North Station

by Suah Bae

  Question: It’s been eight years since you first came here, right?

  Response: That’s right.

  Question: What brought you here? To put it a little differently, what, to you, is the fundamental difference between being here and being there?

  Response: Questions like those. I want to wander in search of the answers to questions like those.

  Question: So you’re saying that you deliberately set out to wander in search?

  Response: I love wandering in search. It’s my job!

  Question: In that case, is it fair to say that you came here (of all places) in order to wander in search of the answer to “Why did I come here (of all places)?”

  Response: It’s the same for the question “where did I come from?” Since, in order to wander in search of that answer, I have to have come from “somewhere or other.”

  Without a moment’s hesitation, the bus drove right toward the center of the assembled crowd that was blocking the road. The crowd, which had been like water flowing in a smooth, continual current, startled and scattered en masse then, after the bus had gone by, reformed into a line and set off. The passengers on the bus were glassy-eyed, their gazes fixed and expressionless, looking like the heads of pigeons, visible through the bus windows as though in a display cabinet. The demonstrators who were occupying the road dragged their feet as they walked along, heads bent, supporting their foreheads with their hands. Bulky flags covered in unfamiliar letters were wrapped around their bodies, as though these were their clothes. Like monks on fire, like people who had renounced their warm hearts, like fish swimming toward the bank of some gloomy evening river. Are you a Buddhist? the radio broadcaster asked me. We were seated at the back of the bus, and I was watching the retreating figures of the crowd. Are you one of those mendicant Buddhist monks who walk barefoot over heated coals in front of some first-world embassy?

  Response: I’m not a mendicant Buddhist monk; the thing is, I have this fear of coming face to face with a clown. The laughter instigator is constantly chasing me. I’m the best comedy material he’s ever found. That is a stroke of luck for him, but bad luck for me. And the worse my luck is, the louder he can laugh. That’s why I arranged to do this interview on a moving bus, you see. What’s worse, he once suggested that we do a street performance together. I would walk along the street, pretending to just be passing by, and he would throw a furry fruit at me. I act completely enraged, taking it as a deliberate insult, and look wildly around me. Until laughter bursts forth from the spectators. Then you’ll continue on your way, he said, and the performance will be over. And no one will have the slightest inkling that it was all staged. And that’s not all. He frequently walks on stilts and wears long trousers, voluminous as the curtain that hangs over a stage. He wants me to be his little puppet. My performance consists of moving as though by strings attached to his hand, pretending to be a wooden doll. He is on stilts, and I am a marionette shedding ridiculous tears. He cannot understand why I refuse such an unconventional proposal for a moneymaking scheme. I am unable to bear the sound of laughter; he doesn’t understand that. He also told me to follow the carnival procession, dressed up as a Mandarin coolie with a pointed straw hat and a bamboo pole balanced over my shoulders, a basket hanging from each end. I am neither an entertainer nor an actor, I’ve never even thought of becoming such a thing, but he cannot comprehend any of this. I’ve made my thoughts on this matter perfectly clear, a hundred times over, but it seems he doesn’t understand a word I say. Even now he is convinced that it is only right and proper for me to accept his proposal.

  Question: In that case, maybe he confused you with someone else? Perhaps a former assistant who ran away, or someone who really does perform as a marionette or Mandarin, or else with baggy trousers or stilts, or a circus clarinet. Or what if you are confusing yourself with someone else? It’s highly unlikely, but there are times, now and then, when we encounter someone who knows us better than we know ourselves.

  Response: There is something in what you say, but all the same, if there’s one thing in this world that I’m absolutely not, it’s that which the laughter performer thinks I am. That is an indisputable fact, as clear as day. As is the fact that the laughter performer is a stroke of bad luck for me.

  Question: It sounds as though you need help.

  Response: But can an embassy really help someone like me? Or can a Buddhist? Or a radio broadcast?

  Dear listeners, this has been “Portrait of a Foreigner Who Rejects Her Own Identity as Assistant to a Clown,” one of the Portrait of a Foreigner series, from Radio Bremen.

  In the bookshop. A stranger spoke into his phone as he brushed past me . . . that will stay with me for a long time. How long? Four days more than eternity. The man moved farther away, disappearing between the stacks with his back hunched like a gorilla’s. As he passed by me, his stooped profile was so similar to that of the snickering laughter performer—part of whose act was to deliberately exaggerate the curve of his back—that I came within an inch of whacking him with the Bertelsmann world atlas I was holding.

  On the tram. I took a seat in a foul-smelling corner. The chair’s rustling fabric gave off the smell of wet dog, mixed with the smells of damp skin, urine, and beer. As the tram rattled along, the seats swayed from side to side. A suffocating feeling. The suffocation of laboring between night and day, sleep and wakefulness, constantly swaying from one to the other as the tram swayed along its tracks, seeming to writhe in hope of escape but ultimately as bound by this mechanical repetition as the train is trapped by its tracks. But what would be different, even if you lived in a village above the Himalayan clouds? If our imagination were to remember the boundaries of memory.

