Recitation

by Suah Bae

  With these descriptions of his life and thoughts being so very detailed, there were times when I genuinely couldn’t believe that we were apart, when I was unable to shake the conviction that we had always been travelling together, ever since that day long ago when he invited me to his lost hometown. That this shared journey had already lasted for several years, and would continue for several lifetimes yet. Because he spoke to me in such minute detail about his room—saying, for example, right now I can hear the clock hand moving from three minutes past two to four minutes past—even now, in my dreams I sometimes see the two of us sitting side by side against the background of his pale blue wallpaper, sitting half a metre apart with our hands resting on our knees, listening wordlessly to the click of the clock hand as it shifts from three minutes past two to four minutes past; at such times, our attitude suggests that we are thinking about the body heat given off by each other’s chest, about the temperature behind each other’s eyelids. The temperature of the room, the quality of the light, the feel of the air, the sound of the water boiling in the electric kettle, the smell of the damp wallpaper, the black soil in the otherwise-empty ceramic flowerpots, the evening bustle of the station plaza leaking in through the open window, even the faint sound of the train’s whistle, I remember them as though I had actually experienced them against my own skin. I feel them. And in my dreams I encounter them again, unchanged.

  I remember one such day, him yelling straight into the receiver as though it were a demand rather than a statement, ‘We will never meet again in this life!’ An enormous lump inside my chest, what you might call a single, unbroken heart, collapsed with a thud, and I actually experienced vertigo. From that day onwards my body was the remnants of a fire that was sinking down, ever downwards. What I have now is burnt flesh. After that day I became my shell, oh, Banchi. I kept trying to track him down for a long time. One day I made a mad dash to the train station and bought a ticket going to the city where he was staying. This was on my last day in Berlin, the last day my Berlin address was still valid. The next day, you see, I had to return to Seoul. Standing on the platform and wondering why on earth I hadn’t done this sooner, I watched the train pull in. The reality of those innumerable people each with their own feet, their own will, their own freedom and ability to move between cities, seemed scarcely credible. The train sped along without a hitch, and in less than two hours I arrived at the central station of the city where he was living. As I stepped out of the station, the hospital building appeared in front of me like a vision. The square in front of the station was tiny, and the windows of the ultramodern, green-roofed hospital building were each covered with a mesh grille, which seemed to be there to stop insects and bats from getting in. It was all exactly as I’d been told. Granted, it was my first time setting foot in the city, yet it felt as intimate as if those postboxes, flower shops, and bicycle lanes all somehow belonged to me. I walked beneath the awning of the tiny, al fresco Café Goat, where there were barely any customers braving the winter chill, arriving eventually at the house where he was staying, the room from which he’d said he would be able to watch me walking across the square to him. It was a day of bright sunlight despite it being winter, and as I stepped into the small, spartan room of an exile, I was wiping the sweat from my forehead. But he wasn’t there. And not because he was out at the library, but because he’d returned to Russia. To White Russia, that is, which, to him as a university student, had ‘inscribed distinctly into the flesh what it meant to wander the streets and train stations of the world with the face of an East Asian.’ The country that had had a strong white fist, the country that had been like a cold steel net. Which was also the country where his second family was living. And only there did I come to understand why, of all places, he had chosen to stay in that city. Because of the hospital, which was famous for its cardiac surgery department. Had he been diagnosed with something? He must have known to expect me at some time or other, yet he hadn’t left a letter behind, nor even a note. Only once a little time had passed did I realise what that meant. The room where he had been living was empty, the bedding was neatly folded on the bed, and the minute hand of the old-fashioned Siemens clock made a snapping sound every time it went forwards. Snap, another snap, snap. I understood it as the sound of my life slipping down, trickling away one unit at a time. Snap, another snap, ever downwards, snap.”

  Kyung-hee stopped speaking and coughed.

  “All the same,” Banchi said, then paused. “All the same, you’re going to Berlin, and perhaps this time he will be there waiting for you. He did get in touch with you, after all.”

  “Perhaps,” Kyung-hee said thoughtfully. “Yes, I haven’t tried calling the healer yet, but you’re right, Mr. Nobody is the only person who knows ‘my Berlin address.’” They turned in unison towards the supermarket door, because one of the white-uniformed cashiers had come out for a smoke. Cigarette clamped between her lips, the cashier tottered along the strangely blackened wall and disappeared around the corner. There, in an empty lot behind the supermarket, stood a lone Japanese rowan. An aged, late autumn tree which, although its gaudy crimson fruit had almost all been gobbled up by birds, remaining only as red bruises marking the sere and yellow leaves, was still as beautiful as ever. “What are your plans?” Kyung-hee asked Banchi.

