Just thinking about her made him warm inside. No longer did he wish to be a fish or a sunflower—or anything else, for that matter. For sure, it was a great inconvenience to have to walk on two legs and wear clothes and eat with a knife and fork. There were so many things he didn’t know. Yet had he been a fish or a sunflower, and not a human being, he might never have experienced this emotion. So he felt.
Samsa sat there for a long time with his eyes closed. Then, making up his mind, he stood, grabbed his black walking stick, and headed for the stairs. He would return to the second floor and figure out the proper way to dress. For now, at least, that would be his mission.
The world was waiting for him to learn.
Translated by Ted Goossen
MEN WITHOUT WOMEN
THE CALL CAME IN AFTER ONE A.M. and woke me up. Phones ringing in the middle of the night always sound harsh and grating, like some savage metal tool out to destroy the world. I felt it was my duty, as a member of the human race, to put a stop to it, so I got out of bed, padded over to the living room, and picked up the receiver.
A man’s low voice informed me that a woman had vanished from this world forever. The voice belonged to the woman’s husband. At least that’s what he said. And he went on. My wife committed suicide last Wednesday, he said. In any case, I thought I should let you know. In any case. As far as I could make out, there was not a drop of emotion in his voice. It was like he was reading lines meant for a telegram, with barely any space at all between each word. An announcement, pure and simple. Unadorned reality. Period.
What did I say in response? I must have said something, but I can’t recall. At any rate, there was a prolonged period of silence. Like a deep hole in the middle of the road that the two of us were staring into from opposite sides. Then, without a word, as if he were gently placing a fragile piece of artwork on the floor, the man hung up. I stood there, in a white T-shirt and blue boxers, pointlessly clutching the phone.
How did he know about me? I had no idea. Had she mentioned my name to her husband, as an old boyfriend? But why? And how did he know my phone number (which was unlisted)? In the first place, why me? Why would her husband go to the trouble of calling me to let me know his wife had died? I couldn’t imagine she’d left a request like that in a farewell note. We’d broken up years earlier. And we’d never seen each other since—not even once. We had never even talked on the phone.
That’s neither here nor there. The bigger problem was that he didn’t explain a single thing to me. He thought he needed to let me know his wife had killed herself. And somehow he’d gotten hold of my phone number. Beyond that, though—nothing. It seemed his intention was to leave me stuck somewhere in the middle, dangling between knowledge and ignorance. But why? To get me thinking about something?
Like what?
I was clueless. The number of question marks had only multiplied, like a child making rubber-stamp marks all over a page in a notebook.
So I still don’t know why she killed herself, or how she did it. Even if I wanted to inquire, there was no way to do so. I had no idea where she lived, and frankly I hadn’t even known she was married. So I didn’t know her married name (and the man on the phone hadn’t given his name). How long had they been married? Did they have a child—or children?
Still, I accepted what her husband had told me. I didn’t feel like doubting it. After she left me, she had continued to live on in this world, likely fell in love with somebody else, married him, and last Wednesday—for whatever reason and by whatever means—she had ended her life. In any case. There was certainly something in the man’s voice that linked him deeply to the world of the dead. In the late-night stillness, I could hear that connection, and catch a glint from that taut thread. So calling me like that, after one in the morning—whether intentional or not—had been the right decision. If he’d called at one in the afternoon, I never would have sensed this.
By the time I put down the phone and shuffled back to bed, my wife was awake.
“What was that call about? Did somebody die?” my wife asked.
“Nobody died. It was a wrong number,” I said, my voice slow and sleepy.
My wife, of course, didn’t buy it, for my own voice was now tinged with the dead too. The kind of unsettled feeling the newly deceased bring on is highly contagious. It moves through the phone line as a faint trembling, transforming the sound of words, bringing the world in sync with its vibration. But my wife said no more. The two of us lay there in the dark, listening carefully to the silence, each of us lost in our own thoughts.
