Translations of Beauty

by Mia Yun

  After a few stops along the Viale di Trastevere, we get off the bus. Up a couple of yards from the bus stop, Inah steers me into a street with a narrow sidewalk. Lined with low, old, brick buildings, and crowded with small lively restaurants and stores, it looks and feels just like one of the streets in the Village or Little Italy. From that slightly run-down and cramped look to the dingy sidewalk. As if reading my mind, Inah says, with a slight hint of disgust in her voice, that Trastevere used to be a backwater but it has become a Yuppyville and is now considered a fashionable place to live.

  “Sounds just like New York,” I say, smiling because she sounds so territorial. “But it’s lively. It should be safe.” She doesn’t say anything to that. I can feel her mood change.

  “This is it,” Inah says, stopping in front of a scuffed brown door of a gray six-story building that houses a small pizzeria on the ground level. With a key she pulls out from her backpack, Inah lets us into the musty hallway, and we climb the foot-worn stairs to the third-floor landing, lit by a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling like a small, dying moon. For some reason, Inah won’t use her key. Instead, she rings the doorbell, which unexpectedly sounds like an insolent bleat of a hog. After long seconds, from inside comes the scraping sound of footsteps, and the door opens just a crack and a head pokes out.

  “Oh, only it’s you, Inah,” says a girl’s voice in an accented English. From what I can see, she seems about our age and rather short. It’s the dark circles under her big brown eyes that give her round face a strangely fierce, birdlike look. And she’s one of those people who can pass for anything: Italian, Greek, Spanish, Indian or Middle Eastern. She floats me a quick, darting glance over Inah’s shoulder and quickly pulls her head back in and disappears behind the door.

  “Will be back in a sec,” Inah says, slipping inside after her. I crane my neck, hoping for a glimpse of the apartment, but Inah quickly shuts the door behind her. As I stand there waiting for Inah, the whole thing hits me as a little bizarre. It bothers me the covert and furtive way Inah and the girl behaved. Inah didn’t even bother to introduce me to her or ask me in. And the girl seemed almost hostile. I didn’t like her darting eyes, either. It was as if she were hiding something. What is going on? I am flooded with suspicion.

  It occurs to me that Inah might belong to some kind of cult. And I wonder if this place is one of the safe houses run by it. It all seems to make perfect sense. For a moment, I even doubt the story Inah told me about why she left Oxford. It didn’t account for why Inah’s living at this rundown place with this mysterious girl. That’s it. I place my ear to the door, but all I can make out is the intermittent murmurings of their voices. I try the doorknob and give the door a quick shove, but it doesn’t budge. I debate whether I should ring the bell or pound at the door. Just then I hear footsteps approach the door, and I quickly step back. The door opens and Inah walks out carrying a frayed khaki-cloth rucksack, sagging at the bottom with the weight.

  “Remember this?” Inah says, pointing at the rucksack.

  “Can’t believe you still have that,” I say, stealing a quick look at her face. But she looks perfectly innocent. I wonder if I am getting paranoid. I have yet to learn to trust Inah.

  “We bought it together at an Army-Navy store in Man-hattan,” Inah reminds me again as if she can’t believe that I remember it.

  Suddenly, I feel a pang of something like nostalgia. Of course I remember; I remember everything. Isn’t that the problem: remembering everything and not being able to forget anything? Inah probably hasn’t a clue how I miss those days. Whenever she came home for Christmas from Antioch, she would bring with her a long list of things (she was always making lists even then) she couldn’t get in Yellow Springs, Ohio. And then, like an annual ritual, after Christmas, we would spend a day in Manhattan, rummaging through the shelves of used books, racks and bins of used clothes and boxes of old records and used CDs. We loved the same books and songs and movies then, and shared the excitement of discovering a great new book or song over long distance.

  It always seemed freezing and gray. In my head, I still carry an image of Inah from those days, walking next to me, hunched and shivering in her thin dark blue pea coat in the mauve light of winter dusk, and chattering her teeth behind a long, purplish knit scarf and now and then uttering her trademark dry observations like chicken droppings.

