Читать книгу North Station - Suah Bae - Страница 8

First Snow, First Sight

Yang had had countless harsh words thrown at him over the course of his life, and as these had tended to culminate in a curse on his very existence, whenever he discovered that one of his castigators was no happier once they were rid of him, in other words that there was no correlation between their misery and Yang himself, and that this lack of correlation might have been all that ever lay between them, his timid heart found it strange, and faintly baffling. For example, there was the letter that Mira, one of these castigators, sent him one day; sighing that her days were like a ruin—though her entire life had been just that—she said that she was planning to spend a few days in the city where Yang lived, and that they had to meet. Though my entire life has been just that; this noncommittal expression seemed to Yang like a prideful, ultimate desire, which Mira deliberately underlined in her letter to make him hear it as a shout, and it was as though he really did hear Mira’s voice, commanding him to recognize the truth of this claim. But Mira’s voice, that was something that he had forgotten long ago, and in fact he could picture her only faintly, and had to acknowledge that all he remembered of her was so vague that he doubted he could tell her apart from her mother. Having said that, it wasn’t, of course, that he had absolutely no memory of the being known as Mira, simply that this “memory” was now only worth as much as any general, conventional expression related to human beings.

Though my entire life has been that. To Yang, this seemed to impose upon him the responsibility of having as exhaustive a knowledge of Mira’s life as he did of his own, and on top of taking it as a warning not to act as though he didn’t possess such knowledge, never mind whether or not he actually did, he also read into it a form of implicit criticism that was close to mockery; because there was no way for him to know even a fraction of what constituted this “entire life” of hers, any more than he could guess whether this life warranted the label, redolent as it was of melancholic previous-century lyricism, of a “ruin.” Sufficient time had passed for their relationship to lose its validity—it had already been over eight years since they’d last seen each other, had any form of contact, or even had so much as a mutual friend who might happen to let them know, just by the by, how the other was doing—and so, rather than their friendship being one wherein Yang had once had a vast store of detailed information regarding her, but which he had now forgotten, each had from the start shown a complete lack of interest in the minutiae of the other’s life, a life that was after all unrelated to their own and could be called absolute and unvarying—in that, at least, Yang could feel confident in his own memory—yet none of this was to suggest that they were indifferent to one another. It was just that the Mira Yang had known, Mira as she had been back then, had never once thrown that expression “entire life” at him. To Mira—or indeed, he thought, to anyone else—Yang was not someone who warranted deploying such a term. Back then, Mira had never even written “my life,” or mentioned plain “life” in casual conversation, where its appearance would have gone unnoticed. Not only would such expressions, which comprehend time and human beings as a single, indivisible whole, have been inappropriate for Mira as an individual living a present of innumerable dimensions, they were also—and this Yang found especially unpardonable—utterly unoriginal. He read Mira’s letter several times, it not being overly long; those ostentatious expressions—my entire life, and eternal ruin, sticking their heads arrogantly and impatiently out from in between the otherwise well-behaved sentences—meant that any kind of future connection they might have could only take the form of Yang’s plunging into Mira’s world and attending closely to its atmosphere of ruin, and so, shackled by an awkwardness and discomfort as though that high-handed and inconsiderate expression were a pair of handcuffs, there was nothing to do but write an equivocal reply, one that would avoid both definite consent and outright refusal.