—
This woman was the third woman I’d gone out with who’d killed herself. If you think about it—and you don’t really need to, since it’s obvious—this is an extremely high fatality rate. I couldn’t believe it. I hadn’t gone out with that many women in my life. Why these women, all still young, had taken their lives, or felt compelled to take their lives, was beyond my comprehension. I hoped it wasn’t because of me, or in some way connected with me. And I hoped they hadn’t assumed I would serve as a witness to their deaths. Deep down, I prayed this was the case. And—how should I put it?—this woman, the third woman (not having a name to call her by makes things awkward, so I’ll call her “M”)—wasn’t the type to commit suicide. Far from it. I mean, she had all the brawny sailors in the world protecting her, watching out for her.
I can’t give any particulars about what kind of woman M was, or how we met, or what we did together. If the facts came out, they might cause trouble for people who are still alive. So all I can write here is that a long time ago she and I were very close, and at a certain point we broke up.
Truthfully I like to think of M as a girl I met when she was fourteen. That didn’t actually happen, but here, at least, I’d like to imagine it did. We met when we were fourteen in a junior high classroom. It was biology class, as I recall. Something about ammonites and coelacanths. She was in the seat next to mine. “I forgot my eraser,” I told her, “so if you have an extra, could you let me borrow it?” She took her eraser, broke it in two, and gave me half. And smiled broadly. Like the saying goes, in that instant I fell in love. She was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. At least that’s what I felt at the time. That’s how I’d like to see her, as if that was how we first met, in the junior high classroom. Brought together through the quiet yet overpowering intercession of ammonites and coelacanths. Thinking this way about it makes all sorts of things easier to accept.
I was a healthy young fourteen-year-old boy, so much so that all it took was a warm west wind for my cock to snap to attention. That’s the age I was. Not that she gave me an erection. She far surpassed any west wind. And not just the west wind. She was so spectacular that she made wind coming from all directions simply vanish. In the face of such an amazing girl how could I even think of having a sordid hard-on? It was first time in my life I’d met a girl who made me feel this way.
I have a sense that was the first time I met M. It didn’t really happen that way, but thinking about it like this makes everything fall into place. I was fourteen, and she was fourteen too. That was the best age for us to have first encountered each other. That’s how we really should have met.
But before I knew it, M was gone. Where to, I have no idea. One day, I lost sight of her. I happened to glance away for a moment, and when I turned back, she had disappeared. There one minute, gone the next. Some crafty sailor must have invited her to run off with him to Marseilles, or to the Ivory Coast. My despair was deeper than any ocean that they might have crossed. Deeper than any sea where giant squid and sea dragons swam. I started to hate myself. I couldn’t believe in anything. How the hell had this happened? That’s how much I loved M, how much she meant to me. How much I needed her. Why had I ever looked away?
Conversely, ever since then, M has been everywhere. I see her everywhere I go. She is part of many places, many times, many people. I put the half eraser in a plastic bag and carried it around with me like a talisman.
Or a compass. As long it was in my pocket, I knew that someday, somewhere, I would find M again. I was sure of it. A smooth-talking sailor had sweet-talked her into boarding his big ship, and spirited her far away, that’s all. She was always the type of girl who trusted others. The type who would take a brand-new eraser, break it in half, and offer it to a boy she didn’t even know.
I tried to collect fragments of clues as to her whereabouts, in all sorts of places and from all sorts of people. But these were nothing but scraps, assorted bits and pieces. No matter how many you collect, fragments are still just that. Her essence always vanished like a mirage. And from land, the horizon was infinite. As was the horizon at sea. I busily chased it, moving from point to point—from Bombay to Cape Town to Reykjavik to the Bahamas. I made the rounds of every town with a harbor, but by the time I arrived, she was already gone. Only a faint trace of her warmth remained on an unmade bed. Her scarf with its whirlpool design lay hanging on the back of a chair. A half-read book, its pages open, on a table. Half-dry stockings hung out to dry in the bathroom. But she was no longer there. Cunning sailors around the world sensed me coming, and quickly snatched her away and hid her once more. By this time, of course, I’m no longer fourteen. I’m more suntanned, and tougher. My beard is thicker and I know the difference between a metaphor and a simile. But a part of me is still fourteen. And the part of me that’s forever fourteen waits, very patiently, for a gentle west wind to stroke my innocent penis. Wherever that west wind blows, M will surely be found.
