The Old Garden

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  The reason I am describing all these tedious details is because this was my world. Finally I found that I was able to escape from the self-consciousness that had so oppressed me back home. I was able to work a great deal among people who did not know me.

  As I said, once the laborers left after the war and moved into new apartments, the building had been used as a storage facility. The city had purchased it and turned it into studios for poor artists, renting them out for a low price. I found it through a friend, a musician from Czechoslovakia. People still called asking for the previous tenant. My answer was, Call her in Prague. I had also kept her tattered tablecloth and a small framed picture that hung in the kitchen. The tablecloth was an ordinary cotton one, and I guessed it once belonged to her because each corner was embroidered with daisies. Maybe she forgot to pack it. The frame hung above the table, right in front of my eyes when I sat down. It was a lithograph by Käthe Kollwitz, a self-portrait. Because of this one print, I decided I liked the previous occupant. In the 1920s, Kollwitz was already an old woman. Her eyes are filled with tenderness and compassion, yet under them are deep lines of suffering. She is looking out with an expression of a mother worried about her child. I did not hang anything else on the wall, but I did put up a poster next to the door, something I bought from a gift shop selling imported goods at the Kaiser Wilhelm Church. It was a picture of an American Indian warrior, and the photograph looked more like a charcoal drawing; maybe it was a gravure photo, or maybe just an old photograph reproduced carelessly. The warrior is standing on top of a crumbling bluff, and he is spreading a handful of something over the open field below. Looking at the feather on his head, the quiver on his back, and the axe in one hand, I was quite sure that he had just returned from a battlefield. I do not think he was throwing seeds or soil. Maybe it was the remains of someone who had been cremated. Underneath the photograph was a German sentence printed in black letters, “The motherland is sacred!”

  I like the winter in Berlin. There were some really cold days, but most of the time it just drizzles. You just wrap a long scarf tightly around your neck, and if an umbrella is too cumbersome, you just put on a hat. It is not like a summer shower that pours down noisily. It just continues endlessly. And the fog rolls in, turning the space around each streetlamp misty. The bone-chilling cold slips in through the openings around your neck and the ends of your sleeves and reaches all the way up to your elbows.

  One day I carried a sack full of laundry to the laundromat across the square, and I made a new friend there. I liked the laundromat; with a few coins you could do everything from buying some detergent to washing and drying your clothes and ironing, and there was always music playing and books and magazines around, even vending machines and coffee machines, so it was not too boring to sit there until the laundry was done. That night the laundromat was pretty empty because it was late in the evening. I was sitting in front of the washer when the door opened and an old lady entered. She looked as if she was coming back from an outing, because she was wearing a black suit with a silver pin on her chest, a necklace, and a pair of earrings, and her face was carefully made up. She was carrying a large leather bag in one hand, brown with brass fastenings, and I thought it looked very classy. But then out of that bag came her underwear. I could not help but watch her with interest, trying to be as discreet as possible. She put coins in the slot, opened the round door of a washing machine and stuffed in her laundry, then she took a seat across from me. When our eyes met she uttered a greeting, Guten Tag. I nodded my head in response. She sat there for a bit, then her shoulders trembled. She took out a small tin flask from her bag, the kind that so-called drink lovers or, if I’m really honest, alcoholics, always carried around in their pocket filled with cheap whiskey or brandy. She unscrewed the top, threw her head back, and took a generous gulp. She smacked her lips and raised the flask toward me.

  “Would you like some?”

  I was going to shake my head, but I decided to join in her loneliness and reached for it, accepting it with a danke. The moment I put the top to my lips I knew it was German brandy, very similar to French cognac. The taste and scent of it was quite nice.

  “Can I have some more?” I asked her.

  I guess she understood my poor German, and she answered of course I could, and I took another shot. She took another one, too.

  “I’m Frau Mari Kline. I am your neighbor.”

  “Really? I’m Han.”

  “I know, I saw the nameplate at the door.”

  I had no idea who was living across the hall from my room, but perhaps she had been observing me from the day I moved in.

  “My husband was an artist, too. He’s long gone. He loved Asia. I still have a few pieces of Chinese pottery he liked. I could show them to you later, if you like.”

  Other students once warned me to be careful with lonely old neighbors who lived alone, but I did not care. Most of them lived with a dog or a cat as a companion, to whom they talked endlessly, as if to a family member. I was told that they were almost pathologically curious about other people’s affairs, and once you talked to them, they tried everything they could to continue the relationship and meddle in your daily life. But the truth was that I felt like I was about to go crazy. I needed a neighbor, whoever it might be. As we spoke, sometimes neither of us understood a word the other was saying. Sometimes we had to mix in English, and by the time our laundry was done, we had emptied the little flask. I was the one who remembered it first.

  “So can I see that pottery?”

  “Oh, of course.”

