Recitation

by Suah Bae

  Even after he had gone, Kyung-hee remained standing in the same place. She rummaged through her handbag and pulled out a map, but in that street, between walls that were black as blackness itself, it was impossible to make out a single letter. Rather than being simply black, the darkness of the street, a street which amounted to an unplanned gap between walls, the product of an architect’s miscalculation, was closer to a very deeply-dyed, opaque blackish-red. Reminiscent of the pigment commonly known as Martian Red, or Florence Red, powdered iron produced when a meteorite burns, which cools into a blackish-red soil owing to a concentration of iron oxide. If you touch the tip of your tongue to that kind of soil, you don’t only get the taste of ash, but also some salty, fishy notes. The darkness of mineral matter gave off a crunching sound like a black silkworm sitting on a mulberry leaf. While she’d been walking she’d somehow remained oblivious of the darkness, but now that she’d stopped Kyung-hee found herself so utterly overwhelmed by it that she was unable to take another step. Acting on instinct, she began to grope her way along the wall, her arms at chest height. She couldn’t understand how the young man from a little while ago had disappeared with such swift, sure steps. Kyung-hee put the map, which she’d been pressing her nose against, back into her bag, then, sensing another shadow approaching from behind, whipped around and stared into the darkness, but there was nothing to be seen. A great mass of black silkworms were rustling on Kyung-hee’s eyelids. They surged closer to her eyes only to pull back again, moving as one. They were the steady, repeated rhythm of the darkness itself. Forwards and backwards, forwards and backwards, then again forwards. Quietly inducing vertigo. They grew increasingly heavier, gradually weighing Kyung-hee down.

  The black shadow stopped in front of Kyung-hee, looming over her. Kyung-hee knew that the shadow was standing still, observing her. It was a different person from the man who had disappeared a few moments ago. It didn’t have the former’s rough breathing; in fact, it didn’t even look as though it possessed such a thing as body heat. After a little while, the shadow passed in front of Kyung-hee. Kyung-hee felt it. But it hadn’t gone very far before it turned around and came back. And this time it opened its mouth and asked Kyung-hee: do you know where the Vietnamese kid is, the one who sells tax-free cigarettes here every night? Or are you his older sister? If so, then I should be able to buy cigarettes from you, right? Tax-free, naturally.

  While the shadow was speaking his form gradually became more distinct, starting from the area around his mouth. He looked as though he was wearing a partial mask of reddish-black sand, revealing only the lower half of his face and drawing attention to his mouth. This mask, the only part of him that was visible, comprised sunken cheeks, a strong bone structure, hair that came down to his shoulders, and a jaw sparsely sprinkled with beard. Kyung-hee told him that she knew nothing about a Vietnamese boy who sold cigarettes, that she neither sold cigarettes nor even smoked them herself.

  “Oh, I see,” said the shadow’s mouth. As a voice actor, Kyung-hee intuitively sensed that though the mouth was moving, it wasn’t actually producing a sound, that the voice was coming out of some other part of the shadow. The impression of a metallic sound which, rather than being a void, had no physicality; the impression that, as with a radio broadcast, the main body of the voice was at some distance from the sound source.

  “But you are Vietnamese, aren’t you?” Something about the way the shadow asked this question suggested that, rather than being driven by even the mildest curiosity, he was continuing to speak simply because he’d already opened his mouth.

