We walked back together and only spoke of casual things. The minutes felt rubbery and strange because now I had told her, my leaving was as real as the ticket in my pocket. The plane was to fly out the next morning at 6 a.m.
I gave her my poster of Conrad Schumann jumping over the Berlin Wall in 1961, and the one of Andrew Wyeth’s painting The Reefer. We stood in my small room and looked out the window. She was often posted down there and I would whistle to ask if she wanted me to come down. If she whistled back, the coast was clear.
‘Thank you for the posters.’
We went down and had soup for supper. By then I knew that she wouldn’t work that night and would stay with me until it was time for me to leave – as if she were a teta, a matka, a babička, a family member. We didn’t talk about it, no decision was made, it just happened. I nearly asked her to get a ticket too and to chuck it all in.
The words were on my lips as we drank our soup on a low wall, with the soup vendor smiling benignly at us. Instead I gave her my email address and pleaded with her to keep in touch. Dusk spilled into night good and proper as we stayed, holding on to the old life that was leaving us. What would become of her?
The question hobbled around in my mind, and I wondered how to take the leap and ask her to come. But something about Marylou keeps you at bay, something dark and hard, something like a grenade that might explode any second and shatter her more completely than anything happening to her now. I don’t know why I’m so sure of that – maybe because I hold the same kind of grenade in my own hand.
6
The Moon Jar
I SAW THAT MOON JAR dozens of times and it never occurred to me to check its name. I would never have known it was called the Moon Jar if Marylou hadn’t pointed it out to me. It had a presence. The museum slid away, and Seoul slid away behind it. I used to stand there for up to ten minutes, without caring much about anything, in the kind of flow described in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book. I read it years ago, but it’s still alive in my mind. My mother had spoken of it. Considering how much I resent her it’s surprising how I’ve always managed to read every book she’s recommended.
Czechs speak of reading and literature like the French speak of wine or cheese, with dedicated seriousness and no bullshit. For them a good book is religion, like a good Camembert or a good Bordeaux. There’s no pretension, no snobbery involved. Football is a bit like that for Australians. It doesn’t mean, of course, that the Australians and the French don’t love books or have good literature themselves, but for the Czechs, books are food, survival, a day-to-day opium for their people, something to inhale, as essential and ordinary as oxygen, but extraordinary too, because without books, life is out of the question. So when Liběna recommended a book, I read it, and that would be that, just as she would read anything I suggested. Maybe that’s what exile does to you – you don’t waste stuff or time, as if everything could vanish in an instant. In a way, though I was born in this country, have its nationality and have come back here, I’ve also managed to put myself in exile, as if the state of exile were the substratum of my nature and only in reaching it would I be able to function properly. Perhaps, like my mother and grandmother, I needed to lose identity thoroughly and find out what’s still there however far you go – like the Moon Jar – glowing in the darkness until you reach for it.
On a sign on the museum wall, which Marylou had to point out to me, I read that in 1592, after a Japanese invasion of Korea, entire villages of Korean potters were forcibly relocated to Japan. Local craftsmen had to relearn techniques because the masters were gone. My moon jar dated from before that.
And now I’m cleaning up my plate and working on my own moon jar. It’s my first attempt to do anything of this kind. Syn has left the room, like a queen with no pageantry or courtesans. Another guy is fumbling around with his clay, obviously unhappy with it. He looks up hopefully for a chat when I walk by. I nod as curtly as I can manage, and practically run out of the room to avoid the deep and meaningful that I can feel brewing. I hate talking of pottery. Why can’t people just do it rather than talk about it?
Syn is at her desk. She waves at me and I walk over to thank her for giving me the key to the premises.
‘Somebody wants to buy your work.’
The word ‘work’ comes out funny. Work? That means nothing to me. I don’t even know what I’m doing in Melbourne yet. I’ve not finished swimming to shore; a few more strokes are necessary. And then I’ll be there, a wet dog, drying on the beach – but for now anything as definitive as work feels unreal. I must have stared at her blankly, because she hooks her index finger at me and I bend over.
‘Harold, this guy wants to buy one of your pots.’
