Recitation Read online

  Kyung-hee described the event she’d attended the previous evening to the man who’d been her German teacher. The event had taken place at a ‘theatre’ which was in fact a small reconstructed fortress attached to a garden; as the ‘theatre’ designated as such had been situated in the very heart of a wooded park, after getting off at the subway station, the hour already late, Kyung-hee had had to walk for a while along a gloomy, narrow trail through the woods, disturbed only by the hooting of owls and the susurration of the wind. But, arriving eventually in front of the ‘theatre’, she walked around the fortress and discovered a long line of people queuing for tickets, stretching all the way up to the moat; people who, despite the fact that the ticket office had a clearly visible sign stating that they’d already sold out, hadn’t given up hope of there being some returns, and were queuing blank-faced, their thin blouses buttoned up to the throat, their leather handbags heavy in their hands. All the women, with their scrawny, wrinkled necks, stood facing the same direction, their skin as sharp as though it would crumble into powder, and their white hair flying in all directions, more delicate than silk thread and lighter than feathers, shining in the evening dew. The oily black waters of the moat under their feet glimmered like huge dark pupils. Kyung-hee said that, brushing past them on her way into the theatre, these women had stared down at her feet, and for some unidentified reason their eyes were wet with grey tears, and their metal-encrusted handbags weighed down their withered arms, their earrings studded with purple garnets, and their chain necklaces, the pamphlets of stiff top-quality paper they clutched in their hands, and the varicose veins on their legs were all tugging their weak veins still more strongly down, down.

  And when Kyung-hee went in, to her surprise she found a piece of paper with her name written on it affixed to one of the chairs in the very front row. A Belgian literature professor sat in the seat next to her, and next to him there were four young women all in black formal dress. The four blonde women all seemed to be dressed similarly and had similar hairstyles, so much so that there was nothing to distinguish between them, and their gazes, too, were all fixed in the same direction, staring straight at the stage. The women’s abundant coiffures and unflinching straight-ahead stares recalled the golden retrievers, almost making Kyung-hee want to pet them. Shortly after Kyung-hee had taken her seat, the writer who was the protagonist of the day walked up to the stage. He was an elderly man, but powerfully built; he had a large grey cloak on over his brightly coloured coat. Everybody craned their necks to get a look at him, and each time he took a step their heads shifted in response, like hundreds of clams being swept along by the tide. He hadn’t even opened his mouth to speak, in fact, he hadn’t even got up on stage, yet already he was displaying a formidable power of command, as though the whole audience was under his spell.

  After the event was over, the Belgian professor bought Kyung-hee a glass of soda water. As the four women in black formal dress, Kyung-hee, and the Belgian professor had all been invited to the writer’s post-performance dinner, while waiting for a taxi in the theatre hall to take them to the restaurant they talked of this and that, and it transpired that the male guest who’d come to see the teacher and her husband that day was an acquaintance of the professor. “What a strange coincidence, I saw him at another event just two days ago, we even said hello to each other!” the Belgian professor exclaimed happily. With her glass of soda water in her hand, Kyung-hee felt the urge to tell the literature professor all about the incredibly many chance events that had come about during the course of her life, meetings and crossed paths that had hinted at something which could only then be verified after a certain amount of time had gone by. Just then the taxi arrived, and the retriever women cleaved the air like dogs diving into water.

  When they arrived at the restaurant it was close on midnight; but not only were there no empty tables, the corridors and the deck were also filled with people, and as there was no room to wedge yourself inside they had to stand in front of the door, directly in the draft, and wait until a seat became available. Every time a plate-carrying waiter whisked in front of them, enthusiastic at the prospect of getting a tip, the plastic curtain covering the front door fluttered, and with so many people crammed into that narrow space, Kyung-hee said, there hadn’t even been room for to her to squeeze in between the writer’s tie and the retriever women’s black dresses.

