I thought for a moment.
‘Maybe it’s better that way.’
Kerrand looked up. I went on:
‘It gives you a reason to keep on drawing. You might give up on it otherwise.’
He said nothing. I moved closer to the table.
‘What’s this story about?’
He said he’d rather show me the drawings. I didn’t insist. A woman came in with a box of red-bean noodles, a gust of wind blew the door shut. Rain was splattering on the window. Kerrand buttoned his coat.
‘Is it always like this in winter?’
‘This is a strange year.’
The waitress placed some marinated radish on the counter and sat down next to the woman. Kerrand stared at them, then turned to me and said more light-heartedly:
‘I’ve always wondered whether noodles came from China or Italy.’
I said it was impossible to say, people had different theories depending on where they came from. Every country had its own view of history. Did I know anything about European food? he asked. I said I didn’t like spaghetti. He laughed, I’d obviously never eaten the real thing. Italians were the only ones who really knew what to do with noodles.
I looked down, not knowing what to say. He stopped laughing.
‘I’m sorry, that was crass of me.’
‘I don’t get why you’re in Sokcho.’
‘If it weren’t for you, I’m not sure I’d still be here.’
I froze.
‘I’m joking,’ he said, straight-faced.
He swept the scraps of squid to one corner of the table, then helped himself to more.
‘You shouldn’t play with your food.’
He put it down. The women at the counter were giving us furtive looks, picking at their noodles with their chopsticks without actually eating, talking in soft voices. The place smelled of fried onions.
‘What are they saying?’ asked Kerrand.
‘Nothing really.’
He nodded slowly. He suddenly struck me as being very much alone. Perhaps I’d judged him too harshly.
‘This time, when you get to the end of your story, will it really be the end?’ I asked him.
‘Probably not. But yes, for the time being.’
I took hold of a tentacle and stirred the last of the coffee in my cup. He hadn’t touched his. The milk was starting to make my stomach feel bloated. I adjusted my sweater dress to hide it.
‘That red dress suits you,’ said Kerrand.
‘No, it’s too big for me, it used to be my aunt’s.’
‘I just meant the colour.’
We fell silent. The women had served themselves slices of pink cake that lay untouched on their plates. They’d stopped talking. Outside it was dark. You could see the market through the window. The stands like sarcophagi with their tarpaulin coverings.
‘Actually,’ said Kerrand, ‘she’s the only thing missing.’
He was staring at a point near my shoulder.
‘The woman I leave my hero with.’
‘You haven’t found her yet?’
‘It’s not so easy with this cold.’
I looked at him.
‘It’s not my fault.’
‘Sorry?’
‘The cold,’ I snapped. ‘It’s nothing to do with me.’
He raised an eyebrow and said:
‘How do you imagine her?’
I said I hadn’t read his books.
‘It doesn’t matter. You have a good eye.’
But what about his hero, what was his journey all about?
Kerrand leaned his elbows on the table.
‘Isn’t it obvious?’
‘Not to me.’
‘He needs a story that never ends. A story that’s all-encompassing. A fable. A complete, perfect fable.’
‘Fables aren’t happy stories,’ I said.
‘They can be.’
‘All the ones from Korea are sad. You should read them.’
Kerrand turned to the window.
‘And the woman in this fable?’ I asked cautiously. ‘What would she need to be?’
He thought for a moment.
‘A woman for all time.’
A lump formed in my throat. What did he care about my opinion? Whatever I said, he’d go back to his imaginary woman and spend the evening with her. Whatever I did, he’d be far away, lost in his drawing. He might as well leave now, then, this Frenchman. Leave Sokcho, go back to his home in Normandy. I licked the last of the cream from my tentacle and stood up. I had work to do. Kerrand stared at me. Then he looked down and muttered almost inaudibly in French that he’d walk back with me.
‘I’d rather be alone.’
As soon as I started walking, I wished he’d insisted on coming with me. I felt like turning round and pleading with him to catch up with me. But he followed just behind me, all the way to the guest house. Beneath the arch, the leering dolphin dangled by its fin, frozen and deflated, its smile turned upside down.
