Recitation

by Suah Bae

  Anyhow, there will never again be a time when I think of myself as no more than a lump of biology, as I did that day when I dragged my suitcase behind me, searching for a way to leave the city on foot. Do you want to keep my skeleton too? The day I became aware of the fact that there was no city gate. The river rises thick and fast from the neck of some rapids, then flows through the city in the shape of a horseshoe, curving back inwards rather than passing out of the built-up districts. The thing is, without being able to walk out of the city gate on my own two feet, I would never feel that I had, in actuality, left that city and gone out onto the vast steppe. Only through the dark unreality of the plane’s radiation shadows would it be possible to experience the simultaneous switch, like turning the page of a book, of the world of my illusions, illusions such as day and night, moon and sun, black earth and clear water. I’ve met up with Banchi. I’m thinking of persuading him to go to Vienna with me, but I’m not sure how that’ll turn out. What occurs to me just now: the person who told me about meeting a Japanese man at the opera who then threatened to kill them was none other than you, Maria. The Japanese man was short, with a pale face. He came and sat down next to you. He spoke to you, and at first you didn’t understand, but then, after a little while, you did. I’m going to kill you, the Japanese man said, his face white. ‘I’m going to kill you, your family, your friends, your insurance company, people who have promised to leave you money in their will because they like you, all of them.’ You were shocked, and the shock was even more severe because you believed that you had fallen in love with that Japanese man, despite having known him for such a short time. Your head ached, and you felt nauseous. Only after the Japanese man had left the opera house, on foot, did you throw yourself flat in front of your seat, stifling your sobs as Tannhauser continued. Your migraines, your melancholy, your lethargy, your ageing, your swollen intestines, your anguished frowning, your foul stench, your clammy skin, your voice, your vague contortions, afflictions spanning your entire life, in an instant that Japanese man invaded your very centre, becoming the emperor of all your negative elements. A love like this! You sent me a letter filled with facts like these. Now, having lost none of their graphic intensity, they rise to the surface of my mind, with a vividness far exceeding what is necessary. As if I myself were the party concerned, the one who had held hands with the Japanese man in the opera house that day, listening to Tannhauser. If I’m remembering correctly now, I must have sent you a reply along these lines: ‘There’s nothing to worry about, Maria. He must just be in the habit of using violent language, he’s not the type of person who would even dream of putting such threats into practice. No doubt he goes around saying similar things to others as well. Besides, you have to bear in mind that he’s trying to communicate his intentions through a foreign language, one he mustn’t be too familiar with. In that kind of situation people are always reduced to using excessive expressions. With love, Kyung-hee.’ By the way, it’s heartbreaking, there’s no space left on the postcard, so this letter will clearly have to finish here…

  Banchi stepped into the post office building.

  A light-brown cow, with ribs clearly visible and long, solid horns angled forwards, was wandering up and down the road. Rude, arrogant crows flew down low as though about to graze the cow’s horns. The thick smell of animal blood and metal shavings came from the dust that the crows stirred up. Passers-by, paying no attention, dragged their feet through the thick dust on the way to some unknown destination. Huge, shaggy dogs followed behind them. Both the cars and the pedestrians seemed entirely oblivious to the changing of the traffic lights. The deeply flushed midsummer sunlight, the strong, clear alcohol filling a dirty glass, a goat tethered with a rope, the enormous sides of a glitteringly white modern building, the solemn melody of the national orchestra, the slender-necked actress who was performing on the stage, the arc of a rainbow which, after a sudden shower, fell to the earth like an arrow from between the clouds, a sheepdog pressed flat under the wheel of a car, a herd of stubborn goats bobbing their heads with profound indifference, blue cloth fluttering in the wind, designating something sacred, a swarthy woman looking down on the street below from a first-floor window, her exposed chest leaning out over the wooden frame, cat-sized rats threading their way around the legs of market stalls, unlit signs and display windows, a sombrely lit butcher’s fridge, each dark red carcass still buttressed with the animal’s skeleton, Banchi’s printing shop, on the ground floor of a temple on the main street in the city centre, there Banchi makes picture postcards featuring his own translations of Indian sutras.

  Banchi described his products as ‘living pictures.’ Through one simple action, he could instantly transform the picture on a postcard into an entirely different picture. Surprisingly, no digital technology was involved in this. Instead, all you had to do was tug the bottom of the postcard and watch the vast steppe landscape morph into the image of the four-armed goddess Kali, or a glacier-covered mountain, square-topped like a table, become the face of a young goatherd. Banchi explained that he had devised the trick himself, through the simple method of printing the pictures manually onto double-sided strawboard. As a birthday present or an expression of a particular feeling, doesn’t this seem so much more sincere than an email or an ordinary postcard? Banchi suggested. “Banchi, do you have a patent for this technique?” Kyung-hee asked. Banchi stayed quiet for a while, perhaps because of the crudeness of the word ‘patent’, then responded apathetically that “such a thing is meaningless in this chaotic city.”

