I still can’t come to terms with the fact that I’ve left her, that we’ve broken up – two words, two shards of pottery. You open the kilns and it’s all too late – the perfect pot is gone forever. No, breaking up doesn’t really conjure what’s happened, it doesn’t explain it, it doesn’t hold any meaning; like the waters of Cheonggyecheon Stream, it runs through my fingers.
3
Pots
HERE IN MELBOURNE I seem to be seeing people inside a cupboard I left behind, the one with the beheaded toys, the despised Scrabble board, the old cricket ball, the rusty harmonica – ligan objects lying on the bottom of the ocean, sometimes marked by a buoy, which can be reclaimed.
I crane my neck to look south towards the city. I wonder if people still live on this street, above and behind the shops and the roar of the traffic, huddled in their houses with their tiny front gardens, or if the houses are all yoga institutes and osteopaths, cool cafés and accountants. I wonder if the ordinary people are there, behind their front doors, with kettles singing, children running down the stairs, and dogs barking at any new arrival.
I must have come back here for something. This thought keeps cropping up, a kind of weed in my brain. It’s certainly something I don’t remember planting. But it’s there all the same, part of the landscape.
When I started learning how to make pots, every pot that failed made me think of childhood – breaking so many parts of you.
As a kid in Richmond I thought each unknown face could be that of a friend, but each friend could just as well have been one of those people walking further and further away from that first glimpse I had of them – a mother, a newsagent, a neighbour, a perfect stranger; every possible connection was tenuous and profound.
In Seoul my friends could only have been Sung-ki, who had so many wrinkles he didn’t know what to do, and Marylou, who had been with so many men she only had a pseudonym, after Dean Moriarty’s girlfriend in On the Road. It suited her American accent, and her fluency, even if her diffidence verged on the British, probably one of the reasons she loved Chandler so much. I didn’t know Marylou’s real Korean name. It gradually became obvious that she’d lived in America for quite a long time. One day she let slip that she’d done a year of English at a university in Los Angeles before dropping out. She was now twenty-four and read Chandler and Dostoyevsky as she waited for her clients. This seemed like a good combination to me. The sadness of the Russians and the tough, good-hearted detective were bulwarks for her life on the streets. I’d always felt Dostoyevsky’s hand under my elbow when I read him and had been oddly hopeful when I read Chandler. Perhaps it was just that they both understood human nature so well. You couldn’t feel numb in their company – they provided too many neurological pathways out of disaster and pain.
Strangely, in spite of her sad, wild beauty she reminded me of my grandmother, with whom she shared the same kind of sassiness, the same no-nonsense attitude that grasped the day by its coat-tails. I had no idea why she was doing the oldest job in the world. I only hoped that the money was good, and that no psychopaths darkened the threshold of her thighs. I hated the sight of her flagging down cars and being swallowed by them. It made her vanish. It made her Czech.
She always greeted me in same way.
‘Hey, Marlowe.’
She called me Marlowe for Philip Marlowe, though sometimes I wondered whether she didn’t mean Marlow from Heart of Darkness. She also called me Prince Myshkin sometimes.
‘Hey, Marylou.’
‘Do you want some soup later on?’
‘Anything with you, Marylou.’
And she would tip her sad, sassy smile towards me and stretch one of her beautiful limbs as if she were about to walk out into the night by my side, though we always stayed where we were, on the kerb. If a man walked by she would turn three-quarters towards him and I would fall back into the shadows. It was so easily done: she didn’t need any hustling or fancy talk, all she needed was to turn towards them in a desultory way, as if it were an off-the-cuff, last-minute decision, casual for her and instantaneous for them.
‘Marlowe, do you ever feel the need to go to the country?’
‘I do, sometimes. When it happens, I rent a car and shoot off to get a bit of sky above my head. There’s not enough here.’
‘Here?’ she said, as if she were referring to some Caribbean island in the middle of nowhere.
‘Were you born in Seoul, Marylou, or in America?’
