Recitation

by Suah Bae

  That bespectacled monk passing by just now, sheltering under a small umbrella amid the hazy shade made by the wall of fog outside the window, isn’t he the Dalai Lama? Kyung-hee was aware of this thought flitting unbidden through her mind. A young man sitting by the window, probably a university student, clearly had the same thought. From being hunched over his phone he jerked himself half out of his seat and touched his hand to his forehead, staring piercingly at the monk’s retreating figure. His mouth and eyes were both wide with shock. He automatically blurted out, “That’s the Dalai Lama! That’s the Dalai Lama!” A clattering of coffee cups rippled through the café.

  Otherwise, there was no reaction. Everyone remained absorbed in their own conversations, laughing and gossiping excitedly. But the young man’s hasty outburst gave Kyung-hee the courage to say to the East Asian, “That student wasn’t seeing things. I also thought I saw the Dalai Lama going by just now, a monk’s robe seeming to flit past close to the window of this Starbucks. Only, a gust of wind blew his robe over his face, so I couldn’t get a proper look at him.” Without even bothering to turn towards the window, the East Asian said, “It’s impossible that you saw what you think you did. Does it make sense that the Dalai Lama would appear out of nowhere, without any prior notice that he was visiting this city? You shouldn’t imagine that every tonsured East Asian wearing monk’s clothes is a Buddhist. Aside from street musicians, performance artists, and beggars looking for attention, there are also people who go around dressed like that purely for their own enjoyment.”

  “That winter, I saw her.” Privately disappointed, Kyung-hee continued with her story. At some point the East Asian had moved to sit across from Kyung-hee, and was now leaning forwards, as though he was hanging on her every word. His black pupils radiated affability. But this kind of behaviour didn’t sit well with Kyung-hee, who rejected the European belief that a person’s eyes could tell you anything about what they were truly feeling. She found the East Asian’s exaggerated attentiveness grating. It’s just a simple story about my sister, so why is this person going so over-the-top in his role as a chance listener, is it nothing more than the superficial etiquette particular to the Far East, or has this story revealed something important about me, is it possible that he lived next door to me when I was a child, that he was one of the neighbours I’ve since forgotten, even as she carried on speaking these thoughts were running through Kyung-hee’s mind, all in her mother tongue.

  “That winter, I saw her. Really saw her, that is, in a way I never had before. One night that winter, I was in bed reading a manhwa comic. ‘Manhwa’ being on the list of items that were strictly forbidden in our house, alongside romance novels, which were considered indecent, swearing, sugary biscuits that rotted your teeth, and laughter, which was frivolous. And so, when I woke up in the middle of the night and discovered a dark shadow looming in my room, it stands to reason that what seized me, ahead of any ill-defined, instinctive fear of the dark, or of ghosts, was an all too concrete terror. I automatically assumed that the person standing there was one of my parents, that while I was asleep they’d taken the opportunity to go through my bag and desk drawer. That was the kind of thing they did from time to time. My heart contracted. What I felt at that moment was the wish to die right there and then, the genuine desire to be dead, to have it happen without a moment’s hesitation and thus avoid both the heavy punishment which was surely imminent, and any contemptible, desperate fretting in the face of that punishment, one whose soul is as hideously crooked as their body, and whose mind has been cauterised. It really was a sincere wish, so much so that I didn’t feel the slightest pang at the thought of relinquishing whatever life I would otherwise have gone on to live. In a movement which I hoped would look as though I were merely tossing in my sleep, I pulled the quilt over my head, but in doing so I knocked the manhwa, which had been next to my pillow, right off the bed. The book thundered onto the floor, which shuddered as if in an earthquake—in what, to me, felt and sounded every bit as severe. Now there’s no way out, I thought to myself. My possession of such an item was about to be brought to light, and they would ask me where I’d got the money to buy it. When that happened, there would be nothing for it but to confess all, yes, to confess that I’d swiped a note from my mother’s purse the day before yesterday. I might even have to confess that this wasn’t the first time. They would pick up the manhwa and beat me over the head with it. Or they would shunt me off to prison, their faces cold and unrelenting, just like they’d always said they would. At school I would be constantly harried, be made to feel the disgrace of what I’d done. My friends would all be informed that I was a thief and a liar. Trying to bury my head further down under the quilt, I was praying that if something had to happen then let it, whatever it was, for god’s sake just get it over with. The black shadow stood by the desk, and though it must have seen the manhwa fall to the floor, it had remained entirely motionless. Far from snatching up the book and using it to beat me over the head, it was just standing there with its arms folded, apparently uninterested in my illicit reading material. As time passed I became increasingly aware of how strange this whole situation was, and though I was still terribly afraid, the need to know eventually won out, forcing me to push my head fully out from underneath the quilt. As soon as I did this I was confronted with a face which loomed so close it seemed practically to be touching mine. My reflexive response to the shock was to shield my face with my hands, even before I had time to realise who that other face belonged to; in that split second I’d taken it for my own, reflected in a black mirror.