  Banchi’s printing shop was located in the temple annex, next to the stairs leading up to the hall; the hall wasn’t large, but as the place where the monks from each temple gathered to hold their meetings when there was a special event—for example, if the Dalai Lama happened to visit—it was ordinarily quiet and empty. I could lay down my life for my family, Banchi said. “Perhaps many men in this country have similar thoughts. Not because there are any especially appropriate reasons. It’s like with the sutras; we carry them imprinted in our blood.”

  They stepped out into the temple yard, where the tourists were nosing around in search of something worth seeing. The door to the central shrine was wide open, and the monks could be seen eating a meal, at the same table where they had been studying Buddhist scriptures. They ate with gusto, only pausing now and then to glare at the tourists, who were eying them unabashed. Not that they were the only ones for whom the act of eating was private; there were also a handful of European tourists who were at pains to avert their gaze. Dirty pigeons squabbled over feed in the middle of the disordered yard. The old women who sold the pigeon feed hung around at the edges. Young girls with braids fished coins out of purses to buy some feed. Every object in this city had broken corners. The temples and their bells, the monks, cars, stone steps, and buildings, the corners of the pigeons and of Banchi himself. Kyung-hee grasped Banchi’s arm and said, “Banchi, what I meant was that I wanted to come here on foot.” But Banchi didn’t respond to those words, only saying “I could lay down my life for my family. But that doesn’t mean doing everything that my family wants. In last year’s elections, I voted against a bill to sell off the vast expanse of desolate land to foreign buyers. And this was even though casting a vote in favour would’ve left me five hundred dollars better off. Officially, no one lives on that land. What that means is that the land is not a place for registered citizens. In principle, it is only for wanderers. And I am not a wanderer. Neither is my family. We’re all of us long-time city-dwellers. Five hundred dollars is a lot of money in this city. My wife snapped at me: look, Banchi, you have two kids, why would you turn down such big money? You have to vote in favour of the sale and stop being so pessimistic about the future. When everyone else is taking the money, why should we be the only ones left sucking our fingers? The bad things you’re imagining won’t happen straight away, if we get political stability then all other calamities are nothing but fantasy. Please get rid of that dichotomy which says that
all human desires are wicked while primitive nature is wholly good. Human beings have the right to make choices. Free yourself from this obsession that all outcomes, all new developments, are bad. And even if bad things do come about as the result of certain choices, perhaps they won’t always be the very worst that could have happened, as you insist on believing… what I mean is, there are also lesser evils. Can’t you accept that there might be reasons and explanations which depend on the choices of people other than yourself? More than anything else, the most important point is this: business is slow at the printing shop you founded, you have almost no income, and you have two children! On top of that, you shelled out such an inordinate amount for that Japanese copying machine that you still have to pay off the installments. The bank couldn’t care less whether your desires are good or bad, how your choices might affect a single grain of soil or breath of wind in one corner of this planet’s abandoned land. In other words, you have to cast a vote in favour and take the five hundred dollars. If you don’t, that means only one thing, that you no longer love us, your children and me…”

  “That’s right, I’m a city-dweller,” Kyung-hee broke in, as though talking to herself. “I didn’t get a bank loan to buy a Japanese printer, but I did borrow money for other reasons. While the loan manager was transferring the money to my account, he said, ‘Are you aware that the current world will be bankrupt by 2013? Or else 2012. There are various predictions to support it. So taking out a loan right now might well prove to be an extremely wise decision.’ So I asked, in that case, what will be left after it goes bankrupt? The loan manager briefly bowed his head, as though consulting the loans guide on his desk. Then he looked up again and, while examining the faces of all the others who were waiting to borrow money, said, “It will probably be calm for a while. For a short while, at least, perhaps nothing much will happen. And then there will be a new Big Bang, and life will come again. The routine cycle of the universe, in which minerals die and flashes of light are born, will begin again. Don’t you think?’”

  They walked along the path in front of the temple, where young elms were dotted here and there. “I’m a city-dweller just the same, unlike my father I was born and raised in a city. I might repeat those words hundreds of times, I’m a city-dweller,” said Banchi. “So, unlike my father, I do not know all the many dialect words to describe a horse. For certain tribes, words indicating horses are so innumerable they call to mind the stars of the Milky Way, or a rainbow’s hazy remoteness. A one-year-old horse, a two-year-old horse, a three-year-old horse and a four-year-old horse are all described using different words, right. And not just that. There will usually be different names for each individual colour combination. A three-year-old horse with a brown mane and black-and-white dappled patterns, and a young white foal which was born on a stormy night, are described using different words in just the same way as city-dwellers use different terms to distinguish between a ‘desk’ and a ‘well.’ To horse tribes it’s self-evident that those are entirely different species of horse, as different as a desk is from a well, and thus require entirely different species of words. And what all this means is that translating Sanskrit is no problem for me, but I could never write a book on horses.” They crossed the road, taking care to avoid the speeding cars. Banchi said that here it was safer to cross the road in a group when the traffic lights were red than to attempt a solo crossing when they were green. “Because, you see, this city hasn’t been civilised.” Banchi used the expression ‘this city’ instead of saying ‘our race’ or ‘the people of this city.’ Having crossed to the opposite side, Banchi indicated the ground floor window of a bulky stone building.

