by Suah Bae
The woman’s book was from the library where she worked and had a classification code stuck to its spine. The blue stamp of the library’s name was visible on the first page as she flicked through the yellowish pages. At the time, Yang couldn’t see the book’s title. It was clear that the couple were both extremely shy, unable to enjoy parties. They wore passive smiles that melted inconspicuously into those around them, and made an effort not to exclude anyone from their gaze, without actually staring at them. Yang furtively rubbed his finger, sticky from the sugary drink, against the wall. The scraping sound startled him, loud as a scream. Equally loud was the rumble then produced by his stomach, sloshing with drink; fearing stares, Yang tried not to attract attention as he rummaged through the host’s son’s toy box, hoping to find something that would muffle the sound yet seem like merely an amusing distraction, a pair of castanets maybe, but all he found was a yellow rubber duck that made a squeaking sound when squeezed, and a toy arrow. As time passed and the night deepened, Yang grew gradually more uneasy, seized by an ever-more inexplicable terror; whirled about by such emotions, oppressed by the scenery that lay before him, of the veranda and the snow-covered rooftops, their existence seemingly visible only to himself, and in order to slip still further into the antinomic pleasure of his heart smarting and melting as though pierced by the toy arrow, Yang did not stop deliberately pushing himself further into the center of the unease. Even as he did so, he worried that his secret enjoyment would be unwittingly brought to an end by someone closing the veranda door, cutting him off from the sight of the rooftops, but luckily no one did. The woman gave the book to the host, who thanked her. The couple put on their hats and coats. They kissed the host on the cheek and said their goodbyes. They left, closing the door behind them as quietly as possible. Yang was shaking, but kept his gaze fixed on the veranda. After he’d calmed down a little he stepped out onto it, under the pretext of smoking a cigarette. The snow was piling up in the streets, and the shadows of the couple, seen from Yang’s vantage point, were startlingly tall.
Later, the person who had invited Yang to the party asked him to return a library book for him, which he’d borrowed a short while before unexpectedly having to move house. He added that, though the initial due date had already passed, it wouldn’t be a problem since he’d renewed the book twice for one-month extensions, but if there was some miscommunication and Yang did in fact end up having to pay a late fee, he would of course be reimbursed. The friend’s need to move in a hurry made it difficult to find time for such errands, so Yang decided to do him this favor. There was no reason to refuse; the library was on his way to work, and returning the book wouldn’t take much time. He went there a few days later. He’d been on night duty at the hotel, working at the front desk until the early hours and the gradual arrival of morning. When he got to the library he discovered that it wouldn’t be open for another half hour. Coming back the next day would be easy, but he might forget, or the library’s opening hours might be different, and if they didn’t coincide with the time that he left work—since, for the hotel’s temporary employees, these weren’t fixed but depended on the circumstances—he might end up returning home only to have to head out again later, so he decided that it would be best just to wait, and get something to eat at a cafe nearby. There was no cafe serving breakfast in the immediate vicinity, but he was hungry, and in any case it was far too cold to wait out in front of the library. But the sparsely populated cafe he did find was barely any warmer than it was outside; the stingy owner must not have the heat on. After ordering toast and coffee, Yang got out the book and looked inside—the first time he’d opened it—finding there the blue stamp with the library’s name, but neither this nor its title stirred any memories in him, as by then he had entirely forgotten the couple at the party. Yang read the first few pages while buttering his toast, drank his coffee, then opened the book again around the middle and read some passage or other, rummaged in his bag for his pen and notebook and continued reading, jotting down a few passages as he did. It wasn’t that these had made any especial impression on him, simply that he liked to collect sentences this way, and tended to note down whatever caught his attention, as long as he had the tools on hand. Lacking a similar fondness for organized filing, however, meant that the quotes thus amassed were stored in a slapdash manner. Since the notebooks and loose paper where he wrote down random sentences were not kept specially for this purpose, and since, moreover, they were themselves not collected in one place but rather scattered here and there, he almost never looked at them twice, and in the majority of cases just discarded them for no reason whatsoever. Now and then he would stumble across them among his belongings, sentences he himself had written down, but which by this time he had entirely forgotten ever having read, never mind what they meant or which book they’d come from. Rather than lodging in his mind or being engraved upon it, these sentences were fated to be forgotten from the very moment he recorded them, and though the business of collecting them, being purely habitual, did not go beyond simple, repeated, profitless labor, discovering unlooked-for sentences recorded in his own handwriting, and in the most unpredictable places, seemed such an intimate mystery that Yang could not bring himself to abandon the habit. Though there were almost no cases in which the sentences had a particular, significant meaning, he still wrote them down: on the back of the map he always carried around, the business cards of people he didn’t know, the corners of the previous year’s memorandum, in the blank spaces on receipts from ultimately forgettable restaurants he’d stumbled across in the course of a meandering stroll, here and there in the magazines he often flicked through, in newspaper margins, on flyers and pamphlets found on the bus, and on postcards he would never send. Sentences that even lacked a concrete subject, since he gained enjoyment from the mere act of recording them, and since, moreover, he attached the most importance to actions that were coincidental and impromptu, there were also cases where the sentences’ simple, everyday nature—what was sometimes their mundane brevity— made them still more meaningful and enigmatic. Naturally, Yang no longer has the notebook in which he recorded several of the library book’s sentences that time in the cafe. He is, however, able to recall something of the book itself; that it was a collection of letters exchanged between Voltaire and Emperor Frederick. Regrettably, Yang had understood almost nothing of what the book contained, for the simple fact that it was written in French. And so there is a strong possibility that what he transcribed, rather than complete, coherent sentences, would have just been flowery phrases and eulogizing fragments comparing Frederick to various heroes of legend. Yang had transcribed whichever sentence fragments happened to contain words he knew—for example, certain specific names—without any particular logic. “The young Solomon . . . or Socrates, were they here now, what is that to me, it is Frederick who I love.” Though of course, Yang would have understood no more of this than Solomon, Socrates, love.
