Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River
Page 10
According to N, a middle-aged woman who’d turned up in the town one day long ago took over the roller skating rink, which had been there for a long time, but she shut it down before long and disappeared—which was all there was to the story, but which in a way wasn’t. According to N, although no one knew the real story, the new owner of the rink now skated by herself there, and although there were many stories surrounding it, they can be summed up by saying that someone had told someone that there was a rumor going around that someone had seen the woman skating by herself, and now N was telling me the story—having heard that someone else had heard that same someone tell someone else the story—but she too didn’t know if it was true. There was no way to confirm that the rumor about the woman skating by herself at her roller skating rink was true, and although there were only rumors that couldn’t be confirmed surrounding the woman I thought, without any grounds, that perhaps she was a ballerina from the former Soviet Union.
There was no telling if the woman danced a roller-skating dance that metaphorically expressed a tornado—having been inspired by an enormous funnel-shaped wind she’d seen up close once when a tornado came—and there was no telling, either, if she didn’t mind someone watching her dance, but hoped that no one would if possible, and yet she didn’t mind if passing birds, or birds that had stopped for a moment while passing, watched her, and there was no telling, either, if among the creatures she didn’t mind—starlings, eagles, and owls who lived in the area—a particular owl had shown unusual interest and watched her roller-skating dance from the top of a telephone pole, and there was no telling, either, if, as she danced her roller-skating dance, she turned on “The Internationale” or “The Cossack Lullaby,” which she must have been familiar with since she was little, instead of disco music that was popular when roller skating was popular, but nonetheless I pictured the woman dancing in a roller skating rink to the song “Madame Press Died Last Week at Ninety,” a song that was written in 1970 by Morton Feldman—who was born to Russian immigrant parents, and who was a friend of John Cage’s—for Vera Maurina Press—who was a woman from a Russian aristocratic family, and who’d been his first piano teacher when he was a child—when she passed away; a short song that lasted about four minutes, with a continuous repetition of notes that sound like a knell, bringing to mind the sound of a cuckoo clock played by instruments including a flute, a horn, a trumpet, a trombone, a tuba, a chime, a celesta, a cello, and a double bass, save for very brief piano sequences at the beginning and the end; a song I used to listen to while thinking that a mind that couldn’t be put at ease no matter what was as necessary as any other kind of mind, although there was a time when such music had put my mind a little at ease, although it no longer did; a song I used to listen to when I heard of someone’s death, mourning alone in my heart; a song I used to listen to when I had some other thing to mourn or when I’d finished writing a book; a song that had once been my requiem—there was no telling if she listened to that song or, instead, to “The Owl and the Pussycat,” which was the last song written by Igor Stravinsky, who was also from Russia; and the thought of someone roller-skating by herself, in the middle of the night in her own rink in a little town on a vast plain in Texas, seemed like utter nonsense, but wonderful for that very reason, and my seven samurai, too, who in the meantime had been getting swept away in a river again, seemed to think it was interesting even as they were getting swept away in a river.
JUNG YOUNG MOON is an award-winning South Korean writer whose works have been translated into numerous languages. He is also a prolific translator of American literature, including works by Raymond Carver and John Fowles. He is an alumnus of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, the University of California-Berkeley’s Center for Korean Studies residency, and the 100 West Corsicana Artists’ & Writers’ Residency in Corsicana, Texas, which inspired the creation of this novel. His novel A Contrived World (Dalkey Archive, 2016), won the Han Moo-suk Literary Award, the Dong-in Literary Award, and the Daesan Literary Award. Deep Vellum published his novel, Vaseline Buddha, in 2016, and will soon publish his next book, Arriving in a Thick Fog. He lives in Seoul.
YEWON JUNG’s translations include Jung Young Moon’s Vaseline Buddha (Deep Vellum) and Hwang Jungeun’s One Hundred Shadows (Tilted Axis). She received a BA in English from Brigham Young University, and an MA from the Graduate School of Interpretation and Translation at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies.
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