  “We lived here when I was young. In this very room. In this room, my parents gave birth to me and my three siblings, and this is where we spent our childhood. It’s the dorm building of the university where my father used to teach German. The bathrooms and kitchens were communal. Because my father was a city hater, he was desperate to build a house in the suburbs for his sons. The first house he built was commandeered by the government, but somehow or other he managed to hold on to the second one. But it meant that he lost his position at the university, and ended up going to Vietnam as a war correspondent. This was when China invaded Vietnam, you see. Later, after he returned from Vietnam, my father got a job at a museum, and I attended a Russian language school. My favourite writer is Hemingway, but I can still look back on that time, when studying Dostoevsky and Pushkin first opened my eyes to literature, as a particularly beautiful period in my life. Ah, if only you knew how to speak Russian! Maria spoke it quite well. But I was studying German when I lived with her, so I insisted that we always speak in German. Perhaps you’ve come across something like my ‘living pictures’ in Korea?”

  Kyung-hee shook her head. “Computer graphics technology means people aren’t impressed even by really marvellous pictures. These days, even if a three-dimensional dinosaur backbone were to morph into a hologram of the Madonna, no one would bat an eyelid. They’d find it as ordinary as butterflies over flowerbeds. But Banchi, don’t you want to see Maria again? If you’d like, we can go to Vienna together.”

  On foot, Kyung-hee did not add. And Banchi, a bashful amateur artist from the third world, who had once made it all the way to Austria only to fail to complete his course of study, merely replied that he could lay down his life for his family. As they walked, they passed a restaurant called ‘Sisi.’ Is that an Austrian restaurant? Kyung-hee asked. Of course not, Banchi answered. They have a portrait of the Imperial Princess Sisi hanging on the wall, but you can’t really call it an Austrian restaurant. They have lamb stew, potato noodles and goulash on the menu, but no Weiner Schnitzel. “But this city has a European beer hall I could show you round, if you’d like. Genuine German cuisine. It’s in the area near the German embassy, and inside you can look through a window at the beer-making facilities. The North Korean embassy building is next to the German embassy, but there’s nothing to see there—only two days ago they cleared out the building and recalled the staff to North Korea. The building was torn down, and an enormous amount of dust poured down on the heads of passers-by. I thought of you when it happened. If you’d arrived in this city only a few days earlier we might have been able to get a front-row seat to watch the embassy being pulled down. I definitely wanted to show you it. The North Korean embassy was a special place for me, you see. When I was a child I used to pass it on my way home from school. I never failed to stop and marvel over the paintings covering its otherwise white walls; gaudy landscape paintings of the North Korean countryside, and paintings that record historical events, decorated with soft pink flowers. Paintings of tall, strapping men and charming young women, I had no concrete idea of what they were intended to show, but they gave the impression of being both solemn and sorrowful and, at the same time, touchingly beautiful and heroic. I would peep in through the iron gate at the embassy building, and oh, how incredibly dignified and majestic it was. It looked like a palace in some distant country. How I yearned for it, which seemed to embody those obscure, abstract names I first encountered as a child: moderation, elegance, honour, order, dignity, foreign country, alien. But now nothing is left of it. They left here without a trace.”

  “I don’t know many cities,” Kyung-hee said. “Back when there was only one city that I knew, my perspective was still closer to that of a visitor to this world than a fully-assimilated immigrant. Because, you see, I didn’t know the language. When the foster parent was teaching me words syllable by syllable, there were still trams and bicycles in that city. My first memory of that city is of a young woman, probably blind, walking in the road. Remembering what I saw back then, sitting in my buggy, it’s odd; I wonder why she was walking in the road, rather than along the pavement like everyone else? Now that I think about it, that moment took place on the very first afternoon of my life. That day, a man was riding a bicycle. Some non-language afternoon on which the tram slid itself along, attached to an electric cable overhead. Cle
arly what it actually was was time passing by, or else the present-tense image of the eternal ‘right this moment’ of my illusion which, until now, has simultaneously and unchangingly progressed beneath my eyelids. The tram goes by over the woman’s body. Without a sound. (I can’t remember a sound.) The woman throws her arms up to cover her face and falls to the ground, and the man on the bike lifts her body up. That phrase, lift my body up, seems to have come to me not in my mother tongue but in some ancient language now long-forgotten. At the time I was still a visitor, not long since arrived in that city, and being pushed in a buggy, all the objects and scenes I saw, all the syllable-by-syllable language, not a single thing was familiar to me. And so I frequently thought in an ancient language, I was mixing up the ancient language and the new. I got the foster parent confused just like I did language. I confuse then with now just like I do with cities. I throw up my arms to cover my face and fall to the ground. The tram slides by over my body. And when I open my eyes, I discover myself in another city.”