Recitation Read online

  As there was no living room, the three of them had to squeeze around the tiny kitchen table. The healer fetched a wooden stool from his room. Luckily there were hardboiled eggs in addition to the day-old bread rolls, plus butter and jam. Kyung-hee made the coffee. She even rummaged around in the drawer to find the Christmas napkins that had been stained by an old knife which a previous tenant, who’d been evicted, had wrapped in them after using. There was no dish or spoon for the eggs, so they settled on holding them in their hands to eat them. The healer let Kyung-hee have the sole plate, putting his own bread on a napkin, and gave Mr. Nobody the wooden chopping board. Kyung-hee brought a bottle of honey from her room. As they each cut their bread and spread it with jam and butter they were careful not to make any large or sudden movements, so they wouldn’t end up jabbing each other with their elbows. It wasn’t yet eight o’clock. The only person who used the kitchen to eat a proper breakfast at such an early hour was the healer, who maintained regular hours at the school and library. Kyung-hee solved the problem by eating the morning meal in her room, and Eun-hwan always slept in late. Mr. Nobody added a dash of milk to his coffee, and a good helping of sugar. Kyung-hee gestured towards Mr. Nobody.

  “This is my friend,” she explained to the healer, somewhat belatedly. “He arrived in Berlin last night.” Hurriedly adding, “And he’s leaving Berlin tomorrow.”

  “I heard that you might be coming,” the healer said, politely encouraging Mr. Nobody to have some more coffee. “You probably won’t be used to having breakfast so early in the morning. City dwellers seem to get up later and later these days.”

  “I’m not a born-and-bred city dweller,” Mr. Nobody responded, “and I’ve always been an early riser. If I was in my hometown, I would already have finished breakfast and be taking a walk around the hill in front of my house. But for someone as young as yourself to be getting up early every day, you must be an exception to the rule.”

  “It’s because I have to go to the library, of course, but even if that wasn’t the case the morning is still my favourite part of the day. When the sun comes up and I feel its light on me, I notice a marked increase in my energy.” Narrowing his small eyes even further, the healer peered at the kitchen window, where the sunlight was just beginning to come in. He turned abruptly back to Mr. Nobody and asked, stiffly, “But perhaps you are a Christian?”

  Mr. Nobody replied that he wasn’t. At that, the healer laughed out loud, loud enough for it to seem somewhat inane. “Then the three of us are non-Christian barbarians living in an empire of Christian culture, ha ha ha!”

  Kyung-hee drained her coffee and cut off the healer’s laughter by stating that she was not ‘living’ there.

  Mr. Nobody, too, solemnly countered that he was only a traveller, putting up in Berlin for a couple of days.

  “Well, if you look at it like that, then it’s the same for me. I’m not a permanent resident either. On all official documents I’m simply listed as a foreign national studying here temporarily. All the same, I’ve been here for some years now. But the crux of what I was trying to say is that it’s not an issue of whether you’re a long-term resident… what I’ve felt since coming here is that the people in this place waste an inordinate amount of time debating whether or not a certain address counts as a hometown. Indeed, it’s a characteristic shared by everyone who is conscious of their immigrant status. This naïve, inflated sense of having lost one’s hometown. But really there’s no such thing, huh, what is it about this ‘hometown’!”

