by Suah Bae
At the end of the letter the woman wrote that she wanted to see him again, just one more time. “For god’s sake, please give me permission to visit you. Please decide everything for me, I mean. I need to be decided.” He paced up and down in the chilly room, his hand to his forehead. Swept up in some terrifying passion, his senses were so disarranged that he’d forgotten to close the window. Before he’d even read the letter through he knew how he would answer the woman’s entreaty, and the result was not at all to his liking. If only it were possible to alter his decision. But how? If only it were possible to turn back time, he would return to the north station platform where he’d been standing several months ago, follow the woman up into the train and travel far away with her, to somewhere very different from the place he now found himself. To an oh-so-eternal yesterday. Was it the woman’s fault? No. It wasn’t because of her at all. He shook his head as though confirming his own firm resolve. “It’s entirely natural for one person to form a relationship with another. Even if that relationship is the fruit of error and uncertainty. No—or is it that the closer a human relationship is to error, the more perfect, the more natural it becomes? It’s no one’s fault when a relationship doesn’t proceed straightforwardly from one person to another. Even when the individual is captivated by himself rather than the so-called object of his affections, such an object is still needed, if only as a convention.” He couldn’t claim to be a stranger to those relationships that are formed without the need to fall in love, of that elegant intimacy and tranquil companionship, that comfort and affection, unease and insufficiency, passivity and resignation, of the constant fretful need for psychological escape. His life, like many others’, was a garden blooming with these exact relationships. He was well aware of what the woman was currently experiencing. Though she would not yet have realized this, it was a congenital disease of those who are by nature already liberated. It was the stench inevitably caused by moving in the direction of freedom. Just then, he recalled that he had become a father through absolutely no will of his own, that it had taken almost twenty years for him to learn of the existence of his daughter, and that her name was Ann. Ann’s mother had telephoned out of the blue and demanded that he take his now-adult daughter with him on this trip to Malaysia. Becoming a father through no will of your own could be every bit as appalling as inadvertently becoming a mother, even granting that no one had forced any responsibility on him. To put it boldly, it was a basic human right to be protected from such a thing. In his own case, he was too free from mother and daughter for “avoidance” or “rejection” to be an option; such terms cannot apply when no claim is being made. And it was too late to run away, there was no need to anymore. He was being swept to the shore of mothers and daughters, borne there on fate’s slowly-contracting tides. The sadness and discomfiture of that time, the scrabbling for purchase, the odd little despairs of the breakfast hour. The vain and feeble attempts, always thwarted somehow, to love the mother and daughter. He was nothing more than a stranger to them, just as he had always been . . . Several years passed by in this way, with no object he could leave or even want to.
In just the same way, he could imagine how sad and discomfiting the woman’s hours must have been ever since she met him. “It’s not my fault!” the woman wrote. “It’s not my fault!” A protest that announced itself through the deep indents the pen had made in the paper, the sweat stains from nervous hands. But eventually, unable to reason it out in a logical fashion, her trembling hand had written “It’s not my fault! But it’s also not something other than my fault . . .” Her earnest desire to deny this statement, though such a thing was impossible, was revealed between the lines, an unmistakable accent of desperation. And the woman wrote “though it seemed I would burst with longing at every moment” “this meaningless thing” “turned each of my footsteps toward the grave.” What he knew of the woman’s life, of what she carried with her from her personal history, was mostly a void. Just as there was no one who really knew his own life, his own private burdens. They’d exchanged no personal information other than their respective addresses. They had held hands only, walking side by side above the clouds. Their stares were vacant, their conversation silence. He had closed his eyes and walked into a daydream. The pendulum that swings between nothingness and infinity, absence and absence of limits. The woman, born in the city that spread out beneath the balcony he had long since left, took only two steps to cross over to this place, yet in the meantime decades of time had flowed by. “In order to catch up with you I run swift as a hunted deer. I run a little faster every day.” To the man with whom the woman now lived, he would have been one of the things that threw her into confusion even though there were no bonds of any form. In certain moments, his ability to leave becomes a trap itself, clamping down around his ankle, and he forgets his tolerance and hefts an ax to his shoulder. The friendly fire that breaks out between those who find themselves together in the same place! The hours of death ensconced in a close life! (Just as the Malaysia trip with Ann had been for him! Just like the long, failed struggle to love Ann!) The train had already departed; the woman who has fallen in love has nowhere to go. The countless cities listed on the platform timetable, each one becomes a bird and soars up out of the north station. They will fly all the way to the region of the polar easterlies, and alight on the aurora. Skipping ahead to the conclusion, we can say that the woman could in fact have left at some point or other, could have made some kind of decision for herself and put it into action. (Just as he himself had done! Oh, the unending shamelessness of free human beings!) But her simultaneous inability to do these things was because for her, belief was a prerequisite for action, and she instinctively yearned to have faith in her own freedom. Otherwise, the birds would flutter back down again between the trash cans on the platform. Once again building their nests on the dregs, just as they had always done.