JUN-OH CAME BACK two days later, arriving close to midnight. His bus was delayed by the snow. I waited for him at the guest house, in the visitors’ lounge. I’d made some ginger calamari for him. He didn’t touch it, he’d already had something, he was watching what he ate now.
As we walked to my room I commented on the fact that he’d never asked me for my news when we spoke on the phone. And I’d never once called him, he snapped back. He was tired of this long-distance business. It was time for me to move to Seoul, his salary would be enough for both of us until I found a job. I sighed. We’d already discussed this, I couldn’t abandon my mother. She could come with us then. I shook my head, she wouldn’t have a job there and I didn’t want her living with us. Jun-oh squeezed my hand. He couldn’t say no to this job, it was a real opportunity. I cast my mind back to Seoul. All the drinking, and partying, the blinding lights, the bone-shattering noise, and girls, girls everywhere, and those plastic boys, the city strutting and swaggering, rising higher and higher, and I said no, it was fine, I’d stay here. No need for him to give it up for me. He said I was being stupid. Told me how much he loved me.
In bed we didn’t speak. We lay looking up at the ceiling. Eventually Jun-oh muttered something about getting the bus back to Seoul in the morning. My feet were frozen. I pressed myself close to him. He swept my hair up, searching for the nape of my neck. I whispered that there was someone in the next room. Breathing heavily, he lifted my nightshirt to lick my belly and disappeared between my thighs. I protested again and then I let him carry on. I wanted someone to desire me.
I GOT UP early to make breakfast. When I came back to my room, Jun-oh was waiting outside the bathroom, bare-chested, a towel around his waist. Kerrand slid the door open in a cloud of steam. Seeing Jun-oh, he froze for a moment, nodded to me and shut himself in his room. Jun-oh snorted with laughter, he’d never seen such a nose. I said since he was having plastic surgery anyway, why didn’t he have his nose made to look like that? He stared at me, speechless. What was wrong with me? I’d changed. I kissed him on the forehead, said he was imagining things, he should hurry, the bus would leave without him.
A large box was sitting on the desk in reception. My mother had brought it for me earlier, Park said. She hadn’t asked to see me. In the box, octopus soondae.
On my way to the kitchen to put it in the fridge, I caught sight, through the glass doors, of the girl with the bandages. She was eating honey rice cakes, sweet tteok. They’d been overcooked and kept stretching out in long filaments. She nibbled at one and put her phone to her ear. Her lips moved between the strips of dressings. After she hung up, she calmly took hold of the bandage, held it between two fingers and began to tug. I could see the wounds weeping as the skin was exposed. Her eyebrows hadn’t grown back yet. She looked like a burn victim, the face neither a man’s nor a woman’s. She dug a nail into her cheek and scratched. Rooted around. Dug. Raked. Pale pink flakes crumbled into her lap, onto the tiled floor. Eventually she stopped and looked around
, as if astonished. With the cloth I used to dry the dishes, she carefully gathered up the dressings and bits of skin, placed them on her plate on top of the tteok and put the whole thing in the bin.
I hid behind the desk in reception so she wouldn’t see me as she went out.
At two o’clock, she left for Seoul.
IN THE HALO of light from the pink lamp, Park was noisily slurping his noodle soup, Edith Piaf playing on the radio. He’d asked me to cook the noodles in meat stock, he was tired of fish. The radio started to crackle. Park turned it off. He stayed there motionless by the radio and said he’d seen two more new hotels that afternoon, near the bridge. He’d have to take out a loan to finish renovating the first floor before the summer. What choice did he have? The guest house wouldn’t survive otherwise.
