Recitation

by Suah Bae

  So what happened with your sister?, the East Asian asked Kyung-hee, his voice composed as he ran a finger over the rim of his coffee cup. Did she apologise, or offer you some kind of explanation? But Kyung-hee said, I’m not waiting for the opera to start, I’m waiting for it to end. At that, the East Asian exclaimed, ah, so you’re a fan of that famous singer too, I’ve heard that some of his fans think nothing of flying in from distant cities to see him perform, even from as far away as Japan. But Kyung-hee said, no, I’m not a fan of the singer. But it’s true that I’m waiting for him. One day I decided that I needed to go travelling on foot in order to achieve a particular desire; somewhat embarrassingly, that journey didn’t even last a single day, but the resolution did become the seed of the discontinuous, intermittent wandering I later embarked on. At one point I landed at a certain airport and went in search of accommodation, found something that looked suitable, noticed a theatre opposite and thus, entirely by chance, ended up in the audience for one of that singer’s performances. He’s not one of the really big names like Placido Domingo, but a decent number turned out all the same. Later on, I happened across him again in Berlin and then Shanghai. It seems to me that chance, in all its unfathomable mystery, had caused our paths to cross repeatedly during this particular period of our lives! I mean, haven’t you ever read a story in which a person’s hopes, their hours, their memories determine the path they take through life, but you have no idea how? That’s how it is whenever one person encounters another in the course of their own fixed path; these coincidences, already fixed in advance, happen far more often than we think. So even if, after my wanderings have brought me to this city, during the few days I’m staying here there happens to be, of all things, yet another of his performances, that wouldn’t surprise me in the least, she answered. Did you try having a frank conversation with your sister, to get to the bottom of what had happened? the East Asian changed the subject again.

  “That might have worked,” Kyung-hee said, “after enough time had passed, only it wasn’t possible because, after that night, I never saw my sister again. She was nowhere to be seen when I got up the next morning, but that was no surprise, as she always slept in late. My mother had just finished getting ready to go to work, and was sitting at the kitchen table. I remember noticing how her eyelids drooped, their elasticity gone, and the foul odour coming from her skin, which she’d tried and failed to mask with perfume. She looked to have aged fifty, no, five hundred years in the space of a single night. I was all too aware that my mother was a dried-up schoolmarm whom her pupils found unlovable, as I myself attended the very same school at which she worked. No, rather than finding her ‘unlovable’ it would be more accurate to say that she was the object of hatred, especially among the older girls. The main reason for this being her age and her hideous appearance; her nervy, fierce personality was less of an issue. To most human beings, old age excites ridicule as well as abhorrence. And if an old person fails to conceal a strong desire for something, that is taken as a viable reason to inflict the most severe ridicule. Bearing in mind that desire is a sign of being alive—the dead are those who have moved beyond wanting—and that there is a tendency to consider old people as living on borrowed time, having been granted a temporary stay of execution. I was perfectly aware that the senior girls all wished my mother would hurry up and die. That is, if there was absolutely no chance of her choosing to retire before they themselves graduated. Those girls were on the cusp of that ferocious, neurotic period in their lives, keen as a knife edge and marked by the tang of blood, and quite naturally had complex, confusing feelings about that sharp, stinging femininity that was in fact their own, which they had no idea how to respond to or how to demonstrate, and so their cruelty was in fact understandable. The rumour spread among them that my mother tormented certain girls because she envied their pretty faces. That she detested the femininity which was no longer hers. Girls who were older than me would stare hard at my face for a sickeningly long time when they brushed past me in the corridors. I knew exactly what that staring meant. It was fear of and contempt for the hysteria which was my future inheritance, collective sadism, animal curiosity, aggressive provocation, hostility, provoked by the menarche, whose object was unclear, and hatred of me, who was my mother, and in whom all these things were included and condensed.

  That morning, though, staring at my mother’s drooping skin, slack as a corpse’s, which perhaps was what she genuinely was, I remember feeling for the first time in my life something akin to pity for her. Not only because her thick, yellow tears were spilling onto the table. She pushed the rice bowl and plate of fish towards me, hesitantly reached out to stroke my hair, though there was no special reason for her to have done this, said an absent-minded good morning to me as she sometimes did, bit her lip, sobbed soundlessly, then, unable to hold back any longer, burst into a grotesque stream of snivelling. I had an instinctive aversion to being touched by my mother and, wanting to avoid being infected by the elements which constituted her, I shifted away, though carefully, so it wouldn’t seem that I was deliberately cringing back. If I only managed to keep away, I would never droop and spill and slacken like her. I remember watching as she blew her nose, seeing how twisted her wrist was, as though someone had stamped on it. Her own explanation was that she had rheumatoid arthritis from writing on that cursed blackboard for all those years. Her tears were yellow-tinged, dirty-looking. I stared, marvelling, at that unusually viscous liquid.

