North Station

by Suah Bae

  Mrs. Kim saw. Yellow walls and deep-brick-colored roofs, long rectangular windows and rain gutters, and the cooing of a pigeon perched on a chimney, gently craning its neck. As with all beings that live in the air, an invisible root can be felt in the pigeon’s cries, which the wind scatters far and wide. Sunday morning wakes abruptly to find itself spread out beneath a taut and shadowless swathe of blue sky. In that place there is a window. And beyond it is the scenery of the world. “Tell me your address,” whispers a voice from outside the window. Mrs. Kim sees the voice. The pigeon flies away and there in its place is the voice, perched on the chimney. The voice looks like a tall, willowy acrobat, dressed in black, who is just about to start a performance.

  “I’ll send a letter as soon as the performance is given the goahead. Whether or not we’ll be able to meet on Highway A92 that day . . . my guess is that you’re still wavering. Thinking that it’s far too quick, and far too unpredictable, and far too different from the world as you’ve always known it. You remember the proverb I told you, right? ‘There are things we are able to do, but nothing that we are compelled to do.’ These words apply to many things in our lives. So set your mind at ease. Let your thoughts be as peaceful as lily pads on tranquil water . . .”

  Though the sun will not have to rise much higher before the day warms up, at this hour of the morning the air coming through the open window is extremely chilly. Cozy, lazy tossing, and then the brief 6 A.M. news on the radio. When is it, this moment after I have woken from sleep? When is it, that time first thing in the day when you absentmindedly open a book and the story it contains becomes your own? Things that are the me I am already, or the me I will be in the future. A woman who used to tell fortunes as a game rather than for money had a method she called “book fortunes”; selecting a volume from the books you brought with you, opening it and choosing a sentence, all done arbitrarily, she would insist that that sentence told the person’s fate. And after all, why would the “personality” of a sentence in a book be fundamentally any different from that of the picture on a card or the movement of the constellations? Of course there was a lot that seemed absurd or meaningless in believing that sentences chosen through such a method can reveal a person’s fate, but the fortune teller had a wonderful way of speaking, like flowing water, packaging simple sentences with obscure hints and garlanding them with gorgeous rhetoric. At the time Mrs. Kim was struggling with the role of the beautiful widow Lé-Ou, who appears in Jules Verne’s Tribulations of a Chinaman in China; on the book’s inside cover was a large paper umbrella floating in the sky, with the title and author’s name written on it in calligraphy, and below that was the nineteenth-century Chinese landmass, sunk in turmoil.

  A battle was taking place on the bamboo-thick river; surrounded by people fighting and risking their lives, a farmer walked slowly along the riverbank, carrying a water-toting device over his shoulders, and in the distance there was a stone tower soaring up into the sky, and a huge lion brilliantly picked out by the moonlight. Scholars with long hair and round glasses debated around a table while ghost-like people sank in the water, their expressions blank as they were swept to their deaths. The script had been cobbled together from several of Jules Verne’s stories, and was one of the scant handful of works in which Mrs. Kim had been given the role of co-star, though it was, admittedly, a student production put on at a university. The scriptwriter was also a student, a bibliophile who was currently around halfway through Jules Verne’s sci-fi adventures. The woman who told “book fortunes” rented a room in his family’s home, and it was among her things that the bibliophile had discovered the Jules Verne series in the 1967 edition put out by the Swiss publishing house Diogenes, and had put its stylish illustrations to use in his own theatrical staging. The illustrations were all strange and outlandish. When Mrs. Kim first glanced at the picture on the inside cover she was more taken by the apocalyptic scenery, the backdrop depicting the crumbling Chinese empire, than with the Occidental looks of the beautiful widow Lé-Ou, whom she was to play. Enormous masts in the claws of the wind, the black river, assassins swimming through that dark water, each carrying a knife in his mouth, the round moon floating on the water’s surface, a philosopher on a boat, and the densely clustered bamboo leaves that seemed to hem him in, stabbing in from the edges of the picture like sharp sawteeth. The woman who told book fortunes naturally made use of this Jules Verne series in her line of work; it was obvious that these ink drawings, with their elaborate detail and ruinous atmosphere, would for the most part substantiate her prophecies with the dramatic hints and unreal colors that permeated them.