A piece of kimchi sloshed about on the surface of my soup, flanked by a belt of grease. It made me think of the girl’s scabs. I asked Park casually if he’d seen the Frenchman. Kerrand had stayed in his room for the last three days, since Juno-oh had left, a ‘Do not disturb’ sign on his door. He’d stopped giving me his laundry, he didn’t come to the communal area to read any more. It was only in the bathroom that I felt his presence, streaks of toothpaste in the basin, the bar of soap getting smaller. The night before, I’d seen him outside the convenience store but he’d walked straight past me without saying a word. The fog was dense, but we were barely two metres apart.
Park muttered that he was going to have to go back to the dentist too. I glanced at him. His throat throbbed when he chewed, like a sickly baby bird, newly born, dying.
That evening, I called Jun-oh. I asked him how he was, then I told him I was breaking up with him. Silence. I thought he’d hung up. He asked why. I stood up, opened the curtains. Wet snow was falling. A figure hurried by, sheltering under a newspaper, then plunged into the alleyway and vanished. Eventually Jun-oh said in a faint voice that he was tired, he’d let me go, we’d talk about it again later.
I took off my jumper. I pressed myself up against the window, crushing my belly and breasts to the glass and waited until I was numb with cold. Then I went to bed.
On the other side of the wall, the hand moved slowly. A stately dance, dead leaves in the wind. No violence in the sound. Sadness. Melancholy. The woman uncoiling in the palm of his hand, winding herself around his fingers, lips brushing the paper. All night long. I tried to block out the sound, pressing at my cheeks to cover my ears. All night until the early hours, when the pen finally fell silent and I went to sleep, exhausted.
ON THE FOURTH EVENING, I gave in and knocked on his door. I heard him replace the lid on the ink bottle before he came to the door. Bare feet, rings under his eyes. Wrinkled shirt beneath his sweater. Boards and sketches piled up on his desk, a bowl of instant noodles. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other.
‘The other day, that boy, it’s not what you think.’
Kerrand furrowed his brow, as if he was trying to recall the incident. Then he looked taken aback. I felt stupid. I asked him if he needed anything, he said thanks but no. He had to get on with his work.
‘Can I see?’
‘I’d rather you didn’t.’
I suddenly flared up, tired of keeping myself in check.
‘Why not?’
‘If I show you now, the story won’t come together.’
‘You showed me that other time.’
Kerrand stepped back, as if to block my view of his desk. He ran his hand over the back of his neck.
‘I’m sorry.’
He asked me to go, he had nothing to show me, he needed to work.
I slid the door closed.
Then I opened it again and said in a blank voice:
‘He’s not going to find her here, you know. Your hero I mean. There’s nothing for him here. Not if he’s anything like you.’
Kerrand was about to make a brushstroke. He stopped in mid-gesture. A drop of ink was swelling at the tip of the brush, almost ready to fall. I thought I saw a glimmer of pain flash across his features, then the ink splashed onto the paper, flooding a section of the landscape.
I walked through the alleyway as far as the main building and into the kitchen, unwrapped the sausage from my mother and crouched on the floor, eating frantically, filling this body that stifled me, stuffing myself until I couldn’t breathe, and the more I ate the more I disgusted myself, the more my lips twitched, my tongue fumbled, until I slumped to the ground, drunk on sausage, while my stomach heaved and vomited bile onto my thighs.
A green neon light came on in the corridor. Footsteps. Park came into the kitchen. Took a good look at the scene in front of him. Me, with my hair spread all over my face. He put his arms round me, patted my shoulder as if he were comforting a baby, wrapped his coat around me and, without a word, led me back to my room.
THE NEXT DAY, I worked through my chores on autopilot, all energy sapped by the turmoil in my stomach. As soon as I could escape, I shut myself in my room and lay down on the heated floor with a pillow under my hips, arms and legs spreadeagled to escape the touch of my own skin. The only thing I could bear to have on was my nightshirt, with no elastic at the waist. I stared out of the window.
Two loud knocks on my door. Kerrand. He had to go to the supermarket again. No need for me to go with him, could I just translate one word for him?
I held my breath.
It didn’t matter, he said eventually, he’d manage. He paused. Then, in French, he said that I was right. He’d been too wrapped up in his hero for far too long. He’d decided to go back to France, he wouldn’t waste any more of my time. He was leaving in four days.