  We walked back to the building together, each of us carrying laundry under one arm, as if we had known each other for a long time. We climbed up the spiral stairway, now one of us ahead, now the other. We lived on the same floor; my unit was on the right, while Frau Kline’s was on the left. She opened the door and went inside first to turn the light on. It was identical to my unit except that there was no loft. The first things I saw were the paintings that almost completely covered the wall and the pottery displayed on top of a wooden chest of drawers. The room was sparsely furnished with a large bed at the far end of the room, a dining table with two wooden chairs in the middle, and a single easy chair. She turned on two lamps, and the room glowed warmly, as if lit by several candles. But nothing could hide the fact that it was the home of a poor, lonely woman. I walked to the chest and carefully studied each vessel that she showed me one by one. Two of them were Japanese, ordinary liquor bottles that you find in souvenir shops. A couple of jars with wide mouths and a calabash-shaped bottle were from China, perhaps more than a hundred years old. I realized these were the pieces of pottery she had been talking about. Still, they were just everyday vessels that were probably from a small antique shop in Hong Kong or another port city, and I bet there were many others just like them. The rest were earthenware, all of them produced for tourist shops.

  “Aren’t they nice?” she whispered. “My husband bought them for me. This one we bought together when we went to Japan.”

  I picked up the calabash-shaped bottle to look at the landscape painted on it.

  “If you want it, I’ll sell it to you.”

  “Well . . .”

  I just smiled at her.

  “How much do you need?”

  Frau Kline thought about it for a little while.

  “It’s probably worth more than 500 marks, but I’ll accept 300.”

  I nodded. I had not been to her kitchen yet, but I guessed that her pantry and refrigerator were empty. It seemed like she was on welfare, and she could probably survive a few days on nothing but liquor. She did not offer me a seat, but I sat down on the chair in front of the table.

  “I think I have some tea. Should I add some whiskey to it?”

  “How about just whiskey?”

  “That sounds about right.”

  She went into the kitchen then came back with a small bottle of whiskey, half-filled, and two glasses. She poured each glass about half full and sa
t down on the easy chair facing me. Frau Kline raised her glass toward the calabash-shaped bottle.

  “Goodbye, my dear,” she muttered.

  “Was it something you cherished?”

  I knew it was just an inexpensive object, but I did not want to hurt her feelings.

  “My husband was a very famous artist.”

  “When did he pass away?”

  “Ten years ago.”

  “The paintings on the walls are his?”

  “They are what’s left, everything else went to galleries and museums.”

  I got up to walk around the room and study each painting on the wall, starting from the entrance area. Frau Kline remained in her easy chair.

  “Actually, he died almost twenty years ago.”

  I turned my head toward her.

  “He worked a lot for about eight years, until the mid-sixties, then he went into the hospital.”

  What I saw were the traces of the abstract expressionism of someone who wanted to escape from our fixed ideas and the rationales of the objective world. Using a knife or the rough strokes of a brush, a thick line was drawn from the top to the bottom, or paint was clumped together like a child’s scrawl. These were familiar, like the paintings I had seen at many graduating student’s exhibitions. On the second wall, the paint was more thickly applied and spread as if still wet. Various colors overlapped or separated or met again. On the third wall, up to the middle of it, was one with abstract characters roughly scored on a simple background. At the end of that wall was the largest painting in the house. Runny paint was mashed and squashed by fingers drawing numerous circles and lines. The color was not vivid, but muddy, as if someone who did not know how to apply paint was using too many colors and losing the original shades. In an attempt to remove the painter’s thoughts and compositions and plans, he had actually left behind numerous imprints of his own hands and fingers on the painting. I was very happy. I stood in front of it for a long time, holding the glass in my hand and sipping from it little by little.

  “That is the best one, isn’t it?” she said.

  I wanted to throw the question back at her.

  “Why, is that what you think, Frau Kline?”

  “You can call me Mari.”

  “Okay, I’ll do that.”

  “He earnestly concentrated on wasting his talent. We had no choice. After the war, what was left were just piles of bricks and rats. Both of us detested this country.”

  “What did you do during the war?”

  “You know the Hitler Youth? Even now, all Germans are soldiers. They’re very good at lining up.”

  “Then why didn’t you leave this place?”

  “We were too poor, so we just lived here.”

  I spent about an hour talking to Mari and drank a couple more glasses before I got up.

  “You want to come over to my place?”

  “Will that be okay?”

  “I should pay you for the pottery.”

  My room was three or four steps away, but she put a thick red shawl around her shoulders. I walked into my house with her close behind me. When I realized that I had her eyes following me, all of a sudden my house seemed unfamiliar. The first thing Mari did was look at the poster by the door and read out loud the words printed on it. Mother. Land. Sacred.

  “A great image. But in Europe we killed the mother a long time ago.”

  I pretended that I did not hear her, grabbing my purse from the table to take out my wallet, and Mari walked over to the table to look at Kollwitz’s self-portrait.

  “Haven’t seen this face in a long time. We are no longer able to produce something like this, not anymore.”

  “Ah, that’s not mine. The previous renter left it here.”

  “Did you see the original in Cologne?”

  “Not yet . . .”

  I paused for a bit, then I added, “On one hand, I am so sick of people that I am trying to get rid of them and run away. On the other hand, I’m doing my best to find them.”

