Читать книгу North Station - Suah Bae - Страница 9

Owl

There was an ambulance parked in front of the house. A pallid stillness lay over the whole scene, nothing moved, and the air was like a warm, transparent wall. A regular ticking sound pierced the silence of 33 degrees Celsius—as indicated by the wavering gradations of the rooftop thermometer. The lazy beat of a mechanical heart. Or else, was it the metronomic footsteps of someone running down a corridor in rubber-soled shoes, or the ticking of an unusually large wristwatch hanging from my ear? Perhaps the person living on the ground floor had turned on the washing machine, or maybe the sound was coming from a broken electrocardiograph. A man was being brought out on a stretcher to the ambulance. His shoes stuck out from under the blanket. Water was dripping from them. The house was a wrecked ship. I know that old man, with the huge green oxygen mask jutting from his head like a green dragon on a ship’s prow, or I think I know him. I try to approach him but the nurses hold me back, their speech incomprehensible. When I turn the page of the picture book a toad and a red orchid are melting to a pulp in a flowerpot. The ruins of a castle appear as I keep walking, and a narrow stony road that rises at a steep gradient. There is the scent of hot grass and dry sunlight. Just then, soaked in sweat, I look back over my shoulder and see a large damp reptile soundlessly following me. I can’t recall its physical form. This is all a scene from a dream. I could only sense the warmth of its long black tail, which it held erect; warmth like that from stone steps burning in the heat of the midday sun. Someone took my hand. And suddenly the scene changed.

The old bookshop, which had no ventilation system other than its windows and door, was full of cigarette smoke. I sat at a table with an espresso cup on it; a corner of the square was visible through the open door, and I could see people sitting around tables by the side of the road in spite of the hot weather. I got the feeling that I was being watched intently by the countless books that lined the walls from the floor to the high ceiling, and by the stories within them. Strangely overwhelmed, I overcame my shyness and got up from my seat, looking up at the higher shelves as I wandered among them. It was the second time we’d visited this bookshop. The first time we’d arrived too late, after the bookshop had already closed for the day, and so could only stand outside for a while and peer in at the display stands. We talked as I examined the books laid out in the window display, pointing at the titles I recognized, but also at those I didn’t. It was winter. The wind shook the awnings of the open-air cafes, and after midnight the snowflakes began to fly. But it was summer now, and we went inside the shop. They brought out small cups of an espresso that was thick as tar. A calm yet persistent scent eddied around us, made up of trees and stale dust, paper and the wooden floor, and cigarette smoke. You were talking with the owner about the difficulties facing small bookshops, about the pessimistic outlook; I finished walking among the shelves, and stepped outside the shop. The shop immediately next door was a florist’s, with a single chair outside. I sat down and put on my sunglasses. Happily, I’d been given a book from the shop as a present. The first story in the book was about five cities, and very short. The title, Invisible Cities. I began to read aloud from the beginning of the book. Time went by. Reptiles surrounded me, listening to the sound of my reading. They were curled up quietly, barely moving; only their raised black tails swayed slowly in the air, as a huge butterfly might, in that sunlight of late summer sliding into autumn. Heat radiated from their skin, which had been warmed in the sunlight and from the square’s asphalt. This afternoon subsiding by degrees like a swamp. Asleep, I heard the sound of sleeping breath. Of one sleeping breath fumbling for another. They must be tangled with you, my breathing, my sleep, and my dreams. And I wanted to keep dreaming. Tears and sweat were flowing from me, wetting my face and watch and pillow. Sleep drifted about over lukewarm waves, like an anesthetic leaching in through veins, seized by sleep’s phantoms . . . held within sleep, one eye makes a simultaneous record of what the other sees. Sleep, the soul’s gelatinous component, the made-visible half-form of that which is unseen. Dreams and the embrace of dreams, which always stir up such sluggish, stunned sensations. This thing that stimulates my sleep, the respiration and waves of dreams, waves of breath and waves of water, that chord and note. And a silent song-cum-selfless-aria spun out on the keyboard. I passed back into the dream, back into the bookshop.

But you’d left, they told me. You were alarmed to find I’d disappeared and hurried outside to look for me, they said. And that it had already been over half an hour since you’d left. He left? While they were speaking I suddenly became alien to the dream, quite at a loss. All the books turned away with cold, sad faces, all the writers clamped their mouths shut and went back to being dead. The cold espresso dregs stained the bottom of the cracked coffee cup. He really left? I repeated blankly, clutching the book that had been my present. As though there was nothing more I could do. Which was true, in fact. I had been sitting in front of the florist’s, reading aloud from the book. I didn’t see you come out of the bookshop. And you didn’t notice me either. I’d thought I was waiting for you. You believed I’d gone away. Like something that had always been spoken of, not knowing that it had not been true. In that moment when you failed to find me, I was reading Invisible Cities. I do not know where you live, and my house, though you know it, is too far away.