  “I’ll stay here for a little longer, then go and spend some time with my friends from the Buddhist organisation,” Banchi said. “In fact, some of the ones who came here used to work at a teak yard in south India. I’ll inquire about a job at the hotel where I used to work, way back when I had to share a single rented room with several others. The hotel had a big room in the basement where all the dishwashing was done. When the plates and cutlery from the restaurant were loaded into the dumb waiter and arrived down in the basement, first we’d get rid of the scraps of food, then arrange the cutlery neatly in the dishwasher, set the machine going and then, when it had finished its cycle, take them out again, dry them, and send them up to the kitchen.”

  “And did you earn enough to cover all the installments for the Japanese copier?”

  “If I’d kept on with that work then I probably could have managed it. But the thing is, I only purchased the newest model laser copier in the first place because I’d never imagined that the toner it needed would be so expensive, or that it would go through it at such a rate… I only found that out later, but by then it was too late, so all my calculations got thrown off.”

  “But what you really wanted can’t have been to pay off the installments on the copier, right? Or, of course, a job in the dishwashing room of even a first-class hotel in a European city.”

  “What I truly want, though my family are opposed, is to stand in the square one more time with five thousand of my friends. And if I can’t do that, perhaps paying off the money for the copier and starving to death here is the next best thing. Or going to the teak yard in India and becoming a lumberjack.”

  “Well, whatever it is, I’m all for it.”

  “Are you aware that there are fewer and fewer places these days where, as an alien, an outsider who believes in taking an objective point of view, you can squeeze your way in and be accepted? Let me tell you a story I heard during my university days, from a friend who’d worked as a woodcutter in that southern Indian teak yard by day, and been a supporter of the anti-government guerillas by night. While he was studying in Europe, he happened to read a pamphlet put out by an anti-government organisation whose essential position was that ‘the scientific and technological advances and the spread of wealth in one half of the world correlates precisely with the responsibility of those who benefit from such things to redress the starvation occurring in the other half’; in other words, it was an eco-Maoist pamphlet about preventing forests and other natural resources in the third world from being swallowed up by the gaping maws of the multinational corporations. Well, he picked up a bag and set out for India. Thinking that the best way to establish contact with the left-wing environmental organ
isation who’d produced the pamphlet would be to get a job on the teak plantation. ‘In the field’, you might say. As a result, he wasted nine months there, on a wage that wasn’t even equivalent to two euros per day. Everything he’d expected, everything he’d hoped to find, was there in that place. In other words, people who looked to have chosen a life of slavery, their hand forced by poverty and debt. There, it was perfectly natural for the entire life of both the son and the as-yet-unborn grandson to be mortgaged in order to pay off the father’s debt. People are not aware that this form of debt is both horrifically inhuman, and, moreover, has no legal grounding, and neither do they seem especially concerned to find out about it. His first reaction upon arriving there and witnessing the situation would probably have been a smile of satisfaction. Since, according to his friend, that place was fertile soil for third-world Maoism.

  But when he asked around, it transpired that no one knew anything about any anarchist naturalist organisation, or the emergent Maoists of that region, and not only had no one heard of the pamphlet, the worst thing was that all his talk seemed to meet with blank incomprehension. Those whose trust he was trying to win were convinced that he was, variously, European, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a slanderer, an alien agitator, a vagrant, a tramp, a university student, or worst of all, a penniless American with puffed-up ideas. And this was a guy who’d never even set foot on American soil! Anyhow, one day the police made a raid on the village where he was staying, arresting the labourers whom he’d been working alongside, as well as the barber, the village’s only teacher, even the old-timers who were considered local chiefs. This was something he only found out later, but apparently a police officer had been murdered in the neighbouring town, and the prime suspects were the Maoists whose activities centred around the teak plantation in the southern region. Only when he heard this did he realise that the villagers were living double lives, coolies by day and guerillas by night.

  Naturally, he was arrested and investigated along with the other men, and though it became clear that he had no connection with any Maoist terrorists (for whom, ironically, he had spent over half a year in a fruitless search, unable to ‘find’ the very people who were in fact all around him) he still ended up spending six months in prison, because he didn’t have an official labour permit. During his incarceration he came to a very slow, hazy realisation: that it had been a spectral pamphlet that had seduced him, and led him to fly all this way. The plantation workers were all Hindus from birth, teak-yard labourers and frightening Maoists, who were both transcendental meditators, terrorists, mystics, and the very smallest pawns in the profit system of multinational corporations and, at the same time, pawns of a revolutionary organisation. Like my friend, they were unable to understand the university-educated view of beliefs as something that one searches out or selects. They were people who had realised long ago that you cannot change your skin colour for the sake of an abstract belief. Since to them, beliefs were not the kind of thing that can be ‘chosen’, they felt no need to put a name to them or even think about them in any concrete fashion. And so when my friend asked them about the environmentalist guerilla organisation, they had no idea what such a thing might be. When it was actually themselves. The jungle itself, the teak plantation that was closely connected to London’s financial systems, the workers’ village, poverty itself as a kind of debt which you were born into, the colour of their skin, in other words natural existence. Once my friend found out that even the landlord of the hut he’d been renting was a cell of the guerilla organisation, he felt even more bewitched by the whole thing. Because this was a man who went around with a hunting gun and butchered wild animals, yet couldn’t even understand the word ‘Maoist.’

