Vaseline Buddha

by Jung Young Moon

  And for some reason, I really liked the dark green sweater that she, a stage costume designer from the old East Germany who was almost out of work and who, as a result, was almost always free, and was, as a result, very poor, wore, which she knitted herself and was unraveling around the wrist—I thought I could even make love to the sweater—and thought I could keep seeing her as long as she wore the sweater when we met—and during the short time when we saw each other, she continued to wear the sweater when we met, as if she had nothing else to wear. I thought I liked her more because we were the same height and she wore an unraveling sweater, than because of the unique way in which she spoke English, or talked to another German person, such as a café employee, in her native German, or sat with her legs crossed, or twirled her hair as if she were having trouble recalling something. Looking at her sweater, I would sometimes think, with her sitting right there in front of me, I’m quite attracted to the owner of that sweater, what should I do? The sweater was something she made out of a piece of clothing she bought very cheap at a flea market, which she cut and sewed up so that the stitching showed on the outside, and I wandered around the streets with her, who was wearing the sweater, past midnight, and I was pleased to discover a ping-pong table in a park near her house where she took me, because the ping-pong table, which was standing in the middle of a silent park at two in the morning, looked somewhat out of place. I thought that two people playing ping-pong, listening to the quiet sound of a ping-pong ball while other people were asleep, would make a fine sight, but we didn’t play ping-pong or anything. When we sat down on a bench from which the ping-pong table could be seen, and she looked at me with her very big eyes and said, while talking about something, that there was a lake not far from the park in which people swam in the nude in summer, I felt an irresistible, fierce desire to pull the unraveling yarn of her sweater, even if it meant asking for permission, as if that were all that I wanted in the world at that moment—once, in a similar way, I was consumed with the desire to pull out at least two or three of the hairpins in the hair of a woman I met for the first time, for she was wearing too many hairpins in her hair, thereby ruining her own hair, and I wanted to help her by pouncing on her and pulling out her hairpins, in the same way I would want to help an old woman climbing up the stairs with difficulty (some desires came over me in such violent ways that I had to stand violently against them, or do something by cooperating with them)—and I thought that it might be nice to visit the city again in summer. And at one point her sweater as a whole seemed like a badly tangled skein, and feeling a very strange yet very natural desire to untangle a badly tangled skein, I couldn’t resist the desire to pull the unraveling yarn, and told her that, and she graciously said that I could pull it slightly, not too much. I pulled the yarn slightly with caution, and expressed the delight by stamping my feet, and as I did, I thought that there was a certain delight that could be expressed only by stamping your feet. We laughed together, and I felt as if we’d become friends.

  When she told me that some time ago, when she was sharing a room with a friend, she was cleaning with the door open, and her friend’s robotic vacuum cleaner went out of the house and fell down the stairs, and somehow in the meantime, she found a large black dog standing in the living room, as if the robot cleaner had turned into a dog, I really felt as if we’d become friends. The robot cleaner was stupid and cunningly dodged, as she put it, spots that had to be cleaned, and mostly liked to stay under the bed. And the dog that had suddenly appeared didn’t look shabby, but smelled bad as if it had been roaming the streets and sleeping out in the open, so she had no choice but to turn it out of the house, but it wouldn’t leave willingly, and in the end, she was able to throw the dog out by turning on the robot cleaner, which she brought back inside, and was fortunately not broken. When she told me that she tried to put a cat she had at the time on the robot cleaner in operation and make it ride around on the cleaner, and finally succeeded after numerous attempts, I told her that she should make the cat ride around on the robot cleaner, wearing a little eye patch, and when she told me that she would, I felt an urge to kiss her. She said that the cat came to enjoy riding around on the robot cleaner very much after that.

  And several days later, when we met again in the middle of the night and went to the park, and she suddenly jumped up on the trampoline that was there, and kept bouncing up and down on the trampoline as if overflowing with energy, as if she couldn’t control her overflowing energy, she farted unwittingly, without being able to help herself—for she wouldn’t have farted on purpose just to let me hear her fart—and when we heard the sound together, I felt an indescribable fondness for her.