‘Where has he seen it?’
‘He walked into the gallery and your stuff was cooling down on the rack.’
‘But they weren’t on exhibit.’
‘No, Harold, but he saw it anyway because it was there.’
She speaks patiently, with her ‘duchessy’ tone. Whenever I’m near her I weigh in my mind how much she reminds me of Ha-yoon. The answer is always the same: not at all. There’s a sardonic spark in her eye, as if she knows the likes of me, as if she has sorted me out in a nanosecond. She seems to humour me for the fun of it. She reminds me of a beautiful cat. I often wonder if she has one – a cat, I mean.
Then the agony of thinking of Ha-yoon works its way into my system, while Syn sighs expansively.
‘Harold, we have a shop. We live off lessons, off the sale of clay, off the use of the ovens, but also off the shop. We take a commission if you sell something.’
‘But that was a one-off.’
‘He’s a professor at Melbourne University. He does collection management.’
‘Are you sure he liked it? Maybe he was just trying to chat you up.’
There’s a silence.
‘He liked it and wanted to buy it.’
‘All right, tell him it’s a thousand bucks.’
‘Have you gone mad?’
‘Which pot is it, anyway?’
She gets up and, as she turns away from me, something in her movement does remind me of Ha-yoon. My heart jumps up into my throat and shrivels there …
I never saw her again. I never explained. Even with my mother, Liběna, I took the trouble to say goodbye. So why was I so brutal with Ha-yoon? Probably because if I had seen her again I would never have been able to leave. Saving my conscience felt more like saving my skin.
Syn walks peacefully to the rack where everyone cools their stuff. My last pot is sitting there where I left it. We both knew which one she was referring to. Without taking her eyes off my face, instead of pointing, she indicates its general direction wearily.
‘Also, Harold, we can’t continue storing your pots once they’re glazed. You have to sell them or take them home.’
At that, she looks me full in the face, and I say: ‘I’m sure Verity has some empty cupboard at The Sea & Us.’
‘Well, you’d better ask her or change your price.’
I smile at her with a twisted grin, which seems to come out of some lost repertoire of smiles. Some smile I must have had, long before my father left and all that stuff happened. Resisting Syn has become some sort of work-out for me, a pleasant session of push-ups.
‘I’ll ask her tonight. See ya, Syn.’
I walk away. After working with Do-yun, selling a pot makes me slightly sick – as if I weren’t still a deep amateur. The time with him feels like fairy gold now. How could I cash in on all I have learned from him? Learned from being nudged towards my own deep end? It would be a kind of … I frown … heresy. Yeah, the word isn’t too strong.
I’m back at The Sea & Us before I know it.
Bernard is emptying the dustbins out the back and Verity is there as usual, cleaning up for the day. The oil is thrown out in cans, the surfaces are wiped with long, sweeping movements that remind me of a sailor cleaning his deck – not that I’ve seen many sailors do that, never h
aving set foot on a boat. Everything starts smelling really nice, as if the place had never housed a fried fish in its life.
‘Why, it’s altogether good to see you, Harold.’
I smile at her. Marylou would like Verity, and it makes me wish she were here, at the university or in a job like a normal girl, but I know she isn’t made for any of those things. And this has me frowning straight through Verity.
‘Harold, you worried about something? The rent? Don’t worry, I can wait.’
‘No, no, I’m fine with the rent, Verity.’
‘But not with anything else, is that it?’
I raise an eyebrow at her, but she’s not put off.
‘Come on, Harold, let’s have a drink out the back.’ After a few more useful, choreographic moves, her deck is sparkling and we walk towards a small door.
One might imagine anything behind it. In a way I am prepared for anything, but not for the books crowding every spare shelf, eating their way into every available space. There’s a low windowsill with a long cushion pretending to be a sofa, and two bucket armchairs. She settles me in one of them and goes and gets the booze. There’s only one painting on the wall. In spite of its pallid colours, it’s strong. Mauves, beiges, greys. Dying rusty pinks. It’s abstract, but swimming towards figuration without quite making it. Strangely, it reminds me of a Morandi, and of Marylou. Is that what makes a painting good? That it seems to sweep you sturdily into the physical, into a real place, a place where you have lived and breathed, but which also brings you into contact with one particular emotion, plugged deep inside you? It’s true, I wish the gang were here. After a few weeks, I have to admit it to myself: I do miss the old girl sorely. Who is watching her six now, apart from the soup vendor?
