safety under his care, and could be on my way home.