  In that case, Kyung-hee asked, what was it that he had originally wanted to discuss. And the healer answered that he had wanted to talk about the sun. “In ancient Egyptian myths, the sun is described as male, the opposite gender of the German word, and the sky as female. Because, you see, the sun is what moves, moving into and back out of the body of the sky, which remains stationary. The rosy morning sunlight symbolises a being which is born anew every day. The night herds us into the realm of dreams, burning out life’s vitality. Throughout the night, the spirits of the dead seduce people in an array of constantly shifting forms, flitting from a small bird to a young girl, a peculiar dwarf to a butterfly with the head of a woman, making them claw the air in the flames of fleeting love. According to how the Egyptian myths have it, these are the shadow-apparitions of various dizzying objects arising out of the phenomenal world, which the sun god ‘Ra’ sees while he travels in a coracle along the river of the underworld. In the evening, the female sky god ‘Nut’ swallows the sun. This swallowing is a receiving into the fleshly body. And so the sun spends the night travelling through Nut’s body, just the same as he does during the hours of the day. Nut bends her long, elegant body over the earth in a soft curve. So that each of her four beautiful limbs touch the earth, you see, indicating the four cardinal directions. In ancient Egyptian murals, the female god Nut is depicted with her body bending over the ground like this. And in some paintings the blazing sun is drawn shooting towards the stooping Nut’s abdomen like a burning arrow. When the next morning comes, the sun, having spent the right rowing a boat along the river of the underworld, leaves Nut’s warm, moist stomach, which he had spent the night churning with his oar, and slips out through her genitals, which form the gap between the earth and sky. Heralded by the brilliant, flushed lustre of an incomparably lovely satisfaction. And in the evening he seeks out her genitals once again and burrows back in, like a cub that misses its mother’s teat. Looking at it this way, don’t you think that the sun’s rising every day is a cosmic relationship rendered as a natural phenomenon?”

  “And so it happens that Nut gobbles up her own offspring,” Kyung-hee put in, doubting even as she spoke whether this was an appropriate response. “That is, she swallows something that’s come out of her own body.”

  “Every time I encounter that myth it makes a deep impression on me, this unending vision of the universe as one in which the heavens and the underworld, birth and death, appear as separate things only in our eyes, whereas they are all ultimately flowing past as a single, interrelated whole, not as opposites but as each other’s end and beginning.” Mr. Nobody looked as though he had given this much deliberation.

  “Those might not be the only things to form a whole, you know.” As he had a mouth full of bread, the healer’s words were somewhat unclear. “Given that the sun has intercourse with the body of the mother, what this amounts to is that the sun can be thought of as both its own father and its own offspring. A relationship in which it becomes, at one and the same time, ancestor and future. We can say that we are born from a gushing fountain over and over in an endless repetition, remaining all the while on the feedback loop of eternal life. The moment I apprehend the truth of this, my soul trembles as though struck by lightning. Because what it means is that though the individual is small and nameless, each of us is walking endlessly on, leaving footprints in the sand of eternity. I like the mornings. The spectacle of the sun edging its way over the border drawn by the horizon, blazing upwards through the clear sky, never fails to move me deeply. When morning comes, you see, and I stand alone in that light, all the various phenomena that have caused me pain and suffering the previous night crumble into nothingness. It is a time when the falsely beautiful bodies that had tormented us are extinguished. Bodies of seduction lose their mysterious pull and return to being nothing more than phantoms, nothing more than soulless shells. Extinction is their inevitable fate. Their fundamental essence is echoless death, no more than that.” The healer’s facial muscles quivered, his expression one of cold, wicked revenge. “Last night, amid the whirl of dizzying coquetry which those ashen demons always perform, I saw a marvellous sight: the towering tree of life, and the tree’s bride. The bride was pressed up against the tree, with only a white veil to cover her naked body, while new leaves and branches were constantly sprouting from the trunk. Its fruits must have been incredibly heavy; the branches were so bent under the weight that they were almost touching the roots. But do you know what they loo
ked like, these ‘fruits’? Pitch-black mouths, caves yawning wide, lumps of red-black mud ploughed up like filthy wounds, deep pools black with mire…” As the healer carried on with his tale, his vaguely intoxicated expression suggested that he had become so carried away in recounting his memories that he had almost forgotten the existence of Kyung-hee and Mr. Nobody. “And then, as soon as I went up to the tree, right there in the middle of the trunk was the face of an old man, so old he looked to be two hundred years at least! Before I had time to recognise that face, in fact almost as soon as I caught sight of it, the bride who had been pressing herself up against the tree turned her head sharply in my direction; only then was I able to recognise that grotesquely contorted woman. Shockingly, the two of them were my parents, the flesh-and-blood bodies of my living mother and father. They were open-mouthed and shrieking. Yes, and they were so intent on this that they seemed to have no interest whatsoever in their surroundings, I might as well not have been there. They were groaning amid their gruesome shrieks, the sweat was streaming off them, a disgusting sweet stink rolling off their armpits and groins, they were tangled together in one hideously drooping lump of laughing flesh, their fingers and tongues gouging each of the other’s orifices, slurping greedily at the other’s secretions, and on top of all that the white fabric which I had initially taken for a veil was in fact a wad of bandages stained with dirty blood, sticking out of my mother’s crotch. Oh, I spent the whole night tortured by their screams, unable to tear my gaze from their animal writhing. There truly is no other hell! Now surely you can understand why I offer up such grateful praise to the fresh morning sun!”

