‘You could have knocked.’
Park had let him in. He took off his shoes. Snow melting under the soles.
‘Leave them outside.’
He said he’d leave if I carried on like this. I didn’t care one way or the other. If he was staying, he should put them outside. He grunted and did as I asked, and then came and sat down beside me. He asked me what I was reading. I tilted the book towards him. He moved my arm aside to pull up my sweater. My breasts tightened. His hand, ice-cold, dug into my flesh. He said nothing but I could feel him judging me, making comparisons, measuring, weighing me up. I pushed him away. Jun-oh sighed. Then he held out his phone to show me the website of a modelling agency in Gangnam. He was leaving in two days to go for an interview. He stood up, checked himself out in the mirror, said he didn’t think they’d expect him to have surgery, but if they did, he was prepared to have his nose, chin and eyes done. He turned to face me. Clinics were offering deals, by the way, I should look into it, he’d bring me some brochures for facial surgery. He examined the back of his right ear. Everyone had things they could improve, he said. Me included, especially if I was hoping to go and work in Seoul at some point. Although in the literary world, looks didn’t count as much. Depending on the job you had, of course. He sat down again, one hand on my thigh. I was wearing a sweater dress, I’d taken off my tights. He ran his finger along my scar, the long, fine line that marked the time I’d fallen on a fish hook when I was little. I put my book down abruptly.
‘Okay. Tell me what you want me to look like.’
He laughed. Why was I acting so hostile? He thought I was just perfect. He pushed a strand of hair back behind my ear and lay down, one leg on top of mine, to kiss me. I kept my mouth closed against his tongue. Why did I always do that, he protested, we weren’t going to see each other for days. I said I’d miss him, but the time would go quickly, I had lots to do at the guest house. Jun-oh got up to leave. He said I could sleep at his place the next day if I wanted to. Then he went out, slamming the door behind him.
NINE-THIRTY in the morning. I was doing the washing-up. The couple came into the kitchen wearing matching pyjamas, pink for her, grey for him. She poured herself some coffee listlessly. Her bandages made her look like a panda. She pecked at a yogurt from the tip of a spoon. He had toast with persimmon jam. They sat at the table for a while, their phones in front of them, the wifi faster here than in their room. The climber had eaten at half past five and then left for the mountains. Black coffee, four slices of plain bread, a banana, cut lengthwise and spread with butter.
Through the window between the kitchen and reception I saw Kerrand as he came in. He said something to Old Park, who shouted my name, annoyed at his own lack of English. I left the dishes in the sink, wiped my hands, waited for the fog on my glasses to clear before I went to join them. Kerrand was asking about going to the North Korean border. I explained to him that the bus could only take him as far as the vehicle checkpoint. To go to the observation point in no man’s land you had to be in a private car. Kerrand wanted to rent one. Park called the rental agency. You needed an international licence. Kerrand didn’t have one. But he did have a French licence. Park said he was sorry, that wouldn’t work. I suggested I drive him myself. They stared at me in surprise. Park agreed, so long as the rooms were done first.
‘We can go another day if you like,’ Kerrand said.
It was settled, we’d go on Monday. I asked Kerrand if he’d had breakfast, I’d be clearing things away soon. He wasn’t hungry, he was going out for a walk.
While he was out, I went to do the cleaning in the other building. The tray was lying where I’d left it, untouched. Kerrand must have seen it, he would have had to step over it to get to reception. He could have brought it back. Thanked me at least. Why was I bothering to drive him to the border? I was giving up my time for him. I wasn’t sure he deserved it.
The colours in his room were starting to glow as light filtered through the curtain. I noticed a shadow on the floor beneath the desk where the ink had dripped down. He must have tried to mop up the stain. A thin coil of smoke drifted up from an incense burner. Beside it, a pack of incense from Naksan Temple. His suitcase sat in a corner of the room. From the size of it, he’d barely be able to fit more than two or three changes of clothes. I opened it a little. Neatly folded clothes, ink, brushes wrapped in raw silk, a book. A satchel with paper inside, the pads he’d bought with me, their pages blank. I started to scrub the floor, afraid he might come back before I finished. The ink was fading but it would leave a mark. I emptied a packet of Dunkin’ Donuts from the wastepaper bin along with the wrapper from a Paris Baguette cheesecake. Before I left, I checked that I’d closed the suitcase properly.