The library was busier than Yang had expected it to be so early in the morning. It was a fairly compact place, a French cultural exchange library operating out of the provincial government office, and didn’t boast many visitors, but the handful of employees were so busily engaged in sorting documents, seemingly a task of some urgency, that none of them looked up when Yang walked in. While he stood there waiting he was able to enjoy the pleasingly crisp sound of paper rustling, and the rich smell of books common to small libraries where the reading room is not separated from the reception area. When Yang announced that he was there to return a book, one of the receptionists directed him to the next window along. The tall woman whom Yang had seen at the party, who stood there in silence the whole time, was nowhere to be seen. There was no notice board with information relevant to library users, perhaps with it being such a small-scale place, and no one was sitting behind the counter window the receptionist had indicated. As Yang’s business wasn’t all that urgent, he decided to wait until someone appeared. Just beyond the window were bookshelves, and a you
ng man whose job was to return each book to its proper place in the classifications. There wasn’t much else for Yang to do than watch the man at work. He looked very young, more like an apprentice than an official library employee. The youth was working clumsily; he clearly hadn’t yet managed to master the locations of the various categories or the art of sorting the books efficiently, so each time he made some trivial mistake he would get himself into a terrible fluster, even though no one was there to harangue him. When he turned in Yang’s direction and his face was revealed, Yang thought he couldn’t be more than eighteen. It was a child’s face through and through. Yang had been similarly impressed by a face once before, on the subway. A bunch of primary school kids had entered the car and begun chattering away about computer games and anime films. No, not chattering, it would be more correct to describe them as bellowing at each other with all their might, with the blind aggression peculiar to children who have just begun to bloom. In the opposite corner from where Yang was standing, visible straight-on to him, a boy who made an unusually strong impression was tangled up with his friends; Yang’s gaze was immediately captured by him. The boy seemed like a sprite from some mythical, light-flooded country, just now banished to the subterranean world of the train. The visual impression he made was of one formed not of solid materials like flesh, blood, and bone, but of pure luminosity and far-traveled echoes. Not because he was so very beautiful, but because his was the beauty of zero self-consciousness. This would partly be his youth, but he appeared utterly unaware of his own beauty, of putting on airs, of admiring himself in the mirror. He was a being who hadn’t yet been reincarnated, an ignorant, foolish being who had, at least up to that moment, been ignorant of how he had to hold himself apart from the other objects of the world, alive at precisely that moment, so inadvertently beautiful that it made your heart ache. But this vacuum state, this total lack of consciousness regarding the world, would not last long. And precisely because it would be so brief, Yang was flooded with such heartbreaking emotion he felt his chest grow tight. He kept his eyes on the boy right up until the latter got off the train, disappearing into the crowd with his arms around his friends’ shoulders, howling with laughter. And now, again, Yang shrank back and held his breath. Were the boy from the subway to have aged in an instant and be standing right there in front of Yang, this was precisely how he would appear. That is, if time were able to flow over the surface of human beings, self-contained and inviolate, with neither weight nor substance, neither affecting nor penetrating them. Or else, if time were an image inadvertently made, formed in the air by the radiation of such secret light, playfully scattering gold dust, receding into the distance while howling with laughter, this was the shape that would then be left in the air. No one would be able to touch it. Because it is only a shape, not some material thing existing in reality. Because it is only a certain function of time, made of light rays, luminosity, and echoes, formed of memories lost to oblivion, of hypothetical sadness and objectless regret.
As soon as the youth noticed Yang his face turned red to the lobes of his ears and he came toward him in such a rush, though there was barely a couple of strides separating them, that he almost broke into a run. And he apologized for there having been no one at the counter window, and his not having noticed Yang what with being in the stack room. His apology had an air of genuine contrition, a rare exception to the common rule whereby employees and visitors pay each other as little attention as possible, causing Yang himself to feel contrite for having caused this youth needless concern by standing there without a word. Once Yang had returned the collected letters of Voltaire and Emperor Frederick, the youth asked him imploringly if there wasn’t anything else he needed. When Yang answered that he was looking for other documents related to this particular exchange of letters, the youth, blushing openly, replied that the library held many such documents, all in French of course, and there were also many magazines for which they had a regular subscription, several of which were related to literature or history, so it might be a help if he looked through some of those. In any case, he said, theirs was the most substantial collection of and on French literature in the whole city, with the exception of the university library, so if there was anything Yang was after in the way of specific publications, he himself should be able to help.
