North Station

by Suah Bae

  I do not personally know any collectors of engine-fitted model planes or of porcelain sugar bowls, of maps of the premodern world or printed matter such as picture postcards, of glass products infused with color, portraits of famous figures, marionette dolls, signs with the names of streets on them, stuffed specimens of birds, posters advertising cosmetic products, or trinkets such as bangles. There was a period when I used to travel around to this place and that, living in temporary accommodations, a succession of rented rooms; after gathering together the necessary articles and packing them into a very large suitcase, I would take taxis and buses to the airport, stand at the end of a long line and, after going through the departure formalities, board the plane. Small, unfamiliar rooms arrived at in that way, rooms given to travelers who would be staying for several months, belonging to someone who had themselves gone traveling for a similar period of time. Even when I try to dredge up those rooms from my memory, recalling the tastes of their owners, I never get the feeling that there was even the slightest trace of a collecting hobby. Aside, of course, from picture frames and travel souvenirs, insignificant dolls and one or two toy planes suspended from the ceiling. Living for several months in rooms where the individual traces of another person remained animate, or else where those traces were eternally present-progressive, always felt strange; one place I frequently stayed in was one such rented room, originally belonging to someone else or on loan just for the time being, where furniture and curtains, books and ornaments, toys and slippers and bedding, were jointly owned.

  There were actually many empty rooms in the city as a whole, but because those who rented out rooms generally preferred longterm residents, obtaining a rented room for the comparatively short period of two or three months was not easy. In the worst cases, when there was no suitable room available for the period I needed it, I would have to traipse back and forth between the houses of friends and acquaintances, or even of strangers who had been introduced to me by friends, hauling my heavy suitcase from this city to that; on days when a strike or delays had left the central station all but paralyzed, I would set my bag down on the platform, perch on it with my shoulders hunched and, during the seemingly endless time spent waiting for the train, lose myself in futile doubt over whether the laborious business of struggling across the country on discount tickets really did reduce my expenses so much as to outweigh the convenience of staying in a hotel. Whatever the case, I didn’t want to let the exhaustion of living overwhelm me. At such times, I would force myself to be cheerful by reminiscing over the week I’d spent in the InterContinental Hong Kong one winter. The hotel receptionist was a German woman, the white quilt cover was smooth as silk, and my room boasted a magnificent view of the New Year’s Eve fireworks display, the bright night scene of Hong Kong Island between the harbors. Or else I would recall the cottage at Bodensee where I stayed for ten days one summer. The cottage had three bedrooms, two enormous living rooms, a cellar, kitchen, and dining room, and two balconies looking out over on the garden and the lake respectively. It was evening when I first set foot in its yard, and since the access road was graveled over the sound of the taxi I’d arrived in pulling away was strangely obtrusive in the midst of the silence, and as soon as that sound had disappeared I was struck by the kind of feeling you get on arriving at a solitary island, known by no one, and disembarking alone from the boat. Later, when I tried to explain to a friend how I’d felt at that time, I said that if I had such a thing as a fate, that island was the kind of exceptional place where even that fate could not have been predicted. Like dreaming once more inside a dream, the feeling of having arrived at a destination only to set out again. But there were also rented rooms where the case was exactly the opposite, such as the one whose owner had a name somehow recalling slender birds, but the overriding memory of whom is that his house was narrow and damp, with the smell of cigarette smoke permeating every nook and cranny, and of how, when I got up that first morning and went out onto the balcony, I was faced with a heap of dust and miscellaneous junk, all kinds of abandoned goods, rusted garden chairs, damp earth, and weeds that gave off a foul smell, all piled up in the courtyard overlooked by the neighboring buildings’ hideous walls. I’d had to arrange my accommodations before setting out from Korea, and as it was impossible to check each little detail of every house I rented, it was only to be expected that I might meet with this kind of misfortune, at least every once in a while. Whenever anyone asked me about something to do with travel, the very first thing to jump into my mind was all the difficulties I’d had to go through in order to obtain a rented room that was cheap and otherwise suitable; rather than having to do with nature or adventure, or else being seen as a break from everyday life, what “travel” meant to me was, in a certain sense, the moving from place to place and staying with strangers, and in fact was almost a synonym for “a new rented room in which I can write,” meaning I could no longer count the number of emails I’d written in order to arrange my stays, and had ended up qualified to include “extensive experience staying in all kinds of rental accommodations” in the so-called personal introductions on those websites that act as an intermediary between those looking for a place to stay and those looking to rent one out; in spite of this, all the rooms I’d ever managed to get had only ever come through friends or chance encounters, never through those websites.