To remain only as neighbors of the past. Thinking that she had to loosen some bond if she was to achieve decisive liberation, the woman wandered in search of that exit that is both nowhere and everywhere, constantly thwarted until eventually, arriving at the very brink of suffocation, she reached out her firm, dry hand to him. She wrote him a long letter. Oh, you poor soul.
City and cities. This city and that, a city whose name gets spoken, and names that go a whole lifetime without being pronounced. Those names which, therefore, are to certain people no more than sounds, infinitely meaningless. The evening lights of the city, which spread out presently when the plane attempts to land; the houses and stations looming faintly; the parks and fountains that stagger like sick pigeons in the pallid white darkness; the shapes of buildings—why do they all look so tired and sad? The scenery is spread out like a quilt, as though with an invisible flick of the wrist. Now is the hour for sleep. But in dreams there are only longing lips. Fog, mosquito swarms, and the lips of the monsoon, and lips that bloom amid a crowd of flies, whimpering over watermelon juice. The sensual sleep of some brief moment, with the woman on the balcony, that he was always trying to depict, though only in his imagination. The bed’s rattan frame, the light summer quilt, the breeze that used to press itself persistently against the flesh, and the swaying of the flower-patterned fan . . . When he first set out for that place, the events of 1967, the eleven who had been tried as spies after being extradited from a foreign country, and subsequently sentenced to capital punishment, were still fresh in people’s memories. And so none of his colleagues would answer that city’s call for university scholars. He alone had gotten on the plane and flown out there for the seminar, had agreed to being photographed, and signed his name in the guestbook, and been guided around palaces and various folk performances, and attended dinners here and there, and made conversation with people from the university, who all had their hair cut short. Eventually left alone, he slipped out of the central hotel where they were putting him up and took a bus around the market and old quarter, with no clear objective. It was an extremely strange week all told, li
ke being an asteroid temporarily broken free from its orbit. A city encountered quite by chance, abrupt and easy as turning a corner; whose name, he had thought obscurely, would likely never rise to his lips again. A city with the pronunciation of a crooked tongue and uncommon throat. He recalled all he had seen at that time, the narrow, kinked alleys, the people, handcarts and buses, the elderly and children. A teacher of classical languages, getting on in years, who had invited him and some university students to his house—and how proper and correct they had been, more like soldiers than students—and made a bedroom for them on the balcony. Ah, what was his name . . . As the plane slowly began its descent and the city’s wrinkled face fanned out, the river revealed itself, meandering like the long tracks of tears. Why do cities all show such similar faces when seen just before the plane lands? Faces with eyes half-closed, the look you wear on beginning to resign yourself to something, of having experienced too much too young, of having been woken too quickly or of falling asleep too soon, the point at which reality gets confused with dreams. The sky, shot through with the pink haze of the setting sun, hilly districts seen from far away, the blank face of the runway, and the artificial chill leaching into your knees. In some cities there were jungles, too. Whose clouds had sharp, distinct contours, like handkerchiefs spread out onto the sky. Against that still-pallid background, the clouds’ deep red was unsettling. A buoyant moon above them, huge and nearly crimson. A single thread of gray smoke rose up from the jungle. That smoke gave off not the warm scents of a village at evening, of rice cooking in the pots, but one of helpless, sorrowful oblivion, as though the last nomads to leave the jungle were burning what possessions they could not carry. Passing through this subtropical city, worn with an exhaustion that belied its age, his plane groped in search of the runway. He’d been able to travel much more frequently since retiring, from one sunset city to the next. Each place had its own unique scent. But airports, airports were different. Each time he stepped out of an airport roses were invariably withering nearby.