On the landing of the main building, the couple were getting ready to go out. He had his arm round her waist, while she hung on to him, teetering bird-like on her high heels. He asked me to clean their room before they came back that afternoon. I did it quickly. Change the sheets, air the room. In their bin, two condoms, packaging from a night-time face cream, mandarin peelings.
JUN-OH WAS still asleep, lying with his back against my stomach. I ran my finger along the line of his shoulders. The alarm rang. He turned it off, moaning. His breath smelt of soju. We’d had too much to drink, my head felt heavy. My arms around him, unreal. He reached out for his Polaroid at the end of the bed and framed me in the viewfinder, he wanted an image of me to take with him. I pulled the sheet up to hide my face. He took the picture. When I looked up, he was tightening his belt. He’d lost weight, muscle. He pursed his lips in concentration as he buttoned his shirt. Like a child, I thought, feeling irritated. When he came back from the bathroom he kissed me on the forehead, picked up his bag, gave me his keys to keep until he returned from the capital, and left.
I waited for the sound of his footsteps on the stairs to die away before getting up. He’d left the photo behind, on the bed. I turned it over. The colours were still developing. Portrait view. The curve of my hips in the foreground, a wasteland of ribs and shoulder blades receding into the distance. My bones sticking out. I was surprised at how much. But I never saw myself from behind, so it made sense that I didn’t recognise myself in the image. I dressed hurriedly, without taking a shower.
Jun-oh lived in a studio flat in the city centre, a good distance from the guest house. I had enough time to walk back, it was still early. On the beach, snow was melting on the sand in a shaft of sunlight. I thought I saw the outline of a man hunched over in a wool coat, like a willow in the wind.
There was no one there.
IT STARTED RAINING when I got back. Park usually covered the outdoor furniture with a tarpaulin he kept on the roof terrace. I went to fetch it. The trap door was open. Kerrand, leaning against the railing, under an umbrella. He greeted me with a nod and went back to looking out at the city.
‘Looks like it’s made of Playmobil,’ he said as I began to head back down clutching the tarpaulin.
‘Sorry?’
‘Those little bright-coloured toy characters—’
‘I know what Playmobil is.’
‘They always come with extra pieces when you buy a box of them, little buildings with brightly coloured roofs. That’s what Sokcho reminds me of.’
I’d never really looked closely at Sokcho. I’d never thought of it as particularly interesting. I walked over to join Kerrand. Before us, a jumble of orange and blue corrugated roofs, the burnt-out ruin of the cinema. Further off, the port and fish market. Kerrand was casting me a sidelong glance. He thanked me for doing his room. I nodded without really looking at him.
He’d paid for half-board but he never appeared for meals. Perhaps he didn’t like Korean food. The evening before, I’d told him I’d make a French dish, pasta in a crème fraîche sauce. He didn’t show up, the other guests didn’t like the pasta, nor did Park, and I’d found pastry wrappers in his room again. I’d made up my mind to stop putting myself out for this foreigner who showed no interest in
local cuisine. But his drawing was wound through my thoughts; I couldn’t get it out of my head.
I stood there for a moment, not moving.
‘Are we still going to the border on Monday?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
Feeling suddenly annoyed, I turned to face him. Was he going to stay on the roof for much longer? If not, I’d lock up. He stayed.
I decided to go to the jjimjilbang. I hadn’t had a soak in a sulphur bath for ages, it would do me good. I scrubbed myself for a long time with a boar-bristle brush, scraping away dead skin cells and sebum from all the different parts of my body: feet, legs, backside, belly, shoulders and breasts. Then I plunged into the scalding water until my skin dissolved into a mass of muscle and fat as pink as the scar on my thigh.
