Recitation

by Suah Bae

  Kyung-hee stopped walking and started coughing, gasping for breath. With the practised movements of a genuine hobo, Banchi plonked himself down on the pavement, took off his trainers, turned them upside down and shook out the golden grains of soil that had found a way in while he was running after Kyung-hee. A line of reddish-black German-made tourist buses drove past. A line of decapitated horses, bearing equally headless policemen, clopped past over the pavement. 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. Kyung-hee had identified with the young female protagonist of the film, who was preparing for a science competition. An identification which ushered in the absurd, unlooked-for hope of becoming an actress. As soon as the sun shrugged off the wisp of cloud that had been veiling it, Banchi’s hair glittered like wet coal, such an intense, gleaming jet black that Kyung-hee found it almost unbearable. The colour had a hard, material quality about it, quite unlike something made of light, black as a chunk of obsidian just fished from the water, the rock which the ancients used in scalping. I will not permit such a blade to enter my body. I absolutely refuse to imagine it. Kyung-hee got the Noscapine syrup out of her pocket and immediately downed more than half the bottle.

  Even supposing I end up bored and with no prospects, if I’ve aged so much that all the edges of my being are as worn as they can be, if I can no longer perceive colour, taste or smell, cannot endure life stretched out over such a deplorable length of time as a hundred years, and finally, worst of all, were to end up producing some kind of scribble that resembles a poem, my doing so would have absolutely no connection with my father, Banchi said.

  I was walking along the bright, hot, dirty alley, where the sun’s horizontal passage high above the embankment, a sun yellow as a ripe pear, cast a thin strip of deep shadow at the base of the left-hand side wall; at a certain point, I began to sense that someone was following me, Maria said. Maria sped up, and the one who was following also sped up; she slowed down, and so did her pursuer. The height of the afternoon. The houses which lined the alley all had their doors tight shut, each with a piece of white paper pasted onto them, bearing writing in a script that Maria couldn’t understand; she thought that they probably meant something like ‘everyone gone’ or ‘evacuated.’ Maria didn’t dare to turn and look back. Her Japanese ex-husband who, though many years had since flown by, was still sending her threatening letters at regular intervals twice a year, rose into her mind. Everyone close to Maria was aware of these persistent threats, and found it odd that she didn’t call the police and demand their help. There was a reason for that. Maria bared her chest, exposing her operation scars to Kyung-hee. Next to her left breast, which was darkly tanned, cruelly wrinkled and withered, there was an unsightly hollow, as though the flesh had been gouged out with a trowel. The tumour had apparently been discovered in her mammary gland when she was still living with her Japanese husband. When she received the diagnosis, her husband was in Japan tracking down various medicinal plants, of all things. Maria informed him over the phone that she had to have an operation. Far from hurrying back, her husband returned even later than planned, after the date of the operation, but told her that the delay was due to his having hunted down a precious herb, and showed her several small, dried black roots. He told her the name of the herb too, but Maria said she couldn’t remember it. He insisted that it was the only medicine she should take. It was a type of herb that granted eternal youth, one which the ancient kings of the East had wandered far in search of. Maria’s husband looked utterly sincere when he told her that if she ate it, not only would she recover from her disease, but she would never die, not ever. But Maria said that she didn’t want to live forever, just to grow old appropriately, as others do, in good health. I’d hate to linger on for two hundred years and be begging a doctor to put me out of my misery, Maria said, in a light, joking tone. But her husband shook his head. There is no ‘appropriately’; either you eat this and live forever, or be reborn as a tumour in someone close to you. Maria peered at the roots, which looked like a lump of dirty coal wrapped up in a cloth. It looked like the mummy of a stillborn foetus, newly excavated from a Mexican pyramid. A lump of carbon from which whatever moisture it had once possessed had all dripped away over thousands of years, leaving the pulverised dregs of an organism made mineral. But in any case, what does it matter? Maria nodded in agreement. Not, of course, because she believed her husband, but because she didn’t especially disbelieve him, either. It’s a divine discovery, one that a pharmacist can only hope to get their hands on once in a lifetime, he said. I’m giving this to you. And so you, Maria, will live included in my life. From now on, all that is my own will be eternally included within Maria’s eternal life. At the time, he did not give any concrete explanation as to what exactly he meant by ‘eternally included.’

  When the bell rang and Kyung-hee opened the door, a middle-aged postwoman was standing there. She held out a letter. But she did not hand it over to Kyung-hee. Since there was no address written on the envelope, Kyung-hee doubted whether the letter was for her, and as the woman wasn’t wearing a postal uniform, she also doubted whether she was really a postal employee. The postwoman declared that she was an employee of a private international postal company. The company delivers letters and parcels; as a rule, the expenses are cash on arrival. And so Kyung-hee could only take receipt of the letter after paying the special-delivery postage. If she didn’t want to pay this fee, it was of course within her rights to refuse to take the letter. Only, in that case, Kyung-hee would, of course, be unable to obtain certain information about the sender of said letter. This is company policy.