That’s M to me.
A woman who never stays in one place.
But not a woman who would take her own life.
—
I’m not exactly sure what I’m trying to say here. Maybe I’m trying to write about essence, rather than the truth. But writing about an essence that isn’t true is like trying to rendezvous with someone on the dark side of the moon. It’s dim and devoid of landmarks. And way too big. What I want to say is, M is the woman I should have fallen in love with when I was fourteen. But it was only much later that I fell in love with her, and by then, sadly, she was fourteen no more. We were mistaken about the time when we should have met. Like forgetting when you’re supposed to meet someone. You get the time of day and place right, but miscalculate the day.
A fourteen-year-old girl still resided within her, however. That girl was complete inside of her, not just fragments. If I looked closely, I could catch a glimpse of that girl coming and going inside of M. When she lay in my arms as we made love, she would turn old one minute, then become a young girl in the next. She was always traveling in her own private time zone. And I loved her for that. I’d hold her tightly, so tightly that she said it hurt. I might have held her too hard. But I couldn’t help it. I didn’t want to give her up.
But, of course, the time came when I lost her again. All the sailors around the world, after all, had her in their sights. I couldn’t be expected to protect her all by myself. No one can keep their eyes on someone every second. You have to sleep, have to use the bathroom. Need to scrub the bathtub sometime. Have to slice onions, have to snap off the ends of string beans. Check the air in the tires of your car. That’s how we left each other. Or, rather, how she left me. There was always, in the background, the unambiguous shadow of a sailor. A single dark, autonomous shadow gliding up the wall of a building. Bathtubs, onions, and air were simply shards of metaphor scattered like thumbtacks by that shadow.
After she left, no one knows how wretched I felt, how deep the abyss. How could they? I can barely recall it myself. How much did I suffer? How much pain did I go through? I wish there was a machine that could accurately measure sadness, and display it in numbers that you could record. And it would be great if that machine could fit in the palm of your hand. I think of this every time I measure the air in my tires.
—
In the end, she died. The phone call in the middle of the night made that clear. I don’t know where, or how, or why, or what the point was, but M decided to end her own life, and end it she did. And—probably—she then quietly withdrew from this real world. All the sailors in the world, and all their sweet talk, couldn’t save her now—or even abduct her—from the land of the dead. But if you listen really closely in the middle of the night, maybe you, too, can catch the far-off sound of the sailors’ mournful dirge.
When she died I lost my fourteen-year-old self. Like a baseball player’s number that is permanently retired, the fourteen-year-old inside me up and left for good. My fourteen-year-old self was now locked away in a thick safe, intricately locked, buried on the bottom of the sea. The door to the safe won’t be opened for a billion years. Until then, ammonites and coelacanths will silently keep watch over it. The pleasant west wind no longer blows. And sailors all over the world mourn her passing. Not to mention all the anti-sailors around the world.
When I learned of M’s death I felt sure I was the second-loneliest man on the planet.
The loneliest man had to be her husband. I reserve that seat for him. I have no idea what kind of person he is. I don’t know how old he is. I have no information at all about what he does or doesn’t do. The only thing I know is that he has a deep voice. But that doesn’t tell me a thing. Is he a sailor? Or someone who opposes sailors? If the latter, that makes him one of my compatriots. If the former…I still feel for him. And I wish there was something I could do to ease his pain.