  “There’s a book I want to give you; how about you come round to mine for a bit after the meal?” the literature professor suggested to Kyung-hee as they worked their way through the asparagus, and she said she would. After one in the morning, the writer, who had to leave at noon for Beijing—Beijing, encouraged by the fact that it was hosting the Olympics, had become passionate about inviting various foreign writers and scientists—said that he hoped his guests would understand his leaving before them, but that first he wanted to smoke a cigarette. At the time, a law had already been passed banning smoking inside any and all restaurants, but the writer, untroubled by such a trivial regulation, wanted to get out a cigarette and smoke it, and none of the party could do anything to restrain him. But then the head waiter came up to him and said, “This is a no-smoking area, and we’re not able to break the rules even for Nobel Prize winners like you.” Anger contorted the writer’s face; not because he couldn’t smoke, but because he’d never won a Nobel Prize. “This guy must have me confused with Günter Grass,” he grumbled, slowly raising his heavy body from the seat. One of the four women stood up with him; she had a youthful look, indeed, she was very young, perhaps still in her early twenties; she was the writer’s niece, and an editor at a famous publishing house. As the young niece and the other women had sat in close formation around the writer throughout the meal, as though they were his bodyguards, Kyung-hee and the Belgian literature professor had been almost entirely unable to get a direct word with him, and were only able to greet him with glances from the other side of the table. After the writer and his niece disappeared, the three remaining women all turned in unison to face Kyung-hee, asking, so how did you come to know the writer; the question was laced with suspicion regarding her level of intimacy with the latter, which was sufficient for him to have invited her to the meal and sat her at the same table as them. And so as soon as Kyung-hee told them the name of her former German teacher, who’d come to see the teacher and her husband earlier that same day, and explained that, as something sudden had come up which prevented him from attending the event, she’d ended up coming along in his stead, the retriever women instantly lost all interest in Kyung-hee and their heads swivelled back.

  Very deep into the night, Kyung-hee and the literature professor were taking a taxi home. Kyung-hee had to go to the teacher couple’s flat where she was staying via the professor’s guesthouse. “I’ll just wait in the taxi,” she said, “then you can go and fetch the book for me.” The literature professor wavered a little at this talk of waiting in the taxi, saying that first he would have to go and get the key from the owner of the guesthouse, and then go to the building across the road, where the guestrooms were. So it might take quite a while, and how about they just leave the taxi and go to his room together. In that case I’ll probably be able to treat you to a cup of tea. But Kyung-hee shook her head and said, “I’m grateful for the offer, but it seems easier if I just wait in the taxi. At least, easier than leaving this taxi and then having to flag down another one in this quiet neighbourhood, or else phone for one.” The taxi driver parked in front of the literature professor’s guesthouse, the professor got out of the car, rang the bell of the owner’s house, and went inside. The literature professor seemed to have given Kyung-hee some reasonable explanation, something about how the guesthouse owner still hadn’t gone to bed at this late hour, or how guests didn’t keep the keys themselves, but Kyung-hee hadn’t really been able to understand what he was saying. After obtaining the key, the literature professor hurried over to the building on the opposite side of the street, tottering slightly; his movements, which se
emed somehow awkward and clumsy, showed that he wasn’t used to the speed a situation like this demanded.

