The Red Queen

by Margaret Drabble

  Dr Babs Halliwell is beginning to feel exhausted by the strangeness of everything that she sees. She knows nothing of this kind of architecture. The bright, painted colours and patterns of the woodwork are strange to her. She does not know what any of it means. She cannot understand any of its symbols or principles. It seems at once utterly foreign and yet somehow deeply familiar. Can it be that the Crown Princess, who so forcefully took possession of her astral body on the Air France flight, is now forcing and urging her onwards, towards some other denouement in real time? Has the Crown Princess invaded some of her memory, and is she forcing upon her some new agenda?

  These thoughts occur to her, but she knows that of course they are complete nonsense. Babs Halliwell scorns the supernatural. She has never liked ghost stories. She does not believe in metempsychosis or the transmigration of souls or reincarnation. She does not think that we may be punitively reborn as worms or dogs or rats or microbes. She does not even believe in the more plausible Buddhist concept of enlightenment along the eightfold path of meditation. She does not believe that the ghost of Marie Antoinette appeared to two respectable English Oxford women academics in the grounds of Versailles in the year 1901. She is not superstitious. She knows that we cannot speak to the dead, nor they to us. Never. They can never speak to us. So why is she feeling so light-headed, so confused, so besieged, so transported?

  Jet lag and culture shock and hunger, suggests the wise Dr Oo, as he sits her down at a little table in a spruce and spotless small café on the busy sidewalk just outside the palace gates, and encourages her to order a little light lunch. She has no idea what any of the dishes are, and cannot read a word of the menu, so he orders for her: this will be as useful a tip as the lesson of the Maxwell House machine, he assures her. She must learn the word ‘bibimpap’. Bi-Bim-Bap. He makes her say it several times. Bi-Bim-Bap. She will feel much better when she has had some of it, he says. And it arrives, accompanied by various delicious little sushi-style side dishes and pickles, and it is delicious. Bibimpap, or Bi-Bim-Bap, is a heated iron bowl of rice, topped with various vegetables and sauces, and a charming poached egg. A light and innocent dish, a fortifying dish. She can stir it all up together, or pick bits out, as she chooses. She can do whatever she likes with her bibimpap. It is a free and easy dish, and she can get it everywhere, in varying formats. This, he agrees, as he delves into his own, is a fine example. They have been lucky here. He has not been to this café for some years, and he is pleased to find it as good as ever. Seoul is changing rapidly: it is good when the good things do not change.

  Over the rice, he responds to her questions. He is willing to tell her more about himself, and his sister and his mother in New York, and his wife in Amsterdam, and his sons at school in Amsterdam. He is working at a research hospital, where he is studying the effect of certain recently developed drugs on those who have suffered from severe strokes. ‘Stroke patients,’ he tells her, as he moves into didactic professorial mode, ‘are much neglected by the medical profession, although the stroke is so common an event and kills and disables so many. It is the commonest cause of death, after heart failure. Mostly they are old people who have strokes, and we do not care for the old. It is not considered exciting work by many. In South Korea, we talk much about longevity. In principle we care for the old, we talk much about respecting the old, but I am afraid we care for them only when they are old and well. We do not like people who are old and ill, people with mobility and communication problems. Like you in Europe, we ignore them somewhat. Sick children, sick young people, people with unpredictable rare diseases in middle age – these are interesting stories, for everyone, everywhere. These are newspaper cases, cases where we have to make dramatic decisions, perhaps dangerous decisions. You tell me that you speak about these decisions in your paper on medical risk. It is an interesting subject.

  ‘But an elderly person with a stroke – this is just what happens to us, we accept it. We do not pay much attention, we do not even try to understand what happens in the brain, we do not bother with re-education programmes or even with much stimulation. In my hospital in Amsterdam, where I work, there is an excellent volunteer service, which brings professional readers of short stories to entertain and interest these stroke patients. Sometimes poems even. We can test the attention span, and the memory span, and the effect of stimulus, the effect of a new face, the impact of a new person in the hospital ward. There is much that can be done. It is not a waste of resources. There are few high risks in my area. There is more to be found of simple neglect.’

