North Station

by Suah Bae

  It was getting near to evening, and the sunlight was so pallidly faint that there was almost no warmth to be had from it, and the ducks had all vanished somewhere, and when the wind grew even chillier the people began to fold up their blankets and leave their spots by the lake. The tall couple, along with Yang, were among the last to leave. They sat up side by side, adjusted their glasses, and brushed any remaining moisture from their swimsuits, pulled on T-shirts and trousers over their swimwear, stood up and into their shoes, then folded their towels and hung them over their shoulders. Though Yang wanted to address them with some brief word of parting, and ask whether she had stopped working at the library, almost as soon as the thought occurred to him he felt that it would be difficult and annoying to put it into practice and actually open his mouth, besides which, the couple would likely have responded with indifference, so in the end he just stayed quiet. Glancing at his watch, he saw that he would soon need to set off for home. Mira had decided to call on him around 8 P.M., so he needed to be back before then, though beyond that there was nothing, absolutely no reason to rush. Yang had let the time drag on in the hope that Mira might wear herself out and decide not to come after all, but these hopes had ultimately been thwarted. Though he had no reason to think so, at some point during this impatient passage of time Yang had begun to worry that Mira had him confused with someone else. It was possible. They hadn’t seen each other in at least eight years, and whichever way you looked at it, Mira coming all this way to meet him, to meet Yang—she’d said it was just a passing visit but it was clear that he was the reason for her trip—simply wasn’t credible. By the same logic, she might not even recognize him. Again, as it was so long since they’d last met, or even heard the other’s voice, it was possible. Yang experimented with examining himself in the mirror, assessing to what extent his appearance had altered over the past eight years, but he couldn’t even guess what he’d looked like so long ago. And surely Mira’s memory would be equally poor, as in fact his was of her. Yang repeatedly reminded himself that Mira was a specific, material human being, a specific, material woman; sometimes this was strange and discomfiting, sometimes it seemed a joke so clumsy he wanted to laugh, and at one point he genuinely did laugh so hard he was almost doubled over. Eight years ago, Yang had been afraid of Mira. It was the same now. She was a magnificent-looking woman, strong-willed and fearsomely obstinate, and her assertiveness was uncommonly pronounced. But Yang’s fear of her wasn’t solely down to her powerful ego or will to dominate. It was because she had wanted him to fear her. There had been a period in his life when he had quailed at the thought that she might leave him. (The terror had been such that it seemed his chest would explode from the anticipation alone, and had gone on for such a long time at this same intensity that when Mira finally did cast him aside, in a dramatic scene entirely her own creation, it was actually less painful.) Back then Mira had hesitated, gently and patiently holding Yang’s head to her chest. We fell in love at first sight, you know, in a way that had never happened before. And still you’re afraid, what on earth are you afraid of? . . . Despite having arranged to come around at eight, it was past nine and there was still no sight of her. Yang sat on the bed and waited, watching the clock. Though strongly suspecting that she would arrive in due course, Yang fervently hoped that a last-minute change of heart might cause her to stay on the train and just pass the city by entirely. He didn’t put the radio on, or the lights, didn’t light any candles or make a pot of coffee. He simply waited, adopting unbeknownst to himself a posture of obedience toward some vague subject, preparing to receive the aggressor into the sphere of his shy soul. This was waiting only, without performing any action. At some point he fell asleep.