I liked to talk about dreams. For lovers, Freud was a gypsy of romance and sensual desire, part fortune-teller, part lute-carrying poet, and the manufacturer of a wonder drug. At some time or other, I told you about the beautiful yellow bird I held in my hand. The sense of a being delicate as a spider’s web, suggested by the heat from its fierce warm breast, its slender weak toes and the soft down on its skin. About the wingbeats that had seemed shockingly strong in spite of such delicacy, the feel of its muscles tense and tremble beneath the skin, the ruddy memory of its chest suddenly springing up at that smallish yet explosive wriggling. At that, you pronounced my dream both enjoyable and extremely well behaved. I didn’t know the reasons for your conclusion. I wasn’t a student of Freud like you. But I could guess that the reason you found it enjoyable wasn’t because of what Freud himself had taught. You dismissed such provisional explanations, given purely for the sake of carnal intimations, as “Freudian versification.” Imaginary poetry that looks forward to a time overflowing with amusements.

Believing (incorrectly) that I had grown sad and left, you found yourself all alone. You must have been hungry—it having grown quite late by then—and might have gone to a restaurant, even without a companion. There were plenty of places lining the square, as in the small streets that radiated out from it. The kind of place, in other words, that people felt was highly suitable for evening dates, especially fashionable Friday evening ones. After peering inside several of the restaurants, I quickly realized that I had miscalculated—you would never have chosen to eat alone amid such a cheerful clamor. The square was a place for what is commonly called “going out.” The parties and pairs clustered at each table all had smiling faces and cheeks slightly flushed. There were no tables with single occupants. My search so far had been in vain, and it was clear that someone with your firm sense of self-respect wouldn’t be drifting around like a loner. I gave up on the restaurants, but couldn’t think where to try next. I saw the lights of a taxi rank—you must have taken one. And left. I’ve experienced the emotion of love twice in the time that I’ve known you. The first time is long past, the second is still ongoing. Both times it happened with writers, and both times I fell in love with them without ever having met them in person. Though you yourself were somewhat acquainted with the first of the writers. To be precise, you told me that your acquaintance had only lasted for a brief while, a very long time ago, but now and then you would make a vague plan to go and see him again. Using this as a pretext, we put together a fairly concrete plan for the two of us to visit that first writer. He lived far away, and though we managed to obtain his address and get an appointment with him, we weren’t sure whether the trip would require a passport or visa. Only once we’d gone to the harbor to catch the ferry were we told that a passport was necessary. I had mine in my handbag, but you’d left yours at home. We watched the ferry depart without us.

After that, I would sometimes dream of going to meet the first writer. You told me that, a very long time ago, you’d traveled to that city, the city where the first writer was now living. You said that the tolling of a distant bell was audible in the ruins at the heart of the city, a place so little-frequented that even the shadows of passersby were rarely seen. It had been a curious experience. You were sitting halfway up a tall flight of crumbling stairs, and the wind blowing in through the gaps in the ruined stone walls carried with it the sound of the bell. But as for the creaking of a nearby window-frame, or the scrape of carriage wheels over paving stones, there was nothing. Ah, this was still a little while before such typical tourist things had appeared in that city. Might the whispering of lovers on the other side of the wall, blending creole and patois in their speech, have sounded to you like the ringing of a bell? But that is merely conjecture, with only the faint possibility of truth.

You once asked me to write about my dream. Not just an off-hand mention of a certain scene, but to describe the whole thing in as much detail as possible, and send it to you. I said nothing at the time, but privately decided not to. It would be comparatively easy to write about only one particular scene, or one aspect of the dream that had made a strong impression. But recording it in its entirety from beginning to end—if dreams can be said to have beginnings and ends—was another matter entirely. Not only had the dream lacked a sequential plot, but its story was not a rational one, it didn’t fit with consistent logic. I was unable to judge precisely where it had started or come to a close. No, I was unable to remember. A dream, once dreamt, is soon forgotten. The lifespan of the dream, still vividly remembered when I woke up in the middle of the night, was not all that long. On touching the surface of consciousness, the mosaic of the dream rapidly oxidized and crumbled away, and my mind filled in the blank spaces with colored tiles of its own invention. The dreams I can still recall at least in part are, without exception, the ones that I recounted to you. Through the telling, those dreams found a foothold in my consciousness. But in doing so, the dream would have inevitably altered, becoming tainted with deliberate contrivance. The dream degenerated into that which was not a dream. It was impossible to tell whether it was a dream or something imagined while sleeping. And more than anything else, my own belief is that there are many cases in which dreams are fundamentally void. For the most part, what appears in dreams are no more than relics, imagined or recalled by the eyes of day, presented at random without relation to either time or will. And so, dreams can be neither a divine revelation nor a prophecy. The dream says nothing about me, no more than it does about you. It bears as little relation to reality as the fortune inside a fortune cookie. Even if you believe what the dream seems to show, that doesn’t alter the fact of its nullity. And so, even if I were to spy on myself, record the entirety of my dream and send it to you, ready and willing to disclose myself, such a record would clearly lack the ability to disclose or betray anything of this self. You strongly opposed my belief in the nullity of dreams. Since when have dreams been nothing? That’s evidently not true. Hints and paradoxes, caves and reptiles, never mind what you call it, they clearly have some kind of psychological meaning. To interpret a dream, you need more than the dream itself, more than a mere process of mechanical unraveling; rather, you need the counseling process, in which the concerned party and the interpreter collaborate. People who declare that dreams are nothing simply do not want to believe them, or are frightened of doing so.

