Recitation Read online

  At that, Kyung-hee confessed that she could never distinguish precisely between one type of hawk and another; the very fact of having made such a response seemed to stake a claim for its having at least some degree of significance, but in fact it was made almost without thinking, and Kyung-hee couldn’t help but feel that it was somewhat untimely in nature. Or else, perhaps it was timely enough as a confession, but the vocabulary used to construct it was altogether wrong. Still, Kyung-hee felt duty bound to carry it to a conclusion now that she’d begun, and so carried on speaking. A confession on the subject of natural history, specifically her inability to tell the difference between goshawks and black kites, peregrine falcons and the general kind of hawks, mountain eagles and sparrowhawks, and the difficulties she had in forming a clear picture of a ‘kestrel’ or ‘buzzard’, despite the fact that these names appeared in books as frequently as our everyday encounters with sparrows and pigeons. Saying that also, just briefly, although she wasn’t religious, when she thought about death its inevitability was sufficient to provoke a sense of respect in her, and that she felt as though that mysterious, unknowable death had already triumphed over each of us long ago, something that we ourselves were the only ones unable to grasp. And that she therefore thought of life and love, of death, which are more commonplace than miraculous, as they appear in The End of the Affair, as the avatars of a sincere god.

  The clothes that the teacher couple had stripped off and left on the sand, including the husband’s hat, were slowly losing their animation. They still had shape and colour, but unless you examined them closely their original character could no longer be discerned, they had become nothing but anonymous flotsam. The couple had been wild in their younger days, and it was only a few years ago that the wife had danced on the table at the newspaper company’s party, and the man had been a long-haired liberal, the male guest who had been Kyung-hee’s German teacher insisted once more. Or had that been a story about the man himself, or even about Kyung-hee? The man kept talking. About how, when he was young and living in the Middle East, he lost his way for two hours by the Mediterranean, had his watch stolen by a Jordanian soldier, was treated to a glass of liquor by someone referred to as ‘Captain’, and about how, on the way back to his home in Europe, he bought two yellow fur hats, one for each of his women. But as soon as the woman who’d had the right to open his bag first discovered the two hats, she went into the other room and cried, loudly and pitifully, and so there was nothing else for it but to say that he’d bought both of them for her. Kyung-hee recalled once again the anonymous lovers trapped in the shadow of whirling time.

  All their lives, they could never revive their former relationship. When, after having crossed countless mountains and rivers, I end up arriving at somewhere beyond temporal and geographic limits, perhaps the fact that I am my self of right now, that my thoughts are bounded by my own consciousness, can, amid the totality of all the light that this universe has ever produced or has yet to, no longer be unique and exclusive, Kyung-hee thought to herself once again. In that case, what is the nature of this desire, which persists though I know it to be futile? The desire to be myself, this pitiful desire to want what this so-called self wants. Like a personality which endures eternally through repeatedly changing its form, like another sky situated at the same time both above and below the clouds. Yes, that was a goshawk flying through the air. And she opened her mouth and inadvertently let slip the thought that had flashed into her mind. “In that case, are we goshawks tumbling from this life to the next, never to meet again in the same form as before?”

  3. I will long for you

  The healer removed his shoes by the front door and ushered Kyung-hee inside. The house’s interior, flooded with sunlight, had no scent of burning incense, no stone statue of Buddha, no eagle’s head, no eastern-style silk cloth patterned with gold leaf, or anything of the kind. Everything was radically spartan, redolent of twenty-first century proletarianism, with every available surface covered in plain white square tiles. The door to the kitchen stood open, letting out the strong aroma of frying sausages. The healer was a plump man who only came up to Kyung-hee’s shoulders, his hair as black as squid ink. He was the very first person to respond to Kyung-hee’s ad seeking a room in Berlin for a stay of several months, which was why she was here now. No conditions at all, the healer had said, all I need is two hundred euros per month. There’s no deposit, and no additional charges. Your room is furnished, including a desk and a bed, there’s central heating, and you can also use the kitchen. Quilt and blanket goes without saying. But there’s no internet or washing machine. You can access the internet at the library, and I’ll let you know where the local launderette is. There’s a radio, and a coffee maker. You can even borrow the television in my room, if you so desire. Only during the week, that is, I’ll be using it myself at the weekends. But the bathroom and kitchen have to be cleaned every day, and that falls upon the residents. You have to wash up as soon as you’re done cooking; there’s only one frying pan, one plate, one saucepan and bowl, so no one else will be able to eat otherwise. All the same, you won’t lack for anything. There will be three of us living here, but since there are four beds, in cases where, by some chance, there happens to be an unexpected visitor, you can use the spare bed. When I bought the beds they were being sold as a bundle, on special offer, you see.

