by Suah Bae
Since it had happened so quickly, so suddenly, it might be that even the person concerned had been unable to clearly recognize it for what it was until the very last moment. It had happened at lightning speed. In spite, of course, of such speed being unnecessary. I had the feeling that I had glimpsed such uncanny speed once before. If that were the case, could it have been a vague, nameless hint, formed only from silhouetted gestures from behind a dark curtain? Hints speak to me, kiss me. Arms locked with one another. It’s like I am forever embracing and re-embracing these hints thick as fog. That is the way it seems. Pure hints, unrelated to each other, with not even a sliver of foreshadowing to enrich them.
They flutter, flowing against time, and I follow after them. That day, we said goodbye at Karin’s house in Munich. The day was overcast, somber and melancholic, and you had arranged to go to the train station. I can’t remember where you might have been taking a train to. Maybe Frankfurt or Leipzig as usual, Weimar or Zurich, or else Vienna, some other city, or if not then perhaps Bielefeld. As you dragged your bag down from Karin’s third-floor apartment, the sound of it thudding against the old wooden stairs grew gradually fainter. You always rushed down those stairs, which were wide but slanted to one side, in that house, Karin’s house, which was orderly and proud, the well-tended flowerpots arranged neatly on the gleaming wooden floor giving it a fresh look despite its age. Always rushing, so that it made you seem impatient, as if you felt a great, unreasonable rage at the fact of other people being able to watch you as you leave. Perched on the windowsill of the third-floor room, I watch as you slip out of the front door and disappear down the street. Always with that black New Zealand baseball cap jammed down on your head, the hem of your bright trench coat flapping wildly, holding a suitcase in one hand—even though the zip was broken you took it traveling with you all over the world—walking briskly, rapidly, with an air of soldierly resolution. That year, summer in Munich was particularly cold. The streets funneled the wind, and the scene beneath the overcast sky was one of bowed heads, lips drained of color, and hair wildly disheveled. You had not yet turned the corner, and in that moment I suddenly remembered something, something that made me want to rush down the stairs and out into the street to catch up with you. What was it I remembered then . . . had there been something I wanted to say to you? But if so, what? You were coming back to visit Munich next month, meaning we were sure to meet again very soon—what could be so urgent that I had to tell you right then? That though as I watched you and could see you were almost running, you didn’t have to since you were still in good time for the train; that in fact, for us everything was already too late; or that nothing will ever now be late again. But one does not hurtle down old wooden stairs, treacherously slanted and slippery with wax, just to share such a trivial thought. And besides, you are already about to turn the corner, where you will see the entrance to the subway directly in front of you. You will jump on the train and it will take you straight to the central station, whisking you away from in front of my eyes. The ghosts’ faces are visible on the other side of the carriage window, translucent like congealed cheese, their forms slightly distorted from flowing rapidly into the dark cave, their density momentarily diluting, visible around the middle of light and form, these final faces that for some reason make us stop and stare. It’s only natural that it should be so, but all things are already too late. Already they will end up being much too late. The world where nothing will ever be late lies just over there on the far side of the river; a day of uncommonly bright sunlight, revealed to us briefly amid the fog rolling off the river, only for the enticing vision to be veiled again behind water and shadows, even before the stirrings of longing have yet to pass off. And thus, it seems, are we caught, rapt, by this unidentified yearning. I was aware of this quite clearly at the time; strange that then, unlike now, it caused me no confusion.
The airport. It’s an unbearably sad place to discuss, a place forever tinged with sorrow. When the tense wait is over and the fuselage finally thuds down onto the runway—something is over, and yet, something has begun; the intersection of two mutually indistinguishable feelings that gesture from across the dark void. This goes without saying for a Korean airport, or for Hong Kong’s; and for the huge, old dinosaur that is Frankfurt airport; and for the much more carefree Munich airport; and for Berlin’s cold, confusing Tegel airport; and for Boden’s Friedrichshafen, comically dwarfed by the lake next to it; and for the now-defunct Berlin Templehof, too. Walking down the long corridors of the impressive Templehof complex, on my way to meet you, the very first words that always sprang to my mind were “concentration camp.” If the airplane is the steamship, then the airport is the harbor. These jokes immediately before the ship’s departure. The airport cafeteria immediately before a plane’s departure. The constant clinking of china teacups, the shop assistant’s monotonous drone, the click of camera shutters, and the squeak of suitcase wheels, mingled with the somewhat restless bustle of the travelers. I always get the feeling that time flows differently, and has a different character, according to place. Because of this, this place will always be different from that place. Even this place’s “us” and that place’s “us” will inevitably differ. I cannot help but write differently in that place than I would in this one. While one time flows out of us through the right ear, another time enters in through our left. Now and then it pierces even the heart. The movement of that piercing is slow. Now and then it will always be passing through us. As a writer, I am drawn to that mysterious time difference, unique to every person. I am always wanting to talk or write about it. It is somewhat nebulous at present, but I have a premonition that it will soon coalesce into some kind of form, and this will suffice for now.
