I remember the bar owner. He was short and wiry and wore black from head to toe, but never quite managed to fill the part. I liked him. His bar was tiny and smelt strongly of almonds. He often played Bill Evans. We never talked, even when I went there alone, but I could see he had an eye on me. Too young, too lonely; never drinking too much; something not quite right seemed to be his diagnosis.
I wasn’t that lonely – the English lessons, the occasional girl – but somehow all this hadn’t left much of an impression. I was still a part-time inhabitant, a traveller, even if I hadn’t bought a plane ticket in years. Sometimes I felt like those vampires who don’t have a reflection in a shop window or a looking glass. I was one of the many people in a city who don’t quite exist, not properly. The barman would pour my Zubrowka carefully, like medicine, and push the glass towards me with his knuckles, reminding me of poker chips being pushed slowly across green baize. Then, after Ha-yoon, he started treating me like a tycoon. She had that effect on people. I may have walked off with Ha-yoon under his admiring nose, but something in me knew there’d be a payback time. This was more Philip Marlowe’s territory than mine.
I still can’t fathom how I managed to get talking to her. Holding a cocktail umbrella stuck in an olive, her fingers made figures of eight in her Bloody Mary. It might have been something else but it’s the only cocktail I can remember. I hate the things. They’re so fake, they remind me of the type of women you read about in Graham Greene’s gin-soaked novels.
Yet she didn’t feel like an escort or a bored housewife feeding off cocktails. She seemed like a lonely woman, the kind you meet in parks or at libraries.
After a straight Zubrowka vodka I was a bit more plain-spoken, outspoken, than usual. That drink, I’ve always found, makes you wittier than you really are. I didn’t even notice myself talking. I was just there with her – with that woman at that bar, leaning on our elbows, ordering each other another drink. I didn’t realise she was picking me up, not straight away. There was something smooth and educated about her. Something so adult, so self-contained, that one felt she must have been like that as a child. It was as if she lent you her presence. I don’t remember exactly when I fell in love with her. It must have been that night. That night, when I was taken, as the Irish say.
We had walked pleasurably, a little sedately, before I realised how excited I was. The very slowness of it reminded me of Kundera’s Slowness – the way she carried herself. It spelt complexity, and effortlessness, at the same time. She had a way of putting the flat of her hand against her hair that fascinated me. Women touch their hair in myriad different ways, but Ha-yoon’s way was the way. She reminded me of no one. I could have been born on a desert island, and she the first woman I’d ever met. Which, in a way, was true.
The darkness in Seoul is a special kind of darkness. The night is thick with blackness, an endless measure of it, as if it were the true texture of the place. Lights stud it and bore holes into its denseness, each with a sort of painful joy. People walk around languidly, lazily, as if this immense, incommensurable night had been theirs since the beginning of time. Ha-yoon’s relationship to it was different. She waded through it with swimming steps. She didn’t laze. Rather, it seemed to energise her. She was the suave stranger in her own land. She didn’t quite belong. And that brought me to her.
We went and sat by the Cheonggyecheon Stream. There’s something about that place that reminds me of Melbourne. I can’t pinpoint the resemblance except that the stream is as real and as lazy as the Yarra. It moseys along, not bothered by the buildings sprouting along its sides, the people dotted along its embankments like crib ornaments, the city beyond going to pot for all it cares. The beauty of the place is in its atmosphere, not in its aesthetics. Moonee Ponds is a bit like that – the perfect little town, a saintly suburb near Brunswick. Its main drag, Puckle Street, is nothing to write home about, yet one sees beauty, one hears and touches beauty – the opposite of the sculpture of the three monkeys who see, hear and touch no evil. In Moonee Ponds, whatever you hear, see and touch is good for you, for the child holding your hand or for the straw hat on your head.
I also love the slow turning of the wheel. I keep it a degree slower than they advise and Syn has prompted me a few times to return it to the right speed, implying that disaster would ensue. When it hasn’t, she’s frowned. Do-yun’s way is flowing through me, as if the distance between us has cleared the channels of my brain and my fingers are hearing everything I ever heard him say.
Even on that day, that last day … our hands were full of clay and we were drained of anything personal because that is what clay does to you. When he spoke he knew what he was doing – I was as mentally naked as a baby in his bath.
‘Ha-yoon has told you she’s my wife.’
I was not surprised. Of course he knew.
‘Yes, she told me this morning, Do-yun.’
My hands were hearing him.
It was easy to ask: ‘For how long have you known, Do-yun?’
Each word seemed to stick in my mouth.
‘Since you finished the blue bowl. One feels these things.’
I made a mental calculation. And during that time he’d continued being just the same?
Do-yun breathed out.
‘You must forgive an old man. I understand you are the one who is feeling betrayed.’
‘I have nothing to forgive you for, Do-yun. But why did you ask her to invite me after that? Surely …’
‘When I want someone over I always ask her. Other Koreans don’t. But we are different. And then, when you didn’t agree to come …’
We both knew we were talking at cross-purposes. That’s when he lifted his hand and the pot slowed down of its own accord. It seems to me that some words, like some pots, are made for one occasion, one instance, one moment. Their particular cast can be thrown out straight after. He explained, without calling for pity or understanding, leaving nothing in the shade, nothing to doubt, nothing to mull over, putting paid to the matter. It was quite simple really – as simple as the dust motes, very nearly as simple as clay.
