by Suah Bae
And then we sat in the garden for a while longer. Not talking about anything in particular, we quietly ate apples and drank coffee. Gold and red was mingled in the apples that had been picked directly from the garden’s trees, and their surface was not slippery, but firm and tasty. We laughed, each sunk in our own thoughts as we bathed our faces in the sunlight and wind, then stood up from our seats praising the cider that was a specialty of the city. My suitcase was in the trunk of the owner couple’s car, and I had planned to go straight to the station and take the train back to Berlin. In the car on the way to the station I described to the owner woman the dream I’d had the previous night. Because quite by chance, a person who we both knew very well had appeared in the dream, the person who had introduced me to the Holbeinstrasse couple and thus made it possible for me to stay in their house for the week of the book fair; none other than the model-plane collector himself. In the dream, the two of us were strolling along opposite banks of the Main River. I couldn’t tell whether it was evening or morning, but as I had both hands stuffed into my pockets it was clearly a cold day. Walking with the width of the river between us, we each passed under the same bridge, and when I raised my head I could see huge spiderwebs strung like curtains between the supporting struts. Was this my new house, which I would come to live in in the future? The river flowed slowly, the color of steel and spider webs. I called across to the model-plane collector that it was late and we ought to return to the house on Holbeinstrasse. Though my words had no sound, I was aware of myself opening my lips and speaking, and of the model-plane collector on the far side of the river hearing the words I spoke. I was aware that that person, on the far bank of the river, wearing a black baseball cap and walking along with his head tucked unusually deeply between the lapels of his trench coat, was the model-plane collector. He walked without movement, looking like one asleep. He was there without a physical form. I continued to speak. I’ve wanted to say to you for a really long time now: this place is strange. All the places where I am with you are strange to me. Heterogeneous air and soil, pooled wind and flat sky and the huge bird frozen in midair, even the curious mild warmth enveloping my flesh is strange, nothing but strange. That which is outside me and which constructs me, this water and this picture, is unfamiliar. I had been living inside this peculiar irreality, I said, and had now become one with it. And since it occurred to me that he asked the cause I carried on to explain the reason. There’s no way for me to know where Mouson Tower is, since I’ve never even heard the name before. And even after seeing it with my own two eyes, I didn’t truly believe that there was such a tower, I couldn’t feel the reality of a tower by the name of Mouson existing in this world, and so even when you were saying Mouson Tower, to Mouson Tower, practically bellowing it, as though you were the pilot of a plummeting plane, shouting into the wireless radio, the whole time I could only guess that it was not a tower, that you must have been confusing it with a small provincial museum somewhere in the French countryside. And yet no words came out of my mouth, since I believed that all of these scenes were simply shadows passing through the interior of the dream, and so this momentary pain or unfreedom would not hinder us any more than all the other irreality we entertain. To put it the opposite way, there is no reason to resist pain or unfreedom as these are the very things that make us dream most wonderfully. And in fact, from a certain point onward, I always felt myself to be an outsider of history or stories, a jester whose life and performances would go eternally unrecorded. But even in the middle of giving this explanation, other memories flowed by inside my head; one day I had discovered “Creme Mouson Intensive Moisture” among the cosmetics arranged in a pharmacy display counter. I’d been walking quickly down the road, both hands in my pockets; the moment I saw it I stopped in my tracks, moved close to the display case, and peered for a while at the longish tube of it, but the fact that even now, long after the Mouson company had ceased to exist, the brand was still being sold, was not something I could accept as reality, and so that moment beneath an advertising board on which a model with retro-style curly hair was smiling like an angel, accompanied by the old-fashioned slogan of “Your skin should never look tired,” I seemed to have found myself in the 1950s room of a history museum. I must have wanted to tell you that story. And that I rode in a taxi with the model-plane collector along the road that ran above the river, but the oil-black water was concealed by the metal guardrail and ugly flowerbeds. Having arrived at the museum by taxi, the model-plane collector was already in a state of some anxiety; he asked if I knew the way to Mouson Tower as soon as I got in, but I didn’t. I sprang lightly up into the air at each soft step I took over the ground; my shoes were white, and I was unable to see them as a layer of smoke and diluted darkness hung over the ground like a pall, but the feeling that I was floating half a hand’s breadth above the ground never left me, and the model-plane collector, seeing this, spoke soundlessly with the face of one deeply asleep, without even raising his head from between his lapels; since from a certain moment onward I could no longer see his tongue or the pupils of his eyes, those words seemed to ring out from the world of his dream to the interior of mine, piercing through transparent walls and taking up residence inside me, like the three words “like a bird”—that was how I heard it.
Dignified Kiss of Paris Streets
It began in Mao’s room. Hazy, formless, faint things, things that were neither light nor shade, yet at the same time the illegitimate children of both, a moment of glittering black and dark whiteness, confusion that swept down the backbone, and then a sudden voice. Do not tell anyone about this. This feeling, these non-sensations of leaden abstraction. But since the familiar, mistaken attempts at talking about what cannot be said were gathered together into a single face, a montage of confusion, people said that the face that appeared in photographs was mine.