  “We went to see The Buddha of Suburbia that night at the Public Theater,” I say to assure Inah that I remember. “It was a BBC miniseries, wasn’t it, adopted from the Hanif Kureishi novel you liked?” Impressed, Inah nods. Later that night after the movie, we rushed down to Tower Records on Bleeker Street, hoping to get hold of the David Bowie title song of the movie. We had to have it right then and there. We thought it was one of the best songs we had ever heard. But we couldn’t find it.

  A couple of years later, I finally got hold of a David Bowie CD with the song on it and mailed it to her. She was then in San Francisco working for a nonprofit organization called Food First, whose lofty mission was feeding the world’s hungry. I remember it was about the time that Inah’s slow drift started.

  Inah pushes open the door, and we file back out to the street of the warm night. The misty air hangs thick with smoke and cooking smells.

  “Inah. Do you remember the song? From that movie Ashley Judd starred in. ‘Trying to hold on to the earth …’”

  “You mean Ruby in Paradise?”

  “Right, that’s it! ‘If I close my eyes, I’m afraid I won’t wake up; If I stop and listen, I’m afraid I hear too much … solid gold question mark, twenty feet tall …’” To my surprise, the rhythm comes right back to me, too. I used to love that frenzied flurry of pounding beats toward the end of the song. It always gave me an urge to run out into a downpour.

  “I used to listen to it all the time and feel sorry for myself,” Inah says. “Maybe it’s just the song for the young and confused. I don’t know…. Music always makes you sad anyway.”

  “Don’t you think you gravitate to sad music because you are sad to start with?”

  “Maybe … ,” Inah mumbles, looking uncomfortable. She wants to steer clear from any subject that might lead to a discussion of her life. We lapse into an awkward silence. I think about what Inah said; music always making you sad. I wonder if it’s because we always remember the first time we hear a certain song. The place we were, the people we were with, the time of the day and the light and how we felt then. And every time we hear that song, we relive all that. That’s why we listen to the same music again and again in the hope of recapturing that first emotional experience. And isn’t it always sad to remember something that’s past and gone? And isn’t the same true with life? Isn’t so much of life, after a certain age, about trying to replicate what’s past and gone? To recapture the magic of a place and time that no longer exist? But the truth is that we can never experience the exact same thing twice. And that’s what’s so sad about life.

  “So what do you listen to these days?” Inah asks after a while, trying to lighten up the mood.

  “Andrea Bocelli? I guess I’m getting old.” Inah hoots deliciously. “I’m not kidding, Inah! Mom has been reminding me that I will be thirty next year by Korean age.”

  “And I won’t be?”

  “She even says things like how in Korea, no man will touch an old miss like me with a ten-foot pole.”

  “Like it’s a great loss,” Inah says drily. At the scrubby piazza up the street, someone starts singing through a static speaker. It sounds like a sudden bleat. And then we hear peals of laughter. They must be having that singing contest again, Inah says. We walk down the rest of the street in silence, chasing our separate threads of thought.

  “What did you say the girl does?” I ask Inah when we are at the bus stop.

  “Who?” asks Inah absentmindedly. Then she glances at me curiously. “You mean Nidra Phookan? I told you she’s a doctoral candidate at Oxford. She’s here for her research.”

  “I
don’t think you told me anything about her,” I say, hating my apologetic tone. “What is she? Indian?”

  “She’s English,” Inah answers in an offhanded way, looking away, annoyed.

  “She seems a little strange,” I say, fishing for more information. I know I am pushing, and I hate myself for it. I am as hopeless as Mom.

  “She’s fine. She’s just not the most sociable person in the world,” Inah says in a tone that says that’s the end of our discussion of her. After a while, though, she adds, “Don’t worry, it’s not at all what you think.” I never get to ask her what she meant by that because just then a bus comes. I know enough to drop the subject.

  Back at the Piazza Venezia, we are the last and only passengers to get off the bus from Trastevere. The warm air still feels as thick as syrup. The huge and curiously ugly Victor Emmanuel II monument in the white floodlight looks as if sculpted out of a snow mountain. Slowly, we head for the Trevi.