  Mari was not just an alcoholic old woman. A faint trace of a smile appeared around her mouth.

  “That sounds very familiar. Stephan died at the national sanatorium. He lived there for twenty years with no idea who he was.”

  I took the money out of my wallet and handed it to her.

  “Here, 300 marks.”

  She accepted it, counted and checked each bill like an old woman at a store making sure that the money was real, and put it away in her pocket. I watched her walk into her apartment from my doorway, and I placed the humble calabash-shaped bottle she left behind on the table and stared at it blankly. For a second or two, I thought I should put a couple of roses in its empty mouth.

  I thought about how Mari and Stephan probably met in the middle of postwar ruins, at a studio or an art school or maybe a makeshift exhibition space in a warehouse. I do not think they came from East Berlin or had any intention of crossing to there. But I still think they had a hard time adjusting to postwar West Germany, where freedom was plentiful but it was that of the occupied, a freedom rationed by Americans. It was also the case for many East German artists who had been stuck with the mannerisms ingrained by propaganda, which had forced them to cease to be individuals, but who had finally managed to awaken from their disillusionment. As soon as he was released from the sharp teeth of the swastika, young Stephan might have been attracted to the Americans’ sense of naïveté, their wild freedom. After all, every desire begins with a reaction against something. By the time they realized that their generation had been caged and domesticated behind the Iron Curtain, it was too late. He probably often drifted off to a place of spring naps, like the place painted on the exotic bottle he brought over for Mari, and he gradually forgot the way back to his humble home in Berlin.

  How can I start again? I cannot be another Mari, whose life stopped twenty years ago, self-anesthetizing myself, can I? According to her, Stephan was little known in the art scene because his friends, now the establishment, bought his paintings and donated his work to public museums. But what I felt looking at the modest works he left behind, hanging on the walls of her house, is how small we are, that a person’s ideals, life, and work could be just a little bubble. I could see the last traces of his hand when I went back to Mari’s house, but I began to think that they were actually his beginning.

  The reason I wrote down details about Frau Mari Kline is because she was one of my closest friends during that time. And she is also the only person who knew the intricacies of my sad relationship with someone else.

  Wait, there is one thing I forgot. Just like you and me, they lived together freely without the legal union of marriage. They lived for ten years in a warehouse in Kreutzberg, now a Turkish neighborhood. Mari sent her man, who had by this time forgotten how to speak, to a sanatorium and visited him once a month. She gave up painting and worked as a caretaker of the elderly during her middle age, and then as an hourly maid when she got older, barely making a living.

  Much later, I saw her drawings and sketches. She would go to Tiergarten near the Zoo station, always clean and neatly dressed, and sketch with a pencil on a small pad the size of her palm. Numerous lines overlapped each other, and they seemed simple, yet complex. I was barely able to make out objects like a bicycle and a house, or a bathtub and a pair of shoes. I knew for sure that there was a female figure, repeated in similar shapes, perhaps herself. A circle for head, and a few pencil lines behind the circle to denote hair. I asked her about it once.

  “This . . . what is it?”

  I asked, pointing to a figure that looked like a tangle of wool.

  “Oh, that’s Hans.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Stephan’s dog.”

  “I guess there’s a story here.”

  Mari pointed to something else that looked like a showerhead.

  “It’s a mop, used to clean a room. I beat Hans with that mop.”

  “You don’t have a dog.”

  “He died a long t
ime ago.”

  “Ah, so what you’re drawing at the park is not from the present. You’re drawing memories.”

  Mari stuck her red tongue out between her wrinkled lips, like a little girl whose important secret has been revealed.

  “Why did you beat Hans?”

  “Because I hated Stephan. It was his dog, after all. I think it was the winter of 1970. He was not painting anything at the time, not one single painting. I was working as a caretaker for sick people. I would come back early in the morning after working all night, and he would have finished a whole bottle of cheap schnapps and be sleeping. Of course he did not think of feeding the dog. Hans would get crazy, whining and jumping all over, so I punished him really harshly. After that, Hans didn’t like me. Yuni, you probably don’t know what the year 1968 was like for us.”

  That’s what she called me, Yuni.

  “A little bit.”

  “Here was worse than Paris. The young people thought that everything had to be destroyed so they could start all over again. After that, there were two choices left. Go back to the countryside and the primitive lifestyle, or become a terrorist.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “There’s not much of a difference. One lot was thinking in the long term, the other thought there was not much time left. They wanted to change the methods of production and consumption.”

  “After the war, we all wandered about like Stephan, in Japan and in my country. Even the paintings are similar. The brave avant-garde. Now, we’re much better than that.”

  Mari’s eyes were turning red.

  “These days I wonder what he really wanted to do. I just live by remembering little things.”

  The eighties went by so fast. Some other Korean students in Berlin who were my age got together once and talked about it. They said it was just like we went to the outhouse for a few minutes, and when we came back a decade had gone by. In Mari I saw myself, and in the disappeared Stephan I saw you and Song Young Tae and most of all Mi Kyung.