Vaseline Buddha

by Jung Young Moon

  Feeling dizzy as a result, I left the doctor’s office and accidentally made my way to the opposite side of the entrance on the first floor of the clinic, and when I opened the door and went outside, there was a neglected plot of land with weeds growing on it, which looked like the site for a new building. I walked among the weeds, and as I always did when I made a visit to the hospital and learned the cause of my symptoms, I felt both happy and sad to have learned the cause for my dizziness.

  And I found something white among the weeds that looked like the backbone of some kind of a vertebrate. It was possible that the thing, which had several joints and looked like the backbone of an animal, wasn’t a backbone. Nevertheless, looking at the thing, shining white in the sun, I felt a certain sadness, and felt tempted to make a story out of it, as I’d made a story about false teeth out of a teeth-marked apple sitting on a bench covered in snow in a royal palace in Budapest. But there are some things that are better left alone and kept from developing into a story, which I felt was the case for the thing. Still, I picked up the bone and kept it in a drawer.

  For the past several days, in quite a vague state, I spent time making vague or elaborate plans, or making vague plans in an elaborate way, about things I would never do or end up doing. It occurred to me that I was spending each day without any plans as to how I would live in the days to come, with no confidence as to how I would face the very next day, but I thought that it shouldn’t be a problem.

  Now I’m listening to a monotonic yet strange and beautiful music played on a shamisen. The album was something I bought when I went to Japan after going to the site of the Battle of Waterloo near Brussels, Belgium, where Napoleon’s army and the Prussian allies fought a fierce battle—until then, I didn’t know that Waterloo was in Belgium, and in the war memorial where there was a room filled with huge panorama pictures (panorama pictures, a forerunner of movies, touch you in a different way than movies, and I feel like a child when I look at them) depicting the war, there was a statement, proudly written, saying that the Belgians devoted themselves to taking care of the wounded on both sides during the Battle of Waterloo, as if that were all that the Belgians, who handed over their land, did—and then returned to Brussels and had a meal at a Japanese restaurant, during which I heard some shamisen music—I ate in the restaurant alone in the afternoon, and the music, monotonous yet intense, touched me in a mysterious way that left an unforgettable impression on me. Immersing myself in the music, I think that I could write a story with a circular structure in which I somehow extricate myself from the story in which I’m lost and then get lost again entering a story, where my life seems to be.

  The story I began to write around the beginning of summer and planned to finish during summer continued into winter, and I seek to end the story as I greet winter, talking about winter in the story. The pumpkin vines in the garden outside the window, which had been thick in summer, and had made a kitten tremble in fear one very bright morning, were nipped by frost and the leaves have withered, but the stems are still intact.

  I’m sitting in the sun like a cat. There’s nothing but a few withered trees in the garden outside the window. I once had a dream that the landlady of the house I was renting appeared in an empty garden, no, it’s possible that it wasn’t a garden, but a place I was sure was a garden, or used to be a garden, and suddenly for some reason, took off her pants and paced up and down in her underwear, and then quietly disappeared. No, that’s not true. I say that I dreamt it, but it actually happened. I don’t know why she did such a thing. Before she went off somewhere, she glanced in the direction of the window where I was, and our gazes met for a very brief moment. I saw two cats playing around at the back, slapping each other with their front paws. It was May then, and there was a thick growth of small leaves that looked like duck feet on the sycamore trees in the garden. The landlady was a bit off in the head, and one day, I saw her walking up and down on a patch of various vegetables on one side of her garden. Once, she brought me an armful of persimmon that I just couldn’t eat and I took them to a nearby woods and wondered what her intention was as I hurled them one by one, counting them—there were twenty-seven in all—but I couldn’t be sure.