  It’s well past eleven, but the narrow streets converging into the Trevi are still clogged and buzzing with crowds. The ice-cream store is still bright with lights. The terraces around the flood-lit fountain are swarmed with tourists, happy and laughing, wistfully throwing coins over their shoulders. The Italian boys with slick, moussed-back hair and slippery smiles, the ones who come every night to hang around and check out girls, are still here, too, smoking and laughing at the doorways and around motorcycles parked up the narrow steep side streets.

  We stand there for a while, watching the happy crowd milling about, and then continue on to Via della Dataria. The deserted street stands hushed and strangely eerie in the dark. Outside the arch entrance to the Palazzo del Quirinale, the motionless guards look like stone statues dressed up in uniform. Inah looks at me dragging my feet and says, “Will race you to the piazza for a piggyback ride.”

  “I can’t. I’m totally pooped.”

  Lugging the rucksack, Inah sprints up the hill anyway. Halfheartedly I trot up after her and then kind of get into the spirit. I slip off my sandals and speed up the hill. The stone feels warm and hard on the balls of my feet. Inah disappears over the piazza just as I reach the foot of the steps. I crawl up and tiptoe my way to the obelisk, where she is bent over, catching her breath. But before I can jump her, she quickly spins around, shrieks, and runs off, startling a couple who are making out by the balustrades behind the police box. After racing to the other end of the piazza, Inah stops, turns around and leans against the staircase, so she can keep an eye on me. In the light, her sweaty face gleams like half-fired pottery. I casually stroll toward her.

  “Shoot!” Inah squeals and sprints for the stairs that lead to Via Maggio. Still, I manage to catch her arm.

  “OK. You win!” she hollers hoarsely, collapsing, and gasping for breath.

  “Bend over,” I order. Inah takes off the rucksack and obediently bends over, turning her bony back into a slippery bow. I step back and then, kicking my heels, jump onto her only to slip right back down. Inah turns her head, looks at me and bursts out laughing. I try again and slide off again, landing on the ground on my butt. It’s so pathetic, she can’t stand it any longer. Laughing and holding her sides with her hands, she staggers off.

  “Come back!”

  “No, stop it!”

  “Don’t be silly! I am not doing anything,” I say, still sitting on the stone, all sweaty and sticky. Finally, I pull myself up on my wobbly legs. Inah comes back and bends down again on all fours, making it easy for me. I climb up and straddle her skinny back. She hands me the rucksack and wraps her arms around my legs and stands up, lurching under the weight. She then gingerly picks her way down the steps and trots along as I paddle her sides with the sandals. Suddenly, just before the carabiniere station, she picks up speed and runs past the row of parked police cars, screaming in mock horror. I am certain she is going to stumble and fall any minute and send us both down the steep sidewalk. Tumbling like broken dolls. I quickly jump off and slip the sandals back on. Inah shoots ahead down the hill, screaming, “Aaaaah! …” Acting goofy.

  Watching Inah’s extra-large white T-shirt shrink away in the dark like a flag of surrender carried by a ghost, I feel something like hope; I become a water bowl filled to the brim. If I move too fast, the bowl will tip, and the water will spill out all over. And then I will never be able to stop crying.

  Inah looks up from a doorstep and holds out her hand, and I pull her up. Her hand, unexpectedly soft and supple, fits just so into mine. For a second or two, she leaves her hand in mine. I can’t hold it any longer; the water bowl tips, spilling out all over.

  “Yunah?!” Inah whines. “Why do you have to ruin it?”

  “Sorry, can’t help it.”

  We walk down slowly, hot and exhausted. In the mist down the street, the neon-lit letters of our hotel look like gigantic free-floating fireflies in the summer night. I don’t want the moment to end even though I am scared to death to feel hopeful again. But it’s worth it. Every fleeting second. We live riding the waves and the drifts of time. Without ever knowing the ending. And sometimes, as Inah once said, what we have now has to be good enough.

  FIVE

  Warm rain falls lazily and soundlessly the afternoon we drive to Princeton. Dad at the wheel, with his new haircut and in a black dress shirt, couldn’t look lonelier. And Mom, next to him, sits as still as a stationary shadow, close to the door, as far as she possibly can be from him without leaving the car. Outside, the grainy world rolls by in still pictures. Elizabeth. Bridges. Cars. Trucks. Docks. Containers. Cranes. Refineries. A barbwired prison. Newark. Planes taking off like gray birds. Rumbling the leaden sky. Rain. Inside, necessity, struggle, needs, and soggy silence. Mom’s face, which I steal a glimpse of in the rearview mirror now and then, is sad and sad and sad. Sadness drips and drips and fills the car, and we are all slowly drowning in it.