In fact he was grateful to me because Ha-yoon had taken to picking up men in bars, and all that had stopped – thanks to me, he said. He was grateful. It was bad for her health. It worried him. But what to do? Anything else would be imprisoning a young, beautiful woman in a cage of celibacy because she was married to a man thirty years her senior.
He smiled, but I saw the flash of pain as clearly as the splash of clay on his brow. He had taken on more than his heart could hold and he had probably known that from the start. I wondered if this isn’t always the case. You know you’re going to end up being flotsam, jetsam, ligan or derelict, but you do it all the same.
The moment I saw his wry shake of the head was when I really decided to leave, even if I had thought about it before. He must have felt it, because he immediately said, ‘You don’t need to go away, Harold.’
But it was too late, the pot was cracked. Dropping our poor show of keeping up appearances, he didn’t try to convince me and quietly voiced his regret instead.
‘I shouldn’t have invited you to dinner. My affection for you got away with me. I should have been content with things as they were. But then, when I realised what you were for her, I was all the more intent. I wanted to make sure of you. I wanted to safeguard her future. More like a father than a husband.’
I didn’t answer, so he continued.
‘I am seventy. Things are going to go wrong with me soon. They must.’
But I couldn’t give in. I would have lost myself, as I almost lost myself to Liběna, my mother. Pity is worse than cruelty, I’ve often thought. Better to break the perfect bowl than to run with pity.
We worked on in silence and our silence was whole again.
I realise now how unusual it was for him to have given me extra classes alone. At first I worked in his normal apprentice-filled studio, but as time went by more and more time was spent alone with him.
Now when my fingers move on their own, without thought or travail, just obeying the clay, I can almost feel Do-yun sitting there, somewhere in the room, in a trick of the light, between light and shadow.
That day, we continued for hours, late into the night, only speaking a few words here and there. I can still see his longish hair, without a hint of white, so fine it slid off his cheekbones, his tall body easefully planted on his potter’s stool and his helplessly long fingers nearly immobile as the bowl appeared. You could see how death would be effortless company for him, how his flesh would wash clean from his bones, how his voice, deep and light at the same time, would stay alive in many ears, how he’d go, swift and easy, just as he would walk out of a room with his slight stoop, more meditative than elderly – the timeless stoop of the potter.
Whenever he left a room you felt a void. I can still clearly see the two folds around his eyes when he smiled. And to think that he knew about Ha-yoon and me for so long, in that twilight … The only one who had all the cards was Ha-yoon, and that was also what made me decide to leave that night – that night that swirled around me as I worked.
Why am I letting these people climb back into my memory like passengers for a very long flight? Why did I have to start pottery again? Probably because I can’t do without it.
Syn ignores me now and lets me use the place day and night as I please. She has even given me a key. Maybe I could have a job here, but I recoil from giving classes. I could never teach anyone pottery. My mind, like someone turning in his sleep, turns to Do-yun when I last saw him.
I couldn’t leave it alone – I had to talk about it all again.
‘If I had known who you were, Do-yun, I would have left. Left Seoul. Left South Korea.’
‘It was for the best, then. At least not knowing had you stay longer.’ He smiled. I could see he’d given up trying to have me change my mind and was back to his old self, with that detachment that seemed to guide him past any private pain.
‘For a long time, we both thought we only had pottery in common …’ His voice left him as if it had gone from the room.
The white curtains of the rectangular window were moving slightly in the breeze that sometimes picks up after dusk. I stared at them. I could hear him breathe.
‘She …’
Do-yun’s hand freed itself from the clay and chased his own word away. Then it was time to say goodbye and we both stood up. I left my last pot behind, hoping he would keep it. We stood by the door. We bowed to each other. It felt like any other day and I frowned, trying to remind myself that this was the last time I would see him. But before I could catch myself thinking anything, Do-yun had moved forward to shake my hand.
Then, instead of melting into the night as usual, after glancing at me, he pivoted on his heels and returned to the room to hold my pot in a strange, proprietorial way – like a man laying his palm on a horse, a pillar or a tree.
‘May I have this, Harold?’
‘I was hoping that you would, Do-yun.’
He shooed me out then with an unusual movement of his arm that was more like a thwarted welcome than an adieu, and stayed there with my piece of clay.
5
Saying Goodbye to Marylou
MY NUMBNESS HAD grown when I met up with Marylou at the soup stall the following afternoon. I had always liked listening to her chat to the soup vendor. Like two stray cats commenting on their forays into the neighbourhood, they spoke softly, under no awning because there was none, the icy wind prowling around above their heads, above the heat generated by the boiling pots, as if it wanted to tear us all apart, while the lettering for Korean soups flapped about like scarlet birds intent on pecking at the steaming food.
