Recitation

by Suah Bae

  Defining, citing analogous terms, enumerating samples, explaining, rephrasing, communicating, imitating, speaking in poetry, composing haiku, speaking without the use of certain indispensable words, speaking using only certain other, entirely unrelated words. This was the method of instruction which the German teacher had used with Kyung-hee. One day Kyung-hee claimed that she had forgotten everything she’d learnt and refused to have any further lessons.

  Even though I changed city and language, it was no use. This giddy vertigo, the feeling of something ceaselessly sucking away at me.

  …the fantasy of having her be my final hometown earth.

  One day a young woman came to see me, the healer said once he had recovered. A young woman whom I’d never met before. And yet, she knew me—because she was a journalist at a magazine which had once carried one of my articles. In my opinion, the article I’d written was embarrassing, nothing more than the childish product of an excessively conceited student. But she said that my writing had made a very deep impression on her, and because she praised its purity, calling it writing which evinced a firm, sincere will—though such words must be ten-a-penny in conventional introductions—well, even granting that her looks were no more than mediocre, I warmed to her from the very beginning. So I decided to hear her out, and do her the favour of forwarding the letter she was planning to leave behind to the mother who had long since left her. Even while I agreed to this, though, I could be quite certain that she was mistaken as to one particular fact. Namely, that the woman she called her mother was no such thing! But if anything, the fact that I of all people knew what she did not made me still more kindly disposed towards her. As if, though this is something of an exaggeration, she were my never-before-seen fiancée. Her eyes were far apart, and in spite of her youth hers was a face which had something vague, something unclear about it. Rather than the usual curve, her eyelids drew a flat line across her eyes, giving her a sleepy look. Her eyes drooped under long eyelashes. It was an unusually wide, tranquil face, whose expression when at rest was one of impassivity, which could, according to the circumstances, be interpreted as unfeeling. There was no blush to her skin, which was sallow as a pear. When she smiled, the smile didn’t reach her eyes, and neither did she have a bird’s lively skittishness. What with describing it now, her face, her form is coming back to me in still greater detail; I lack the confidence to judge whether my recollection of her corresponds to the reality, or whether it is an impression created by my breaking the original impression she made down into atomic fragments and combining these anew in my language, entirely as I pleased—an impression, in other words, of rearranged pixels. She was sitting at the kitchen table writing a short letter, and I was watching her do so. As the French windows which opened onto the kitchen veranda had no curtains, mornings would generally see the kitchen flooded with unbearably strong sunlight. And all of its surfaces would glitter as brilliantly as though the kitchen were a kingdom of brass. The sunlight fell upon on her right cheek as she bent over her writing. Like a rocket’s concentrated beam. Though I was standing in the shade, watching her made my own skin throb as though it was itself struck by a fierce ray. But the actual temperature of the solar energy was quite low, low enough for her not to notice its impact, or be aware of the risk of getting burned. Curiously, she was barefoot. Summer had been over for a little while already. The kitchen floor was very cold. And so she was resting her right foot on her left, toes curled, as though embracing the one with the other. I had a strong desire to examine one by one the wrinkles which clasped the sole of her foot. And to try and visualise the simmering and bubbling occurring on her burned right cheek and the sole of her right foot. Just then, the phone in my room rang. I wanted to stay and watch her for a little longer, but I had to take the call. Leave the letter there when you’re done, I shouted to her as I went to my room. I’ll put it in an envelope and make sure it gets to your mother! I said this even though I knew that the woman she thought was her mother was not. I even called her by her name, as though we were intimate. As that name would strike your ears as terribly strange and foreign, for the sake of convenience I’ll call her simply Maria. Maria made no response. As I stepped into my room she turned her head, perhaps about to say something, but at that point the receiver was already midway to my ear, and the kitchen door blocked my view of her. Whether she hadn’t quite caught what I said, or whether she’d said something in reply and I was the one who hadn’t heard, I’m not sure. If, when the call ended and I returned to the kitchen, she, Maria, had still been sitting there at the table, mightn’t I have been able to explain to her, quite calmly, this feeling of mine regarding her mother who was not her mother, my sense that her pseudo mother had sat just like that in just that spot, that queer and contradictory facts about Maria had come out of her pseudo mother’s mouth; yes, there are times when I think I could have explained it, though it’s difficult to describe, that experience of what seemed a form of tangible contact between human beings separated by time, the physical closeness and distance between us that this produces…

