North Station

by Suah Bae

  A line of identical houses ran on from one another. Houses whose wooden boards gleamed black in the rain and whose roofs were sparsely tiled. You would think you were looking at a single house, then realize that it was in fact dozens of houses huddled together, a hill of blackly soaked rags, no, dozens of hills clustered into a mountain. At first I’d thought that there was no one in the darkness outside the car, but I soon became aware that the darkness was itself made up of myriad expressionless black eyes, gleaming like fish eggs, eyes that concealed thought and feeling, which slowly softened and dispersed as though flowing into the rain, revealing the darkness little by little, revealing a long line of figures wearing coats and trousers of a similar cut, like ghosts passing by between the metallic black streaks of rain. Though nothing was actually audible aside from the sound of the rain, each time their shoes met the stony ground I experienced the splashing sound of the water and its slippery feel as though these things were happening against my own skin. Like their vague stares, which had seemed to bore into us each time they flitted past our car, for a very brief moment, as though stealing a glance at something secret . . .

  This is exactly the scene I saw in a dream a long time ago, Mrs. Kim thought reflexively. But as to whether it was genuinely a “dream,” or something she’d seen occur in a certain city, a certain room, something described in an unintentionally overheard telephone conversation or in a book she’d absentmindedly flicked through, she couldn’t be certain. How like a mirage this thing we call “memory” is! Far beyond the horizon of a deserted stony wasteland, a variety of orange flowers that has never grown before blooms in a riot of gold. In fact, there are several varieties. Is that true, or was it once true, or will it be, in the future, a thing that once was true? Mrs. Kim was happiest when she felt that she was living in a reality that did not belong anywhere.

  “We couldn’t tell where we were anymore. We’d thought that the forest in front of us, black as wet coal, was an enormous sloping mountain, then realized that it was in fact an endless mass of houses stuck together cheek by jowl, a narrow watercourse giving off a foul stench, alleyways paved with blackish stones, and the shadows of countless rain-soaked people. Everything was entangled with darkness. And those entangled things formed a harmony as perfect as that of a musical scale, endowing the scene with a certain equilibrium. The streets were now too narrow for the cars to go any further, so we sat in our car and watched the two soldiers vanish into the rain. The interpreter remained in the car. Why are they going to such trouble? Surely they could have just given us the maid’s address. I could picture her only hazily, the small figure of the maid, possibly in her mid-forties, who had only a smattering of English and French and so communicated through a series of nods, shakes, and tilts of the head, whom we had always called ‘Nan.’ The only reason I could think of was that her government did not want its citizens to have any unregulated contact with foreigners, especially not contact that would be impromptu and out of the ordinary, as this was. Though it was a simple matter of retrieving a spare key.”

  Mrs. Kim closed the magazine, disappointed that nothing more was said about the key. When it comes down to it, she thought to herself, this is a story about China, not about keys at all! So we’ll never be told whether they ended up getting the spare key, whether this led the maid to be accused of being a spy for a foreign country, whether she was publicly punished, or where my own key is. That was as far as her train of thought could carry her, because all she knew of China was the InterContinental Shanghai hotel and its immediate surroundings, where she had gone on her honeymoon. And besides, if it were 1970s China, wasn’t that the time when people hadn’t called China, China? Mrs. Kim recalled that she had read China’s Red Star, as many others had at the time. But she couldn’t remember a single thing aside from the title. There had also been Jules Verne’s The Tribulations of a Chinaman in China, hadn’t there. Something about a widow called Lé-Ou . . . naturally, Mrs. Kim was ignorant as to the precise nature of the Chinaman’s tribulations, having never read the book itself, only a play script quoting an episode from it, and the illustration, of course. But the book’s title and the scene from the illustration were engraved in Mrs. Kim’s mind in such sharp relief, convincing her that she had in fact read the whole thing. More than that, convincing her that she remembered it. By contrast, everything about China’s Red Star, which she genuinely had read, was mired in doubt.

  “I’m sorry, but right now I don’t have the key to the office. I must have given it to the manager! Would it have been last year? I worked in Shanghai for six months last year. For a Swiss construction company based in Shanghai, to be precise. That’s right, I handed everything over before I left for Shanghai. Everything. I definitely wasn’t working there last year; I was in Shanghai.”

  Ah, a key story! Mrs. Kim pricked up her ears.