As soon as the vendor saw me, he would start talking to someone else, because he knew I was her friend instead of her client, and he approved of that. He also kept an eye on Marylou. We often exchanged looks. The whole soup-drinking population of the neighbourhood seemed to enjoy his being there. He extended bowl after bowl to his customers with wiry agility, expending too much energy in each of his movements, so that a sprinkle of his chutzpah accompanied every soup he sold.
I proposed to her that we walk over to the museum. Would she like to see a pot, I asked her? I knew that Marylou smelled a rat, because she nodded and accepted immediately, no questions asked. That stroll has stayed in my memory like a film. All I have to do is frown and half close my eyes for it to unspool in my head – the way we walked, the things we said …
The museum itself has a windy Bauhaus look, with a refined Soviet-era touch. You are engulfed by its immense garage-like portico and soon find yourself as far away from Seoul as if you had taken a plane in time.
The pot was in the White Porcelain Room on the third floor, and as we trudged up the stairs, Marylou said that the History Museum had the exhibits of the past on the left and the exhibits of the future on the right. In this one, it was a more a vertical scale – the most beautiful things were at the top. She was a font of miscellaneous knowledge, as if she had trudged through many museums on her own. She seemed at home there, peaceful, purposeful.
We reached the third floor and stood in front of the fifteenth-century Moon Jar, which sat there – solidly elusive. We stared at it like two schoolchildren, but I still couldn’t get around to telling her that I was leaving.
She stared at it for a long time. You can always tell when Marylou likes something. She drops her smart-alec poses, a cloud of tenderness envelops her and she withdraws into herself, to a place no one can enter. And it would never have occurred to me to try. I just waited. Then when she turned, I bent down towards her.
‘Marylou …’
‘Did you say it was a pot, you loop boat? It’s a jar, see?’
She pointed to the sign and said, ‘Moon Jar, Joseon Dynasty, fifteenth century. And look, it could be the rings of Saturn too, not only the moon.’
She was right. You could see milky wreaths in the pot’s texture. Then I heard her take a breath.
‘Hey, Myshkin, do you know Morandi?’
It was the first time we’d talked about painting.
‘Yeah. I love him.’
‘That’s no surprise, old chum.’ She threw me a smile, as she would a golden coin into a beggar’s bowl.
I kept my eyes on the pot.
‘Georgio would have had a blast here.’
She didn’t answer so I swept in with my latest news.
‘I’ve left Ha-yoon.’
‘Never!’
‘Yes, last night.’
‘Have you told her? It doesn’t work until you tell them.’
Marylou was full of board game rules, though I would have bet a Morandi painting she’d never played one.
‘Nope. But I don’t need to – I’m packing up.’
‘What? You’re joking. What about the gang?’
She often referred to us as ‘the gang’.
‘I’m going back to Melbourne.’
She dug deep for her deadpan tone.
‘Your birthplace?’
She knew as well as I did that I had no birthplace and, more to the point, no sense of one. We knew each other as if we had come from the same litter.
‘Yeah.’
‘Home?’
‘Well, whatever you call it. I’m off. Put it that way.’
Our repertoire wasn’t working so well anymore. Somehow it was out of puff. It worked because we knew we would be seeing each other every day, bumping into each other on our street corner, bleary-eyed or hungry for breakfast, running to the soup vendor or staying close because the night was empty and hard, streetlights biting into the asphalt – the last client back with his wife and kids or business or gang of hoodlums (though Seoul isn’t a hotbed of gangsters). Our repertoire was failing us – perhaps because this ending of our friendship was harder than I’d ever bargained for. It had always been fun – but it had also been all about today. Now, suddenly, tomorrow had come.
I thrust my hands into my jean
s and played with my keys. I knew she could be staring at my shoulders, my profile, my earlobe, my jacket, my chin or my shoes. When she’s disconcerted, Marylou has the habit of fixing her gaze onto some part of you. I’ve never met anyone who could get herself into a trance like Marylou.
She frowned.
‘Does it hurt bad?’
‘I don’t know, kid. I’m kind of numb.’
‘Does Ha-yoon know?’ she asked again.
For some reason this reminded me of The Graduate, when Dustin Hoffman tells his parents he’s going to marry Katharine Ross. They ask him when he proposed and he answers: ‘I haven’t asked her yet.’ I shook my head and told her about Do-yun being Ha-yoon’s husband and about the non-existence of the three kids. She nodded. I never needed to explain things much with Marylou. It seemed that my reaction made perfect sense to her. This was unexpectedly consoling, almost vindicating.
I had sorted out almost everything that morning. My going had been quicker to organise than a funeral. Marylou would inherit all my books, which, she commented wryly, was the one big advantage of my departure.
‘Do you want me to help you pack your non-existent belongings? Have you got your ticket?’
‘Yeah, it’s all good.’
We went to see the Pensive Bodhisattva and when we both looked at it, Marylou, for the first time ever, took my hand.
‘Old chum,’ she said.
She has a funny hand, as small as a child’s, while managing to have long fingers. Again the feeling that we were of the same brood, that we played in the same sandpit, overwhelmed me. We stood there with time at our backs shoving us forward. She didn’t look at me once, she didn’t joke or call me Marlowe but just left her hand there for me to hold, and sometimes, like now, I feel I’m holding it still.
The Sea & Us Page 4
