Cursed Bunny

by Bora Chung

  When the ground beneath her feet gave way, the princess found herself floating in the air before she could scream. A familiar ticking noise surrounded her. Above her head was that shadow once more, the same shade that had once given her shelter.

  Floating above the crumbling palace, the princess stared as the ship of golden gears leisurely crossed the desert sky.

  15

  The palace was completely destroyed. Not a single hewn stone in a wall remained where it had been. Once more on the decks of the golden ship, the princess gazed into the haze of dust that had once been the palace.

  “This is not the fault of the princess,” a low voice proclaimed, making the planks beneath her feet quake again. “One can break the curse, but it is impossible to cure their blindness from greed. They were always ready to wage another war.”

  The princess nodded, shaken. Like the dust cloud below, her thoughts were so foggy that she found it hard to think straight in that moment.

  Something cold and moist touched her hand. Startled, the princess turned around.

  The master of the golden boat was handing her a goblet of water. The goblet was smaller than the princess’s hand. Despite the hot desert winds that raged around them, the water was as cold as ice, attracting water droplets to the surface of the goblet.

  The princess slowly raised the goblet. Her lips touched its rim. Cold water flowed into her.

  The goblet may have been smaller than her hand, but it poured forth an endless stream of water. She drank her fill. It seemed like an eternity since she had drunk such cool water. Perhaps it was the first time in her life.

  “Stay here,” said the soft voice that rang through the golden decks. “Rule the winds and sands with me, sail above the horizon of time. Until the day the sun and moon shatter and disappear, everything the stars and clouds can reach in this endless realm, it shall all belong to you.”

  The princess looked down at the goblet in her hand. She had drunk her fill, but it was full again in the blink of an eye. Water droplets gathered on the goblet again, and the cold moistness in her hand gave her a strangely lovely feeling.

  “I wish to live as a mortal,” she finally answered. “I wish to meet a man who is like me, who will cherish and love me as I do him, to have children, to see them grow up and find their own mates and have their own children … That is the life I wish for.”

  “There is death at the end of such life.” The master of the wind and sand’s voice was soft.

  The princess nodded. “I know. But I will live life fully until my very moment of death.”

  The man of the golden ship said, “I cannot give the princess the life of mortals, but I can still promise you a peace and eternity that they do not know.”

  The princess smiled. She nodded.

  The man’s empty left sleeve began to move. The princess felt a cool and soft breeze brush against her right cheek.

  The gears of the golden ship began to creak and turn. As the ship changed course, the teeth of its gears shattered the sunlight into shimmering sparks. With the sun behind it, the golden ship began to slowly cross the desert sky toward the princess’s home, the land of the grassy plains.

  Reunion

  This love story is for you.

  No one asked us, when we weren’t famous

  Whether we wanted to live or not

  I expected so many things

  But didn’t know what I wanted …

  I was sitting on the southern side of the plaza. Nursing a mug of cheap mulled wine, the kind they sell everywhere on the streets in the winter. Mulled wine is a European winter drink made of red wine that’s simmered for a long time with spices like cinnamon and cloves. The alcohol evaporates somewhat in the heat, but it’s not entirely boiled away so there’s just enough left over to get drunk on. Which was why sipping this hot beverage in freezing cold weather was making my head spin a little.

  “Czy kogoś szukasz?” Are you looking for someone?

  I turned my head. He smiled at me.

  He opened his arms. I stood up. We embraced. He further greeted me with a kiss on each cheek. Awkwardly, I reciprocated. No matter how glad I was to see someone, greeting with kisses still felt strange to me.

  “Mogę?” May I? He indicated the seat next to me.

  I smiled and nodded.

  “Wiedziałem, że będziesz,” he said. “Czekałem na Ciebie.” I knew you would come. I’ve been waiting for you.

  *

  A long time ago, I met him in the plaza for the first time. Poland’s summers are hot and dry—I was holding a cold drink in one hand and sitting in the shade. My life was making me anxious. I wanted to escape from it, for just a little while at least.

  The plaza was full of people but the voices that drifted toward me were mostly speaking English or German rather than Polish. The city was a tourist town. Nine out of ten people sitting under the statue in the center of the city plaza were from abroad. I was one of these foreigners, and like other foreigners, I was sitting by the plaza’s statue at an outdoor café, staring at the sunlight heating up the paving stones.

  Then I saw the old man.

  I didn’t spot anything different about him at first. Again, there were many people in the plaza, and the countless foreigners were taking pictures, drinking beer, talking on phones, talking to each other. Living in the moment, so to speak. There were people moving slowly, people just standing around, and people moving about in a hurry. There were people with dogs and people with children. It wouldn’t have been easy spotting someone doing something strange in that crowd.

  But the main reason I was paying attention to the old man was because for one thing, he was walking with a very pronounced limp. Another reason was that despite his limp, he moved with surprising agility.

  The third reason I kept watching the old man was because he was only walking on one side. I need to explain this a little more.