I move forward to see the signature in the corner of the painting: Madeleine Peters. I promise myself to look her up.
Verity is rustling about in her sparse, galley-like kitchen – obviously an antidote to the fish kitchen on the other side. This one is fitted without an inch to spare with wooden shelves bearing honey, tea, bottles of wine, olive oil, jars of olives, pepper and spices, garlic and red onions – all dry and sunny ingredients. Everything has a spot and there is the same feeling of care, but this is more intimate. Only the flower on the small waxed table is less shipshape. It’s rather brave and lonely – a bit like Verity.
When one sees this, of course, one is bursting to ask her: What is it with the squalor upstairs? But one doesn’t, of course. One waits for her to put two glasses of wine and the bowl of olives on her sofa table which is the same wood as her kitchen table. She perches on the ledge under the window, obviously her favourite spot, and tries to extract my life story from me. It works, partly, and in return she tells me bits of hers. We’re in a fair way to becoming friends. I wonder about the strange paths that people open up in our lives. I also wonder why I never took Ha-yoon to see the Moon Jar but went to see it with Marylou – as if that were the only thing to do.
7
Sold
I’VE ALWAYS HATED the expression ‘break-up sex’ – tempestuous antics like smashing all the crockery in the cupboard, flinging the contents of the wardrobe out the window … But that last time, it was a bit like that with Ha-yoon.
Ha-yoon has Chinese blood; she’s not completely Korean. There is a Confucian courtesy in her that makes much of preliminaries and leave-takings. Her voice had an erotic effect on me. It was grave, making use of all the consonants, ditching the vowels, in a travelling, private, throaty echo that made its way directly to my spine. That’s probably why I didn’t say goodbye, and left when she thought she had chained me good and proper to her skin, her sweet breath, her prayer-like poses, her long, low laugh.
Ha-yoon isn’t dainty. She has a fuller, slower kind of beauty. Her face is broad and mild, with a lovely golden shadow over it. Her hair is long and she slides an ivory chopstick pin through it with a gesture that is always the same, gathering it at the nape of her neck with a swift, seamless figure of eight. Her arms are curved in their movements, with dimples near the elbows, and her pubic hair is serene, not like some I’ve seen that reminds you of nests and marshes, or of some ring road around the city at night, wild and purring with cars – without peace, without real night, eating stars, eating destinations.
That last time I was naked with Ha-yoon in bed was just after her telling me about Do-yun. Avoiding further conversation or word contamination, she walked us back to my place and took her clothes off as if she were a tree losing all its leaves out of season. I knew what she was doing. She was trying to get me to go along with all of this, as if I were the Cheonggyecheon Stream, flowing past all the bobbing feet and the lights and the buildings, forgetting its own city, forgetting its own bed, forcibly led to a different sea – waylaid. But with each naked movement, I was saying, No, Vůbec ne, and I was saying goodbye to all that, to all that she was and never would be again.
In that last lovemaking I had betrayed Do-yun good and proper. I had been made acquiescent. I was going along with the whole thing. I was tainted. So why not carry on? This was her pragmatic Confucian plan, I’m sure – a plan that didn’t occur to me until dawn the next day, as if my conscience had been screwed too.
I’m back on this pockmarked footpath, where tree roots sprout and the wind has a presence that stops and starts. Rather than blowing, the Brunswick wind seems to burst onto the scene, like a kid into a sleepy bookshop with his skateboard hanging from his fingers, its wheels still turning, his cloud of noise interrupted by the quiet place just as its silence is interrupted by the boy.