Then he went back to his room.
I dragged myself to my bed and curled up in a ball under the covers.
He had no right to leave. To leave with his story of Sokcho. To put it on display halfway across the world. He had no right to abandon me, to leave me here, with my own story withering on the rocks.
It had nothing to do with love, or desire. He was a Frenchman, a foreigner. It was out of the question. But the way he looked at me had changed at some point. When he first arrived, he didn’t see me at all. He sensed my presence, like a snake that coils its way into a dream and lies there in wait. But then I’d felt his hard, physical gaze cut into me, showing me my unfamiliar self, that other part of me, over there, on the other side of the world. I wanted more of it. I wanted to live through his ink, to bathe in it. I wanted to be the only one he saw. And all he could say was he liked the way I saw things. That I had a good eye. Those were his words. A cold reality, devoid of emotion. He needed me to help him see.
I didn’t want to be his eyes on my world. I wanted to be seen. I wanted him to see me with his own eyes. I wanted him to draw me.
That evening, while he was in the bathroom, I went back to his room. The boards were tidied away. A ball of paper, wet with spit, was lying in the waste bin. I unscrewed the ball. The paper was sticky. The woman was torn but there was a hint of an outline, enough for me to fill in what he hadn’t sketched. She was sleeping, her chin resting in her open palms. Why didn’t he breathe life into her, bring this haunting creature to life so I could rip her to shreds? I moved closer to the desk. Ink, gleaming in the pot. I dipped my finger in it, ran my fingertip along my forehead, nose and cheeks. Ink dripped down into my mouth. Cold. Clammy. I dipped my finger in the pot again and brushed it down my chin, along my veins to my collarbone, then I went back to my room. Ink had seeped into my eye. I screwed my eyes shut to stop the burning. When I tried to open them again, my eyelids were stuck together with ink. I had to stand in front of the mirror and pull out my eyelashes one by one until I could finally see myself again.
THREE DAYS PASSED, time moving slowly, like a ship coasting over the waves. Kerrand didn’t leave his room, I only went back to my room late at night when I was sure he was asleep. Every evening I walked down to the port. The men would be getting ready to go out fishing for squid, lingering at the soup stand, adjusting their waterp
roofs at waist and neck to keep the wind out before heading to the jetty to climb aboard the twenty-four boats and light the bulbs strung on cables from stem to stern, lights that would lure the molluscs out at sea. Lips unspeaking, hands busy, groping blindly in the dark. I would walk out to the pagoda at the end of the jetty, skin clammy from the stench of the sea spray that left salt on the cheeks, a taste of iron on the tongue, and soon, the thousands of lights would start to twinkle and the fishermen would cast off from shore and make their way out to sea with their light traps, a slow, stately procession, the Milky Way of the seas.
ON THE MORNING of the fourth day, as I was sorting dirty washing in the laundry room I found a pair of trousers the girl with the bandages must have forgotten. I took off my tights to try them on. My thighs were swimming in them but I couldn’t do them up at the waist. I pulled them off, on the verge of tears. As I went to put my tights back on I noticed they had a run. I crouched down to find another pair in the pile of washing and saw Kerrand.
He was standing against the door holding a bag of clothes. I tugged at my sweater to hide my legs. I told him I was sorting the colours, he should leave his things with me. He put them down awkwardly as if his arms were too long for his body, and then changed his mind, no need to wash them, his bus was leaving the next morning at ten.
‘I’ll send you a copy of the book when it comes out.’
‘Don’t feel you have to.’
He sat down to lower himself to my height. The smell of detergent and kerosene was making me feel light-headed.
‘I’d like to thank you somehow, before I leave.’
I stuffed the clothes hurriedly into the machine. I stood up. I wanted to get away, but Kerrand had his hand round the back of my knee. Slowly, without looking at me, his eyes fixed to the ground, he leaned towards me until his cheek pressed against my thigh.
Winter in Sokcho Page 6