by Suah Bae
Certain tribes hold the belief that the soul of the dead one becomes a bird and flies up into the sky. Certain other tribes say that you enter the underworld by passing through a door guarded by a monstrous dog; that the living cannot endure the gaze of that terrible hound and so are unable to pass through that door, while the dead find themselves translated beyond all terror. Various sea-going races who inhabit small islands load the dead into boats and push them out to sea, which to them is the eternal abyss of death. There are also tribes for whom bodily death is an encounter which takes place in the crown of a white birch. With their old, worn body balanced in the topmost branches, the dead one ultimately sinks into a dream in which they cross a slender bridge over the roiling waves to the world on the far shore. For some tribes, death is the kidnapping of the soul by the sea snake. Not wanting to pass to the next world all alone, the dead one entices the soul of another along with them, and there are also tribes whose legends tell of the souls of the dead passing to the western world. When they cross the distant western plain where human beings do not tread, they find a tree standing there, and a giant waiting in the branches who will take them up into the sky. The soul shifts form, appearing to humans variously as a tiger, a snake, an eagle, etc. In such a way, the souls of the Inuit are seals. An old woman of incredible age, a single-filament bridge spanning a river, sleep and dreams, the song of Orpheus, the jawbone of some fierce beast, fire, a pillar, a fantastical tree with white breasts, an enormous ancient cauldron giving off great billows of steam, three universes co-existing simultaneously, a coiled snake, a polar bear committing adultery with a human woman, the sacredness of a being who appears as a mountain of iron; there are also tribes who believe these things. For some tribes a hole opens up in the sky, for others their shamans use cigarette smoke, hallucinogenic mushrooms, or a particular cave through which to catch a glimpse of the heavens, slipping the bonds of consciousness to travel briefly back up to the moon. Here, rather than being an end point, death is simply a pathway, one of many human experiences. On nights when the moon is bright, the shaman goes out onto the steppe wearing a cloak of white feathers, and beats a bronze drum while he prays. Without exception, fire plays an important role in all rituals where the deity of the underworld is entreated to send a soul back. The examples are countless, Kyung-hee thought.
I was reading a book when it came to me that the transmission of these nonessential gods and primitive beliefs, no matter the form they take, seems to influence only the members of tribal societies which have a particularly long and unbroken history of such traditions. Given this, I wonder about the collective soul of the widespread and artificially constructed new tribe known as the ‘city dweller’, who is no longer a part of any traditional society or race, and has never at any time held spiritual or religious beliefs which arise from any geographic specificity, or at least beliefs which are current only in a specific region, given that, even in regions where such beliefs had once held sway, the degree and duration of industrialisation meant not only that shamanism had lost its power but that access to collective memories of it had been completely cut off, with each individual inextricably bound up with things that would once have been foreign to them, psychological differences flattened, made to conform to an international standard now long accepted, a globally-current ‘enlightened’ standard that is considered the only one of value; the modern city dweller who has thus lost no few of their native, traditional, mythical elements, which defy explanation; the modern city dweller in whom the majority of us can now recognise ourselves. According to the book, at some point in the future, human beings are going to evolve into machines which exist within and are derived from nature; mightn’t this ‘present’ time in which we are living already be a part of that future, mightn’t the initial phase of a mechanical organism, which has neither an innate soil or a soul that would be in direct communion with such a soil, which has, perhaps, no longer a need for such things, be none other than the ‘city dweller’? At that, Mr. Nobody laughed and answered: I’m a city dweller myself, but at the same time I’m also an ancient who retains old tribal memories. But that means I’m all on my own, that I’ve fallen away even from you! Kyung-hee cried out in surprise and despair. No, not that, you are my descendant, Mr. Nobody said to her. Mr. Nobody took Kyung-hee’s hand and suggested that the two of them go to his land. Berlin was neither Kyung-hee’s land nor his. But it’s the land of city-dwellers, Kyung-hee said.
