“The arrow is a shovel. In the box is Hans. I wanted to bury him in a garden filled with daisies—”
“Is that all you think about these days, Hans?”
“About the baby.”
“He was a dog.”
“I came back from a night shift and the dog was sleeping. I opened a can and put the dog food in a bowl and pushed it over to him, but he stayed there, his head buried between his legs. I must have had a drink after that, because I was really drunk by the time the sun came up. I touched him, and he was stiff. I wrapped him in a plastic bag and carried him in a cardboard box, and I walked for a while to a park. Then I saw the yellow garbage truck. I staggered over and threw the box in the back of that garbage truck, then came back home and slept as if I were dead. When I woke up in the afternoon, Hans was gone. It took me a long time to remember that I had thrown him away that morning.”
“Stop it. So what? I’m tired of your story about the dead dog.”
“Once, Stephan and I got pregnant. I had an abortion.”
I turned to the next page and saw a body of a square and a triangle overlapping with the circle with sprouting lines. On top of Mari’s skirt was a box. Maybe this was not the box containing Hans, maybe it signified the death of a child. I didn’t ask her.
“I heard that old age may be lonely, but it’s peaceful.”
Mari laughed again.
“That’s a lie. You just pretend that that’s the case. You look different but what’s inside is the same as ever. Like the desire to sleep with a man. But there is something you do finally learn.”
“What is that?”
“The best time of your life. And love.”
“Are you talking about Stephan?”
“The baby. I am an old woman who almost became a mother. And Stephan also became my son.”
At that moment, I felt a shudder coursing through my body, as if I were being electrocuted. I thought of the portrait of you as a young man that I painted that summer, how it still remained in Kalmae covered with dust.
It was autumn again. Mr. Yi and I became more of a routine. Instead of running through the park looking for him, I concentrated on working, producing a piece a week. I did not tell him about it, but around that time I began to think of you again. I would sit at the tiny table in my kitchen drinking tea and watching the brown leaves of the horse chestnut tree fall, and there you would be, pacing around in the courtyard. Of course I knew it was not really you, that it was just an illusion. If I felt guilty toward someone it was actually toward Mr. Yi Hee Soo, not you. I loved him because it was comfortable. He was near me, like a glass of water on the bedside table. But the strange thing is that he had to leave me around the time you were coming back to me. I wonder now if I was being punished.
The reunification of Germany was complete by October that year, as expected. Mr. Yi was nearing the end of his stay in Germany and was getting ready to go back to Korea. For a little while, I thought about giving up and going back with him. It had been exactly one year since the wall had come down, and the cold weather rushed in so quickly that I was always wearing a thick down coat.
Mr. Yi Hee Soo went on a business trip to somewhere near Frankfurt with Martin. He was planning to visit a small community there. He had a dream of opening a beautiful little school in his hometown when he went back to Korea. I knew very well that he missed the little village he had left when he was a child, and we used to talk over and over about the bridge and the elm tree and the ponds as if I myself had been there, although I had just heard about them from him. It had been almost a week since he’d left, but he had not called. I was a little worried and wondered what was going on.
In the morning I went to my school and called the research institute at the engineering school. Naturally, they told me he was not in. I asked for Martin, and they made me wait for a long time. Somebody came back to the phone and asked for my address. It seemed a little odd, but I gave him my address and asked what he needed it for. I guessed he was a German research fellow or an assistant there, but all he said was that someone would come see me. I was baffled, but decided not to think about it too much. But no one came, and no one called me the following day. I stayed home all morning, then invited Mari over for lunch. We reheated Korean mixed noodles and frozen spring rolls and we ate them all. I went out to buy paints and brushes, then saw a Korean movie I had heard had won some awards. It was intriguing to hear the lines in Korean but to see the subtitles in German. I don’t remember much of it, but I do clearly remember the scene of a child monk picking up a tiny bird that had fallen from the nest. And the funeral of the old monk, his body on top of a woodpile in flames. I sat alone at a Viennese café, drank a cup of cappuccino and a glass of cognac, and stayed there a while neither thinking nor doing anything in particular. When I came back to my neighborhood near Bundesplatz, it was already dark. I slowly climbed the stairs and was about to turn the key and open my door when Mari appeared at her door and said, “Yuni, you have guests.”
“Guests? For me?”
She beckoned me in with her head. I went into her apartment as if I were being sucked in. When I entered, I saw an older lady sitting on the sofa where we always sat down and relaxed. A young woman stood up from the wooden chair next to the table. Mystified, I just stood there and looked at them. The young woman, who seemed to be around my age, spoke first.
“Are you Miss Han Yoon Hee?”
“Yes, and you are?”
“I’m Yi Hee Soo’s sister. I heard so much about you from my brother. This is our mother.”
Only then did I bend my body and bow to them. I took them back to my studio. The older lady collapsed onto the sofa.
“Please excuse me,” she mumbled. “I need to lie down.”
I quickly found a pillow and placed it on the armrest.
“You should rest your head on this.”