  7. I become the low hills’ lupins

  Kyung-hee wasn’t exactly famous, true, but we still thought of her as an actor with a certain amount of renown among stage professionals or lovers of recitals. And so when we got in touch with various theatre companies and audio book publishers to try and find out her contact details, and came up against the fact that no one had any information about her, this left us at something of a loss. To put it simply, none of the people we got in touch with had heard of Kyung-hee. The stock response that kept coming back to us was that there was no recital actor of that name. What’s more, one person even informed us that the breed of artist who could be called an ‘actor specialising in recitation’ no longer existed in South Korea, that the renowned stage actor-cum-singer who had passed away many years ago would probably have been the very last performer to specialise in recitation and solo voice acting, that these days one was more likely to encounter stage recitation, if indeed one encountered it at all, as something which radio actors dabbled with as a sideline. Of course, that person later clarified their remarks, saying that they’d meant the kind of actor who enjoyed such a level of fame among the general public that they could appear on television broadcasts. Now and then, people showed signs of confusing stage actors specialising in recitation with writers of fairytales or radio actors or puppet theatre voice artists, ventriloquists or even magicians who used their voices as part of their act. There was a reason that we had to meet Kyung-hee. But everyone we telephoned said in chorus, there is no recitation actor named Kyung-hee, if it’s not a pseudonym then it’s probably a false name, or else a lie. It can’t be, we said. If we said that we’d invited Kyung-hee to our house and hosted an at-home recitation, the listener would express their superficial admiration by saying in wondering tones, ‘Oh, you must be so wealthy! Only the upper classes could hold a private recitation in their own home!’ Though at the same time, they didn’t forget to add that, though the situation might well be different elsewhere, there are some things that South Korea simply does not have, and that one of these was a recitation actor by the name of Kyung-hee. But none of them could give us a convincing explanation as to why they were so sure on this count. It sounded as though, rather than indicating that there really was no Kyung-hee, perhaps it was simply that the phenomenon of a woman by the name of Kyung-hee was insufficiently noticeable, and the voice of a woman of that name was fated to go unrecognised. Just an empty exclamation. “An at-home recitation, well I never! What uncommon class!”

  Having been drawn to Korea by an utterly inexplicable, irresistable impulse, we cannot forget the sight we saw at a small countryside school. When, after a fairly lengthy bus journey, we eventually alighted at a stop quite far from the built-up areas, around evening, we were immediately confronted by a cacophonous war cry drilling into our ears, with an accompaniment of screams and roars. It was coming from the small playground in front of the bus stop. In the cen
tre of the playground there was a long pole, tall as a flagpole, with scores of children thronged around it, shouting a single name over and over again in a rough chorus. We were rooted to the spot; that name was ‘Kyung-hee.’ Since the constant refrain ‘there is no Kyung-hee’ had been coming at us from the mouths of so many people, theatre professionals and those who were connected with the world of the stage, that chance encounter went beyond surprising—it was miraculous. The children were raggedly chanting the name of a girl who, dangling perilously from the upper section of the pole, could neither move further up nor come back down. We couldn’t tell whether the intensity which laced their voices indicated wild encouragement, hate-filled curses, severe collective scolding, or a simple madness that had nothing to do with any of these. Despite being clearly terrified, and lacking the means of crawling further up the sports pole, the girl didn’t look to be thinking about retreating back down it either. She was trying to hide herself, frantically burying her face in her arms as though fleeing from something, but the position she found herself in offered little hope of this. Not only did the children not tire, their screams of Kyung-hee, Kyung-hee! were growing gradually more aggressive. Compared with the confident, strapping children screaming up at her, this girl called Kyung-hee cut a fragile figure. We stood there for a while. We listened to the yells bursting from the mouths of the enraged children. That was the first, and perhaps the only Kyung-hee we encountered in Korea.