Kyung-hee said: he was walking towards me, from the opposite end of a gloomy alleyway; a small black car sped across his path and instantly transformed into a chicken, stretching its legs out as far as they would go. A big white rooster with a red crest, its sparkling wings half spread. “And so I ran up behind it and awkwardly shooed it away,” said Kyung-hee, covering her hand with her mouth as she laughed. Mr. Nobody wondered aloud whether he had been the one driving the car. They were discussing Kyung-hee’s dream. “No, you’d gone back home by then. The room whose window looked down onto a forest of black-leaved bamboo trees was yours, wasn’t it. Nobody else would have dared to go into your room. The other room was full of people. They were a race of vegetarians, their bodies wasted into slenderness. And I lay down among them. A mother and three daughters, all of them sleeping, they surrounded me on all sides. One to my left and one to my right, one at my head and one at my feet, they were each lying stretched out with their heads nearest me. With our bodies aligned in that way, we radiated out like the spokes of sleep. In this dreaming state, I ask, are we going the right way? Also still asleep, one of the daughters turns to look at me. The gorgeous silk quilt slips away to reveal her naked body, which resembles a hard piece of bleached driftwood. They introduce themselves as a fortune teller and her three daughters. The daughter baring her naked body holds out to me a scrap of paper with a single line written on it. ‘Fate must comply with morality,’ or some such phrase. I get the feeling that that sentence doesn’t quite tally with the rules of grammar. Over this daughter’s face, one of the other daughters’ faces is overlaid. All of them sleeping all the while, they repeatedly overlay each other like that, one by one, at first only briefly before they break apart. But, as these palimpsests gradually last for longer each time, those daughters and mother flow into an inextricable entanglement, like four white torches fused into one. And so it takes a little time before I realise that they’re now a muse sitting up on a huge revolving disc, hands clasped and dancing a soundless circle around me…”
While recounting the dream, Kyung-hee felt its vertiginous dizziness swoop back, every bit as intense as while she had been asleep. The two of them were lying on the bed when they heard the landlord-healer arrive home. The healer took off his shoes at the front door, went into the kitchen, put a frying pan on the gas ring, struck a match and kindled the flame. The crackle and pop of the oil heating up, the creak of the hinge as the healer got a plate down from the cupboard, the clatter of a glass tumbler, could all be clearly heard. As could the healer’s slippers on the tile floor. The healer thunked a plate of deep-fried meat down onto the table and washed his hands with a great deal of splashing. If you want to use the bathroom before you go to sleep, Kyung-hee whispered to Mr. Nobody, now would be the best time. “The landlord doesn’t know you’re here right now,” she added. Just then, they heard someone going into the bathroom. It was Eun-hwan. “He’s an engineering student, and you know, even though they live in the same house, he and the landlord never exchange so much as a single word. In fact, even if they come face to face in the hallway they just pretend that they haven’t the faintest idea who the other is, and walk right on past.” Mr. Nobody looked about to ask how on earth anybody could be so inflexible, so Kyung-hee hurriedly continued, “Come on, they’re both still students after all, think about what it was like for you back then. You must have stayed in a dormitory, right? Someone puts a snow tire up on top of the wardrobe, then, while they’re asleep, someone else drags it down and shoves it under the bed. You can’t even conceive of such
a thing as a private basement; there simply isn’t the space. And so the stink of petrol ends up spreading through the whole house. Or what about those cramped dorms you used to have to share during high school, with so many kids to a room they were practically on top of each other? Finding a room like this for two hundred euros in Berlin is no mean feat. And the landlord might come in at any moment on the pretext of borrowing a mirror, so whatever you do don’t poke your head out from under the quilt.”
The room I lived in when I was at university was right by the elevated train, so naturally every time a train went by, which happened at one minute intervals until the early hours of the morning, the room would shake from side to side as though the whole building had been struck by lightning, accompanied by an absolutely thunderous din, Mr. Nobody said. Not just the building itself, when I was lying down I could even feel my bed juddering, he added with a laugh. And continued, every night spent in that house was like being in a train’s sleeper compartment. Kyung-hee responded: “I see that. But this house is extremely quiet. It’s a long way from the train station, so after dark it’s pretty rare to even see another person, you know. And that means you’re free to gaze out of the window for as long as you like, without the danger of some passer-by thinking you’re staring at them. As a temporary place of residence it suits me. It’s a great thing, and actually quite surprising, that I can feel so at ease sleeping in someone else’s bed, using someone else’s furniture, sitting at someone else’s desk to write a letter.”
Having finished his dinner, the healer let the plate clatter into the sink, picked up a damp cloth, and began to give the kitchen floor a vigorous scrubbing. He bustled about, wiping the table, washing up the dishes, stamping back and forth between the kitchen and his bedroom, his footsteps loud on the hallway floorboards. The sound of running water was audible from the bathroom. He filled a porcelain vase with water, carried it back to the kitchen and slammed it down on the windowsill. All in all, it was a clumsy, impatient, angry, repressed, clench-mouthed, highly-strung, cantankerous, ostentatious, excessive, tumultuous demonstration. Perhaps tonight the landlord will be unable to sleep again, Kyung-hee mumbled as she burrowed under the quilt, and will end up sitting at his desk writing a long article to send to Korea. Just then, something slid under Kyung-hee’s door with a papery rustle. It was a slip of paper that the landlord had pushed in. It said, “Please keep the kitchen clean.”
What did the room in your dream look like, Mr. Nobody asked.