In my opinion, it’s more appropriate to say that whatever psychological meaning a dream has is more to do with the one who interprets it than the one who dreamt it. And so, interpreting a dream rather than disclosing one would be the more effective way to disclose oneself. Only some time later did I come to understand that, by treating dreams as an amusing pastime, you were largely aiming to provoke. You might also have fostered that light, benign atmosphere as a way of setting me at ease, so that I wouldn’t be afraid to disclose my dream. Wanting, as you did, for me to put it down in the form of an essay, as a full and coherent literary composition rather than some series of fragments.

The dream was nothing, but at the same time it was also me. Because the dream was my fabrication, my lie. I was aware of that fact and did not conceal it from you. Even while recounting the dream just as it had unfolded, I believed I had prepared an escape route by continually suggesting that it was all a lie, broken free from the control of self-consciousness.

There is a dream, one that ceaselessly recurs for me, a dream related to water and snakes.

But to hew to my theory, that dream’s hidden psychology would necessarily lack any concrete connection to either water or snakes. Water or snakes would just be chance symbols, improvised keys that fit no lock. And so, any attempt to attach ourselves to the figures of the dream, to the faces within it, would be like trying to open a door with the wrong key.

A newspaper ran an interview with my second writer. You sent it to me in the mail. The envelope contained page 17 of the newspaper—plus page 18, inevitably, printed on the rear side—the entirety of which was devoted to the interview, and which you had torn out as a full page and folded into a square. You hadn’t enclosed a note, as far as I could see, or even jotted something down on the newspaper itself.

Mr. H, what do you generally get your inspiration from when you write?

Back in the day, my subjects were almost always beautiful women I admired, you know. But now, the meaning of a “subject” has itself paled. It can be a mailbox or trash can. The subjects from which I draw inspiration now are precisely those that ensnare me in confusion . . . that ambush me in an utterly unpredictable fashion. That I can neither prepare for nor calculate in advance. Like dreams . . .

Like dreams, that part was underlined. Your method of underlining is so very familiar to me. You always applied more strength than necessary, ruthlessly and impetuously, like drawing an arrow. I never knew you to use a pencil. Sometimes you would draw a big circle around one word, sometimes your underlining would be so excessive that I couldn’t make out the sentence itself. And then it would come to an awkward end, breaking off in some crude, incomplete shape as though you had snatched your pen away, having abruptly thought of something else. Next to the underlined passage there would generally be an exclamation mark, triangular in shape, gouged deeply into the paper. The kind of underlining that clearly had decades of egoism behind it.

At some point I was standing in a long immigration queue. Even though I turned to look in all directions, the only thing to see was the throng of people drifting around distractedly, so many they filled the large entrance hall. You couldn’t even tell where the immigration counter was. A uniformed man (presumably a policeman) had planted himself firmly halfway down the line, standing with arms crossed and legs apart, to prevent everyone rushing forward en masse. In their jodhpur-style trousers, the policemen reminded me more of colonial prison officers or detention camp guards than they did of ordinary policemen. The concrete construction of the wharf entrance hall amplified noise. The extraordinary din of the crowd made me feel as though my head had been shoved inside a clanging steel bell. The people in front of me suddenly began to run. They were running blindly forward, all carrying bags, some holding the hands of little children wearing little backpacks. Without knowing the reason for all this, I too flowed into the crowd. As soon as we turned the corner, the immigration counter became visible. The instant they had that reassurance, ah, now we’re here, those who had been running stopped in their tracks. Once again, policemen were blocking the way in front. We were unable to move any closer to the counter. It was the turn of the group who had slipped through the other gate to approach the counter. Only then did I figure out the control system. Each line had fed in through a different gate, and now they were all rayed out in a semicircle, the people in them staring piercingly at the immigration counter. The policemen were fixing the throng with some truly intimidating looks, while there were those who accepted the system as familiar, and presumably had their reasons. Inside my bag was the notebook containing the first writer’s address, and when I recalled that fact my courage revived. As long as he is still living in this city, if he remembers the past appointment, I would be able to meet him. Perhaps, if I mentioned your name, I might receive some small welcome. He would ask how you were doing, and I would tell him.

I thought that the city, though it was a city, would have looked suburban for the sake of those foreign aliens who came from rural areas. Befitting an exotic Special District. This was down to the brief, fairy-tale impression I’d gotten from you. I was vaguely expecting that if I came out from the harbor and took the bus, after a few stops I would be in the heart of the city, the square and ruins would appear and, without even knowing the name of the street, I would be able to recognize it at a single glance, with the feeling of ah, here it is. And my first writer was living in some apartment nearby. In that room with a potted red orchid and where the balcony window, hung with a rattan blind, looked down onto the ruins where a bell could often be heard.