  “In that case, would it be okay if a friend came to stay?” Kyung-hee asked cautiously, making an effort not to give the impression of cutting the healer off mid-conversation. He didn’t answer straight away. He examined Kyung-hee doubtfully, a deep furrow creasing his forehead. “If this visitor needed to use the shower every morning, well, I’m sure you can see that that wouldn’t exactly be ideal.” This reply was made in the manner of someone at a loss for what else to say, though the hint of dissatisfaction was ever-present in his voice. Even so, his face was soundlessly insisting, the ideal guest would be the one who never actually arrived.

  As the healer always left the door to his room wide open, Kyung-hee was able to see that, alongside a passage in Tibetan taken from a sacred text—not that she’d been able to recognise the alphabet, but this was something he’d explained to her at a later date—he had on his wall a sheet of white paper on which ‘homo spiritus’ had been written using brush and ink. His official profession was that of healer-cum-philosopher, and he spent every weekday at the library studying Nietzsche, only returning home late at night. There was one other lodger in the healer’s house. This was an engineering student, a tall young man named Eun-hwan; Eun-hwan had fallen out with the healer, his landlord, but was apparently planning to move to another city soon anyway, as he had to change schools. The sunlight streamed in through the bright window under which Kyung-hee was sitting. Her obtaining a room in the healer’s house had been all because of a certain man, a man who, for the sake of convenience more than anything else, she had known as ‘Mr. Nobody’—no one had been able to tell her his original name, since there was no one who could remember it exactly, or remember how to pronounce it. Kyung-hee had needed a Berlin address, somewhere she would be able to receive a letter from Mr. Nobody. Though the two of them had met for the first time at a restaurant in Europe, both in the capacity of travellers, they had in fact already been aware of each other’s existence.

  They had sat at opposite sides of the large table, like perfect strangers. The gathering had been arranged for some people from Mr. Nobody’s hometown—thinking about it, they had all immigrated in the distant past—and Kyung-hee had been invited with her friend Maria. Maria was one of Mr. Nobody’s readers, who had gone into raptures over his book. Mr. Nobody’s face was so utterly devoid of expression it was as though he was wearing a flat mask. But Kyung-hee knew that he was aware of her, and in a slightly more particular way than ordinary people ‘knew’ her. And so it wasn’t that Mr. Nobody was a stranger to Kyung-hee. With his body half turned away, Mr. Nobody asked Kyung-hee where she lived. “In Berlin,” she answered casually, not giv
ing it any particular thought. That wasn’t even half true. At the time, it hadn’t been long since Kyung-hee had begun that travelling which consisted of leaving all familiar objects and streets behind, and she had chosen to extend her stay a little even after a television crew who had come to Berlin to produce a radio play had finished filming and gone home, staying behind on her own. And she had been planning to return to Seoul in the near future, which had at that point become the central transfer station of her travels.

  “Around Berlin Templehof airport, you know.” At that, Mr. Nobody had blurted out, “What a lucky coincidence! I stay in Berlin at least one month a year; perhaps I’ll be able to get in touch with you when I’m next here, if that’s possible. If I knew the address, I’d be able to drop you a postcard.” And so Kyung-hee promised to send Mr. Nobody an email with her Berlin address. When they went outside the restaurant to get a taxi, a soldier in dappled camouflage gear, on his way home, made Mr. Nobody’s body disappear obliquely from Kyung-hee’s field of vision. The external world flitting darkly past. As soon as they stepped outside, they choked on the smell of the road and invisible air which came from the shoes of the travellers that filled the street. When Kyung-hee, who had been walking along the pavement, happened to move close enough to the road for his speech to be audible, Mr. Nobody repeated the phrase “your Berlin address,” though without looking at Kyung-hee. From that day on, the word ‘Berlin’ was never absent from her mind.