  Generally, a garden is nice to spend time in, and nice to look at through a window. Around the beginning of winter, I went to Brussels for some time to attend a dull literary event, then to Berlin to gauge the publication of a book of mine that was being translated into German (it was fruitless, as expected), and spent most of the time staring at the garden outside the window in a room on the fourth floor of a building that was in a residential area in the city. Being quite dizzy, I had no choice but to stay cooped up in the room most of the time. I had barely managed, in fact, to get to the room in Berlin. I was faced with the greatest crisis at Brussels Airport, when I felt so dizzy after the long flight that I had difficulty just making it to the transfer ramp, so I sat down in a chair with my hands on the cart, and was going to ask someone around me, someone kind looking, to put me in the cart and take me just up to the transfer ramp, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask a stranger to do such a thing, and in the end, I made it to the departure gate, pushing the cart and leaning on it, after resting for over an hour.

  The only person I knew in Berlin was an old Jewish man who lived in the room next door and who worked as the building manager. He was very old, and had difficulty getting around. We chatted when we ran into each other now and then in the corridor, and I learned that he was from the Czech Republic and spent two years in hiding, seeing almost no light at all, in the home of a kind Christian man, and moved to Israel several years after the war ended, but was unable to settle there because there was something about the place that he didn’t like, and returned to live in Germany, and I thought that maybe I could go to Prague when I got better. He told me frankly that he became a little strange after living in a dark, closed space for two years. He was, in fact, receiving ongoing psychotherapy, and had the eyes of someone who was slightly crazy. At a certain time of the day, he listened to some old music on a record that sounded like something that might have been heard playing on the radio during the Second World War, and listening to the sound of the music coming from his room, I could picture him in the dark, listening carefully to the British BBC radio broadcast reporting on the war situation. Still, he looked like someone who was kind by nature, and although he never actually helped me in any way, he tried to help me in one way or another and seemed to regret not being able to help me. I, too, regretted not being able to help him, and it seemed that my regret was greater.

  Once when we ran into each other again in the corridor, I wanted to learn more about his past, and he said he’d set aside some time in a few days to tell me. But when the appointed time came and I went to see him in his room, he looked quite unwell, and courteously declined the interview, apologizing that he had been wrong to tell me that he would talk to me. It seemed that he no longer wanted to say anything about his past. I wasn’t particularly interested in his past, or the Jewish issue, either, so I said that I hoped he was okay. And when I ran into him again after that, he was doing something astonishing, standing on a small red carpet he’d laid out in the corridor in front of his room and holding some kind of a red flower. He said he was waiting for his boyfriend. But when I returned a couple of hours later after going out, he was still standing in the same spot, holding the flower, looking a little tired and disappointed. But I wasn’t sure if he had a lover of the same sex and was waiting for him or if he was doing such a thing because he was out of his mind. It was a sad sight, whether he had a lover of the same sex and had invited him home and was waiting for him, who never showed up, or whether he was doing such a thing because he was off his rocker and imagined up a lover of the same sex who didn’t exist. In any case, I hoped that the latter was true, because someone actually being stood up seemed the sadder thing to me. Nevertheless, I pictured him standing before a mirror in his room, holding a red flower on a small red carpet he’d l
aid out. It seemed like the only thing left for him to do. And it seemed sad but beautiful.

  I spent about fifteen days like that, lying on a bed in a room next door to the room of a somewhat strange Jewish man who lived a life similar to that of Anne Frank’s at a certain period in time, staring at the garden four floors down, as if staring off into an infinite expanse. For the most part, I didn’t really mind that my somewhat poor condition persisted. Sometimes, things were good because I was unwell, and in fact, good ideas often came to me when I was unwell. A poor condition wasn’t all bad, at least when it came to writing. But during those fifteen days in Berlin I was in such poor condition that I could do almost nothing. That was an unusual period of time even for me, who had no desire to do anything most of the time, and tried to do as little as possible, as far as I was able to do, or as far as I was able to not do. Unlike at any other period of time I had no desire at all to live, but it wasn’t that I was longing to die, either. I was in a very terrible, obscure state in which I didn’t want to do anything for myself, and didn’t seem to have any strength to do so, either. And I thought as negatively as possible, as if on purpose, although it wasn’t on purpose. The thought that I was somehow okay today even in such state, but tomorrow, when tomorrow came, I wouldn’t be okay, wouldn’t leave me, like some sort of a belief.