  One year I was lucky enough to be able to stay in a villa in Germany provided by a literary organization; as the German air traffic controllers were on strike, I experienced several complications at the airport, and didn’t manage to get to the villa until after midnight. All I’d been told was that there was a safe set into one of the villa’s external walls, that the code to the safe was A19***, and that if I entered the code and opened the safe I would find the key to my room inside, along with a note detailing the room’s number and how to get to it. My shoes squelched into the rain-softened soil as I tugged my heavy suitcase through the garden, and I glanced nervously about in search of this “external wall”; it was totally dark aside from the faint electric light at the main entrance, the only sound was that of the ceaseless rain splashing onto the ground, loud enough to be alarming, and I stood there in silence for a while getting rained on, at the end of a twenty-hour trip; is this my house, is this my dream, I was confused, engulfed in a dreamlike fantasy state that was similar to a kind of bodily exhaustion, which is perhaps a mental disorder caused by the effects of a long plane journey, because your nerves get unstrung due to the time difference, or else the higher levels of radiation to which flight exposes you, no one lives in this huge villa, all the rooms are empty, in this place, too, this night, I will be lost, just as I was lost for a few hours in the airport that same afternoon; as though this time known as my present had seen me slip accidentally back into a dream which I had dreamed a long time ago, for a while I would be divided between the me who was going to get lost here and the me who would be watching that me, and before I had even gone up to that room I had seen it, and had the feeling that I knew the space very well, and not only that, but also knew the things that would come to pass there, the things I would end up doing; scene after scene passed slowly through my mind, as in the kaleidoscope that the lame musician used to go around with; rather than coming and going in orderly succession, these scenes recurred at unpredictable intervals, crawling fitfully in between those that appeared later, and I felt aware of things which it was not yet possible for me to know; the lonesome and oppressive fantasies of that time, which were nevertheless filled with conviction, have not completely left me even now that time has passed, and I am utterly unable to tell whether these discontinuous images that, ever since that day, have come back to me for a time and calmly possessed me before once again fading away, are purely the constructs of my imagination, dreams dreamed in a waking state, sights that I saw a long time ago, or sights from the future that, upon encountering, I would feel that I had seen before.

  Among the temporary residences that I had wandered insecurel
y between, there was a house on Frankfurt’s Holbeinstrasse that I ended up at thanks to an introduction; I stayed there last year, during the week of the book fair. The old house was very pleasant and comfortably furnished, and the owner couple gave me an empty guest bedroom. It had its own bathroom en suite; I recall that on the day I arrived russet leaves that had fallen from the huge flowerpot were scattered over the soft bathroom rug like something painted by an artist, a deliberate decoration. The owner was a retired engineer who told me that, in the past, he had gone on frequent business trips, to a number of different cities, and as there were times, especially when major expos were being held and it was very difficult to secure a hotel in the city center, he would then—as I was doing now—rent a room for a period of days from someone to whom a friend had introduced him; these rooms had not originally been intended for this purpose, but had been used by the owners’ family, and so one time he stayed in the room of a young boy where all the shelves were crammed with footballs and model airplanes, and even the boxes under the bed had been filled with all kinds of models. When I woke up suddenly that night, I discovered a model-plane mobile revolving in midair like an electronic dragonfly, its faint taillight blinking, and I even seemed to hear a low, stifled burr, as though the plane were chafing its thin wings together, threading through my dreams; I remember how it felt, he said, how strange it was, even now. This was when we were talking, over cider, of the various temporary residences we had each known over the course of our respective lives.