  “I’m travelling at the moment,” Kyung-hee explained her position to the healer. “And I need an address in Berlin where I can receive post. I’m planning to be here for a while, you see. It just happened to turn out that way, it looks like I’ll be without work for a while. And so I’ve been left with this stretch of free time.”

  “Getting work, the need to get work, the need to be occupied with work, being engaged in work, is a reality which weighs heavily on us all.” The healer accompanied his answer with a sigh. He and Kyung-hee were sitting facing each other at the kitchen table, each with a mug of tea in front of them. “After all, though this business of ‘work’ certainly has various shades of meaning, the most definitive of its attributes is that it prevents us from travelling. I’m not talking about the couple of weeks here and there that you spend on a business trip or in a hotel. I’m talking about wandering in the true sense of the word. Crops grab hold of you by the ankles. After planting the seeds you have to tend the patch constantly until the grain ripens, and by the time the harvest is over and you’ve piled up the grain in the warehouse, winter’s gusting snowstorms are already on the horizon. And then what about livestock? You’re responsible for giving them food and water, every single day without fail. My father was a farmer, so I’m only too aware of what that kind of life is like. Even if he’d won the lottery, he couldn’t even have dreamed of a trip to Venice, you know. None of the farmhands would have known the livestock as well as he did, would have looked after them as though they were a part of their own body. It isn’t revolution that liberates farmers, is it, only ageing and senility, which mean death isn’t far away. That’s right, for a farmer ‘work’ and their ‘address’ are one and the same. Work is a kind of ID card that shows how much money they have, and how much freedom. And so for my father, anything surplus to his needs, a luxury along the lines of ‘my Berlin address’, was impossible. There was a period in my life, too, when I used to dream of filling my days with nothing but endless travel. Of wandering from place to place, that is, getting by on whatever I could earn from my writing. Though now, to almost all adult members of society it will appear self-evident that my dream has been frustrated…” The healer gave another exaggerated sigh. “Even so, if you look at it from a certain angle there are also times when, irrespective of whether or not that dream is realised, at least one thing is clear; that I’m living a completely different life from that of my father. Of course from your point of view, someone who’s always been a city-dweller, the difference probably won’t seem all that great, but…” The healer trailed off and glanced at Kyung-hee. Kyung-hee told the healer that she might be having a visitor, that he might stay in her room for a day or two, and asked cautiously if such a thing would be possible. The healer made no reply other than an unenthusiastic ‘huh.’ Narrowing his eyes peevishly, he seemed to be asking whether Kyung-hee’s visitor was the kind who absolutely had to turn up, but Kyung-hee interpreted his non-response as something that could be taken, if not as a positive sign of assent, then at least not as a flat-out refusal.

  In the daytime, when the healer landlord was out of the house, Eun-hwan talked to Kyung-hee about how he’d ended up falling out with the healer; here, too, the subject of visitors came up. Eun-hwan was dating a Japanese girl called Yoko. Yoko had a fairly nice flat in the city centre, not far from the university, and so they generally spent time at hers. “And I still paid up in full every month, you know, even when I spent more time there than I did here.” But then, around six months ago, there was a fire in Yoko’s building. Not some huge conflagration, just someone chucking burning newspaper into the rubbish chute as a practical joke. The fire engine came, Eun-hwan said, and they put out the fire pretty much straight away, but the building had become filled with smoke in the meantime, and the smell lingered stubbornly afterwards.