  Babs chopsticks up a morsel of sea greenery, and asks him why he first became involved in this field? Why did he specialize in stroke patients? She already knows he will have an answer. And he has.

  ‘It is because of my mother,’ he says. ‘My mother, she suffered a serious stroke while quite a young woman. I was still at medical school, here, at Seoul National University Hospital, just across the road from where we are now. For a while she lost her speech, and she lost permanently use of one arm and one leg. She was wheelchair-bound for some years, but slowly she has recovered. She has been my experiment, my inspiration. She is a fine woman, my mother. She is OK now, in New York. America is good for old people. It has every contrivance. Here, we have been slow with improvements. The World Cup 2002 brought more help for wheelchair users to travel in this city. It is better than it was. You have not been on the underground yet, I think? You must try the underground before you leave. It is easier to use now, after the World Cup. The maps are excellent. Very clear maps. Very good and helpful English-language notices.’

  The thought of plunging down into the underground makes Babs Halliwell feel faint with fatigue. This immersion in Korea past and present is challenging. It would have been more restful to have stayed in the Sejong Auditorium to listen passively to the Japanese professor. On the other hand, Dr Oo represents something unique. He is a multicultural opportunity that is not to be passed over. The Crown Princess has sent him to her as a messenger, and she must follow him.

  Dr Oo suggests that, while they are in the neighbourhood, they should pay a short visit to the Munmyo shrines at Sung-Kyun-Kwan University. Then he will let her go back to her hotel for afternoon rest and the evening programme. She will never find these shrines without him, and they are worth the visit. This was the university where his brother studied. His brother is now in software, working on Chinese-character transliteration programs. She will like the Munmyo shrines. They are more private, less visited than the royal Jongmyo shrines. Is she up to it?

  Babs, who had thought the Jongmyo shrines fairly quiet, is sufficiently intrigued by the thought of the yet more deserted and yet more secret shrines to agree to stagger on. Her feet are painful, but if he can do it so can she, for she is younger than he. (If she agrees to go to Hwaseong with him, she will abandon vanity and wear her trainers.) Mercifully, he hails a taxi, and they take a short ride uphill, and disembark at the beginning of a broad and populous road leading up towards a large, modern campus. The shrines, he says, are to the right: the main royal gateway to them is under restoration, so they will have to go round through the back entrance.

  As they approach, on foot, they hear the sound of chanting, perhaps the very same sound that had been airborne towards them over the high wall of the queen’s gardens. And when they enter the courtyard, by a side door, they find that they are not alone. There is a faint air of desertion and dereliction, but the far end of the courtyard is filled with rows of people in colourful costume, performing some kind of ancient ritual. These people chant, and a stout man from time to time strikes a vast hanging drum. Nobody could possibly mistake these substantial figures for ghosts, for they are very twenty-first century in figure and deportment, and some of them have false beards and moustaches. Is this a film set, or is it a religious ceremony?

  It is neither. It is, says Dr Oo, a rehearsal. It is a preparation for an enactment of ancestral rites by a Confucian Society. He had forgotten it was the season for
these events: he should have remembered when he heard the chanting floating over the garden wall. These are not actors, and they may not be true Confucians. They are re-enactors, not actors. Every year they dress up and go through these rituals, to honour Confucius and his ten philosophers and his six sages. So it is religious, she pursues? Not really, he says. Look, there are several women lined up in the ranks in dark green silk dresses. That is quite irreligious and anachronistic. In true Confucian ceremonies no women could ever take part. Your Crown Princess, she would never have been admitted to these observances in this temple. It is true that on her sixtieth birthday she went to Suwon-Hwaseong in royal procession and great pomp, but she had to remain hidden in her palanquin. And here, she would not have been admitted. These green-robed women, they would not have been here. Perhaps the Confucian Society is short of members and now has to accept these women to make up numbers. Anyway, says Dr Oo, Confucianism is not a religion, in the Western sense of the word. It is not supernatural; it does not recognize the soul.