  Kyung-hee didn’t answer his question. Instead, she asked which direction she needed to go in if she wanted to get to Prinz Eugene Strasse. The shadow gestured with his chin back the way he had come. “That way. When you go out onto the main road, that’s Prinz Eugene Strasse right there.” Then, before Kyung-hee had time to thank him and leave, he opened his unusually large mouth so wide it seemed it was about to tear at the corners, saying ‘take a good look at me.’ The corners of his mouth, which were like those of a fish, sprang back and up, revealing the narrow tip of his tongue poking out between white teeth. Kyung-hee had never seen a tongue so narrow or of such an intense, bright scarlet. Like a fish’s gills… Alarm Red, the thought rose unbidden into her mind. The tip of his tongue, reminiscent of a pyramid, tapered into such a sharp point that it was surely not natural, as though the flat of the tongue had been deliberately cut into a triangle. Sticking his tongue out as far as it would go, the shadow started to wiggle it up and down, a frantic movement accompanied by a thrumming sound. It was trying to imitate a snake or devil; that much was clear. This shadow mustn’t realise that I come from a cultural area where no one believes in angels or devils, Kyung-hee thought. The whole concept of ‘evil’ is alien to me. Wickedness is causing harm or willfully obstructing something, it’s neither primal nor transcendental. An American Karakorum who stayed at Maria’s house later travelled to Thailand, where his corpse was discovered in the food waste bin down a back alley in a foreigners’ resort. Apparently all ten of his fingers were broken, and needles had been inserted into both eyes. Maria became aware of these facts when she saw his face in the paper. According to the article, his genitals had also been cut off, as punishment. Maria had informed Kyung-hee of this in a letter. Maria wrote, ‘They must have tortured him simply to find out the PIN number of his credit card, but there dwells some primal, horrifying thing, frightening and depressing, in the form his ‘punishment’ took… if it was intended to punish the First World, that is… but in his punishment there is something else besides simple politico-economic discord. They seem to have wanted to go beyond mere pain or terror, beyond agony. To something like the awe and reverence you feel in the face of darkness and the abyss.’ But I deny evil, Kyung-hee thought. Since, if there is no good, then there is no opposite concept either. If being depressed actually made me feel happy, that… the rustling of the silkworms of darkness snapped into silence. The smell of damp rot swirled up from the darkness, throbbing. The darkness increased in density and in front of Kyung-hee’s eyes those things began to spill and slip down. Spurred on by the desire to elicit transcendent terror in Kyung-hee, like a primitive human absorbed, trance-like, in the friction needed to make fire, the tip of the shadow’s tongue was continuing its quivering red vibrations, right in front of Kyung-hee’s nose.

  6. Absurdly, the sight reminded Kyung-hee of a particular day a long time ago, whose morning had been spent diligently studying the Reader’s Digest she’d been given at the bus stop on the way to school, while in the evening she’d watched a film called The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds…

  Around half an hour later Kyung-hee came out of the supermarket. She walked over to the bench in front of the Volksbank where Banchi was sitting. Banchi had Kyung-hee’s already-withered bunch of yellow chrysanthemums resting on his knee and was absent-mindedly reading the text on the newspaper they were wrapped in, but wasn’t touching either the flowers or the newspaper with his hands. The sun swiftly concealed itself behind the clouds. Banchi scattered the crumbs of his leftover bread for the pigeons. The newspaper rustled ceaselessly. As the wind was cold and heavy with moisture, altogether bleak, it was clear that right at this moment somewhere very far away, a grape-sized snowflake was about to fall heavily onto a Karakorum mountaintop. In Kyung-hee’s hand was a bottle of blue-tinted nail polish remover. “I felt like I needed to buy something,” Kyung-hee said as she sat down next to Banchi, as though by way of an excuse.

  “Did you talk to her?” Banchi asked without looking up from the newspaper.

  “Of course I did. But Banchi, Maria says…” Kyung-hee trailed off. Banchi only gazed at her wordlessly. “Now is an incredibly busy time for her, and also she said that you coming to call on her out of the blue like this has thrown her off balance a bit.”

  “I haven’t ‘come to call’ on Maria. We were just passing by, and then the thought came to me while I was waiting here on
this bench.”

  “Right, that’s what I said too.”

  “I was aware that she would be busy. And that I ought not to disturb her while she’s working.”

  “Right, that’s what Maria thought too.”

  “And to be precise, I followed you. You were on your way to see Maria at the supermarket where she works as a cashier, and I was just strolling along after you.”

  “Right, I was the one who suggested you come with me.”

  “Is Maria doing okay?”

  “Looks to be.”

  “Healthy?”

  “Looks to be.”

  “That’s great. And now’s a busy time for her, but the fact is that she doesn’t want to see me.”

  “It’s not as though she actually said that, not in so many words, but…”

  “I understand. In any case, if that’s the way it is then there’s no reason for me to sit here anymore!” Still, Banchi didn’t get up right away. He only jogged his knees for a bit. Kyung-hee rescued the withered bunch of flowers that was slipping from Banchi’s knees, and cleared her throat.