Yang was lying supine by the lake. The water was surprisingly warm, given the cold wind, and in fact the heat was sufficient for the grass to give off a strange and sickening scent. The sun kept poking out from between the clouds, and as long as he stayed wrapped in his towel he wasn’t bothered by any chill. The lake didn’t have many swimmers that year, perhaps because the summer hadn’t been as warm as usual. A handful of wild ducks were huddled unmoving not far from Yang, so as an experiment he tried tossing them the breadcrumbs left over from his lunch, but this didn’t seem to interest them in the slightest, as though having to move for the sake of mere crumbs was too much hassle to even contemplate. Now and then there was a decent gust of wind, each one ruffling the ducks’ long feathers so that their round bodies appeared even plumper, while the down on the backs of their bowed necks was swept briefly flat, gleaming like a pale gray blanket. Yang wanted to stay where he was for as long as possible. Hoping that his skin and general constitution would withstand the chill of the wind, he closed his eyes. The feeling of his whole body, from the crown of his head to the tips of his toes, being as light as the down on the ducks’ necks, and thus being whisked away by the wind, that was it, as though in a dream—a dream, that is, of flying low and languid over the earth, sighing quietly at the sight that lies below, the seclusion of flat fields stretching on and on, low houses, people and their bicycles, looking friendly as toys—he struggled to keep that feeling. All the while, as though in a dream, he was taking care to regulate his breathing and not suddenly plummet down to earth, or lose the calm control of his orbit and go spinning away into the empty air like a baseball struck by a bat, governed only by centrifugal force. He was flying, and at the same time was sinking in a measure of fear and anonymous sadness—which was muted and mild enough to be enjoyable, and he felt the urge to shed actual tears. Tears warm as the gentle heat of an autumn evening, harmless as spiderwebs floating quietly in the November breeze. He tried to make the tears well up by calling to mind some concrete sadness, but it didn’t work. He dredged up several lines of poetry: “Today, only today I am beautiful / Tomorrow all disappears / Death, death approaches.” These lines had always seemed to him both beautiful and sad, but even they could not cause the tears to flow. Even while regretting this, the original sad-yet-tranquil feeling persisted. Of all the sadnesses he knew, the early morning kind when you’ve only just woken up, the kind against which there is no defense, for which you’re never prepared, was the most poetic. Mornings when birds cried outside his window, the inside of his mouth was washed with salty tears, the distant drone of traffic sounded as though it had just started up, the street below echoed with the soft footsteps of people heading out early to work, a dog groaned in the kitchen, and none of it, not the leaves or sunlight or wind or the flowers on the balcony, was the least bit different from the day before; curled up in bed, he would often be gripped by a sadness so irremediable that only the day before it had threatened to make his heart judder to a stop; he would sleep for so long that he forgot it, and would forget even himself, as fully as paper dissolved in water, and would feel that kind of obscure sadness that seemed to have flowed far away on the river of oblivion, still further away, finally to be washed up here. The moment he opened his eyes, though the already-forgotten dream had given him an intimation of sadness, this was now, in his waking state, only a hypothetical sadness that could not be approached even through the contours of memory. Sadness and tranquility, which belonged to and yet were indifferent to him. In this state of willed torpor, Yang waited for evening.

Some time later, Yang opened his eyes to find a young man and woman lying down near his own spot, side by side. Their bodies were fully stretched out, and they were both extremely tall. Shockingly tall, in fact. Close to 190 centimeters, Yang estimated, or perhaps even more. Even sunbathing, the two of them hadn’t removed their black, thick-framed glasses—for myopia, not the sun—and the parts of their bodies that weren’t covered by their swimsuits looked firm yet sleek, such a vast pale expanse it was almost inhuman; the woman’s legs were unshaven, so the splayed pattern of wet brown hairs clinging to her pale skin, plus the goose bumps on her thighs, was conspicuous. Yang had always liked tall people. Though of course, he didn’t know how they thought of him from their perspective. And so, these tall people having taken his fancy, Yang wanted to look at them for as long as possible within the bounds of propriety. Aside from the issue of their height, their physical bodies harbored a factor that Yang had never before encountered in reality, a factor that could probably be called literary particularity. Because it felt as though those two bodies lying side by side were addressing him with incomprehensible words, like speech formed of some alien language. Like a song thrown together in dialect, like a wordless question, like a braying donkey. But at the same time, and despite the fact that, at least superficially, they made no gestures to indicate particular boundaries, their posture and facial expressions as they lay there with their eyes closed revealed a strong, primitive, animalistic awareness of their own borders, and an equally strong desire to safeguard these from seepage, to the extent that, for example, if they were to appear at a party holding hands, no one around them would dare approach as they crossed the threshold, their bodies formed one discrete region, solid and impermeable. They could not be called skinny, but it was true that their figures were spare, extremely ascetic. In the man’s case, each time he took a breath the scaffolding of his ribs was clearly outlined, and those long, strong frames were ever so elegant, yet it was as though they were being borne on the currents of a strange and ineluctable fate. They looked like they might be brother and sister; more than in any similarity of facial features, the resemblance lay in their attitude and bearing, their movements and self-made mentality. The language of such acquired, a posteriori flesh made them seem like twins, closer even than brother and sister. Flesh of familiarity and homogeneity, shared exclusivity and extreme bashfulness. The transparent black-framed glasses, the woman’s dully gleaming swimsuit, its thick black fabric patterned with water droplets, hair cut short as a duck’s feathers, slightly protruding jaw, navel concealed neatly with both hands; large, flat hands that seemed to be clutching something wallet-sized, and long toes curled together in a way that looked both stubborn and shy. Reckoned in terms of sensitivity, the man was superior. He had both eyes closed behind his glasses and each time the light undulated his eyelids trembled perceptibly, their speed in precise proportion to the degree of that undulation. Though he was lying down undressed and with his eyes closed, he resembled “man thinking about anxiety” more than “man sleeping.” Alongside the habitual, though very slight, forward thrust of his jaw, the look on his face was one of surprise. It seemed a private indication of his having come face to face with some abstract surprise that can be discovered only with one’s eyes closed. As for the woman, she opened her eyes now and then to examine the situation with respect to the sunshine and her own body. She shifted her body a little at a time, stretching out both legs but taking care that her feet didn’t touch the sand if it could possibly be avoided. In spite of the fact that the beach towels they had brought with them were extremely large, larger than Yang had ever before set eyes on, their feet stuck out over the ends. Just then two huge dogs suddenly leapt into the water at their owner’s urging, panting heavily, and the startled ducks made for the hill on the opposite side of the lake. With no movement other than to open her eyes, the woman observed this brief disturbance. Though she must have felt Yang’s watching her and her partner, her glance did not stray in his direction.