  The sound of the fart that had come from a woman who was jumping on a trampoline in a silent park in the middle of the night, a woman who was six feet tall, at that, wasn’t that loud, and so didn’t spread far, far away, cutting through the silence of the park in the middle of the night, but it sounded like the short but clear sound produced by an accidentally disturbed little bell, or the fleeting chirp of a bird, so the incident, which could have been quite embarrassing for both of us, was far from being quite embarrassing for both of us, and became something that made us feel quite merry, before we could even do anything about it. We broke out into merry laughter, and the reason why I felt merry, at least, was because the sound of the fart that had come from a very tall woman I didn’t know very well, and vanished into the air, made me think, as it vanished, that it was like a bubble that rose to the surface of a still pond, through a breath exhaled by a fish, or through some kind of an activity at the bottom of the pond. And watching her go up and down in the air on a trampoline in a silent park in the middle of the night, I felt as if she were the last survivor after the extinction of mankind, and jumping on a trampoline seemed just the thing to do for the last survivor after the extinction of mankind. And I thought that if mankind ended up going to a planet other than the moon, on which we have already set foot, the first thing we should do is set up a trampoline there and jump on it. In a way, what the astronaut who took the first step on the moon did was also jump, as if on a trampoline, on the moon whose gravity is much lower than that of the earth—the image seemed to be one of someone leaving his own world and landing on another. I felt an urge to sleep with her, the last survivor of the earth who was jumping on the trampoline by herself after mankind had disappeared. And the urge grew when I recalled that once, while having a meal at a restaurant in mist-shrouded St. Mark’s Square, I wondered if there was a trampoline in a park or a playground, with children jumping up and down on it in a thick mist, and thought it would be nice if there were such children.

  Physical relations between us seemed a natural thing, only a matter of time, and we both knew that we wanted physical relations, but our relations did not advance into such. For reasons I don’t understand, it seems that I anticipated in my heart a development into a physical relationship that could soon take place, but at the same time, wanted to prevent it in any way I could. And there was a practical reason, too, for I wasn’t well at the time and wasn’t sure if sex was indeed possible. It was almost certain that sex wasn’t possible, and I was sure, almost confident, in that respect, and it could be nice to fail in your attempt to have sex with someone for the first time, making that person fail as well, and to do something unforgettable as a man, thus becoming an unforgettable man to that person.

  I went to her house that day, but all we did was sit by the window and have a drink. She gave me a seashell as a gift, and told me she collected seashells. But there was only a few shells she’d collected, too few to be called a collection. I told her that I collected bones, and suddenly recalled how, when I went to a snow-covered mountain in Nepal, I tried to find some kind of a bone there as well. I collected bones without thinking that I was collecting them, and there were some animal bones of unknown origin in my house, but not many. Still, I thought that I could collect bones, and that perhaps people could leave their children a certain bone in
their body when they died, and that it could be a great keepsake. (And I collected sleeping pills—including tranquilizers and antidepressants—which could amount to a lethal doze when taken at once, but I never thought that I would take them at once someday. I collected leftover sleeping pills as a sort of hobby, just as some people collected things such as stamps or trays or knives. Is this true? Perhaps I’m saying something somewhere between the truth, something close to the truth, and something far from the truth. In any case, I collected a good amount of sleeping pills, with which I filled five small transparent glass bottles, each of which could hold about a hundred pills, and put them in a music box and the kitchen cabinet. The sleeping pills in the cabinet look like a kind of seasoning for food, not medicine. One day, I was so bored that, looking at the glass bottles containing sleeping pills of various colors, I thought I could perhaps crush up the pills to the size of sand grains and create a desert scene of mummies lying in sand, after the manner of sand bottles created by Arab artisans, pouring colored desert sand into glass bottles to reproduce desert scenes, such as oases or camels, to relieve the boredom a little, just a little, really, but I didn’t actually do it. But it seemed that doing so would be a kind of little magic, and I was reminded of ancient Arabians, for whom magic was a part of life. A desert scene of mummies lying in sand, made up of grains of sleeping pills that were like sand grains, would enhance the feeling that everything in the scene was in eternal slumber, and be a nice souvenir of my sleeplessness. And I think that one day, I could put a sleeping pill scorpion or palm tree, or fish or dolphin, in a small glass bottle, although it wouldn’t be an easy task.) I told her how I used to carry around in my pocket something that looked like a boar canine, which I picked up in a mountain somewhere, and left it in the seat pocket in front of me on a train when I got off. She said that there were a lot of boars living in the forests of Berlin, and that you could see a fox from time to time if you were lucky. I said that if I had a chance, I’d like to go to a forest in Berlin with her to see a fox, but I never got to see a fox in a forest in Berlin. We didn’t go to a forest in Berlin together to see a fox, and we didn’t meet again, either.

