North Station

by Suah Bae

  Praise for Bae Suah

  “Bae Suah offers the chance to unknow—to see the everyday afresh and be defamiliarized with what we believe we know—which is no small offering.”

  —Music & Literature

  “With concise, evocative prose, Bae merges the mundane with the strange in a way that leaves the reader fulfilled yet bewildered, pondering how exactly the author managed to pull this all off.”

  —Korean Literature Now

  “A compact, personal account of anomie and withdrawal in a time of rapid social and economic change. . . . An easily digested short book that nevertheless feels much very substantial—a very full story. Impressive, and well worthwhile.”

  —The Complete Review

  “The mystery, like the achievement of [Nowhere to Be Found], occurs not in space, but in time.”

  —The National

  Also by Bae Suah

  A Greater Music

  Nowhere to Be Found

  Recitation

  Copyright © 2010 by Bae Suah

  Originally published in Korea by Changbi Publishers, Inc.

  All rights reserved

  Translation copyright © 2017 by Deborah Smith

  English edition is published by arrangement with Changbi Publishers, Inc.

  First edition, 2017

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

  Names: Pae, Su-a, 1965- author. | Smith, Deborah, 1987- translator.

  Title: North station / by Bae Suah; translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith.

  Description: First edition. | Rochester, NY: Open Letter, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017022257 (print) | LCCN 2017032524 (ebook) | ISBN 9781940953700 (e-book)

  Subjects: LCSH: Pae, Su-a, 1965—Translations into English. | BISAC: FICTION / Short Stories (single author). | FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Contemporary Women. | GSAFD: Short stories.

  Classification: LCC PL992.6.S83 (ebook) | LCC PL992.6.S83 A2 2017 (print) | DDC 895.73/5—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017022257

  This book is published with the support of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea)

  This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts

  Design by N. J. Furl

  Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press: Dewey Hall 1-219, Box 278968, Rochester, NY 14627

  www.openletterbooks.org

  Contents

  First Snow, First Sight

  Owl

  North Station

  The Non-Being of the Owl

  Mouson

  Dignified Kiss of Paris Streets

  How Can One Day Be Different from the Rest?

  First Snow, First Sight

  Yang had had countless harsh words thrown at him over the course of his life, and as these had tended to culminate in a curse on his very existence, whenever he discovered that one of his castigators was no happier once they were rid of him, in other words that there was no correlation between their misery and Yang himself, and that this lack of correlation might have been all that ever lay between them, his timid heart found it strange, and faintly baffling. For example, there was the letter that Mira, one of these castigators, sent him one day; sighing that her days were like a ruin—though her entire life had been just that—she said that she was planning to spend a few days in the city where Yang lived, and that they had to meet. Though my entire life has been just that; this noncommittal expression seemed to Yang like a prideful, ultimate desire, which Mira deliberately underlined in her letter to make him hear it as a shout, and it was as though he really did hear Mira’s voice, commanding him to recognize the truth of this claim. But Mira’s voice, that was something that he had forgotten long ago, and in fact he could picture her only faintly, and had to acknowledge that all he remembered of her was so vague that he doubted he could tell her apart from her mother. Having said that, it wasn’t, of course, that he had absolutely no memory of the being known as Mira, simply that this “memory” was now only worth as much as any general, conventional expression related to human beings.

  Though my entire life has been that. To Yang, this seemed to impose upon him the responsibility of having as exhaustive a knowledge of Mira’s life as he did of his own, and on top of taking it as a warning not to act as though he didn’t possess such knowledge, never mind whether or not he actually did, he also read into it a form of implicit criticism that was close to mockery; because there was no way for him to know even a fraction of what constituted this “entire life” of hers, any more than he could guess whether this life warranted the label, redolent as it was of melancholic previous-century lyricism, of a “ruin.” Sufficient time had passed for their relationship to lose its validity—it had already been over eight years since they’d last seen each other, had any form of contact, or even had so much as a mutual friend who might happen to let them know, just by the by, how the other was doing—and so, rather than their friendship being one wherein Yang had once had a vast store of detailed information regarding her, but which he had now forgotten, each had from the start shown a complete lack of interest in the minutiae of the other’s life, a life that was after all unrelated to their own and could be called absolute and unvarying—in that, at least, Yang could feel confident in his own memory—yet none of this was to suggest that they were indifferent to one another. It was just that the Mira Yang had known, Mira as she had been back then, had never once thrown that expression “entire life” at him. To Mira—or indeed, he thought, to anyone else—Yang was not someone who warranted deploying such a term. Back then, Mira had never even written “my life,” or mentioned plain “life” in casual conversation, where its appearance would have gone unnoticed. Not only would such expressions, which comprehend time and human beings as a single, indivisible whole, have been inappropriate for Mira as an individual living a present of innumerable dimensions, they were also—and this Yang found especially unpardonable—utterly unoriginal. He read Mira’s letter several times, it not being overly long; those ostentatious expressions—my entire life, and eternal ruin, sticking their heads arrogantly and impatiently out from in between the otherwise well-behaved sentences—meant that any kind of future connection they might have could only take the form of Yang’s plunging into Mira’s world and attending closely to its atmosphere of ruin, and so, shackled by an awkwardness and discomfort as though that high-handed and inconsiderate expression were a pair of handcuffs, there was nothing to do but write an equivocal reply, one that would avoid both definite consent and outright refusal.