  “No, I’m not going back. My contract didn’t get renewed after the first six months, you see. When I left for Shanghai I was excited about obtaining a position in ‘rising Asia,’ but I guess my luck must have been bad, because I just kept landing the worst jobs. Pay was fixed at a lower level than what I’d received at the main office in Geneva, plus the work itself was harder than I’d thought. It began from the very first day; someone was waiting for me at the airport, to take me straight to the office. I didn’t even get the chance to unpack my luggage first. I was tasked with managing the rental apartments of European residents in Shanghai. But I couldn’t speak Chinese, no one explained Chinese law to me . . . There weren’t even any documents translated into English. How was I expected to be able to set up an apartment management guide when I didn’t know the local laws and regulations? Though others seemed to just ignore such things and focus on keeping it all running, it caused me a great deal of confusion, you know. It was very different from how I’d always done things, even at school. I couldn’t shake the feeling that everything was done by pure guesswork, without any definite governing principle. And that’s no way to run things. Eventually, something horrible happened.”

  The speaker was Philip, who lived next door. He was talking to someone on the phone. Mrs. Kim could see him through his half-open door, standing with his back to her. Since it was the only phone in the house, whenever someone wanted to use it they had to pull the cord into their room, or else stand and talk in the corridor. It was a communal line, so each time one of the residents made a call they would write down the number, date, and time on the itemized list posted in the corridor, then the landlord would calculate everything at the end of the month when he received the phone bill, and ask for individual payments. Mrs. Kim decided that she ought to ask whether Philip had seen her key, or whether he had taken hers from the kitchen thinking it was his, put it into his bag with his other things, and taken it with him to Shanghai. Once he had finished his conversation, of course.

  “A Chinese worker fell off the roof he was cleaning.”

  Poor Philip. Mrs. Kim had heard the sentence as “Something horrible happened; while working in China, I fell off the roof I was cleaning.” Experience is made up of things that fall under “making a living,” and things that fall outside it. That also looked like two personalities that constitute making a living. Mrs. Kim was sitting in the hospital waiting room. It would have been the exact moment when, for Mrs. Kim, menstruation ceased to be one of those things from which she was “making a living.” There is a checkpoint at every national border. They want a certificate, or tax, or a bribe. She would have had to pay something. Medical insurance card, travel insurance card, passport, or simply credit card? Mrs. Kim had just had an injection; since no one had told her what the injection was, she was simply enduring its effect in ignorance. As she closed her eyes and leaned back against the chair, she saw a seaside where she felt as though she had stayed at one time, but was clearly a foreign resort she had never set eyes on; in spite of that the thought ran through her mind that she had once been in that place, whose form and colors looked curiously altered, no, the though
t that she was there right now, ran through her mind. It was a bow-shaped beach made up of narrow bays, beneath a low blue sky. The air was a mix of turbid brown and pale pink. Mrs. Kim saw. The people strolling along the beach were all unmoving photographs or paintings. They were brilliantly colored tin or strawboard or colored paper or balls of yarn or scraps of cloth attached to buttons. Happy smiles and contented expressions, hems hitched up for splashing through the shallows, dogs on leads and opened parasols, even the sound of their laughter and the cheerful atmosphere all fixed, unmoving, to the screen of the backdrop. Only the waves were moving, surging up onto the beach at a regular tempo. Each time a wave washed up, the weight of the water would tip Mrs. Kim’s head to one side. Rather than retreating back to the open sea, the waves piled up inside her. A certain part of her was fated to drown. The water gradually rising inside her corresponded to the level of her sadness. It was far too heavy a sadness for her body to resist. It was an enraged feeling, not of her heart sinking or becoming depressed, but of flaring up as in an explosion, a feeling that she was riding the uncontrollable waves, surging frantically toward an extreme shore. Mrs. Kim turned and muttered to the person next to her before she realized what she was doing, “I don’t know why I’m so sad.”

  Her neighbor glared at her briefly then turned away without responding. But a nurse happened to be passing by who heard her and did respond.

  “Quite a few people say their mood lifts as soon as they have that injection. They even come to the hospital complaining of depression, swearing that they’re going to get the injection.”

  “There’s this scene that’s coming back to me, like a memory from long ago, and although it didn’t make any particular impression on me, so there’s no reason whatsoever for me to become emotional, it feels like I’ll die of sadness. I’m crying so much I can barely see.”

  “Just wait, and in a little while all those emotions will fade. It’s a temporary side effect. Later, the only feelings left will be happiness and contentment. Honestly,” the nurse told her kindly, then went away into one of the wards.

