Looking at the ordinary wallpaper in the hotel room in which I was staying, I briefly considered death in a hotel room in a foreign land, which I’d always considered, and how a hotel room was a good place in which to have such a thought. But taking my own life still seemed premature, and I thought about suicide only in a vague and faint way.
And I recalled the time several years earlier when I went to France and stayed in a small town with no clear purpose or reason, in order to leave the country where I was born and lived in because I couldn’t stand almost anything about it.
When I thought of the small town, someone always came to my mind before anything else. In a little square in that French town I stayed in there was a statue of someone who was a scientist as well as a cyclist, and a beggar who was the spitting image of Karl Marx always sat next to it at a certain hour. But the beggar, at whose side was a bag which looked as if it would contain The Communist Manifesto, didn’t do anything at all, as if he had forgotten his duty as a beggar, or as if he were doing his duty as a beggar. I’d never seen a beggar who didn’t do anything, not to that extent. It seemed that the man, who looked questionable as a beggar, carried out his routine activities such as eating or receiving alms in other places, and his spot next to the statue seemed to be a place he visited in order to not do anything. No, it’s not true that he didn’t do anything at all. He did one thing, which was to take out some kind of a candy from his pocket at a certain time of the day, take off the plastic wrapping and put the candy in his mouth, and suck on it quietly like someone lost in meditation, and when he did, it seemed as if the present world, whose ideals haven’t been realized, were quietly, sweetly crumbling away. No, this isn’t true. He didn’t do anything at all, not even suck on a candy. It was my imagination that put a candy in his mouth. That didn’t suit him. He was better off doing nothing, which, fortunately, was what he was doing. In that town, where I saw a dolphin tube float down the river one winter, or which I left, thinking I saw a dolphin tube floating down the river, I dated a French woman for several months, and we would drive to nearby castles in her little car, and take walks in the woods, or hold each other in the woods, smelling the grass and talking, or taking a nap. One day, awake from one of those naps in the woods, I saw her, still in her sleep, and suddenly felt as if my life were happening out of my hands, which felt pleasant beyond description, which made me smile, and she, awake now, asked me the why I was smiling. When I didn’t tell her the reason, she didn’t pry, and I said it would be nice if we could come like this more often and take naps, and we did so several more times. And I would go see her on the bicycle she lent me, and the handlebars of the old bicycle were slightly turned to the left, so in order to go in a straight line, I had to mentally turn them slightly to the right, and do so in reality. Anyway, one day, I found that the bicycle, which I’d placed in a park, was gone. Someone had brutally severed the chain and taken the bicycle. We didn’t go around looking for the lost bicycle, but for several days after that whenever we sat in cafes we would stare fixedly at passing bicycles, and she said that her bicycle was easily recognizable. I felt as if she were saying that she could recognize her own baby, so I felt it imperative that we find the bicycle. But finding a lost bicycle was harder than finding a lost baby, and we never did find the bicycle. And we seriously discussed stealing someone’s bicycle, but we didn’t actually commit theft. Still, we kept our eyes on bicycles when we took walks, and all the bicycles were brutally chained up. I don’t remember much else about her, but I do remember that thanks to her I learned French very quickly, and that she made me feel awkward by crying when I left the city. I awkwardly took her hand and tried to respond in a way you should in front of someone crying, but it wasn’t easy. Fortunately, she didn’t seem to notice that I felt awkward, because she was busy crying. With that, I could sum up what happened between us. (It may be wrong to talk about your relationship with someone, short or long, and furthermore, about someone’s life, in such a way, but everything can be summed up in a few sentences.)
In the end, I came out of the hotel, and before leaving Paris, went again, for some reason, to the Eiffel Tower area that I’d vowed never to go near again and sat with my back to the tower on a bench from which the tower could be seen in its entirety, and, seeing the person sitting on the bench next to mine staring off into space, I, too, stared off into the space into which he was staring, but then he suddenly turned away his gaze, as if angry at discovering that someone was looking at something he alone was looking at, something that he alone should look at — I couldn’t understand the reason at all, for the space into which he was staring was an exceedingly blue sky with no clouds at all, and there being no signs of weather change, it seemed that the space, in which there was nothing but the blue sky, wouldn’t change at all no matter how he stared at it, no matter how much he stared at it — and glared at me, which made me realize that space, which I thought was for everyone, and something at which anyone could look at any time, wasn’t something at which you could look thoughtlessly at anytime, that there was something in space that people shouldn’t look at together. No, I think it was more because I had a hangover and was quite red in the face. But looking with such disapproval at someone who was red in the face because of a hangover was something that no human should do. I turned my gaze to something else, and saw a black dog. It would be very big when full grown, but it was still small. The dog didn’t yet possess the dignity that dogs of that breed have when full grown. In a little while a white dog — it was a kind that doesn’t grow to be very big, and was small, although it was already an adult dog — appeared, and the two felt each other out for a moment, then sniffed at each other and barked. The dogs seemed to be communicating perfectly with each other. Then in a moment, the white dog went off somewhere else, and the black dog, left alone, went to a flowerbed nearby and ran around among the flowers playfully, wantonly. The dog, like all dogs, demonstrated that dogs want to run around every chance they get, and never miss an opportunity to do so. At that moment it suddenly occurred to me that one night, while spending the night with the woman I’d broken up with, I might have strangled her at one point when it seemed as if I would pass out. I was drunk, and extremely tired, and it seemed that I unwittingly strangled her with my hands, then came to myself when it looked as if she had stopped breathing and let go, and woke her up by slapping her cheeks several times. But it wasn’t clear if such a thing had actually happened.
In the flowerbed, there were roses and other pretty flowers of various colors, and I casually hoped in secret that the dog would trample on the flowers even while being pricked by their thorns, as if it couldn’t help itself, and thoroughly ruin the flowerbed. But the dog was careful in its own way not to ruin the flowers, although it didn’t look as if it would be, and wasn’t injured by the thorns hidden by the trees, either.