by Han Kang
“I’m planning on renting a friend’s studio.” Her face was so utterly devoid of expression, it was impossible for him to guess what was going on inside her mind. “Ah…your sister…” He wished he didn’t have to bring this up, but there seemed to be no way around it; his stammering words seemed to betray him, showing him the situation for what it really was in a flash of painful clarity. “You see…it’s a secret.”
She gave no sign of assent, but none of refusal either. He held his breath and greedily scanned her impassive features, desperate to fathom the answer that she meant this silence to signify.
—
M’s studio was pleasantly warm, thanks to the wide window that allowed the sunlight to stream in. The space was around a hundred p’yong, more like the size of an art gallery than a studio. M’s paintings were hung up in carefully chosen spots, and his painting materials were all arranged in a surprisingly ordered fashion, so much so that he found himself tempted to try them out even though he’d already put together sufficient paints and brushes of his own.
“I was quite surprised when you called me up,” M had said, when he was handing him the keys after making him a cup of tea. M had managed to secure a full-time post at a Seoul university at only thirty-two, the first from their graduating class to do so, and now his face, clothes and attitude all combined to endow him with the dignity of a professor. “If you ever want to borrow the studio again, please just ask. I spend most mornings and afternoons at the school, so it’s usually free then.”
He took down a few of M’s paintings, the ones that were slightly overlapping the edges of the window, thinking as he did so that they were far more conventional than anything he would put his name to. He spread a white sheet over the large rectangle of wooden floor upon which the light fell most strongly, and lay down upon it for a while, checking what she would have in her field of vision and whether the position would feel comfortable enough. The wooden beams spanning the high ceiling, the sky outside the window, the sheet, a layer of softness between his back and the hard floor, which was a little chilly but not unbearably so. He turned over onto his front, where different things caught his eye: M’s pictures, the patch of sunlight carved into the shade of the wooden floor, the soot caked onto the unused brick stove.
He spread out his painting materials, checked the batteries in his PD100 camcorder, set up the studio lighting for a long session of filming, opened his sketchbook, closed it again, put it back in his bag, took off his sweater, rolled up his sleeves, and waited. When it was getting on for three p.m., which was when they’d arranged to meet, he pulled his sweater back on and put on his shoes. He walked briskly to the underground station, breathing in the clean air of the suburbs.
His mobile rang, and he kept walking while he answered the call.
“It’s me.” His wife. “It looks like I’m going to be late finishing today. And the babysitter’s got a flat tire. You’ll have to pick Ji-woo up from the nursery at seven.”
“I can’t,” he answered shortly. “I can do nine at the earliest.” He heard his wife sigh.
“All right. I’ll ask the woman in 709 to look after him until nine.”
They hung up without any unnecessary small talk. That was the kind of relationship they had these days—that of business partners who were careful to excise any superfluity from their dealings, and whose only shared business was their child.
That night a few days ago after he’d gone to see his sister-in-law, he’d reached out in the darkness and pulled his wife to him, without giving himself time to think about what he was doing. Surprised and confused by this apparent show of desire, his wife still had no reason to question that this was what it was. If she’d looked, she would have seen something closer to fear in her husband’s eyes. But it was dark.
“What’s got into you?” He’d put his hand over her mouth then, so he wouldn’t have to hear that nasal voice. He pushed himself toward the image of her, finding it there in his wife’s nose and lips, the child-like curve of her neck, all outlined vaguely in the darkness. With her nipple standing straight and hard in his mouth, he reached down and pulled off her knickers. Every time he wanted to get the image of the small blue petal to open and close, he shut his eyes and tried to block out his wife’s face.
When it was all over, she was crying. He couldn’t tell what these tears meant—pain, pleasure, passion, disgust, or some inscrutable loneliness that she would have been no more able to explain than he would have been to understand. He didn’t know.