  And then at some point he woke up; because he wasn’t immediately aware that he’d been asleep, it took him some time to grasp why he was collapsed in bed with his clothes, even his shoes, still on, and what had then woken him up. In this state of his exhausted bewilderment he heard shoes shuffling across the floor, and dishes clattering in the sink, which went on for an uncomfortably long time. These rude, unpleasant sounds rubbed his nerves the wrong way, needlessly reviving evil memories like a coin dropped into a tin dish. And who was that crossing the unlit room? Mira had arrived. She had opened the unlocked door and come in, made herself something to drink—paying no attention to the sleeping Yang—and had just now emerged from the kitchen. This was a moment he had imagined time and time again, suffocating inside every time that he did, but now, seeing the shape it was actually taking, he was convinced that reality was no rare thing, was in fact nothing more than a poor imitation, dull and run-of-the-mill, of that imagination that anticipates everything. He was in no hurry to get up, and given that his body was deaf to his commands, leaving him unable to so much as turn his head, shackled to the air as is common in fever dreams, he could do nothing but continue to lie down as he was, watching Mira get some bread out of the cupboard, slice it, and spread it with margarine. Even in the dark Yang could see that Mira had grown yet more emaciated, as though a gust of wind might blow her away, and that her long hair was hanging down behind her back in a very ordinary way, tied in a ponytail. She was wearing a pale-colored wool dress, belted at the waist, and though her clothes didn’t seem all that big, the material looked baggy on her hips. The fact that she had dwindled away like an aged, withering woman triggered surprise in Yang. Seemingly famished, she scarfed the bread down in the near dark, the only light from the moon shining in through the window. The sound of her swallowing was incredibly loud. And then she coughed for quite a long time. Ages ago, they’d been in line to buy train tickets when they first set eyes on each other; struck by an immediate attraction, they stood there hesitating behind the door to their respective destinations, pressing their ears up against it to hear whoever was on the other side; the bell rang to announce the train’s departure. Doors opened and closed, and people appeared and disappeared quiet and courteous as funeral-goers, and the pianist struck up Chopin’s Funeral March as if in response. (The music shakes Yang to the core. If not for that music, sadness would just be sadness; that was the kind of music it was.) The candle that had been placed in a corner of the room made the couple’s shadows dance on the opposite wall, so tall it seemed they would touch the ceiling, and the wind that slid in through the door to the veranda flipped the pages of the book. On the wall where the shadows were undulating, Yang transcribed the sentences that so suddenly appeared, that were in a language he could not understand, that were all the more beautiful because of that. The snow was piling up on the rooftops; the stars shone mysteriously in the sky. A skinny black figure, broom in hand, was sitting next to the solitary outline of a chimney, and Yang gasped in surprise at the realization that he himself was the sole observer of this scene. The snow looked to be getting gradually thicker. “I’m the chimney sweep of sadness, I cry, cry, cry . . .” Yang grazed the pencil hesitantly against the wall. “I cry, cry, cry . . .” Taking care to get the spelling correct, he wrote it out again and again. “Cry, cry, cry . . .” Behind Yang, the shadow of the tall man was whispering, his words whisking out through the door: “But clearing snow is no easy thing. No, it’s not easy at all.” The voice receded, wavering with what seemed like regret, disappearing like a candle’s last smolder. The woman took the man’s hand and they passed over the threshold together. Yang brought his lips to the wall, close as a shadow, found the sentences he had written and read in a small voice: “For twenty years I searched for such a place, where no one lives nearby, where the landscape is wide and rolling with meadows, hollows, swamps, solitude, forests, and the sky. Not even a village, just a tiny hamlet without a church. –Botho Strauß.”

  Mira got up from her seat and approached Yang.

  And Yang knew that now, finally, it was time to let the tears fall.

  Owl

  There was an ambulance parked in front of the house. A pallid stillness lay over the whole scene, nothing moved, and the air was like a warm, transparent wall.
A regular ticking sound pierced the silence of 33 degrees Celsius—as indicated by the wavering gradations of the rooftop thermometer. The lazy beat of a mechanical heart. Or else, was it the metronomic footsteps of someone running down a corridor in rubber-soled shoes, or the ticking of an unusually large wristwatch hanging from my ear? Perhaps the person living on the ground floor had turned on the washing machine, or maybe the sound was coming from a broken electrocardiograph. A man was being brought out on a stretcher to the ambulance. His shoes stuck out from under the blanket. Water was dripping from them. The house was a wrecked ship. I know that old man, with the huge green oxygen mask jutting from his head like a green dragon on a ship’s prow, or I think I know him. I try to approach him but the nurses hold me back, their speech incomprehensible. When I turn the page of the picture book a toad and a red orchid are melting to a pulp in a flowerpot. The ruins of a castle appear as I keep walking, and a narrow stony road that rises at a steep gradient. There is the scent of hot grass and dry sunlight. Just then, soaked in sweat, I look back over my shoulder and see a large damp reptile soundlessly following me. I can’t recall its physical form. This is all a scene from a dream. I could only sense the warmth of its long black tail, which it held erect; warmth like that from stone steps burning in the heat of the midday sun. Someone took my hand. And suddenly the scene changed.

