by Han Yujoo
Time is passing. The time she’ll come for me hasn’t been determined. I don’t want to meet her. If possible, I want to delay our meeting. She and I will end up talking about someone’s death. I’ll say that I’m not responsible for that death, and then she’ll blame me. But I must finish the story before it gets buried in snow. I must finish it before its bones turn black, before they turn white, before they turn red, before they turn transparent. Now that I’ve begun, I must finish. Perhaps I began the story in order to finish it. One step, two steps. The thought that I want to see the end collides with the thought that I don’t want to see the end. Perhaps I shouldn’t finish the story. All of a sudden, the word lilacs comes to mind, but I’ve never seen lilacs before. Was it a dream?
It’s neither snowing nor raining. The weather hasn’t yet been determined. How do you describe a neutral season? Perhaps not describing anything is the only way to portray a neutral season. My senses don’t operate. Nothing has become certain. Not yet. The space between my desk and bookshelf is a cease-fire zone. Here, fiction confronts reality. Across from the desk are winter and spring, and across from the bookshelf are summer and fall. I’m able to summon a summer afternoon without rain. But I could describe a scene where it begins to rain all of a sudden, and the children who had been waiting for class to end look out the window to either discover, or not discover, the faces of their mothers or fathers, and they run out of the school gate, holding their shoe bags over their heads, and they share umbrellas, or get soaked by the rain, as they cut across the school field. I might have already written a scene like this. This kind of scene was only a sketch. Could I give a single raindrop a name? But there is no time. Even a blank page isn’t enough.
I begin to walk again. Once again, it’s not a dream. I live on the fifth floor, not the second floor. When I descend over a hundred steps and open the lobby door, sunlight spills in. It’s daytime. The road in front of the building splits into four paths. No matter the path I take, I always end up in the same place. And so, I set out on any path. People pass by. Cars pass by. The traffic lights blink. Every streak of light and shadow is anchored to the fronts and backs of buildings. Does each ray of light have a name? I realize that I left without wearing my watch. When I glance down at my bare wrist and look up again, it’s growing dark. The sun is rapidly burning out. Before me is an enormous stadium. What’s the largest building around here? The stadium is too big for my field of vision. People are pouring out of the exits. Could I give each person a name? Is there a name for the top part of the stadium, the top part of the top part? Is there a name for the left part of the stadium? Does the person smoking beside the exit with his head bowed have a name? Could I give each fleck of ash a name? Could I give each plume of smoke a name? Does each fading ray of light have a name? The stadium’s scoreboard reads 8:47 p.m. Could I give each flagstone a name? The game is over. What could I call the time after a game is over? There are banners hanging all around the stadium. One player, two players. Written on the banners are unfamiliar names. The next game is in four days at 6:00 p.m. While glancing at the names, I discover among them the name of a friend who died several years ago. This friend and the player share the same name. What should I call the friend and the player? Is there a name for the friend’s forehead? Is there a name for the player’s feet? Is there a name for the friend’s elbows? Is there a name for the player’s sweat-soaked uniform? I turn my head and look up at the scoreboard again: 8:47 p.m. Not even a minute has passed. But if I closed my eyes and opened them, it would be a different time again. A time I could not give a name to.
I must go back. And I must wait for her. We will talk about someone’s death, and about some things like death. She will come without warning and leave without warning. I must wait for her.
31
No sentence is clear. Or unclear, for that matter. Every time I discovered traces of all of you in the sentences I’d written, I cracked my knuckles as though it were a habit. There were always too many or too few sentences to contain the copied words. Therefore, it was impossible to copy down all the stories that were conveyed to me. There are four sentences on the chalkboard. The king died. The queen died. War broke out with a neighboring country. A plague spread across the entire country. Each of these sentences contains an incident, and depending on the kind of story that is inserted between these sentences, the context changes. Although I have forgotten the name of the person who first composed these sentences, I discuss them repeatedly in the second class each semester. The king died. Why? The queen died. Why? War broke out with a neighboring country. Why? A plague spread across the king’s entire country. Why? This is followed by the conclusion. The order of the sentences can be switched as you please. The queen died. It was because the king died. The queen was charged with adultery with a state minister. War broke out with a neighboring country. The queen had been the princess of the neighboring country. The alliance that had been forged through marriage was broken. A plague spread across the king’s entire country. The people grew miserable. The plague penetrated even the royal palace. The king caught the plague and died. In this way, one story is composed mechanically. The number of stories you can generate using four sentences is twenty-four. The students in the class nod. I can’t bear it.
I make up another story. My grandmother was Japanese. She was born in 1931 and didn’t go back home even after Japan lost the war. A harsh period followed. After the Korean War ended, she married a Korean—my grandfather. But he became ill and passed away before the end of the sixties. My grandmother raised my father and his brothers on her own. And then I was born. Although I don’t have many memories of her, the memory of the taste and smell of the pickled Japanese plums she often served at mealtime is vivid. It was my mother who taught me that umeboshi is the Japanese name for what we call maesil jangajji. I’ve tasted umeboshi only once; never since. My grandmother never left for Japan until she left this world. Whenever I see umeboshi at a Japanese market or izakaya, I can’t help thinking about my grandmother. The students nod. I wait a few seconds for the story to sink in.