  Yang was lying supine by the lake. The water was surprisingly warm, given the cold wind, and in fact the heat was sufficient for the grass to give off a strange and sickening scent. The sun kept poking out from between the clouds, and as long as he stayed wrapped in his towel he wasn’t bothered by any chill. The lake didn’t have many swimmers that year, perhaps because the summer hadn’t been as warm as usual. A handful of wild ducks were huddled unmoving not far from Yang, so as an experiment he tried tossing them the breadcrumbs left over from his lunch, but this didn’t seem to interest them in the slightest, as though having to move for the sake of mere crumbs was too much hassle to even contemplate. Now and then there was a decent gust of wind, each one ruffling the ducks’ long feathers so that their round bodies appeared even plumper, while the down on the backs of their bowed necks was swept briefly flat, gleaming like a pale gray blanket. Yang wanted to stay where he was for as long as possible. Hoping that his skin and general constitution would withstand the chill of the wind, he closed his eyes. The feeling of his whole body, from the crown of his head to the tips of his toes, being as light as
the down on the ducks’ necks, and thus being whisked away by the wind, that was it, as though in a dream—a dream, that is, of flying low and languid over the earth, sighing quietly at the sight that lies below, the seclusion of flat fields stretching on and on, low houses, people and their bicycles, looking friendly as toys—he struggled to keep that feeling. All the while, as though in a dream, he was taking care to regulate his breathing and not suddenly plummet down to earth, or lose the calm control of his orbit and go spinning away into the empty air like a baseball struck by a bat, governed only by centrifugal force. He was flying, and at the same time was sinking in a measure of fear and anonymous sadness—which was muted and mild enough to be enjoyable, and he felt the urge to shed actual tears. Tears warm as the gentle heat of an autumn evening, harmless as spiderwebs floating quietly in the November breeze. He tried to make the tears well up by calling to mind some concrete sadness, but it didn’t work. He dredged up several lines of poetry: “Today, only today I am beautiful / Tomorrow all disappears / Death, death approaches.” These lines had always seemed to him both beautiful and sad, but even they could not cause the tears to flow. Even while regretting this, the original sad-yet-tranquil feeling persisted. Of all the sadnesses he knew, the early morning kind when you’ve only just woken up, the kind against which there is no defense, for which you’re never prepared, was the most poetic. Mornings when birds cried outside his window, the inside of his mouth was washed with salty tears, the distant drone of traffic sounded as though it had just started up, the street below echoed with the soft footsteps of people heading out early to work, a dog groaned in the kitchen, and none of it, not the leaves or sunlight or wind or the flowers on the balcony, was the least bit different from the day before; curled up in bed, he would often be gripped by a sadness so irremediable that only the day before it had threatened to make his heart judder to a stop; he would sleep for so long that he forgot it, and would forget even himself, as fully as paper dissolved in water, and would feel that kind of obscure sadness that seemed to have flowed far away on the river of oblivion, still further away, finally to be washed up here. The moment he opened his eyes, though the already-forgotten dream had given him an intimation of sadness, this was now, in his waking state, only a hypothetical sadness that could not be approached even through the contours of memory. Sadness and tranquility, which belonged to and yet were indifferent to him. In this state of willed torpor, Yang waited for evening.