I’m scared, she’d muttered, turned away from him. No, it wasn’t that. You’re scaring me. At that point he was already slipping into a death-like sleep, so he couldn’t be sure if those words had really passed his wife’s lips. She might have lain there sobbing for hours in the darkness. He didn’t know.
But the next morning she hadn’t acted any different from usual. On the phone just now, there’d been no trace in her voice of what had happened between them, no particular sense of hostility toward him. It was just that her way of speaking—that almost inhuman patience, those trademark sighs of hers—made him feel incredibly uncomfortable. He walked a little faster, trying to shake that feeling off.
Surprisingly, his sister-in-law was already waiting at the station exit, slumped on the steps as if she’d been there a long time. Wearing a fairly chunky brown sweater over shabby jeans, she seemed to have stepped straight out of another season. He stared at her face, which was shiny with sweat, and ran his eyes over the contours of her body. He stood there for a while without calling out to her, wanting to keep her there in freeze-frame. Passersby flicked uneasy glances toward this man who looked possessed.
—
“Take off your clothes,” he said in a low voice.
She was standing staring blankly at the white poplars outside the window. The afternoon sunlight shone desolate on the white sheet. She didn’t turn around. Thinking she hadn’t heard him, he was on the point of repeating himself when she raised her arms and pulled her sweater up over her head. The white T-shirt she had on underneath came off next, exposing her naked back; she wasn’t wearing a bra. She slipped off her old jeans and revealed her two white buttocks.
He held his breath and examined them. Above were the pair of dimpled hollows commonly called “the angel’s smile.” The birthmark was thumb sized, imprinted on the upper left buttock. How could such a thing still be there after all these years? It didn’t make any sense. Its pale blue-green resembled that of a faint bruise, but it was clearly a Mongolian mark. It called to mind something ancient, something pre-evolutionary, or else perhaps a mark of photosynthesis, and he realized to his surprise that there was nothing at all sexual about it; it was more vegetal than sexual.
Only after some time did he tear his eyes away from the Mongolian mark and consider her naked body in its entirety. Her composure was impressive considering that she wasn’t a professional model, and taking into account the kind of relationship she’d had with her now ex-husband. Suddenly he remembered being told how she’d been found stripped to the waist in front of the hospital fountain, that day when she slit her wrist; that that was what had led to her being put in a closed ward; that her discharge had been delayed because even in the hospital she kept trying to take her clothes off and expose herself to the sunlight.
“Should I sit down?” she asked.
“No, lie on your stomach,” he told her, his voice so low it was barely intelligible. She did as he said. He stood there completely motionless, frowning as he struggled to identify the source of the roiling confusion inside him, which the sight of her prone body had stirred up. “Stay just like that. Give me a minute to set up.”
He fixed the camcorder to the tripod and adjusted the height. Once he’d arranged it so that her prone body filled the frame exactly, he got out his paints, his palette and brushes. He’d decided to film himself painting her.
First he swept up the hair that was falling over her shoulders, and then, starting from the nape of
her neck, he began to paint. Half-open buds, red and orange, bloomed splendidly on her shoulders and back, and slender stems twined down her side. When he reached the hump of her right buttock he painted an orange flower in full bloom, with a thick, vivid yellow pistil protruding from its center. He left the left buttock, the one with the Mongolian mark, undecorated. Instead, he just used a large brush to cover the area around the bluish mark with a wash of light green, fainter than the mark itself, so that the latter stood out like the pale shadow of a flower.
Every time the brush swept over her skin he felt her flesh quiver delicately as if being tickled, and he shuddered. But it wasn’t arousal; rather, it was a feeling that stimulated something deep in his very core, passing through him like a continuous electric shock.
By the time he eventually completed the leaves and long stems, which continued over her right thigh all the way down to her slender ankle, he was completely drenched with sweat.
“All done,” he said. “Just stay like that for a minute more.”
