Recitation

by Suah Bae

  “You speak as though you were a wanderer of life! Or, one would have to say a wanderer of time.”

  “For a very long time I wasn’t; such a long time, in fact, that almost all of my life had slipped by. I didn’t want to know anything about wandering, I even had a job.”

  “A stage actor.”

  “A voice actor.”

  “That surprises me. Not that you had a profession, but that you were able to make a living through that particular one. In this city, even if such a profession existed, there’s no way anyone could live off it. The very idea! If you look at my friends, they’re all exceptional poets, writers, actors, magicians, painters, and healers, but at the same time they’re actually taxi drivers, low-level legal clerks, sales employees in the airport’s duty-free shop—at times they’re Buddhist monks, functioning as a kind of tourist attraction, and also managers of small printing shops. The way I see it, my father is the only native of this city who supports himself solely as an artist.”

  “And he might be the wealthiest writer this city has produced. But Banchi, do you realise that we could set off for Vienna tomorrow, to see Maria?”

  “No, I can’t. I have to decide whether to cast an assenting or dissenting vote in this election.”

  “You have to make a decision right this moment? From what you told me, I understood that you had cast a dissenting vote in the last election, that the whole of your country had already completed the decision-making process.”

  “But sometimes, ‘right this moment’ can exist as something eternally delayed. That’s what I’ve understood from listening to you.”

  They walked along the wall surrounding the North Korean embassy compound, the building itself having been completely demolished, leaving only an enormous dusty hollow. Over the wall’s railing, they could see a man strolling around in the dust. Aside from him, there was no one else in sight. Why does this thing we call ‘the nation’ have to exist forever? Kyung-hee asked herself, without expecting to come up with any convincing answer. Seemingly out of the blue, Kyung-hee recalled that the man who had been her first husband –officially, her only husband—had been a civil servant, and as a representative of the nation his job had been to investigate and negotiate with the market, though in fact it would have been more accurate to say ‘agonise over the role of the nation in relation to the market’, hampered by the fact that the banks and companies saw him as the ambassador of an entity that was steadily going extinct, a lonely diplomat despatched by the nation. The movement of feet from one place to another, evoking the tactile sensations of lucid, vivid dreams, of the reality which is this abstract past. Opposite the embassy was the European-style beer hall Banchi had spoken of. Banchi guided Kyung-hee inside. The interior of the spacious hall was half in shadow, having no artificial lighting, and refreshingly cool; the vast majority of the customers who were occupying tables were European. Resting their chins in their hands, peering wordlessly into their glasses of beer with the sombre, even gloomy expressions characteristic of sandy-haired Europeans, they looked like refugees from some distant disaster. The light which slanted in through the entrance was suspended like a roof over their heads. One side of the hall was entirely glass, and on the far side were the facilities for fermenting beer. In the hall, ads reading ‘Beer made using the German method’ were dotted here and there. After a calm walk around the hall, Banchi and Kyung-hee went back outside. Neither the staff nor the customers paid them any attention. Banchi led the way, his tall body bouncing lightly as he crossed the road. After the two of them had been walking for a little while, he abruptly ducked into a narrow shop, so small it didn’t even have a sign. It was a printing-and-office supplies shop, with a handful of printers inside. My shop is similar to this one, Banchi told Kyung-hee, his casual gesture almost proprietorial. Kyung-hee nodded. And said, “Of course, it stands to reason that you frequent these shops, coming and going quite naturally, just as a nomad would. Just as a wild animal knows no borders.” The people inside the shop merely regarded them with blank stares.

  “At first I thought that this city and that city were completely different places, you know,” Kyung-hee said. “Since, even leaving aside the geographical distance between them, all individuals necessarily encounter them one after the other, after a certain gap of time, and for that reason each city appears as a separate entity, showing their faces in a successive order. Just as a new life can begin only after another life has definitely ended, I thought that cities, too, existed like that. But if you try walking from one city to another, since there is an invisible vein of space-time running through all these cities, each of which has their own individual appearance, at a certain point it becomes a kind of airport of the mind; in this way, I think, cities actually exist simultaneously. And that in fact, rather than each city being absolutely separate and distinct, they interpenetrate, forming a palimpsest, though we may be unaware of this. And the same rule applies to one life and another. Before I had fully arrived in this current life, I saw the tram pass over my previous flesh-and-blood body. So perhaps we don’t need to focus our minds on a single place in order to give ourselves over to ‘right this moment.’ The more I focus on myself, the more this central self grows vague, and I become a derivative of myself, become divided into many simultaneously-existing selves. I’m not a Buddhist like you, Banchi, or a practitioner of meditation. All I’m trying to say is that as my life progresses I become more and more diluted and spread out, permeating a part of the manifold universe. So eventually I myself will become the horizon of the whole world. Such a moment will come. But Banchi, right this moment you’re great. Right this moment, even more than at other times, you’re the best you can possibly be. I want to go and visit Maria with you.”