“No, that’s not me, you saw me wrong, you or your camera.”
“Even if that were the case, what’s certain is that this is you at the moment the camera went off, even if it isn’t you as you are now.”
But photographs are taken of countless faces, uncountably many, in the literal meaning of the phrase; there has to be some clear reason to be able to distinguish—not indicate—this one face from among them, this face made up of several large white holes, an unspecific black background, and densely clustered windows of indefinite form, as me. Mao is a photographer, which means that taking photographs is one of the various things he does to make a living.
We live as photographs. I imagine, we live as a performance without a stage. Or else as writing, as theater, as a writer of pamphlets, a publisher of books, a traffic-light repairer; a translator of trade documents, white goods’ manuals, and medical prescriptions; a speaker at exhibition openings, a business-card designer, a magazine contributor, a maid, a writer of travel essays and critic of miscellaneous things, all possible types of freelancer, a guest lecturer at an art institute, the debtor of a bank, one unemployed by grace, thanks to all unpredictable temporary things whose forms are very different to what we had expected. I imagine. In order to further extend the life of my imagination, which is made up of everything it is possible to imagine, I want to imagine still more, to arrive eventually at the skin of what cannot be imagined, to feel it. Mao specialized in photographing certain specific parts of the human body; the money he was able to make through this unique line of business was thanks to the various women who were always completely happy to model for him without receiving a single penny in return.
I can’t take this photograph home, I imagined. And I especially can’t mail it to them. If I did, they would all get angry, both people I know and people I don’t. They would think that I’d deliberately intended to anger them by sending them such an imprecise photograph. But Mao can get just as angry, too, so I try imagining that. In certain cases, Mao will get angry at me arbitrarily. But I don’t get angry. Unless, unrelated to this photograph, a pathetic dog in a jester’s costume chases after me. The
re’s no need to go far back in time for a specific instance; it happened only yesterday. I was going about my business when someone threw a good-sized fruit at my shoulder. It was a furry brown fruit from the fruit market. When I turned around in surprise, one single laugh burst out, high and exaggeratedly loud, shrill and antagonizing, from between the other laughter that was rowdy, or rather, to be exact, rowdy yet timid. Its author was a performer, in a manner of speaking, the emperor of amusement and instigator of humor; making people laugh—making them burst out into great guffaws—was his job. This is how he made his living. All the people at the roadside cafe laughed as they stared at me. With a look in their eyes that demanded that I understand the joke as they did. But the anger was welling up inside me, and I flared up like an old woman brandishing a cane. I knew the joker. I’d fallen victim to his surprise attacks a couple of times already, always a similar trick. One time, I was crossing the square in the middle of the day when he snuck up from behind and grabbed my hand. I kept on walking, not thinking much of it as I simply assumed that the owner of the hand must be Mao. Because of course, it didn’t occur to me to look and check. That time, too, it was the sound that flustered me, that impetuous, persistent, clearly malicious sound, shrill as a scream—his laughter. Only after the sound had shaken me did I become aware of the unfamiliar hand that had stealthily crept into my palm. A huge throng of tourists, gathered on the terrace of the cafe in the square’s center, warm in the sun, laughed merrily as they watched us, the joker and I. Oh, that’s right, tourists. An old crowd, their mood marred by fitful sleep and the hotel’s tasteless food, and worn out from spending the entire day being bussed around city center sights, which were basically the same, and who had been winding down with mugs of beer in front of them, their eyes gleaming, craving some light entertainment. Entertainment of the type that, despite its lightness, would be suitable for them, tourists at a tourist destination. Humor is humor, after all, the joker said right into my ear, as I took in the big red Pierrot nose protruding from powder caked on so thick it resembled a mask. His eyes, so transparent that you almost couldn’t tell what color they were, stared hard at me from frighteningly close up. Dear god, let me not have to experience this kind of humor twice in one lifetime. There’s nothing wrong with playing the fool. It’s not as though the idea of being made a laughingstock, helpless in a foreign land, is completely unbearable to me. But that laughter! An eardrum-shattering octave, massively exaggerated! A frantic cawing produced by the bloodied beak of an enormous bird flying hundreds of kilometers, its great wings covering the whole of the sky! The worst aria, in which the very highest notes, which ravage the singer’s vocal chords, rise above each other and are forever connected, a comedy of insults mixed with ridicule in which the intention to make something inside the human body spontaneously combust through repetitive stimulation is all too clearly revealed! The insane merriment of the most cruel and excessive human beings! That acoustic assault is what’s unbearable. I glared at the joker but, in the end, was unable to let myself explode with anger, as his grin told me that he was planning to wring the very last drop of laughter from the crowd by saying “the Chinese don’t get humor.”
All work is melancholy. No, to be precise, that work “with which we make our living” is melancholy, both in itself and in what it inevitably induces. Melancholy without any hope whatsoever, aside from that of retirement and death. For example, the ones that we know, office workers, estate agents, train crews, computer sellers, gardeners, painters, bird chasers, street entertainers, laughter instigators, aged actors, paunchy police, doctors, church doorkeepers, museum ticket-desk workers, teachers at technical colleges, unemployment benefit claimants, and the countless jobseekers who insist “still not me” or “not me anymore.” If they were aware of how fatally gloomy and ashen their own countenances are. Mao, capture their captured faces and confine them in photographs. I’ll come to get my photo taken again next week.