  The professor returned after around five minutes with the book in his hand, and passed it to Kyung-hee through the taxi window. It was a collection of Max Frisch’s lectures on literature, Black Square. “This book contains transcripts of two lectures that Max Frisch gave in 1981, in English, related to his own literary theory, at New York University. It was published this year. Are you wondering why the title is Black Square? It isn’t just because the entire cover is painted black. In his lectures, Max Frisch told an anecdote about a western diplomat who visited a St Petersburg art gallery during the Cold War, where he’d been able to see ‘Black Square’ by Malevich, who led the Russian avant-garde in the early twentieth century and who critics called the founder of Suprematism. That painting wasn’t hung in one of those display cabinets designed to keep the general public at a distance, but concealed in a secret warehouse. The diplomat said to the gallery director: ‘I don’t understand why this painting isn’t shown to the public. As you can see, it’s no more than a simple black square. I mean, even if it had been hung with other paintings in the social-realist category, people wouldn’t have been able to guess its meaning. Perhaps they would think it’s simply black wallpaper.’ At that, the director replied: ‘What you say is correct. People wouldn’t be able to understand why a painter might paint a black square, of all things. But even so, the moment they see this painting they would become aware that there are things of value existing in this world other than society and the people. And so this painting can’t be displayed.’ I hope you read this book and also attend the forum on Max Frisch, which will be held next year in Brussels. You see, our hope is that this book will be published in translation in all the civilised countries of the world by 2011, which is Max Frisch’s centenary.” Kyung-hee didn’t actually like Max Frisch all that much, she wasn’t particularly interested in him. But she promised the literature professor that she would read the book. “It’s a real stroke of luck that I met you today,” the literature professor said, sounding deeply grateful. There wouldn’t have been another opportunity for him to give the book to Kyung-hee; he had to take the train back to Belgium in the afternoon of the next day (technically the same day, as it was past midnight). His daughter had given birth to her third child. As he said this, the literature professor grinned broadly, not bothering to hide his obvious delight.

  The teacher couple’s heads bobbed up on the surface of the lake side by side, like two balls. They were swimming skilfully, moving their limbs leisurely; as they pulled further away from the lakeside their figures gradually diminished, so that eventually they looked like two grey nuthatches sliding along the surface of the water. The male guest who had been Kyung-hee’s German teacher had known the couple since he was a boy, but he said that their wild temperament absolutely hadn’t altered with age, in fact if anything they seemed to be growing gradually more feral. Kyung-hee had first come to know the teacher couple only a few days previously, but it suddenly occurred to her that she’d seen a photo of the teacher in her younger days somewhere. Now it came back to her, she remembered that she had also heard a certain anecdote about the wife.

  “A couple of years ago when I was staying in a boarding house in München, I remember chancing upon a photo of the female teacher. One day the proprietress showed me an old album. Among the photos she spread in front of me then, of München in the sixties and seventies, there was a small picture of a young blonde woman, which seemed as though it had been included by mistake. The woman in that photo was an old friend of mine, the proprietress said quickly, we met while I was studying French literature. And our friendship was ruined because she and my ex-husband fell in love. I made it up with my ex afterwards, but things between my friend and I were never the same. I didn’t ask any questions at the time, because I didn’t want to pry into past affairs and stir up painful memories for the proprietress. And so I don’t know the ins and outs. But it’s strange, after I came to the teacher couple’s house, according to what the wife herself told me one morning, a long time ago she had broken with a female friend, a complete rupture; she also said that friend was now living in München. That they’d become friendly while they were studying French together, and that things had turned out the way they had because they’d loved the same man. That’s how it is, the wife’s current appearance is certainly far removed from that of the cute young woman I saw in the photo, but even so, trivial events that seem to me like nothing but chance—you introducing the teacher couple to me as old friends of yours, and the fact that you used to cohabit with the guesthouse proprietress in München without being legally married—end up spontaneously forming a particular pattern and taking on a given form. I don’t spy on the past. But because I have an instinctive preference for stepping unhesitatingly out into a whirlpool of invisible stories which evoke an individual life as one long, unbroken thread, and because for some time now I’ve been aware that such lives are all around me, addressing me in desolate voices—ah, there are times when I regret that I didn’t think of studying a discipline like archaeology or ancient history, then I would be able to clearly make out these whisperings of countless bones and stones—regardless of whether or not my conjectures have any basis in fact, I’m actually growing even closer to this house, this couple, and to the sleep I experience in the chimney room, the dreams I have then, the dream of the ceiling facing the sky. For example, the long, deep sleep of the teacher wife which goes on behind the locked front door.”