  I jerk awake as though having been flung forward on some impact. The sharp air of wakefulness gathered around the bed. Dust and white sunbeams rolling in through the window. The cold palm of wakefulness laid on my forehead. The curious mechanics of being wedged between being awake and having been awoken, between one sleep and another in the repeating cycle. There is no way for me, sleeping, to doubt the fact that I am asleep, but as soon as I am released from sleep, something, a sense of shock and loss that takes my conscious mind by surprise, this body surrounded by hints of forgetfulness. Have I really been asleep? Where was I while I slept? What is it that belonged to my sleeping self? Whispering: your life is made up of things you do not know and things you forget. Of things that you did not live, of your external sleep. All that you have experienced becomes alien as you experience it again through your dreams, your imagining. Thus does your life fly toward you. Fly from all that is fixed, toward a single expression within an unfixed nap. What is sleep, which is a part of real existence just the same as clocks and time are? How can I be sure that the I who is currently speaking the words is not in fact asleep? That day, there was a letter from the embassy in the mailbox. The letter opened its envelope-shaped mouth and read: Dear Frau . . . , you applied for a new identity card and documents. This letter is in response to that application. We have enclosed a copy of the registration documents that we have for you, for you to use as a temporary proof of identity. This temporary ID will be valid for one year; your new proof of identity will be mailed to you during that time.

  Though Mao lives in one of adjoining buildings, the lack of a connecting passage means that to get there I have to go downstairs and through the side door we use to take out the trash, skirt the backyard, which is always covered with damp blue-tinged soil, go around the corner and across the parking lot, up the external stairwell, through the metal front door, then up to the fourth floor again. The building comprised a cluster of artist’s studios, with rough walls of exposed concrete. Originally these had been flats rented out by the factory workers, but they now were studio apartments. Mao had no way of locking the door; I always knocked twice before going in. Mao was sitting at the desk in the center of the room. He was wearing a white vest, and nothing else; his usual attire. He was sitting with his left leg propped up on
his right knee, peering at a calendar for the following year that was spread open on the desk. Each year, the building’s Artisan Society produced a calendar using its residents’ artwork. This time, Mao had apparently been one of the participants. Mao, I called. He slowly raised his head. Mao, I got something strange in the mail. It doesn’t make any sense, but they’re saying that I’m this person. This person? Mao asked, without moving. Someone named Frau . . . Mao waited, mouth clamped shut, for me to explain some more. He was looking right at me. Behind his back, the window was half open as ever. Open-mouthed, facing the darkened courtyard. What time it was when I woke up, whether this was evening or an overcast afternoon, the gray of damp fog: these are things I didn’t know. Have dreams always been shadowed like this? Do dreams make all people, all objects, appear so distant? Distant scenery, patterns of light and shade like a fixed backdrop. Mao is watching me, as usual, without even a single twitch of his eyelashes. I feel his stare pressing me to continue: So? Don’t you see? They’ve mistaken me for someone else. They think I’m Frau . . . , they want me to get a new ID card using that name. An explanation so futile it made me pluck at my sleeve. Keep this up and before I’m dead I’ll have no sleeves left worth the name. My face burned red, then immediately cooled and stiffened. Insult? Frustration? Emptiness? No, no single word expresses an emotion. Only the emotion itself continues, shading from one to the other, imitating such words in succession. Does Frau . . . think of me? The thought made me raise my head. Is Frau . . . aware of the fact that I am thinking of Frau . . . right now? Is Frau . . . aware of the fact that I am not Frau . . . ? An imaginary candle, burning up and dripping down to its base, body and gaze, bare feet scattering, thrown into confusion by the moving bus. Then Gita, who had been wordlessly crammed into Mao’s bed in a corner of the room, stood up and went to the bathroom, tramping heavily over the clothes that lay strewn across the floor. Gita’s back and buttocks were white and smooth as a cleanly plucked sparrow. This Frau . . . , what was the name again? Mao asked again in a slow, calm tone, as though Gita were invisible, and as though the sound of running water, which had just started up in the bathroom, was not audible. This is her. I went over to Mao and showed him the photo on the temporary ID. Why would they have stuck someone else’s photo on my documents? But the name isn’t yours either. You aren’t Frau . . . Well, of course not. I was still holding the temporary ID that purported to be mine. Mao took the piece of paper from my hand. What I’m saying is, if both the name and the photograph are different, that means it isn’t your ID! I was still somewhat bewildered. I must have woken up at the wrong hour. Or woken up wrong altogether. Peering at the photograph, Mao continued: given that both the name and the photograph are different, given, in other words, that you are not Frau . . . and that this photograph isn’t yours, they must have sent you someone else’s ID by mistake. But it would usually take a fairly long time to get this kind of bureaucratic mistake sorted, especially with you being in a foreign country. An unnecessarily, pointlessly long time. Mao shrugged and turned his gaze back to the calendar. Anyway, he mumbled, I was just about to show you this . . . this is your photograph. Unlike the one on that ID. Mao pointed to the page on which the calendar had been left open. Only then did I flinch, and say, bitterly, “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.”

