Recitation

by Suah Bae

  “Look at those blockheads over there,” Fatso said, pointing at a ground-floor office, the only place with its lights on in that secluded street. “So we’re not the only fools still working at this hour!”

  “They’re not working,” the blond corrected him. “It’s an after-hours political meeting. Small political parties who don’t have the money to rent permanent office space hold meetings at night. As far as I can tell from the address, it’s the office of this district’s senior citizens’s party.”

  Kyung-hee followed the men’s gaze and peered inside the office. In the brightly lit interior, around a dozen people were sitting around a large round table, with one person standing up, presumably giving a speech—he was certainly gesticulating wildly enough. Were they really a senior citizens’ party? They seemed old enough to form such an organisation, and also not. That is, if there were a fixed minimum age for such things. Though nothing of this could be heard from inside the car, the man who was giving a speech had his sleeves rolled up and was declaiming with great fervour. His hair was grey and his face was lined, but he didn’t look to have yet reached ninety. If he were still no more than eighty-nine, people might hesitate to use the term ‘elderly’ to his face. The speaker rested both arms on the table, bowing deeply and breathing evenly. Then all of a sudden he turned in the direction of Kyung-hee’s car; though of course, Kyung-hee herself wouldn’t have been visible to him. All the same, he stared at her window for a good long time. Long enough for Kyung-hee to realise that he bore a surprising resemblance to the East Asian who’d sat with her for a while in Starbucks. Perhaps he really was the same man. Kyung-hee wanted to press her face right up against the black glass and get a better look at him, but the car hadn’t stopped and was now at some distance from the meeting. Aside from that one office, the other residents of the street looked as though they had all agreed to be as frugal as possible with the electricity. The upper stories of the buildings were all residential use; aside from a couple of lit-up kitchen windows, the rest was dark, like the shops closed up for the night. “You’re wrong,” Fatso interjected. “That man was a foreigner; how could he belong to a senior citizens’ party? And there were a few there who couldn’t be called elderly just yet… if you ask me, they look like part of the Tibetan Independence Movement. And even if they’re not, apparently there are plenty of radical Buddhist skinheads around these days.” And the three of them turned and stared at Kyung-hee.

  They drove through the opera square. Only from that point was Kyung-hee able to remember anything of her earlier route. “Now we’ll follow the tram line,” said the blond man. “At some point, we’ll probably come across the subway you mentioned.” In fact, the subway appeared at a much earlier point in time than any of them had expected. As soon as they had passed it, Kyung-hee was able to recall the street and house number of her lodging; when the blond man asked her, apparently without sarcasm, how she would have planned on getting back if her memory had continued to fail her, she wasn’t able to come up with an suitable answer.

  “Now listen, we’ll all go up to your house together,” the blond man said, ushering Kyung-hee out of the car. “To check your passport.” The fat man got his gum out of his pocket and popped a piece in his mouth. The three men stood and watched as Kyung-hee fished the key out of her bag and opened the door. The flat was on the fourth floor, so they all panted their way up the stairs. Fatso was panting loudest of all, and seemed to be muttering something to himself, plainly put out. The carpet lining the stairs was extremely thin, so when the four of them happened to mount a step in time it sounded like a hammer clanging dully beneath them. Whenever Kyung-hee sped up the three men instinctively increased their speed to match her, following hot on her heels. Kyung-hee thought to herself that if she were to turn around then and there and say to the three of them, look, this flat isn’t some secret hideout for refugees, there’s no illegal immigrant Triad gangs with saw cutters for hacking off horses’ heads, so there’s really no need to trouble yourselves coming up here, it might well make for an incredibly funny joke. On one of the upper floors a door clicked open then slammed shut, unnecessarily loud, like a kind of warning.