I took the tram and got off at the station for the museum. The very first thing I saw were countless pigeons blotting out the sky above the heads of wandering dogs. And the large, gorgeously colored scarabs on each leaf of the linden trees. The mutually consistent countenance of each living thing as it swims toward an unspecified bank. An exhibition of life’s tenacity being held in front of the museum. After you buy your ticket and pass through the museum’s entrance to go up the central stairs, you find yourself in a wide hall encircled by six bulging stone pillars, in the center of which there is a bed. An ordinary wooden bed, with a little decoration on the frame done in stone. The air in the hall is chilly, and gives off the scent of the era of stained glass and marble. A man is lying on the bed, stretched out straight underneath a white sheet, sleeping more deeply than anyone else in this world. His head and throat have the appearance of old, friable paper, and his dry puckered lips are slightly parted, his sleeping breath crawling out from between them in the form of a yellow insect. The man and I are the only ones inside the hall. Opening the newspaper one day, I came across a review that had to do with sleep. The body of a sleeping man that had been exhumed from the Parisian hills. The man had been brought here one day as though from a foreign country known as “sleep.” No one knows who he is, so people named him “Sleep” and transferred him to the museum. The man is still sleeping.
“This is a part of your respiratory system.” There was a monotonous gaping hole in the photograph that Mao showed me the following week. Because there was only one hole, it looked overly large, overly solitary. Its details shamelessly magnified. A reddish lump of gruesomely inflamed flesh with heinous, swollen protrusions, plump, puffy mucous membrane and pores where filthy fluid had gathered. Mysterious fine dark lines slanted here and there along the gutters of the wrinkled skin. Like metallic arrows inserted into the ugliness of an organic body. I turned my head, unable to look any longer at the brazen pitch-black lumps of flesh paraded in the photograph, a metaphor for “the shamelessness of existence.” Instead, I imagined. Taking money in return for exposing the shameful viscera of human beings makes Mao the photographer no different from the butcher with the same name. I have to send in a photograph like this; that’s what they’d said. A photograph that will be an official testament to my existence, a kind of proxy for me. My photograph will end up among their records. But this photograph isn’t me. It is simply one in the series of “black viscera photographs” taken by Mao, its subject matter and composition determined purely by his own personal tastes. This is Mao and Mao alone. Which also means it is myself “alone.” But Mao declared that “the title of this photograph is ‘Dignified Kiss of Paris Streets.’”
“Even though you said that what you’ve photographed is my respiratory system?”
“That’s right. But the title is ‘Dignified Kiss of Paris Streets.’”
And with that, end of discussion.
Back to the station by the museum. A portion of the museum building was neatly covered by a milky construction cloth. The pigeons and dogs had all disappeared somewhere. Floating dust motes slipped through the wounds of open mouths and quietly took up a place inside. From that day onward I went to the museum daily. This was in order to visit the sleeping man. The man was sleeping as deeply as he always seemed to be, and in what always seemed the same position, with no way to move. At the museum entrance, audio guides resembling lunch boxes with headphones were handed out for visitors to hang around their necks. A title card reading SLEEP had been set up in front of the bed where the man was sleeping, and below that it read “serial number 228.” If you keyed in 228 to the audio guide you could listen to a commentary on the work. It said that this man was sleeping in front of Mary Magdalene, who, according to myth, had just recovered her senses after witnessing the resurrected Jesus appear before her, say noli me tangere (touch me not), and disappear; this was clearly a lie, an invention of history. Within the vertigo taking over my mind, I imagine: the butcher of sleep, and Mao holding an ax, and the man’s bed floating in midair. The square in
front of the museum that greets you when you go outside. The optimum place to embrace and kiss and ask after each other’s health if you bump into a former lover in the middle of the street, your high-heeled leather shoes coming to a halt as they carry you to the bus stop. The sunlight falls on beaming lips, moves away from them in a sharp red arc. Oh, how have you been, you whom I haven’t seen in all this time? The street that one can walk down carrying the illusory flowers known as “the passage of time.” Concentric layers of pink petals burst open to reveal their infinitely secret creases. A place where things cannot be otherwise, a place that is rare in this world. Puddles become the eyes of wild animals, scrutinizing our footsteps, and the museum’s glass wall divides the image of the two of us approaching each other into billions of screens. Your former lover’s hand, your former lover’s lips, touch your cold and clammy forehead. A soundless voice. Didn’t you come here every day to look for me? Didn’t you stand here every day in front of me as I slept, key in the number for the audio guide and listen to my voice? The sky, a soft path suspended above our heads along which a plane appeared to collide with a swan as it passed. Five in the afternoon, an interview with the radio scriptwriter on the bus. Microphone and Dictaphone, hot tea in a thermos (for the throat), a spoonful of honey, cough drops, notebook, and pen.