Recitation

by Suah Bae

  “But those watch sellers have nothing to do with the leather crafts shop I mentioned earlier,” Kyung-hee responded curtly. “I thought a city with an airport was what you were interested in, not fake-watch sellers. Isn’t that what you wanted to hear about?” Someone else who’d been there seems to have retorted that every city has an airport. Almost every city, another voice put in, but quietly, so that it didn’t seem a rebuke. “A few years ago I had an accident on stage—I broke my toe in the middle of a recitation. The role didn’t call for anything extreme, all I had to do was sit on a chair and read my lines, then, after a while, stand up and walk across the stage with my script in my hand, just a few paces back and forth, and tap my hand lightly against my chest as I walked; that was all the physical acting that was required of me. Aside from the chair there were no other props to clutter the stage, and it wasn’t that I slipped or stumbled somehow. There was nothing about the set-up that might have been expected to lead to an accident; the stage wasn’t too dark, but then it wasn’t too bright either, so I wasn’t in danger of being dazzled. There was overhead lighting throughout the performance, because that was best for when I was sitting in the chair and reading the script. In other words, it was just the kind of staging that I was familiar with from other performances, with nothing that might catch me off guard. I got up from the chair and walked across the stage, careful not to step on the hem of my long skirt. I had the script in my hand but I’d pretty much memorised it already, so I didn’t need to keep looking down at it as I walked. Now, it’s true that the script was quite intense, quite emotional. But even with the most intense script in the world, could whatever emotions I experienced really be sufficiently physical as to cause the little toe on my right foot to break, entirely of its own accord, while performing an action no more complicated than a simple step forwards? And then there was the sound it made, so loud that the audience in the front row could hear it too. Snap! Even more than the pain itself, the thing that really shook me was how intrusive that sound was, how definitively it seemed to have interrupted the recital. The pain only made itself felt after a couple of seconds’ lapse, you see, whereas my embarrassment was entirely synchronous with that snap. Ah yes, I forgot to mention my shoes. Well, they weren’t high heels, or the pointy kind that really pinch your toes. They were just an ordinary pair of pumps that I wore all the time. In fact, the other recitation actors used to say they made me look like some old nun shuffling about in her slippers. So it couldn’t have been the fault of my shoes. What it was, was an unwitting step forward into that too intense, too excessive, too heavy, too restless, too chaotic, too aggravating, too dizzying, too much, too lacking, startlingly dramatic whirl of emotion, the kind that strips you bare and leaves you gasping out noisy sobs over every little thing, even while remaining utterly unmoved. You know, people often dismiss mental or emotional dizziness as just some abstraction, but they’re wrong; it has its own concrete form, its own specific scent. And what’s more, there are certain objects and places that are saturated by it. For example, sitting on the second chair in the kitchen always calls up a very specific feeling for me. As though the emotion itself lives in that chair. We step into its country quite by chance. A couple of seconds after the snap, when cold sweat broke out on my brow and the dizzying pain meant it was all I could do not to just collapse where I stood, but all the same I had to grit my teeth and make the three or four steps over to the chair, a distance I only just managed; even then, finally able to sink down into the chair, I knew. I’d gone far, oh, much too far from myself. My body is a burning brand, a traffic light regulating the flow of my life. That thing, that riot of emotion, has flicked it to green: Go. And from that moment onwards I was set in motion, propelled into a peripatetic life. The tears streamed down, scalding my cheeks as the audience fixed me with their bright gazes, exclaiming, look at that woman, look how red her face is, like a burning lump of coal!”

  So you’re saying that was when you decided to go wandering—walking—halfway round the world? someone muttered diffidently. The moment your toe broke? A walking trip wouldn’t exactly have been the first thing on my mind.