  Hello, said the female television presenter, speaking into the mic, and welcome to Wednesday’s Good Morning Show. Let me introduce today’s special guest. He’s both a scholar with a degree on Nietzsche, a researcher in alternative medicine, and an East Asian healer. He’s here today to give a brief talk for us. But before that, let’s have a short demonstration. How about it, you said that when patients come to call on you, you first and foremost study how they look, the way they move, and concentrate not on what they say, but the way they say it. Could you explain what you mean by all that in a little more detail?

  The healer said that, before thinking in terms of an illness, he first acquaints himself with the person holistically, examining everything about them that can be physically perceived—their voice, the words they use, the look in their eyes and direction of their gaze as they’re speaking, the expression they make when he pours black vinegar into a glass, dilutes it with water and hands it to them, entreating them to drink this most sacred wine. In fact, he was usually able to discern from the very start the type of thing they either lacked or had an excess of, in their movements as they walked over to him, their gaze as they looked at him. Especially when he touched the patient’s affected area—and the point that had to be made clear was that to him as a healer, every human subject in this world, himself included, was a patient—the degree of that discernment would be so intense as to make him tremble.

  So what about me? the female presenter chipped in, so promptly it seemed she’d had the question prepared in advance. What can you discern about me when I look at you?

  The healer replied, I could tell you now, but to be even more certain I would need to touch your chest, there’s a sound coming from there.

  Oh, that’s the sound of my heart racing, said the female presenter, displaying a charming smile. The cameraman swung his camera around, panning slowly over an auditorium full of faces flushed with curiosity.

  In that case, said, Kyung-hee, I choose not to take the letter.

  The healer said, a letter for you from a young female journalist…

  Closing her book, Kyung-hee turned to Banchi and said, the page I just read is about an I
ndian man who goes to India. The man’s younger sister is trying to persuade him to go to India. He’s spent so long travelling only in foreign countries, he needs to go and experience India, to be with the Maoist revolutionaries, even if it’s just a one-off trip… the location of their conversation is, of all places, a city in western Europe, sitting outside a Berlin café. I seem to have encountered a similar scene in some other book. But why does it appear, incomprehensibly, to overlap with the conversation we’re having right now, when the two are actually on quite different topics?

  Goshawks flying through the air.

  Were those goshawks flying through the air?

  Despite the fact that I am not actually your sister, that I didn’t tell you to go anywhere.

  The healer got to his feet, stretched both arms out in front of him and gently pulled the female presenter’s head towards himself. Displaying extreme agility—indeed, the whole thing was done in a way that seemed designed to create the most extreme spectacle—he slipped one hand beneath her collar and down to her breast. Though the female presenter’s complexion didn’t alter in the slightest, the complete lack of agitation visible on her face seemed, paradoxically, to reveal an extremely mechanical tension. The healer swayed on his feet, producing a babbling sound that could equally have been laughter or an order. Stay still just for now, I’m interpreting the shrieks from your heart, the healer said. As though these words were a command directed at them, the audience kept their gazes riveted on the stage, motionless even down to their fingertips and eyebrows. After several minutes of this, the healer exhaled heavily in a great whooshing sigh: you’ve been to Amsterdam, he said, the words seeming dredged up from deep inside. The tension, which had seemed at breaking point, slackened, and a ripple of light laughter passed through the audience. They started to rustle in their seats, shifting this way and that. That’s right, the female presenter confirmed, giving herself a good shake, and I’ve also been to Tokyo and Beijing. But the healer only narrowed his already small eyes even further, saying, I will listen to what your second heart has to say. Second heart? queried the female presenter, louder this time. I once met a woman who had a second heart attached to her pelvis; she complained that it weighed her down on one side. She was bent at the waist as though she was lame. So did you heal her? the female presenter asked. With the healer’s hand on her breast the whole time. No, she refused to let me give her a massage. She didn’t believe in my healing skills, you see. She herself probably doesn’t know this, but her pelvis will gradually have been tilting to one side all this time. That’s the prediction I made. And the healer laughed out loud.

  It just came back to me; apparently the name of that magazine is Journal of Shamanism Abroad.

  The female presenter grabbed the edge of her blouse, gripped the mic, stared directly into the camera and said, we’ll continue after a short break, so stay with this channel.

  It’s a quick quiz. Today’s problem: what colour is a white horse? Or, how long did the Thirty Years’ War last for?

  When Kyung-hee asked, in that case what would the poem’s title be, Banchi answered ‘The wife of the Saora tribe’s shaman.’

  I don’t read poetry any more, said Kyung-hee. One day a theatre director came to me and said he was going to pay me per character for my on-stage readings.

  After the first conversation finished, he asked his lover ‘who are you?’ and his lover answered ‘I am a wandering soul.’ (Andre Breton, Nadja, p. 56)

  One of the audience members got up and walked towards the stage. The camera zoomed in on her face. It was a yellow face in which the eyes were unusually far apart, the sockets as flat and wide as a roof. The woman was as impassive as a dead horse. Her big square teeth added to that impression. The black hair that fell to her shoulders was already streaked with grey and hadn’t been dyed in some time, so the white hairs straggled out of her centre parting. As though bleached time was sliding down her hair. Her lips and complexion were pale, almost grey. The woman shuffled her crooked body awkwardly forwards. A man who appeared to be her husband took her arm to help her up onto the stage. The woman, who was from East Asia, said she was a patient. The female presenter held the mic up to the woman’s mouth, but it was her husband who spoke. Maria has a severe speech impediment, and has been barely able to speak for a very long time.