  They came across two elderly women, straight-backed and looking directly in front of them, making their slow, steady way down the stairs. It seemed an effort for their legs, stick-like in opaque tights, to drag their heavy, dull leather shoes down the steps. The quivering skin of their faces suggested the struggle to suppress a bronchial tube spasm. Skin covered with the thinnest possible faint, milky film, minutely, furtively decomposing. Rheum sliding out from four reddened eyes. Twin strawboard faces recalling a grey-haired Frida Kahlo. They passed by Kyung-hee in turn, weightless and scentless. The men stopped and pressed themselves up against the wall to let the women pass. Women who looked light as sinking dust, apparently through long resignation. If someone were to approach them, rest a hand on their friable shoulders and say, Maria, which one might actually turn to look back?

  When she finally arrived at the door to the flat, Kyung-hee sank down onto the stairs. She’d pretty much run all the way up, without stopping for a rest, so now she was wheezing like a pair of bellows. A look of cruel anger glittered in the eyes of the three men watching her, anticipating that she was about to come out with yet another typical Chinese excuse. A look which told her plainly that if that were the case, they wouldn’t forgive her for having dragged them all the way up there, they wouldn’t give up their quarry. ‘Dragged you up? No, I was thinking of going still further down into the deep earth, and it was you who stopped me, but I forgive you. Because right now I’m the only one of us who knows that you’re getting paid to make a fuss about nothing.’

  Kyung-hee was barely able to get any words out, as though she had become mute. Thinking that this was either due to her tongue having disappeared or to her having grown an extra one, she hauled herself up, inserted the key she was clutching into the lock and turned it. But as the lock snapped open, Kyung-hee suddenly doubted the wisdom of letting these men into the flat. ‘I don’t know for sure who they are, and since the flat isn’t mine and there are other people living here, if a problem really did come up its scale and character probably wouldn’t be the kind of thing I could cope with. And besides, one of these men looks to be carrying a gun, though admittedly I’ve only seen a case. I’ve never heard of European plainclothes policemen going around with guns to hunt out illegal immigrants. I’ve never even seen a gun with my own eyes. True, it’s not as though I’ve heard everything there is to know about this world. That things I know nothing about nevertheless have a place in reality, I’ll just have to make my peace with that. The gun I thought I saw is real. But does that have any bearing on whether or not I ought to let these men into the flat?’ Before Kyung-hee had time to come to a decision, the men pushed the door open and swept inside, shoving past her without bothering to wait for her consent. They lined up in the hallway with their arms crossed, and said, we’ll wait here while you fetch your passport from your room, in case you’re nervous. Ah, so you really are policemen, then? Kyung-hee thought, but didn’t ask.

  After passing a closed door from behind which a radio could be heard and turning towards the bathroom, Kyung-hee tried the handle of what she thought was the room where she’d spent the previous night. But the door was locked. Perhaps it wasn’t a room after all but a cupboard where the broom was kept or else some multipurpose space. So Kyung-hee went over to another room which adjoined the corridor. The room was exactly as Kyung-hee had left it. Except for the note which someone had left on her sleeping bag. As always, the window was open, and the room was even chillier than she remembered. All she could see out of the window was the cold cement wall of the building opposite, the two buildings so close together as to be permanently in shadow, or, if she craned her neck to look down, the rear yard where brown, withered stems of lily turf drew sharp shadows amid a straggling riot of grass. Stepping around the various objects strewn over the floor, Kyung-hee made i
t over to her suitcase and fished her passport out of the front pocket. She hesitated, then reached over to pick up the note that had been left on the sleeping bag. She unfolded it and read: “I woke up and went out to get some food, but when I got back you’d gone out. A call came from Berlin; they said that someone is looking for you. Someone who knows ‘your Berlin address.’ They asked me for the number of the Berlin healer’s house. I’m planning to meet up with some friends from university and go to a pub in the centre. You probably went to the opera, right? We’ll be at the ‘Louisiana Blues Pub’ on Prinz Eugene Strasse if you want to come along. Banchi.”