  After a few moments, though, I realised that it was my sister who had come into my room. And that there was something even more shocking than the mere fact of her presence: she was naked, without a shred of clothing on her. Two occurrences which surpassed the bounds of imagination! Granted, I’d seen her many times in a fairly slovenly state, wandering around the house in nothing but her chemise, and with her hair all dishevelled, but never entirely naked. Unlike the kind of accidental situation in which you get undressed before heading to take a shower and a family member catches sight of you naked, this was a revolutionary occurrence in which a person had deliberately chosen to be naked, and to flaunt that nakedness. Revolutionary, of course such a word wouldn’t have popped into my head at that age, but I was still aware that I was witnessing an event of that character. Even now, I’ve no idea why she came into my room at that hour. It might well have been the first time she’d ever set foot in there. To me it was all terribly unfamiliar, troubling, even frightening. A burglar would probably have been far less of a shock.

  I can’t remember whether she acknowledged my presence in any way. Whether she asked me something, or even just spoke my name… this has only just occurred to me, but is it even certain that she would have known my name? Given the age difference, perhaps she would have thought of me as a small, mute frog being raised in her house. And had my lips ever pronounced her name? Had I ever even thought it? Over the course of our lives, we often meet people with the same name… names are like acquired behaviour, souls we learn to inhabit. I live within my name, not the other way around. It sounds strange, but how on earth would I have known her name? Anyway, I’ll just say a little bit more, not about her name but about her naked body. Because it wasn’t an ordinary body, you see, that just anyone might have. Her stomach, covered with gooseflesh and distended as though filled with the kind of gasses given off during decomposition, please forgive me, to a young girl it couldn’t help but look like a nightmare.”

  Kyung-hee stopped speaking for a while and met the East Asian’s gaze straight on; to find out if he believed she was speaking the truth, if he really was listening with the most sincere concentration, if he was absorbed in her story. Though the East Asian didn’t avoid Kyung-hee’s gaze, he nevertheless appeared somewhat aloof, as though he were gazing not at Kyung-hee herself but at a different, transparent body behind hers. Kyung-hee reflexively placed both hands on her stomach,
one on top of the other. I wouldn’t be able to do a two-person play, Kyung-hee thought. My voice simply doesn’t have sufficient expressive power. And besides, I’m no stage actor. People would think I was imitating someone else’s story. In other words, they would be constantly aware that I was performing. I’m sure of it. So I have to write a letter of refusal. The East Asian leaned back in his chair and exhaled loudly.

  Kyung-hee had been too caught up in her story to notice that a faint light had crept into the scene outside the window. Under a sky thick and heavy as dirty cotton, countless shadows were passing back and forth, bundled up in coats, their backs to the light. Footsteps fluttered heavily. When a driver forgot to slow down to make a turn, their car would briefly resemble a lighthouse, the beam from its headlights scything through forty-five degrees. Thanks to the discontinued light of the unlit street lamps, suspended midway between the sky and the ground, to the lidless windows darkly glittering, and the fragmented shadows darker still, and thanks to the ashen smog which was rising up from underground and forming a thick blanket over the pavements, shrouding faces and muffling footsteps while at the same time swelling every object with still more abundant contours, the night’s materiality—is this night?—as it unfurled in front of the opera house was a tangible, material fact. Like faces of ash in a volcanic cloud, like the real world seen only through a plastic screen suspended over the stage, Kyung-hee thought in her mother tongue.

