North Station

by Suah Bae

  When, after a fifteen-hour flight, Mrs. Kim caught the bus from the airport to the train station, she was only just in time to catch the train. According to the timetable she’d checked in advance, the train was due to depart at a quarter past five in the afternoon, and if she missed that one she would have had to take one with two changes, both in unfamiliar cities in the middle of the night, or else wait until the next day. Dragging her large wheeled suitcase—because she’d been planning not to go back to the house again, she’d wanted an especially large bag that could hold as many of her things as possible—and also with a heavy bag slung over her shoulder containing basic necessities and several books including Goethe’s Faust, still feeling as though she were suffocating thanks to having been trapped for a long time in the cramped economy seat, constantly deafened and unable to sleep, grumbling over the fact of having spent almost half a day on a plane, yet unable to register this as something she had really experienced, still, Mrs. Kim managed to find an empty seat on the train. She had the letter in the front pocket of her bag, so that she would be able to get it out and read it whenever she might have the time. It was the letter she had received barely a month ago.

  The letter was from the unicycle performer who had fallen madly in love with Mrs. Kim, one he’d been supposed to send a long time ago in order to let her know his performance schedule. But in the meantime something unexpected had happened, an explanation for which had been added to the letter. He wrote that his wife had decided to leave. According to the letter, though she had not actually left yet, her decision was made; she wanted to go back to India and stay with her family to study classical Indian music. And he wrote that he had no intention whatsoever of opposing his wife’s decision, that he was planning to spend the next month touring cities in the border regions, doing street performances.

  Nan, the street performer called Mrs. Kim in the letter. He called her that several times. He liked that single syllable, which shortened the final syllable in her name. He addressed her in a way that no one else did. His deep, beautiful voice set him apart from everyone else. He was also a magician wrapped in a black manteau. His voice was able to make the words he spoke into a living bird and send them flying up into the sky. He was able to make the wooden duck he pulled out of his bag cry. He could even get the duck to open a black book with its bill, to the page that would tell the onlooker’s fate. And if he read the sentence that was written on that page, it became poetry. Unwittingly captivated, the audience gave a chest-trembling sigh. He had a beautiful body, elegantly slender as a youth’s, and beautiful silver-colored hair. And a face that, though admittedly wrinkled, produced a smile as beautiful as ever. Even when he donned his Pierrot nose and got up onto stilts to play the fool, he was a beautiful actor. That was revealed in his gestures. Even if he performed in a room where the lights were off, so that no one could see him standing on the stage, still no one in the audience would doubt that at that precise moment, a moment that was set apart, he “looked beautiful.” Beautiful, in a way that was ever constant. He was a definite being formed of indefinite cravings, of whom Mrs. Kim had always dreamed when she was young. Mrs. Kim understood that. And they were carried away. They fell in love. It was a brief, dazzling moment of miracle.

  Suddenly the train clattered to a stop in the black darkness. It was not a scheduled stop; it had broken down, the cause unknown, and could not go on any farther, meaning that the passengers all had to get off and change trains there. On top of that, the announcement clarified that because this was a small station, not especially well connected, the passengers should examine the timetable carefully to get to the closest city with a connection to their destination. Though Mrs. Kim was so tired and exhausted she could have sunk to the ground and fallen asleep then and there, she got down from the train along with the rest, pulling her suitcase behind onto the desolate platform. Pallid stars were clustered in the sky like droplets of milk, above the stationary train, the track stretching on, and Mrs. Kim. The stars were looking down on them. They were at a small village station almost forty kilometers from the city where, at that very moment, the street performer would be giving an evening performance at a restaurant downtown.

  A uniformed station worker came up to Mrs. Kim, who stood there blankly, and asked her where she was going. He advised her that if she waited just half an hour she would be able to catch a train to her destination. While he was speaking, a train pulled in, remained briefly, then carried on its way. Mrs. Kim only needed to wait “half an hour,” he said, and then she could catch the train. The timetable on the platform said the same. But what if the train was delayed? The train that Mrs. Kim had originally been on had arrived around fifteen minutes later than scheduled at the station before this. So, after the promised “half an hour,” how would she know whether or not the train that arrived at the platform was the one she needed to take? What if the route or train number was not written somewhere on the body of the train? Or if there was something like that in the front window, but Mrs. Kim missed it as the train pulled in? In that case, Mrs. Kim would have to haul her heavy, cumbersome bags all the way to the front of the train, check the sign, then drag the bags back down the platform to the nearest passenger door. But would the train stop for a long enough time at as small a station as this? Why, the last train hadn’t stopped for much more than thirty seconds. The biggest problem was that Mrs. Kim had no idea where the train was going, or how to ascertain such a thing, or where she needed to look when the train arrived, this train that was actually now pulling into the platform. Of whether the destination would appear as an electric sign at the very front of the train, or on a notice board in the passenger windows. All she had to go on was the timetable. If she’d been in a major city station where each platform had its own electronic information board there would have been no need to worry, but no such thing existed in this small station, which had only the one platform. Only then did Mrs. Kim’s chest tighten with the fear that suddenly crowded in. What if she missed the last train of the day? No, what if she got onto the wrong train and ended up even farther from her destination? If that happened, the street performer would think that Mrs. Kim had had a change of heart and decided not to come. He would believe that she had succumbed to fear.