  All I could manage to do was drag myself out into the street when darkness fell early in the afternoon, and come home after walking on the streets for a little while. And I would return to my room after the short walk, and lie down on the bed and smile faintly in my mind, just managing to feel a pure joy that comes from being drained of all energy. Sometimes the feeling that I was almost perfectly alone, that I had no one, was so appealing that it seemed like something I couldn’t give away, not to anyone.

  And then I usually took some sleeping pills and fell into a long slumber, like someone who had come to the city in order to sleep. When I woke up, everything seemed so far away, and I felt as if I were in another world different from this one. Sleep, which felt violent yet gentle, seemed like an imaginary creature that gave me a hard time when I came out of it after being in it. I even thought that I could perhaps return to this city someday, only to sleep. My newly prescribed sleeping pills put me in a haze until the next afternoon, and made my palate too sensitive and fussy, making eating, which was difficult to begin with, even more difficult, and had side effects, such as making it so that I couldn’t bear the slightest noise, which may have had nothing to do with the sleeping pills because I had always been that way, and perhaps I could learn about other side effects in the future.

  But I couldn’t fall asleep right away even after taking sleeping pills, and could go to sleep only after a long process of picturing green cats, blue elephants, red cats, yellow hippopotamuses, and so on, or drawing a circle with a chalk on a chalkboard and writing the number 100 in the circle, then erasing the number and the circle with a chalk eraser, and then writing the number backwards.

  And whenever I fell asleep in that way, I thought calmly and carefully about the question of taking my own life, as I often do when I become steeped in a sentiment brought on by feelings, and by solitude and thoughts on solitude, that come over me when I’m in a room in a foreign city or other such places. I’ve thought countless times, of course, about what someone called shy homicide but I considered bold homicide, and the thought of suicide was something that stayed with me, but I didn’t come to a decision about it or anything, just as I’d never thought about it before to the point of coming to a decision. And yet I thought once again that I couldn’t accept a death of natural causes, that I would end up choosing suicide, a means to end this absurd life in an absurd way, not a final revenge on life, but an ultimate realization of your will. But I couldn’t decide on the specific method and time for the execution of suicide. Yet regarding the method, I had a notion that it should be somewhat tragic, but not without dignity—for losing dignity would be the most tragic thing of all. And the time would be at some point in the far or near future, a little before, or much before, the time of my natural death. The time, not specifically appointed, could be appointed in the near future or somewhat far future. So before deciding on the time at which I would go through with suicide, I had to decide on the time at which I would make up my mind about it.

  The room I stayed in, thinking such thoughts, wasn’t the best place to sleep in, but a moderate amount of noise that created a cozy feeling could be heard from time to time, and although it was cold outside, it was warm inside, and looking at the huge poplar tree in the middle of the garden that looked at least a hundred years old, and was spending the winter in the bone-chilling cold, I felt a sort of satisfaction in that I, at least, wasn’t trembling in the cold, and looking at my body, which was as skinny as that of the old Jewish man who lived next door, I thought that my weight remained the same when I almost never ate, but that sometimes, when I ate more than I usually did, I lost weight, but I didn’t know the reason why, and wasn’t even sure if it was true. And I thought about how once, I had a dream in which I was lying on the floor of a wrecked ship, and things like chairs and drawers and pillows were floating around in the water in the cabin of the wrecked ship, a dream that in itself was like a wrecked ship, and how I thought afterwards that the ship, which sank, unable to bear the weight of my body, would be able to rise above the water only after I disappeared without a trace, or if I sank into a deeper dream, and continuing on with the thought I had in mist-shrouded Venice, I thought about a giraffe that escaped from its cage and was poking its head in through a second story window, opened by someone in the confusion of war or revolution, and continuing with that thought, I thought about lonely declining years made up of days I would start or not start by opening a window, through which a giraffe I was raising would poke its head, and I would pat my cherished giraffe, keenly feeling that the giraffe was all I had left but thinking that it was enough, and of course that was something symbolic, not real, but to me, it was quite real. And continuing on with that thought I thought that perhaps the problem with my life was that for some time now my life has been a full-fledged fight against realism, a fight that was long and difficult, and tedious but pleasant, and felt a vague yet tangible anxiety that the rest of my days may or may not pass in the way I vaguely thought they would, and wondered why I almost never thought about going to the zoo here in Berlin, although when I visited a big city, I always tried, if possible, to go to the zoo that was bound to be there, although that didn’t mean that I’ve been to a lot of zoos, but I couldn’t figure out why.