  The re-enactors of this pageant do not seem to mind that she and Dr Oo are wandering round their sacred courtyard, gazing at the Hall of Great Accomplishments and the Hall of Illuminating Ethics. Modest paper lanterns of red and blue hang along the wooden eaves of the cloisters, and small children play in the dust. A very large granite turtle with a smoothly rubbed nose rests beneath a mulberry tree. A woman appears carrying a great raw leg of pale meat in a metal basin. It is an offering to the ancestors. Babs and Dr Oo peer into the gloomy interior of the shrine, and see rows of little, dark brown boxes on tables, arranged to receive more food offerings. It is all very odd. It is neither real nor unreal. The scene belongs neither to the past nor to the present. It belongs to no time.

  Babs follows Dr Oo in his exploration of the hinterland of the compound, where young people who seem to be students are living in rooms that line one of the courtyard walls. They, unlike the re-enactors, are not at all keen to be seen. They wave away these intruders, and try to repel them, as the rulers of the Hermit Kingdom had for centuries tried to repel earlier visitors from the outside world. Dr Oo mumbles what she takes to be apologies, but the young people understandably continue to look displeased. They do not want this gross and grotesque Western woman to see their washing pegged up to dry and their shoes lined up on the floor and their unscholarly magazines lying on their reed mats. This lack of welcome does not deter the inquisitive and tireless Dr Oo from penetrating yet farther into a homely little labyrinth of cottages and gardens that strays and tumbles off to one side of the main structure. Here golden melon flowers bloom, and pale pink roses clamber, and large gourds lie unharvested and unwanted upon the paths. A glimmer of red gold and pale blue autumn light strikes the turning leaves in the afternoon sun. Familiar-looking weeds flourish in neglected borders: she thinks she identifies the modest meadow yellows and pinks of cow-wheat, mallow, bistort, tormentil. For some reason, this garden reminds her overwhelmingly of her paternal grandparents’ garden in Orpington. The sense of mingled recognition and bewilderment is simultaneously both shocking and comforting. She feels on the verge of some immense discovery about human nature and culture. But maybe she is merely tired, and her feet do sadly ache.

  ‘I can’t tell you how interesting all that was,’ she tells Dr Oo, as they taxi back together towards the Pagoda Hotel. ‘I can’t thank you enough. I would never have seen such things without your help.’

  ‘Tomorrow morning,’ he tells her, ‘your conference has a group coach tour round the city and to Cultural Expo 2002. I read of this on the hotel notice board. Your group coach tour will not show you the things that we have seen. I wonder what Professor van Jost will make of Expo 2002.’

  ‘I don’t suppose Professor van Jost will bother to come on the group coach tour,’ says Babs Halliwell. She cannot quite keep a tone of disappointed pique out of her voice, although she knows it is wholly inappropriate. She hopes that Dr Oo will not notice it because she is ashamed of it. And she wishes to make a good impression on Dr Oo because she stole his suitcase.

  When Dr Halliwell reaches Room 1517, she finds that her message light is blinking. She would have been surprised and annoyed had it not been. She needs to be needed. She had expected the oblique reprimand from her boy-minder, who wonders where she is and why she hadn’t been there to hear the Japanese professor, though he puts it more courteously than that. There is also an invitation from her Australian friend Bob Bryant, suggesting they meet that evening for a drink in the bar, and another, more important message from the National Women’s Hospital wanting to set up an appointment to show her its work on gene therapy and cancers of the bone marrow. This is a subject near to what was once her heart, and close to her professional concerns, so she responds at once, rings back, and sets up an early morning meeting for later in the week.

  Her programme is filling up. Will she have time to get to Suwon-Hwaseong in the company of Dr Oo, to celebrate the anniversary of the sixtieth birthday of the crown-princess-turned-queen-mother?

  She has solved one memory puzzle: it comes to her, suddenly, that the granite boulders of the Palace Gardens remind her of the artificial landscapes of New York’s Central Park.