Just then it started to seem to Yang that he had met them both somewhere before. At first, the thought was like something in a dream, imagination and expectation tangled up and dim as the ground seen from a great height, but it gradually became invaded by echoing doubts, which might very well be facts. If Yang was not mistaken, they were that tall, odd couple who had been at the birthday party of the person living in the attic room that winter, who had stood there quietly side by side, practically glued to the wall, joined hands and did a little polka once the music started up, then gone home at the stroke of midnight, without at any point having spoken a single word to anyone else there. Since it was uncommon to encounter people as tall as they, Yang slowly became convinced that he was correct. At the party they had both been wearing sweaters; the woman with a sleeveless jacket on over hers, plus black stockings and a gray, pleated knee-length skirt. None of the other guests had seemed to know who they were, and were presumably none the wiser once the party had ended, but as Yang had been standing close by when they’d exchanged greetings with the host he knew that the woman worked as an assistant librarian and the man was a college student. Just then it had begun to snow outside. It was the first snow of the year. The flat where the party was being held was on the top floor; the door to the veranda had been left open for the smokers, and the night was peering in through it, a night formed from keen rays of darkness, and within that only a chiaroscuro of what was dark and still more so; the lofty cityscape, comprised of the silhouettes of chimneys and rooftops, which were completely different entities at night than they were during the day, was casting a sharp eye over the room’s interior. The rooftops, sloping at somber and beautiful angles, recalled iron warships floating mute in the sea of night, made with great toil but that were, having weathered a hundred years, desperately old. Yang loved the shadows of such rooftops on winter nights, and since whenever he encountered something he really liked there would stir in him a vague terror proportionate to the delight, intangible yet burdened with physical sensation, though in fact any experience of unbearable beauty will bring with it a measure of terror—in this case, the experience being the room full of people and the veranda that looked out over the rooftop nightscape—he had to be careful to make his body as inconspicuous as possible and not shock others with the pallor of his fear. That winter, the man had said he had to leave the party because he was working part-time clearing the snow from around the university office. Yes, that was it. Yang’s memory began to revive from the dust of tangled unconsciousness, curling into animation gradual as a snail. Before the couple left, the woman got a book out of her bag. Yang could see it without moving from his place in the shadows, pressed up against the wall in the corner of the room. Not that he had stationed himself there in order to observe them; the two of them had simply happened to position themselves right between Yang and the open veranda door. Just then, Yang shuddered at the caustic sound of a hard, pointed talon scraping the metal handle of the apartment’s front door. The sound grew louder as the music did, and disappeared when it died down. Though Yang surreptitiously opened the door several times to investigate whether some kind of wild beast was struggling to get inside, each time he opened the door to nothing but the stale smell of the old corridor, the saturated air raising goose bumps on Yang’s face like being licked by a huge tongue.