  I never rented the same room more than once. Rooms that had once been used by me appeared to have their purpose quietly disappear thanks to some third-party will. Even now when I spread out a map, the rented houses where I stayed here and there, the addresses of owners that had at one time been familiar to me and from which mail would arrive for me after my stay, plain rooms and the simple furniture inside them, windows that each wore their own expression, and the things that I had written there, together with the names of those underground stations that were the ones I’d had to get off at during the months of my stay, the sight of the ice cream shop, the bakery, the alfresco cafe where I used to eat the weekend-only brunch, will naturally rise up into my mind. I always walked the streets; on turning my head, the owners were riding by on their bicycles, watching me and waving. For many years, according to the rule I’d made for myself, whenever I had time and money I would, almost without exception, fly to a city, and live there for a time, and before returning to Korea I frequently left my bags in the cellar of the house I’d stayed in, or asked to leave in the owner’s safekeeping any luggage that I didn’t need to have with me, books and clothes, etc.; I did this each time with the confidence that I would come back to visit the same city again, perhaps even the following year, the owners acting with just the same sense of surety, apparently believing that, if my bag was there, I would of course come back. Despite all this, strangely enough I never did visit those same houses again, and the owners almost never got in touch to tell me to collect my belongings. There was only one time, it was late summer in Berlin and had turned unexpectedly cold, so there was nothing else to do but to contact the owner of a house I’d once stayed in, and ask their permission to come and take a few winter sweaters from the bag I’d left in the cellar. That cellar, in the house I found myself visiting again for the first time in a long while, was stuffed with the luggage of wandering renters who had stayed there after me, and I recall that in order to get to my bag, which was jammed in furthest inside, I had to move every single other bag out of the way, and all of them heavy as houses.

  I lived in a Buddhist temple in Berlin, home to a single monk; a narrow, shaded brick house; a house on a Parisian street with a splendid view of the beautiful, stylish facades of the buildings opposite; an austere, rectangular socialist building that towered up in the middle of the empty street; in the vicinity of the canal where an Arab market had stood and on a street of antique dealers; right next to the Munich government and municipal offices where applicants for unemployment benefits and those reporting a change of residence turned up in droves each day from the crack of dawn; a room that had only a mattress on the floor; winter rooms I primarily remember for how unspeakably cold they were, thanks to the huge glass windows; the “house of literature” whose lodgings were accessed through the narrow, rear-door kitchen stairs; and, for one week when my luck was good, a beautiful old hotel that made me think of silent-movie era actresses, and which was opposite the “house of literature.” But the rooms I generally stayed in were lonely and poorly heated. Window-seat beds where, if I opened my eyes in the middle of the night, the chilly winter constellations were spread out at my bedside. I fell asleep beneath a cold and deeply shadowed wall, and read Rilke in bed: “If I had money, the first thing I would buy before anything else would be a good stove.”

  The couple who owned the house on Holbeinstrasse invited me to their weekend garden. A twenty-minute walk from the house brought us to the kind of well-demarcated green spaces that were common in the city’s suburbs, and the edge of the forest became visible. The weekend garden was there. As soon as you passed through the entrance you found yourself in a large space with plenty of trees, enough to have stocked a small orchard, and the ground was carpeted with pleasingly long grasses, and in the very heart of the garden where the honey-colored sunlight collected as in a crater there was a long log dining table, a set of chairs, and baskets filled with ripe apples picked from the garden, and in addition to the garden house, which had a terrace and small cooking room, there was a storehouse where bicycles and gardening tools were kept. Looking at the countless holes that pockmarked the ground, the owner woman told the man that they were going to have to do something in order to get rid of the moles. This was the very end of the book fair, in the middle of autumn. We were wearing thick shawls. The light was cold and bright, the air was clear, and in the microclimate beneath the German firs where the chill in the air, though always felt, exists alongside the warmth of the sunlight, each maintaining their separate characteristics, sitting at the log table with mugs of steaming coffee, the owner woman began her story.