  “You always manage to settle every issue in the same fashion!” Banchi said, carefully but firmly extricating his hand from her grasp. “It surprises me that for you, two different cities can be identical, that it’s so natural for you to get a city confused with things that aren’t cities. And that, despite having received a perfectly adequate education, you are entirely incapable of understanding the difference between an assenting and dissenting vote. That you can be so careless of the difference between love and that which is not love, life and that which is not life. Or that to you, such differences are by no means conclusive. Yes, I’m surprised. You are surprising, you for whom a given issue and that which is not that issue are nothing but stars which glitter in sullen silence, drearily identical. Stars which produce no sound whatsoever. Stars which are formed solely of rock, without an atmosphere through which sound waves could travel. Where all that is visible is the horizon of light, drawn out like a long gold filament in the absolute darkness. Only that horizon which is called ‘the closed eyelid of the divine.’ Marvellous things can sometimes be true, you know. But though I’m a failed visionary who sets out every night on an abstract journey, searching for a single star, all the same, I could still die for my family, the family of this life. I was born and raised in this city where wolves still appear now and then, where the rich keep pet crocodiles in their gardens while the homeless spend every night wailing in despair. So there’s no such thing as a zoo in this city. I’m both surprised and frightened by how easily you can think of this city overlapping with the one in which you were born and raised. This word ‘simultaneously’, which you’re so fond of using, frightens me. It’s not at all the simple, innocuous thing you think it is. The power of repeated phrases goes beyond that of language. You who, having appeared suddenly as a breath of wind, will clearly disappear again after having poured out countless individual words, as though this is nothing at all, are surprising. Surprising and frightening. I marvel at you, you who skip so easily from one city to the next. You’re like someone reciting a story which has neither beginning nor end, someone who lives inside such a story. You’re as dizzying as the indivisible universe. You’re like the old tale I heard when I was young, recited continuously over four days and nights. The words that
come from your mouth always sound like something being read aloud; you’re constantly saying what you are not; I think that sometimes you yourself are that which is being spoken. You who have metamorphosed, become derivative of yourself, a metaphor of yourself, endlessly diluted, to the point of transparency. You are strange and surprising, but it’s okay for you stay in our house even so. For as long as you’d like to be there. We welcome you. You will see what an incredibly kind, friendly person my wife is. She won’t be showing you kindness simply because my father telephoned to ask us for this favour. Whoever comes to visit, whether family, friends, or my guests, she always gives them her whole-hearted hospitality. She’s a nurse at the hospital, she earns one hundred and fifty dollars a month. That’s the woman for whose sake I have to decide whether to vote for or against. I have to decide whether to sell that vague land, that place which we city-dwellers have never been able to visit, and which we never will set eyes on in the future, either, whether to let the Japanese become its legal owners. Whether or not the Japanese buy the land, my body and that land are likely to remain utterly unrelated forever, mutually unknown entities, and I will never graze so much as a single sheep on it, and yet I’m involved in deciding the issue of its sale—it’s incredibly perplexing. The 2000s were a truly difficult decade for me. And now all of a sudden I find myself involved in selling land. This will probably seem meaningless to you, but when I think of how I will end up seeing this land countless times in the dreams I am yet to have, this land which I have, of course, never actually seen, not even in a photograph, this present life already surprises me. In my dreams I will ride a horse across that land, a lonely old chieftain like my forebears.

  That land from which my blood and bones were formed, upon which my ancestors lived, which will be forever unknown to me. But no, perhaps even right this moment I am really and actually holding a shabby bundle in my hand, leading my wife and children across that land, taking a lifetime to cross it on foot. Land that it would take someone their whole lifetime to cross. Given that to me this land exists in actuality as a second reality, running parallel to this one, having to decide the issue of its legal sale through a democratic ballot, here in this distant city, feels like holding a ballot to decide whether I will see Maria again. Your belief that two or more individual kinds of phenomena can coexist in one world will never fail to surprise me. If chaos is truly the fundamental nature of time, as you maintain, then I will both see Maria again and not see her. Because those two outcomes will likely remain eternally undecided, or at least until the day when all of our lives come to an end. In that case, what will become of the land? What will become of that barren wilderness which I’ve never seen, where no one has ever lived, and of the ballot? Ah, what a load of nonsense this is! I’ve always hated such senselessness! Let’s put it aside. The government has said that it’s a wasteland, a barren steppe devoid of vegetation, littered with heaps of stones and bleached animal bones, where blind field mice and starving foxes burrow into the dried-up earth. Long-ago traders who crossed mountain ranges and continents on foot did not use that steep, rugged land as a route, and the only ones who ever claimed to have set foot there were those who were murderers, the banished, or those for whom a long period of wandering had left their mind unsound. The modern age is the age of the map. As it was no longer permissible for any corner of the world to remain a blank, explorers went there and affixed their names to it, making topographical maps of rivers and mountain ranges. And so, for the first time, that place became ‘territory.’ I know that I will never see that land. But I also know that I may well spend my entire life encountering it in dreams, that it may become inextricably woven into a lifetime’s worth of dreams. I am a city-dweller. I spent my childhood in a one-room university dorm apartment with a coal fire, and my children will grow up in a similarly cramped downtown apartment. A pauper’s apartment which will crumble helplessly at the first earthquake. I have to sell the steppe wilderness littered with the bones of camels. I feel a sense of responsibility towards the issue. It is an uncontrollable vertigo. The vertigo of democracy, the vertigo of city life, the vertigo of density, the vertigo of rationality and actuality. How strange it is, that I myself came out of that land, land which I would one day end up selling off. My bones are formed from its soil. My father was born there. Until he reached the age of eighteen and went off to university in Leningrad, he lived in a tribal tent covered in wolf hides, and drank warm goat’s milk. Between what the government is saying, what the explorers wrote down in their books, and my father’s words, there’s something that doesn’t add up. I mean, were our ancestors banished criminals? Or might they perhaps, as my father maintains, have always lived on that land, might they even be living there still? Who are they? Are they perhaps none other than I myself? Either way, they are clearly people to whom nobody pays attention, people who are not seen. That’s distressed me for a long time. But you cannot understand me, you cannot understand my being distressed by such things. The land is making even that distress, the last piece of my inheritance, into something both vague and ‘simultaneous.’”

