by Suah Bae
He has no idea that at some later date, when this present-now resurfaces in his memory, he will scarcely pause at the moment just before the last train departed, that moment when his lips had just grazed those of the woman, like warm air hastily scudding past—pretending not to be lips but breath gone astray—before proceeding onward. In truth, that moment lasted no longer than it took the platform clock’s second hand to move a single click, but to him it lay outside the flow of time, was instead the fossil of an enormous deep-sea whale—yes, a fossilized whale!—remaining in his mind as a discrete moment, forever delayed. When the train pulled into the station, the woman’s hand and his reflexively moved apart. And their hands again verified the feel of the other’s palm, in order to shake; a still more formal pose followed this polite gesture, an attempt to conceal the extreme fear and fretfulness which wracked them both—comprising the fear “we might never meet again,” the mute questions “will you really write to me?” and its partner “will you really wait for my letter?,” and a continuous flood of wordless doubts each following on the heels of the other. The woman’s lip quivered as though she might burst into tears. “Are you afraid?” he asked. Without even asking “afraid of what?,” the woman hurriedly shook her head. And turned toward the train as she did so, one foot raised to step up into the train. Struggling to conceal a look of frustration, her face contorted into a strange shape. The conductor, wearing a red hat, was standing outside the door to the train and peering at the platform clock. The wind mingled the faint scent of oil with that of coffee from the dining car and of train carpets dirtied by muddy footprints, stimulating their sense of smell. At almost the same time as the conductor’s second whistle broke the platform’s frozen silence, signaling departure, he bent over the woman’s lips in a stiff, hurried movement. And wished her a safe journey.
At some later date, when this present-now resurfaces in his memory, arriving each time at the memory’s end, he would instead take the woman’s hand and climb up into the train with her. Passing through the carriages, down the narrow corridor adjoining the passenger compartments, they end up in the dining car, its air sullied with steam. Their bodies vibrate at the same frequency as that of the juddering train. Their wordless whispers, blind stares, and paralyzed lips perform this regular back-and-forth movement, rattling along with the scenery framed by the window, the timetable hanging in the corridor, the cutlery and crockery. All these vibrations taken together produce the wavelength of distress. From right to left, and from left to right. Their eyelids and hearts oscillate at this identical rhythm. A slow acceleration soon arriving at a steady speed, creaking and rocking whenever it rounds a bend, and at those parts where the track is jointed together, as though arrived at the very edge of the world, the body of the train jolts along while the wheels below growl and shriek. In no time at all, slender glasses are filled with clear yellow alcohol and handed out to the irritable passengers. They fall asleep leaning on each other, with their glasses still at their lips. Every now and then when the train comes to a stop, a long sharp blast from the conductor’s whistle will shatter their restless slumber. This hand and that, these lips and those, that do not pull apart even in a sleep achieved with open eyes, this dream and that, overlapping. This is how the journey goes, for countless weeks and months. Passing platform after platform, each deserted as a barren steppe, they travel toward the city where the woman lives. Toward one of the countless cities that lie between this, which he had arrived at quite by chance, and that, and another city beyond these two, a pall hanging over these cities’ existence, which labor under the weight of anonymity until they finally succeed in obtaining a name. Before he left that city, people had said “Though we are living in the same century, we never know what on earth goes on in that distant province—in the border regions of the world, in village after nameless village where the national boundaries are constantly changing, in one of the countless cities on this earth that today fights for Stalin and tomorrow against him.” But he would seek out the woman’s house. He would go to the farthest corner of the farthest corner and knock on the door he found there. A whole life spent seeking the house of a young woman in such a distant place. And so only knocking on the door. And even if it were Stalin’s name he found there, there could still be no substitute. The woman is living next to the desk in his room . . . but as her address only, the address that he’d pinned there to the top of a pile of notepaper, her home address. And since at the same time the woman will also exist somewhere in this alley with the strange-sounding name, all of this—the labyrinthine alleys, corners where dogs loiter, bicycles, the fruit stall where he will ask for directions—will be, to him, a plum of ripe yearning. Midsummer of 1970-something, sweet, deeply purpled plums whose flesh is critically overripe, seemingly about to burst out of themselves in the heat of the sun. Given that lips to which a song had once risen speak unbidden until they die, no gesture would be able to prevent his dream from strolling billions of kilometers and reaching the woman’s corner, the woman’s plum. His lips were forever flying toward hers, even after the train had pulled out from the platform, had been sucked away into the darkness in one deep gust. Like a butterfly flitting its way across the sea, a dead swan finding the water of the canal, like a remembered autumn sliding on into November, and as though all the trains in the world ran toward the woman’s address. Always at some later date, when this present-now resurfaces in his memory.