  The plaza was roughly the shape of a square, with a statue of a nineteenth-century Romantic poet who was considered a treasure of the nation placed in the middle. The reason it was “roughly” a square shape was because while the plaza had roads on all sides, there were also little alleys radiating from the center. A typical European city plaza, with the northern side—the side the poet’s statue faced—lined with souvenir shops, and to the west, a little away from the poet statue, a clock tower, and to the east and south of the plaza, outdoor cafés, pubs, and restaurants. I was sitting with my back to the poet statue, looking south.

  The old man appeared on my left and walked toward my right. Limping at a surprisingly rapid speed, he crossed the main road and disappeared into an alley. Then just five minutes later, he reappeared to my left at exactly where he had first come from and walked to the right. Swiftly limping all the way, he moved in a straight line to cross the main street on the right and disappeared once more into an alley. And again, he reappeared to my left not five minutes after. With his mouth firmly shut, slightly biting down on his bottom lip, and his eyes opened wide, his face frozen into a desperate expression, he diligently moved his uncomfortable leg to walk, right before my eyes, from the plaza’s east to west in a straight line.

  The plaza was wide. It took about fifteen to twenty minutes for the old man to traverse the southern side of the plaza on his bad leg with his wobbling walk. Even if he had taken a shortcut that I didn’t know about, it should’ve taken him at least twenty minutes to circle back to the square if it had taken him twenty minutes to get to the alley. But the old man would disappear and reappear barely five minutes later in the exact same spot. And limp the same distance at a fearsome speed. In a single direction, over and over again.

  “Czy Ty też go widzisz?” You can see him, too?

  Startled, I turned my head. The man, who stood with the sun to his back, looked like a giant from where I sat.

  “Mogę?” May I?

  The man was pointing at the chair next to me. I just nodded. In all honesty, I was already taken aback by the old man, a
nd now this giant, wherever he came from, was also so unnerving that I couldn’t find my voice.

  The man came and sat down next to me.

  For the next hour, the man and I said nothing to each other as we watched the old man. And the old man, seemingly unexhausted, kept walking and walking in the same direction as before with his limp.

  Sitting there with the tall man, I discovered something else about the old man we were observing. It was the height of summer but the old man wore long black slacks and a khaki-colored sweater, and despite the sun beating down on him, he didn’t seem at all tired or hot. I couldn’t see if he was sweating from where I sat, but at least he didn’t make any motions to wipe his sweat away. And no matter how closely I watched him, I had no idea where he was trying to go or how he managed to return to his original spot so quickly.

  “Przypomina mi o dziadku,” the man next to me murmured.

  I looked at him.

  “He reminds me of my grandfather,” he said again in English.

  Most Polish people don’t expect foreigners to understand Polish. Since I had no understanding of the situation—who he was, why he was talking to me, or who the old man was—I decided not to get into it. I said nothing.

  The man didn’t seem to mind either way.

  “He was lost, my grandfather,” he said. “Just like him.”

  Naturally, my eyes returned toward the old man he was pointing at.

  The old man was no longer there. This was unsettling. I stood up and looked around for him, but he was nowhere to be seen.

  “On wróci,” the man mumbled. “Zawsze wraca.”

  He’ll be back. He always returns.

  The man stood up, nodded at me, and left.

  *

  It was in a library where I met the man again.

  I was finishing up my graduate studies back then and was in Poland on a research trip. My university had given me some funding, but that money barely covered the cost of the plane ticket. Housing, bus fare, even the price of getting copies made at the library, all that I had to pay out of pocket. And there was no guarantee that I would come out of all this with anything to show for it. But I wanted to finish what I had started, and the most immediate and tangible way I could accomplish that was to borrow books from the library.

  Like many libraries in Eastern Europe, the university library I had made my pilgrimage to had closed stacks. I had to find the call number for each book, fill out a slip for each one, and a librarian would go into the stacks to fetch the book for me. So I wrote my slips and handed them over to the librarian at the circulation desk, who happened to be that man.

  Neither he nor I spoke a word of greeting or recognition. He matter-of-factly picked up the slips, flipped through them for a moment, and told me to come back two hours later. I nodded and decided to go back to my seat and look for more material.

  Two hours later when I returned to the desk, the man presented a stack of books to me and said, “Więc mówisz po polsku?” So you speak Polish?

  “Tak.” Yes.

  A question I had been asked on numerous occasions. I answered simply. The man looked at my stack and asked me another question.

  “Druga wojna światowa?” The Second World War?

  I couldn’t answer him. I had just picked up the books and was trying to keep my balance, pressing down on the top of the stack with my chin. The man stopped asking me questions. And so, hugging the books, I gingerly turned around and went back to my seat.

  It was because I could see the old man, and also because I was researching the Second World War, he told me later. I had a feeling that was the case. There was probably some racial curiosity involved as well but I didn’t ask about that. All I did was read in the library during the day and come out to the plaza in the evenings for a simple dinner and some people-watching. Prices in Poland at the time were very low, and I could afford a meal even in that touristy section of town, as long as I stuck to the outdoor cafés and didn’t go into the restaurants. I would grab a bottle of sparkling water and a sandwich, watch the people coming and going and the carriage for tourists going round and round the plaza, and try not to think of the future. I didn’t believe in any bright future for me. I didn’t know if I would even be able to make a living. Therefore, “a moment ago” was always the best moment, and the present was always better than the future. When I returned, I knew I would miss leisurely sitting in this spot, enjoying the slowly setting sun. I tried my utmost to enjoy it as much as I could.