  They walked without speaking for a while.

  “I’m grateful to you and your father for letting me stay here,” Kyung-hee said to Banchi. “Even though it’s been more than a year since I last saw him.” At that, Banchi peered down at Kyung-hee and smiled faintly. “It’s been over five years since I saw him last. True, he always helps me out with money. But in my opinion, it doesn’t look like he’ll ever return to this country, not even if he were granted an entry permit.”

  The face of Mr. Nobody, whom they both missed, appeared briefly in their minds.

  “Banchi, at heart you’re probably perfectly aware of this, but there are certain things which are unchanging, no matter where you are or what you’re doing. For example, someone being born when someone else dies. Or the moon being the sun’s only bride, despite never once being able to meet. In my opinion, it’s an absolute rule that when one door closes, somewhere else, another door which had previously been invisible appears. Don’t worry about what’s waiting outside that door. There’s no need to be distressed because you want to change the world. There’s no need to be distressed over what you want. You can hope for what you want in a way that is pure and without suffering. Irrespective of whether or not this wish is fulfilled. Even if you didn’t actually make any effort to try and bring it about, you’d still be able to keep that wish intact for your whole life. I don’t want to coerce you, I just want to tell you this as a suggestion, nothing more. You could go to Maria. It seems as though you could also return to that land of your father’s right now, and live clad in wolf hides. But not only that: you could do both of these things simultaneously. What does it matter about long-dead explorers or the maps they made? Forget the gangs who call themselves politicians, who barely know twenty words to string together. Some of the government officials clearly have no desire to set foot on that land. They’ll probably content themselves with giving it a once-over from the comfort of an aeroplane. I hope you’ll stop driving yourself into deeper distress, wondering what they’ll be thinking about inside that plane. If you go there you’ll probably find that the hills join up as though stretching out their arms to each other, that during the brief rainy season the rivers flow naturally from one valley to another, that short-lived flowers are happy to go without names, blooming without regard for what they might be called. In that harsh wilderness, where the riverbeds dry up once the rainy season is over, the grasses will wither and die, but they will not call such a thing ‘distress.’ In that land onto which no borders have been drawn, where there are no soldiers, no flags, no permanent residents. Maria used to say that she wanted to go there, do you remember? Because she wanted to witness the entire process by which a dead horse’s flesh-and-blood body rotted into the ground, to stand right next to it from beginning to end. Maria said, we ourselves are the only thing hampering us in making a decision. You yourself are the only thing preventing you from going
to that land. And imagining that one concrete individual will make more mistakes than anyone else in this world, that you might be able to determine anything in reality—well, such things only hold true in your imagination, just like the belief that the decision will have any real influence on your existence. But I’m only saying this to you as a suggestion, purely that, so I’ll shut up now.”

  Banchi’s house was an old apartment in the city centre. It was a cramped house with only two rooms, but it was warm and, according to him, the best thing about it was that it was near his children’s school. The best location it could be, as my children don’t need to cross any dangerous roads, go down any dark alleyways, or past drinking joints of dubious repute. On top of that, there are even two scrawny poplars in the alley, next to the bins. Nature-isn’t that a luxury in this city? When the children grow up, I’m planning to tell them how many green trees there are in Vienna and Leipzig. The largest room in Banchi’s house functioned as a living room, guest bedroom, his study, and even a playroom for his youngest son, who wasn’t yet a year old. On the shelves of this room were the sutras Banchi had translated; Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, his favourite book; several of his father’s books, and the literary magazine he published in collaboration with some friends; he pointed this out to Kyung-hee. His wife made up a batch of warm soupy rice with lamb. She didn’t know any German, so Banchi explained, “We went for a walk around the centre. We passed by the spot where the North Korean embassy used to be, and Sisi restaurant. There was a ton of dust in the road, same as always. On the way back I popped into the shop out front and bought two bottles of water for Kyung-hee, some vegetable juice for you, and Cola for the kids.”

  Banchi took a small notebook down from the shelves, opened it and showed it to Kyung-hee. The notebook was crammed with poetry, but all written in Cyrillic; only one poem had been written in English, the only one Kyung-hee was able to read.