THE WIND WAS sweeping the clouds over the surface of the road. Late afternoon light. Skeletal remains of villages on either side of the road. Cardboard boxes, plastic waste, blue metal sheets. No urban sprawl. Gangwon Province had been left to rot since the war. I told Kerrand to drive faster or we’d be late for the tour. I translated the road signs for him. I’d handed him the keys as we got in the car. I hated driving, I’d never intended to drive him there. It suited him fine.
At the checkpoint, a soldier younger than me made us fill in forms. A loudspeaker was delivering instructions on a loop. No photography. No filming. No leaving the marked pathway. No loud voices. No laughing. I handed the papers back to the soldier. He saluted and the fence opened onto no man’s land. Grey and beige as far as the eye could see. Reeds. Marshes. Here and there, a tree. It was two kilometres to the observation point. We had an armed convoy as our escort at first. Then it turned off and we were alone. The road started to snake between snow-filled ditches. Suddenly, Kerrand put his foot on the brake and I was thrown against the windscreen.
‘I thought she was going to cross,’ he mumbled, his hands clutching the steering wheel.
By the side of the road, a woman. Hunched beneath a pink jacket. Kerrand signalled to her to cross. She stood there, not moving, her hands crossed behind her back. He started up again carefully. I could see her in the wing mirror, following us with her eyes. She watched us until we disappeared from view round a bend. My throat was feeling dry from the heater.
In the car park at the observation point, the wind whipped our coats against our legs. A smell of cold oil wafted towards us from a tteok stall. Kerrand buried his hands in his pockets, his sketchbook protruding from the right pocket. We climbed the hill as far as the lookout point. A line of binoculars. For five hundred won, you could gaze at North Korea. I slid a coin in the slot. It was so cold our eyelids stuck to the metal frames. To the right, the ocean. To the left, a wall of mountains. Ahead of us, fog. Not much of a view, but what could you expect in this weather? We went back down to the car park.
The old lady we’d seen earlier was there, talking to the woman selling tteok at the stall. As soon as she saw me she was all over me, talking at me and stroking my cheek with her rough hand. I pushed her away. She whimpered. I clutched at Kerrand, he calmly put his arm round my shoulders.
‘What did she say?’
‘We’re God’s children. She thinks I’m pretty.’
The woman at the stall pointed to a dumpling floating in the pot. Oil was seeping from its pores, expelling little bubbles of air. I shook my head. The other woman was still whining. Kerrand drew me towards the car.
Inside, I wedged my legs against the heater, rubbed my hands between my thighs. I wasn’t warming up. We headed towards the museum. It was late in the afternoon, I hadn’t eaten since the evening before. A Choco Pie had burst out of its purple wrapper at the bottom of my bag and I began picking at it, one crumb at a time.
‘When was the last time you were here?’ asked Kerrand.
‘This is my first time.’
‘You’ve never been here before? Out of a feeling of solidarity, I mean?’
‘Shedding a few tears behind a pair of binoculars? You call that solidarity?’
‘That’s not what I meant.’
‘Tourists are the only ones who come here.’
Kerrand didn’t respond. At the museum entrance, inside a sterile box, a woman’s face leaned in, mouth close to the microphone. Five thousand won.
‘For two?’ I asked.
A pair of bulging eyes looked languidly up at me. Yes, for two people, she said in English. I choked back the humiliation of not being addressed in my own language in front of Kerrand. A rubber-gloved hand pointed us in the right direction.
Too much of everything. Too big, too cold, too empty. The clatter of our shoes on the marble slabs rang out. Kerrand wandered aimlessly, hands in his pockets, looking distracted. Eventually he stopped in front of a display of leather helmets and asked me to translate a sign.
It gave a summary of the conflict between the two Koreas that began in 1950, the North supported by the Soviets and China, the South by the US and the United Nations, the signing of the armistice on 27 July 1953 and the creation of this frontier on the 38th parallel, the world’s most heavily militarised border, in the midst of a no man’s land four kilometres wide and 238 kilometres in length. In the course of those three years, two to four millions deaths, both civilian and military. No peace treaty had ever been signed.