“Whenever that time comes back to mind,” the woman wrote in her letter, “I think the ghost has come to call again, the one that held me captive that day I rode the train back home, and is sitting soundlessly by my side, pressing its flesh against mine. A ghost with no smell or body heat, that knows neither touch nor respiration. At first I thought it was a product of our parting. But now the ghost seems more and more like you yourself, and I grow ever more frightened. Frightened by the thought that ever since we parted that day at the north station, the you whom I had known, those brief hours we spent together, have all been nothing but ghosts, never again to be known in reality. This is how everything really exists; why is our world so unreal, a mere ghost of existence?”2 Perhaps, in the course of writing the letter, the woman had slowly come to realize what his answer would be. In the letter’s final stages, the tremors of shuddered breath seemed ever more apparent in her handwriting, shaken at the last by a growing unease. “But for god’s sake, don’t give in! I won’t!” He read the letter again many times after that first day, and each time he came to the end his chest would be throbbing with a cruel unease every bit as a severe as the woman’s. He had only to recall that final passage and his heart would be crushed by the misfortune of loss. Above the exhausted letter hung the vague, blurred lights of the north station’s platform. Above the two of them as they waited for the last train, at an hour when even the pigeons were asleep, the woman being bludgeoned by the struggle inside her. “For god’s sake,” the woman wrote again, over and over like a tic. “Don’t think about anything else, just let me come see you!” “But for god’s sake, don’t give in!” he whispered as though he sat at the woman’s side. Stretching out his hand as she had done to the ghost who interrupted her writing. Who was it that had shown him such a gesture? “Ever since we parted that day at the north station”: he reads the passage that begins thus several times, out loud, as though repeating a refrain. After reading it several times back to back, it really does come to feel like a song. Like his own song, which the woman had been pregnant with. Like his song which goes as follows: “It was only our ghosts who parted at the north station that day; the real us left together on the train, and are together even now . . .” The plane was now in mid-descent, sliding toward the evening city whose final look was one he had seen countless times in the course of his life. The city and its jungle were visible beneath the clouds, shrouded in the smoke of evening, their countenance curious and brimming with melancholy.
“Ever since we parted at the north station that day.”
