But it was so cold that I could no longer sit on the bench with the false teeth, so I checked to see if anyone was watching and then put them stealthily in my pocket even though I could have been picking up something someone had discarded, after which I realized that stealing someone’s false teeth was a very thrilling thing to do. And at the same time, it seemed as if I’d done a good deed, done the right thing, by taking the false teeth that looked as unfortunate as a kitten that had lost its mother and was begging you to take it with you.
In the end, the lovely false teeth that must have allowed their former owner to chew and swallow his food, smile with his gums showing in happy moments, bear his teeth at growling dogs, and perk up his ears to the sound of his false teeth clattering severely, shivering as severely as I was, on a very cold day, came to meet a new owner, and live a different life in a shoebox in my house, and became the best souvenir from my trips, and whenever I returned from a trip after that, the first thing I did was take it out and look at it.
But this unlikely story isn’t true. It’s true that I shivered in the cold in the courtyard of an old royal palace in Budapest, but what I found on the snow-covered bench when I came out into the courtyard after taking a look around the museum for a little while, having come to Hungary during the night although I’d originally intended to go to a city in Austria by getting on a passenger car of the wrong train — in Europe, there are many opportunities to get on a passenger car of the wrong train, and you can end up greeting morning in Italy when you had intended to go to Switzerland, but it’s one of the charms of traveling by train in Europe — and discovering upon waking up in the morning that I had arrived in Budapest, was an apple someone had taken a bite out of, with clear teeth marks on it, and the story about the false teeth is something I made up. No, there was no such thing as an apple on the bench, only the trace of something like an apple in the form of a hollow semicircle in the snow. No, how about changing the story, by changing the previous statement, and experiencing a confusion of memories, or artificially creating a confusion of memories, or saying that I was confused, and saying that there was only snow on the bench, and no such thing as a hollow semicircle, or that I took out an apple from my bag and placed it on the snow-covered bench, or that actually, there wasn’t even snow on the bench? What if by doing so, I made it impossible to tell how much of the story was true, thus turning the story about the false teeth into a fact that shows that what people commonly call a fact always contains something that’s not a fact, that in fact, the boundary between fact and fiction is quite vague? So what if this whole story about false teeth is in fact a means of making up, in my own way, memories or impressions of my trip long ago to Budapest, to preserve them in myself in any way possible because I recalled the trip while eating an apple at home but everything about it had grown dim, as dim as if I had never taken the trip? (These words are proceeding dizzily among things happening between immovable facts and fiction that hovers around them, or between moving facts and fixed fiction, or among the things that I will make happen. By so doing, I’ll be able to stand in the way of these words turning into a story, even if I can’t keep them from doing so in the end, and I’ll be able to keep them from turning into a narrative, at least.)
When I went to the royal palace in Budapest there was snow piled up on the bench there, and there may or may not have been an apple with someone’s teeth marks on it on the bench, but through a story about false teeth I’m placing a teeth-marked apple on the bench there.
And in a shoebox in my house there’s a set of false teeth, a plaster replica I bought in a souvenir shop on my way back from Budapest. Even now, I take out the replica from time to time and put it on a table by a windowsill and look at it. On this table, there’s a flowerpot with a flower whose name I do not know, and a little statue of an ivory monkey, which is covering its eyes with its hands as if to say that there’s nothing it could bear to see with its eyes open, which is what I like about the monkey statue.
Now, having written a story about false teeth, I take the replica in my hand and become lost in futuristic thought. All devices installed in human bodies, such as artificial eyes and prosthetic legs, elicit great admiration, probably because in them can be seen a model of the most primitive stage of the mechanical man, which could emerge sometime in the future — they’ll be manufactured in factories instead of being born from the womb, but that, too, could be called a birth. This is the kind of thing I see in people who wear things like false teeth and artificial eyes and prosthetic legs, and I very easily think that they’re people from the future.
~ ~ ~
In the meantime (from when to when does meantime here refer to? It’s probably the period between when I began to write this, or when I became lost in thought after that, and this moment. And I could also say that it was when most of the trumpet creepers outside my window had fallen, and the grapes in the fridge had gotten all rotten and moldy, and I found that a lot of juice had come out of the plums I put in a glass jar with sugar, and I had finished translating part one of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, which ends with the Ramsays and the visitors to their summer home going to bed at the end of the day, and which I had been working on much longer than usual because I wasn’t feeling well. Anyway, I feel as if during that time, I passed through a space like a river you have to swim across, and was carried in a rough current to a wrong place, completely different from where I’d intended to go at the beginning), I would often slip into a state in which I never went outside and let my thoughts float around, thinking about traveling, or perhaps about certain places. As the range of my movement decreased, and I could barely manage to go on with everyday life, let alone travel, I didn’t become more and more desperate to travel.
I liked stories of adventurers, such as the story of Marco Polo, who wanted to reach the end of the world of his imagination, and Ibn Battutah, who traveled, endlessly deviating from his original itinerary, led by revelations and strange dreams — if his superhuman will was the light that led him, revelations and dreams seem like clouds that both blocked the light and let it shine through their cracks — but I didn’t enjoy going on adventures. And I liked to have people tell me about the somewhat strange experiences they had while traveling, but didn’t think about writing a travel sketch, for the experiences I had while traveling, which remained in my memory, were things that most people wouldn’t find interesting.
For almost the first time since I’ve been writing, I think that I might talk about certain trips I took. But even if I do, what I write won’t be an ordinary travel sketch. What I write will probably be as far from an ordinary travel sketch as possible, and not very helpful for many people, or not helpful at all for some people. That would be because essentially, there’s nothing I seek to gain through traveling, and even if there were something, it would be nothing more than little passing impressions or some perceptual experience that would be difficult to explain.
And although traveling, in a way, is one of the only tolerable things that remain for me, there are many things that make it difficult for me to travel. First, I’m not very good at planning or pushing forward with something, but I can’t very well stand traveling with someone, either.
In addition, my whims — alternating in my heart are the desire to do something, and the contrary desire to do nothing, which moves faster — and boredom, which follow me doggedly wherever I go, also make it difficult for me to travel, but the biggest reason is that when I consider traveling, the thought, What would I do if I did go somewhere? Nothing’s going to change anyway, would present itself before anything else. In the end, the moment when it becomes possible for me to travel is when, very rarely, the thought, What would I do if I didn’t go anywhere? barely manages to prevail over the thought, What would I do if I did go somewhere? But even when I end up traveling in this way, I often get caught up in a serious quandary as to why I’m traveling. Countless are the times when not long after I’d set out on a trip I witnessed and confirmed my reason for being there, which may not have existed in the first place, quickly vanishing, and I always regretted taking the trip, and at times gave up the trip midway through. And in part, my disposition itself, which makes it possible for me to feel utterly bored by anything and everything, which in a way is an inherent gift, makes it difficult for me to see and experience something new. What I found in traveling in the end was boredom, which wasn’t different from the dreadful boredom found in everyday things, and boredom, indeed, was something that accompanied me wherever I was, and there was nowhere I could rid myself of it.