“Yours had a large window, looking out onto an ashen scene sunk in dusk. You wanted to be alone so no one else was allowed to come in, but the door stood open. The house was not very wide, but had a series of rooms laid out in a long line, like the carriages of a train, connected by sliding doors. And there were many families there, not just the fortune-teller and her three daughters; each room was as jam-packed as a B&B during the midsummer holidays, with almost every available inch of floorspace taken up by thin Korean-style mattresses. All of the doors had been left standing open, probably because it was so hot, so I was able to look through them all the way down to the very end of the house, over all the bodies of the people lying down, to the scene outside your room’s large window. The bamboo grove was in the foreground of a cityscape of disordered suburbs, the train station, wooden struts that had been erected over the brimming canal, an old orphanage, etc. There at the end of the house, all of this flowed by undisturbed. I’d forgotten about you as soon as I went into the room and lay down on the floor, and seemed to have been concentrating on gazing out of the window. After a while, though, the slender bodies of the fortune-teller and her three daughters started to disturb my concentration. It seems that—because of the scenery flowing by outside the window—I was thinking of your house as a boat drifting with the current, or else a train. Which is what made me ask the fortune-teller’s daughter, are we going the right way?”
The night wore on, and deep into the early hours they found themselves still unable to sleep. Toward daybreak, Mr. Nobody said again to Kyung-hee, “Come to my house. There are no solid walls or roof in that place, no tightly sealed rooms, so your soul will be able to wander as it chooses. Let’s go to my house, to my hometown, together. What flowed from me is now in you. I am your land, your ancestor.”
The following morning, the healer came face to face with Mr. Nobody in the bathroom. The healer had just had a shower, and was on the point of stepping out of the door when Mr. Nobody was about to walk in. When he first got out of bed in the mornings, especially on cool October days, Mr. Nobody felt that he ought to wander around the house without any clothes on, which was precisely what he was doing that morning. With a towel wrapped around his thick waist, and with one foot on the bathroom door sill, the healer looked up at Mr. Nobody, who was two heads taller than himself. Around the healer’s expressionless face, drops of water were dripping from his hair to splash onto the floor tiles. Kyung-hee thought, all that water splashing over the tiles is extremely dangerous, he’ll have to give it a quick wipe with a dry cloth. Only after a minute had gone by did the healer step aside so that Mr. Nobody could enter the bathroom. “Good morning,” he greeted him. “As you’re a guest, I’ll make you some breakfast.” Kyung-hee, who didn’t shower in the mornings, heard all this while standing in the centre of her bedroom with the quilt wound around her, having flung the window open in order to air the place out.
Early and late mornings in the healer’s house, the sunlight swept strongly into the kitchen and Kyung-hee’s room. In the afternoons the sun’s oblique rays slanted through into the hallway and a honey-coloured stillness puddled onto the floorboards, and when the sun began to go down both the healer and Eun-hwan went out onto their respective balconies to soak up the back yard’s silvered evening light, the scent of the night’s beginning. In the healer’s house was a second-hand vacuum cleaner that he’d fished out of the bins. However long you spent trying to get it going, it never actually sucked up any dust, just creaked and groaned and whirred, so Kyung-hee had opened it up once; a veritable mountain of dust was so densely packed inside that there didn’t look to be space for a single mote more. But there was no paper bag, and so there was nothing for it but to leave it in its current state. Whoever was on cleaning duty had to get down on their hands and knees to mop the kitchen and bathroom floors. When it was Kyung-hee’s turn she always filled a basin with soapy water to wipe down the bathroom mirror, bathtub, and toilet. Once a week, she wheeled a suitcase full of dirty laundry down to the laundry room. After buying soap powder from the vending machine and setting the washing machine going, she sat down on the bench and read a book while she waited for the cycle to finish. On weekdays, during work hours, few people ever came down there. The only people who did occasionally drop by were retirees living in studio flats which had no space for a washing machine, senior citizens, or foreigners who, for one reason or another, maintained a ‘Berlin address.’ Kyung-hee glanced up from her book as someone shuffled slowly in and transferred their laundry into the dryer; the newcomer looked to be in their nineties. Warmed by the autumn sunlight coming in through the long window, and by the hot air produced by the machines, filled with the low, regular whir and swoosh of the washing drums, and the rattling of the dryer, the laundry room was, overall, peaceful. Kyung-hee looked down at the street scene, its sharply defined borders between light and shadow. Alleyways where, invisible to her, items of laundry fluttered in the breeze. The faces of people riding by on their bicycles like thousands of golden ears of barley, like ears of barley in the shape of arrowheads, passed into the scene, fusing into it as individual particles of its whole. For some obscure, incommunicable reason, my heart always seems about to burst… the whisper of a frightening dream, reassuring us that there is nothing to be frightened of.