It had reached the point where he practically knew the letter by heart, could recite large chunks of it with his eyes closed. But he still carried it with him at all times, never putting it away out of sight. On the last day of his trip, he had left the hotel and been walking for quite some time when he began to read that passage. He quickly flicked his eyes up from the letter to take in the scene in front of him. A group of tourists on their way back from a mountain temple surged across the road in front of him, moving like a strong current to where their bus was parked. Despite being surrounded by such a mass of people, a simultaneous racket of myriad languages, his view was entirely filled with the vivid red of the bougainvillea, a riot of color against the deep-blue skyscape. He read the woman’s letter several times, and thoughts of her ran through his mind. Those thoughts were extremely specific. He’d been a brilliant student at school, though that was a long time ago now. He’d never skipped a single piece of homework, and got top marks in every exam. He’d been a voracious reader, and even considered it a matter of course that he would die with his nose in a book. When he grew up and started to have relationships with women, more than in the women themselves, he reveled in that specific emotion that could only be evoked by such clandestine relationships. It was common to those whose experience of the world has for the most part been through reading. He put great stock in the fact that pleasure or sensuality were not merely something to be enjoyed, but could be noble objects evoking a specific song. Once he was old enough to reason, he naturally began to think of himself as an explorer. Ordinary explorers wander in search of beautiful undiscovered islands, of flowers found only in special regions, of highly-prized parrots with gorgeous plumage or as-yet-uncivilized primitive tribes. Because such objects would then be named after their so-called discoverers. His own task, which he himself had decided upon, was to search for the most unique song, “the one and only song.” Since that song would be none other than the song of the discoverer. “Then again,” unable to tear his eyes from the bougainvillea, he was struck by a thought. “Then again, the greatest beauty and significance might not actually belong to the fruits of such labor, or to the long process of wandering itself, but to something we already know quite well. Something so incredibly natural that we are aware of it as a matter of course, like the moon or stars, or the songs we sing every day. What if we’re unable to see it simply because we can’t hold it in our hands or put our own name to it? Because it’s not something that we can possess? And so we just pass it by, pushing on into the heart of the jungle. As though we have no need of whatever we cannot own, no need to cultivate an appreciation for the variety of life. What if countless unique things—the moon and stars, flowers and parrots, even that one unique song—had already skimmed right past us, so that we never even noticed they were there? If that were the case, I would know so many unlucky people, myself included.” At that, he felt that he had become lost in certain thoughts as a means of experiencing the pathos of happiness and sadness, joy and despair—those being fundamental human passions regarded as worthy of admiration—no, for the sake of the woman herself, a weak and imperfect being. Pure, affectionate compassion for both himself and the woman . . . It was such a simple, plain thing, yet it brought such an immediate sense of fulfillment that the cry was on the tip of his tongue: “For god’s sake stay like this!”
He carried on walking, going against the current of people. Now both sides of the r
oad were a jungle. A small truck that had come to pick him up was parked at a fork in the road. Tourists visiting the school usually came in small or large groups; that day, he was the only one. Crouching in the severely rattling truck bed, choking on the dust that it threw up from the unpaved road, he was jolted along for more than an hour and a half, in the middle of which was a brief rain shower. He pulled a tarp over himself to keep the rain off, but the rough material kept sliding around him, and the raindrops beating vigorously against it sounded like a round of gunfire. The thick veil of vapor produced by the rain isolated him from real time. Within the haze, some dim thing raised its head. Some faint, opaque, yet decisive thing, which could have either been extremely significant, or have passed by him entirely without him even noticing. Something that passed him by without his putting a name to it. But the moment when, red rising into the mosquito bite he was scratching, he tried to apply himself to thinking about what that thing might be, the clouds abruptly vanished from the sky, some last plump rainbow-colored drops ricocheted in arcs off the leaves, and the rain came to a stop. Once again able to make out the muddy dirt road, he was overwhelmed by the green swathes of jungle surrounding it. Before long, they arrived at the entrance to a small village, a residential area deep in the mountains near Chiang Mai. The sound of laughter could be heard as the truck pulled up in a clearing, coming from children playing in the yard adjoining the school and dormitory buildings. A cool breeze blew in the wake of the rain, and a rainbow bridged two blades of grass, strung together by the small world of a spider’s web. The silkweaving spider, slender as a needle, had fallen from that bridge into the muddy yellow river that had collected in the truck’s tire tracks. Floating along with a look of despair, it must have been thinking that it would be carried to the world’s end; in that moment, he felt himself become the spider, his thoughts the spider’s thoughts. Desperately thrashing his limbs, he made a vain attempt to stave off death. In that moment, the spider’s despair, the spider’s world was clear and distinct in his mind. Despair and desperation. Yet on the other hand, such an inexorable fate can bring with it a certain measure of peace, not unlike the willing surrender of those of us who are blessed to reach old age. After clambering down from the truck, tottering with dizziness, he began to walk slowly over to the school building. It was the School for Life, where he was to volunteer as an English teacher.