  Sitting on the waiting room chair, Mrs. Kim cried her eyes out. She couldn’t help it. Each time a wave surged up the beach, riding a regular rhythm, her heart contracted as though being squeezed in a vice. Like a soft sponge being wrung out. But strangely enough, the sadness was empty. She keened in the face of a white hole of memory. She hadn’t made such a sound since her time in the secondary school choir.

  “If you use soap,” the landlady explained, “you have to wring the sponge out afterward, like this. Otherwise it will stink.”

  Mrs. Kim simply nodded.

  “And since there’s only one key per person, you have to be very careful not to lose it. If one key gets lost, all the locks have to be changed, you see. For everyone. For security, you know. And for the front door as well. Just imagine what a hassle that would be! And the person who lost the key would have to cover the full cost, you know.”

  “No, he wasn’t a real employee, just some guy from the sticks who did occasional handyman jobs. The company had no obligation to take out insurance for him, which was precisely why they hired him, because it was cheap. He was taken to hospital, but there wasn’t much that could be done. Who would have paid the hospital fees? The nine mouths he had to feed all descended on the hospital, bawling their eyes out, not worried about him, but about how they themselves were going to manage. Which was probably what the man would have been thinking about, too.”

  Still with the receiver pressed to his ear, Philip went into the kitchen to get some water. The phone cable trailed after him like a faithful dog. Using gestures only, Mrs. Kim asked Philip if he’d seen her key. In order to indicate the word “key,” Mrs. Kim moved her lips exaggeratedly to make the shape of the word. But Philip couldn’t understand right away so, covering the mouthpiece with his hand, responded by mouthing “what?” When Mrs. Kim pointed at the key box attached to the front door, Philip then shook his head to say that he hadn’t seen it. All the while, a rapid stream of words could be heard coming from the person on the other end of the line. So Mrs. Kim wasn’t able to ask him anything else.

  “You’re asking why he fell from the roof? I don’t know. How would I know whether he deliberately let himself fall, or just happened to be less careful that day? I know nothing about him. Whether he was a trained roof cleaner or a novice who’d crawled up onto a roof for the first time that day. It had nothing to do with my work, my position. The Chinese employees were the ones in charge of hiring Chinese laborers. Was he wearing protective equipment? How would I know that? Didn’t I tell you I didn’t even know if the use of protective equipment was prescribed by law? The Chinese employees might have known, but not me. But it’s correct that, though he was the first to fall while cleaning the roof, it certainly wasn’t the first time the roof had been cleaned. The company said it was entirely the fault of the worker’s carelessness and therefore not their responsibility. Perhaps no one had ever used any kind of protective equipment. I mean, I’d never heard of anything being used . . . What sort of shape do Chinese-style roofs have? Well, they’re good . . . but the houses we managed were all communal villas for the exclusive use of foreigners, only for Europeans. The roofs of those houses were all red, in that horned-saddle shape that Europeans prefer . . . I felt I should to go to my boss and bring up the topic of the value of life. Not that I expected him to pay any attention. And I was proved right. None of the other employees batted an eyelid, either. The Chinese were cooler still. They simply said that a Japanese patient had already arrived in the very next ward, and that he would be receiving the Chinese worker’s internal organs at any moment.”

  Why would people pretend to be talking about keys before shifting the topic to China? You only have to open up a newspaper to come across some special article on China, whether in the financial, culture, or travel section, or wander down any street at random to see a poster for an exhibition on Chinese culture to celebrate the Beijing Olympics, alongside one for a lecture by the Dalai Lama. China will even have a starring role in the pamphlet of an aid organization that allows people to sponsor unfortunate third-world children, providing them with a fixed amount of money each month in exchange for a letter or photograph. People enjoy talking about China. But they each talk about a different China. Countryside and metropolis, this city and that, the southern provinces and the northern, the east and the west, this ethnic group and that, Buddhists and Muslims and shamanism, summer and winter, airplanes and trains, desert and marshland, rich and poor, spread out in a panorama where each has its own wavelength, separate and discrete. But the stories that Mrs. Kim was seeing all had the same backdrop. High mountains capped with white clouds, a remote cave where an old dragon lives, a waterfall flowing over a remote cliff, and a vast forest of bamboo that shivers with each gust of wind to produce a mysterious sound. In the emperor’s palace in Beijing, envoys flock from vassal states scattered far and wide, squabbling to present their offerings. China controlled its vassal states through having them perform such commercial transactions, rather than choosing to build an empire through waging war. And then there are the media’s guaranteed crowd-pleasers: an elderly woman with bound feet, the blackened fabric fused with the skin; helpless young girls, victims of human trafficking and of sexual abuse; the merciless Cultural Revolution and the sayings of Chairman Mao . . .