  At the time, though I doubt my mother was aware of it, there was a game that was very popular among the schoolgirls, similar to the hallucination game. We arrive at school clutching our book bags and trudge into line. The playground in my memory is entirely, implausibly devoid of vegetation, constantly washed in an opaque, arid light. It is a scene of everlasting drought, the desolation of something from which all the healthy flesh has been gouged out, where the stones are frozen blue in winter. Not a single drop of water dripped from the rusted tap, and the tap itself, plastered with bricks and cement, was full of pallid moss; after it rained it would be swarming with earthworms. All day every day, songs inciting nationalism and patriotism boomed out from the playground speakers. As the school was used as a military drill yard on weekends, the yard would be crossed by trucks full of people in army uniforms. As though a part of the opaque dust stirred up by these trucks, some unidentified voice begins to whisper out among the children standing there. The first mouths to channel and pass it on belonged to the tall boys in the upper grades, then the long-haired girls who had abruptly materialised from behind the main building, pretty girls with charming, limpid eyes who were always top of the class and who were doted on both at home and at school, then the lovely little classroom prostitutes who, though there was nothing exceptional about their grades, were the objects of secret desire on the part of their perverted teachers; then the middle rank, whose mediocrity in other respects had led them to develop cunning and quick wits; and finally the rumour finds its way even to the indistinct majority, a bespectacled tribe so hemmed in by rules that it was difficult for any of their attributes, either their timidity or the exemplary way in which they fitted the mould, to be considered a characteristic. The fact is that none of us are our parents’ children. Our true parents were gobbled up a long time ago by aliens—don’t laugh!—and the old couple currently impersonating our parents are spies wearing the bloodstained shells of our parents that the aliens spat out. And there’s nothing we can do about any of this. The naïve conclusion was that ultimately all we could do was guard our secrets, since if our ‘parents’ were to get wind of them they would include them in their nightly reports to the aliens, when they huddled under the covers and used a special device to transmit information about the earth in the form of radio waves.

  You’ll have guessed this already, of course, but not even a naïve young school kid would have taken a rumour like this at face value. Spreading rumours was just a bit of fun for them, a kind of game. And an incredibly popular one
at that. For example, the rumour that a war was about to break out was always doing the rounds. Though it wasn’t as though the rumours always passed from the stronger kids to the weak, from the privileged minority who were loved and had excellent grades to those who were run-of-the-mill, beneath notice. On the contrary, it was frequently the opposite… generally, the tribe that was strongest in the world of rumour were the flagrant exhibitionists, those with a particular aptitude for conjuring up fanciful scenarios, as they were the kind who enjoyed concealing themselves in secluded places, like spies on undercover operations. In the course of my childhood I participated in several collective rumour games of a similar sort. Now and then there were some extreme cases. When it happened that the first-year runts were the first to catch wind of a given rumour, then there would indeed be storms of tears, but the majority just took them as a bit of mischief, something to shiver at, increasing their enjoyment by pretending to believe them more than they actually did. Absurdly enough, as I stood there staring at my mother’s yellow tears, I found myself recalling that rumour. No doubt it was extremely childish to imagine that those inhuman yellow tears might be a sign of alien genetics. It was probably due to that occasion that ‘yellow tears’ became added to the alien rumour as an identifying characteristic.

  Just then, my mother told me that my sister had left home while I’d been sleeping. I was shocked, this all being very abrupt. After all, though it was theoretically possible that my old sister might leave home to get married or for some similar reason, it had never crossed my mind that this might actually happen, and besides, there was nothing normal about such a sudden disappearance. What’s more, according to my mother’s subsequent explanation, rather than my sister having left home to get married, she’d gone abroad to study singing. Apparently she’d spent the past few years preparing for such a move! That certainly came as a shock to me: that she was a fan of music, that she’d ever sung a single song, that she’d actually wanted or prepared for anything in her life. It was hard to believe, but then, even unbelievable things do come about from time to time. I don’t recall precisely how I interpreted her departure, but I certainly found it less exciting than the rumour about metamorphosed aliens and fake mothers. I stared fixedly at the sight of my mother’s yellow tears as they soaked into her blouse and dripped onto the table, stained the dish and spoon, and dirtied the corners of the knitted floor cushion. Conscious of my gaze, my mother spent a few seconds haphazardly fumbling with her face as though trying to wipe away her tears, then, abandoning that for whatever reason, clasped her hideous wrist with the opposite hand, then let both hands fall heavily onto her lap. My father shuffled into the room with his tie hanging loose over his shirt, wearing the knitted vest in which he usually drifted about the house. His socks so baggy around the ankles that they sagged right down onto his feet. On his way to the front door he stopped in his tracks and asked me why I hadn’t written him a Father’s Day letter. It was something we did every year at school, you see. I told him that I’d forgotten to take any letter paper with me that day, so as punishment they’d made me stand outside the classroom for the full hour. Mumbling to himself, he said that I could have borrowed some paper from one of my classmates. My mother, who’d been sitting there blankly making no attempt to wipe away her tears, her face a sallow, expressionless mask, curtly told my father not to start with that whining. For some reason or other a golden bee was buzzing to and fro between the table and the kitchen area, drawing a mysterious pattern in the air, though, as I recall, not a single fellow creature was there to interpret the sign.