  Strange. I get the heavy feeling that I had already had this conversation, a conversation identical to this one, a long time ago or from some vantage point very close by—could it have been with Mao? It was a pain more than a conviction, like a crude medieval arrow. The unreal shock of waking abruptly from a long nap, early or late in the afternoon, at some unguessable time. The kind of shock that makes a person yield to insensibility.

  “Why do you look so pale all of a sudden?” Mao asked, sounding concerned. “And sad, and like you’ve been sort of . . . ambushed by your frustration . . . why is that?”

  “It’s nothing.” I turned and started toward the door. Though Mao made as if to grab my sleeve, he quickly changed his mind and lowered his hand back onto the desk, lightly, onto the calendar.

  “Come next week. I don’t mind taking your photo again. Then send them that photo, with a letter saying you need a new ID. It will take even longer to get it sorted that way, but how else will they be able to know your face? Since you’re not there; only here.”

  I hurried to my familiar sleep, with one arm flung over my face, resting my heavy head on the pillow. My darkness left that place occupied. Clear, bright darkness, artificial, produced by the closing of eyes. My familiar yellow darkness where sporadic fireworks drift about, blurring through my pupils. Small sharp arrows of silver fireworks shot from a bowstring. Metaphysical and opaque scintillations. Signs harbored by my flesh, signs that will never know liberation. Lovely bloodstains.

  Frau . . . of Parisian streets, my official, documented self, who is not me.

  The laughter performer holding a black clarinet, how old would he have been?

  Audio guide number 228: sleep is not a dream. Sleep is not a brief rest. Sleep is not black, sleep neither flows nor pools. Sleep is not dark. Sleep envelops me with thousands of limbs and eyelids, pressing down, sleep closes the thousands of windows inside me one by one. Sleep is not still. Sleep does not subside. Underneath all skin live obscene, fat-bodied larvae. Sleep is compound eyes, is blind moles. Poison poured into tunnels, to kill the moles that dig up the garden. Sleep does not knock on the door of unconsciousness. Sleep goes outside while sleeping, and sleep wakes up from me. And my imagining begins. Please tell me that I’m outside myself now, in a dreamless sleep.

  Afternoons, the Parisian streets are made up of humped hills, sweatsoaked milky light, and incessantly chattering peddlers. In the past these hills were a little higher, the gently slanting sunlight a little warmer, and the peddlers a little smaller and shabbier, like tatty marionettes. My past self stood at the foot of the hills, smoking a cigarette and looking down on the Parisian streets. I was with him, but at the time, in our hearts, we each thought we were alone. Thinking about it now, even granted that none of this was ever put into words, it was precisely that thought, that feeling, that was the spirit of the times, the only thing that we felt certain of, and which we acquired internally without the influence of any particular propaganda. And it was through that feeling that we were able to know solidarity, so that we could look each other in the face without fear or anxiety. I look down from the hills at the Parisian streets. The street where peddlers produce such a clamor it’s as though their entire bodies are nothing but mouths, where a performer has his back bent and contorted, where a superior but ridiculous marionette threads its creaking way between them on tall wooden legs. For me, these things defined Paris streets, and the streets I subsequently encountered them in never failed to remind me of Paris streets, to be Paris streets. All the hills that appeared after that day and reminded me of the Paris hills. Hilly streets shaped like prone clams. At the time, we were unable to know that we would come to imagine that day very differently from how it had been in reality, that only within this imagination would we finally come to understand each other. Not only that day, but all the days that we thought (wrongly) had gone by, will reappear and live on, without limit. We’ve probably already discussed this. Topics of conversation brought up inadvertently, simply because they had just popped into our heads. When twenty years or so have passed, how will the air and light and smell of this precise moment have changed? In the future, when around twenty years or so have gone by, the air and light and smell that are passing by us at this very moment—rather, we ourselves who are sweeping by this air and light and smell like a slow train, right this moment—we, or else they, or else everything, will end up flowing past what air and light and smell, to what air and light and smell? After saying the words I laughed, and answered myself: then too, as ever, we wil
l be sitting side by side in this place and smoking. No, this exact moment might already be precisely that moment, all the moments made up of everything that will already have passed away, all the moments that will pass ahead of us. In that case, are we speaking now of the tedious cycle of eternity? Here in this station, at which the train we took by mistake just happened to arrive. At that very moment, like magic, this day of long slow youth grows unspeakably tedious, hills and unknown objects grow so familiar that it is difficult to bear, strangely enough, while crazed by the fact that yesterday, too, we were sitting like this on this very hill and listening to the siren and battle cry of the approaching police car, hideous pulped faces, soundlessly turned pages, faster and faster, the day that was eventually released from this fever, will stiffen faster and faster, without time to age, and bleed, yesterday and yesterday and yesterday, yesterday’s yesterday’s yesterday too . . . I say to him, at some point yesterday’s me will end up meeting you. And in the future too, eternally, Salut. We will be entirely unable to step into other water, Salut. I stopped imagining. Even without imagination we were aware that tomorrow would be no different from yesterday or today. A season filled with the premonition that nothing would change. Fireworks that always come to us too late. We don’t imagine. Even without surreal imagination, it was clear that the Paris streets filled with peddlers, performers, and marionettes, would live forever, constituting ourselves, Salut.