When we returned, Professor H., having examined the sky and foretold more rain, proposed that rather than spending the afternoon viewing traditional Japanese art or visiting the Shin Yakushi-ji Temple or the Kasuga Taisha Shrine (we’d already seen Todai-ji that morning), we could take in a more popular although in his view equally instructive spectacle: the striptease. From that moment on he decided to do his best to get rid of the only young woman in our midst, my admirer, judging it better not to involve her in this venture because, even if he was willing to have us, his foreign guests, slum it with him (we were obviously his cover-story), he still retained some sense of decorum, gallant enough to wait until after the young woman’s departure, even hurrying it along somewhat, before leading us down his favorite dark alleyways. You have to go back to Kyoto now, Yoshiko, he said, looking at his watch with hypocritical concern. I’ll go with you if you like, said Charlie (strippers aren’t exactly my thing, he said, and they walked off arm in arm toward the station). The last little setback Professor H. had to deal with before satisfying his unavowable desires in Rémi’s and my name was our desire to do a bit of Christmas shopping beforehand. Then, our shopping done, just when he must have thought he’d almost reached his goal, we said we wanted to make a last detour to a shop we’d heard sold authentic handmade paper lanterns. Only then, having each acquired one of these expensive lanterns, our arms loaded with two large paper bags full of Christmas presents for our wives and children, costumes and brushes for our daughters, sandals and incense, trinkets and lacquers, we arrived at the entrance to the strip club. Having bought our tickets, we penetrated into the dubious dark of an old theatre smelling of urine and fermented soy and followed a corridor covered with obscene kanji and scrawled katakana where, here and there in the shadows, banged-up and abandoned vending machines displayed cans of Kirin and Sapporo beer. Professor H. couldn’t be restrained, and deserted us as soon as we got into the theatre. Professor, Professor! we yelled, reaching out to hold him back, but it was too late, he was gone. Rémi and I, clenching our bags full of Christmas presents, ventured into the dark labyrinth of corridors before going into the filthy bathrooms reeking equally of piss and miso, of shit and soup, the walls tacked with not particularly well-built Asian pin-ups astride huge Japanese motorbikes. Having stoically taken a piss, our noses pressed up against the exhaust pipes of these humongous bikes and doing our best not to breathe (nice place, by the looks of it), we too finally made our way into the striptease hall where, bathed in a shadowy reddish light, a stripper was just finishing her number on a stage surrounded by mirrors and curtains and lit up indirectly by the phallic beam of a dim red spot. We crossed the hall noiselessly and went over to join Professor H., who tilted his head over to us without taking his eyes off the stage and whispered to us to sit down on two seats that had remained free beside him. We set our bags of Christmas presents down beside us in the darkness, arranging them neatly on both sides of our chairs before looking up at the stage where a stark-naked stripper was spreading her legs on the floor and stuffing a little red ping-pong ball into her vagina before making it pop like a champagne cork, pop, which then fell softly back onto her stomach, whereupon she immediately stuffed it back inside her and started this intimate cup and ball game all over again. After these gymnastics, which only did credit to the suppleness of her anatomy (no matter how you looked at it, she was good at what she did, and we gave her a short round of mental applause), she came over to the edge of the stage and spread her legs wide right under the noses of the spectators in the front row, offering them little transparent plastic towels so they could wipe their fingers in case they were overcome by the urge to thrust them into her pussy and rummage around at their leisure for a while. That afternoon in the theatre it was an exceedingly eclectic group who took her up on this offer and started mucking around inside of her — there were young men and old, two well-dressed, elegant businessmen, three or four mean-looking yakuza with faces like syphilitic thugs who gave her a concentrated, attentive feel, and a pale and sickly fellow in a baseball cap and one of those white gauze masks meant to protect you from germs. Then as the stripper continued to look out benevolently at the audience with her legs spread at the edge of the stage, never losing her perpetual friendly smile like that of an Asian-American television hostess nor seeming to be at all aware that three guys were kneading her breasts and fingering her pussy with all the diligence of indiscriminate, narrow-minded, monotonous adolescents, she absently wiped the tips of their fingers again and moved slightly to one side to give the next spectators a glimpse of the depths of her soul, taking with her as she went the little pile of used transparent towels which seemed to me the most repugnant thing about this well-oiled ritual. Well, merry Christmas.