The woman’s book was from the library where she worked and had a classification code stuck to its spine. The blue stamp of the library’s name was visible on the first page as she flicked through the yellowish pages. At the time, Yang couldn’t see the book’s title. It was clear that the couple were both extremely shy, unable to enjoy parties. They wore passive smiles that melted inconspicuously into those around them, and made an effort not to exclude anyone from their gaze, without actually staring at them. Yang furtively rubbed his finger, sticky from the sugary drink, against the wall. The scraping sound startled him, loud as a scream. Equally loud was the rumble then produced by his stomach, sloshing with drink; fearing stares, Yang tried not to attract attention as he rummaged through the host’s son’s toy box, hoping to find something that would muffle the sound yet seem like merely an amusing distraction, a pair of castanets maybe, but all he found was a yellow rubber duck that made a squeaking sound when squeezed, and a toy arrow. As time passed and the night deepened, Yang grew gradually more uneasy, seized by an ever-more inexplicable terror; whirled about by such emotions, oppressed by the scenery that lay before him, of the veranda and the snow-covered rooftops, their existence seemingly visible only to himself, and in order to slip still further into the antinomic pleasure of his heart smarting and melting as though pierced by the toy arrow, Yang did not stop deliberately pushing himself further into the center of the unease. Even as he did so, he worried that his secret enjoyment would be unwittingly brought to an end by someone closing the veranda door, cutting him off from the sight of the rooftops, but luckily no one did. The woman gave the book to the host, who thanked her. The couple put on their hats and coats. They kissed the host on the cheek and said their goodbyes. They left, closing the door behind them as quietly as possible. Yang was shaking, but kept his gaze fixed on the veranda. After he’d calmed down a little he stepped out onto it, under the pretext of smoking a cigarette. The snow was piling up in the streets, and the shadows of the couple, seen from Yang’s vantage point, were startlingly tall.

Later, the person who had invited Yang to the party asked him to return a library book for him, which he’d borrowed a short while before unexpectedly having to move house. He added that, though the initial due date had already passed, it wouldn’t be a problem since he’d renewed the book twice for one-month extensions, but if there was some miscommunication and Yang did in fact end up having to pay a late fee, he would of course be reimbursed. The friend’s need to move in a hurry made it difficult to find time for such errands, so Yang decided to do him this favor. There was no reason to refuse; the library was on his way to work, and returning the book wouldn’t take much time. He went there a few days later. He’d been on night duty at the hotel, working at the front desk until the early hours and the gradual arrival of morning. When he got to the library he discovered that it wouldn’t be open for another half hour. Coming back the next day would be easy, but he might forget, or the library’s opening hours might be different, and if they didn’t coincide with the time that he left work—since, for the hotel’s temporary employees, these weren’t fixed but depended on the circumstances—he might end up returning home only to have to head out again later, so he decided that it would be best just to wait, and get something to eat at a cafe nearby. There was no cafe serving breakfast in the immediate vicinity, but he was hungry, and in any case it was far too cold to wait out in front of the library. But the sparsely populated cafe he did find was barely any warmer than it was outside; the stingy owner must not have the heat on. After ordering toast and coffee, Yang got out the book and looked inside—the first time he’d opened it—finding there the blue stamp with the library’s name, but neither this nor its title stirred any memories in him, as by then he had entirely forgotten the couple at the party. Yang read the first few pages while buttering his toast, drank his coffee, then opened the book again around the middle and read some passage or other, rummaged in his bag for his pen and notebook and continued reading, jotting down a few passages as he did. It wasn’t that these had made any especial impression on him, simply that he liked to collect sentences this way, and tended to note down whatever caught his attention, as long as he had the tools on hand. Lacking a similar fondness for organized filing, however, meant that the quotes thus amassed were stored in a slapdash manner. Since the notebooks and loose paper where he wrote down random sentences were not kept specially for this purpose, and since, moreover, they were themselves not collected in one place but rather scattered here and there, he almost never looked at them twice, and in the majority of cases just discarded them for no reason whatsoever. Now and then he would stumble across them among his belongings, sentences he himself had written down, but which by this time he had entirely forgotten ever having read, never mind what they meant or which book they’d come from. Rather than lodging in his mind or being engraved upon it, these sentences were fated to be forgotten from the very moment he recorded them, and though the business of collecting them, being purely habitual, did not go beyond simple, repeated, profitless labor, discovering unlooked-for sentences recorded in his own handwriting, and in the most unpredictable places, seemed such an intimate mystery that Yang could not bring himself to abandon the habit. Though there were almost no cases in which the sentences had a particular, significant meaning, he still wrote them down: on the back of the map he always carried around, the business cards of people he didn’t know, the corners of the previous year’s memorandum, in the blank spaces on receipts from ultimately forgettable restaurants he’d stumbled across in the course of a meandering stroll, here and there in the magazines he often flicked through, in newspaper margins, on flyers and pamphlets found on the bus, and on postcards he would never send. Sentences that even lacked a concrete subject, since he gained enjoyment from the mere act of recording them, and since, moreover, he attached the most importance to actions that were coincidental and impromptu, there were also cases where the sentences’ simple, everyday nature—what was sometimes their mundane brevity— made them still more meaningful and enigmatic. Naturally, Yang no longer has the notebook in which he recorded several of the library book’s sentences that time in the cafe. He is, however, able to recall something of the book itself; that it was a collection of letters exchanged between Voltaire and Emperor Frederick. Regrettably, Yang had understood almost nothing of what the book contained, for the simple fact that it was written in French. And so there is a strong possibility that what he transcribed, rather than complete, coherent sentences, would have just been flowery phrases and eulogizing fragments comparing Frederick to various heroes of legend. Yang had transcribed whichever sentence fragments happened to contain words he knew—for example, certain specific names—without any particular logic. “The young Solomon . . . or Socrates, were they here now, what is that to me, it is Frederick who I love.” Though of course, Yang would have understood no more of this than Solomon, Socrates, love.