  That night, being very passive, I was going to stay the night in her room if she asked me to, but she didn’t show that much initiative, thanks to which nothing happened between us. Leaving her house, I thought that I wasn’t in a position to be nitpicky, but that I was being strangely fussy, and going down the corridor, I thought that I wanted to keep being fussy.

  One day, without a word to her, I moved to a house in another area of Berlin (not far from where David Bowie once stayed), and fingering the very old and chipped seashell I got from the woman who collected seashells, I hoped that the woman, with whom nothing had actually happened, and whom I may be able to suddenly recall in the distant future, after having almost completely forgotten about her, when I saw a woman wearing a sweater, or a child jumping on a trampoline, would be happy, collecting many pretty seashells, and live the life she wanted, and wearing her pretty green sweater, do something similar to farting while jumping on a trampoline in a park in the middle of the night with someone she recently met, making him grow fond of her, and making both of them feel merry, and making them grow affectionate toward each other.

  I didn’t say anything either to the French owner of the café where I met her, and to be honest, there was nothing to talk about with him besides disparaging things about Germany and the German people. And he was so chatty that I felt like heaving a sigh when I listened to him talk, and all that he said to me were negative things about Germany. On the day I moved, I thought that a virtually nonexistent relationship was all there was to my encounter with her, and felt that my brief encounter with her would remain a good memory for me. And although I wasn’t sure if by doing so, I broke the heart of a German woman, and although I didn’t think that by doing so, I made a German woman go through what a French girl, who had stood me up long ago, made me go through, but I felt good, thinking that I’d taken some sort of a revenge. I hoped that she, too, would take revenge on someone in the future, if she felt betrayed by me. No, that was a childish, shameful thought, and I tried not to think like that. Could it perhaps be that by doing so, I thought I could figure out the reason why the French girl had stood me up? But I still couldn’t figure out the reason. But it wasn’t such a bad thing to suddenly recall something that happened with someone because of something that could never be explained, and wonder about it, and still be without an explanation.

  In my new area, too, I mostly took brief walks around the house, but most of the time, I stayed in my room. Late at night, I’d go into little parks and playgrounds that made people just pass them by and gave the feeling of being withdrawn, and come to a stop at every street corner as if there were something special there that made me come to a stop even though there wasn’t, and roam the building and tree lined streets that gently revealed themselves in the streetlights, with nothing overwhelming about them, and seemed to be giving me their everything and embracing me, and when I did, I felt like a true city walker. And even when I returned to my room after a walk I could see a huge poplar tree in the courtyard, and the moss-covered tree, which didn’t really look as if it were dying, looked age old. I spent a lot of time looking at the broken bicycles and strollers discarded around the tree, the way I do when I observe something very carefully, and thought that I was turning into someone or something I’d never considered, and wrote down, in my notebook full of bizarre thoughts, such as, If everything that looks like latex aliens standing next to unstable blue order is heading toward an irrevocable end, there’s nothing that can be done about it, and thought about going to a city in Germany someone told me about, with a street whose buildings, from number one to one hundred, were full of offices of one of the greatest publishing groups in the world, and wasn’t very much to look at as a city, and also recalled that I once saw, between fields of reeds by a lake created by the only active volcano in Germany, which I visited while traveling long ago in Germany, bubbles that indicated that the volcano was still active. With me at the time was a friend I’d made while traveling somewhere else, a German guy who worked as a stained glass restorer at the Cologne Cathedral, and thanks to him, I had the chance to see a structure at the top of the cathedral that looked like an emptied whale’s belly.