Kerrand was listening to me intently, head down, one hand on his forehead to hold back his hair. The only display that had caught my attention was one with schoolchildren’s shoes from the North along with Choco Pies packaged in blue instead of their trademark purple. Were they the real thing? Did they actually have a cake inside or had they been specially made for the museum?
I checked the time on my phone. The tip of my finger had gone white. I touched it and felt nothing. Ten minutes later the blood still wasn’t flowing back. I signalled to Kerrand. He held my fingers in his warm hand and said it wasn’t normal for me to be so cold. I said I was always cold. He shook his head, tucked my hand into his pocket.
The last room in the museum was a reconstruction of a military camp. At the far end, wax figures of men lying on straw. The room doubled as a souvenir shop. You could purchase Pyongyang alcohol, children’s drawings, badges with images of the North’s dictators. Behind the counter, a waxwork of a woman in a grey uniform staring straight ahead. I walked up to it. The eyelids twitched. A real live person. Sales staff. I tried to catch her eye. No movement of the lips, no raising of the eyebrows.
I told Kerrand I wanted to go.
We drove back in silence. The rain hammered down, the sea rising beneath it in spikes like the spines of a sea urchin. Kerrand drove with his left hand on the wheel, the other on the gearstick, brushing against my knee. Between us, his sketchbook his gloves resting on it. Shadows on his nails, traces of ink. I felt uneasy and did my best to stay close to the door. The angle of the seat made my position uncomfortable.
That evening, I spied on him again through the half-open door. He looked older, bent over at his desk. He’d scribbled an image of a woman’s torso, bare-breasted, her back arched, feet half-hidden beneath one buttock. Curled on a futon. He sketched a wooden floor, filled in the details of the futon, as if to avoid the faceless body clamouring for life. He finished the background in pencil and took up his pen to give her eyes. The woman sat up. Straight-backed. Hair swept back. The chin awaiting a mouth. Kerrand’s breath came faster and faster, in time with the strokes of his pen, until a set of white teeth exploded into laughter on the page. The sound too deep for a woman’s laugh. Kerrand knocked over the inkpot, the woman reeled, tried to cry out again, but the ink slid between her lips, blacking her out until she vanished completely.
THE KOREAN search engine had no information on ‘Yan Kerrand’. But google.fr gave me access to pages from his books. He signed his work ‘Yan’. The tenth and final volume of his most well-known series would be out the following year. I learnt from the readers’ and reviewers’ comments that it was about a globe-trotting archaeologist. A different location for each book, a voy
age in monochrome ink wash. No dialogue, very few words. A lone figure. With a striking resemblance to the author. Clean lines, his silhouette standing out clearly against the other mostly shadow-like figures. A lumbering giant, dwarfing all others. Or else, in miniature, only the hero’s features discernible. The others, hidden behind the detail of a chair, a stone, a leaf. A publicity photo showed Kerrand receiving a prize. Smiling sheepishly. A red-haired woman at his side, almost his height, square face, short hair. A publicist? His wife? They didn’t look right together. A married man wouldn’t leave for a trip with no definite return date, I thought. She didn’t look like the woman I’d watched him draw the other evening. That woman had softer lines.
MY ROOM WAS bathed in cold light. I opened the window. I closed it again once I was fully awake. I pulled on a jumper, changed my mind, put on a tunic dress instead. I inspected myself in the mirror. Took off the tunic. My hair was sticking up. I licked my palm to smooth it down on my head, put the jumper back on again.
The boy was in the kitchen, he looked dishevelled. His girlfriend was still sleeping, he said, she wouldn’t be coming down for breakfast. The Japanese man didn’t appear either. I’d given up expecting to see Kerrand. There was nothing for me to do, so I had a coffee with plenty of milk.
My phone rang. Jun-oh. He’d been gone for two days and his image was becoming a blur. He’d been held up, he was staying on in Seoul for longer than he’d planned, on a trial basis. He told me he missed me but didn’t ask how I was.
Park arrived and asked me to make some red-bean tteok. I asked if he’d seen the climber. He muttered something about the Japanese man going back to Tokyo the evening before, I’d have known if I’d done his room.
Winter in Sokcho Page 2