But what you’d told me was very different from what I found. The fact that quite a few years had passed since your visit needed to be taken into consideration. After finally escaping from the harbor area I managed to make it to the bus stop, constantly jostled in the great tide of bodies, and caught a bus with the driver’s seat on the right-hand side. The bus was small and there were many passengers, so I had to stand and cling to the handrail. Each street we passed through was packed with such an enormous mass of people that my eyes widened in shock. I thought of the mass of immigrants I’d seen at the harbor. If the throng that had passed through immigration was at this very moment heading for the narrow sloping alleyways of the old quarter, or the downtown shopping district, or to take souvenir photos in the tiny square with the fountain, this—the entire city looking as though it had been occupied by a swarm of scurrying ants—would have been the natural result. The bus cut through the city center, which was dense with malls and department stores. I had no idea where I needed to get off. More people crowded on at each bus stop, and I was gradually pushed farther to the back. I craned my head with effort to look outside the window, but couldn’t see a single street that might be part of the old district. On top of that, I didn’t know for certain the name of the ruins where my first writer lived.

A long time ago, and a longer time ago still, two people I knew each came on a separate trip to this city. They sat on the steps of the ruins. What they saw was the last remaining colonial wreckage, a breeze soft as young rice, and in the heart of it a beautiful, young, yellowish-green woman who turned calmly toward them in the light, and the open window of some nameless apartment. A potted red orchid had been placed at that window. At each gust of wind the laundry hanging from the balcony, a white handkerchief, fluttered. All the balconies were ships leaving port. They were fixed there but forever departing, and with no way to return. All were the things of 1999, an awfully long time ago.

For a long time now I’d been thinking of him as someone incredibly old. According to the common expression, someone “with one foot already in the grave.” But this was an illusion. Not that the first writer was old, but old people like him already have one foot in another world, hear voices from that other world and put them into their writing. Only later, when I was as old as him, did I realize how mistaken I had been in this. The first writer was still among the living. I’d been greatly attached to him for several years, but could not have described his face in any detail. All I had was a photograph, one that had been taken some twenty years ago and printed in a book. Beyond that, there were only the photographs that accompanied his newspaper interviews, and they all seemed impersonal, sterile. Those images of him with his white hair, wearing black sunglasses and carrying a cane. All that anyone could tell from such a picture was that he was very old, that he wore unattractive, shabbily cut suits, was slightly stooped, and relied on a cane. But it was neither the cane nor the sunglasses that allowed me to recognize him at first glance. What stood out for me was his tempo. Because it was the tempo I’d come to love through reading his work. True writers emanate their writing from their body. And so his tempo is the same as the respiration of what he writes. It is neither faster nor slower than that of other people. At the same time, neither is it not faster nor slower. That was an error shining with self-conceit, quite out of touch with reality. A mistaken assumption made by millions of people, tiny yet persistent. At some point, in a magazine interview, he had answered the question “if you weren’t a writer, what would you be?” with “I would have gone mad and killed myself fifty years ago.” A wavelength that breaks up and becomes broken up, a lunatic wavelength. A tempo that reveals sickness and transcendence at the same time. His sentences, pulse, and tempo, made up of words that have slightly different meanings than they do in the dictionary. And only then did I realize that the small space filled with people was the entrance to the ruins, where I needed to get off. I pushed my way between the other passengers, and rang the bell.

In his youth, he liked to gamble.

He wagered everything that could be wagered. After having an appendectomy, he gambled his own appendix, preserved in formaldehyde, and a few days later his family had him dragged off to the psychiatric hospital.

Even after he became quite well known, there was a time when he was always pressed for money.

Content found on Wikipedia. He came here on a trip with his girlfriend, then set down roots, never returning to his hometown. More than twenty thousand dollars remained of the debt he’d accrued there, a sizeable amount at that time. Although he’d had no lawsuit taken out against him, even after having built a solid reputation as a writer he was unable to shake the stigma of having fled gambling debts. When he received the Andreas Gryphius Prize at the end of the 1970s, his creditors announced that they would officially write off his debts, happy to be magnanimous if it meant sponsoring a famous writer. The prize money and his success as a writer made it possible for him to settle his debts, but he didn’t, and never went back to his hometown, even after his last remaining creditor, who had at one time been his friend, died some time ago at the age of ninety, without a legal heir.

“The morning after I’d lost all the money I’d taken to the casino, I was strolling the dew-damp streets of the ruins; I thought I heard the blue-tinged sound of a bell coming from between the martyrs’ graves. Though there was no way of explaining whether I really had heard it, or whether it was only an auditory hallucination produced by the climate peculiar to that place. We both stopped walking at almost the same time. Sighing lightly, she described it as the cry of a greenfinch searching for its mate. Whatever it was, we’d both heard it at the same time, there in that place. Turning to me, she asked ‘what if we lived here . . . ?,’ speaking as though to herself. At that time I had failed at everything I’d attempted, my heart was constantly torn to pieces, and I had no money, so I felt as though each day brought me closer to the brink of disaster. Worse, I would think to myself that even she whom I loved so much might leave my side at any moment. Because she was beautiful, the daughter of a rich family, and young to boot, only just past twenty, while on the other hand I was a flat-broke writer in his forties who had experienced one setback after another. But the moment I heard her say those words, I felt an abrupt, unlooked-for assurance that I was not alone. If I lived here, why, I could have it all, that kind of thought. All meaning both her and writing. At that, a feeling of relief swept over me, filling me up. Fulfillment such as I’d never known . . . it’s been a long time since then, and now, as you can see, my circumstances are very different from what they were. I broke up with her, and married a Mandarin-speaking woman who came here after 1999. My wife writes poetry, you know. My life back then, and the way this place looked then, will sound strange to you as I describe it now. Over the past few years, there’s been a huge increase in the number of mainland tourists who descend upon this place. Though it’s true that I have no plans to leave, I don’t want to say that it became my hometown at some point. At least to me, ‘hometown’ has long been nothing more than a word in a dead language.”