He took the camera off the tripod and began to film her close up. He zoomed in on the details of each flower, and made a long collage of the curve of her neck, her disheveled hair, her two hands resting on the sheet, seeming tense, and the buttock with the Mongolian mark. Once he’d finally captured her whole body on the tape, he switched off the camcorder.
“You can get up now.”
Fairly worn out, he sat down on the sofa in front of the brick stove. She rested her elbows on the floor, raising herself up slowly as though her limbs were stiff and aching.
“Aren’t you cold?” He wiped away his sweat, stood up and spread his sweater over her shoulders. “It wasn’t difficult for you?”
This time she looked at him and laughed. Her laughter was faint but lively, seeming to reject nothing and be surprised by nothing.
Only then did he realize what it was that had shocked him when he’d first seen her lying prone on the sheet. This was the body of a beautiful young woman, conventionally an object of desire, and yet it was a body from which all desire had been eliminated. But this was nothing so crass as carnal desire, not for her—rather, or so it seemed, what she had renounced was the very life that her body represented. The sunlight that came splintering through the wide window, dissolving into grains of sand, and the beauty of that body that, though this was not visible to the eye, was also ceaselessly splintering…the overwhelming inexpressibility of the scene beat against him like a wave breaking on the rocks, alleviating even those terrifyingly unknowable compulsions that had caused him such pain over the past year.
—
She put on her jeans and his sweater, and wrapped her hands around a mug from which the steam was rising. She left her slippers by the door, stepping lightly across the floor in her bare feet.
“It wasn’t cold?” he asked for the second time, and she shook her head. “And it wasn’t difficult?”
“All I did was lie there. And the floor was warm.”
The whole situation was undeniably bizarre, yet she displayed an almost total lack of curiosity, and indeed it seemed that this was what enabled her to maintain her composure no matter what she was faced with. She made no move to investigate the unfamiliar space, and showed none of the emotions that one might expect. It seemed enough for her to just deal with whatever it was that came her way, calmly and without fuss. Or perhaps it was simply that things were happening inside her, terrible things, which no one else could even guess at, and thus it was impossible for her to engage with everyday life at the same time. If so, she would naturally have no energy left, not just for curiosity or interest but indeed for any meaningful response to all the humdrum minutiae that went on on the surface. What suggested to him that this might be the case was that, on occasion, her eyes would seem to reflect a kind of violence that could not simply be dismissed as passivity or idiocy or indifference, and which she would appear to be struggling to suppress. Just then she was staring down at her feet, her hands wrapped around the mug, shoulders hunched like a baby chick trying to get warm. And yet she didn’t look at all pitiful sitting there; instead, it made her appear uncommonly hard and self-contained, so much so that anyone watching would feel uneasy, and want to look away.
He recalled the face of her ex-husband, whom he’d never liked, and whom he no longer had any need to call “brother-in-law.” A dry face, which seemed to value nothing outside of the everyday, nothing he couldn’t touch with his own two hands; the mere thought of those vulgar lips pressed greedily against her body, those lips that had never mouthed anything other than the trite and conventional, filled him with a kind of shame. Did that insensitive oaf know about her Mongolian mark? He couldn’t imagine their naked bodies twined together without its seeming insulting, and defiling, and violent.
She stood up, holding out the empty cup, and so he stood up too. He took the cup and put it down on the table. He then replaced the tape in the camcorder and readjusted the tripod.
“Shall we go again?” She nodded and walked over to the sheet. The sunlight was now a little weaker than before, so he turned on one of the overhead tungsten lights, the one directly over the sheet.
She shed her clothes and lay down again, on her back this time, looking up at the ceiling. The spotlighting made him narrow his eyes as if dazzled, although the upper half of her body was still in shadow. Of course, he’d seen her naked body front-on before, when he’d accidentally disturbed her in her apartment, but the sight of her lying there utterly without resistance, yet armored by the power of her own renunciation, was so intense as to bring tears to his eyes. Her skinny collarbones; her breasts that, because she was lying on her back, were slender and elongated like those of a young girl; her visible ribcage; her parted thighs, their position incongruously unsexual; her face, still and swept clean, open eyes which could well have been asleep. It was a body from which all superfluity had gradually been whittled away. Never before had he set eyes on such a body, a body that said so much and yet was no more than itself.