He woke up in the middle of the night. Slowly, the bodied forms of furniture revealed faint shapes in the darkness. He hadn’t been dreaming, hadn’t heard something, wasn’t thirsty, didn’t need to go to the bathroom. He’d simply woken up. That awakening had a different character to opening your eyes in the morning. He hadn’t slept entirely soundly, and was still deep in the ravine of sleep’s vacuum. He turned his head on the pillow, thinking that he would fall asleep again almost right away. But it wasn’t possible. He knew what it was, the root of this fretfulness that had gone on for several months now. He had hope. And this hope was a frightening thing. For example, there can be no peace for the condemned criminal who clings to the hope that his execution might be stayed. And no freedom either. The day before the execution, would the convict be able to sleep? His mind was swept up in a vortex of raging thoughts. How old would he have been when the newspaper printed the shocking photograph of the Turkish dictator Adnan Menderes hanging from the gallows? In the museum of postwar history—where he had first met Ann, whose mother had been working there at the time—Ann had just so happened to be standing right of the photograph of the executed dictator. She had been very young (he had felt certain that, like other young women her age, she would never even have heard of Adnan Menderes); her plump figure was not unattractive, she had her longish hair tied in braids, and crude rubber boots like those worn by sailors. As she turned her head and looked at him, the corners of her lips turned sharply upward. The way she was standing next to the photograph made it seem as though those red lips were a spearhead aimed at Menderes. At the same time, as though the look on her face were nothing special, merely chance, she said “I don’t know who that man is, but I’m sure the one who should be hanged is you. Am I right?” Practically as soon as they met, they were packing their things and setting off on a trip to Malaysia. Once they reached their destination, not a single moment went by without Ann finding a way to start arguments, in which he was fated to be ever the loser. He could not resist Ann. They’d assumed they were done with each other after that trip, but that wasn’t how things turned out. In fact, he’d gone to see her only the day before. A signature had been necessary in the matter of inheriting a relative’s house, and though this could have been solved quite easily by mail, he’d chosen to drop by Ann’s office. She didn’t like him, and she didn’t bother to conceal that. Ann stood with her back to the wall. Sometimes, while making a gesture of explaining a project to a customer, she would shuffle sideways along the wall, for no particular reason; it was a ponderous movement, like forcing swollen f
eet to walk in too-small shoes, and made her appear barely able to move under the weight of her own mass. Though she knew that he had entered the office, Ann did not look at him. Her lips and chest were thrust out in front of her, like someone on the point of a voluminous sigh. Though the cut of her black skirt was demure and classy, she was so squeezed into it that the slightest movement sent a ripple through her bell-shaped lower half. She’d put on weight since a few years ago when he’d last seen her; now, her skin glistened noticeably, and even her hair looked to have grown thicker, more lustrous. As ever, she looked more like a strapping opera singer fresh from a production of Verdi, or a tall Viking maiden standing spiritedly at the prow of a ship (wearing the distinctive horned helmet and carrying a round shield and curved ax, as though about to charge at something and smash it to pieces) than the financial officer of a credit institution. He and his world were clearly included in the list of things this youthful woman was itching to smash. “Oh, it’s you,” she spat out eventually, when his proximity meant speech could no longer be avoided, her words filled with a sense of obligation, the sense that she might as well get it over with as quickly as possible, seeing that it had to be done. And clasped her hands neatly in front of her belly button.
He wanted to fall asleep again, but he couldn’t. Very far away—though clearly somewhere within the building—a wall clock was chiming three in the morning. He thought about sleep. Sleep, a word symbolic of forgetting, lightens the load of the night that has fallen through forgetting and forgetting again, and sends it flying away. He was accompanied by a sleep that was an experience of the soul, both an imitation of and a rehearsal for death. Sleep, the asceticism practiced by a Buddhist monk, everything falling under the designation “alone” . . . his whirling thoughts gave rise to vertigo, and a longing whose intensity shocked him. At some point, the firm, dry form of a woman’s hand had lain beneath his own. A small, warm hand. A bird flying into his palm. With a hard beak, a warm belly softly feathered, and glassy eyes recalling the hard, smooth surface of amber. Overlaid in this way, their hands crossed vast plains, stony deserts, and high mountain ranges. They exhausted all the realm of time, passing over to dimensions beyond. Their hands flew over Moses’s reed bed and the strait that divides this world from the next. This side of the earth was the woman’s exposed breast, and on the far side were the scenes that that breast was dreaming. He opened his eyes to scan the terrain. But the world hovered over by their linked hands was nothing but a land of darkness. Where is this? Where on earth! The breast’s sweetness leaked like honey from out of the dream’s private jar. His imagination was wandering, had lost its way; the woman’s house appeared abruptly at the very end of a road. The stony road sloped gently upward. He was sweating inside his winter suit, and the buildings lining both sides of the road recalled public schools or national museums. There was an airfield nearby, formerly used as a barracks, and the noise of planes taking off or landing could be heard at regular intervals. In the darkness that enveloped his surroundings entirely, making it impossible to tell whether it was day or night, the woman’s house looked down on him with a solemn countenance. The house looked like a deep-sea whale beached on a sandbank, moments before death, and also like the Papal window. In front of it, he stood and shook violently for a while. In this deep, viscous stillness, known by none.