  My Nan, I know full well that you are afraid. I understand. The street performer had written such things several times.

  For a long time, Mrs. Kim practically forgot about her play. Rather than the idea of it having passed into oblivion, she simply kept it from rising to the surface of her consciousness. Though perhaps it was only natural that the play would be forgotten, given that it could be neither published nor performed. And so when, after several years had passed, she happened to meet someone who remembered the play, Mrs. Kim experienced surprise, faint palpitations, and even the reflexive wish that the person in question had done her the favor of not remembering that the performance had been thwarted. But such a wish was doomed from the first, given that the person in question was none other than the play’s director, whose relationship with the actors had broken down and ultimately caused the production to be cancelled, and worse, who had uncovered Mrs. Kim’s secret desire; a person, in other words, whom she had earnestly hoped never to meet again. Mrs. Kim had continued to be involved with the theater, though this involvement was fairly infrequent, and as the director had continued to work as a director, their bumping into each other wasn’t necessarily that big a coincidence. What did make it so was that the director had since emigrated to South America, and had had nothing to do with Korea or its theater scene for some time. He was visiting Korea for the first time in a long while, had made time to come and see a play, and had by chance bumped into Mrs. Kim, who had come to see the same performance, also on her own. Mrs. Kim’s uneasiness was not unfounded; predictably, after the usual bland pleasantries had been exchanged, he launched straight into the subject of their play.

  At first Mrs. Kim was unable to find the appropriate responses, and as the conversation progre
ssed she blushed from embarrassment. After praising Mrs. Kim’s play as one of the works that had left the greatest impression out of all those he had worked on, the director asked if she had written anything else since. Has he forgotten what a difficult time it was for all of us who were involved with that play? The investors got burned, the government organization who’d funded us gave us a huge lecture, several fights broke out among the actors, leaving them irrevocably estranged; I couldn’t even think of writing another play. But instead of enumerating these facts, Mrs. Kim decided just to respond with a vague smile. In an unpleasant fashion, though this hadn’t been his intention, the director had brought to light Mrs. Kim’s grand dream of passing beyond the borders of her own imagination, as an actress who, when the lights in all the other rooms flicked off simultaneously due to some accident, leaving only her own room illuminated, had momentarily forgotten her own anonymity, an anonymity which she had always carefully maintained but which had needed to be hidden inside countless other selves, inside a room that was only a small part of an enormous overall staging, so terrified was she of revealing so much as a sliver of her dream. The director had also recalled to her that she had a responsibility to that anonymity. Mrs. Kim found being with him uncomfortable, forcing her as it did to recollect the incident—as Mrs. Kim referred to it—which connected them, leaving her quite helpless. But in this, too, the director’s feelings were quite different from Mrs. Kim’s. He wanted to talk with her for a long time. Especially about that play. What they should have done to prevent it from getting in such a fix, for the performance to have gone ahead and been successful, was there really no way to give the actors a little more agency while still ensuring that their performance remained within the bounds of the play’s creative constraints, wasn’t there a more effective way to stage that monotone panorama, one we just didn’t think of in time? If only it had been successful, what a huge opportunity for the both of us! The director’s monologue rattled on ceaselessly. Shaking his head, he said, “Coming up with such crazy schemes, there’s no doubting we had our heads screwed on funny back then! All those rooms! All those actors! We worked so hard to prove that it was all meaningless!” or “if the critics had actually seen the performance they might have been even more scathing, ha ha!,” and even burst into laughter while slapping his knees. Then, as though something had suddenly occurred to him, he bowed his head in Mrs. Kim’s direction and said, in a low, grave voice, “I must confess that back then, after the whole production had fizzled out, I started to wonder, belatedly, how things would have turned out if I’d agreed to your proposal. You as the only real actor on stage, inside a single room among many. Since it’s not that the remaining rooms are all dead, there’s no need for their lights to be turned off. In each of the other rooms, there would be a marionette posed in place of an actor. The dolls have a simple mechanism fitted inside them so they spin around or dance or sit or stand, repeating simple actions, and now and then two dolls in the same room are made to lie down in a pose of lovemaking. At first glance, the audience cannot tell who is a doll and who a real actor, but after a certain amount of time has passed, the difference would become clear to them, right? Since, rather than performing naturally, like the sophisticated robots that appear in films, the marionettes will only crane their necks or dangle their limbs loosely like ordinary dolls. And so those dolls are not intended to cheat the eye. The opposite, in fact; they are tools for discovering what is real. From the perspective of the audience, you see, the real play begins the moment they recognize you. Just like you, the dolls all change rooms after a fixed amount of time. But the role of the dolls does not in any respect go beyond that of dolls, and the real performance, the main action on the stage, is something that you improvise alone. Rather than just passively watching the stage, the audience is responsible for identifying ‘you’ among the many marionettes. Of course, for such a performance the stage will need to have a special mechanical device, but how about it, don’t you feel that it would be worth trying? Why couldn’t we have thought like that from the beginning?”