vietnam
Francophonie is on the decline in Vietnam, as I ascertained on a ten-day study trip to Hanoi. Just off the plane on the evening of my arrival, my flexible black travel bag in my hand and a bead of sweat on my forehead — stoic, immobile, looking around for my hosts in the jostling nocturnal bustle of the arrival gate, I was accosted by an eager and amiable Vietnamese man. Möchten Sie ein Taxi? he asked me. Nein, danke, I said to him in my German, which was getting worse with every passing day. Um nach Hanoi zu fahren, he added, inviting me to follow him. Nein, ich danke Ihnen, I said. I didn’t need a taxi (in principle I was being picked up by someone from the French embassy). I got up on tiptoes and looked around once more for my host. Nothing. Es ist nicht teuer, the taxi driver insisted, fünfundzwanzig Dollar. Aber ich brauche kein Taxi, I said. Woher sind Sie in Deutschland? he asked. Und Sie? I answered. He looked at me. (It seemed he wasn’t German either.)
People in Hanoi tend to get around by motorcycle. The very first time I myself got on one was also in Hanoi, behind Solange. Solange, who’d come to pick me up at the hotel to take me on a tour of the city, had proposed I get on the back of her little Honda, and I’d swung one leg in the air and over the seat with my accustomed ease, a bit like the way I’d heard you straddle a pony (although I’m not much of a horseman either), and once in the seat, not terrifically reassured, I’d propped my two feet on the footrests. Then, as she abruptly pulled away and veered resolutely into the traffic, I completely lost my balance and, not knowing what to do with my hands, after a quick look around, my goodness, I put them on Solange’s hips. Actually, I found that very pleasant, driving around Hanoi holding Solange by the waist and talking in her ear in a low voice, feeling the very light fabric of her dress under my fingers. I later found out, however, that it was not exactly done to hold your driver by the waist like that when you were not at all on familiar terms, nor was it proper to close your eyes and rest your head in a melancholy way on her shoulder (mentally humming some Italian serenade), and that in fact there was a handle to grab onto on the back of the bike. Behind Professor Bich, moreover — a professor of comparative literature who was kind enough to take me to visit a historic village just outside Hanoi the following weekend — already better-acquainted with motorcycle etiquette, I didn’t have the slightest urge, not even the hint of a temptation, to hold him by the waist. Nguyet, for her part (what an urbane life I lived in Hanoi: Solange, Nguyet, Professor Bich; and that’s only to name the ones who shared the favor of their motorcycles with me for a few moments), who was no taller than four foot eleven and weighed eighty-eight pounds at the maximum, had no end of difficulty transporting me — at twice her weight — on her own motorcycle. At first she suggested I drive (don’t even think about it! I said, looking at the contraption), then, as she could tell that I was hardly about to give in on this point, we finally set out, she kicked the motorcycle off its stand and pushed it onto the street. Our departure was hesitant, laborious even, we both ran along beside the motorcycle to get it up to speed like a bobsled before jumping onto the seat and zigzagging for fifty or sixty feet down Tran Nhan Tong Street. Finally we got stabilized, Nguyet in front, very serious, sitting perfectly straight on the seat and gripping the handlebars with both hands. Then, as we slowed down to approach an intersection, leaning dangerously to one side or the other as we lost speed, Nguyet tried to keep the motorcycle straight while I, immobile behind her, said to myself, “We’re going to fall, we’re going to fall” (what a mistake, what a mistake to have accepted this invitation to Vietnam). I was preparing to jump clear when I heard the terrifying honk of a truck just a few feet away, however after a final sinuous, ellipsoid loop we elegantly avoided the impending danger, picked up speed and weaved our way once more into traffic.