At some point or other, I stopped loving the first writer. And the second writer became “my writer.” We made plans to go and visit the second writer just as we had with the first. This time you had a good knowledge of the locality where the writer was living. You called it the supreme land on earth; meaning, of course, that the natural environment was beautiful. In the meantime, I was drunk on anticipation. It swelled my body and tongue, made the rain fall endlessly in my dreams. Even while asleep, I had to wipe away the grass-scented rainwater flowing down over my forehead and cheeks.

One day you asked me what question I would ask the second writer if I did manage to meet him. I said there were two, and that one was about the relationship between writing and ecstasy. Of course not the drug ecstasy, I was referring to the word that derives from the state of religious rapture that can be achieved through meditation. And added that my question had absolutely nothing to do with everything that word generally connotes. You confronted me then, claiming that the state of religious longing that arises from piety—in other words, from the desire to be submissive that human beings have always known, and which can on the surface be something obscene—is also and thus a comic struggle to make a clear division between ekstasis and ecstasy, though in any case both have the same meaning, with the one being the Greek, Latin root of the other. “And one more vague thing that’s impossible to distinguish. I doubt whether your ‘first writer’ and ‘second writer’ are really two different people. I’m starting to think that the reason you so abruptly switched to thirsting for your second writer was that you were trying to overlay him onto the first writer, and thus conceal from yourself the fact of their separate existences. In other words, you selected both the first and second writers on the grounds of their being people you had never met, people with whom, from your individual point of view, your ‘association’ can only be indirect, given that they are both so famous, and who must always be plural, and fatefully far away, thus satisfying the desire for non-specificity; though you keep saying that it has always been your dream to meet them, deep down you fear that meeting them in person would bring to an end the sense of distance and one-sidedness that establish the relationship’s necessary tension. Of course, the reason you need these individually ordinary human beings to be vague and mysterious is that this will amplify and perfect their perceived greatness, a greatness that you deeply long for. Do you remember what your first writer said in one of his interviews? ‘The point in time at which writers like myself acquired a kind of greatness was that at which human beings stopped believing in a god, and came to want a substitute for divinity.’ Most ordinary people would call that nothing more than vague envy. Envy has always had the character of a daydream. And persistent envy is a flight from something inside oneself.” You continued. “To you, then, is it a flight from ecstasy, or an ecstatic flight?” I told you then that you were no better than a porn addict, that you were unable to talk about dreams without making them into something dirty and vulgar. I could see that you were pleased, though too shy to want to show it.

I spat out what was inside my mouth. The taste was unbearably poisonous and bitter. I didn’t know what it was, but its absolute inedibility was clear. The thing that I’d spat out was quite a large lump of excrement. I was shocked. The lump fell onto the widespread expanse of an enormous petal. The balcony was crowded with brilliant-hued flowers, but I kept feeling as though I would vomit . . . I thought. A while ago I put a poster up on the wall right next to my bed. It was a photograph in which the light-and-dark contrast of shade and sunlight was clearly defined. The shade was a black that looked deeper than darkness, thick and viscous, and the part where the sunlight shone was brighter than streaming sugar, and whitened as the real sun’s yellow light fell softly upon it. If I briefly woke up in the middle of the night, my eyes would always drift to that poster. Of course, in that kind of hazy dreamstate in which you haven’t completely woken up, I am never aware of it as a poster. It seems to be something other than the image I know from the daytime. And each time something different. It would generally be connected to something I’d seen in a dream, or an extension of the dream unaltered. If I started awake from a state of dreaming the bright part of the photo glowed a brighter white, jumping out at me as a different being each time. That night it appeared in the form of a luminescent well. The well from which light was streaming stretched slowly up into the air, becoming a huge pair of pale lips that seemed to suck me in. Though afraid, I stretched my hand out toward it. I don’t know why. But when I did, my fingers bumped up against a cold, hard wall. No, it was your wristwatch. A wristwatch with a large, round face. As soon as I took hold of it your wrist elongated like a butterfly’s feeler and before I knew it was pursuing me to the balcony, which was crowded with pots and planter boxes. I hurriedly gathered some petals to cover the disgusting excrement I’d vomited. But it struck me that I’d never be able to cover it completely, that you’d see it and I’d plummet into an abyss of shame and despair . . . There was only one way to avert disaster, nothing else for it but for me to swallow it back inside me. Making my mouth into the shape of a bird’s beak, I bent down toward it . . . Just then, the first writer carried tea into the room adjoining the balcony.