The library was busier than Yang had expected it to be so early in the morning. It was a fairly compact place, a French cultural exchange library operating out of the provincial government office, and didn’t boast many visitors, but the handful of employees were so busily engaged in sorting documents, seemingly a task of some urgency, that none of them looked up when Yang walked in. While he stood there waiting he was able to enjoy the pleasingly crisp sound of paper rustling, and the rich smell of books common to small libraries where the reading room is not separated from the reception area. When Yang announced that he was there to return a book, one of the receptionists directed him to the next window along. The tall woman whom Yang had seen at the party, who stood there in silence the whole time, was nowhere to be seen. There was no notice board with information relevant to library users, perhaps with it being such a small-scale place, and no one was sitting behind the counter window the receptionist had indicated. As Yang’s business wasn’t all that urgent, he decided to wait until someone appeared. Just beyond the window were bookshelves, and a young man whose job was to return each book to its proper place in the classifications. There wasn’t much else for Yang to do than watch the man at work. He looked very young, more like an apprentice than an official library employee. The youth was working clumsily; he clearly hadn’t yet managed to master the locations of the various categories or the art of sorting the books efficiently, so each time he made some trivial mistake he would get himself into a terrible fluster, even though no one was there to harangue him. When he turned in Yang’s direction and his face was revealed, Yang thought he couldn’t be more than eighteen. It was a child’s face through and through. Yang had been similarly impressed by a face once before, on the subway. A bunch of primary school kids had entered the car and begun chattering away about computer games and anime films. No, not chattering, it would be more correct to describe them as bellowing at each other with all their might, with the blind aggression peculiar to children who have just begun to bloom. In the opposite corner from where Yang was standing, visible straight-on to him, a boy who made an unusually strong impression was tangled up with his friends; Yang’s gaze was immediately captured by him. The boy seemed like a sprite from some mythical, light-flooded country, just now banished to the subterranean world of the train. The visual impression he made was of one formed not of solid materials like flesh, blood, and bone, but of pure luminosity and far-traveled echoes. Not because he was so very beautiful, but because his was the beauty of zero self-consciousness. This would partly be his youth, but he appeared utterly unaware of his own beauty, of putting on airs, of admiring himself in the mirror. He was a being who hadn’t yet been reincarnated, an ignorant, foolish being who had, at least up to that moment, been ignorant of how he had to hold himself apart from the other objects of the world, alive at precisely that moment, so inadvertently beautiful that it made your heart ache. But this vacuum state, this total lack of consciousness regarding the world, would not last long. And precisely because it would be so brief, Yang was flooded with such heartbreaking emotion he felt his chest grow tight. He kept his eyes on the boy right up until the latter got off the train, disappearing into the crowd with his arms around his friends’ shoulders, howling with laughter. And now, again, Yang shrank back and held his breath. Were the boy from the subway to have aged in an instant and be standing right there in front of Yang, this was precisely how he would appear. That is, if time were able to flow over the surface of human beings, self-contained and inviolate, with neither weight nor substance, neither affecting nor penetrating them. Or else, if time were an image inadvertently made, formed in the air by the radiation of such secret light, playfully scattering gold dust, receding into the distance while howling with laughter, this was the shape that would then be left in the air. No one would be able to touch it. Because it is only a shape, not some material thing existing in reality. Because it is only a certain function of time, made of light rays, luminosity, and echoes, formed of memories lost to oblivion, of hypothetical sadness and objectless regret.

