And once, I was on my way to a port in the morning to make a reservation on a ship headed to a Scandinavian country, just to go a little further north from Amsterdam, but I suddenly felt no desire to go after seeing a doll drifting down a canal, and decided to give up going to Scandinavia and leave the Netherlands immediately — or did the doll come into my sight as I was thinking that I should leave the Netherlands? — but a little thing that happened as I was making my way to the train station led me to stay longer in the Netherlands. I was passing by a bus station when a young Caucasian woman coming toward me smiled at me, no, she was already smiling before she approached me, and asked me cautiously if I could give her two dollars, and the moment she opened her smiling lips wide to say that, I saw, through her uneven teeth — one of the teeth was missing, and another was sticking out — a big chunk of spinach, like a gold tooth someone had put in to show off, in the bright sunlight. And there was a brown stain on her pink blouse, slightly puffed up around her stomach, as if she’d spilled some food on it, and there was some blood on her arm, as if scratched by thorns on a tree, not a lot but a few drops of it, not yet fully congealed. I thought that she must have come before me after stealing spinach from someone’s garden at the center of Amsterdam and filling her belly with it, and then making her way through a thorny bush, such as a rosebush.
After thinking for a moment I took out two dollar bills from my wallet and handed them to her, after which I learned that the two dollars I’d given her were a compensation for showing me her teeth, with spinach stuck in between. It also occurred to me that it was because it had been too long since someone had smiled at me without an ulterior motive — even if she did have an ulterior motive, it was for no more than two dollars. She remained standing there smiling, and the somewhat awkward smile wouldn’t leave her lips, as if stuck there, as if her facial expression had gotten stuck at the smile. And the smile was something that could be produced only by someone who was captivated by herself, and it seemed that she had long lost interest in the bills she’d received. I took a close look at her face, and everything about her looked funny, the lipstick smeared around her lips, the nose ring she was wearing, the hair that looked as if it had been dyed red, her face itself, the dress with too many flowers on it. She was mumbling something incoherent, and seemed drugged up. I thought a bunch of flowers would suit her, so I wanted to give her a bunch of flowers, but I didn’t see any flower shops nearby.
Our encounter was brief, and we parted ways smiling, but thanks to her I could remember the Netherlands as a country in which a woman who smiled, baring her teeth with spinach stuck between them, and had a few little drops of blood on her arm as if scratched by thorns, and had lost her mind, or was drugged up, initiated a conversation with me, and I could stay in the Netherlands for a few more days, feeling refreshed. And during my additional days in the Netherlands, the country seemed almost lovely. It was also because a somewhat strange thing happened while I sat in a café the day before I met her, when a man came up to me and said something in Dutch, and when I told him in English that I didn’t understand, he asked me in English if I wasn’t a classmate from his school days. When he asked me that, I almost said yes, a little surprised, no, not really surprised, but pretending to be surprised. In the Netherlands, of course, there were a lot of children who were adopted from the East, and he must have taken me for one of his old classmates, and in the end he apologized and left, but that, too, pleased me, and I recalled how once I wondered what it would’ve been like if I had been adopted into someone’s home when I was little, and thought about it briefly. And afterwards, when I met the woman with spinach stuck between her teeth, I couldn’t help but feel quite close to her, and the encounter pleased me quite a bit. Such trifling things brought me pleasure, and it was also pleasing to see myself becoming very pleased by such things.
Another time, in a foreign city, Paris, I think, someone asked me if I weren’t from a country in Central Asia, and although I don’t remember how I answered the question at the time, I do remember that I recalled a country called Turkmenistan, whose capital’s streets, which I saw on television, were lined with massive new buildings that seemed to embody the socialist ideal, which I would have been quite satisfied to see if I were Stalin, but were too empty and deserted, and felt almost surreal, and said that I was from Turkmenistan, and thought that it was a good thing to be of ambiguous nationality, and an even better thing to lose your nationality altogether.
(The things that took place in my life were, like the above, things that couldn’t be called incidents, things that fell short of being incidents — except, of course, my recent loss of consciousness and collapse at home — things that would turn into nothing if I didn’t fix them in my memory by putting them into writing like this. By putting into writing the faint, fragile memories in this way, I’m fixing them, stories that can change again later in a different way, like printed photographs.)
The next day I returned to the café where I’d met the man who asked me if I weren’t an old classmate and had coffee there, hoping to see him again, although it would be okay, of course, not to see him again, and tell him how much his blunder had pleased me. And I thought I could make a movie, combining the scenes in Amsterdam in which I met the woman with spinach stuck between her teeth and the man who mistook me for an old classmate, with my experiences in New York, as well as things I experienced or imagined in other places while traveling, because I felt as if the woman with spinach stuck between her teeth and the man who mistook me for an old classmate came up to me, like characters in a movie, and posed a riddle and then disappeared, leaving me alone in the movie. It would be a very strange movie without a storyline, whose scenes would linger in the mind despite, or because of, its lack of a storyline. It’s a strange thing to dream of making just one movie that’s very strange, but it made me happy, as if I were having an enchanting dream. The previous night I’d dreamt about a naked woman whose thighs and chest were embedded with pieces of translucent mother-of-pearl, put together like a mosaic in the form of a woman. I was tangled up naked with the naked woman, which seemed quite erotic. It was an erotic experience that told you that you could have a truly erotic experience only in dreams. And the woman’s face was as black as ebony, and naturally led me to think of the word death. I thought I could put that dream, too, in the one movie I could make.
During my additional days in Amsterdam, I mostly sat in a café from which I could see the canal, writing down words such as stained stain, sleeping sleep, dreaming dream, drained drain, and smiling smile. And the words became the phrase, a smiling smile that arises on a drained drain of a stained stain in a dream dreamt by sleeping sleep, upon whose completion I left the Netherlands.
Reading what I’ve written so far, I think about how I should move forward, or make it move forward, about all its possibilities. It’s always a pain to read over what you’ve written. Writing isn’t without moments of joy you can’t feel in doing anything else, but such moments are much too rare. And the moments vanish as soon as they come.
It seems now that I am completely lost in what I’ve written. That was part of my intention, of course, and so it wouldn’t be a bad thing to get completely lost in my own story. But getting lost and wandering in a story makes you more clearly aware of yourself as you’re disappearing somewhere, in a way that’s both similar to but different from getting lost and wandering in a forest or the streets. I feel as if I’m somewhere that doesn’t exist, as if I exist somewhere that doesn’t exist as a nonexistent being, as if I’m disappearing.