  One day, the old Jewish man told me that the poplar was dying of a disease, that nearly all the poplars planted at the center of the countless buildings in Berlin had come down with the disease, and that for some reason, the Berlin authorities were leaving the trees, which were an exotic species, to die. Strangely, the fact that the poplars of Berlin were dying in this way saddened my heart.

  Later on, when I was a little better, I took a short walk in the streets around my place from time to time, had a meal, had coffee in a café on the first floor of the building I lived in, then came home. The rest of Berlin seemed too far from me, and it seemed hardly possible for me to go there. At the café, where I became a regular customer after just a few visits, I talked to the café owner, a French man, about Germany and the German people, but mostly he criticized them and I concurred without giving it much thought. He rambled on about how weird and boring the Germans were, and I agreed, saying that in general, people who were weird were interesting, at least, and it was a terrible thing to be just weird, and not interesting at all. And yet he lived in Germany, and had a girlfriend who was German. Regarding that, he said that Berlin, although it was a part of Germany, wasn’t like Germany at all, and that his girlfriend also hated the Germans. He said that most of the people living in Berlin were people who hated Germany. According to him, there was no part of Germany, no field or forest, that was untouched by human hands, and the Germans continuo
usly maintained everything in an almost compulsive way, not letting nature stay in its natural state, as if they couldn’t condone it. Actually, while traveling in Germany before, I’d felt very uncomfortable, seeing that everything from the fields to the forests was artificial. The French café owner said that in Germany, a country that was like a well-manicured garden in itself, there was no countryside like the French countryside, and that Berlin was the only place in Germany where you could see weeds, and that was the reason why he lived in Berlin. It suddenly occurred to me that the Germans of the past could have made the rash attempt to turn all races into the Aryan race because of some kind of an obsessive compulsive disorder, like the kind that kept them from letting weeds grow anywhere. But thinking about how they tried to make everyone look like them, when they weren’t that attractive in general, I thought how ridiculous their scheme was. Even as I sympathized with his expression of antagonism against the Germans, I didn’t tell him about the antagonism I’d felt against France while living there.

  And one day I ran into a German woman at the café and became friends with her, and we grew somewhat fond of each other, and took a late night walk together from time to time. I thought that she wasn’t the type of woman I liked, but I did like her in some ways, perhaps because she was six feet tall, the same height as mine. My feelings for the woman, who looked like a volleyball player even though she wasn’t, would have decreased considerably if she was just an inch shorter or taller than I was, I thought (Later, when I learned that she weighed 145 pounds, the same weight as mine, my feelings for her became indescribable). It was an odd criterion for liking someone, but the fact that we were exactly the same, as far as the length of our bodies went, made me like her. To tell the truth, I met, along with her, another woman who was at least six feet tall, and it was this woman who showed more interest in me. To be precise, she showed a little more interest in me than the six feet tall woman did, and I was more attracted to the six feet tall woman.