The older lady lay there with one arm covering her face, and the sister remained silent for a while, sitting with her head down. Something was not right.
“Did something . . . happen?” I finally managed to ask, and almost at the same time the sister covered her face with two hands and cried, “My brother is dead.”
I just stared at her. At first, I could not understand what she was talking about.
“He hasn’t come back from Frankfurt yet.”
The moment I said so, I knew it was wrong. The sister took her hands down from her face and shook her head as if she wanted to brush off something, and she took a deep breath. Now, she was looking straight at me and continued in a much calmer tone.
“We got word last Friday. We were in Frankfurt until yesterday. We came to Berlin to pack up his belongings.”
I was not surprised. It felt like my head was completely empty. Things had been moving too smoothly, hadn’t they? I had known something was going to happen. A faint sneer spread from under my chin and brushed my lips before it went away.
“When? How?”
“The first day of the trip. There was an accident on the autobahn. His friend, the one he was traveling with, got badly hurt, too. He told us about you when we saw him. We’ve been calling since yesterday but we couldn’t reach you, so we decided to come today.”
Listening to her now calm and collected voice, I could not feel much of anything. Still, tears welled up in my eyes and rolled down my cheek.
Martin gave me the details much later. It was snowing lightly from the moment they left Berlin, but the road conditions seemed okay. Some spots were icy, and the snow continued until they got near Frankfurt, where cars were slowing down considerably. At the autobahn interchange near the city of Hanau, a container truck coming the opposite way crashed into the median and flipped. The dislodged container crashed onto the other side and slid down, blocking the road and causing a series of crashes. Five cars in total; several people died at the scene. Martin lost consciousness. The ambulance came and managed to get the two men out of the crushed car. Even several months later, I could not ask
Martin about Mr. Yi’s last moment and what he looked like.
I looked straight back at Mr. Yi’s sister with my wet cheeks.
“Where, where is he now?”
“We closed the casket yesterday and sent it to the airport. I am so sorry to bother you, but do you mind bringing us to my brother’s place? My mother has not been able to sleep at all. We’d like to rest there and then pack, since we have to fly back tomorrow.”
“Of course,” I mumbled, stupidly. “I have the key.”
I crossed Volkspark the way I always did, and the two women, quiet, their heads bowed, followed behind me. That night was freezing cold. The streetlamps in the park looked like they were frozen blue. The windows at Mr. Yi’s place were dark. He would never come back here again. I remembered how sometimes we would talk to each other on the phone and I’d come over here and wait for him to return from a local bar or from a walk through the park. I used to look at the darkened window with a sense of warm intimacy. Or I would come over here after he had gone to bed and ring the doorbell. I would wait for a while until I heard his sleepy voice through the speaker and saw the light turn on.
Entering his place, I easily found the light switches in the dark and faced his belongings in that house, things I knew so well. Humbly, I stood by the door and waited patiently while his mother and sister looked around the room and studied and caressed the objects, still holding onto his touch.
I don’t want to go on and on. I could not join in their sorrow in that room. As I was about to leave, before I bowed to the two women, each now sitting in chairs far away from each other, I had to ask the sister, “Would it be okay if I took this with me?”
She turned her head, following my fingertip. She probably was not in a state of mind to realize exactly what it was I meant, whether it was the little Buddha sitting on the windowsill or the Tibetan holy scripture in German next to it, but she quickly nodded her head.
“Of course, please.”
I tried my best not to look at anything else and walked straight to the copper sculpture the size of my palm. I took it, turned around, and left.
When I came back home, the moment I sat down on the sofa, I began to cry as loudly and as much as I could. Mari later told me that she heard me cry that night, but she did not take one step out of her room. Westerners are usually circumspect when it comes to getting involved in other people’s emotions. They only have a fixed amount of emotion. I knew what time their flight would be, so I went to the Tegel Airport the following afternoon. The two women were again sitting apart as if they did not know each other. I went over to the sister and sat next to her. Unlike the day before, her face was made up, and she had changed her clothes, so that now she looked like a different person.
“We packed up everything. The people at the research institute said they’d send everything over later.”
I imagined his room empty, white sheets covering the furniture.
“Were you going to marry my brother?” she asked.
If I had answered honestly, I would have said I was satisfied with the way we were in Berlin, and I did not think about the future. But I did not answer honestly.
“We were thinking of going back to Korea together,” I said.
“He always had the worst luck.”
She calmly opened her purse to take out a handkerchief and wiped around her eyes. They were walking to the gate when Mr. Yi’s mother, who had not said a word until then, turned around to look at me and then took a few steps toward me.
“I just wanted to apologize on behalf of my son,” she said. “I am so sorry. I wish you all the best.”
26
Another year passed. With the attempted coup of August 1991, the Soviet Union was completely dismantled, showing the whole world the birth and death of a constitutionally socialist state.
