Recitation

by Suah Bae

  I think it’s possible that as a child, you lived through a very peculiar time. For example, living under the same roof as your own future, a future that felt like a stranger to whom you were, nevertheless, strangely close. All parents can be seen as a past which wears the future’s clothes. We become parents, I think, because we hope to lie down alongside the ancestors of the past. This is something I’m always thinking about, but our being simultaneously past and prophecy, both our own future and something produced by our parents’ bodies, is extremely significant when considered with the concept of time. It’s certainly an important reason for denying time’s continuity and successiveness. Since ‘parents’ are bodies in which hints of the future mingle with memories of the past.

  A sister who is older, who stutters, who even has an unplanned pregnancy, might be interpreted as a separate individual who has the same name as you, your own image running in parallel. Since through her you lived out a portion of the future simultaneously, she is a premonition that the life which lies ahead of you might, as Sebald said of Tlön, somehow end up composed of the remaining fragments of a fantasy, relics of a transparent fiction. I thought that your name, your face, your future, had arrived in this world in advance and were waiting for you, like several layers of time disclosed concurrently, ensconcing themselves within your memories and watching all the while, still a part of you even now.”

  Kyung-hee went over to the theatre. After she’d been waiting around outside the performers’ entrance for a little while, the singer who had played the lead that day appeared. His unusually massive frame and correspondingly large lung capacity were clearly apparent when he was on stage, but the figure who stepped out onto the road wearing a thick coat and with a shawl wrapped around his neck looked like an ordinary man, not especially striking, a bespectacled music teacher who was getting on in years. The street had darkened completely; lingering in the air alongside the thick, damp fog was the smell of iron in the blood. The police line had already been lifted, but the chalk outline of the person who had collapsed to the ground was still distinct. A gang of people crossing the street were twitching their facial muscles inexpressively and casually tossed their paper plate into the road after eating the final piece of sushi. One group, who were mainly women, detached themselves from the crowd and ran over to the singer, holding pens and programmes or autograph books out in front of them, and asked him to sign. With a friendly ‘if you would.’ Kyung-hee hung around at the back of the group, waiting until they’d all wandered off. After signing all the various things that were thrust under his nose, diligently shaking hands and maintaining an impression of general affability, by the end the singer looked almost done in. That this city boasts an unusually large number of opera programme collectors, determined to get a signature on every programme they own, is already well-known as far afield as Japan. The singer reached out and grabbed the opera programme that Kyung-hee was holding, scrawling a clumsy, mechanical signature in the blank space. “Your name?” the singer asked, pen in hand, aware that Kyung-hee was the last of the lot and therefore with the intention of displaying some extra friendliness. “Your name?” “Maria,” Kyung-hee blurted out. The singer wrote the dedication swiftly and absent-mindedly, with a familiar carelessness. ‘To darling Maria.’ He then thrust the pamphlet at Kyung-hee and strode off in the direction of the car park. Someone was heard saying that the person who had been stabbed at the crossing had died. He was the only fatality from that day’s Amok episode. Kyung-hee was shocked by the singer’s non-reaction to the name Maria. “It’s unbelievable,” she exclaimed. “I expected him to at least ask me something about Maria.” This was directed at the East Asian, who had left the Starbucks and come to stand next to Kyung-hee.

  “It’s because Maria is a common name,” the East Asian comforted her. “He would never imagine that it was somebody he actually knew.”

  “But he lived with her for two years. A long time ago, but still.” Kyung-hee sounded pained, as though vomiting out some stifling knot from inside herself.

  “He must have guessed that it would be unwise to confuse you with that Maria.”