  A while ago we finally cleaned out the study in the house, and we ended up donating most of the books we had to the library. We’d been living there for over thirty years, and while we were sorting through all those old books, we spotted one very old box stuffed away in a corner, which was clearly mine, though which seemed to have vanished from my memory a long time ago, so that I had probably not given it a single thought in the decades that had passed. The box was full of letters. Letters my older brother had sent me in the 1960s. Thinking about it, we had a very good relationship, for siblings. My brother had left home several years ahead of me to attend university abroad, and he worried about me a lot, was always trying to look out for me, especially as I’d just started university myself and was living independently for the first time. Because we were each studying in different cities, our main form of contact was through letters, which we used to inform each other of trivial events, our everyday doings. Our bodies may have been far apart, but we were very close. Now, after all that time had gone by, I had rediscovered those letters and began to read them again. Minute bursts of feeling that we’d been ignorant of at the time, all the things we had been blessed with in this world, things that will not come again, things that were a matter of course and yet surprising, things that will be forgotten, things that no one will know, matters that will come to seem no different from all the world’s other memories; through that chance reunion they pierce through time and were revived in front of me one by one, whether memories live inside our ghosts or are forever a part of our real selves, we will arrive at the train station at this hour and meet each other on the platform, we’ll go on a holiday or visit our parents at their home, will make an appointment to do this and will wait for that appointment, and I wish you good luck, I really worry about you, I hope everything gets sorted out for you, hope your cold goes away soon, these were the kinds of things
we exchanged, that could not have been more mundane; and our shared childhood, the happy memories and memorable episodes that only we knew about, were naturally touched upon here and there in the letters, and in their revival these everyday words and scenes were replete with certain ingredients that had not originally been there, made manifest only after a long passage of time, and recalling them now, when my brother and I are both around seventy years old, they also spark the calm premonition that we will soon vanish from each other’s sight, that that moment might be near at hand; countless people of that youthful, warmhearted time have swept by in front of our eyes, and it occurs to me that we have been unable to perceive the unique and private gesture with which each must surely have parted from us, and while thinking all this I peered at those letters as though invoking a name of supreme significance, and all that now lies ahead of us will still be beautiful as the road down which we have come, and that mysterious pain and longing that those old letters stirred up again will become, at the very end of my life, a cherished happiness; this was how I came to think of it. A while later, I attended my brother’s seventy-third birthday party and read out one of the letters he’d written me. A letter from a day in May 1962, the paper yellowed, my brother himself would most likely have completely forgotten its contents, and it wasn’t that there was anything so very grand written there, it was just a letter in which my brother worried about my health, as I’d been suffering various aches and pains after recently moving, the earnestness held within that letter was vividly revived, the unconfessed affection, and the hearts of the penniless young brother and sister, distressed by no longer living together, beat again, and because of all this, above all because of the human feeling that had maintained an unchanging present-tense despite the great expanse of time sundering it from its first appearance, I was unable to read the letter through to the end, and equally unable to look directly at my brother as he wiped away his tears. From time to time I think of how lucky it was that I read the letter that day. If I hadn’t, I would probably never have known how to properly communicate to my brother the happiness that had come to me, calm yet soundlessly intense. Because, you see, that birthday was the last my brother saw in this world, in fact his cancer was already fairly advanced at the time, and only a short while afterward he crossed over to the eternal world. And after a brief pause the owner woman turned to her husband and added, darling, we really must do something about those moles.