The death of Mr. Yi Hee Soo passed with an unexpected quickness. It is not that I felt the time I spent with him was wasted, it just felt like it was not real. I did not remember it as the recent past but as a fleeting moment from a long time ago, like a spring day when I was a little girl playing by the levee, making necklaces and bracelets out of clover flowers and violets and lying on the ground chewing foxtails. Certain parts are vivid, but some things are vague, no matter how hard I try to remember. The tiny unimportant details remained with me for a long time, and now everything is just an unimportant detail. Only the little brass sculpture I took from his place, that now rests on my desk, remains the same.
Now it was time to say goodbye to Song Young Tae.
He called me from time to time, sometimes acting serious, sometimes explaining that he was doing something very important, sometimes angry. Still, he was one of the few close friends I had in Germany. I once went to see him in Göttingen. We went out to the countryside with his friends to drink and barbecue, and we sang throughout the night to release ourselves and made the neighbors angry.
From the outside, I did not appear depressed at all. Since I had been working hard for a while, I had more than forty paintings to show, including eight large canvases. I had a solo exhibition at a gallery near Tiergarten. I think it helped me complete the Meisterschiller.
The exhibition began with drawings, continued with large and small canvases mixed together, and ended with the most recent work, which was somewhat different from my past work. To be honest, I was greatly influenced by Mari’s childlike graffiti with simplified lines and expression. But I tried to be more specific and also to appropriate the simplicity and abbreviated forms of folk art. I did not want traces of the past to be the starting point; I wanted to start within my own style. The subject was hidden inside the form, and the objects were shown as certain symbols that were highly stylized. The audience looking at them would reinterpret and translate according to their own views. The figures were distorted and overlapped and clumped together, but they were still bound by certain rules of geometry. My bigger canvases followed this set of rules even more strictly, depicting simplified figures bubbling up, as if they were about to burst.
The exhibition was pretty successful. Several media outlets covered and reported on it, and offers for exhibitions in other cities followed. I spent every single day surrounded by strangers. The last day, I stayed late at the gallery after it was closed to take down the paintings with Mr. and Mrs. Shin. Well, maybe it was not so late, perhaps half past seven, around dinnertime on a summer evening. A man with glasses wearing an unbuttoned white shirt and a loose cardigan walked in. He was pulling a large suitcase with wheels behind him. I took a hurried glance at him but turned back to take a painting off the wall, and then the familiar voice came from behind. “Can’t you take them down after I’ve looked at them?”
Turning around, I realized it was him, Song Young Tae.
“You can’t complain. You’re too late!”
But I was happy to see him. Somehow he always managed to reappear when I was just about to forget him, and of course he always presented a new set of problems every time he did, which was taxing. I stepped back and waited until he had walked around the gallery. I introduced him to Mr. and Mrs. Shin, and he helped us clean up and pack everything. Temporarily, the paintings were to be kept in the gallery’s storage room. We went to a Greek restaurant nearby to eat dinner. We talked about the absurd failure of the coup in the Soviet Union and about the depressing prospect of worldwide capitalism. There was nothing new or radical about our conversation; we were saying things students were saying in cafeterias everywhere. After we bid farewell to Mr. and Mrs. Shin, Young Tae and I took a taxi back to my studio because of his cumbersome suitcase.
“What on earth is this? Where are you going now?” I grumbled, as he put the suitcase into the trunk of the taxicab.
“I’m going back,” he replied casually.
“And you’ll give up your studies?”
“Miss Han, why don’t I buy you a drink to celebrate the successful end of your exhibition? We can go out again after we drop off my suitcase.”
“There’s no need to go out. I have plenty to drink at home. There’s a case of beer and a few bottles of Mosel wine. Let’s just drink at home. I don’t want to go out.”
“But I want to buy you a drink!”
“Next time.”
I dragged him back to my studio. I knocked on Mari’s door and invited her, too, and we had a little party. Sometimes we talked in German, but mostly in our language. Mari lifted her glass and said, “Congratulations on your solo exhibition.”
Young Tae also raised his glass, so I had to as well, a little embarrassed.
“Yuni, there was one painting that I really liked,” Mari said.
“Which one?”
“The one with cream sprouting from a long rectangle and touching the numerous triangles above. That one. The large canvas on the first wall of the last room.”
It was a painting of a human figure, transformed into a soft, melting shape, reaching out one hand from the confines of walls and trying to catch a butterfly, which was in the form of two overlapping triangles. Outside of the rectangular frame were numerous butterflies with triangular wings. The only nongeometric form was that of the human being, melting and caked within the walls. Mari had read it as a lump of cream. Unlike her, I did not translate my own painting for her.
“Your paintings were incredibly depressing,” Song Young Tae muttered in his usual peremptory manner.
“Really? In what way . . . ?”
“They refuse to communicate, they are egocentric, and they seemed to be saying that the world is determined not to change anymore.”
“That’s how I feel these days.”
“Let’s go on a trip together.”
Since he was so unpredictable, I had to reply, guarded, “Where, back to Seoul?”
He rustled around and took something out of his back pocket.
“Tickets for the Trans-Siberia train. I heard about it from my grandfather many times. How about we commemorate the end of the Cold War with this trip? Let’s go.”
The Old Garden Page 55