  “There was something very fishy about my sister’s exposed stomach. The old house in which we lived was a shabby, dull, two-story affair, and was incredibly difficult to heat. Because of money, that is. We could never just casually switch the heating on. The only exception was if we had someone visiting. The only heater in the whole house was a small electric thing that lived in my parents’ room. In winter we had to have a hot water bottle every night. As a child I was constantly shivering with cold; I seem to have grown used to it. I remember there were always articles in the newspaper saying that the price of oil had risen. Never any saying it had fallen. Isn’t that strange…,” Kyung-hee murmured brightly, still staring into the East Asian’s eyes.

  The warmest place in the house was the small kitchen. As the room had originally been used as a greenhouse it had glass walls on all sides, allowing the light to flood in at all hours of the day. When Kyung-hee stepped into the kitchen there was a young hawk on the floor.

  The hawk’s eyes were yellow as oiled paper and round as small Chinese coins.

  The majority of its feathers were a bright, earthy brown, with a smattering of glossy blacks and whites sticking out here and there. The bright sun of the declining afternoon drew an arc of yellow light as it passed over them.

  She thought of it using the name ‘hawk’ because she remembered having heard that word used somewhere. The actual form of the young hawk there in front of her was the very last thing she became aware of, after all other information related to hawks had passed through her mind. At first the hawk was still as a stuffed specimen, then it took a few crabbed steps, in fits and starts, springing up in the unrealistic manner characteristic to birds, but neither spread out its wings and flew up, nor went any great distance across the floor. The hawk shuffled slow as a venerable philosopher. A length of string was tied to one of its feet and on the other end of the string was an enormous dumbbell. The figure of the falconer in his triangular hat was nowhere to be seen. The hawk craned its neck this way and that at regular intervals, looking faintly mischievous. Kyung-hee laughed. At the hawk’s being there.

  Not knowing the difference between a goshawk and a black kite, the regular kind of hawk, Siberian peregrine falcons, mountain hawks and sparrow hawks, Kyung-hee was ignorant of the very concept which the word ‘hawk’ denoted, and yet here she was making free with that same word; dreamily, she surmised that this was all somehow necessary to complete her confession, a confession she had begun for no clear reason.