  “Even opening the windows was no good. You could still smell burning newspaper, in the corridors, in the lift, in the passage leading to the main door. People chuck all kinds of things into the rubbish chute, you know, even though they know they’re not supposed to. Everything; plastic, toys, rubber gloves, food waste. So the smell was worse than if it had been just newspaper that burned; somehow even nastier because you couldn’t tell what it was. Yoko and I decided there was nothing else for it but to come and stay here, just for a few days, until the smell had completely faded. Even then, I was still a bit uneasy about the whole thing. I was well aware that, for whatever reason, my stingy landlord had an unshakable dislike for the beings known as visitors. Of course, it was to be expected that he wouldn’t welcome the prospect of a stranger encroaching on his privacy, but he himself frequently put up female shamans from Korea, and I never said so much as a word about it. Anyhow, I was practically never here since I’d got together with Yoko, but still paid the rent on time, so I didn’t think that it would be such a huge problem for Yoko to come and stay for a few days. But I didn’t want to give him an excuse to make trouble, so I didn’t actually let him know that Yoko was here, just in case. She brought her stuff over in the daytime, when the landlord was out, and since he never got back until late at night I told Yoko that in the evenings she should just keep to the bedroom, as far as possible. I mean, thinking about it now, it wasn’t as though we absolutely needed to behave like that. You know, it would have been better if I’d kept it all above board from the beginning. Anyhow, I explained to Yoko that she had to sneak around like that because the landlord was a bit of stickler. And then he goes and chooses that day of all days to knock on my door, something he never did ordinarily. The reason being that he had the sudden, irrepressible urge to borrow a mirror. My room’s the only one with a mirror, you see. Well, I opened the door just a crack and tried to pass the mirror through to him, but he still managed to spot Yoko. Yoko lying on the bed. That threw me for a moment, but then I blew up in a rage at having to explain myself over such a private situation. I thought to myself, what on earth is the problem? What’s wrong with someone having their girlfriend over? She hadn’t even been there a single night, and she hadn’t caused either the landlord or the other lodger the slightest inconvenience, just kept herself to herself; was it really on me to start apologising? So I didn’t say anything, just closed the door in his face. Without any explanation, that is. The next morning, just before he went out, he pushed a piece of paper under my door. On the paper he’d written the question, how much longer is that Japanese woman planning to stay here for? The phrase ‘that Japanese woman’ was odd and offensive. Because he’d met Yoko before and I’d introduced t
hem, so he knew her name perfectly well. And she’d never wronged him in any way. On the contrary, she even helped clean the kitchen before she went back to her own flat. And still the landlord has been giving me the cold shoulder ever since! I explained it all to him the next day, right, about the fire in Yoko’s building, how she’d been planning to stay here just until the place stopped reeking of smoke, but had decided now that it would be better to go to a friend’s house, last night being a bit awkward. Well, perhaps my tone was a little brusque. I suppose the landlord might have thought I was quarrelling with him. While he was staring at me, I could see all sorts of suspicions in his eyes; more of what he has to say always leaks out from his eyes than ever passes his lips. Later on, just a while ago in fact, I happened across a Korean magazine in the bathroom. The landlord gets it every month through international mail, a magazine put out by some shamanist organisation. Well, as it happened, this magazine was lying open on the page carrying a column by the landlord. There was even a photo next to the byline, so there can’t be any mistake, no way it was written by a different person with the same name. It was a kind of sketch-piece describing his lifestyle, the lifestyle of a healer-cum-philosopher residing in Berlin. A certain passage caught my eye, in which he claimed that while a minority of wealthy exchange students, born and raised in Gangnam, lead intemperate, disordered lives, cohabiting with foreign women as much as ten years their senior— “in order to satisfy carnal desires”, that was the expression he used—the majority of ‘genuine’ students remain steadfastly devoted to their studies, even in such an uninhibited Western environment. Wealthy and from Gangnam, foreign women as much as ten years their senior; whichever way you look at it, there’s no mistaking that these words were aimed at Yoko and I. Not, of course, that my background is anywhere near as wealthy as he stubbornly persists in believing it to be. But, going by the impression I got from living in his house for over six months, he considered anyone whose circumstances were even slightly better than his own, he who had been a scholarship student at a provincial college and had his studies abroad fully funded by the shamanist organisation, as wealthy. And you know, his describing me as ‘wealthy’ also held the implied criticism that such a state was the precise opposite of a sincere, spiritual life achieved through self-restraint and moderation. Of course, I didn’t put myself out trying to correct these prejudices of his. There was no need for that. But here was this man almost ten years older than me, and studying philosophy, Dionysian Nietzsche no less, allowing such knee-jerk bias to form the basis of his worldview—that always struck me as incredibly bizarre. Perhaps the article he wrote was largely formulaic, not really something worth assigning very much weight to, and I can see that it might have been mainly intended to play up his sincerity and dedication in the eyes of the foundation who was supporting him. Nevertheless, it’s still a fact that the opinions expressed there chime exactly with the impression I’d formed of him while I’ve been living here. That’s undeniable. Still, it didn’t occur to me to try and justify myself in some way. On the contrary, given that I was supposed to be leaving Berlin the following month, and that his loathing of me was already as rigid as his convenient worldview, he wouldn’t have had the slightest interest in any excuses I might have cared to make.”