  I had finished my day at the library and was in the plaza, looking around for an empty table at an outdoor café, when the man appeared.

  “Piwo?” Beer?

  A short question. After a moment of brief hesitation, I nodded.

  *

  From then on, whenever I left the library and went to the plaza, he would appear before me after a little while. Or, on the days I wasn’t working at the library, he would wait for me there. During our simple dinners he would mostly drink beer, and I would drink coffee or sparkling water.

  I never saw the old man again.

  “On kiedyś tu wróci,” he said. He’ll come back here someday.

  I laughed. “That’s the title of a Polish language textbook one of the universities here publishes.”

  “I know,” he answered, smiling.

  The title was actually Pewnego dnia tu wrócisz ponownie —You’ll Come Back Here Someday. I didn’t believe I’d ever be back. As much as I loved the place, life doesn’t give such opportunities so readily, and I couldn’t continue this state of hovering between reality and unreality forever.

  That was probably why, when he suggested we go to his apartment, I accepted.

  … If I could make a wish

  I wouldn’t know what to say

  What should I wish for

  Bad times or good times …

  *

  He asked me to tie him up. The tools, methods, and positions differed slightly each time, but he was always very thorough in explaining what he wanted.

  He was asking me to tie him up, not the other way around, and it seemed like such an important thing to him that I didn’t ask any questions and just did it. It goes without saying that I had never tied up a person before in my life. Even tying knots was awkward for me. Patiently, he explained what he wanted over and over again and was grateful when I had bound him up tightly in the way he wanted.

  It wasn’t so much a fetish as it was an obsession. He had a fixed script for the whole thing from beginning to end. Only when he and the other person (me, in other words) followed this script precisely could he calm down. But if one thing went off-script, he became very anxious and repeatedly asked me to correct it until we followed the script precisely once more. But that script was solely his own, and the problem was that I didn’t know it at first.

  On the surface, I was the one doing the tying and he the one being tied, but in practice, he was the one ordering me around and I the one trying to adhere to the script. He didn’t seem aware that he was following some imaginary script. He kept using words like “correct” or “wrong” to describe my attempts. But on a fundamental level, there is no wrong or right way of tying up your lover in bed. It was tough for me when I didn’t understand his highly subjective judgment regarding what was correct or wrong. He would patiently repeat himself or try using easier words, but that only made me feel like I was stupid. He wasn’t angry when I was “wrong,” but I could see he was getting nervous, which made me feel even more stupid and useless.

  “I’m sorry.” He would apologize when I seemed frustrated. “I know this is unpleasant. I know I’m strange, too. But please, bear with me.”

  I didn’t think tying him up was in itself unpleasant or strange. There are many kinds of tastes in the world, and if I had found his so unacceptable, I wouldn’t have stayed. I just wanted to do something that was important for him because I didn’t dislike him as a person, and to do that, I had to understand the general picture he possessed in his head, th
e script he stored in his mind.

  It took quite some time for me to understand the context. His apartment, to speak in Korean terms, was a “one-room.” Small and narrow, but the ceiling very high, with a skylight through which you could see the stars. Gazing at my body and his own tied-up self reflected on the glass panes above us against the black night, he would murmur, “Beautiful.”

  I’d nod mechanically. From my perspective, things were a little too unreal for me to really appreciate them. Things like Poland, this tied up man, myself.

  Then, he told me about his grandfather.

  *

  It was the summer of his eleventh year when he went to live with his grandfather. His grandfather had survived the Nazi concentration camps. Not only did the Nazis have the notorious death camps with their gas chambers, they also ran munitions factories using forced labor. This was where many Polish people with no Jewish ancestry ended up. When labor was in short supply toward the end of the war, the Germans would roam the streets snatching up anyone they could find to send to munitions factories or farms. His grandfather was one of the people who had been taken from the streets.

  “But Grandfather never told me what life had been like in the camp. Not even once. Isn’t that strange?”

  It genuinely seemed to perplex him.

  His Grandfather was taken up with other concerns. According to his grandson, the older man’s purpose in life could be summed up in one word: “survival.”

  The old man never left the house. His life consisted of practicing how to survive without ever leaving his home. Once the sun went down, it was forbidden to turn the lights on or even turn the faucets to take a shower, as was making any kind of sound. They spared their water and food as much as possible, which was why their home was always stacked with canned food.

  “My favorite times were Easter and Christmas and Catholic saints’ days. We got to eat things that weren’t from a can.”

  His grandfather also regularly cleaned the house and did the laundry—their home was as neat as a pin and their clothes were immaculate. But there were always fully packed suitcases by the door in case they ever needed to make a run for it. A crucial part of his life with his grandfather was checking the contents of those bags, making sure the food and batteries were regularly replaced.