  The old bookshop, which had no ventilation system other than its windows and door, was full of cigarette smoke. I sat at a table with an espresso cup on it; a corner of the square was visible through the open door, and I could see people sitting around tables by the side of the road in spite of the hot weather. I got the feeling that I was being watched intently by the countless books that lined the walls from the floor to the high ceiling, and by the stories within them. Strangely overwhelmed, I overcame my shyness and got up from my seat, looking up at the higher shelves as I wandered among them. It was the second time we’d visited this bookshop. The first time we’d arrived too late, after the bookshop had already closed for the day, and so could only stand outside for a while and peer in at the display stands. We talked as I examined the books laid out in the window display, pointing at the titles I recognized, but also at those I didn’t. It was winter. The wind shook the awnings of the open-air cafes, and after midnight the snowflakes began to fly. But it was summer now, and we went inside the shop. They brought out small cups of an espresso that was thick as tar. A calm yet persistent scent eddied around us, made up of trees and stale dust, paper and the wooden floor, and cigarette smoke. You were talking with the owner about the difficulties facing small bookshops, about the pessimistic outlook; I finished walking among the shelves, and stepped outside the shop. The shop immediately next door was a florist’s, with a single chair outside. I sat down and put on my sunglasses. Happily, I’d been given a book from the shop as a present. The first story in the book was about five cities, and very short. The title, Invisible Cities. I began to read aloud from the beginning of the book. Time went by. Reptiles surrounded me, listening to the sound of my reading. They were curled up quietly, barely moving; only their raised black tails swayed slowly in the air, as a huge butterfly might, in that sunlight of late summer sliding into autumn. Heat radiated from their skin, which had been warmed in the sunlight and from the square’s asphalt. This afternoon subsiding by degrees like a swamp. Asleep, I heard the sound of sleeping breath. Of one sleeping breath fumbling for another. They must be tangled with you, my breathing, my sleep, and my dreams. And I wanted to keep dreaming. Tears and sweat were flowing from me, wetting my face and watch and pillow. Sleep drifted about over lukewarm waves, like an anesthetic leaching in through veins, seized by sleep’s phantoms . . . held within sleep, one eye makes a simultaneous record of what the other sees. Sleep, the soul’s gelatinous component, the made-visible half-form of that which is unseen. Dreams and the embrace of dreams, which always stir up such sluggish, stunned sensations. This thing that stimulates my sleep, the respiration and waves of dreams, waves of breath and waves of water, that chord and note. And a silent song-cum-selfless-aria spun out on the keyboard. I passed back into the dream, back into the bookshop.

  But you’d left, they told me. You were alarmed to find I’d disappeared and hurried outside to look for me, they said. And that it had already been over half an hour since you’d left. He left? While they were speaking I suddenly became alien to the dream, quite at a loss. All the books turned away with cold, sad faces, all the writers clamped their mouths shut and went back to being dead. The cold espresso dregs stained the bottom of the cracked coffee cup. He really left? I repeated blankly, clutching the book that had been my present. As though there was nothing more I could do. Which was true, in fact. I had been sitting in front of the florist’s, reading aloud from the book. I didn’t see you come out of the bookshop. And you didn’t notice me either. I’d thought I was waiting for you. You believed I’d gone away. Like something that had always been spoken of, not knowing that it had not been true. In that moment when you failed to find me, I was reading Invisible Cities. I do not know where you live, and my house, though you know it, is too far away.

  I liked to talk about dreams. For lovers, Freud was a gypsy of romance and sensual desire, part fortune-teller, part lute-carrying poet, and the manufacturer of a wonder drug. At some time or other, I told you about the beautiful yellow bird I held in my hand. The sense of a being delicate as a spider’s web, suggested by the heat from its fierce warm breast, its slender weak toes and the soft down on its skin. About the wingbeats that had seemed shockingly strong in spite of such delicacy, the feel of its muscles tense and tremble beneath the skin, the ruddy memory of its chest suddenly springing up at that smallish yet explosive wriggling. At that, you pronounced my dream both enjoyable and extremely well behaved. I didn’t know the reasons for your conclusion. I wasn’t a student of Freud like you. But I could guess that the reason you found it enjoyable wasn’t because of what Freud himself had taught. You dismissed such provisional explanations, given purely for the sake of carnal intimations, as “Freudian versification.” Imaginary poetry that looks forward to a time overflowing with amusements.