And then I continue. To be honest, that story was a lie. As far as I know, my grandmother is definitely Korean, and she has never tasted either umeboshi or maesil jangajji. You all assumed the story I told you was completely true, or at least partly true. Such is the power of story. It was because of one word—umeboshi—that you believed my story to be true. The students nod. I can’t bear it. On the back wall of the lecture hall, the hands of the clock point to 12:25. Only twenty-five minutes have passed since class began. There’s nothing I can do. I must hastily make up a story about a story. During those twenty-five minutes, the only thing that had made me remotely happy was the fact that I was able to work in some wordplay—left for Japan and left this world. I stop there and take attendance. Three students are absent. When I look up from the attendance sheet and survey the lecture hall, I spot an unfamiliar face.
She wasn’t here the first day of class. Her name isn’t even on the attendance sheet. But I think that I’ve seen her face before, somewhere, unexpectedly, no, just in time. She looks as though she has just slipped out from the shadows. I look at her, momentarily forgetting what I was saying. She doesn’t avoid my eyes, but peers calmly back at me. When I remain silent, several students give me strange looks. Her gaze blends in with the other gazes. I open a book with trembling hands, but I can’t remember anything—what page I’m supposed to turn to, what sentence I’m supposed to read. Her face is blank like ice. I begin to rattle on about anything, stories that make no sense unravel from my tongue, and pages turn, carelessly, without method. The story of how a few birds defended an amphitheater, how a nameless man drifted along a nameless road, how the piper didn’t play the pipe, stories that were scattered like the stars in the night sky, but you can’t really see the stars in the night sky anymore, can you, actually, they say a million, perhaps ten million birds defended the amphitheater, only the horizontal line exists in the world of the romantic nov
el, whereas the vertical line, rather than the horizontal, is clearly apparent in realist books, the nameless road that the nameless man walked along had neither a horizontal nor vertical line and was instead full of dots, only dots, like the stars and remote stars tens of thousands of light-years away, countless dots that existed like hordes of mice. Mice, where could all the mice have gone? Where could all the human fingernails and toenails that the mice swallowed have gone? Now that the mice, which are no longer mice, have eaten these things and look like humans, where could the rest of the mice who aren’t humans have gone? When the piper no longer plays the pipe, where could all the children who followed him have gone?
Her face is cold, hard, and expressionless like ice. She looks at me, but I don’t look at her. Wouldn’t the story be more realistic if a million, perhaps ten million, birds, all together, held up the stone pillar of a collapsing amphitheater? Wouldn’t it be more realistic to hear how the birds smashed their heads, bled, and sacrificed their lives? At what point does a story acquire realism? Or what method must be utilized for a story to maintain plausibility? Fingernails. Toenails. The words I don’t speak spill from my mouth. I forget what to say. Wordlessness continues. I spread open a book and peer at the first sentence. I must go on. I go back to when the piper plays the pipe, when the 475,955th bird holds up the forty-sixth brick, when Julien Sorel recites the Bible in Latin. I should probably shut my mouth now. I should probably end class early and return home before the face without shadow follows me. But I can’t stop. Mixed-up shoes, mixed-up names, desires that surge vertically and then scatter horizontally, useless objects, cruel people, hat, rope, key, drawer, well, river, pond, sky, power plant, laughter, extinction, coffee, transmission, wire, monopoly bureau and flood basin, consonance and dissonance, hair tie and pencil. The face is still looking at me. The tolling of birds, some people witness such a scene and make up a story. Some people hear such a story and make up a story. But when the birds bleed, an instant like that can never be reduced to a story, but if it must be turned into a story, it must become a story that goes beyond a story. Anyhow, I don’t know why I’m still talking about this. The power of a story is sometimes so great that one can’t escape its shadows. Asymmetrical desires; desires that can’t be covered by even the deepest darkness; fingernails and toenails that can’t all be swallowed. Once a thief broke in and flung open all the drawers in my house. The contents of the drawers became jumbled up. Among those things were the first clippings of my fingernails and toenails from when I was a baby. They all disappeared. I sometimes wonder where those clippings went.