  “So, Banchi, the friends you met last night were all from your hometown?”

  “Most of them were.”

  “But there seemed to be people from other countries, countries a little further to the south. Or Tibet.”

  “That’s right,” Banchi nodded reluctantly. “There were a couple others, but they were from India, not Tibet. A long time ago, we were planning to set up a transnational organisation of young Buddhists, but nothing came of it; then the idea got revived at a certain point, and this time some of my friends living in Europe are being really active.”

  “And it’s to do with Tibet, right?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What I mean is, yesterday while I was sitting in Starbucks I thought I saw the Dalai Lama walking down the street.”

  “What a load of nonsense,” Banchi snickered. “There’s no way a person like that goes around on their own in this city.”

  They sat there side by side for a while, each with their hands resting on their knees. Then Banchi asked, “Did you try calling Berlin?”

  Kyung-hee shook her head. But said that what she’d in fact done was buy a ticket to Berlin. And that she would therefore end up going to Berlin. The supermarket’s entrance was a glass door. There was a dog tied to the bicycle rack in front of the building, while through the glass shoppers could be seen transferring purchased items back into their shopping baskets. Beggars who had congregated underneath the roof which jutted out over the bicycle shelter were sitting waiting for loose change, leaning back against the tiled wall. I wonder why you never see any elderly beggars in this city, Kyung-hee said. Beggars and the homeless and hippies with piercings, where do they all go when they get old?

  “I used to wonder that myself, a long time ago; Maria told me that they go to Australia,” Banchi answered with a straight face. “But I didn’t take her at her word.”

  The supermarket’s glass door opened and a woman walked out with a basket in each hand. She set them down at the entrance and started flitting back and forth to the sale table in front of the building, which was practically overflowing with flowerpots and heaps of discounted fruit and biscuits. The cashiers were sitting in their starchy white uniforms. Every time they made a particular movement the till’s metal drawer clanged open, then closed. It seemed as though fireworks of static electricity were dancing from the cash in the drawer onto the backs of their hands. Most of the cashiers were women past middle-age, and they all looked much the same sitting there. “Just one euro, please, just a spare one-euro coin,” one of the beggars muttered, as though placing an order. “Just a one-euro coin, to put towards travelling expenses to Australia.”

  “Mr. Nobody,” Kyung-hee began, “once made a particularly harsh speech about poverty. About poor countries and poor people. Of course, his intention was to talk about countries that are poor because of greedy politicians, flimsy social infrastructure, and rampant corruption. As a concrete example, he talked about the plight of those without homes. People who are forced to live on the streets because they have nowhere else to go, forced to huddle underground during winters as cold as minus forty. He also gave a particularly gruesome description of an underground tunnel choked with sewage, teeming with rats the size of a human forearm. He said that he once looked after a woman who gave birth in such a place. And that, if you look at it in a certain way, the child’s death, it having fallen into a drain as soon as it was born, was simply a matter of course, even lucky, in fact. And that, in spite of such poverty, politicians care only about buying houses in Europe and stashing bribes in offshore bank accounts. As soon as he’d finished his rant I told him that I’d been a part of an ‘anti-society’ group for a year during university. The homeless lifestyle was compulsory for all members. You had to snatch a night’s sleep in various underground passages, and get your meals either through begging or at a soup kitchen. But it wasn’t as though the group had some political aim in associating themselves with the poor. They were just kids who couldn’t stand their parents or their parents’ homes. It was a form of social performance, designed to embody a voluntary asociality. The boys viewed pickpocketing and sexual harassment as a form of enjoyment; some of them even ended up in prison. The girls chose to go against the social norm through homosexual love, or, in a slightly more abstruse dimension, prostitution. It’s true that they were constantly exposed to the danger of experiencing even more serious things… but they didn’t go to prison purely on account of the homeless. They weren’t all choosing to break the law just because they wanted to live the homeless lifestyle. You’ve probably never tried it yourself, but I genuinely did go begging on the streets. You, who see poverty only as something to be eradicated and go around giving speeches to that effect, won’t be able to understand, but I’ve got a good idea of what a poor person’s ego can actually be… I can’t understand what I was thinking, now, coming out with such absurd stuff. I mean, I absolutely wasn’t trying to ridicule him, the way he spoke with such earnest solemnity, it was just a bunch of thoughts that happened to come to me, turning into words and slipping out of my mouth. But Mr. Nobody got angry with me. He said to me, ‘You’re all as vile as the Americans.’ And added, ‘You imitate them, like monkeys.’ So I told him, you saying that reminds me of the time when I first came to Europe, when someone asked me where I was from and then, when I answered South Korea, said, ‘Ah, you mean Americanised Korea.’