As soon as the youth noticed Yang his face turned red to the lobes of his ears and he came toward him in such a rush, though there was barely a couple of strides separating them, that he almost broke into a run. And he apologized for there having been no one at the counter window, and his not having noticed Yang what with being in the stack room. His apology had an air of genuine contrition, a rare exception to the common rule whereby employees and visitors pay each other as little attention as possible, causing Yang himself to feel contrite for having caused this youth needless concern by standing there without a word. Once Yang had returned the collected letters of Voltaire and Emperor Frederick, the youth asked him imploringly if there wasn’t anything else he needed. When Yang answered that he was looking for other documents related to this particular exchange of letters, the youth, blushing openly, replied that the library held many such documents, all in French of course, and there were also many magazines for which they had a regular subscription, several of which were related to literature or history, so it might be a help if he looked through some of those. In any case, he said, theirs was the most substantial collection of and on French literature in the whole city, with the exception of the university library, so if there was anything Yang was after in the way of specific publications, he himself should be able to help.

“But you must have already tried the university library?” the youth asked.

The flush had not yet completely left his cheeks. It had spread even into his eyes, so looking at them felt like looking at blue glass beads into which the sky and shining sun had been poured. At the youth’s direction, Yang entered the periodicals room and gathered a large armful of magazines that he then carried away to read. Yang could make neither head nor tail of French, and since the documents the youth had brought him were all in this language, Yang had to occupy himself by flicking through until he found a picture, which he would then linger over as it though it contained some vital clue. The youth seemed unvaryingly gentle. Visitors generally addressed him first, and without exception received friendly guidance from him. It seemed he must have been this amicable by nature, but it might also be an attitude common to all vocational school students studying and working part-time at some corporation or other. During his time in the library, Yang learned that, as per his initial guess, the youth was there on an apprenticeship rather than as a regular employee, and did indeed study at a vocational school, from which he was soon to graduate. He also learned that the youth’s name was Edmund. That day, Yang photocopied several sheets of documents that he absolutely didn’t need, though he made sure that they were ones with photographs, and took out his first book from the library, a biography of Voltaire. When he filled out the form for a library card and presented this to Edmund, the latter said with a smile Yang? What a peculiar name.

Over the next four days Yang spent as much time as possible at the library. During those four days Edmund was assiduous in conveying this or that document to him, and Yang was equally unflagging in pretending to read them. If a given document didn’t seem to arouse Yang’s interest, Edmund would appear rather disappointed. He was a truly zealous apprentice. He threw himself in to whichever task was required of him, making an effort to comply with every possible breed of request related to books or documents; to refuse or ignore these would have been alien to him. Yet the books themselves, beyond containing essays or documents that might be of use to Yang, didn’t actually seem to interest him. His default response to the words “Voltaire” or “French literature” was an ordinary, professional smile, a far cry from any wild enthusiasm. Even when, in the course of discussion, the words Rimbaud or Aragon, surrealism, Rilke in Paris, etc., rose to his lips, he was every bit as cold and indifferent as when he pronounced the names “George Bush” or “Luciano Pavarotti.” But at a request for “the October 1986 edition of magazine X,” he seemed ready to clamber right up to the summit of the stack room, his cheeks flushed with genuine happiness. On the fourth day, Yang heard another of the library employees wish Edmund a quick “Happy birthday!” as they walked past him.

“Today is your birthday?” Yang asked, also quite casually. By this time, they were sufficiently intimate that their conversation could stray slightly beyond the formal exchanges of visitor and employee, though it was of course still bound by the domain of the library.

“Actually no, it’s tomorrow; Mrs. Hella has a day off tomorrow, so she wished me happy birthday in advance.”

“Ah, in that case I want to say happy birthday too. How old are you?”

“Nineteen. Thank you.”

“And I’d like to give you some kind of present. Since you’ve been helping me so much.”

Looking genuinely shocked, though with his smile as unwavering as ever, Edmund replied that there was no need for that, he was merely doing his job.

“All the same, would you mind giving me your address? I really would like to send you a present, as long as that’s okay.”