If the world were to become a place in which books are forbidden, and the only way for humans to have a relationship with literature was to learn entire books by heart—this is a hypothesis connected to Ray Bradbury’s novel—my first writer unhesitatingly gave two names when asked which writer’s works he would memorize, or which would be worth the effort even without such a hypothetical ban, and even though it would seem absurdly laborious: Shakespeare and James Joyce. But, he said, the writer I personally admire is Goethe. Though regrettably, he continued, laughing softly, his death makes it impossible to visit him and take tea together. He made a brief mention of Goethe’s house, now a museum, and added, still laughing, when I visited that house I stood in his study and could picture the writer sitting there at his desk, composing his works. When he lived there, Goethe generally employed a secretary to transcribe what he dictated, rather than putting pen to paper himself. I was surprised by this, and responded that in that case it’s hard to believe his sentences are entirely his own, as his secretary would have been able to improvise some minor edits in the course of his transcription, and since Goethe himself could not have remembered every sentence precisely as he’d dictated it, down to the punctuation, even on examining what his secretary produced, it’s possible that he wouldn’t have been able to spot any cuts or alterations. But the real cause for my surprise was that such a method, whereby another personality can squeeze its way into a creative work, was strange to me. The first writer immediately refuted this, saying that such a thing could not be. What makes you so sure? It’s not as though you yourself are Goethe. It’s unimaginable that a writer could compose a piece “through another’s pen.” “The ‘cornerman,’ who was one of those secretary-cum-assistants, took it upon himself to arrange Goethe’s manuscripts, you know. But he wasn’t just an assistant, as people commonly think, who looked after Goethe’s needs or ran small errands for him. Though his reputation has been thoroughly besmirched, a misconception that persists even today . . . the ‘cornerman’ was himself a poet, and had been one before he ever met Goethe. Though of course, some people devalue his poetic worth by labeling him ‘Goethe’s parrot.’ He was the son of a poor peddler, and lived in poverty his whole life. His fellow poets would never accept him into their own artistic rank. But it’s simply impossible to think that he would have put his hand freely to Goethe’s manuscripts. He was Goethe’s helper, but he was also his friend. I cannot think of him as someone who practiced petty deceptions while sitting at Goethe’s side. And since such a thought can, on the other hand, occur to you,” here the first writer broke off for a short while, as though pondering whether it was really admissible to speak his mind so frankly. “I think you must have never actually read Goethe’s original writing. Or books about him, such as Conversations with Goethe. If you want to make claims about a certain writer, you have to have read his books. If only you’d known the extent to which his writing pursues strictness and exactitude.”

After this discouragement, the first writer fixed me with a look of obvious disappointment. He’d probably supposed that I was an academic, faithful to the classics. I’d thought I knew a lot about him, but had completely forgotten his ardent worship of Goethe. What I knew of his career history and personal inclinations had actually led me to suspect the opposite.

“Are you suggesting that professional assistants could only work if they were always shut up in a corner? And that’s why they were called ‘cornermen’?” I’d hoped to avoid any further criticism by going off on a tangent, but he hurriedly dismissed it with a wave of his hand. “No no, that’s just a coincidence.” As though meaning to apologize for having been overly touchy, he arranged his features into an expression of tolerance, of choosing not to make an issue of my outburst. “His name really was ‘cornerman.’ Eckermann. It was a genuine surname, inherited from his father’s father’s father.” “Oh,” I said, clamping my mouth shut after that short sound.

We drank lemon-leaf tea in his study. The pale green leaves floated in the teacups. His study also served as his bedroom, workroom, office, dining room, and living room. The apartment comprised this single decent-sized space with a balcony, plus a small cooking area and bathroom. Apparently he and his wife each lived in a different apartment in the same building, so that each could have their own creative space. In the center of the room were three longish desks, each of a slightly different size, shape, and even height to the others, the three arranged in the shape of the letter , and littered with books and mail, documents and photographs, a standing clock, a typewriter and an ashtray, a penholder, a glasses case, a notebook, a lamp, pills, a tape recorder, a vase, a candle, a wine glass, a fountain pen, one bottle of ointment and one of ink, a muffler for windy days, a flyswatter attached to a key ring, a fax machine and telephone and, next to these last, a pair of socks, tossed there casually. The bed was pushed into the corner where the ceiling sloped down, the one section of wall that hadn’t been colonized by bookcases. The impression the first writer gave was not much different to what I’d gleaned from the photograph in the book. Granted that, according to him, it was twenty-two years since that photograph had been taken. In the photograph he was already gray-haired, a man with a short, sturdy neck and long, thick eyebrows, his lips curled in dissatisfaction. When he first removed his sunglasses, his gray-blue eyes appeared small, set in a face so deeply wrinkled it seemed strewn with dry straw. They were eyes that saw deeply, yet at a slant. Even the faint evening light seemed to dazzle him, causing him to blink repeatedly. Holding his teacup, this time he was the one to question me. But what it is that you do? Are you a journalist, or a writer? I grew terribly flustered; I was neither, and had been unable to prepare any response that might be suitably impressive.

Contrary to your expectations, you never went back to the first writer’s house. The orchid’s petals and the empty birdcage were swaying in the wind. The balcony with the laundry hung out to dry, the brass candlestick clattering on the table, the chirping of unfamiliar language pressing in through the open window, the noise of tourists thronging the alleyways, and of motorbikes, formed the scene. And what it hinted at was a curious waiting. The kind of formless waiting that takes place within a long and hazy nap, when your schedule for the rest of the day is free. The first writer was remembering your name. But he was unable to recall when it was that he’d seen you last. It might have been several years ago, or several decades. He was remembering you as a broad-minded journalist who wrote pieces for newspapers and radio. Though as far as I knew, you hadn’t written an article for a very long time.