  Having found a kind of refuge, though a perilous one, there at the top of the pole, Kyung-hee had almost no physical form against the dark-washed sky. So there was actually nothing odd in everyone having told us that there was no Kyung-hee. There in that playground, already strewn with twilight and tinged red like rusted soil, the evening was rapidly spreading as though slipping down from the surrounding hillocks towards the flat land. It was the moment in the day when the contours of objects, where a given form begins or ends, grow rapidly vague and become confused with one another. The white pole became a sharp metal pillar, boring into both sky and earth. As a form of appendage suspended from the wretched human whom they were calling Kyung-hee, who clung to it like a little monkey, the pole seemed to be testifying with its whole body to the confidence of matter, the integrity of matter, the immortality of matter. Morning glory flowers bowed their heads and shrank into themselves. Propaganda banners fluttered and subsided of their own accord, and we froze in a pious shudder.

  Later, a teacher emerged slowly from the school building and, looking somewhat shifty, explained to us that the child called Kyung-hee had been stealing her friends’ money, and that when the student body, unwilling to take any more of this, had gathered in a simultaneous display of anger, the frightened little girl had displayed a superhuman strength in crawling to the top of the pole, which had been set up ahead of the district athletics competition the following week.

  We did visit several recital stages, but if these had names then nobody knew them. Theatres exclusively for recitals were usually found a little way out from the city centre, in residential suburban areas or in shabby single-story buildings near train stations. On days where there were no performances these places were locked up and, as they would have neither a business sign nor a notice board, could easily be mistaken for basement offices; only when the evening performance was soon to start would the door be opened and a makeshift ticket office set up, usually nothing more than a shabby fold-out table. At some point, we’d become convinced that as a recital actor, Kyung-hee must be known by a stage name. And that this explained why we’d been unable to track her down so far. So we decided to do the rounds of as many recital stages as possible, without bothering to find out the name of the performer. Strolling the city from one recital to another. And with the expectation that, sooner or later, we would stumble across one of Kyung-hee’s performances. But we never did get to see her standing on-stage. Not only that, but we learned that not even the scant handful of regulars attending the recitals, who all knew each other by sight and had naturally become quite friendly, knew anything about anyone who might have been Kyung-hee. As time passed, what we already knew about Kyung-hee, what we’d thought of as concrete facts, became vague. As the concrete Kyung-hee grew more and more vague, the symbolic Kyung-hees standing on-stage drew ever closer, little by little, through voice and gesture, and we would experience a simultaneous receding and approaching. As with the countless screaming voices, all directed towards the tiny figure outlined against the dark sky, dangling perilously from the very top of a pole, those disembodied voices which formed a symbolic pointing finger, crying Kyung-hee! Kyung-hee! as though they had seen through to her unrevealed essence. For example, each time, late at night at our lodging, we listened, deep in thought, we would hear a crisp, continuous whispering coming from the other side of the wall. We fell into imagining that an impromptu recital was being held in the next room, that a female recitation actor was reading a long text in an uninflected voice. But the more we strained to catch the details of what was being said, the more the whispering persuaded us of Kyung-hee’s absence. Kyung-hee had been discontinued. Kyung-hee was finished. Kyung-hee had boiled down. Kyung-hee had been annulled. Kyung-hee had been dismantled. Kyung-hee was the burnt-out past. Kyung-hee had become no one. Kyung-hee was nothing. That woman lacked the fact of being Kyung-hee. Kyung-hee had been extinguished. Kyung-hee was within the sleep of sleep. In other words, doubly asleep. Kyung-hee was with a woman who no one knew, with no way to tell the two of them apart. Kyung-hee was three-fourths Kyung-hee. Notification of the fusion of Kyung-hee’s components. Kyung-hee had slipped down in the form of low hills… The whispering continued night after night, lingering into the hours of broad daylight, clinging to our ears as we rode the bus or the subway or wandered the streets of Seoul, and we didn’t know how to shake it off.