Edmund hesitated for a bit before acquiescing—“if you really want”—and writing his address in the notebook that Yang held out to him. Yang slipped the notebook back into his pocket. Edmund regarded Yang with a somewhat blank look, unsmiling. Then, when Yang met his eyes and said “bye then,” he blurted out “bye” in response and awkwardly raised his hand, extremely flustered. Yang strutted out without looking back.

Each time he passed the gift shop, Yang’s eyes strayed toward the china dolls. Never in his life had he possessed such an object, or even considered that he might one day purchase one. The majority of the city’s gift stores were clustered along a huge road that stretched out to the west. When the evening sun was setting on those smooth milky brows, the dolls seemed like shy, flustered beings standing there at a loss, blushing, yet zealous and warm and surprisingly intimate. Yang was only too well aware of his own timidity, that he was always at least somewhat afraid. He’d always been that way, ever since his school days, but he’d never been able to understand why this timid disposition, perfectly natural to him, caused others to feel discomfort or awkwardness or even open hostility. To Yang, this defensive state of his was actually quite beautiful. Because it was another acute sensation only perceptible to himself. When he first spotted the china dolls in that shop, Yang had seen in them a single personality, irritating and intractable, like a fractious stepchild, but also pale and weak and frightened and beautiful. To Yang, this was by no means an unfamiliar combination. He found the china dolls’ pose of pessimistic hesitation far more attractive than the gorgeous coquetry of Eastern European painted porcelain dolls. He used all the cash he had on him to buy a Meissen sleeping Venus figurine. Yang could spend some time in close study of the sleeping Venus, and still find that it aroused no greater a desire for access or possession than had those other surpassingly beautiful beings. The salesperson put the Venus in a box, gift-wrapped it, and finished it with a red ribbon that read “Edmund, a very happy birthday.” The next day Yang bought nineteen yellow roses, and, walking slowly and clutching the note with the address, went to find Edmund’s house.

It was getting near to evening, and the sunlight was so pallidly faint that there was almost no warmth to be had from it, and the ducks had all vanished somewhere, and when the wind grew even chillier the people began to fold up their blankets and leave their spots by the lake. The tall couple, along with Yang, were among the last to leave. They sat up side by side, adjusted their glasses, and brushed any remaining moisture from their swimsuits, pulled on T-shirts and trousers over their swimwear, stood up and into their shoes, then folded their towels and hung them over their shoulders. Though Yang wanted to address them with some brief word of parting, and ask whether she had stopped working at the library, almost as soon as the thought occurred to him he felt that it would be difficult and annoying to put it into practice and actually open his mouth, besides which, the couple would likely have responded with indifference, so in the end he just stayed quiet. Glancing at his watch, he saw that he would soon need to set off for home. Mira had decided to call on him around 8 P.M., so he needed to be back before then, though beyond that there was nothing, absolutely no reason to rush. Yang had let the time drag on in the hope that Mira might wear herself out and decide not to come after all, but these hopes had ultimately been thwarted. Though he had no reason to think so, at some point during this impatient passage of time Yang had begun to worry that Mira had him confused with someone else. It was possible. They hadn’t seen each other in at least eight years, and whichever way you looked at it, Mira coming all this way to meet him, to meet Yang—she’d said it was just a passing visit but it was clear that he was the reason for her trip—simply wasn’t credible. By the same logic, she might not even recognize him. Again, as it was so long since they’d last met, or even heard the other’s voice, it was possible. Yang experimented with examining himself in the mirror, assessing to what extent his appearance had altered over the past eight years, but he couldn’t even guess what he’d looked like so long ago. And surely Mira’s memory would be equally poor, as in fact his was of her. Yang repeatedly reminded himself that Mira was a specific, material human being, a specific, material woman; sometimes this was strange and discomfiting, sometimes it seemed a joke so clumsy he wanted to laugh, and at one point he genuinely did laugh so hard he was almost doubled over. Eight years ago, Yang had been afraid of Mira. It was the same now. She was a magnificent-looking woman, strong-willed and fearsomely obstinate, and her assertiveness was uncommonly pronounced. But Yang’s fear of her wasn’t solely down to her powerful ego or will to dominate. It was because she had wanted him to fear her. There had been a period in his life when he had quailed at the thought that she might leave him. (The terror had been such that it seemed his chest would explode from the anticipation alone, and had gone on for such a long time at this same intensity that when Mira finally did cast him aside, in a dramatic scene entirely her own creation, it was actually less painful.) Back then Mira had hesitated, gently and patiently holding Yang’s head to her chest. We fell in love at first sight, you know, in a way that had never happened before. And still you’re afraid, what on earth are you afraid of? . . . Despite having arranged to come around at eight, it was past nine and there was still no sight of her. Yang sat on the bed and waited, watching the clock. Though strongly suspecting that she would arrive in due course, Yang fervently hoped that a last-minute change of heart might cause her to stay on the train and just pass the city by entirely. He didn’t put the radio on, or the lights, didn’t light any candles or make a pot of coffee. He simply waited, adopting unbeknownst to himself a posture of obedience toward some vague subject, preparing to receive the aggressor into the sphere of his shy soul. This was waiting only, without performing any action. At some point he fell asleep.