  “It wasn’t a decision,” Kyung-hee replied, “more like a thought that came to me already decided. Every bit as unrealistic as my idea of walking all routes in the purest fashion. Because of course, what lay between me and my destination weren’t seas, deserts, and endless, featureless steppes, but modern borders, surveillance systems, arms traffickers, soldiers, and government officials. All of this means you have to travel by train, or at least in the goods hold of a truck. And when you come to the sea, it’s only natural that you have to pay for the ferry, right? Yes, it’s true that I’d decided I had to go on foot, though the reasoning behind this wasn’t clear even to me. But that decision came after I broke my toe. On the face of it, it’s only a superficial resemblance, a chance affinity, that connects the decision with the broken toe. But the fact is that those two events both found me at a similar time in my life, sweeping in like a whirlwind and somehow taking possession of me, of my flesh. Thinking about it now, the common ground shared by a toe and trip on foot would have to be the blind sincerity of flesh. A sincerity both pure and unmediated, that’s what I was hoping for, one that would be sufficient for me to be granted admittance at the border of that unidentified country I was heading for. And perhaps I would have walked all day. All day long, and then all day long the next day. But all that was something for later on; just then, my toe was in a plaster cast, and while I waited at home for it to heal I passed the time listening to Bayern 4 on the radio. For no apparent reason, I can still remember the news bulletins that were on at the time. The station had an hourly news programme, and when nothing special had occurred in the world since the last broadcast the same stories would usually be repeated again and again, more than ten times in the same day; as this is what happened with the story of the UN secretary-general’s trip to Pakistan, perhaps it’s not all that surprising, though it doesn’t really explain it, that the soundbite about the secretary-general in his kaftan is still stuck in my head. And one day I thought yes, I have to go there on foot. Walking seemed to be the only way of acquiring a form of non-linguistic legitimacy, the highest that I myself can achieve in this day and age, a comprehensive representation of both the flesh and that which animates it. I might find my way blocked and have to turn back. Retracing my steps might take even longer, with occasional further obstacles to taking the direct route, and enough of these forced diversions could eventually lead to complete disorientation, but still nothing would prevent me from walking that lost route, the same that my feet have always taken me down at decisive moments in life. And I realised that I’d only ever lived in the city where I was born, a city which now seemed both strong as adamant and elaborately curlicued, like a besieged fortress encircled by a moat, archer’s holes in its castle wall, adorned with gargoyles of pig-faced warriors. At some point, I myself had become one of the solid stones which made up that city’s wall. I formed a single discrete part of that soaring battlement, from whose summit traitors were hung by their necks. I constituted and extended the city, and at the same time I was like a spear or cannon, part of that menacing bulwark defending the city against its potential deserters. And the feeling that I was a part of the city’s eye. A part of that geographical entity, the physical weight of its flesh, the tangibility of its epidermal sensations. It was the first time I’d felt like that, you know. Up until then, I’d always felt that my life was lived incredibly freely. I’d never doubted that, not once.

  It was probably the incident with the plaster cast that brought about that desire to detach myself from a specific location, to free my material self from being tied to a given set of coordinates, fixed in a single place. Looked at from a certain angle, perhaps it’s more accurate to call my soul the author of that shriek of despair, and relegate my toe to the role of intermediary. The doctor sawed the cast off after four weeks. The serrated edge crunched into the solid cast, pain g
rating along my nerve endings as sensation returned to numbed bones and stiffened muscles. It hurts, I said. Of course, it’s bound to be a bit sore when the cast first comes off, the doctor replied brusquely, without looking at me. I gritted my teeth and tried to bear it, but the pain’s keen edge flamed through me, surely more than any doctor had a right to demand their patient endure. Every time the blade of the saw made a pass, that pain flared up inside me. It’s too much, I said, I can’t take it. But she told me it was nothing but the stimulation of stiffened muscles, why, even a child could put up with it. At the time I was already planning to escape my life, to get completely outside it, and to do so on foot, which made my broken toe seem especially unpropitious. My jaw clenched, mouth convulsed into a rictus, an image of perfect clarity suddenly penetrates into the heart of the pain—that of a person lying on a hospital bed. He once described hospitals as ‘the home of that particular brand of physical and psychological torture which goes by the name of surgery.’ Death, he said, has been reduced to nothing more than a medical formality. Though few people now remember it, the institution we know as the hospital had originally fallen under the purview of the military, functioning primarily as a facility for disposing of the city’s death-row outcasts, its escapees or intruders who, according to him, were falsely accused of treachery or theft. These hangings were extremely popular, giving rise to markets and merchants trading in the necessary accoutrements of the death penalty: axes, rope, and plenty of wooden buckets for carrying away the filth. The city is the abode of the arrogant. Miniaturists and amateur anatomists transferred the corpses to the hospital. Hobbyist engineers trailed along behind, seeking a glimpse of that mysterious automaton inside each human body, wondering whether there might be a way of making it start up again once stopped. The city’s condemned pass down the hospital corridors, their progress hampered by their broken necks. Their own stench is rank in their nostrils. Their necks are bent forward at such a crazy angle that their faces are entirely hidden even to those standing directly in front of them. And so, he said, I fervently hope that nothing happens to bring you here—to this charnel house they call a hospital.” This was in the letters that he wrote to me every so often.