I’m convinced that I moved in the right season. Not only because of the equinox, not only because I had invested Ha-yoon with sacredness – the sacredness of sex, of betrayal, of lies – but because everything she said reverberated through me, and gave me no choice. I obeyed the silently issued edicts of her presence, as if she were some vestal virgin or priestess dispensing prophecies. Isn’t that what love is anyway? You give people you love the power to believe in them. That may not be a logical sentence, but it’s the logic of my life as I try to explain it to myself in this strange country where I was born, but where I don’t belong, as if my scattered atoms were still whirling away, trying to find me.
Even now I don’t understand why I have returned here. I could have gone anywhere. I know it’s bad for me to mull over things like this, but walking down the street after my drink with Verity last night, I realised that, when night comes, I look forward to seeing the stars here. They always make me feel at home. My feet are slowing down and it’s taking me a ridiculously long time to get to the workshop. Then I hear a cry: ‘Old mate!’
It’s Ben. I’m so deep in thought, it feels as if he’s swooped on me, but in fact he’s just landed a casual hand on my shoulder.
‘Ben, how are you?’
‘All good. Off to the Brotherhood for the day …’
He’s on his skateboard. When he discovers I’m going to a pottery workshop he’s in awe. He picks up his board, as if it jumps into his hand, and as it hangs there obediently, he says: ‘I’ve always wanted to do pottery. I tried once, but I don’t think it’s for me.’
‘What is for you, Ben?’ I hesitate. ‘Or is that the prince of unwieldy questions?’
I don’t know why I come out with these phrases, maybe all that lonely reading in a strange country. He smiles his big, welcoming smile.
“‘The prince of unwieldy questions”! I like that, dude.’ His eyebrows take on a rueful slant. ‘I’m not sure. I’m trying something, man, but I’m not sure.’
‘Do you like doing it?’
‘Yeah. But I’m not sure. I’m a “not sure” kind of guy.’
I put my hands in my pockets.
‘You too?’
He chuckles and lowers his skateboard to the ground again.
‘I’d better let you get on with it, Harold.’ A very slight smile escapes him, and I can see he’s smiling at my name. People can’t help themselves. But with Ben,
I don’t care. He could laugh in my face and I’d still feel his aura of friendliness. I can also sense he wants to escape any more questions. This makes me wonder what he’s up to, of course. But he’s already halfway down the street before I hear ‘Let’s have a meal soon!’ as the wind snatches at his words.
I walk into the workshop, put an apron on and start slapping some clay on the wheel head. Syn, who had been talking to someone at the desk, comes over a bit later and stands by my stool.
‘Your pot is sold.’
‘What!’
‘You gave me a price, didn’t you? Here’s the money, less our cut.’
She hands me the cash.
‘And he’s going to come back for more.’
I stare at her and feel sick, as if some death knell has sounded and I have jumped onto an unknown train in a war-torn country. Where is this going to lead me? I have been squirreling craftsmanship away, learning densely, slowly, silently, with Do-yun’s hovering spirit showing me how to let things happen, never forcing it, never wanting anything. And now I was having, I was milking …
I bend down again when she leaves with her step that needs no one. My fingers don’t hear the clay anymore. I start doing a very simple plate. It reminds me of the plate that holds the seas that the ancients believed in. The edges are wobbly, as if the seas were pouring over it. I don’t like how it’s going. I’m sure I’ll break it, but I’m at it for hours. Even before I realise, the afternoon light is weighing heavily on the rectangular windows, and soon night will be breathing over it. You can already sense it’s there, as dark as in Seoul, as dark as the idea of leaving. I know that if I go back up there again, I won’t have a soul of my own, a life of my own. I know.
I remember one of the last things that Do-yun told me. We were at the workshop, and we both knew I wasn’t coming back. He stood up and came to me. He was tall, and even though he wasn’t as tall as me, I always felt his sheer height. He made me think of the cliffs of Dover. Enormous, hovering and gentle, promising England from the open sea to those men who brought the soldiers back from Dunkirk in any yacht, any motorboat, any rowboat, any skiff, anything floating available that could be manned by an Englishman along the coast. Do-yun reminded me of those people. Doing something simple that you love can be a crazy, potent thing – and he had it. Pot by pot – he had it.
The Sea & Us Page 5