She stared then and started humming some dated ditty, like ‘Yes! We Have No Bananas’. She knew all kinds of American songs – again, like my grandmother, who was subject to fits of jazz fever and talked about Mezz Mezzrow, Billie Holiday and ‘The Bird’. Marylou may have reminded me of my grand-mother, but I liked her as if she’d been a chum of mine since kindergarten. She’d punch my arm and we’d clink soup bowls. The grandmother business was just an added perk.
I soon learned to stop asking her questions. They were obviously too close for comfort. I just hoped she would give me some answers one day.
Reading was her other career. We never talked much about anything else. Books spilled from her mind, leaching into her life, more potent than what was happening to her.
There was no desire or attraction between us. I never understood it. Her looks were like a medical condition: they were over the top. There she was, leaning back against the wall, so close, her flawless skin breathing next to me in the night, and it did nothing for me – zilch. Her glow had a puzzling quality. It reminded me of yoghurt or milk, of a white cloud or sand seen from far away. It felt like it couldn’t be touched, not really – even if it so often was. It had that heartbreaking quality of a child’s skin, of snow, until one saw in her smile a sadness that was scary because it seemed to contain all the other sadnesses around it.
I can still hear her scratchy voice calling me ‘old boy’, ‘old man’, ‘chum’ or ‘mate’, and I’d tell her, ‘I’ve got your six,’ in that Spitfire pilot lingo we both liked. Indeed, I had her back, keeping an eye on her returns and taking down car numberplates. I just knew that one day something would happen. But Czechs are born pessimists.
One night she was kicked in the face. She couldn’t work for a week. I didn’t notice right away. Instead of her usual get-up, she was dressed in jeans and a big sweater and there were no jokes. I looked at her more carefully. Then car lights flashed by and I caught a glimpse of her profile. When I grasped her shoulders to look at her, Marylou leaned into me, without a sound or a whimper. And as she did, I felt the bewilderment of foreign boots invading my city, of a strange language being barked down my streets. Hlasy z vlasti – voices of the homeland. I – who had never been kicked in the face, who had never been put in prison and never had to flee on foot from my own country till my shoes bit into my skin – sensed Marylou’s pain was not about her kick in the face; it was an old agony as present as the history my mother and grandmother had experienced and poured into my bones. Marylou’s wound, whatever its cause, seemed to be the kind that was always there, more tangible than any bruise a madam, a pimp or a client might inflict on her.
Ha-yoon never met Sung-ki or Marylou. I met them all at different times and, somehow, they each glowed independently, in their own orbits. All the people I saw in Korea I saw alone. Marylou and I would joke in the night, eating our noodle soup standing up. Sung-ki and I would chat quietly in the morning or early afternoon. Ha-yoon I would visit at Ha-yoon times: in between lessons, at dusk, at night, at lunch. She sewed herself into my days, unexpectedly – days that were addictively monogamous, at least for me. I realise I miss these rituals already. Big decisions might take seconds, but how many years will I take to live mine down? If decisions are like tides, I feel like the beach. Up to now, I’ve only made two. With a few smaller ones tossed in between.
Marylou once told me that the equinoxes were the best times to move. ‘Didn’t you know, ignorant debris, that equinoxes also rule the tides?’
It’s strange how I rem
ember every single one of her quips, and I can visualise the evening she told me about the equinoxes. It was a few days before she was beaten up. She looked worried, cautious. It would happen sometimes. The concentric ripples spreading from the invisible people around her would erupt on her face, leaving marks and bruises, and bringing Philip Marlowe or Myshkin to the rescue when reinforcements were needed. Since then I’ve imagined equinoxes as big doorways, quite unlike solstices, which are more elastic, stretching winter and summer at the two ends of the ecliptic.
When I decided to leave, some equinoxial doorway must have swung open for me, making everything easy. The lease for my room was ending. I found a cheap plane ticket. Soon I was packing my backpack and queuing at the airport, before the word goodbye had even sunk in.
It’s about ten. There are no more excuses for not attempting some sort of life. I decide to haul myself out onto the street, and now I’m walking along a pockmarked footpath. I look around hoping that the minutes of now will strap me to my walking shoes and find my way to where I am decidedly going. Tree roots are tearing up the bitumen. I like the neighbourhood around here. It seems to have digested its memories.