  Kyung-hee burst out laughing around a mouthful of bread. This is really too awkward a topic for the breakfast table, she might have rebuked him with a few words along those lines, but chose instead to let the healer carry on with everything he wanted to say, let him enjoy his revenge to the full. After all, where was she going to find a room like this in Berlin for two hundred euros? And, what was more, a room which didn’t require an estate agent’s fee or a deposit? By this point, Mr. Nobody seemed equally well aware of what the healer was trying to do, but didn’t seem overly put out. Instead, and assuming a cheery voice, he said, “In that case, what you witnessed in your dream was the very moment when you yourself were materially formed! ‘The moment you came into the world’ in the true sense of the words, or ‘the moment the world came to you’!” and roared with laughter.

  The night before, Kyung-hee had crawled up a ladder. The ladder, formed from a withered tree, resembled Mr. Nobody’s body. The white ladder was a pillar supporting the house and the world. With the wind blowing around her, Kyung-hee shouted several times, “You are my tree, my ancestor tree.” A blanket which had escaped from the window of someone’s house flew past right in front of them, undulating along its entire length. You are my house. My lovely person, my person made of earth. Unable to sleep, Eun-hwan had padded across the hallway floorboards and knocked on Kyung-hee’s door, but neither she nor Mr. Nobody had paid this any mind. Riding on Kyung-hee’s head, Mr. Nobody sang a song. Kyung-hee couldn’t understand the song, as it was in Mr. Nobody’s mother tongue. His song had a majestic, resonant melody, but contained more martial tragedy than pathos, and seemed to be ringing out especially in the cellar and the earth, disturbing the slumbering spirits of the dead. Mr. Nobody explained that it was a song about fireworks. Supporting the ceiling with both hands, Kyung-hee laughed. Eventually, she shouted out that she was touching the sky. “Look, your firework song has lifted me up to the sky! I see differently from before, hear differently from before, feel differently from before. Right here, this is space-time as it was before the Big Bang, that’s how old we are. We are the world’s parents.”

  By the end they were pounding the table and laughing uproariously. Breadcrumbs and eggshells bounced up off the plate, the knife clattered. Even the healer eventually burst out laughing, with a mouth full of egg. “Be careful of red cars,” the healer said, giving Kyung-hee a gentle dig in the side, the expression on his face suggesting that he was being particularly generous with his advice. “I can’t tell you anything concrete about your future, but what I can tell you is to be careful of red cars, and that if you carry on dressing entirely in black your spirit’s vital energy will suffer.” Kyung-hee replied, “I’m a traveller. Whatever belongings I take with me have to fit into a single bag, so all I have in the way of clothes are a black coat, a pair of black trousers, a black skirt, and a blouse. For me, this place is a point on a journey. I’m not able to be fastidious about the colour of my clothes. Also, my friend will be staying here tonight too. You don’t mind, right?”

  “A single night is no problem,” the healer replied straightforwardly, as though there were no issue whatsoever, having eventually decided to give in. And he said to Mr. Nobody, “You’re probably in pain after your long journey; I know how to give a quick back massage, so if you’d like I could give you one this evening.” Mr. Nobody really did have a sore back. Not only because he’d spent many hours scrunched into the economy seat of an aeroplane, but because, as he explained, he’d had a chronic affliction for some years now, and neither doctors nor drugs could ease the pain; in fact, the only thing that helped was the dexterous hands of a Thai masseuse. “I’d be grateful for that,” Mr. Nobody said courteously. “Only, I haven’t washed myself with water for the past three years; I suppose you wouldn’t mind that.” The healer and Kyung-hee looked at each other in surprise. The healer, who showered twice a day, sniggered, and even Mr. Nobody laughed a little. “All the same, I take a kind of wind bath I’ve devised myself, using the air and a wet towel. Early in the mornings, at the rising of the sun who is both son and father.”