  “Ah, that’s right, Maria was Karakorum, and an unusually liberal one at that, meaning she lived with lots of men. And lots of women too, of course. Now and then she even had couples paying her a visit, or no, to be more precise, paying her room a visit. Since Maria herself was only ever renting a room in a shared house. So in fact you could say that she lived with all of them. Each of them looked like travellers, and would turn up in front of Maria’s door, entirely unannounced, with enormous backpacks. Maria never asked how long they intended to stay. Even after a month, two months went by and they still hadn’t left, she never asked when they were planning to move on. She never even asked who they were, or whether they genuinely were the same Karakorum who’d contacted her in advance of their stay. So there were times when a Karakorum would turn up at Maria’s door when there was already one staying in her room. But they were each perfectly satisfied with their own little corner, just enough space to lay out their sleeping bag. Karakorums twice stayed with Maria in Japan, too. But were they really all Karakorum? A Karakorum husband and wife, a Karakorum couple, a singleton Karakorum, a gay Karakorum, a sixteen-year-old Karakorum and an eighty-year-old Karakorum, Maria’s Karakorum lover, Karakorums who leave and Karakorums who arrive, a landlord Karakorum, a tax collector Karakorum, people who all had different body smells, an imperfect lover Karakorum and a three-fourths lover Karakorum, they lived together in Maria’s room as though vaguely overlapping one another.”

  “And are you staying with this Maria now? Until you go back to China?”

  “I’m not going to China,” Kyung-hee said testily. “Why on earth would you say such a thing?”

  “It’s something I’ve always thought of doing myself,” the East Asian responded coolly, and Kyung-hee remembered the lie she had carelessly tossed out. “Ah, what I mean is I’m not going there right away,” she sighed. “One day the singer said to Maria, ‘I’ve spent so much of my life roaming around, with one particular issue on which I never could make up my mind; only now do I feel able to come to a clear decision.’”

  “You’ve told me so much about it, I think even I can guess what the issue was.”

  “That’s right, he meant that he wanted to have a child, so he’d have time to watch them grow up before he died.”

  “And what did Maria say to that?”

  “What options did she have? It meant that he wanted to leave her; he only phrased it like that so he could put a respectable front on it. At the time, Maria had already passed her sixtieth birthday, you see. He said, Maria, my love. I will never forget your name.”

  They walked across the man’s outlines chalked onto the zebra crossing. With all the other people. Once they’d crossed the road, the East Asian pointed left and said, “I have to go that way. It’s nearly time for my appointment with some colleagues, and we’ve arranged to meet in an office on the opposite side of that road over there. By day it’s an ordinary building where employees come to do their shifts, but at night it becomes our office. In other words, we only have that place for half of the day, in terms of hours, since our lease is only for the hours when the sun isn’t up. And in my opinion, I sense that you will go in the opposite direction.”

  When Kyung-hee had left the house she’d had no plan beyond the vague intention of meeting the singer and letting him know—or else asking—how Maria was doing, but she didn’t like the idea either of following the East Asian or of going in the opposite direction, so she said, “I still have to think a little bit more about what direction I might go in. So please go ahead to your office.” Kyung-hee was left standing absent-mindedly in the middle of the pavement, and was still there a long time after the East Asian had disappeared from sight. Kyung-hee took a taxi. This happened because the taxi driver mistakenly believed that she was trying to hail his car—while standing on the kerb, she had stretched out her arm to sweep her hair up
—and pulled up neatly in front of her. But Kyung-hee didn’t feel the need to inform the driver of this misunderstanding.

  They were passing through the city centre, past streets of silk, streets of smoke, streets of factories, streets of houses, and a riding school, to the natural history museum next to the Restored Catholic Church. The taxi driver asked Kyung-hee if the cloth with which her handbag was embroidered was Chinese silk. And then, before Kyung-hee had managed to formulate an answer, informed her that his ex-wife had at one time worked as a salesperson in a Chinese silk store. And that that store, which dealt mainly with textile products from the northwest regions of China, was not that far from the Restored Catholic Church, or the Natural History Museum, which the two of them were on their way to. A Vietnamese acupuncturist had recently opened next to the silk store, and business was thriving at a tea house across the road, which sold Japanese mochi flavoured with matcha. And the driver turned swiftly to Kyung-hee and said, “Say to me what you look for in this city, in order to remind you of your homeland. I think I can show you that.”