  When was it, that time when she had woken from a long, dream-filled sleep and was lost in thought wondering about that dream; when that drawn-out, static scene of herself lost in thought had been a dream in itself. Mrs. Kim groped by her pillow for paper and pen. Her cleanly laundered and neatly ironed bedlinens, the smell of the cold tea she had been drinking the previous night, and the smell of sleep not yet completely dissipated hung around the bed. Lying down nestled among these smells, Mrs. Kim slowly wrote the following words.

  “And so, I received the letter you sent and was flooded with happiness. It’s true that our first encounter was of an intensity rarely seen. Once our gazes had become entangled, there was no way for us to pull them apart. Considered in a certain light, it was precisely the kind of gaze that I’d thought I’d be captured by, that I’d always dreamed of, but I’d never imagined I would encounter in reality. On actually experiencing it, I felt sure that the pain would have been too much to bear had I lived, aged, and died in ignorance of it, but of course this doesn’t make any sense, because how could I be hurt by something I was ignorant of? And in any case, no pain could surpass that of knowing you but being unable to have you, being unable to be with you, of you just grazing by. Right this moment, I can think of nothing but how I might run to you. But you are too far away, and in the future, too, you will always be on tour, performing in various cities. I wonder how I can explain it, as all emotions progress so quickly, far faster than I can put them into writing . . . even if we cannot see each other a single time during this whole month, when August comes we’ll be able to film together at least for one day, somehow or other. I already gave the director my consent. I heard that you are also scheduled to appear. The director told me that this time, it will all go ahead as planned. And so, if the world were to end before then, the despair would kill me before anything else. We will end up meeting. I must be the only performer who hasn’t read the original work, which will soon become obvious to everyone, but I don’t care a bit. The only important thing is that, one way or another, we will end up meeting.”

  There are also mornings that take a different form. Dense black rainclouds come crowding in and fat raindrops fall from the sky. Everyone bows his head at a similar angle, simultaneously, as though choreographed, and opens black umbrellas. Were they in some third-world country, it would have looked like a mass demonstration conducted in silence. People indoors hurriedly close their windows to prevent the rainwater from blowing in. Mrs. Kim, who had been choosing a peach at a street stall, raises her head the instant the first raindrop falls onto the nape of her neck. It occurs to her she has already witnessed this exact scene at some point in the past. There is nothing at all surprising about this, since always, at all times, Mrs. Kim is seeing many things. A line of bicycles passing through sodden streets, reflected shadows produced by puddles, the shadows of shadows, slow, failed shadows that have lost their way in the instantly absent sunlight, wildly fluttering newspaper, the flustered gestures of someone enjoying himself yet feeling awkward, racing quickly in through the door together with the thick scent rising from dog fur, a lump of strawberry ice cream abandoned on the ground outside. Unique scenes that seem only coincidental and momentary and innumerably repeated, in which such things take shape.

  . . . And the paper on the desk and the paperweight shaped like a dog’s head that has been set on it, and the document
paper fluttering all through the room where no one had remembered to close the window, scraps on which memos had been jotted down. Damp white butterflies of rainy days. Slanted potted-flower petals where rainwater gathers.

  Because Mrs. Kim had so many memories of the countless things she had seen, it took her such a long time to bring them back one by one that a well-remembered scene would take as long to recall as to drink an entire cup of tea, while those whose edges had worn away with the passing of time morphed into vague, incoherent masses, and at times this process of slow extinguishing transformed them into other, absolutely unknowable forms. In some instances, the memory would be riddled with huge white holes, naturally obscuring its face. Holes that become the memory itself.