But there was no way I could find my former girlfriend’s husband. I don’t know his name, or the place where he lives. Perhaps he had already lost his name and place. He was, after all, the world’s loneliest man. When I go on walks I like to sit down in front of the statue of a unicorn (the park with this particular unicorn statue is on my usual route), and as I gaze at the cold water in the fountain, I think about this man. And I imagine what it means to be the loneliest man on earth. I already know what it is to be the second-loneliest man on earth. But I still don’t know what it is to be the loneliest. A deep gulf separates the second and the first loneliest on earth. Most likely. Deep, and wide, too. The bottom is heaped high with the corpses of birds who have tried, and failed, to traverse it.
Suddenly one day you become Men Without Women. That day comes to you completely out of the blue, without the faintest of warnings or hints beforehand. No premonitions or foreboding, no knocks or clearing of throats. Turn a corner and you know you’re already there. But by then there’s no going back. Once you round that bend, that is the only world you can possibly inhabit. In that world you are called “Men Without Women.” Always a relentlessly frigid plural.
Only Men Without Women can comprehend how painful, how heartbreaking, it is to become one. You lose that wonderful west wind. Fourteen is stolen away from you forever. (A billion years should count as forever.) The far-off, weary lament of the sailors. The bottom of the sea, with the ammonites and coelacanths. Calling someone’s house past one a.m. Getting a call after one a.m. from a stranger. Waiting for someone you don’t know somewhere between knowledge and ignorance. Tears falling on the dry road as you check the pressure of your tires.
As I sat there in front of the unicorn statue I prayed that someday her husband would recover. I prayed, too, that he would never forget the really important things—the essence—but would be able to forget everything else that was unimportant, and secondary. I hoped he could even forget the fact that he had forgotten them. I truly felt this way. Imagine that, I thought: here was the second-loneliest man on earth feeling compassion for—and praying for—the man who was the loneliest (someone he had never even met).
But why had he gone to the trouble of calling me? I’m not criticizing him for it, it’s just that I can’t answer this fundamental question, even now. How did he even know about me? And why did he care? The answer is probably simple. M must have told her husband about me. Something about me. That’s the only thing I can imagine that make him call. What she told him, though, I have no idea. What value, what meaning, could I possibly have had for her, that she woul
d tell her husband about a former boyfriend like me? Was it something critical connected to her death? Did I cast some sort of shadow over her passing? Maybe M told her husband how beautiful my penis is. When we lay in bed in the afternoon she used to lovingly hold it on her palm and gaze at it like she was admiring the legendary crown jewels of India. “It’s sooo beautiful,” she would say. Whether that’s true or not, I have no clue.
Was this what made her husband call me? Phoning me up after one a.m. to express his respect for the shape of my cock? Hardly. That’s absurd. Any way you look at it, my penis is less than spectacular. The best you could say is that it’s pretty average. Her sense of beauty often left me shaking my head. She had an offbeat sense of values, unlike anyone else.
Probably (and I’m just imagining here) she told her husband about sharing half her eraser with me in the junior high classroom. She had no ulterior motive in telling him, and she meant well. It was just a small memory from the past that she happened to share. And of course this made him jealous. The fact that M gave me half of her eraser would have caused him to be much more jealous than if M had had sex with two busloads of sailors. It’s only to be expected. What do two busloads of brawny sailors mean? M and I were, after all, both fourteen, and all it took for me to get an erection was the west wind. Having a girl break her brand-new eraser in two and give me half was extraordinary. Like handing over a dozen old barns to a gigantic tornado.
After that, every time I pass the statue of the unicorn, I sit down there for a while and contemplate Men Without Women. Why that place? Why a unicorn? Maybe the unicorn, too, is one of the Men Without Women. I mean, I’ve never seen a unicorn couple. He—it has to be a he, right?—is always alone, sharp horn thrust toward the sky. Maybe we should adopt him as the symbol of Men Without Women, of the loneliness we carry as our burden. Perhaps we should sew unicorn badges on our breast pockets and hats, and quietly parade down streets all over the world. No music, no flags, no tickertape. Probably. (I’m using the word “probably” a bit too much. Probably.)