  Inah and I assumed all along that there would be some kind of dramatic, clear-cut ending to Dad’s affair, a defining moment, but there wasn’t any. One day, he just moved back home with his blanket and tubby pillow and the clothes we had once delivered in two black trash bags to his basement apartment in a shopping cart. He also went back to his old job at Uncle Shin’s trading company in Manhattan. Inah and I asked no questions. Neither Mom nor Dad tried to offer us any explanations, either. We didn’t want them, anyway. It seemed more bearable that way. We just pretended everything was fine again. He came back. Wasn’t that good enough? We were a family again. Remember? Koreans are nothing without family, Uncle Shin always said.

  But we are also old enough to know that it’s not as simple as picking up a paper towel and wiping up a coffee spill. Nothing is so innocent anymore. Every little gesture and every remark is suspect. The new carefulness. The awkward moment of silence. We notice them with guilt. And we can’t help but remember. Despite ourselves. Memories, we are finding out, have a way of haunting and taunting. Like shadows in the corner, the regrets and the hurt will linger on. For now, we can only try to make adjustments. Because after riding out the swells, who can tell which shore we will wash up on?

  But the worst of it all is that we will always wonder what happened to Dad’s affair. Did it just run its course and come to a fizzling end? Was that why he came back to Flushing? Or was it to resolve what had been dragging on unresolved? In an excruciating limbo.Maybe he didn’t know himself. He had simply gotten tired of his illicit life in a strange city. Maybe the isolation and the guilt started taking a toll on him. Passion, or whatever it was that had given him the absconding feet in the first place, had proved to be not nearly enough. In the end, he realized what colossal courage he had to summon. To begin a new life. To start all over again. That it was not so easy to discard the old life and go on. That his choices are few. Maybe at some point it occurred to Dad how he had simply exchanged one trap for another. Get rid of the old shoe. A new shoe will eventually wear out, too. Every life eventually disappoints.

  I know for a long time Inah and I and Mom will hear that little v
oice of doubts. We will wonder again and again whether Dad’s decision to come back to us was his next best choice, the choice of reason rather than that of heart and whether he will hate himself for that and resent us for denying him a chance of happiness. And Inah and I will wonder whether Mom took him back in for the sake of Inah and me. Sacrifice is the most sacred word for Korean parents. Divorce was never an option she would have considered. It would be the worst kind of failure for her. A flawed life is always better than a failed life. Koreans are nothing without family.

  The Princeton campus is nearly deserted, with most of the students gone for the summer. In soundless drizzle and dusklike light, we walk around, stopping at the rain-slicked paths cutting through mint green lawn and looking at the beautiful old buildings carved in gray stone—as still as in a painting, majestic and grainy in the gray veil of rain mist. It’s a new old world. So removed from the grime and shabbiness of grinding daily life in Flushing, it’s a finely visualized version of Mom’s American dream for Inah and me. Mom, who came to America afflicted with an incurable “Ivy League” disease, points out buildings, a fountain, sputtering lamps, a sculpture, and lingers at the edge of well-tended, freshly cut lawns, trees thick with the shawls of summer foliage, her permed hair turning frizzy in the rain. Looking so wistful. Dad stabs the soggy Princeton guide into his back trouser pocket and lights a cigarette.

  Inah drifts away, not wanting to give Mom a chance to start all over again. It was Mom’s idea to begin with, to come here today for our belated tour of the Princeton campus. But it’s more of a denouement. And like so many things Mom does, an exercise in futility. For Inah is all set to go to Antioch College in the fall. Mom and Inah fought and wrangled over her choice of college like two merchants negotiating a lifetime deal, as if their lives depended on it. In the end, Inah, attracted by its work-study program, chose the small progressive college in Yellow Springs, Ohio, over schools like Vassar, Princeton and Yale.