  When Kyung-hee came back to the front door with her passport, a university student who was staying in one of the other rooms was glaring at the three men, making sure they stayed out of her room. The girl had a packet of refrigerated ham in one hand, a plate of deep-fried meat in the other. The smell of food was making them all hungry. Kyung-hee held her passport out to the men. They went through it with a fine-tooth comb, a page at a time, checking the innumerable stamps that acted as entry permits or recorded the dates on which Kyung-hee had entered or left various countries. Though they hadn’t asked for these, Kyung-hee also showed them her train ticket to Berlin and the plane ticket to Korea. Several minutes went by before the men eventually arrived at some form of conclusion, and handed the passport back to Kyung-hee. The student disappeared into her room.

  “There’s a reason for all this,” the blond said, sounding reluctant to explain himself. “According to our records, you were registered as residing in this city more than twenty years ago, so finding you here now meant it looked as though you’d been staying here continuously, over a long period, without having obtained permission to extend your stay. In other words, you never got permission for an extension after the initial period of your stay had elapsed, yet there was absolutely no record of your having left the country. And so there was nothing for it but for us to obtain concrete proof that you did in fact leave. Now, having checked your passport, it turns out there’s nothing wrong.”

  “How did this misunderstanding come about?” Kyung-hee asked.

  “This is just our guess, but it seems to have been one of those cases where there are two people with the same name, or else one whose name was recorded incorrectly. It’s rare, but it does happen now and then. Foreigners’ names all sound pretty similar, you know, so it’s difficult to tell one from the other. The operator makes a mistake with the spelling and it gets into the system like that. Your name is probably fairly common in your country, right?”

  “That’s right. Very.” Kyung-hee nodded fervently, adding, “We differentiate between names that look the same in our phonetic script by writing the Chinese characters next to them. Ideograms, that is.”

  Uneasy, perhaps even hostile, in the face of this unfamiliar word, the three men stood in silence.

  “In that case, do I have to go to the residents’ government office and make an official statement about leaving the country?” Kyung-hee asked after a bit.

  “No, there’s no need for that now,” the blond man answered with a shake of his head. “We’ll sort all that out for you.”

  They’d only been doing their duty, so Kyung-hee didn’t feel like the situation was all that regrettable, and after saying that she hoped they felt the same way, they left. After they’d disappeared, Kyung-hee couldn’t stop thinking about the leather holster which the blond man had been wearing beneath his shirt. It’s the first time I’ve actually seen one with my own eyes, she thought. It looked like a cattle prod that they use for jabbing cows in the head at the abattoir. Would the men really have jabbed Kyung-hee’s head with a stick, or might they have been satisfied with boorish laughter? Had they gained a certain amount of enjoyment from the situation, or had they honestly thought I was a dangerous character? The student inched her door open and asked Kyung-hee, “Have those men gone?” Kyung-hee nodded. “They were police, right?” Without waiting for Kyung-hee to answer, she said, “I had an encounter with a similar bunch myself. Last month I was driving back from a rave with my friends when these guys came out of nowhere and stopped the car. And told me to get in theirs, saying they needed to examine my passport. We’d had a bit to drink, you see. But we insisted on seeing their ID first, we wouldn’t back down. We called the police and got confirmation that there really were policemen with those names. We didn’t move an inch from the car until we’d got it all checked out, including what they looked like. Did you do the same?”

  “No,” Kyung-hee shook her head.

  “And you still brought them all the way to the house?” The girl sounded completely flabbergasted. “What d’you think would have happened if they hadn’t been policemen?”

  “They are policemen. One of them even looked like he was carrying a gun.”

