When she told me that some time ago, when she was sharing a room with a friend, she was cleaning with the door open, and her friend’s robotic vacuum cleaner went out of the house and fell down the stairs, and somehow in the meantime, she found a large black dog standing in the living room, as if the robot cleaner had turned into a dog, I really felt as if we’d become friends. The robot cleaner was stupid and cunningly dodged, as she put it, spots that had to be cleaned, and mostly liked to stay under the bed. And the dog that had suddenly appeared didn’t look shabby, but smelled bad as if it had been roaming the streets and sleeping out in the open, so she had no choice but to turn it out of the house, but it wouldn’t leave willingly, and in the end, she was able to throw the dog out by turning on the robot cleaner, which she brought back inside, and was fortunately not broken. When she told me that she tried to put a cat she had at the time on the robot cleaner in operation and make it ride around on the cleaner, and finally succeeded after numerous attempts, I told her that she should make the cat ride around on the robot cleaner, wearing a little eye patch, and when she told me that she would, I felt an urge to kiss her. She said that the cat came to enjoy riding around on the robot cleaner very much after that.
And several days later, when we met again in the middle of the night and went to the park, and she suddenly jumped up on the trampoline that was there, and kept bouncing up and down on the trampoline as if overflowing with energy, as if she couldn’t control her overflowing energy, she farted unwittingly, without being able to help herself — for she wouldn’t have farted on purpose just to let me hear her fart — and when we heard the sound together, I felt an indescribable fondness for her.
The sound of the fart that had come from a woman who was jumping on a trampoline in a silent park in the middle of the night, a woman who was six feet tall, at that, wasn’t that loud, and so didn’t spread far, far away, cutting through the silence of the park in the middle of the night, but it sounded like the short but clear sound produced by an accidentally disturbed little bell, or the fleeting chirp of a bird, so the incident, which could have been quite embarrassing for both of us, was far from being quite embarrassing for both of us, and became something that made us feel quite merry, before we could even do anything about it. We broke out into merry laughter, and the reason why I felt merry, at least, was because the sound of the fart that had come from a very tall woman I didn’t know very well, and vanished into the air, made me think, as it vanished, that it was like a bubble that rose to the surface of a still pond, through a breath exhaled by a fish, or through some kind of an activity at the bottom of the pond. And watching her go up and down in the air on a trampoline in a silent park in the middle of the night, I felt as if she were the last survivor after the extinction of mankind, and jumping on a trampoline seemed just the thing to do for the last survivor after the extinction of mankind. And I thought that if mankind ended up going to a planet other than the moon, on which we have already set foot, the first thing we should do is set up a trampoline there and jump on it. In a way, what the astronaut who took the first step on the moon did was also jump, as if on a trampoline, on the moon whose gravity is much lower than that of the earth — the image seemed to be one of someone leaving his own world and landing on another. I felt an urge to sleep with her, the last survivor of the earth who was jumping on the trampoline by herself after mankind had disappeared. And the urge grew when I recalled that once, while having a meal at a restaurant in mist-shrouded St. Mark’s Square, I wondered if there was a trampoline in a park or a playground, with children jumping up and down on it in a thick mist, and thought it would be nice if there were such children.
Physical relations between us seemed a natural thing, only a matter of time, and we both knew that we wanted physical relations, but our relations did not advance into such. For reasons I don’t understand, it seems that I anticipated in my heart a development into a physical relationship that could soon take place, but at the same time, wanted to prevent it in any way I could. And there was a practical reason, too, for I wasn’t well at the time and wasn’t sure if sex was indeed possible. It was almost certain that sex wasn’t possible, and I was sure, almost confident, in that respect, and it could be nice to fail in your attempt to have sex with someone for the first time, making that person fail as well, and to do something unforgettable as a man, thus becoming an unforgettable man to that person.
I went to her house that day, but all we did was sit by the window and have a drink. She gave me a seashell as a gift, and told me she collected seashells. But there was only a few shells she’d collected, too few to be called a collection. I told her that I collected bones, and suddenly recalled how, when I went to a snow-covered mountain in Nepal, I tried to find some kind of a bone there as well. I collected bones without thinking that I was collecting them, and there were some animal bones of unknown origin in my house, but not many. Still, I thought that I could collect bones, and that perhaps people could leave their children a certain bone in their body when they died, and that it could be a great keepsake. (And I collected sleeping pills — including tranquilizers and antidepressants — which could amount to a lethal doze when taken at once, but I never thought that I would take them at once someday. I collected leftover sleeping pills as a sort of hobby, just as some people collected things such as stamps or trays or knives. Is this true? Perhaps I’m saying something somewhere between the truth, something close to the truth, and something far from the truth. In any case, I collected a good amount of sleeping pills, with which I filled five small transparent glass bottles, each of which could hold about a hundred pills, and put them in a music box and the kitchen cabinet. The sleeping pills in the cabinet look like a kind of seasoning for food, not medicine. One day, I was so bored that, looking at the glass bottles containing sleeping pills of various colors, I thought I could perhaps crush up the pills to the size of sand grains and create a desert scene of mummies lying in sand, after the manner of sand bottles created by Arab artisans, pouring colored desert sand into glass bottles to reproduce desert scenes, such as oases or camels, to relieve the boredom a little, just a little, really, but I didn’t actually do it. But it seemed that doing so would be a kind of little magic, and I was reminded of ancient Arabians, for whom magic was a part of life. A desert scene of mummies lying in sand, made up of grains of sleeping pills that were like sand grains, would enhance the feeling that everything in the scene was in eternal slumber, and be a nice souvenir of my sleeplessness. And I think that one day, I could put a sleeping pill scorpion or palm tree, or fish or dolphin, in a small glass bottle, although it wouldn’t be an easy task.) I told her how I used to carry around in my pocket something that looked like a boar canine, which I picked up in a mountain somewhere, and left it in the seat pocket in front of me on a train when I got off. She said that there were a lot of boars living in the forests of Berlin, and that you could see a fox from time to time if you were lucky. I said that if I had a chance, I’d like to go to a forest in Berlin with her to see a fox, but I never got to see a fox in a forest in Berlin. We didn’t go to a forest in Berlin together to see a fox, and we didn’t meet again, either.