And he could recall how once, he looked up false teeth in a book because he liked to leaf through medical literature to pass the time and it suddenly occurred to him that false teeth were one of the many marvelous human inventions, and was pleased to learn that from ancient times, people have used false teeth made from hippopotamus or sea elephant tusks, or teeth from dead people, but they rotted easily, so before the modern days, when ceramic false teeth were devised, most people had bad teeth, and thought that he wanted to write a story about false teeth, and actually wrote a short story about them as follows.
One very cold winter’s day long ago, I was standing in the courtyard of a royal palace, from which I could see Budapest, Hungary at a glance. The palace, which could be seen at a glance from anywhere downtown, looked bleak, and it also looked bleak downtown, which could be seen at a glance from the palace. It was still early, and although I hadn’t planned on it, I was the first to arrive at the palace. The museum that used to be a palace wasn’t open yet, and I was able to go into the museum and get away from the cold after waiting for a long time — I mostly stood around the heaters, like someone who had come to get away from the cold, or looked halfheartedly at works that were on exhibit far away, which would have suited only the tastes of the royal family in the past and didn’t inspire any feelings in me — but the interior of the royal palace and the things therein seemed only to be conspiring to make people feel as heavyhearted as possible.
After I warmed up I came out of the palace building as if to escape and took a walk in the courtyard, thinking about what I should do next and looking down at downtown Budapest, which looked gloomy even at a glance, and found something startling on a bench in a dark corner of the garden, which looked like false teeth and were, in fact, false teeth. I sat down cautiously at the other end of the bench on which sat the false teeth, for when I saw the false teeth that were sitting quietly and solemnly at one end of the bench, I felt as if there were an octopus or a sea elephant sitting on the bench where, ordinarily, there would be a lost mitten.
The false teeth, which belong in the mouth, but were now separated from the lips that gently covered them and the teeth that softly touched them, and whose upper and lower parts were precisely overlapped, the teeth facing me and tightly clamped, looked as if they were smiling mischievously, or were angry, or quite meek yet very arrogant, and, depending on how you looked at them, they could look as if they were making any kind of expression. I was extremely surprised to find out that false teeth, consisting of upper and lower teeth, could make such a variety of expressions, and I, too, bore my teeth and made various expressions at them for a little while. No, I didn’t actually do it, only in my mind.
As I did, I looked at the false teeth that were before me and thought that the teeth, which made me think of a helmet, although they didn’t look like a helmet, containing memories of battles and honorable wounds, and had nothing about them that was a direct reminder of a helmet — did a certain helmet I saw a little earlier in the museum bear a natural connection to the false teeth? — should be endowed with some kind of a glory, but I wasn’t sure if I could endow it with a glory that was fitting. Looking at the false teeth that looked like some kind of an installation piece, I wondered how they had come to be at that place, and who had placed them there, and tried to find clues about their original owner, but the only thing I could come up with was that he must have had no choice but to wear false teeth because his natural teeth went bad, and I thought arbitrarily that it was because the false teeth, which used to be a part of someone’s mouth, told me nothing more than that.
It was possible that the owner of the teeth, who was traveling, was very absentminded and forgot that he had placed them there and gotten on a train headed someplace else in Europe, but that didn’t seem very likely. Or it was possible that the owner, who was from the area, or was a traveler from another continent and could be from anywhere in the world, had gotten a new set of false teeth, and while agonizing over what to do with the old, which had become worn, even shaky, during the long time they were with him, and which he could have grown quite fond of — it was possible that he wanted to bury them someplace, perhaps in a cemetery or in his garden at home, wishing to give them a proper funeral — he put them in a public place, anticipating that the people who found them would be surprised for a moment, then extremely delighted.
Sitting in the courtyard of a royal palace in Budapest, looking at false teeth that had found someone who needed them because he had no teeth, and were now possibly discarded by him, I considered placing something somewhere for other travelers, but it was so cold that I could come up with nothing other than the idea than that it might be nice to place a pineapple lengthwise on a seesaw in a playground, or a skate on a slide, or a cool artificial eye on a windowsill in a museum, or a living lobster in a sink in a public bathroom.
Once, I thought about things you could put in your house, things that could make you feel good in a strange way when you stared at them in a bored and dazed state, unable to sleep, such as monkey skulls and artificial eyes. Of those, artificial eyes could be great ornaments, and one day I was quite delighted to learn after reading a book on artificial eyes that in the past glass was used as material for artificial eyes, but now acrylic resin was used, and not only were there artificial eyes of various forms, much fancier than natural human eyes, but there were three-dimensional artificial eyes, vacuum artificial eyes, and even moving artificial eyes as well, and because the movements of artificial eyes weren’t as versatile as normal eyes, someone wearing an artificial eye should make a habit of moving his head along with the eye when looking at people or objects.
Anyway, I sat side by side with the false teeth in the bone-freezing cold, thinking stupidly that I could think about something that could warm me up, but no thought could warm me up. Instead, my teeth began to clatter and shake — I was clenching my teeth and it wasn’t easy to clench shaking, clattering teeth, but although the cold was making me miserable, the sound of clattering teeth, which made their way through the inside of my face to the ears, was pleasant — and while looking at the false teeth that were looking at me as if to say that they felt sorry for me, I pictured most people from the king down, before the invention of the modern false teeth, whose mouths looked disfigured with rotten or missing teeth before the invention of the modern false teeth — just as certain people in tropical regions all had red teeth because they always chewed on a certain fruit — talking to each other and laughing or getting angry, and forced a smile at the false teeth and thought about what to do with them. It didn’t seem that I could leave them without making up my mind as to whether I should keep an eye on them, or leave them to their own.
In the meantime, snow began to fall again and thickened, and it was growing as dark as night even though it was morning, and even lightning struck in the distant sky. If not for the cold weather, the teeth and I might have sat side by side and chatted like people who had met on a walk, having a hard time thinking of right things to say. So as the snow that was piling up on my head and shoulders piled up on the false teeth, a conversation about how someone who had never stayed up a night on a bench in the courtyard of a royal palace in Budapest on a cold winter’s day couldn’t say anything about what it truly meant to gnash your teeth might have taken place between the teeth, which looked as if they had stayed up a long, cold night on the spot, and me.