And then at some point he woke up; because he wasn’t immediately aware that he’d been asleep, it took him some time to grasp why he was collapsed in bed with his clothes, even his shoes, still on, and what had then woken him up. In this state of his exhausted bewilderment he heard shoes shuffling across the floor, and dishes clattering in the sink, which went on for an uncomfortably long time. These rude, unpleasant sounds rubbed his nerves the wrong way, needlessly reviving evil memories like a coin dropped into a tin dish. And who was that crossing the unlit room? Mira had arrived. She had opened the unlocked door and come in, made herself something to drink—paying no attention to the sleeping Yang—and had just now emerged from the kitchen. This was a moment he had imagined time and time again, suffocating inside every time that he did, but now, seeing the shape it was actually taking, he was convinced that reality was no rare thing, was in fact nothing more than a poor imitation, dull and run-of-the-mill, of that imagination that anticipates everything. He was in no hurry to get up, and given that his body was deaf to his commands, leaving him unable to so much as turn his head, shackled to the air as is common in fever dreams, he could do nothing but continue to lie down as he was, watching Mira get some bread out of the cupboard, slice it, and spread it with margarine. Even in the dark Yang could see that Mira had grown yet more emaciated, as though a gust of wind might blow her away, and that her long hair was hanging down behind her back in a very ordinary way, tied in a ponytail. She was wearing a pale-colored wool dress, belted at the waist, and though her clothes didn’t seem all that big, the material looked baggy on her hips. The fact that she had dwindled away like an aged, withering woman triggered surprise in Yang. Seemingly famished, she scarfed the bread down in the near dark, the only light from the moon shining in through the window. The sound of her swallowing was incredibly loud. And then she coughed for quite a long time. Ages ago, they’d been in line to buy train tickets when they first set eyes on each other; struck by an immediate attraction, they stood there hesitating behind the door to their respective destinations, pressing their ears up against it to hear whoever was on the other side; the bell rang to announce the train’s departure. Doors opened and closed, and people appeared and disappeared quiet and courteous as funeral-goers, and the pianist struck up Chopin’s Funeral March as if in response. (The music shakes Yang to the core. If not for that music, sadness would just be sadness; that was the kind of music it was.) The candle that had been placed in a corner of the room made the couple’s shadows dance on the opposite wall, so tall it seemed they would touch the ceiling, and the wind that slid in through the door to the veranda flipped the pages of the book. On the wall where the shadows were undulating, Yang transcribed the sentences that so suddenly appeared, that were in a language he could not understand, that were all the more beautiful because of that. The snow was piling up on the rooftops; the stars shone mysteriously in the sky. A skinny black figure, broom in hand, was sitting next to the solitary outline of a chimney, and Yang gasped in surprise at the realization that he himself was the sole observer of this scene. The snow looked to be getting gradually thicker. “I’m the chimney sweep of sadness, I cry, cry, cry . . .” Yang grazed the pencil hesitantly against the wall. “I cry, cry, cry . . .” Taking care to get the spelling correct, he wrote it out again and again. “Cry, cry, cry . . .” Behind Yang, the shadow of the tall man was whispering, his words whisking out through the door: “But clearing snow is no easy thing. No, it’s not easy at all.” The voice receded, wavering with what seemed like regret, disappearing like a candle’s last smolder. The woman took the man’s hand and they passed over the threshold together. Yang brought his lips to the wall, close as a shadow, found the sentences he had written and read in a small voice: “For twenty years I searched for such a place, where no one lives nearby, where the landscape is wide and rolling with meadows, hollows, swamps, solitude, forests, and the sky. Not even a village, just a tiny hamlet without a church. –Botho Strauß.”

Mira got up from her seat and approached Yang.

And Yang knew that now, finally, it was time to let the tears fall.