I never understood that it was nostalgia that got me through things, but I do now. Today feels more like late autumn than early spring. Right now, nostalgia is what makes the footpaths as wide as the weather is still warm in Seoul. Nostalgia cuts through distance and generations like a knife through marshmallow, making the phantom of Seoul dog my footsteps, as I realise at last that the phantom of Czechoslovakia has always dogged everything else. It’s nostalgia that gives Weston Street its strange edge.
I’m going to try the only thing that I learned in Seoul, apart from my feeble Korean, and so I walk towards the pottery workshop that I noticed further down the street. The window is a kind of rectangular porthole, and after climbing the threshold’s high step I venture into a large, low-ceilinged, very white room.
Two women behind a long, curving counter are talking in subdued teacup voices, and I have to wait in a phantom queue. I start imagining three or four people ahead of me. It’s funny how Brunswick types come to me easily. First a man with a stringy beard, waxy jeans and a heavy-metal T-shirt, and then a girl with a bonnet of curls and a toothy grin …
I start thinking of Maminka. There’s an irony in calling her that. Yet that’s what I do when I think of her. She must be like any woman in her sixties walking down the street. Some have their hair cropped short in a way no Korean woman ever would. I wonder if she has given in to that tendency. I suppose she keeps popping up in my mind because I’m back in Melbourne, even if, for all I know, she’s up and left for the Czech Republic.
One of the women looks up. I kick the phantoms out of the way and hop to.
‘Can I sign up for a course of lessons?’
She stares at me as if I had spoken in Korean. I realise I’ve not said hello or given her the time of day. Something in me is keener than I thought to get back into it. I smile belatedly. I can feel the air on my teeth.
She’s Asian, but she has the rigid eccentricity of an English duchess. Something humorous floats in her eyes, something un-languorous in her movements, as if she were about to go out walking with her dogs on the moors. She dresses in autumn colours and wears her hair in a plait down the side of her breast. Her almond eyes and exquisite hands are the only parts of her that remind me of Ha-yoon. But then everything reminds me of Ha-yoon – a door closing, a step, the wind, a wooden table, a sip of water. Even Placido reminds me of Ha-yoon, because they both have sudden, ruthless smiles.
It’s difficult, and bureaucratic, to sign up. They’re already two weeks into a course and it’s too late to enrol. There’s a lot of toing and froing. It’s like being at a frontier post.
‘Can’t I just start tomorrow?’
‘Tomorrow?’ She looks horrified.
I sense getting my hands back into clay is going to be a long, drawn-out process. Not like in South Korea, where you seem to be able to just swim into it. I wait and pull back my shoulders. I can feel my whole body giving her a sense it will start growing aerial roots around her desk if she doesn’t give in. The woman she was talking to retreats, concentrating on a sheaf of papers, divorced from the proceedings. I turn to her, as if I were appealing to another official. She’s blonde with The Good Soldier Švejk’s snub nose, even if she’s not Czech, of course. Though you never know. She has heavy breasts and that kind of hair, so thick it reminds you of horses or lions, not human hair at all. She stares at me stiffly with a token lack of sympathy, probably her way of dealing with amateur potters.
I’ve never felt myself to be a potter anyway. I just need to have my hands in clay. He’s the one who taught me and the one I mostly owe this passion to. I thought I would try doing without pottery to avoid thinking about him. But how can I avoid thinking of Do-yun? And what do I find but this place practically on my doorstep.
I wrangle and wrangle with them. I’m coming close to begging when they suddenly accept because I sign up for a whole year, after discovering that they open in the evenings too. I’ll like coming here after dusk. It’s quite expensive, but I can use the kilns as often as I like. Then it’s the pretty one who asks for my name and address.
‘My name is Harold Vanek and I live above The Sea & Us.’
I get the smile I expect when I give her the information. She must have heard about Verity or had takeaway there.
‘The fish and chip shop!’
‘Yes.’
Now that I’m ‘in’, conversation is bestowed upon me. I’m informed that she’s called Syn. I hadn’t even asked her. Then, in a deadpan voice, she unexpectedly furnishes me with the exact meaning and spelling of her name.
