.
actually read Goethe’s original writing. Or books about him, such as Conversations with Goethe. If you want to make claims about a certain writer, you have to have read his books. If only you’d known the extent to which his writing pursues strictness and exactitude.”
After this discouragement, the first writer fixed me with a look of obvious disappointment. He’d probably supposed that I was an academic, faithful to the classics. I’d thought I knew a lot about him, but had completely forgotten his ardent worship of Goethe. What I knew of his career history and personal inclinations had actually led me to suspect the opposite.
“Are you suggesting that professional assistants could only work if they were always shut up in a corner? And that’s why they were called ‘cornermen’?” I’d hoped to avoid any further criticism by going off on a tangent, but he hurriedly dismissed it with a wave of his hand. “No no, that’s just a coincidence.” As though meaning to apologize for having been overly touchy, he arranged his features into an expression of tolerance, of choosing not to make an issue of my outburst. “His name really was ‘cornerman.’ Eckermann. It was a genuine surname, inherited from his father’s father’s father.” “Oh,” I said, clamping my mouth shut after that short sound.
We drank lemon-leaf tea in his study. The pale green leaves floated in the teacups. His study also served as his bedroom, workroom, office, dining room, and living room. The apartment comprised this single decent-sized space with a balcony, plus a small cooking area and bathroom. Apparently he and his wife each lived in a different apartment in the same building, so that each could have their own creative space. In the center of the room were three longish desks, each of a slightly different size, shape, and even height to the others, the three arranged in the shape of the letter
Contrary to your expectations, you never went back to the first writer’s house. The orchid’s petals and the empty birdcage were swaying in the wind. The balcony with the laundry hung out to dry, the brass candlestick clattering on the table, the chirping of unfamiliar language pressing in through the open window, the noise of tourists thronging the alleyways, and of motorbikes, formed the scene. And what it hinted at was a curious waiting. The kind of formless waiting that takes place within a long and hazy nap, when your schedule for the rest of the day is free. The first writer was remembering your name. But he was unable to recall when it was that he’d seen you last. It might have been several years ago, or several decades. He was remembering you as a broad-minded journalist who wrote pieces for newspapers and radio. Though as far as I knew, you hadn’t written an article for a very long time.
What is it that you do? Are you a journalist, or a writer?
I looked the first writer straight in the eye and said, I’ve been a fan of your writing for a long time, more than a fan, in fact, and so I’ve been hoping for a long time to meet you, and even, if possible, to translate your work—as this is the only possible way of bringing me closer to you, that I could dare to ask for. Though my love for him was perfectly true, the idea of translating his work was something I’d plucked from thin air on the spot. “Oh, so you’re a translator!” the first writer exclaimed, his face becoming open and welcoming. “I’d sensed you were something of the sort, you know. And I was correct.” I was in fact nothing of the sort, had never done anything you could call proper translation, but once the words had popped out of my mouth it somehow felt as though I genuinely did have a long-held wish to translate his book. I made a promise that when I went back to my hometown I would translate his work into my mother tongue and find a publisher worthy of bringing it out. I really was planning to do this.
The two of us exchanged many letters. If emails were included in the tally, the person with whom I’ve maintained the most extensive correspondence would be none other than you. It was already enough to fill a fair-sized book just a year after we first met. Of course, there were plenty of brief notes and postcards with just a single line like “thanks” or “okay.” You were an especial fan of letter writing. Each time you went traveling you sent several postcards back to friends, and your job meant that you spent more than half of each year away from home. My mailbox became crowded with your letters and postcards, not to mention the records and photographs, the essays and poetry collections. Once, you even tore out a newspaper advert you’d come across while eating breakfast in a hotel restaurant, and sent it to me, still permeated with the faint fragrance of tea. It was an ad for a tourist destination that the two of us had once visited together. You’d drawn an arrow in pen pointing to the bench in the photograph, with the words “We sat right here!” You also sent me any interviews you came across with either the first or second writer. Even when I went to Berlin for a while, you asked for my address there so you could keep mailing things. Some mail arrived for me there even after I’d moved out. One was an essay you wrote for a magazine, which you’d sent from America. The Berlin landlord forwarded it on, but it took almost eight months to get to me, having remained in Shanghai for several months in the bag of the person who was supposed to send it on. We called it the essay that had circumnavigated the globe. You sent quite a few letters even after we’d broken up. At the end of the final letter, you recommended a film, urging me to see it. You also wrote that I should go and visit the second writer, as you’d told him who I was. At this point, the second writer was already ill. A magazine carried his last interview, which he gave just before he died; in the photograph that appeared with it, his melancholy and ill health were evident in his face, in his huge sunken eyes. He wore suspenders to hold up his trousers, and his hands gripped the straps where they ran over his shoulders. As if they were a slender lifeline still tethering him to existence, the last such bond remaining.
Mr. H, how do you feel about these articles that talk about your cancer? Does it cause you to lose peace of mind, or start panicking?
I’m not exactly pleased about it, of course. It’s true that such articles make you shudder when you first see them. But all the same, I don’t start panicking or anything like that. The only one who panics is my wife. And so, I try to comfort her, you know. Saying “Darling, this is all a part of nature.”
The first writer and I watched the film together.
There was a scene in which the man said, my whole life, I’ve been afraid of being alone and being unable to write, those two things.
We were sitting in the theater. Once the male protagonist finished delivering those lines the first writer grasped my hand. He turned to me and said, “Those pitiful lines could have been spoken by me. I’ve spent my whole life failing to break free from them.” “But I envy you. You’ve accomplished everything there is, both as a writer and as a human being, and you’ve managed to keep yourself free from some things—economic necessity, for example. It seems there’s nothing left for you to fear. Your world is insanely enviable.” “For god’s sake please don’t say ‘accomplished everything.’ It sounds like ‘finished with everything.’” “All lives come to an end, including those