And your email one winter’s day in 2006. “You asked why my letter sounded so sad. Well, it was because one of my friends—a mere 53 years old—had suddenly died, and so, you see, I was immersed in all the complexities of grief. But there’s no need for you to worry on my account. You know how people always say that weeds cling to life? Well, my constitution is every bit as tough and tenacious as that of a weed, and that’s how I’ve made it this far.” My own time is always spreading slowly toward that place, like an encroaching swamp. “That place” being the name I have given to a certain vacuum in time. That place, where nothing will ever be late. One day I received an airmail postcard with the photograph of the owl attached. It’s been pinned up over my desk ever since, along with the sentences of immaterial time which I wrote myself: “It visited me like this once a year; if one year my name is no longer outside the door to this house, then I will no longer be in sync with you, and I doubt whether I would even be able to remember you.” The owls were the autobiography of a certain moment we shared, and since one cannot turn back time when it has already been written in an autobiography, what I did in that place amounted to crucifying the owls on the now-vanished trees. I crucified myself along with the owls. But it seems that you will never at any future time be able to read about the owls that we loved—though of course, this was the case in the past, too. And memory tends again toward elegant hints. Perhaps, as some physicists believe, our future is already out there waiting for us, pre-determined. However, if we can never know what this future holds, what difference does it make for us whether or not it is determined? In my autobiography of October 26th, 2006: after saying goodbye to you in Weimar, I spent a few days in Bonn before coming back to Berlin. Every time I saw my friends in Bonn I ended up thinking about that simple, warm-hearted life that humans lead, about the loving feelings that constitute these lives as we think of and rely upon each other. Whatever kind of life I dream of is not clear, but somehow it still has the power to move me. Even though she had her hands full with the child, his wife made up a lunchbox with a baguette for me to eat on the train, and he drove me to the central station. As there was nowhere to park around the station, he had to quickly pull into a spot reserved for residents. He helped me carry my bag down, and even came with me onto the
platform, but then he had to go back and find a proper place to park. “But I’ll come back when I do,” he reassured me. “I’m incredibly grateful for all this,” I told him, “but my train will be here any minute, and I’ve taken plenty of trains in Germany before now, so I know what I’m doing. So please don’t feel like you need to rush back.” But he wouldn’t hear it. “The thing is,” he said, “I won’t be able to feel like I’ve seen you off properly until I can see that you’ve found a seat on the train.” The train came around five minutes after he left, and just as I had found a seat I saw him reappear on the platform. We waved goodbye from opposite sides of the glass window. It seemed a very small, insignificant episode, but strangely enough I was greatly comforted by it. I mean, comfort rather than something empty, you know. The day after I arrived back in Berlin, I was sitting in an Indian restaurant on Oranienburgur Strasse. Through the restaurant window, I saw that Berlin’s autumn was just passing its zenith. It was flowing away, time, I mean, and what did the future hold for me? Now, if I were to attempt a quick description of that atmosphere, it would probably get lost behind the formal sentences. But after I came out of the restaurant and was walking down the street, I stepped on a huge dead bird that had fallen from the sky; that’s all I really want to tell you. Right now, as I’m writing this, I’m back home again sitting at the desk beneath the window in my room. In the fading autumn light on Friedrich-Engels-Strasse, when high up in the sky the final lingering luster is painting shining contours onto the city’s rooftops, and twilight is spreading its skirts in the street below, the time of day when those two shadows we call light and dark merge and blend, every leaf on every tree is exchanging gestures of farewell. It cannot be called by any other name. Small birds ride the currents of the wind, and only in this very moment, in which it seems as though this autumn has brought itself into being, do they appear to be exchanging whispers with each other, light and quick as a single breath, murmured conversations tossed into the wind. It is impossible to overhear their secret voices. And so I will never be able to know the secret of the wind, that wind that makes emotions blaze up while remaining calm as the cadence of breath being shared by these children of autumn. Greetings, from Berlin.
But there are those, citizens of this life that seems a colony of death, who try to overcome that personal suffering while maintaining a severe sense of distance. For example, in the case of the writer Walser who, when I dashed off an email in an Arabic Internet cafe after arriving in Munich, answered with the following sentences. “Dear Ms. Bae Suah, it cannot but feel cruel, since man is so powerless in this case. Silent assent and acceptance is our lot. And yet, we try vainly to resist. No matter how useless. The kind of loss you are now experiencing is like a screaming, bloody wound. But you absolutely must stop tormenting yourself with the thought of becoming an orphan. Since, at some time or other, our parents will inevitably leave us, please bear these words in mind: since there is only one of two possibilities; either, whoever we are, we are all of us—and always—orphans, or else we are fated to be unable to become absolute orphans . . . I’m sorry, it is impossible for me to talk as though I am an expert on this matter. All I can say is this: you absolutely mustn’t be too distressed on account of suffering. Because if you dwell on suffering then my heart my will suffer too; and by no means do I wish for any more suffering in this life. Yours, Martin Walser.”