  “Please don’t go further than twenty euros’ worth,” Kyung-hee replied.

  “Oh, that’s far enough to show you somewhere new,” the driver said cheerily.

  The traffic wasn’t good. No, rather than staying within the bounds of ‘not good’, it had crossed over into ‘very bad.’ Even bicycles were overtaking them. Kyung-hee got the natural history encyclopedia out of her handbag, flicked through a couple of pages, then gazed out of the window. The driver explained in a friendly manner that the traffic was so bad this evening because earlier in the day there’d been a demonstration against nuclear power plants. But the demonstration had in fact finished some time ago, and the demonstrators had either returned home or gone somewhere else, a rave, for example. Kyung-hee concluded that the driver was still unaware of the Amok episode which had taken place in front of the opera theatre. A night where it looked as though making it past the crossroads that were right in front of them would never be possible, at least by taxi. Yet is this night? The fare was still less than twenty euros, but Kyung-hee was thinking that it might be better to get out and walk. She had seen a poster in the Starbucks on the opera square saying that today was ‘museum night’, an event which only happened once a year. On that night, every museum in the city centre stays open until at least midnight. But before Kyung-hee could tell the driver to let her out, two people walked in front of the taxi, appearing so suddenly they seemed to have materialised out of the strangely dark fog, and rapped on the rear passenger window next to Kyung-hee’s seat. When the driver lowered his window and asked them what was going on, they pointed at Kyung-hee and asked to see her ID. Kyung-hee didn’t have her passport with her. And so she did end up getting out of the taxi after all, albeit at someone else’s bidding.

  The two of them both looked young and alert; one blond with a gold earring, one in a black suit. The man with the earring got his own ID out of his pocket and held it out to Kyung-hee. They were police charged with tracking down those who were in the country illegally, though this wasn’t something Kyung-hee could glean from their IDs; rather, she simply had to take the blond man’s words on trust. After they had both shown Kyung-hee their IDs, the blond man lifted up his untucked shirt to give Kyung-hee a look at the leather holster attached to his waistband. But Kyung-hee was no more able to tell whether the blond man’s pistol really was a pistol, or nothing more than a leather case he was wearing as part of his disguise, than whether their IDs were genuine or forged. They said to her, if you want you can call the National Police Agency directly and have them confirm our identity, but Kyung-hee shook her head. Instead, she asked them which direction the Natural History Museum was in. The blond pointed into the distance, indicating a vague direction that was neither right nor left. A car with its windows blacked out was parked by the kerb.

  “We need to check your passport,” the blond explained. Kyung-hee didn’t ask why. She genuinely wasn’t that curious, and besides, her passport didn’t have anything much in it worth checking. “If you don’t have your passport with you, would you please write your name here so that we can make enquiries?” said the man in the black suit, holding out a notebook. As she did this, Kyung-hee asked him if it was correct that the museums were open until midnight that day, and he replied that he didn’t know. The man in the black suit got back into the car, holding the notebook in which Kyung-hee’s name was written. The blond man had clearly been observing her in the meantime, standing close by her side though without much in the way of physical contact. This time, Kyung-hee asked him if it was museum night. Museum night was last week, he told her. This week, there’s an exhibition of Burne-Jones’ mythological paintings in the city hall gallery. The man in the black suit got out of the car, notebook in hand. And said to Kyung-hee, “I had a quick search done, and it turns out that we need to see your passport. There is no possible alternative. Our task is unavoidable: to check your passport with our own eyes…”