What is it that you do? Are you a journalist, or a writer?

I looked the first writer straight in the eye and said, I’ve been a fan of your writing for a long time, more than a fan, in fact, and so I’ve been hoping for a long time to meet you, and even, if possible, to translate your work—as this is the only possible way of bringing me closer to you, that I could dare to ask for. Though my love for him was perfectly true, the idea of translating his work was something I’d plucked from thin air on the spot. “Oh, so you’re a translator!” the first writer exclaimed, his face becoming open and welcoming. “I’d sensed you were something of the sort, you know. And I was correct.” I was in fact nothing of the sort, had never done anything you could call proper translation, but once the words had popped out of my mouth it somehow felt as though I genuinely did have a long-held wish to translate his book. I made a promise that when I went back to my hometown I would translate his work into my mother tongue and find a publisher worthy of bringing it out. I really was planning to do this.

The two of us exchanged many letters. If emails were included in the tally, the person with whom I’ve maintained the most extensive correspondence would be none other than you. It was already enough to fill a fair-sized book just a year after we first met. Of course, there were plenty of brief notes and postcards with just a single line like “thanks” or “okay.” You were an especial fan of letter writing. Each time you went traveling you sent several postcards back to friends, and your job meant that you spent more than half of each year away from home. My mailbox became crowded with your letters and postcards, not to mention the records and photographs, the essays and poetry collections. Once, you even tore out a newspaper advert you’d come across while eating breakfast in a hotel restaurant, and sent it to me, still permeated with the faint fragrance of tea. It was an ad for a tourist destination that the two of us had once visited together. You’d drawn an arrow in pen pointing to the bench in the photograph, with the words “We sat right here!” You also sent me any interviews you came across with either the first or second writer. Even when I went to Berlin for a while, you asked for my address there so you could keep mailing things. Some mail arrived for me there even after I’d moved out. One was an essay you wrote for a magazine, which you’d sent from America. The Berlin landlord forwarded it on, but it took almost eight months to get to me, having remained in Shanghai for several months in the bag of the person who was supposed to send it on. We called it the essay that had circumnavigated the globe. You sent quite a few letters even after we’d broken up. At the end of the final letter, you recommended a film, urging me to see it. You also wrote that I should go and visit the second writer, as you’d told him who I was. At this point, the second writer was already ill. A magazine carried his last interview, which he gave just before he died; in the photograph that appeared with it, his melancholy and ill health were evident in his face, in his huge sunken eyes. He wore suspenders to hold up his trousers, and his hands gripped the straps where they ran over his shoulders. As if they were a slender lifeline still tethering him to existence, the last such bond remaining.

Mr. H, how do you feel about these articles that talk about your cancer? Does it cause you to lose peace of mind, or start panicking?

I’m not exactly pleased about it, of course. It’s true that such articles make you shudder when you first see them. But all the same, I don’t start panicking or anything like that. The only one who panics is my wife. And so, I try to comfort her, you know. Saying “Darling, this is all a part of nature.”

The first writer and I watched the film together.

There was a scene in which the man said, my whole life, I’ve been afraid of being alone and being unable to write, those two things.

We were sitting in the theater. Once the male protagonist finished delivering those lines the first writer grasped my hand. He turned to me and said, “Those pitiful lines could have been spoken by me. I’ve spent my whole life failing to break free from them.” “But I envy you. You’ve accomplished everything there is, both as a writer and as a human being, and you’ve managed to keep yourself free from some things—economic necessity, for example. It seems there’s nothing left for you to fear. Your world is insanely enviable.” “For god’s sake please don’t say ‘accomplished everything.’ It sounds like ‘finished with everything.’” “All lives come to an end, including those with no such accomplishments. I could write a great deal about that other kind of life.” “You’re so pessimistic about your future!” “And you aren’t?” “I’m aware that there’s no further future for me. But that doesn’t make me a pessimist.” “There’s only one kind of future I wish for. One where I can free my soul from the mud suffocating it to death! But the more time passes, the clearer it becomes that both a soul and freedom are equally impossible.”

“If only you knew what an uncertain, indeterminate thing the ‘soul’ is, that it leaves us helplessly ignorant of how to look after it, even at our final hour!” He brought his face closer to mine and lowered his voice, speaking almost in a whisper. “Come and see me like this once a year.” The faces on the screen undulated in the uneasy darkness, a composite of light and dust. The dream’s wavelength spread. Bright white ekstasis flashing like lightning. That metallic dream pierced through me as it passed, and I felt a kind of pain that no longer hurt. “Come and see me once a year. For your sake, and for mine. Each year, around this time, come to this city and see if my name is still written by the door to this house. If it is, that will mean I’m still here. Then open the door and come right in, put down your bags, and spend a couple of weeks here. I have an old typewriter you can use for translation work. The kitchen is pretty cramped, but you can make yourself a basic breakfast, or something simple like soup. In the alley directly below there are lots of restaurants for tourists, and you can buy fruit, bread, dumplings, and delicious coffee in the shops, whenever you like. You can keep the windows open all year round here. Go for a walk around the ruins in the evenings. You can keep your orchid in this room if you like, or a bird. Even if you give them names in your language and speak to them every morning, I won’t mind in the slightest. I’ll sit with them for hours, waiting for that moment when you address them in your mother tongue. You’ll give water to the orchid, food to the bird, and your language to me. To me, it will sound like a love song without lyrics. And you’re welcome to leave your bags here between visits. Do you know those kinds of popular songs? If you come back to visit after leaving your bag, even if a year has passed . . . We won’t have that much time together, but there’ll be so much else for you to share in. And at night the two of us will sit side by side drinking lemon tea and I’ll read my writing to you. So you will be my first reader. Just a small gift that I can give to you. Come and visit me once a year, like that. Take a vacation in this city. And while you’re here, dream of the other cities you’ve not been able to go to. Write something about them. Travel together through dreams. Then, one year, when my name is no longer outside the door, think, then, that I am no longer able to welcome you, that I cannot even remember you any more. Cannot read to you, cannot listen to you. After that, there will be no more need to come and visit, not even the following year, as I will have ended up unable to write. I will be truly alone, and so, I will no longer need you.”