  I was intending to write my memoirs, Mr. Nobody said. I’ve had the manuscript nearly complete for many years now. But it turned out that it couldn’t be published. Not yet, at least. There was no lengthy explanation for this; it was simply because he was afraid that what he’d written might unintentionally wound certain people, or that they might feel that he hadn’t fully taken their feelings into account, which, again, was not what he intended. So he put the manuscript in his bag. He went travelling.

  He and Kyung-hee were lying face down on the two beds in her room. Kyung-hee had no chronic pain and no particular desire for a back massage, but was there to keep Mr. Nobody, or else the healer, company. Having warmed up some kind of yellow oil, the healer now used circular motions of his hands to apply this to Mr. Nobody’s back and the backs of his arms. According to the healer, the oil came from desert marmots. The healer’s hands were white and plump. Since she had removed her outer clothing, baring her skin, Kyung-hee felt somewhat chilly. When the healer asked Mr. Nobody whether his back was starting to feel a little better, Mr. Nobody replied with a brief ‘mm’, his eyes and mouth remaining closed. The healer pummelled Mr. Nobody’s back with the backs of his hands, so vigorously that Kyung-hee felt droplets of oil splash her face. The healer seemed in high spirits. His stocky frame was gathering speed, switching direction several times as he darted around the bed on which Mr. Nobody was lying. After squeezing the oil onto the palms of his hands and spreading it evenly over Mr. Nobody’s back—the healer’s arms were too short to manage this without switching mid-way to the other side of the bed—he swept his hands in soft strokes first upwards and then downwards, pressing down firmly on the spine, the armpits, and elbows, etc. Lacing his fingers together, he pressed down onto the individual vertebra one by one, hard. He performed acupressure on Mr. Nobody’s shoulder muscles by manipulating them with one finger at a time. In all of this, the healer seemed to get a kick out of having control over another’s body—the bodies of others being generally larger and stronger than his own, generally more beautiful—and out of governing another’s pain. In spite of the chill, the healer was so engrossed in the massage that the sweat was thick on his forehead. And while he was doing this, he asked Mr. Nobody why he hadn’t been able to publish the manuscript.


  “As to that, various explanations exist, but the most overriding one is that my wife was opposed to it,” Mr. Nobody answered. “You see, there were some things in the manuscript that she wasn’t happy with.”

  “But do you mean that every time you, who call yourself a writer, publish something, it has to meet with your wife’s approval first?”

  “No, not that, but memoirs are very different from fiction. Individuals appear there under their real names, and all words and actions are given as statements of fact, even those which we wish we could forget had ever happened.”

  “But, and this is purely my own opinion, it’s not as though there’s no way around it. Couldn’t you choose to state things in more of a roundabout way? Not actually lying, of course; just, for example, not directly mentioning whatever source of discomfort might happen to exist between the two of you. Aren’t there times when that kind of evasion is life’s correct response?”

  “At first I thought like that too. I mean, it seems entirely self-evident. And I actually did give it a go. But the issue was that precisely that method of unspeaking silence, those vague explanations which, under the guise of considering my wife’s feelings, I’d made deliberately blurry, ended up hurting her feelings irrevocably. As for explanations where I left something out, it later became clear that here there was the strong possibility of provoking a feeling of discontent, of making not only my wife but everyone who appeared in connection with the matter suspect that I had been somehow lax in my dealings with them, had treated my moral obligations towards them as something trivial. I mean, for the most part these were my friends or family, people who were important to me or with whom I was close. My wife was especially hurt, more deeply than anyone else. She still hasn’t recovered even now. She felt that I’d made her look like an idiot, you see. Because I’d deliberately held back from mentioning things which might as well be public knowledge. But she would have been angry anyway, even if I’d done exactly the opposite. Granted, we hadn’t been living together for all that long when this happened, but still, she was my wife, that much was clear. I received a letter from a lawyer. The upshot being that if I had the book published, I would be sued. But all that was years ago. Three years ago, now.”