  The healer clasped Maria’s head with both hands. He breathed in deeply, then out. Maria just sat there on the chair, as still as a statue. The healer brought his lips to Maria’s ear, gathered his strength and started to suck in the air, producing a thin whistle reminiscent of a siren. The whistling sound went on and on, showing absolutely no sign of stopping. The studio was packed with people, while crowded onto the cramped stage were Maria and the healer, Maria’s husband, the female presenter, the other two panellists, one a folk psychologist and the other a folk doctor, and the cameraman with his bulky equipment, who was, of course, not visible on the screen. The collective tension had a material presence, expanding to fill the entire space, the pressure building to the point of explosion, all of which seemed almost visible. Everything was far too close, one thing stuck fast to another. The sound of breathing, the rough sound of breathing, the sound of the healer’s stomach gradually filling with air and his eyeballs bulging out from the pressure, the sound of hearts racing, the sound of breathing through the nose, the sound of a suppressed cough, eyelids trembling, hearts contracting, the sound of saliva drying in the oesophagus and being swallowed, and the sound of the healer’s lips ceaselessly sucking the air out of a human body. Her head slightly bowed, her posture utterly passive, Maria was letting her invisible contents slip out. As he struggled to inhale the air from inside her body, exerting all his strength, the healer’s pupils darkened to a devilish black, his complexion transforming into that of a dead person. He was a fish flapping listlessly inside a basket, at the end of its strength. His hands as they clasped Maria’s head were shaking from the effort. By now, the one with the illness looked to be the healer rather than Maria. The camera zoomed in for a close-up of Maria’s face. Having been rigid as steel for some time, at a certain moment her expression contorted frighteningly. The muscles in her cheeks twitched furiously, seemingly a physical manifestation of the desire to speak. Someone burst into agonised sobs; this was neither Maria nor the healer but the female presenter, who had been standing there in a daze the whole time, the mic dangling from her limp grip. The whistling sound produced by the healer’s respiratory action gradually niggled away at people’s nerve cells, irritating in a similar way to white noise, and eventually seemed even to disturb the studio’s broadcasting equipment. Noise gave birth to noise. A mechanical shriek could be heard now and again. Buzzing intermittent trembling or the scratch of skin being torn, the sharp crack of bones snapping, oscillations that whirred high and low. Symptoms of disquiet appearing as sounds of all kinds. Non-linguistic signs. The enormous rat trapped inside each person’s head began to squeal and squirm.

  The art of healing is one of the skills of the soul that are disappearing alongside ancient languages, said the folk psychologist to whom the mic had been passed. The ancient healers used to practice the sorcery of self-healing by chopping their own bodies into pieces and casting them into the air, then gathering the fallen fragments and birthing a new body from these. Once restored to life, they spoke of what they had experienced while they had been absent from their bodies. While their flesh lay dismantled they roamed the underworld, a journey upon which they encountered their spirit spouse. Men or women dressed in white. They married that spouse and had offspring. And when they were released from their spirit’s spouse they were restored to life, returned to the phenomenal world, and recovered their former flesh-and-blood bodies. Back then, time seemed to flow differently in the two worlds. In the eyes of ordinary people, the healer cutting their body into pieces, then sticking it back together was collapsed into a single, brief moment, while the healers themselves claimed to have lived through many years, many decades in the
meantime, in the world of the ground, the world of the departed, or the world of birds.

  The young woman said that she’d found out something about who and where her mother was. Shockingly, the woman who was her mother turned out to be someone she already knew well, at least in name. Because the young woman had long been one of the few people to have an interest in a certain extremely minor field of art. By this time the young woman was already an adult, so it wasn’t as though she still needed parents for protection or nurturing, yet she still felt the desire, a manifestation of pure yearning, for some kind of personal knowledge of her own mother. And so she made up her mind to set out in search of her… and a kind of female Odyssey began.

  Eventually, the healer had to be forcibly detached from Maria. Though by this point he was unable to breathe and his eyelids had turned inside out from lack of oxygen, he didn’t know how to remove himself from her. He looked to be in urgent need of artificial respiration, but luckily returned to normal after a short while. The camera showed the disordered stage and the shocked, baffled audience. The female presenter resumed her sobbing. The folk psychologist was sitting stock still, save for his quivering legs.

  Maria ate the black roots.

  You will never die, Maria’s husband said.

  Kyung-hee’s German teacher wrote her a letter which said, in the period when death was impending, I would stare fixedly out of the ward window at the triangular roof of the train station immersed in the final dusky light of the declining sun, and, when the final train to Berlin for that day was just pulling into the station, would succumb to the illusion of having spotted a rare Amur falcon flying through the air, its red feet and slender body outlined against the sky, and give myself over to the fantasy of, in two days’ time, illegally marrying the woman who had just then opened the door and come into the ward…