I get out of the taxi and enter the house with its small garden. The house is at the far end of the church tenement block; it stretches back quite far, but has a narrow facade. The front door has recently been painted. Next to the house is a spruce, and on that tree a young owl sits with its eyes half closed. For several weeks already, at around this time of day, that owl has flown from the nearby wood of Chinese thujas to this spruce right by your house. It is dusk.

I remember the day we were together on the boat. In the ashgray air, dense with murky fog, the harbor scene spread out as a wet painting. There weren’t many tourists on the boat; though it wasn’t especially cold, it was constantly sleeting. We were the only ones on deck. You were wearing a baseball cap you’d bought at a Busan street stall, and I had the hood of my coat up over my head. The coat’s waterproof material and the flag of the company that ran the sightseeing trips both produced a rough flapping sound. The flag bore writing in the shape of a shield. The whistle announcing a cargo ship’s departure hung heavy and drawn-out in the fog. Gulls cried as they wheeled in the gray air, and lights flickered on the hill near the harbor, the windows of rich people’s houses. It was the middle of the day, but it was as overcast and dusky as evening as far as the eye could see. The boat was making directly for an orange lighthouse visible up ahead, producing the monotonous repetition of water splashing then sucking each time it passed a hulking cargo ship. It occurred to me that I needed the bathroom. When I made to go down below deck, you told me you would never forgive me if I left you up here alone. Not meaning a quick trip to the bathroom, of course. You laid particular emphasis on “if you leave me alone.” My dear, if you left me alone in this desolate place I would never forget it. And I would never forgive you, you said, with a faint air of theatricality, standing tall on the deck behind me as I, heading to the stairs, tossed out over my shoulder that I was just going to the bathroom and would be back in a moment. I thought how strange it was that I wasn’t angered by your words. Hadn’t you always been the one to leave the other alone? The blue iron stairway was slippery with water. The smell of boiling coffee seeped out from the boat’s empty bar. On the other side of the window, its glass blurred with condensation, the bar worker was leaning against the wall in the small galley, smoking a cigarette. The boat pitched and rolled, and a damp mouthful of coarse-grained fog rushed into my throat and lungs. I coughed. It was the kind of weather that called to mind extreme sadness and impulsiveness.

You go up to the first floor and open the study window. And, perching on the windowsill, stare fixedly at the branch where the owl is sitting. The owl is still as a statue, stuck fast to a branch of the tree. The light breeze fails to ruffle a single feather, not even a single one. Where had the young owl learned to hold so still, as still as the sleep of kitchenware, lying unused in the dead of night? As the owl was almost the same color as the tree, and largely concealed by a fretwork of twigs, it would have been difficult to pick out had you not been aware of its daily visits, the fact that it came to that tree at the same time each day and perched there for a while, facing your room. Keeping your eyes fixed on the owl, you get an old film camera out of one of the drawers. You point the camera at the owl, zooming in as close as possible, and take the photograph. You didn’t even enjoy photography as a hobby, never mind being skilled at it. It simply wasn’t your kind of thing. You didn’t even own a digital camera, like almost everyone else these days. But in that one vague yet revelatory moment, that moment, abrupt and specific as though in a dream, of wanting to breathe in being itself, to draw it deep inside yourself, being with the sluggish, ponderous mass of a whale, already regretting the inevitable disappearance of such a moment, its vanishing into the words of some abstract concept like every other fleeting inspiration, you photographed the owl that was there before you, then heard someone calling up from the floor below to say that dinner was ready. You open the bathroom window and lazily brush your teeth as you sit on the toilet, completely naked. The white froth of toothpaste bubbles and expands inside your mouth, dropping to the floor. A line from Walser’s poetry: “Night, the dream beetle crawls into my open mouth.”

In dreams, looking into a mirror is a hair-raising experience. The empty black holes looking back at you, so threateningly strange and ravenous. A river flows in bed, and on its bank stands a single tree. Its branches stretch out horizontally, and your wristwatch hangs from one of them, ticking. It will still go on telling the time when we have disappeared from the earth. We, now lying down, black-and-white bodies delving deeply into each other. Until we eventually transform into fossilized tree scarabs, with only our shells remaining.

The dream’s fade-out.