  “The Shanghai I saw was a figment,” Philip was saying. China is a country made up of things that get seen by people who are all different from one another. So it stands to reason that the things those people see are also all different. A long time ago people said that Marco Polo was a liar, but he too would only have been able to see that which was made visible to him. Just as the China that appears in China’s Red Star was different from the China of The Tribulations of a Chinaman, and both of these were different again from the China of her honeymoon. Such was the conclusion that Mrs. Kim, who hadn’t left downtown Shanghai once during her honeymoon, and hadn’t
read Tribulations either, came to regarding China.

  But the key was right there in Mrs. Kim’s pocket. This discovery did not shock her. It could have been a dragon in her pocket instead, and she would have still remained unruffled. Mrs. Kim used the key to open the door and stepped inside with her head stiffly raised, pulling her bag behind her. The small room she found herself in gave off a smell of withering petals, damp moss, and wax. On one wall there was a door leading straight through into another room, and this other room led through to yet another. Each of these rooms was decorated with cheap furniture, chairs covered with sheets, Chinese paper lamps, etc., there were several books in the bookcase, a map and train timetable on the desk—but neither sight nor sound of any other human being. Mrs. Kim passed through the rooms until she reached a kitchen; there she found several tables with people seated around them, drinking tea or beer or reading the newspaper. These people all looked extremely tired, and regarded Mrs. Kim with blank stares. Stares that skimmed their object briefly, as though reflexively prompted by the mere fact of something entering their field of vision rather than stemming from any actual interest. After all, there was already plenty going on around them in this room that was no bigger than any of the others, with a man in a red waistcoat bringing drinks or food to those seated at the tables, while another red-waistcoated man fried eggs at an electric stove or made sandwiches or poured coffee. Mrs. Kim had to thread her way through them very carefully while pulling her suitcase behind. The kitchen was all steamed up, its air damp and sticky, and the smells of food and oil and coffee dregs hung in a thick fug. This is like the toilet on a train when the ventilator’s broken! Mrs. Kim thought as she hurriedly slipped out of the kitchen. She was careful, but couldn’t avoid rolling her suitcase over several unsuspecting pairs of feet, whose owners made their discomfiture known. There was another room after the kitchen. A continuous succession of empty rooms. Mrs. Kim walked ahead, pulling her suitcase. This time the rooms were laid out in a row, one leading through into another. Because the connecting doors had all been left open, the long line of rooms appeared to Mrs. Kim like a straight highway stretching out in front of her. There were windows on both sides, through which a green river could be seen, a lake with swans swimming leisurely, a Japanese garden of exquisite pine trees, suburbs of drab, nondescript commercial districts, the wave-tossed sea, fields, women wearing hats, vases, and fruits, all flowing by . . . From some point onward the rooms seemed to become a long glass gallery, the floors shining like brass, with no end in sight. Mrs. Kim was there in its interior, an interior flooded with suffocating white light. With each step Mrs. Kim took, the light morphed into a different form, casting nets and lattices like flickering sunbeams over the surface of the water of which Mrs. Kim’s body now seemed to be made, in a vain attempt to imprison her. The body of the light, which was transparent and had no density, mingled with her own. At some point, Mrs. Kim spotted a man standing on the threshold between one room and another, far in front of her. The man’s face was not clearly visible, not because of the distance but because he had his back to the light, so that he was visible only as a dark silhouette with light trying to break through. Still, Mrs. Kim could tell that he was wearing a red waistcoat like the men in the kitchen, and was holding what looked like one of those handheld payment devices that waiters carry. The whole place was a world unknown to Mrs. Kim. This succession of rooms, those rooms where the scenery outside the window shifted from forest to city, from summer to winter, and passed beyond the boundaries of light and water, was what Mrs. Kim had in Seoul, in Shanghai, or even in that third city whose name was unfixed. They formed a rattling train, and the man was a ticket inspector making his rounds. Having eventually arrived in front of him, Mrs. Kim held her letter out for inspection. At that, the light that was surrounding them grew gradually more faint. The train was entering a dark tunnel.