  Mrs. Kim couldn’t remember exactly at what point she had come to love the director, who at first had only made her feel uncomfortable. They met up every day until he was due to return to South America. They talked and talked for hours about the theater and plays, especially about the play Mrs. Kim had written, and how they might have been able to put it on successfully. They returned to the same subject again and again. Then at a certain moment Mrs. Kim realized that what they were longing for, or at least reminiscing over, was not her play itself but the director’s energetic, challenging youth, which had gone by and would not return again. The moment she became aware of that, her heart became so light it felt like a rubber ball bouncing up, and she was relieved that she no longer had to sit in front of him on pins and needles, feeling as though she had committed some crime and not knowing when the charges might jump out of his mouth. From that point onward Mrs. Kim was able to show him a far softer, more generous, and affectionate smile. It was not the vague or evasive smile of before, or the smile of defense or entreaty, or the obsequious smile of one who senses that their weakness has been detected. It was the unreserved, wholly positive smile given only by those who are truly enjoying their role as listener. It was the smile of a girl expressing pure admiration, untainted by humiliation. That particular smile captivated the director, who was sunk deep in nostalgia. He slipped into the fantasy that he was as young and passionate as he had ever been, unafraid of risk or madness as he had been in days gone by, that he was not flattering himself in this, that he was able to transmit such passion to others too, that his own passion could make fireworks of equal intensity burst in their hearts. It was a fantasy that Mrs. Kim’s smile made possible.

  Mrs. Kim saw. That the look in the director’s eyes had grown gradually more clear and intense, his thinning, disheveled hair and dry lips were now gleaming with luster, he was making an effort to straighten his shoulders and the back of his neck, having previously been stooped, appearing shrunken and cowering, and that even his manner of speech had recovered its former impertinent decisiveness. That the conceited expression with which he had once scorned compromise, believing that he could stand up to one hundred actors and single-handedly put them in their place, was slowly surfacing on his face. Mrs. Kim felt a corner of her heart growing heated. Unlike things that had never existed, forgotten things remained forgotten, and that wasn’t right. Such things were charged with the mission to revive in one form or another. Their initial question, “Why couldn’t we have thought like that from the first?” was changing into the question “Why couldn’t we recognize each other from the start? We spent such a lot of time together . . .”

  However filled with eternal light it might have been, their love was fated to be short-lived. The director had to go back to South America, could not avoid the ties of family, especially as he had become a grandfather only a few months ago, besides which they themselves were instinctively putting up defensive walls, saying that this was not something that could last. What they wanted were all the brilliant, shining things that fill the eyes of a fish that washed ashore, for that brief moment at the end of its life. Things expressed through the warmth, the fragrance of flowers, a parrot flying through the sky, a fiery volcano, a butterfly fluttering in a heat wave, and scenes of legend that are absolutely incommunicable because they can be experienced only at the border between the air and the body of just such a fish, only at that precise moment. Things that are, in this way, unique. Moreover, it is quite clear that love that consents to the lovers’ parting is already no more than the dregs of itself. Already they were frantically wondering how they might prevent love’s character from slowly withering and deteriorating, keep its inspiration from dying off, as though this were the key to them staying alive.