  At times, Mrs. Kim finds strange scenarios occupying a room in her memory, despite the fact that, as far as she knows, she has never witnessed them firsthand or even imagined them. She can’t tell where they have come from. Mrs. Kim guesses that they are the memories or imaginings of other people which, having lost their owners and drifted in the empty air, at some point entered and took up a place with her. In such cases Mrs. Kim is taken by the thought that she has escaped the world of her own experience and dreamed instead the dream of a mysterious sage. A dream of the previous night, or else of a night twenty years ago. In such dreams she sees a white donkey upside down in a deserted country, treading the night sky as it walks along. The stars crunch like sugar underfoot.

  Standing in front of the door with her hands in her pockets, despite having come to the realization that she doesn’t have the key she needs, Mrs. Kim merely feels dispassionate. Because she feels that the missing key is someone else’s rather than her own, the idea that she has briefly entered the memory of another person—the person who had at some point lost the key—was far more intense than her awareness of having lost it herself. To her, that feeling was caused by a vague conviction that some actual event—something like having lost a key—will arise. It will not come about, or had it come about, it would have done so only within a certain hypothetical domain. Loss is a phenomenon that leads to a temporary delusion—the idea that the lost thing has vanished, has become invisible. This is fundamentally different from the idea of that same object not being in a particular place. In actuality, it is simply that the room where the key is has momentarily ceased to correspond to the room in which you yourself are. Were someone—Mrs. Kim had, as always, slipped into an imagining that unspooled like a skein of thread—to have “actually” lost a key, there would be no dreamy sense of unreality. Instead, they would feel physical unrest: headache and vertigo, worry or hysteria, and finally an uncomfortable and gloomy emotion that could be called unhappiness—the direct opposite of the disinterest that Mrs. Kim was currently experiencing. But unhappiness or despair were words expressing an unsurpassably vivid world, one that went far beyond simple imagining. Here, Mrs. Kim’s own imagining wavered. If imagining were like reading a book, Mrs. Kim might have given up and closed it at this juncture. So that it could not speak to her prophetically. But despair . . . that was a body without a skin. Even without deliberate stimulation, the universe itself becomes suffering. Despair was a black picture governed by a feeling of paralysis, an acute impotent craving. The kind of despair that would be described to us by a fish that had been washed ashore, had it been taught to communicate using human language.

  And yet still we are ignorant of it, Mrs. Kim thought. And will remain so forever, as fish do not know to speak.

  I seem to have heard such words at some point or other . . . that’s right, a very long time ago . . . it seems that her parents had spoken such words, right before Mrs. Kim had packed her bags and left home, announcing that she had quit university and was going abroad to live with an older man with whom she’d become involved, a theater actor who was also a penniless womanizer. Some figure of speech related to the unhappiness and despair that set in toward the end of a human being’s life. A long allegory warning of the result of thoughtlessness or irresponsibility. Ending with a phrase of resignation and reproof, you will forever be in the dark. When, as a university student, Mrs. Kim first saw the man, he was on stage reciting the lines given below. The entire play was just a one-man monologue.

  But I’m someone who’s always enjoyed adventure, I’ve always lived as a wanderer, without ties or commitments, and never possessed more than a musical instrument, a T-shirt and a pair of trousers, I’ve gone around many poor countries barefoot, met many friends on the road, all contemplative travelers like me, I went to Annapurna and met a love goddess who let me nestle in her bosom. I’m a musician and a puppet-theater performer, I also appear in and compose music for plays and films, but I generally support myself by putting on performances in theaters and fairgrounds, by playing violin and accordion and riding the unicycle. I’m especially fond of the accordion, which, more than any other instrument, gives me the feeling that I’m performing with my whole body. Our friendship, which will begin from this point, will embrace all of these things. Along with all the aspects of your own life I don’t yet know. But that doesn’t make me hesitate for even a moment as I write these sentences. None of those unknown factors will make me take a single step backward from this point at which we’ve arrived. I’m prepared for everything of ours that we are aware of, and also everything of which we aren’t, to be an accepted part of our relationship. And I want to help you do the same . . . but first I should clarify that I fear this might wound you, that I fear that the all-encompassing and adventurous friendship that lies ahead of us, this near future that will demand all possible kinds of human intimacy, will be a wound to you . . .