The concerto still wasn’t over, but his headache was too unbearable for him to stay seated any longer. Gritting his teeth so as not to let out a moan, he tried, as he slipped out of his row, to gain some measure of comfort from the conviction that he hadn’t been enjoying the performance anyway. The air in the packed concert hall, its smells of clashing perfumes, deodorized underarms, starched fabrics, hair products, varnished instruments, and rosin—merely recalling it was enough to make his throat feel tight. Each breath was a struggle. After forcing an apologetic smile in the direction of the usher, he hurried across the lobby and down the spiral staircase, the whole place decked out to the nines. He remembered that he had once loved these very stairs, these smells that were now choking him. Wasn’t it none other than the scent of Friday evenings, which had never before seemed less than lovely? It was the scent of ink from a freshly-printed score, of air freshener that lingers on the collar and in the hair, of leather shoes permeated by the seven o’clock fog, of a restless heart, of wine and cigarettes, and, more than anything else, of well-dressed women. He got out his handkerchief and mopped the sweat from his forehead, then, after collecting his coat from the cloakroom, pushed open the main door and went straight out into the street. Once he had inhaled a deep draught of the fresh, cold air, his vision started to unblur itself, along with the contents of his head. It had been overcast all evening; when he’d arrived, the thick clouds had been so low they’d seemed about to smother him. Now, it was snowing. Fine-grained as sand, the snow struck angrily at his eyelids and brows. He blinked rapidly and a little of this snow melted, the water tracking downward over his cheeks. He paid no mind to his lack of a hat, just went and sat down on the nearest bench, practically collapsing onto the slats. Leaning back, he stretched his arms up over his head. He continued to struggle for breath, though he no longer felt on the brink of suffocation. He didn’t want to go back inside the building. In fact, he wanted to leave the area entirely. One day, people would stumble upon him somewhere quite different. In a Chiang Mai orphanage, for example, teaching English to children orphaned by AIDS or tsunamis. A long time ago, an old friend who was working to set up such a school there had told him of the need for trained teachers. And an even longer time ago, he taught English and linguistics in a secondary school, albeit for a very brief period. What was stopping him from taking up that line of work again? Given that there were places in need of his skills. And given how easy it would be to get on a train and just leave. From the north station, where all the world’s trains were bound for a single address.
He stayed at home the next day. When he heard the mailman’s bicycle jolting over the bumpy paving stones, the leaves were all rustling on their branches. The air was filled with the damp moisture of the earth and the scent of young shoots. He opened the window halfway. The mailman thrust a letter into the mailbox, swung his leg back over his bicycle, and peddled off. The clattering of the mailbox’s metal lid was still reverberating even after he had disappeared, and a dog barked twice as though in answer. Then the echoes died down, and silence reigned once more. His hand, clutching a pencil, hung motionless over the paper. There was still the creaking of the chair. But aside from that, the world was liberated from sound. In that moment, he slipped the moorings of himself. He listened hard, concentrating, as though he was a hunter trying to pick up the sound of a bird laying an egg in a distant coppice, several kilometers away. There was no sound to be heard. Though he was clearly alone, he was seized by an intense shyness, leaving him unable to move. This shyness proceeded from boastfulness, from private expectations, and from his inability to put any of this into words. Without needing to consciously formulate the thought, he knew the address from which it had come flying, that letter which the mailman had left in the mailbox with a clang, and which was the only letter to have arrived that day, when any letter at all was a rare occurrence. It was early spring, the days continuing to be oddly mild. Around noon, when the light morning fog had dissipated and the sun briefly showed its honey-colored face, there were even times when a breeze blew soft as a quilt.
It was a very long letter, twelve pages, handwritten. It had been sent in a business envelope rather than the smaller one used for letters. Each page had been meticulously numbered, and the body of the letter itself had several sections in which the ink and handwriting looked slightly different, as though it had been written over a number of days. The handwriting, which at first flowed with a schoolgirl’s affectionate ease, seemed to reach a sticking point every few sentences, tensing up and trembling uneasily. I shriek! the handwriting confessed. It took him around an hour to read the letter from beginning to end. There were some parts th
at he read several times. The sun set completely in the course of his reading, so he had to get up halfway through and switch on the light. The hour which formed the border between evening and night did not last the letter’s single exhalation. The shadow of him holding his head in his hands smothered the book-lined wall. Once night had fallen in earnest, the temperature dropped markedly.