  “What? Don’t you know how easy it is to get your hands on a gun? I wouldn’t be surprised if you could get one off eBay. Does your boyfriend know about all this? Ah, that’s right, he went out to the pub.” The girl peered hard at Kyung-hee’s face. “You could do with taking look in the mirror. Your eyes are exactly like a pair of flat wells, silted up with sand…”

  The road was so narrow it was impossible for two people to walk down it side by side. So narrow you thought you could hear the sound of a chest heaving, breathing in and out, coming from the walls on both sides. This cramped road wound between buildings for quite a way. The walls slanted in over the alley as they went up, so that the sky appeared as a long strip of river, flowing between the eaves of houses. In this conical, three-dimensional space—road—made up of the darkness of the walls, the darkness of the shadows, and the darkness of the sky, which each have their own subtle difference in the gradation of light and dark, there was only shade and still deeper shade. Darkness like that of childhood sleep under the covers. The smell of mould came from the gaps in the damp stone walls. Like the bottom of a dried-up well in midsummer. It was a road for small foxes and snails. Phone cables, one of the symbols of modernity, trailed over the walls in a disordered mass, and formed clumps in mid-air like tangled hair. Before she started down this road, Kyung-hee had bought a bunch of yellow chrysanthemums from a street stall, and asked the seller the quickest way to Prinz Eugene Strasse. The seller had told her that she would get there sooner if she ‘went round the houses’ down this small road. The road was gradually narrowing, having already got to the point where Kyung-hee could have reached out and touched the walls on both sides. Had it been even slightly darker, she would have been reduced to taking one careful step at a time, groping her way along the walls. Kyung-hee was aware that if she were to start doing that now, walking along with both arms stretched out, the moment her fingertips brushed the walls her eyes would disappear, nothing would be visible, leaving the walls as her only object of sensory perception. Then what could it mean that Kyung-hee was now carrying a bunch of yellow chrysanthemums?

  Kyung-hee noticed someone walking ahead of her, or so she thought; on closer inspection, it turned out to be not a man walking but the figure of a man standing still. Leaning back against the damp wall with his head slightly bowed and his hands thrust into his trouser pockets, he appeared to be standing sentinel, ready to scrutinise anyone who came through the alley. However long he’d been standing there, Kyung-hee was almost certainly his first passer-by. For a short while before she actually appeared, he would already have been able to hear the sound of her breathing, of her footsteps on the paving stones, of the newspaper in which the flowers were wrapped rustling softly in her hands. It didn’t exactly seem the right place to have arranged to meet someone, or to be enjoying a leisurely stroll. The man was doing absolutely nothing, other than leaning against the wall. He was neither whistling nor smoking a cigarette. He was a young man; had he been a little taller, Kyung-hee might have mistaken him for Banchi, standing there waiting for her. She stopped next to him just to make sure. His face was expressionless. Perhaps you’re one of Banchi’s university friends? I came this way
because I was told that this alley is a shortcut to Prinz Eugene Strasse; it’s so dark, I’m worried that I’ll get lost…The man made no reply, only peered closely at Kyung-hee’s face from between locks of glossy black hair. His hands looked to be fidgeting uneasily inside his jeans pockets. Kyung-hee stood there in front of him for a while. The sound of his breathing filled the space between the walls and bounced back off them, magnified enormously. It rasped out of his nose in what was almost an animal snort, the sound of someone growing increasingly tense. As Kyung-hee stood there watching him, he jerked his head up. She’d seen a stage production once called Puppet Show of Darkness; this was like the time during that production when the white-bodied doll had swivelled its head to the side. The doll was inside a glass box, which was on a table. The box was filled with dust, which meant it could absorb any incidental sound or unpredictable movement, anything that wasn’t a part of the production. A naked electric bulb hung behind the box, dimly illuminating its contents… As the man glared at the bunch of wild chrysanthemums in Kyung-hee’s hand, a look of doubt and discomfort gradually filled his eyes. Prinz Eugene Strasse… Kyung-hee twitched her lips to form the words; even to her own ears, her whispering sounded loading with meaning. His limbs twitching in an abrupt, startled manner, as though his nerve-endings had exploded, the man jerked his body away from the wall. The smell of cold fibres and petrol wafted up from his clothes in a sharp smack, then quickly dissipated. He seemed to hesitate over which way to go, then hurried off down the alley in the direction Kyung-hee had just come. He disappeared into the darkness, walking so quickly he was almost running, with his upper body leaning forwards and his shoulders pumping up and down, like when a rebellious child finally leaves home.