  “…and she wrapped both hands around my throat and squeezed; before I had time to guess what she intended, I was choking. I was trying to say something, then I realised that my throat had closed up, that there was no sound coming out,” Kyung-hee continued. “I was baffled, of course, but actually the first thing I felt was sadness. Yes, I felt sad, sad and uncomfortable; either because of the look on my sister’s face, or because of the whole sequence of abnormal, exceptional occurrences which had brought this situation about. Even in the midst of this confusion, I was writhing in physical pain. The thought that passed through my mind just then was that I knew absolutely nothing about her, and so there was no way for me to judge whether there was some sound reason for her extraordinary actions, or whether she had simply lost her mind. I was seized by the conviction that I had to stop her, somehow or other I had to pit my own strength against that which I could feel in her grip. Strangely enough, in that very moment I recalled a scene that had taken place one gathering dusk, when someone had called her name. She was walking down the twilit alley. The alley sloped at a gentle gradient, lined by brick walls carpeted with soft, pale green moss, the scent of early roses coming from the gardens beyond. It was an evening in early summer, and I was on my way home from school. Our house was at the very end of the alley, right at the top of the slope. But, inexplicably, the person walking along the alley is not me but my sister. The retreating figure is that of my sister. The one returning from school is me, the one being spoken to by the objects which the sunlight touches is also me, the soft breath of the evening breeze and the scent of the roses are sensations I am experiencing, no one else; but the composite whole walking down that old alleyway with the rose branches trailing down over the red bricks, where the evening light has gathered, flushed the colour of rust, is not me but my sister. The strangeness of this strikes me. And then someone calls her name. I, no, she, turns and looks back. In that moment my sensations return to my body, I recover the whole that is I, and I carry on walking down the alley. Why of all things did I recall that preposterous memory, in that strange moment when my sister was strangling me? I grab her wrists and struggle to loosen her grip, squirming furiously to try and shake her off. Whether her face was telling me anything, that I don’t remember. Perhaps she was suffering from some form of mental disorder which had been kept secret from me, or, though the possibility is so slim as to be practically non-existent, perhaps she detested me for some reason of which I was ignorant. As far as I remember, I never stole from her, never teased her or bothered her in any way. I’d barely ever looked at her, never mind disturbed her in any way. Or perhaps she’d simply started awake from a terrible nightmare and been caught up in a temporary madness. The fact was that I was somewhat ill at ease in her presence. Our parents treated me harshly, frequently beat me, but there wasn’t that awkward sense of distance between us that there was with my sister and I. My parents had a direct influence on my life—more precisely, on my survival—and so my feelings towards them were an uncomplicated mix of fear and dislike. Even leaving aside the fact that my sister and I were not ‘sisterly’ in the sense of being close, I thought of her as terribly old, and since the two of us rarely came into contact I think that alone was sufficient reason for me to feel awkward in her presence. Having a sister who is old is quite different to having old parents. Though at the time, perhaps I even thought she was as old as they were! Because, of course, it’s not easy for a child to differentiate between adults of different ages, so to me anyone over thirty looked as though they belonged to a race whose members were all of an identical age. In light of that, I can’t discount the possibility that my sister was actually much younger than I’m guessing. Perhaps it was only her oppressed, melancholy lifestyle, a day-to-day existence in which there was little hope of change, that made her look like an old woman. In any case, she was much taller than me, much stronger, and at least twice my size; barely an adolescent, I was truly incapable of contending with the pressure of her hands around my throat, a pressure which had all her body weight behind it. I struggled and writhed. But, at the
thought that this was my first time seeing her face up close, even within the pain I still managed to notice how bizarre and improbable it was that, in spite of the fact that by that time my eyes had got used to the darkness inside the room, and the light from the street lamps in the comparatively bright alley were shining in through the gap in the curtains, I was completely unable to remember what her face looked like. An enormous hole, that’s right, I only remember her face as an enormous hole or holes. The upshot of all this was that my breath was cut off, I could neither scream for help nor beg her to stop. I remember that, as I was struggling, my shoulder touched her stomach. That hideous stomach, which, as I’ve already explained, her clothes had always previously concealed, so enormously bloated as to appear quite bizarre. As hideous as a dead cow’s. She said something, and only then did I become aware that she stuttered, so badly, in fact, that she was barely able to speak. No, it’s more exact to say that this was the first time I recalled her stutter. The only thing I could do to prevent myself from laughing in her face was to affect a coughing fit, but she was squeezing my neck so hard that my throat was unable to produce the slightest rasping breath. Instead I tried to kick her in the stomach, with all the strength I had.

  People tend to think that women always envy each other. Similarly, they believe that this envy also exists between sisters. But that kind of explanation would only be possible for sisters with much less of an age gap. To me, her hideous jar of a stomach rendered her conclusively unattractive, just a fat cow like other older women, while her stutter made her seem clumsy and wretched; such considerations seemed, if only momentarily, to free me from the pain my body was experiencing, but they didn’t seem to have anything to do with envy, merely cold appraisal, as one might assess an inanimate object. And of course, it had never even occurred to me to compare her existence with my own. I’m certain that the instant my knee touched the perilously swollen flesh of her stomach, I fainted, laughing inwardly, or else slid back into a deep, unbroken sleep. The next morning I was woken by the alarm clock, the same as always. My throat’s mucous membrane burned, feeling tighter than usual, and there were reddish-black bruises on both sides of my neck, but I just assumed that I’d strangled myself while in the grip of one of my recurrent nightmares. Which was something that had actually happened. I enjoyed thinking of myself as Desdemona of the tragic throat.”