  As though it were actually my own, an unfamiliar self from the distant future, Kyung-hee added. And said that it was similar to the intense vertigo she was faced with when travelling around some country villages. “Photographs of unknown faces hang at the threshold. Photographs containing expressions which, while solemn and sincere, cannot conceal their discomfiture. Old photographs like sere leaves. Faces generally guessing that they would soon die. Photographs in which the sitter wears a uniform, like a school uniform or an army uniform from some long-forgotten battlefield. A few years ago when I went for a walking tour along Korea’s southern coast, I encountered such photos and thresholds countless times; when I stood there in silence and peered deeply into them, although admittedly I was apart from them, although on the surface I had lived a life quite unlike theirs, in spite of that, and for no reason I can comprehend, I felt that they were me, that these were photographs of an obscure self that I didn’t know, my own figure that was strange to me, that although it was actually the face not of a past or future ‘I’ but of the ‘I’ of now, it was entirely unrecognisable to me because such a thing is simply a certain kind of eternal reverse image. This explanation of mine is long and tedious, but in fact people can usually express it in one simple phrase, “the reiteration of existence”. Or else, to give a more precise explanation, when the being that is a given person crosses countless mountains and rivers and arrives at a temporal and geographic limit of whatever degree, then at that point those countless mountains are already a single world mountain, and the waters of countless rivers are all flowing as a single world river, and I am therefore inside that mountain and that river; inside the temporal totality of this universe, where millions of stars are simultaneously self-annihilating in a great flash of light, this universe which is dying with a mad frenzy, I felt the fact that, at that time, a certain entity is not me, the fact that I am not that particular entity, the fact that I am the self of precisely now, could no longer be as definitive an explanation of certain phenomena.”

  While Kyung-hee was saying all this, the teacher couple, who had been moving further towards the centre of the lake, creating a calm wake, had become very tiny splotches, and it was as such splotches that they briefly turned back to the shore and waved. An aeroplane flew by overhead. An aeroplane strangely small and close to the ground. It seemed to be not so much flying as staggering through the sky. As though attempting to reconnoiter the holiday-making down on the ground, it was
turning clumsy circles in the air, like a newly-fledged hawk. In a movement describing a question mark. I always think of it when I see a plane, Kyung-hee said. A couple are making love on the roof of a building; a plane passes by overhead, casting a huge shadow over their bodies. While they are looking up at the plane, a dog falls out of the sky. It crashes into the roof, a bloodied wreck. A dog that someone had pushed out of the plane. The couple are also bloodied. The couple who had been making love.

  “It’s a scene from the novel Eyeless in Gaza. Aldous Huxley. A scene that really makes an impression, you know, one you can’t forget. I found that book every bit as interesting as Crime and Punishment. What about you?”

  That was a goshawk in the sky just now, the male guest who had been Kyung-hee’s German teacher said abruptly. “I don’t remember anything apart from the title, which is one of the most memorable of all the book titles I know. As for the content, I’ve forgotten it all, so there’s nothing to say, but perhaps the reason I can’t remember it is because the impression it left was of little importance.” He added, “As for what happened to the couple making love, it didn’t make much of an impression on me at the time but, strangely enough, right now it’s coming back to me. The couple who met during the war are making love; a German army shell drops onto the house. The war is still going on, you see. The man sustains a head injury, collapses and loses consciousness. The female protagonist, thinking he’s dead, automatically offers up a prayer to God, if you bring him back to life I’ll do anything, even if it means never seeing him again. And then, unbelievably, he’s alive again. Rather than being dead, the man had simply fainted. And so, after getting dressed and putting on her hat, and without any explanation whatsoever, the woman simply leaves the man, only making the excuse that she’s remembered something urgent she has to do. It was probably chance, but even so, she’d promised her god that she wouldn’t see the man again if he brought him back to life. But the man knows nothing of this. They spend the rest of their lives living practically next door to each other, never able to return to their previous relationship, and they end up wandering the foggy streets of nighttime London. But that’s The End of the Affair.” And he muttered again, as though to himself, as though seized by something, “it was a goshawk, not a plane.”