by Bora Chung
He tried to understand his grandfather and followed the rules to the best of his ability. But the year he turned fifteen, he rebelled against his grandfather for the first time. His grandfather had stopped him from going out with his friends after the winter sun had set. The reason was not to simply make his grandson obey him, but because he was so afraid and anxious. It was precisely because his grandson understood this that made him snap at his grandfather.
“I shouted at him that the war was long over, Communism was dead, everyone was free, and nothing bad happened to children who played outside past seven p.m.”
“What did he say to that?”
“He said nothing.”
His grandfather had stared at him for a while, turned around, and went into his room. His unfocused eyes and slumped shoulders made him look as if he’d aged ten years in a single moment.
From then on, his grandfather stopped buying canned food or keeping bags by the front door. Until the day he graduated high school, all his grandfather did was sit gazing blankly into a television screen. He died in front of that television.
“He was dead when I came home one day. And right next to him stood a younger version of him. About the age I am now, the way he looked before he was taken to the concentration camp.”
His grandfather’s younger self kept agitatedly looking back and forth between his older self’s face and his grandson’s. The grandson slowly pointed to the door. When he nodded, his grandfather’s younger self, still with a confused expression, slowly walked toward it and departed. From a window, the grandson stared for a long time as his grandfather’s soul walked down the street, crossed the sunlit plaza, and disappeared into a wider realm.
“Grandfather had spent his whole life being terrified of a war that was long over, of a concentration camp that had long disappeared. It was only after he died when he could finally walk about the city freely,” he murmured.
I had to ask him. “Who was that older gentleman walking in one direction in the plaza?”
“Probably someone shot during the war,” he said. “I’ve seen him there often. He crosses the street and tries as hard as he can to go back home, but I think he lost so much blood that he died before he could make it.”
“I wonder why they can’t leave those terrible times behind. Whether in life or death.”
“Trauma. Probably.”
… If I could make a wish
I want to be just a little happier
If I become too happy
I will miss sadness
He occasionally hummed a song under his breath. I asked him what it was once, and he said he didn’t know. “Some song my grandfather sang often. Probably from the war.”
A long time later, I heard the song again in an old movie. It was about World War II and the Nazi concentration camps, and the main female protagonist slightly altered the lyrics of a Marlene Dietrich song.
Life
I love life
… I don’t know what I want but
I still expect a lot
In the movie, a woman imprisoned in a concentration camp seduces a Nazi officer in order to survive, serenading him half-naked. A life destroyed, not knowing what one wants, but loving life nevertheless—the lyrics resurrected my long-forgotten friend, and thoughts of him lingered for a long time.
*
The summer was short, and I had to go back. When I had only a few days left, I asked him a question.
“What is the sadness you miss that makes you want to be tied up?”
There was conflict in his gaze. It was a long time before he spoke.
“No one has asked me that before.”
“Are you happy when you’re tied up?” I asked.
“No,” he immediately replied. And then, after some thought, he added, “It feels safer when I’m tied up.”
“What feels safer?”
He always wanted me to tie him up as tightly as I could. It was clear he was in pain when I did, and there were red welts where the restraints had been when I untied him. Even if I was physically weaker than him, and even if I was his lover, I found it hard to believe that such tight knots made him feel safe.
Slowly, he whispered, “I feel like I’m being given permission to stay alive.”
His reply was somehow so heart-breaking that I tied him up with all my might.
*
When I met him again, he was still in the same apartment. It had been a long time and I couldn’t remember clearly, but his apartment seemed emptier and more desolate than before.
“I thought you’d be married by now,” I said.
“I almost was.”
“Why didn’t you do it?”
“She didn’t want to tie me up.”
I nodded.
“And you?” he asked. “Why aren’t you married?”
For a moment, I thought about the simplest way to answer this question. “I have debts to pay,” I said finally. “Mother borrowed some money under my name.”
And was still borrowing it. I didn’t know how to say “forgery of official documents” in Polish so I couldn’t go into more detail.
He nodded as if he understood and left it at that. I liked that about him.
“Is that gentleman in the plaza still there?” I asked.
“Probably. He’s only visible in the summer usually, I haven’t seen him lately.”
That old man repeatedly walking from east to west on the southern side of the plaza was the only ghost I ever saw. Whether before the plaza or after, in Korea or another country, I had never seen another ghost. Until now.
“Really?” He was surprised. “You were so casual about it that I thought you saw ghosts all the time.”
Since he was four, he had seen things other people didn’t. Dead people, but also dead animals like cats, dogs, or horses. Too young to understand what death was, the sight of half-transparent people and animals floating through surrounding objects was simply amusing to him.
Like most Polish people, his parents were Catholics. When he began describing what the dead animals looked like, his mother thought he simply had an overactive imagination; it was only when he could accurately describe what people had looked like right before their deaths that she became terrified. She prayed and consulted with a priest and spent most of the day in church with him, but it was no use. Even in the church, he could see a priest who had died there two years ago and the man whose funeral they had held the other week. His mother brought him back and starved him, and when he complained about being hungry, she beat him.