  I didn’t want to belittle Mr. Nobody’s classical sense of responsibility. What right would I have had to do so? After all, I knew that in a certain sense, as a typical third-world intellectual, he was aware of an unbounded, shapeless kind of responsibility that had been selected for him in the same way that he felt he had to dress a certain way. It’s just unfortunate that, right then, my attitude appeared incredibly flippant to him. All it was was an intense, impulsive desire to tell him about the runaway life I’d previously forgotten, that period in my life when everything had been up in the air, to reveal something of myself to him, like wanting to bare my left breast in a restaurant—which, if it was to him, I could have done at any moment, with pleasure—but he completely misunderstood me.”

  “So you grew apart after that?” Banchi asked.

  “I can’t say that for certain. Mr. Nobody left Berlin the next day, you see, and went to some other country, but that was all planned in advance. He gave me the address where he would be staying. Plus the address for the third-world country that was next on his itinerary, and for another third-world country after that, a country I myself wasn’t able to go to. He called me from that third country, and we talked for a long time. Then, after a few months, he returned to Germany, as he’d planned to. Not to Berlin, though, which was odd; instead, he stayed in some small city in central Germany that I’d never even heard of. During one of our telephone calls he gave a detailed description of the room where he was staying, what you could see out of the
window, its precise location in the city—all far more detail than was necessary. According to him, the room wasn’t far from that city’s central station. The journey from Berlin, where I was living at the time, wouldn’t even take two hours by train. He told me that you could see a green hospital building from the window in his room. And that the window was covered with a tight-mesh grille. He said that if I were to alight at the central station, take a left as soon as I came out of the exit, and walk diagonally across the small plaza, I would be directly visible from his window. He also said that he went to the library every day to read and write, and that at seven in the evenings he always had dinner at Café Goat, in front of the library. He described his regular waiter at Café Goat, and the cute waitress. He said that, on the advice of his doctor, he chewed his meat slowly, didn’t drink alcohol, and tried to avoid sauces that were enriched with sugar or dairy. He often chose that café as a meeting place, and his editor and her secretary came periodically to see him there. They got him work giving various readings and lectures, and organised his schedule in Europe. And, as he was entangled in an unresolved lawsuit with his second wife, a Russian, complicated by the fact that he himself was a political refugee, he also used the café as a place to meet with a lawyer. He would speak pityingly about you and your family, about the financial difficulties you were having. For a brief period he went every day to the studio of a painter who wanted to do his portrait. He spoke of all the loose ends he needed to tie up before he died. He said that as death came ever closer, his abstract wishes increased in number, and that the temptation to forgive himself, to forgive one who would soon turn to dust, grew stronger. He also spoke of his nephew’s drowning. He told me that the boy had been only twenty years old when his rubber dinghy capsized during military service. He said that the other soldiers wanted to donate some physical training equipment in his name, so that his memory would be cherished for a long time. He spoke of relatives who had died and those who were still living, who had all become city-dwellers. He said that, before he put all of these notions to bed, left the café and went home, he waited for the sound of the last train pulling in to the central station. The last train from Berlin, which, after spending all of forty seconds in that city, headed off to the west. He said that he always kept my Berlin address in mind. My Berlin address, to which he would sometimes send long letters. The words poured out of him in a continuous stream, like a monologue, whenever we were on the phone. These soliloquies of his frequently lasted for almost an hour, with no pause for or expectation of any input from my end. It was his private autobiography. A private memoir, which didn’t need to be run past anyone first. I was his sole audience. Listening with pleasure and rapt concentration.