This time he painted huge clusters of flowers in yellow and white, covering the skin from her collarbone to her breasts. If the flowers on her back were the flowers of the night, these were the brilliant flowers of the day. Orange day lilies bloomed on her concave stomach, and golden petals were scattered pell-mell over her thighs.
A thrilling energy seemed to flow out quietly from some unknowable place inside his body and collect on the tip of his brush. He wanted only to draw it out for as long as possible. The light from the tungsten lamp only illuminated as far as her throat, leaving her face in darkness; she looked as if she were sleeping, but when the tip of the brush grazed her skin her tremulous quivering told him that she was wide awake. Her calm acceptance of all these things made her seem to him something sacred. Whether human, animal or plant, she could not be called a “person,” but then she wasn’t exactly some feral creature either—more like a mysterious being with qualities of both.
When he eventually set the brush down, he looked down at her body, at the flowers blooming on it, with all thoughts of filming gone out of his head. But the sunlight was gradually failing, her face being slowly erased by the late-afternoon shadows, and so he quickly set his thoughts in order and stood up.
“Lie on your side for me.” Slowly, as though timing her movements to some music only she could hear, she bent her arms, legs and waist and rolled onto her side. He panned the camera down the ridge of her side and over the soft curve of her buttocks, then filmed first the flowers on her back, the flowers of night, and then the flowers of the sun on her front. Once he’d finished this he moved on to her Mongolian mark, faint like some blue relic in the gradually fading light. He hesitated, he’d promised himself he wouldn’t do this, but as she gazed over at the pitch-black window he couldn’t stop himself from taking a close-up of her face. The screen filled with her pale lips, the shadowed hollow above her protruding collarbones, her forehead with her disheveled hair, and her two empty eyes.
—
She stood in front of the door with her arms folded while he loaded the equipment into the car trunk. As M had asked, he pushed the key inside one of the hiking boots that had been left on the landing.
“All done,” he said. “Let’s be off.” Even though she was wearing his sweater over her own, she was shivering as though cold. “Shall we go and eat something at yours? Or if you’re hungry, how about we find somewhere to eat around here?”
“Whatever you like,” she murmured, then gestured toward her chest. “Will this come off with water?” As though this practical detail was the only thing she was curious about.
“I wouldn’t have thought it’d come off too easily. You’ll have to wash it a few times to—” She interrupted him.
“I don’t want it to come off.”
Momentarily at a loss, he looked across at her face, but the darkness obscured whatever expression might have been there.
—
Heading into a more built-up area, they tried a few different alleys in their search for somewhere to eat. As she didn’t eat meat, they chose a place that advertised Buddhist cuisine. They ordered the set meal, and around twenty neatly arranged side dishes were brought out, alongside stone-pot rice with chestnuts and ginseng. Watching her as she ate, it suddenly occurred to him that, despite her having spent the past four hours stark naked, nothing he’d done had drawn from her any meaningful response. Of course, his plan hadn’t been to get her aroused, only to film her naked, but all the same it was surprising that the process hadn’t provoked in her even the slightest feelings of desire.
Now, as she sat across from him wearing his chunky sweater and with her spoon in her mouth, he felt that the miracle of that afternoon, which had finally succeeded in neutralizing the persistent, agonizing desire of the past year, was well and truly over. The imagined sight of him throwing her down, rough enough to make all the people in the restaurant scream if they could see it, descended in front of her moving lips like a semi-transparent veil, an all-too-familiar hellish projection flickering in front of his eyes. He looked down at the table and awkwardly swallowed a mouthful of rice.