  Just once I took a night bus in the middle of the night and rode through downtown Berlin to the Brandenburg Gate, the Potsdamer Platz, and the Alexanderplatz, and the snowy streets were almost empty, and the scenes outside the window withdrew like phantoms, and it seemed that during that stretch of time, at least, the silent streets and buildings were the true keepers of the city.

  And having returned to my room at dawn, I lay motionless on the bed in the room which had a very high ceiling and imagined that there was a clown with a painted white face on a very long trapeze hanging from the ceiling, the kind you see at a circus, who was sprinkling over me a mysterious white powder that immobilized people, which was why I couldn’t move, and that I wouldn’t be able to move until I made him fall or dragged him down and immobilized him. In my imagination, the clown was swinging serenely on the trapeze, and already rendered immobile by him, I couldn’t find a way to divert his attention from giving me a hard time. If there was such a thing, that is, if the clown had some kind of a weakness, for instance, being afraid of the sound of a cock crowing, I could find it and immobilize him, but I had no way of knowing if he had any kind of a weakness. No, actually, it seemed that I was the one who was making the clown immobilize me. It seemed as if I had in my hand invisible strings attached to the clown’s head and arms and legs, and could make the clown move, the way you manipulate puppets, but I couldn’t move my hands. In the end, I could move only after making the invisible clown look no longer like a clown, turning him into something that wasn’t a clown, and wasn’t anything else, either.

  But I liked the high ceiling, and felt that I could stay lying down forever if I was under that ceiling
. One of the reasons why I almost never left the room was because I loved how high the ceiling was in that room.

  But from that room, too, I could see various little movements. Beyond the garden out the window, I could see an old woman walking uncomfortably in the house, with the help of a stick, and a man making something late at night, and strangely, all this made me feel at ease. And through a window of the house to the left of my room, I could see a young woman who lived with a dog. Her dog was very big, and was actually almost as tall as she was when it stood straight up, and sometimes, I could see the dog stand upright on its hind legs and jump at her as if to attack her. I wasn’t able to find out what took place between the dog and the woman in her bedroom because of the closed curtains of her bedroom, but I thought, without any real grounds, that the dog was from Iceland, and even if she had physical relations with a dog, man’s best friend, it would be a very natural thing. Anyway, thinking that the garden, through which I could see all this, but which wasn’t much to look at in itself, helped me pass such difficult days, fully experiencing the comfort and discomfort brought on by lethargy, I look at the garden in front of my house now, which isn’t much to look at, either.

  Now winter has passed, and so has spring, and summer has arrived. No, it’s not full summer yet, but it’s approaching summer. In the meantime (I finished translating To the Lighthouse, which ends with the death of some of the Ramsays and the guests who were invited to their home, and with the several who remain taking a boat to the lighthouse) I looked over what I’ve written, and added some stories and removed others, and corrected what could be corrected, and revised it on the whole. In the process, the story again moved in a direction I wanted or didn’t want. And I still haven’t put a title to this story, and again, I feel tempted to title it Vaseline Buddha or A Cat Walking on Piano Keys. But Untitled could be a fitting title for this story, which I feel says a lot about a lot of things, but hasn’t really said anything at all.