  Dr Babs Halliwell knows that she should, at this point in the afternoon, put her feet up and read her Venetian detective story, like a sensible young-middle-aged woman. But she cannot settle. First she washes her Lycra knee-highs with the hotel-provided sachet of detergent and hangs them from the towel rail to dry. Then she places her lecture trousers in the trouser press and switches them on to grill. Then she tries to lie down, and remembers to swallow a few of the pills from the bottles that she has arranged upon her bedside table. She attempts a little deep breathing relaxation exercise, inhaling and exhaling lungs full of the purified and air-conditioned air. Her guardian spirits, who have temporarily assumed the form of one small but rather noisy insect, watch this decorous and regulated behaviour with approval, but they suspect it will not last. They know her too well. And they are right. The hot brightly lit lure of the city and the dark challenge of the underground are too strong for the healthy appetites of Babs Halliwell, and she is too restless to dispose herself quietly upon either of her twin beds. She is overstimulated and overexcited. She has the sense to change her shoes, and to check that she has plenty of won in suitably small denominations about her person, and then she plunges recklessly off into modernity.

  It is the first time that she has set foot out of doors on her own, without an official group guide or Mong Joon or Dr Oo to guard her, and she finds the street instantly confusing. A tide of people is flowing along it, and traffic is pouring in both directions along the impassably wide roads and round and round a monumental traffic island occupied by a vast and handsome three-storey-high medieval oriental gate. The junction is busier than Hyde Park Corner or Marble Arch. At first, she takes the line of least resistance, and allows herself to be carried along the pavement by the crowd of shoppers and homeward-bound workers, past little stalls selling gadgets and trinkets and socks and shoes and magazines and bottles of water, past shopfronts displaying stylish garments. It is an orderly and friendly chaos: everyone has told her Seoul is a safe city, and she feels safe, though she has no idea where she is going. She lingers long by a street trader selling an amazing variety of hosiery. She sees on display some highly desirable knee-high, scarlet nylon stockings, with a pretty pattern of butterflies in the weave. She really wants them. Shall she buy them? No, of course not. She really does not need a pair of scarlet socks.

  She tears herself away, and glances back, to take her bearings, but her tall hotel, with its conspicuous purple logo, has already vanished from sight. She wonders if she will ever see it again. She is in an expensive downtown shopping neighbourhood of big hotels and big stores and international labels; she knows there are other, more distinctively Korean districts to explore, but how will she ever find them? Somewhere there are famous clothes markets and food markets and herb markets, and a celebrated t
ourist-favoured place called Insadong with traditional handicrafts and antiques and art galleries and tearooms. She longs to see all these things. But where are they? Is it worth trying to find them, or shall she just go with the flow? Can she reach them by subway, and dare she try to do so?

  She has various maps, but they show bewildering conflicts and contradictions in scale, in orientation, and in the spelling of place names. The maps of Seoul are not like the maps of London or Manhattan. Plans of the underground, as Dr Oo had hinted, evidence more regularity. She will give the underground a try, if she can find where it is.

  She plunges down steps that might or might not lead to a subway line, and is instantly sucked into another subterranean layer of the city. There is a whole new metropolis down here, with a spreading labyrinth of galleries and arcades and tunnels where touts are offering job lots of surprising items. Books, brassieres and packets of biscuits are heaped about in random piles on the pavement in front of bijou boutiques selling jewellery and shirts and sports shoes. It is confusing, chaotic, enticing. Babs’s sense of direction has by now vanished, but eventually she sees, in the far distance, a green sign saying, in English, ‘TRACKS’. She makes for the tracks.

  Three hours later, in the safety of the Pagoda bar, she tries to tell Bob Bryant where she has been, but she does not make a very good job of it. Her account is as baffling to him as her adventures had been to her: the only part of it he latches on to is her confession that she had forgotten the magic word of ‘Bi-Bim-Bap’, and had ended up by default with a small plateful of the most disgusting cold red noodles covered in chilli sauce. She, who prides herself on being able to devour anything, had been unable to get them down, and now, after all that walking, she declares that she is famished. She is ravenously awaiting the chicken wings with fries that she and Bob have ordered to accompany their beer. Bob has had one or two suppers already, but he is game for another.