  Every time we listen to Bayern 4, we will think of you.

  The toe that was encased in the cast had been sawn almost halfway through. Pain and shock had left me insensible, but I still remember the doctor’s look of utter astonishment, how she practically wailed into my face: Oh I’m so sorry, I must have misjudged it, there’s no way I could have known! I’m so sorry…

  You must never come here.

  2. Are we goshawks tumbling from this life to the next, never to meet again in our former guises?

  A long time ago, when Kyung-hee saw her German teacher for the last time, she was living with a teacher couple whom he had introduced her to. She was staying in their chimney room. Rather than having the standard flat ceiling, that top-floor room, to which Kyung-hee had appended the temporary designation ‘chimney room’, was shaped like an upside-down funnel; the structure rose several metres up in the form of a horn, narrowing as it went, and from the point in the centre where its four sides met, a narrow, chimney-like duct stretched up in a straight line to the sky, and since there was a hole at its very end, if you stood in the centre of the room and tilted your head back to look straight up, a single point of clear sky, a wash of blue light floating in the dark void, was visible through the square duct (hole) which pierced the ceiling. The roof recalled an old-fashioned double-convex telescope, set up to point directly towards the heart of the universe, and since, rather than making distant things appear to have been pulled closer, that telescope plays the contrary role of further increasing the original distance between object and observer, anyone who experiences a night in the chimney room ends up, in their dreams, remembering that sky as having been further away from that particular point on the earth’s surface than it is in all other places.

  The chimney room’s four walls were roughly plastered; white scabs grew tumescent on their old gray surfaces, peeling off and dropping soundlessly to the floor, and after the cleaner had done her rounds all that remained of the wall were so many sand-coloured scars. Whenever someone spoke in the chimney room, the contours of their voice would blur into an indistinct echo as they bounced off the funnel-shaped wall-cum-ceiling, ever increasing in bulk and volume as echoes bred echoes, meshing and overlapping as the voice crept up the funnel like a coiling spring until eventually, unable to pass through the hole to the sky, sinking back down again. With such a weighty amplification being also and at the same time a self-multiplication, the speaker, though alone in the chimney room, would nevertheless be seized by the feeling that there were others in there too, constantly responding to each other with exactly the same words, and with the briefest delay between each response. A cannonade of mischievous, hostile voices. Like an enormous collection of clocks, their hands all moving at slightly different speeds, the ghosts of the chimney room sit side by side on the bed, enunciating with particular emphasis, especially on the final few words, as they run through the senseless motions of their speech, but no meaning can be gleaned from these phrases, mouthed as though merely beating time like a clock’s ponderous pendulum. That evening Kyung-hee made a phone call, but because of the reasons given above, neither Kyung-hee herself nor the person on the other end of the line could make head or tail of what the other was saying. It sounded like the tangled confusion of a conversation where, as when a wrong number has been dialled, two complete strangers each run on with what they have to say, entirely oblivious to the other.

  The chimney room was the smallest room in the teacher couple’s flat, used whenever they had friends or relatives over. Inside their front door was an entrance hall with a hatstand and several coat hooks, leading through to a second door. The chimney room and guest bathroom both adjoined the entrance hall, as did a small living room for the exclusive use of the husband, while the couple’s own rooms lay behind the second door, which had to be opened with two big old-fashioned keys. And so the chimney room was originally a space for them to receive guests, so that the room’s official title would have to be something like ‘guest room.’ Their flat was on the top floor of a four-story building, which backed on to the rubbish bins. The building was opposite a municipal gymnasium and a secondary school, which had been done up a while ago, though the school hadn’t even existed back when the female teacher had still been teaching. The teacher couple, actually it wasn’t both of them that were teachers, just the wife, or at least she used to be; she didn’t work anymore, she had retired long ago, and in fact she was already over fifty when she first started teaching at the secondary school, so that period in her life hadn’t amounted to any more than ten years, but every time Kyung-hee thought of them she habitually employed the phrase ‘teacher couple.’ Once they reached the age of eighty, the teacher couple abandoned their travelling lifestyle; instead, by way of substitute, they began to offer the chimney room to friends who were themselves still travelling, or else to holidaying acquaintances to whom they’d been introduced through mutual friends. And so the chimney room was also home to a band of travellers, all of whom the couple knew personally. After eighty they stopped writing letters, but they were still frequent recipients. Those who’d stayed in the chimney room would send them letters or postcards, either from the hometown they’d returned to or from the next destination in their itinerary.