‘It’s Old Norse. Syn was invoked during trials. She was the goddess of refusal. My father was a scholar. He chose it. It’s written s-y-n.’
I nod, as one tends to do when one gets more than one bargains for. I don’t tell her that syn means ‘son’ in Czech. Usually I like this kind of thing, except when it relates to my own name. Harold means ‘army’, ‘power’ or ‘ruler’ and is Germanic in origin. What was Maminka thinking? And my father, of course …
I have a sneaking sympathy for my lost father. He got away from her, didn’t he? Yet something in me avoids him carefully. Someone I don’t need to think about. A delightful chap – isn’t that what Bertie Wooster says when he wants to dismiss somebody into the outer reaches of his foggy mind?
Syn contemplates me tranquilly, as if from her deckchair overlooking the summer lawn. Maybe she’s waiting for me to make a pun on ‘sin’.
‘Funny how some syllables have a snowy feel,’ I say.
She nods her approval. I notice I’m trying to say the right thing, as if a wrong note could jeopardise my presence here. And then where would I go? I need to come to this place. I need something to stop me thinking. I know from experience that a real job, which I will have to take on soon, doesn’t do that for you.
I’m all right for money for the moment. All my savings went into the bank for eighteen years and I hardly spent anything because I lived like a monk, teaching English and making pottery. The odd girlfriend didn’t seem to change anything much. Maybe I could teach Korean or Czech. Maruška taught me Czech and got me to read Havel, Škvorecký, Kundera … I wonder if anyone in Melbourne is keen to learn Czech or Korean? The children’s stories I dabble at and their illustrations are lying low. Too gloomy to be published, I’m told. Nobody is insured enough to withstand a wave of child suicides. A male Czech Beatrix Potter, I am. Ha. An unseemly pun. In any case, if I get my hands in clay again, the children’s stories will probably lie derelict in the bottom of a backpack.
I say goodbye to Syn and shake her small palm as if she were a minor official of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
4
Do-yun
THE PURRING WHEEL between my knees feels silent to me, and in that silence, I don’t hear the five other wheels. They’ve disappeared. I am in a forest
, unable to catch the other forest noises because of the wind in my own leaves.
I lay some more clay on the plate. I don’t know what I’m going to do with it – or what it’s going to do with me. I’ve been coming to their courses and have seen the differences compared to what I learned from Do-yun. But now I’m forgetting to look up at them; I can’t help myself – their voices are un-mesmerising. Instead, all I can hear is Do-yun’s quiet, elegant, restrained English, tiding me over any difficulty, nudging me on, speaking directly to my listening fingers. He always spoke English to me, rather than tax my Korean. From the minute I’d let myself in through the linen curtain into the wooden-beamed room where he worked, his look of acceptance had settled us both into the clay. When I touched it, I felt instantly renewed. Dust motes hung in the light, yet all one could smell was the wateriness of freshly dug graves.
It’s different here, but I’m starting to get used to it and to answer to it, like a sailor changing his gait to walk on land. I’m also reading the light in a different way. There’s more whiteness in it, less yellowness – in this room in particular. When the pot starts happening the clay recognises the tough and thorough Australian light, that descends on its curves and holds it as it comes out of your hands.
Korean light is gently shifting, it hardly settles, but then it will suddenly slice through the clay and one has to stop the wheel. That was when Do-yun would throw me a look, half a smile. Our friendship, unexpected as it was, was one of my paths to sanity. He had me see the difference between solitariness and loneliness. He gave me back the mystery of being in a strange country, the appreciation of my freedom, the sound of my own steps. There was something in him that created a hollow, a space in the living minute, where you could dwell, where you could make something. How could I have guessed he was Ha-yoon’s husband?
I had met her in a bar. She was alone, sitting in the pool created by a downlight exactly above her head, meditatively sipping her cocktail from a straw, abstracted from her surroundings. Available, elusive, more spell than woman, smiling to herself. I sat a little further down from her. In spite of my having been there for over fifteen years, Seoul could still feel new to me, still strange and alive, pressing against my ribs, against my spine.
The Sea & Us Page 3