  Believing (incorrectly) that I had grown sad and left, you found yourself all alone. You must have been hungry—it having grown quite late by then—and might have gone to a restaurant, even without a companion. There were plenty of places lining the square, as in the small streets that radiated out from it. The kind of place, in other words, that people felt was highly suitable for evening dates, especially fashionable Friday evening ones. After peering inside several of the restaurants, I quickly realized that I had miscalculated—you would never have chosen to eat alone amid such a cheerful clamor. The square was a place for what is commonly called “going out.” The parties and pairs clustered at each table all had smiling faces and cheeks slightly flushed. There were no tables with single occupants. My search so far had been in vain, and it was clear that someone with your firm sense of self-respect wouldn’t be drifting around like a loner. I gave up on the restaurants, but couldn’t think where to try next. I saw the lights of a taxi rank—you must have taken one. And left. I’ve experienced the emotion of love twice in the time that I’ve known you. The first time is long past, the second is still ongoing. Both times it happened with writers, and both times I fell in love with them without ever having met them in person. Though you yourself were somewhat acquainted with the first of the writers. To be precise, you told me that your acquaintance had only lasted for a brief while, a very long time ago, but now and then you would make a vague plan to go and see him again. Using this as a pretext, we put together a fairly concrete plan for the two of us to visit that first writer. He lived far away, and though we managed to obtain his address and get an appointment with him, we weren’t sure whether the trip would require a passport or visa. Only once we’d gone to the harbor to catch the ferry were we told that a passport was necessary. I had mine in my handbag, but you’d left yours at home. We watched the ferry de
part without us.

  After that, I would sometimes dream of going to meet the first writer. You told me that, a very long time ago, you’d traveled to that city, the city where the first writer was now living. You said that the tolling of a distant bell was audible in the ruins at the heart of the city, a place so little-frequented that even the shadows of passersby were rarely seen. It had been a curious experience. You were sitting halfway up a tall flight of crumbling stairs, and the wind blowing in through the gaps in the ruined stone walls carried with it the sound of the bell. But as for the creaking of a nearby window-frame, or the scrape of carriage wheels over paving stones, there was nothing. Ah, this was still a little while before such typical tourist things had appeared in that city. Might the whispering of lovers on the other side of the wall, blending creole and patois in their speech, have sounded to you like the ringing of a bell? But that is merely conjecture, with only the faint possibility of truth.

  You once asked me to write about my dream. Not just an off-hand mention of a certain scene, but to describe the whole thing in as much detail as possible, and send it to you. I said nothing at the time, but privately decided not to. It would be comparatively easy to write about only one particular scene, or one aspect of the dream that had made a strong impression. But recording it in its entirety from beginning to end—if dreams can be said to have beginnings and ends—was another matter entirely. Not only had the dream lacked a sequential plot, but its story was not a rational one, it didn’t fit with consistent logic. I was unable to judge precisely where it had started or come to a close. No, I was unable to remember. A dream, once dreamt, is soon forgotten. The lifespan of the dream, still vividly remembered when I woke up in the middle of the night, was not all that long. On touching the surface of consciousness, the mosaic of the dream rapidly oxidized and crumbled away, and my mind filled in the blank spaces with colored tiles of its own invention. The dreams I can still recall at least in part are, without exception, the ones that I recounted to you. Through the telling, those dreams found a foothold in my consciousness. But in doing so, the dream would have inevitably altered, becoming tainted with deliberate contrivance. The dream degenerated into that which was not a dream. It was impossible to tell whether it was a dream or something imagined while sleeping. And more than anything else, my own belief is that there are many cases in which dreams are fundamentally void. For the most part, what appears in dreams are no more than relics, imagined or recalled by the eyes of day, presented at random without relation to either time or will. And so, dreams can be neither a divine revelation nor a prophecy. The dream says nothing about me, no more than it does about you. It bears as little relation to reality as the fortune inside a fortune cookie. Even if you believe what the dream seems to show, that doesn’t alter the fact of its nullity. And so, even if I were to spy on myself, record the entirety of my dream and send it to you, ready and willing to disclose myself, such a record would clearly lack the ability to disclose or betray anything of this self. You strongly opposed my belief in the nullity of dreams. Since when have dreams been nothing? That’s evidently not true. Hints and paradoxes, caves and reptiles, never mind what you call it, they clearly have some kind of psychological meaning. To interpret a dream, you need more than the dream itself, more than a mere process of mechanical unraveling; rather, you need the counseling process, in which the concerned party and the interpreter collaborate. People who declare that dreams are nothing simply do not want to believe them, or are frightened of doing so.