“But you must have already tried the university library?” the youth asked.
The flush had not yet completely left his cheeks. It had spread even into his eyes, so looking at them felt like looking at blue glass beads into which the sky and shining sun had been poured. At the youth’s direction, Yang entered the periodicals room and gathered a large armful of magazines that he then carried away to read. Yang could make neither head nor tail of French, and since the documents the youth had brought him were all in this language, Yang had to occupy himself by flicking through until he found a picture, which he would then linger over as it though it contained some vital clue. The youth seemed unvaryingly gentle. Visitors generally addressed him first, and without exception received friendly guidance from him. It seemed he must have been this amicable by nature, but it might also be an attitude common to all vocational school students studying and working part-time at some corporation or other. During his time in the library, Yang learned that, as per his initial guess, the youth was there on an apprenticeship rather than as a regular employee, and did indeed study at a vocational school, from which he was soon to graduate. He also learned that the youth’s name was Edmund. That day, Yang photocopied several sheets of documents that he absolutely didn’t need, though he made sure that they were ones with photographs, and took out his first book from the library, a biography of Voltaire. When he filled out the form for a library card and presented this to Edmund, the latter said with a smile Yang? What a peculiar name.
Over the next four days Yang spent as much time as possible at the library. During those four days Edmund was assiduous in conveying this or that document to him, and Yang was equally unflagging in pretending to read them. If a given document didn’t seem to arouse Yang’s interest, Edmund would appear rather disappointed. He was a truly zealous apprentice. He threw himself in to whichever task was required of him, making an effort to comply with every possible breed of request related to books or documents; to refuse or ignore these would have been alien to him. Yet the books themselves, beyond containing essays or documents that might be of use to Yang, didn’t actually seem to interest him. His default response to the words “Voltaire” or “French literature” was an ordinary, professional smile, a far cry from any wild enthusiasm. Even when, in the course of discussion, the words Rimbaud or Aragon, surrealism, Rilke in Paris, etc., rose to his lips, he was every bit as cold and indifferent as when he pronounced the names “George Bush” or “Luciano Pavarotti.” But at a request for “the October 1986 edition of magazine X,” he seemed ready to clamber right up to the summit of the stack room, his cheeks flushed with genuine happiness. On the fourth day, Yang heard another of the library employees wish Edmund a quick “Happy birthday!” as they walked past him.
“Today is your birthday?” Yang asked, also quite casually. By this time, they were sufficiently intimate that their conversation could stray slightly beyond the formal exchanges of visitor and employee, though it was of course still bound by the domain of the library.
“Actually no, it’s tomorrow; Mrs. Hella has a day off tomorrow, so she wished me happy birthday in advance.”
“Ah, in that case I want to say happy birthday too. How old are you?”
“Nineteen. Thank you.”
“And I’d like to give you some kind of present. Since you’ve been helping me so much.”
Looking genuinely shocked, though with his smile as unwavering as ever, Edmund replied that there was no need for that, he was merely doing his job.
“All the same, would you mind giving me your address? I really would like to send you a present, as long as that’s okay.”
Edmund hesitated for a bit before acqu
iescing—“if you really want”—and writing his address in the notebook that Yang held out to him. Yang slipped the notebook back into his pocket. Edmund regarded Yang with a somewhat blank look, unsmiling. Then, when Yang met his eyes and said “bye then,” he blurted out “bye” in response and awkwardly raised his hand, extremely flustered. Yang strutted out without looking back.
Each time he passed the gift shop, Yang’s eyes strayed toward the china dolls. Never in his life had he possessed such an object, or even considered that he might one day purchase one. The majority of the city’s gift stores were clustered along a huge road that stretched out to the west. When the evening sun was setting on those smooth milky brows, the dolls seemed like shy, flustered beings standing there at a loss, blushing, yet zealous and warm and surprisingly intimate. Yang was only too well aware of his own timidity, that he was always at least somewhat afraid. He’d always been that way, ever since his school days, but he’d never been able to understand why this timid disposition, perfectly natural to him, caused others to feel discomfort or awkwardness or even open hostility. To Yang, this defensive state of his was actually quite beautiful. Because it was another acute sensation only perceptible to himself. When he first spotted the china dolls in that shop, Yang had seen in them a single personality, irritating and intractable, like a fractious stepchild, but also pale and weak and frightened and beautiful. To Yang, this was by no means an unfamiliar combination. He found the china dolls’ pose of pessimistic hesitation far more attractive than the gorgeous coquetry of Eastern European painted porcelain dolls. He used all the cash he had on him to buy a Meissen sleeping Venus figurine. Yang could spend some time in close study of the sleeping Venus, and still find that it aroused no greater a desire for access or possession than had those other surpassingly beautiful beings. The salesperson put the Venus in a box, gift-wrapped it, and finished it with a red ribbon that read “Edmund, a very happy birthday.” The next day Yang bought nineteen yellow roses, and, walking slowly and clutching the note with the address, went to find Edmund’s house.