  Oddly enough, this unaccountable whispering reminded us of when we’d attended a recital and seen a tall woman in her sixties recite several poems, standing stock still and with her greying head bowed at almost a ninety-degree angle. Such whispering paradoxically notified us of Kyung-hee’s non-existence through the image of Kyung-hee that appeared, changing name and place here and there within imagination and memory. The recitation actor’s voice sounded like Kyung-hee’s, her silhouette was not especially different from that of the Kyung-hee we knew, and so, fully expecting that she was indeed none other than Kyung-hee, we were unable to tear our gazes from her throughout the recitation. But once she’d finished the final poem and raised her head fully, so that the lighting streamed down onto her face, not only was it the face of a completely different person, but the voice instantly transformed as well. This seemed scarcely credible, but perhaps it was due to a particular acoustic effect caused by the stage’s peculiar construction, which consisted of various circular levels like a snail’s shell, or perhaps the actor having had her neck so sharply bowed, like someone who had just been hanged, and having maintained that singular posture throughout the performance, had exerted an abnormal pressure on her vocal chords. We couldn’t tell the precise cause. The name of that performance was Primitive, and the title of each poem she read was also Primitive.

  Primitive 23

  Wild beasts are born, go by, die.

  Since they go to the land of endless cold,

  To the cruelty of endless night, the heart of darkness.

  Birds come, then fly away, and die.

  Since they go to the land of endless cold,

  To the cruelty of endless night, the heart of darkness.

  Fish come, then disappear, and die.

  Since they go to the land of endless cold,

  To the cruelty of endless night, the heart of darkness.

  People are born, eat, sleep.

  Since they go to the land of endless cold,

  To the cruelty of endless night, the heart of darkness.

  The heavens burn, eyes cave in.

  The evening stars shine.

  On the earth, a harsh chill, in the sky, light.


  People went to that place: those once prisoned in life were

  released,

  The shadows were gathered in.

  Had we not, one such day, had our attention captured by the faint sound of the radio coming from behind a shop’s partition; had we not pricked up our ears and realised that the sound was identical to the ghost whispering with which we were by then familiar, we would have taken what those voices had been saying—phrases related to the non-existence of Kyung-hee—as read, would have dismissed our chance encounter with Kyung-hee at the station, our intense absorption in the story she had told us then, as simply a scene from an unusually solid, tangible dream that had lasted for several days. A dream as a long as an ancient epic poem, a dream which we had dreamed collectively, a dream made up of long-winded, riotous imaginings like those of Apuleius’ Golden Ass, a dream of waking from a dream, part of a dream of entering a dream, and the dream is the sickness that people who have lived for too long a time on nothing but books, painkillers, the radio, and audiobooks, end up contracting at the end of their life, a sweet form of compensation.

  Everything began as a kind of muttering. It was a language of muttering which recalled rough, hard, broken rocks and earth and bleached bones and grainy sand, the sound of a two-year-old horse’s tendons trembling, the sleekness of a smoothly-eroded limestone floor, a cave bat’s breathing, a flute made of swan’s bone, a planetary ring of colliding rock and ice kernels, whispering made up of hard ironware with irregular edges, the sound of bones burning in a fire and soot gusting up like a storm cloud, a bearskin drum. The shop we stepped into was a general store on the outskirts of the city, which sold soap and cigarettes, sugar and soy sauce, etc. We couldn’t understand how we’d ended up there, so far from the subway station. The area was still technically a part of Seoul, but it was more like the ruins of an abandoned construction site than a city; dirty puddles were hidden here and there between mounds of soil, and black mosquitos swarmed around the straggling clumps of grass. The place was littered with various items which had been dumped there illegally, such as fragments of galvanised iron; an old-fashioned, busted TV; a rusted iron stove and an armchair with its stuffing hanging out; a doll missing its eyeballs; a wrecked birdcage. And, on the hillocks which were scattered around, sporadic clumps of lupins, of a breathtakingly intense purple. The sticky spiders’ webs strung between the lupins gave off a sweet scent as they strained and bellied in the wind. Who was it, we wondered, the one who thought to sow lupin seeds in the ruins of this decaying city, a place which wasn’t even their hometown. Nearby was a paddy field, left fallow now for many months, and the low hills continued beyond that, and on one of those hills was an old two-story house, long abandoned. An obsolete building, whose demolition had been postponed for some reason. Walls that had once been painted white were now black with soot, crumbling in places, and the iron plating on the steps leading to the front door was rusted right through. A construction consisting of large windows, a flat roof, and a first-floor veranda over the ground-floor living room. A building obliquely recalling the standardised lodgings of security guards, the jerry-built fashion of the 1970s. The same thought flitted through our heads simultaneously; had a teacher lived in that house with his family? The shop faced onto the road directly opposite the house.