Recitation

by Suah Bae

  The bear spat out the dregs, except for the soft meat and body fluids.

  After being thus broken down and formed again, the shaman’s wife was left as a terrifyingly aged hag.

  Her womb had atrophied, and her breasts and stomach sagged down brutally. Her skin gave off a foul stench, her face was hollow as a corpse’s, and her hair fell out.

  Die, ugly beast, the shaman’s wife muttered as she gazed at her own transparent body, but she couldn’t recognise the thing she was addressing as herself.

  Children appeared from the other side of the red hills and threw stones at her.

  There were blind children, children who were deaf and dumb, children without arms or legs, children whose whole bodies were covered in boils.

  The shaman’s wife hobbled away as fast as she could.

  When one of the stones struck her back it tore straight through the aged, pulpy flesh. Die, ugly beast, the children chorused at her back.

  The children’s voices rang out like the clear peal of a bell.

  The shaman’s wife walked the red wasteland for months without taking a single sip of water.

  A well made of heaped-up stones materialised, but when she got closer it was a puddle of blood,

  A pile of bread was visible on a distant tower, but when she got closer it was the carcass from a sky burial,

  A heap of broken bones covered in reddish-black stains. The faint shape of mountains were strung along the far horizon,

  But every time the shaman’s wife got closer they would disappear as though erased.

  The wasteland knew neither night nor day, and neither the sun nor the moon ever rose.

  The wasteland only continued endlessly on,

  In the form of caves and cliffs, hills of stones and thorn thickets, dried-up river beds and the broken stone images of gods.

  Once she came face to face with an old hag who had suddenly appeared in the middle of the wasteland.

  The shaman’s wife asked the old woman who she was.

  The old woman answered, I was Abakal’s wife; because I loved the village shaman I starved my crippled husband Abakal to death, went to the shaman’s house, and became his fifth wife.

  We were very much in love. But our love couldn’t last for long.

  After our love was all done with I became a cow, as was predicted.

  So I have to drag a plough through the stony fields until my flesh wears out.

  And since I am now so old that it’s completely worn out, with not even the form remaining,

  No one, not even I myself, asks who I am.

  And the old woman disappeared in a puff of smoke.

  One day a huge white bird flew slowly over the shaman’s wife’s head, and as it moved away the shaman’s wife was able to read the words written on its stomach.

  Be happy, woman, your wish will be fulfilled,

  In recompense for your worn-out flesh and your keenly-felt agony,

  You will see your husband living again.

  He will live again, he will continue his life in the world as before, but

  He will not know you,

  He will remember nothing of you,

  You will have become an old woman,

  But he will return as a beautiful young man, in spite of time,

  And so will be unable to recognise you,

  Ignorant of having been swallowed down into your lower half and brought back up again,

  Of having passed through your blood and through your womb, emerging from your naked crotch,

  And thus been restored to the light,

  All while a drum was beaten,

  And a female shaman dressed as a white bird danced,

  And you will return to Abakal’s house and see your lost flesh-and-blood daughter attending to the pleasures of Abakal’s bed,

  But your husband will live out his life with another wife.

  In that case, what has my suffering amounted to? the shaman’s wife thought, with her lump of a body that refused to die.

  I who witnessed my husband’s death

  Did not hesitate

  Did not look back

  Crossed this river where all flesh-and-blood bodies inevitably become stinking corpse-figures;

  I wanted only to bring my husband back from the dead; wasn’t that in order to live with him again?

  All the while I was searching for him, I saw his retreating figure as though he were in front of me.

  I saw his heels beneath the hem of his robe.

  At various times he was a rock I sat on,

  He was my own head or stomach,

  He was the stars in the night sky melting into drops of rain

  And the open square of the dawn,

  The stone image of a man standing alone in the centre of the square,

  A train crossing the far horizon,

  A red roofless tower used for sky burials,

  Sometimes he was a wild cat that attacked me,

  At certain moments he was even Abakal.

  He was my eternal husband, my ancestor, my shaman.

  But now he is one who has been resurrected, and there must be this distance between us.

  Ah, this formless pain. Now my agony is even more cruel than when I witnessed my husband’s death,

  I suffer the nights through.

  I suffer my life through.

  I could never have imagined that there could be a greater suffering than accepting his death.

  Who are you, you who are punishing me so cruelly?

  I suppose after I die all the soft flesh of my body will be offered to the hawks as a sky burial.

  So now please take this fate from me.

  At that, a second white bird flew into view, covering the sky, and imparted to her the second revelation.

  Daughter,

  Since it is due to you that all the things of this world will ultimately come about or not,

  You can both grieve at this knowledge, and be happy.

  If you open your eyes right now, you will escape from this dream.

  Your pain is understood,

  And your leave-taking is complete.

  You will wake from the dream, and at the same time you will enter another dream.

  You will bid farewell to Abakal’s life,

  Bid farewell to the body Abakal’s life left you with,

  Forget what Abakal inflicted on you,

  And you will no longer be Abakal’s daughter-wife,

  And through forgetting Abakal like this,

  Because you left Abakal you will meet Abakal again,

  And because you left Abakal you will begin a new life as Abakal’s woman.

  As you look on Abakal you will no longer question the meaning of suffering.

  Your husband, who has fallen off the eternally-spinning wheel which you yourself still ride, stays in the realm of death.

  People tear open the wall of the tent so as not to obstruct the spirit,

  Making a threshold which the living cannot cross. His corpse is carried there.

  You cry on the threshold.

  His body is placed at the distant top of the tree of life.

  His calm gaze is directed upwards, towards the hawks of the air who will harvest him.

  He will speak without a voice.

  ‘In my young days, I loved youth.

  Only when I grew old and infirm, did I realise that I liked age and infirmity too.