  After listening to my friend’s story, it struck me that while some people strive to reach the moon, the moon as a physical, actual object, other, very primal people are constantly directing their lives back towards their cave, their blood, their ancient language, as though answering the call of the spirits.

  This is a vague and to some extent forgotten tribal concept, a little closer to the source than that of the broad ‘race’, which relies on the concept of cities and nations which have large-scale systems and organisations. They are searching for that stone cave out of which they once crawled as naked monkeys at the world’s beginning. Only those who realise that the enormous whole is nothing but a fantasy, and search instead for their own direction, are the happy ones. Since they know their own cave. The happy ones are those who believe that their names are written on the wall of a cave somewhere in this world, written in wet ash, deer’s blood, and red clay. Others give them names, neo-Maoists, conservationists, terrorists, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Confucians, followers of the Gwangmu school, anything except Christians, but these labels have meaning only to outsiders.

  I am afraid that the moment I cast off the garb of a poor, powerless, unidentified ‘city-dweller’, I will become a refugee, stripped of my citizenship, with no idea of the direction I should take. Aren’t the tribes who have no cave of the soul thought of as the proletariat of technological society? It was only after my father left us that I became conscious of myself as belonging to the family of someone famous. Before that I was too young, although, because the Communist system exercised strict controls on all forms of what they called ‘irrational historical consciousness’, it took me even longer to discover that I was the descendent of an ancient tribe who spoke an ancient language. I then started to think of myself as a typical case of an individual who is severely estranged from the preceding generation. My father is still living, but I no longer know him. My father’s existence is simultaneous with mine, his body is of the same nature, and yet I am unable to grasp even a tiny part of all the many things that he knows. Worse, I hadn’t inherited a single word of his ancient language. Since, under the Communist system, such things were classed as forbidden cultural property. He was one of the many people who left their hometown never to return. I was artificially pruned away. I possess nothing that can be explained without recourse to concepts. Granted, I work translating sutras, but my actual situation is one of being unable to move an inch without a pamphlet to guide my actions. This is clearly a symptom of the new concept of ‘poverty.’ This earth was originally the domain of primitive cave tribes; it occurs to me that city-dwellers have since been occupying it without permission. Perhaps, rather than being divided by a temporal gap of many millions of years, as scientists claim, cave tribes and city-dwellers are actually ‘simultaneous.’”

  “This just came back to me;” Kyung-hee said, “once, albeit for a very short time, probably only three or four months, Maria was married. Her husband was Japanese; apparently he’d been a pharmacy assistant in Japan, then upped sticks and came to Europe one day with no other thought than the longing to become an opera singer. He taught qigong and feng shui at an esoteric school which was only open on weekends. Apparently he knew all kinds of outlandish legends and prophecies from primitive tribes all over the world. His hobby was mysticism as a global phenomenon. Back in Japan he’d even written a book on the subject. On top of that, famous writers and scholars would stop by his pharmacy with some frequency and beg him to show them the rare medicines he had. Maria came to his school at the weekends. But one night, shaking Maria awake from a deep sleep, he accused her of having gossiped about his limp, so that now not only the teachers but even the students were aware of his disability, and asked in a heartrending tone why on earth she had done such a thing. Maria was lost for words, as not only had she never said anything of the kind, she hadn’t even realised up until then that the man did in fact limp. It was only a very slight limp, the product of a long-ago car accident; so slight, Maria said, that it was difficult to make out even once you knew about it, and so the only people who were aware of this ‘disability’ was his family back in Japan. Even if you watched very closely all you would see was one of his feet dragging ever so slightly, the kind of thing you might dismiss as being caused by a too-tight shoe. In
spite of that, the man adopted an extremely severe tone and said, do you know why I left Japan, wanting to be a singer was only an excuse, all I really wanted was to come to a strange land where no one knows about my physical defect.”

  “So that’s why he harboured a grudge against Maria and followed her around like a shadow for several years, threatening to murder her!”

  “Maria moved back into her own room after that. There was no way she could carry on living with the man. At the time she was working in the box office at a theatre, and apparently he even called up the other employees and threatened to murder them too if they were friendly with her. So she was forced to quit her job. Afterwards, she would feel regret and remorse when she looked back over those few months of marriage, the only time in her whole life that she’d spent away from her own room, as a non-Karakorum.”