I look again at the clock: 12:26. I scan the lecture hall. The back door opens and someone walks in looking embarrassed and sits down. The girl has disappeared. I greet the late student with my eyes and wonder if I’d gotten confused. I’d seen that face before. But I don’t know when or where. And because she’s no longer here, I don’t know how to stop my confusion. The page turns. “Quick, a perfect rose.” A line of dialogue catches my eye. A thin line is drawn under the sentence in pencil. I close the book. In fact, I have nothing more to say. I have nothing to say. But it’s too late. Therefore this story … Embarrassed, I begin to talk. This story introduces three or four characters. One is dying, and because her illness begins even before the story begins, the story can’t heal or cure the patient of her illness, and the narrator, too, can only watch the illness go on, that’s right, he can only watch the dying death, the continuation of death. “Quick, a perfect rose.” Because it looks as though the illness would lead the patient to certain death, the doctor consigns her to the fate of the terminally ill, and the narrator advises the patient to take her own life. But she continues to die a slow death, since illness doesn’t retreat merely because death is near, and she wishes for a perfect rose. Quick, before the illness that’s without cause or source flees. Can we understand an illness we don’t suffer? Can we imagine it? The patient waits for the narrator, the narrator receives a message saying that the patient is dying, and because death hasn’t arrived as expected, the narrator goes to see the patient, while doubting the content of the message. When the narrator arrives, death’s already there. The face in bed is that of an effigy, not of a living being. The narrator walks toward death. That instant, death is delayed once more. The patient, who has come back to life, looks at the narrator with a face marked clearly by death. A perfect rose moves across the room. We interpret this as the perfect morphine. The narrator gives the patient, who has come back to life, an injection containing a lethal dose of morphine, death and life burn out at the same time, the last moment disappears, and the narrator no longer mentions the patient, illness, or death. Am I alive or am I dead? Am I living or am I dying? A death sentence delivered at the same time it is delayed. I haven’t heard many other stories that are stranger than this. Silence mocks me. I think about the characters that I’ve killed. I killed them because they had to die. I glance around the lecture hall again. The desk where the girl was sitting is empty. I go on speaking.
Before the Second World War, the author was active in a right-wing organization. The war that everyone expected erupted in a way that no one expected, and after the war was over, the author retired into silence. Can we understand an illness we don’t suffer? Can we imagine it? Can we know it through understanding and imagination? Even if we can’t know it, shouldn’t we know it? Even if we can’t ever know it, shouldn’t we have to know it? The illness of someone we don’t know. The illness we don’t know of someone we don’t know. Even if we don’t know anything about it, shouldn’t we draw near? I think about the characters I haven’t killed. I didn’t kill them because they didn’t need to die. They weren’t given even an adequate death. I think about the characters that have been excluded from the story. They die or are dying outside the story. Without attracting any attention. As though they had never existed in the first place. Gradually, they’re discarded from memory. Then how are we supposed to draw near? How are we supposed to delay our death? How are we supposed to write our own death sentence?
I stop at this point and glance around the lecture hall for the last time. The hands of the clock are pointing to 2:25. Are there any questions? Someone is sprawled over the desk where the new girl had been sitting. I can’t see her face. For a moment, I look at the face that I can’t see. There are no questions. I hastily organize the books and pens that are scattered on my desk. One student intercepts me as I’m trying to rush out of the lecture hall and asks me a question. I look back at the desk where the new girl had been sitting. No one is there. Relief and uneasiness wash over me at the same time. I have no idea whether I want to see her face or if I want to disappear before it pursues me. I’m certain I’ve seen that face before. At last I escape from the lecture hall. As I walk down the stairs, I drop the pen that’s squeezed under my arm. When I bend over to pick it up, my books cascade to the ground. The pages of the books rustle like leaves. My legs shake. I hold on to the railing and just manage to descend the stairs. That face is following me. But I can’t see it.
32
She calls out to me urgently. I hurry down the stairs, pretending not to hear so that I won’t have to turn around. As I skip down two, three steps at a time, I banish that urgent voice from my ears. The tip of my shoe catches on the metal lip of the step. I lose my balance. I falter and fall forward. With the marble step looming close, I suddenly recall the many times I’ve nearly died at the five-way intersection. I’ve had to cross it two or three times a week for the past several years. The traffic lights at the intersection are complete chaos. Cars and pedestrians stop and go at their whim. I do the same. And so I was hit by a car twice, and had a near miss another time. The instant before I clutch the edge of the cold step, I think that if I had taken one more step at the intersection back then, or if I had been two seconds early, I wouldn’t have to tumble down the stairs this way. The books I’d been hugging to my chest crash to the floor once more. A shoe flies off in an arc. My palms and knees thrum from the impact.
She calls me urgently. This time I try to turn around, but I can’t. I pant, lying prostrate on the floor.
She draws near. She stands above me for a moment before picking up my books and shoe that have fallen on the floor. She holds them out to me. I look down at my scraped palm. It’s sore. I place my other hand on the floor and stand up. Warmth flows through me. I put the shoe back on. I take the books she hands me and put them in my bag. I straighten my clothes and then finally look her in the eye to say thank you. The face is unfamiliar. That face watches me in silence. I see myself in that face. It’s actually mine. We may have had the same childhood. She’s me. You’re me. But I’m not me and I don’t look like anyone else. But I sense that the writing about me has already begun. We gaze at each other without speaking. I’ve been waiting for you. I’ve tried to delay your visit. But I knew that you would find me one day, that you would come find me regardless of what I might wish. It’s something you want, but not what I want. Mia. That’s not your name.
There’s something I want to ask you, you say.
The pain dissipates. I peer down at you. You’re a head shorter than me. The bangs that cover your forehead are long enough to poke you in the eye. I notice the sloppy part in your hair. I straighten my bag and begin to walk down the stairs. You scamper after me with small steps. Familiar faces come up the stairs. I greet them with a nod. When I stop to look back, you’re gone. No. That’s only my vague, unclear hope. I don’t even know what I’m hoping for or not hoping for. I don’t disappear. Neither do you.