  They demanded that Kyung-hee get in their car. And go with them to the house where she was lodging. Saying, just give us an address and we’ll find it, anywhere in the city, no need to look it up. But Kyung-hee couldn’t remember the address. “I mean, I only just arrived in this city this morning!” she said. “In that case, how did you get here from there? Did you take a taxi?” “No, I went to the opera square; I didn’t see a performance, though, just had a coffee in Starbucks…” “How did you get to the opera square, then?” “On foot. I do remember, on the way there I followed the tram line for a while, and there was a pedestrian subway.” When she’d walked through the subway there’d been a continuous clanging coming from somewhere above her head… and… ah, perhaps if she went to the area she’d be able to recognise the building by sight. “In that case, we’ll take you back to the opera square and try retracing your steps from there, then you can let us know when you spot the road where you’re staying!” The blond man presented this by way of a compromise, as soon as Kyung-hee had finished her long, clumsy explanation.

  They opened the car door. Inside the car was a third man. He was a fat man with unkempt black hair, scrunched up awkwardly in front of an enormous telecommunications device. They had probably used that equipment to inquire about Kyung-hee’s name. “But I… I’m on my way to the Natural History Museum. It’s museum night, you see,” Kyung-hee protested feebly. “It might already be past midnight by the time we get to my lodging, and then I’ll miss my chance of visiting the museum.” But the men showed no signs of backing down.

  “That’s a shame, but it’s not our responsibility. If you were only carrying your passport on you as a traveller should, then there wouldn’t have been any problem,” the blond man said firmly.

  “But you…” Kyung-hee let her retort trail off and glanced at the blond man’s waistband.

  “You’ve already seen my ID, after all. Or do you want to see it again?” He stuck his hand in his pocket.

  “Perhaps my name told you something about me?” Kyung-hee asked faintly, but there was no answer. Unable to think of any further excuses, Kyung-hee complied with their demands and got into the car.

  To avoid the traffic congestion, the car they were in chose to take a roundabout route through the back alleys. The fat man got out some gum and started chewing, while the other two remained silent. The car’s black windows meant the interior wasn’t visible from outside, but from inside the dark streets (now, curiously, darker still) could be seen, sunk in an opaque light. The lights were off in most of the back-alley shops. The car drove past a travel agency with a sign reading ‘Syria Airlines.’ The car’s headlights shone through the glass wall of an office and illuminated the figures of two men doing something inside a store where the lights were off. Kyung-hee got the natural history encyclopedia out of her bag, opened it at random, and began to read. Probably bored and looking for distraction, the blond man asked Kyung-hee what she was reading. “It’s an entry on anatomy,” she told him.

>   “It describes how anatomy training was carried out in seventeenth-century medical colleges. Practising anatomy was very popular at the time, so it wasn’t only medical students who attended; upper-class laypeople took part as well. They only used the corpses of men who had undergone capital punishment and for whom the church had given them permission to practise on, and during the practice they ate, drank alcohol, and performed music. And it says that they burned medical plants and incense to get rid of the foul stench.” At that, the man asked Kyung-hee if she was a nurse. Kyung-hee replied in the negative. “Last time I was at the Natural History Museum, I saw a woman’s uterus in a glass bottle,” the fat man interjected with a snigger. “Beforehand I would just have guessed that it was round like a ball, but this thing was in tatters, like badly sliced meat, and weirdly puffed up. Like a decapitated chicken.” “Well, it could hardly have been a man’s uterus, could it,” the blond sighed, clearly uninterested. “How would they have managed that?” “Perhaps it was a cancerous womb?” This time it was the man in the black suit who joined the conversation. “I don’t know; I don’t think so. The label didn’t say anything like that.” “Why a cancerous womb, of all things?” the blond put in. “It’s in a museum, not a hospital’s specimen room.” Fatso spat his gum out into some paper, as though his mood had suddenly soured. “Perhaps it was a sheep’s womb I saw, not a person’s. It was really greasy,” he said. Kyung-hee closed her book and looked out of the window. They had left the alleys and were passing slowly through some unfamiliar district which Kyung-hee didn’t know.