  In the library, Mrs. Kim came across a short story that had to do with keys. It was contained in the 1979 Weekly Chosun.

  “In 197X, our family was living in Beijing, where my father had been posted as a newspaper correspondent. One Sunday that November, a French diplomat with whom my parents were friendly invited us to lunch. The weather had been overcast and drizzly since the morning. My parents, my two siblings, and I drove to the French diplomat’s house, which was about half an hour from ours. After lunch was over, our two families went to the national theater, which wasn’t very far away, to see a traditional Chinese play. We probably came out of the theater around five o’clock in the afternoon. The sun was setting and it was already dark; the sky was as cloudy as ever, and the rain had grown a little stronger. Only after we had arrived home and were at the front door did my father realize that his key was nowhere to be found. We waited uneasily in the car while he telephoned the French diplomat’s house and asked if the key had by any chance been left there. The French diplomat said that he didn’t see the key after a cursory glance so would make a more thorough search, and we were to call back in around ten minutes. For ten minutes we sat watching the fat raindrops, in front of the door to the house that we couldn’t enter. But the key never did get found. My father must have dropped it in the theater, or on the way there. And so we had to give it up for lost. But there were two keys to the house; one kept by my father, and one by the maid.

  The maid wouldn’t be coming to the house that day as it was a Sunday. We didn’t know where she lived. But the person who’d introduced her to us was a man called “Gao,” a squat man with a fleshy face and white, feminine, lovely skin, whom my father had met several times through his work at the Chinese Foreign Office. My father telephoned the Chinese Foreign Office, explained the situation to the person on duty, and obtained Gao’s contact details. After, that is, he’d been to the French embassy to get the number for the Chinese Foreign Office.

  Luckily, he was able to get a hold of Gao. But Gao didn’t inform us of the maid’s address straight out. Instead, he claimed that he didn’t know the address himself and would have to ask someone else. But that was clearly a lie. It was an open secret that the maids who worked for foreign families were all regulated by the Chinese Foreign Office. We just had to wait, sitting in the embassy’s reception room where the heating didn’t work,
staring into the darkness of the cold damp outside. I don’t know how much time passed. My youngest sibling lay down on the sofa and fell asleep. Father tried phoning Gao again. But this time Gao wasn’t at home. His wife didn’t know where he was either. Just as we were wondering whether it might be better to give up on this line of enquiry, go to spend the night at a friend’s house nearby and wait for the maid to come to ours the following day, someone came to the embassy to find us.

  This someone was not Gao. In fact, it was a they—two soldiers we’d never seen before. One was short and wearing a large hat; the face revealed in the dim lamplight was outlandishly gaunt, with protruding cheekbones, and his eyes were cold and expressionless as ice. The kind of face whose glare would sting like a slap. Though the other seemed a little more human, his attitude was no less drilled and brusque than his companion’s. Waiting in the car was a uniformed interpreter, whose appearance and attitude was the least noteworthy of the three. Difficult to explain, then, why my father felt the most threatened by that ordinary-looking figure. Even while he was smiling at you or shaking your hand, the interpreter’s eyes never lost their sharpness. Later, when he would reminisce about that time, my father would say “he had a snake’s eyes. As soon as I saw him, I drew in my neck instinctively, to be out of the range of his strike.” Though my father could speak passable Mandarin, the soldiers insisted on conducting the conversation through the interpreter. As it progressed, my father gradually came to sense that the interpreter’s role was not to facilitate the conversation but to keep an eye out for something. The object of his scrutiny might equally have been my father or the two soldiers, or even the maid herself, though it was difficult to guess the reason for this, or even the whole unexpected situation, which encompassed all of these. They listened quietly as my father explained how he had come to lose the key, though they must have already known the whole story, as it had been told to the Chinese Foreign Office and then to Gao. They told us that they would guide us to the place where the maid lived, and we got into our car and followed theirs deep into Beijing’s lower-class district, where we had never before set foot.