  Strangely enough, my father, who always set off to work earlier than my mother, was still hovering by the door, fingering the fountain pen in his chest pocket. Like someone trying to think through what they were hesitating over and why. The phone rang. Ours wasn’t the kind of home where that was a regular occurrence, but when someone did call they invariably did so at an early hour. The maid answered the phone. It was for my mother, but she didn’t want to take it. It was a call from the parents of a student in her class; their pet cat was due to be put down that morning, and since the whole family apparently needed to attend the deathbed, the child would have to skip the morning’s classes. After the maid had hung up the phone, she relayed these words to my mother. My mother listened in silence, completely expressionless, but my father’s face instantly turned the colour of earth. The reddish-black blood whirling beneath his skin, the decrepit tendons stretched to breaking point, were all clearly revealed, as though someone had grasped his tie and was using it to throttle him. I recall that his eyes briefly turned vivid red. Like a fish that had died a bad death. They were old eyes, engaged in a life-or-death struggle to keep the tears at bay. No one said a word. The atmosphere resembled that familiar tension when one person is about to strike another. Or when an event is imminent, superficially similar to a physical attack but actually quite different in character. Whatever it was, my father fled from it, hurrying to the front door apparently oblivious to the hindrance of his sagging socks. A glugging sound bubbled up from his chest like when a drain runs backwards. He beat a hasty disappearance through the door, and still no one opened their mouth to comment. I recalled the recent ‘oyster shell incident’ at the girls’ high school. My father taught mathematics at a school run by the same foundation as the one I attended; his position attracted every bit as much of the pupils’ hatred as did my mother’s. There’d been a rumour going around that, on top of being old and ugly, he wasn’t even any good at his job, and only kept it through toadying up to senior management. Not only that, but he was never able to satisfactorily shake off the kind of scandalous rumours which often dog older male teachers. According to those rumours, my father had a thing for the plumpest of the older girls, the ones whose flesh rippled over their shoulders down to ripe, rounded breasts, and would deliberately follow them around, spotting his chance whenever they were climbing stairs to give their buttocks a quick, furtive pinch. Now, I’m not saying the oyster shell ballot itself was a rumour. It was something copied from the ancient Athenians, who used to hold an annual vote on the most hated person in the city, writing names on potsherds (the Greek word for which was almost identical to their word for oyster shells). Of course, the schoolgirls didn’t have potsherds, so instead they used scraps of ordinary paper, which then went into an empty carton of instant noodles; a name was plucked out at random, and that person was the one chosen to be ‘ostracised.’ It was an open secret that one name was chosen more often than others. Of course, it was only a game, just a bit of fun. The high school girls were too old for the rumour that our parents were an alien race, so they must have needed a different game. Had my father found out about this and been plunged into disgrace? Could that be why he had fled, with a similar countenance to that of the young hawk occasionally brought to our house by a relative, who hunted with birds, when that hawk had, quite out of the blue, splayed its legs and promptly died?

  Some time later I happened across a hypothesis which sought to prove that there were no such things as extra-terrestrial organisms. It took as its premise the fact that intelligent organisms are only able to evolve in environments similar to that of the Earth. The sun was too big, the other planets either didn’t have sufficient volume, were either too near to the sun or too far from it, too blazingly hot or too freezing cold… too much, that is, for the carbon compounds from which organic bodies derive to form strong, stable bonds. Anyhow, according to this hypothesis, of the billions of solar systems in the universe, fewer than you would think fulfil such criteria, in fact our earth might be the only place that does… it made me think back over the rumour game of my childhood; I felt as though the astronomer who had written this hypothesis had constructed an elaborately continuous and connected theoretical universe, linking it up and having it expand unchecked, for our sake, for the sake of our parents, for the sake of safeguarding all of our painful memories, of defending each of our points of view, and yet in spite of that I was unable to shake t
he suspicion that, were certain theses which the scientist had rejected outright (perhaps because the attitude known as the scientific, which we so readily place our trust in, is in fact extremely fallible) found to be true—for example, were some kind of as-yet-unknown consciousness with physical form able to exist even inside the sun’s blazing flares or the tornado of an enormous planet made up of an icy core shrouded by thick dust, with no interest in responding to the language of radio waves which we have been periodically sending out for many years now (though we would never know the reason that terrestrial organisms didn’t respond to our signal), were there to be certain unknown races living in a state whereby they no longer possessed either flesh, the conglomerate lump of an organic body, or even matter, were their existence to be entirely independent of phenomena, meaning that they had moved beyond being corporate bodies of oxygen, and that an ‘environment’ which could sustain living bodies was, therefore, largely irrelevant to them—in that case, using the conditions of Earth’s environment as a basis for our scientific investigation into the possible existence of such organisms would be about as effective as studying a shrivelled caterpillar in a flowerpot that had died three years ago.