  And when I died, I found pleasure also in death.’

  Objects will return to the place they were originally visible, the dead to hawks, human beings to Abakal.

  Picture rising suddenly on a screen above the stage: Enigma of a Farewell (Giorgio de Chirico, 1916)

  Before the performance is due to start, I go the waiting room behind the stage and knock on the door. As soon as my mother opens the door, I tell her who I am. And then say what I’ve been wanting to say for a long time. “Do you mind me being here?” A three-quarter smile appears on my mother’s face, yet she doesn’t open t
he door fully to let me in. She explains the reason. “I’m afraid you’re mistaken; it seems someone has told you a lie. I’ve never had a child. That is a fact, something it’s absolutely impossible for me to be mistaken about.” “But I’ve spent the last twenty years believing that you’re my mother,” I cry, quite shocked. “I even went all the way to Berlin to meet you, to meet my mother, because that’s where I was told you were.” “But I wasn’t there, right?” my mother laughed softly. “People are mistaken now and then, it’s not such a big deal. Whoever was telling you these things must have confused me with someone else of the same name.” Indicating what looked vaguely like a chair and table at the rear of the waiting room, my mother said, “As you know, I have to give a performance now, so unfortunately there isn’t time for us to have a longer chat.” She went over to the chair, sat down, straightened up, and began to read the script out loud. Leaving the door standing half open. I stand outside the door, listening to her rehearsal voice ringing out in that small, dark, underground room which, because I was unable to emerge from it—given that this would have required me to enter it in the first place, which was not permitted—suddenly reminds me of the womb. I wait for my mother’s voice to resonate inside my body and emerge through my windpipe. I think of my father having once described a scenario like this for me, predicting how it would turn out. Describing my mother saying you’re mistaken, I’ve never had a child. Occurrences which are related before the fact are like a walking stick that makes a path through the air. Constantly, throughout the course of my life, my father describes. He whispers. He sings, and he listens. He records. Pasting photographs in large notebooks with yellowed covers. My father makes a scrapbook of picture postcards and tickets to readings, train tickets, payment slips and the like, sketches a new type of beetle which he discovered while out for a walk, describes the weather on a particular day, and inserts diary entries in the form of brief memos here and there. Inside it, I am the reading, the train ticket, the beetle, the payment. He, who loved nature in its most seductive forms, inserts red poppies and full-blown purple lupins between the pages of the notebook, as well as tiny snakes that look like fish. He records the date on which he discovered the lupins as the 8th of August 1990, the day I was born, and the place as ‘one of the low hills of Seoul, around sunset.’ He writes, the sun rises into the flat, milky sky, an otherwise empty expanse which has never before been filled with such a still, solitary light as floods it now. And then he goes away. I’ve lived in Seoul for twenty years and I still don’t know where they are, these low hills where lupins bloom. And I’ve never met anyone who’s seen them. I ask various people, but they all insist that no such place exists. There are some things which absolutely do not exist in the specific place that is Seoul; low hills where lupins bloom are one such thing, they say. But none of them can provide a convincing explanation as to why low hills where lupins bloom, of all things, are absent from Seoul, of all places. I am as ignorant of the manner of my father’s death as I am of the texture of his life. His hometown, a place of early morning strolls through lupin hills, is not Seoul. The unfamiliar scenery that his gaze lighted upon will remain eternally unknowable for me. He encountered lupins directly, seeing them with his own two eyes. To him, nature is inherently good. Flowers come and go. People go to that place. He loves only the object-ness and will-less-ness of nature. I am a child neither planned nor wished for. My mother and father had no intention of becoming parents. One day each writes a letter to the other, hi, there’s no need for us to ever meet again. They do not wish to live on through my body. They do not wish to know my body. But just as my father’s legacy is the lupin he came across and placed in his notebook, just as my mother’s is the voice she spent her life producing on stage, I too will be encountered and read through my involuntary parents, and this will eventually be all that remains of me; I find this oddly reassuring. They each go in opposite directions, but I think and feel what they think and feel. I touch what they touch. They gaze at me. I become a lupin, blooming on the low hills.

  BAE SUAH was born in Seoul in 1965 and graduated from Ewha Women’s University with a BA in Chemistry. After making her literary debut in 1993 with the short story “Highway with Green Apples,” she has gone on to become one of the most highly acclaimed contemporary Korean authors and winner of the Hanguk Ilbo and Tongseo literary prizes. She has written five novels and more than ten short story collections, in addition to translating the works of German writers including W.G. Sebald, Franz Kaf ka, and Jenny Erpenbeck. Nowhere to be Found, her first work to be translated into English, was longlisted for a PEN Translation Prize and the Best Translated Book Award. Bae’s novella Nowhere to be Found, her first work to be translated into English in 2015, was nominated for a PEN Translation Prize and the Best Translated Book Award, and Open Letter Books published her novel A Greater Music in 2016.

  DEBORAH SMITH is a literary translator and founder of Tilted Axis, a nonprofit press based in London with a focus on fiction from Asia. She received a PhD in contemporary Korean literature at SOAS (University of London), and was awarded the Arts Foundation Award for Literary Translation in 2016. Her translations from the Korean include Han Kang’s Human Acts and The Vegetarian, winner of the 2016 Man Booker International Prize, and two novels by Bae Suah: A Greater Music and Recitation, from Open Letter Books and Deep Vellum, respectively.

  1from Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism

  2Parts quoting Borges in W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn re-edited and quoted at the writer’s license

  3A pygmy burial song quoted by Octavio Paz in his essay collection. The title of the essay in which the song is contained is ‘Primitive’; ‘Primitive 2’ is the title assigned by Bae Suah to the song as re-quoted here.

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