Until then it had been thoroughly abstract for me, nothing more than one particular written character with the sound “death.” Though it was dark, it was the dark shadow of strangers passing by. If I am to make an even more truthful confession, it was a wholly artistic, literary thing. Though all sorts of other people often spoke and even wrote about it in that way, I didn’t know what it was, had not even the vaguest premonition as to what it might be like. It might be the kind of “truly, no longer existing” of one whom we had known as living. And it might mean suffering and loss of the kind that “can in no way be undone,” placed between life and death. I didn’t like cultures that ignore death or consider it taboo. In Korea I had once paid 3,000 won, a tiny amount, for a suit of rough, hemp mourning clothes, which I later wore to a funeral in Berlin. At the time I had a vague desire to know what it was, that thing we call death. Someone at the funeral asked about the clothes, wondering what their particular characteristics—exceptionally rough fabric, sloppy needlework, exposed stitches and conspicuously loose finishing—could have to do with mourning. I didn’t know the answer back then, but perhaps now I can say: we wear this sort of clothing because a person’s death is our fault. We have a guilty conscience because, in other words, those who are living are the cause of death. Because someone gets old while we are still in the prime of our life. Because they become ill while we remain in good health. Because they end up dying while we are still alive. Because life is in debt to death. Because one person dies, and in that way the deaths of those remaining are postponed. If this world were to be summed up in a single sentence, it would be this: nature maintains its equilibrium, and man grieves.
For a long time now I have thought about what my death might be like, and have even tried writing these thoughts down. This is the conclusion I came to: “One day, just like any other day, I fall asleep, and when I wake in the middle of a strong wind, I am dying. I am on a high, lonely mountain peak, with only the brass-colored wilderness extending endlessly in all directions, without a single plant or tree to break the monotony. I watch myself dying. Then, I hear a sound coming toward me.” But the “I” in this passage is someone already dead and therefore already released from suffering, not someone having to face up to death itself. There is no flesh or blood in these words. In terms of real, flesh-and-blood death, the death of an actual person, I knew nothing.
When the clock showed exactly 2 P.M., Werner and I left the restaurant. By that time, most people had already gone home. Luckily we didn’t have any of that drizzly kind of weather that day. Just like on the day of Kempowski’s funeral, which you told me about in your email, it came to me. “Well, at least it didn’t rain,” you wrote. Werner and I walked together without the need for words, relying on our mutual silence. We left Haidhausen Cemetery, walked along Einsteinstrasse, and crossed the Isar River over the bridge by Maximilianstrasse. Cafe Roma on Maximilianstrasse was where Werner and I first met, do you remember? It was at that cafe, which featured in Walser’s novel Angstblüte, that you introduced me to Werner Fritsch, the talented, extraordinary writer and independent film director. On the same day, the three of us went to the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich; on your recommendation, Werner was being made a member of the academy. Werner’s and my feet took us to Cafe Roma as if by appointment. There, we would sit at the same table as we had in the summer of 2007, perhaps with you joining us as you so often had back then, and drink espresso. However, as we turned onto Maximilianstrasse we were surprised to see that there was now a Gucci store where Cafe Roma had previously stood. A cafe selling coffee on Maximilianstrasse, the most expensive part of the city, must have been uneconomical.
A few days before coming to Munich, while taking a solitary walk in Korea, I suddenly became aware that it would soon be spring. Although in objective time we were still in the grip of winter, and the weather was indisputably chilly, it was as if the trees felt with their whole bodies that their time was coming round again. The moment of being suffused with nature’s love, which we call spring, and breathing, and life. Expressed through a delicate trembling, the moment of their zenith is awash with secret, private intimations. In this moment, while drawing near each other and not pulling away, the trees understand love. Their highest branches rustling in the slow current of the air, they are as calm as if they were dreaming. There they stand, gesturing that they know why they are there in that moment. I may find myself in circumstances that cannot realistically be called easy, but nevertheless I will not lose courage or be daunted. I believe that I am independent and strong, as I would wish to be, and so even while I am inwardly proud, I have at least s
ome happiness. Because abundant spring will come, that season which embraces within its heart an internal impulse that cannot be refused, and a gentle wind will blow, a sensation as though the air has been made flesh, and in keeping with this I will keep on living, unchangingly, just as I do now. Because, just as I am now, I will keep on walking facing into the wind, unbowed and unshaken. At that, my heart became so much more at ease. And I decided to write a letter to you who would be buried in work.