  Some time later, Yang opened his eyes to find a young man and woman lying down near his own spot, side by side. Their bodies were fully stretched out, and they were both extremely tall. Shockingly tall, in fact. Close to 190 centimeters, Yang estimated, or perhaps even more. Even sunbathing, the two of them hadn’t removed their black, thick-framed glasses—for myopia, not the sun—and the parts of their bodies that weren’t covered by their swimsuits looked firm yet sleek, such a vast pale expanse it was almost inhuman; the woman’s legs were unshaven, so the splayed pattern of wet brown hairs clinging to her pale skin, plus the goose bumps on her thighs, was conspicuous. Yang had always liked tall people. Though of course, he didn’t know how they thought of him from their perspective. And so, these tall people having taken his fancy, Yang wanted to look at them for as long as possible within the bounds of propriety. Aside from the issue of their height, their physical bodies harbored a factor that Yang had never before encountered in reality, a factor that could probably be called literary particularity. Because it felt as though those two bodies lying side by side were addressing him with incomprehensible words, like speech formed of some alien language. Like a song thrown together in dialect, like a wordless question, like a braying donkey. But at the same time, and despite the fact that, at least superficially, they made no gestures to indicate particular boundaries, their posture and facial expressions as they lay there with their eyes closed revealed a strong, primitive, animalistic awareness of their own borders, and an equally strong desire to safeguard these from seepage, to the extent that, for example, if they were to appear at a party holding hands, no one around them would dare approach as they crossed the threshold, their bodies formed one discrete region, solid and impermeable. They could not be called skinny, but it was true that their figures were spare, extremely ascetic. In the man’s case, each time he took a breath the scaffolding of his ribs was clearly outlined, and those long, strong frames were ever so elegant, yet it was as though they were being borne on the currents of a strange and ineluctable fate. They looked like they might be brother and sister; more than in any similarity of facial features, the resemblance lay in their attitude and bearing, their movements and self-made mentality. The language of such acquired, a posteriori flesh made them seem like twins, closer even than brother and sister. Flesh of familiarity and homogeneity, shared exclusivity and extreme bashfulness. The transparent black-framed glasses, the woman’s dully gleaming swimsuit, its thick black fabric patterned with water droplets, hair cut short as a duck’s feathers, slightly protruding jaw, navel concealed neatly with both hands; large, flat hands that seemed to be clutching something wallet-sized, and long toes curled together in a way that looked both stubborn and shy. Reckoned in terms of sensitivity, the man was superior. He had both eyes closed behind his glasses and each time the light undulated his eyelids trembled perceptibly, their speed in precise proportion to the degree of that undulation. Though he was lying down undressed and with his eyes closed, he resembled “man thinking about anxiety” more than “man sleeping.” Alongside the habitual, though very slight, forward thrust of his jaw, the look on his face was one of surprise. It seemed a private indication of his having come face to face with some abstract surprise that can be discovered only with one’s eyes closed. As for the woman, she opened her eyes now and then to examine the situation with respect to the sunshine and her own body. She shifted her body a little at a time, stretching out both legs but taking care that her feet didn’t touch the sand if it could possibly be avoided. In spite of the fact that the beach towels they had brought with them were extremely large, larger than Yang had ever before set eyes on, their feet stuck out over the ends. Just then two huge dogs suddenly leapt into the water at their owner’s urging, panting heavily, and the startled ducks made for the hill on the opposite side of the lake. With no movement other than to open her eyes, the woman observed this brief disturbance. Though she must have felt Yang’s watching her and her partner, her glance did not stray in his direction.

  Just then it started to seem to Yang that he had met them both somewhere before. At first, the thought was like something in a dream, imagination and expectation tangled up and dim as the ground seen from a great height, but it gradually became invaded by echoing doubts, which might very well be facts. If Yang was not mistaken, they were that tall, odd couple who had been at the birthday party of the person living in the attic room that winter, who had stood there quietly side by side, practically glued to the wall, joined hands and did a little polka once the music started up, then gone home at the stroke of midnight, without at any point having spoken a single word to anyone else there. Since it was uncommon to encounter people as tall as they, Yang slowly became convinced that he was correct. At the party they had both been wearing sweaters; the woman with a sleeveless jacket on over hers, plus black stockings and a gray, pleated knee-length skirt. None of the other guests had seemed to know who they were, and were presumably none the wiser once the party had ended, but as Yang had been standing close by when they’d exchanged greetings with the host he knew that the woman worked as an assistant librarian and the man was a college student. Just then it had begun to snow outside. It was the first snow of the year. The flat where the party was being held was on the top floor; the door to the veranda had been left open for the smokers, and the night was peering in through it, a night formed from keen rays of darkness, and within that only a chiaroscuro of what was dark and still more so; the lofty cityscape, comprised of the silhouettes of chimneys and rooftops, which were completely differe
nt entities at night than they were during the day, was casting a sharp eye over the room’s interior. The rooftops, sloping at somber and beautiful angles, recalled iron warships floating mute in the sea of night, made with great toil but that were, having weathered a hundred years, desperately old. Yang loved the shadows of such rooftops on winter nights, and since whenever he encountered something he really liked there would stir in him a vague terror proportionate to the delight, intangible yet burdened with physical sensation, though in fact any experience of unbearable beauty will bring with it a measure of terror—in this case, the experience being the room full of people and the veranda that looked out over the rooftop nightscape—he had to be careful to make his body as inconspicuous as possible and not shock others with the pallor of his fear. That winter, the man had said he had to leave the party because he was working part-time clearing the snow from around the university office. Yes, that was it. Yang’s memory began to revive from the dust of tangled unconsciousness, curling into animation gradual as a snail. Before the couple left, the woman got a book out of her bag. Yang could see it without moving from his place in the shadows, pressed up against the wall in the corner of the room. Not that he had stationed himself there in order to observe them; the two of them had simply happened to position themselves right between Yang and the open veranda door. Just then, Yang shuddered at the caustic sound of a hard, pointed talon scraping the metal handle of the apartment’s front door. The sound grew louder as the music did, and disappeared when it died down. Though Yang surreptitiously opened the door several times to investigate whether some kind of wild beast was struggling to get inside, each time he opened the door to nothing but the stale smell of the old corridor, the saturated air raising goose bumps on Yang’s face like being licked by a huge tongue.