The beatings had an instant effect, and he no longer talked about the dead people or animals he saw. But making him fast had backfired, as hunger sharpened his sensitivity. Especially when he went to bed on an empty stomach, he would talk to the dead in his sleep or sleepwalk with dead people in the middle of the night. This horrified his mother, who would forbid him from eating all day and lock him in the house, beating him mercilessly. His mother always cried as she hit him and prayed fervently afterward. He knew that his mother stayed home all day with him also eating nothing and not sleeping and crying all night, praying in whispers, and that was why the more he was beaten, the guiltier he felt. In his eleventh year, his mother’s maternal uncle—in other words his grandmother’s brother—passed away. When his mother came back from the funeral, he said goodbye to his mother in the voice of his grandmother’s brother whom he had never met. He had no memory of this himself. His mother did not eat for days after that and was hospitalized, which was why he was sent to his grandfather’s house in this city. This was when I learned for the first time that he was not from this southern city but from the outskirts of Warsaw.
“Then is your mother still in Warsaw?”
“Probably,” he replied. “I never saw her after being sent away to my grandfather’s. Except briefly at my high school graduation. We haven’t been in contact since.”
“And your father?” He had never spoken about his father. His expression was so disconcert
ed that I apologized. “I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s not that. My father is … how do I say this …” He frowned. “My father was … an uncertain person. Do you know what I mean?”
I did not. I waited.
“When I was with Mother or Grandfather, the purpose of my existence was clear. Does that make sense? Grandfather’s purpose was to survive using the means he learned in the war, and therefore he always had something to do. Check the emergency bags, check the water and cans, at night turn the lights off and don’t make a sound. When the sun rose the next day, he had a clear sense of having survived to see another day. With Mother …” He trailed off and was lost in thought. “With Mother things were bad, but my purpose then was that she was suffering because I was bad, so I had to not be bad. When I said bad things she would cry, she would starve and pray, tie me up on the bed and hit me, and sometimes leave me tied up all night so I wouldn’t go off on a walk with a dead person. So not being bad was my purpose. But my father …” He frowned again. “Well, Father is my grandfather’s son. But he was totally different from Grandfather. I don’t know what he lived for. He didn’t seem happy or anything. He was always doing something meaningless while his mind was elsewhere.” He thought a bit more. “I don’t know about Father. I’m not in contact with him.”
I could finally understand the horrific and cruel clarity of what he considered to be meaningful. The desperation and immense fear that your life, as well as the future to come, hinged on a moment. I could also understand how, in a situation where there was a single person who could kill you but also save you, all your survival instincts would be used toward satisfying that one person.
Once you experience a terrible trauma and understand the world from an extreme perspective, it is difficult to overcome this perspective. Because your very survival depends on it.
Parents who destroy their children’s lives, who suck the life out of their children’s futures, not only for the sake of maintaining their own illusions but also to zealously expand them into the lives of their children—such parents can almost be understood from the perspective of obsession. Following the words “Be grateful I raised you” is the implied clause “instead of killing you or leaving you for dead.” They probably mean it, too. My parents and their parents’ generations, after surviving the Korean War, had always, just like the generation that survived World War II, set their purpose not to live a human life but to have an animal’s instinct for survival.
Still, understanding and forgiving are completely different things.
He whispered, “Will you tie me?”
I nodded.
“Will you be able to leave after the night is over?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” Then he said, “What are you going to do after I’m gone?”
I couldn’t answer. He asked again. “Will you go back to your country?”
“No,” I said. “I will never go back again.” My own answer surprised me.
Quietly, he said, “Then I will stay here with you.”
“Thank you,” I whispered back.
When I woke up the next morning, he wasn’t with me. I opened the bathroom door. Just as he had looked when he died, he was hanging by the neck from a radiator, his eyes closed.
I tapped him lightly. He opened his eyes.
“Do you want me to untie you?”
His throat was constrained by the cord around it, so he blinked in answer.
As I undid the cord, I listlessly sang along with him.
… If I could make a wish
I wouldn’t know what to say.
What should I wish for
The bad times or the good times
I had no hope anymore for good times, but I didn’t want to wish for bad times, either. I was waiting for something but didn’t know what to hope for. There was no future. All of our survival skills were trapped in the past.
For some people, their lives are ruled by one shocking event reverberating through their survival instincts. Life shrinks into a trap made up of a shimmering moment in the past, a trap where they endlessly repeat that singular moment when they were surest of being alive. That moment is short, but long after it has passed, good times as well as bad slip like sand through their fingers as they meaninglessly repeat and confirm their survival. Those who are unaware of their lives slipping away while they are ensnared in the past—him, his grandfather, his mother, me—are in the end, whether alive or dead, ghosts of the past.
… If I could make one wish
I want to be just a little bit happier
If I’m too happy
I will miss the sadness
I released his neck and wrists.
“How did you do this?” I marveled. “How did you tie your own hands and noose?”
“I thought about it for a long time.” He seemed slightly proud of himself. “I had to do it alone, because if I made a mistake, I wouldn’t die but only get hurt, and that would mean a lot of suffering.”
I hugged him hard. I imagined him alone in that empty apartment, pondering for a long time the most efficient way of hanging himself.
“It’s all right,” he said. “Thank you.”
And he was gone. I was alone in his empty bathroom.
No one asked us, when we were still nameless
Whether we wanted to live or not
Now I wander the big city alone
Looking in doors and windows
Waiting and waiting for something …
There was nothing left for me to wait for.
But there I remained, standing in his bathroom, waiting for someone to miraculously find me, to release me from my ties to this life.
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