The street performer continued his recital.
But the truly frightening thing, the uneasy possibility is that fear might make us stop as we are, without ever attempting anything. And in the midst of all this we might get off the train, and not be able to understand the timetable, and find the station worker’s words equally incomprehensible, and lose an important letter or train ticket, so that instead of pressing forward, forging on to our destination, we fall victim to despair, deciding that it has all been in vain, clamp our lips shut, and go back the way we came. If, our tongue having stiffened when confronted with a strange language, we lost even those magical gestures with which nature had endowed us. We would quickly turn into a fragment of yarn or rag, strawboard or thin tin. We would become colored paper and scatter in all directions. Even so, one day we will go on an outing to the beach. We will laugh happily there. It might even happen that, in that moment of mutual happiness, we become strolling figures in a painting, skimming past, and there will no longer be you and I, and there will be no particular future.
I’ve been a witness to countless fears in my life, and a prisoner to fear more times than I can count. I built a huge castle of my fear and imprisoned myself inside it. Before I left for Nepal, before my law studies were completely suspended, before I climbed up to Annapurna . . . had I, in confronting fear, always made the right choice? And your choice? Regrettably, I couldn’t teach you how to choose. I’m not your teacher . . . at least, if you wanted to learn something, it couldn’t be through aphorisms, and that includes my own. But since the only thing that is clear is that such fear will block our road, I cannot help, though I am afraid, but continue to talk about it. If we couldn’t sing anymore, my Nan, or understand that wordless, bright song that soared up inside us, this letter would be the most meaningless and brazen lie in the world. And brazen things are worse than those that are simply untrue. Because brazen things use lies. And in that case it might have been better for this letter never to have been written. We who are entranced by fear will fly straight into the grave that is silence and lie there. Nothing whatsoever will happen there, there will be no songs, no difference between this and that person’s face—people will likely append the word “fundamentally” there—this and that person’s memory, or at least no reason for them to be so different. My Nan, does the word “grave” make you cower? My Nan, even if fear drove you back as it did me in my younger days, I would not berate you or demand that you go forward. I learned how the living must understand fear. In other words, that what is my own is also another’s. And so, my Nan, I understand you. I am not trying to frighten you. I am not pressing you, I will not resent or curse you, no matter what decision you might come to. Even if you forget me and retreat, you would still be able to stand on stage as you have been, and maybe even continue writing scripts. You would both give love and receive it. You might be happy, for a very long time!
What I imagine is slightly different. Now my eyes are looking into the far distance. Looking, after much time has passed, at the foul stench given off by our death, which hovers over the city dump that is itself made up of countless deaths, then disappears in the underground watercourse of a different, newly-founded city. At a river and smoke forming a world, then making a place for a different river and smoke. Looking, an incredibly long time from now, at such time flowing by, in which even the air itself will disappear. My Ophelia, one day there will be another time so dazzling it is difficult to believe, as certain days were when we were alive, and a distant snow-covered mountain will form above the grave, and above that a clear lake, and we will surge through that water without mass or volume. Pilgrims of the future will peer wordlessly into our eyes in the water. As though we peered at each other in the past. At that time, however beautiful in all directions, however much like a dream, however clear and bright the dew in heaven and earth, though there will be nothing more than the silence, which has already dissolved back into the mists of time, we will peer quietly at them, the pilgrims in the water, their suffering-filled eyes, as though they are our own, as though they had at one time been our own.
And what we see is the stuff of a future when you have grown old as I am now and I have already disappeared from this world. In that future, when your zest for life has cooled and your blood grown dark and viscous, you will end up seeing many things, and among the objects you see will be one that jogs your memory, so that memory will end up hanging around us, and you will recall the time when you read this letter, that afternoon when you went on an aimless walk, and you will wander the whole afternoon, unable to remember what it is you have forgotten—perhaps you might even think it is a key—yet searching all the same. You will move slowly through this room and that, gazing out of the window at times in the vain hope that someone might help you. And then the consciousness and memory of other people, that had always formed you, the characters you performed, the characters who performed you, will appear in turn at the window, their identity concealed, and disappear. Because that appearing and disappearing has a fixed speed, you might think that you are on board a moving train. Those that appear at the window will be lost in thought as they flit by you, just as you will be, riding a train coming from the opposite direction. That you sometimes find yourself genuinely unfamiliar is due to your unusually high sensitivity and responsiveness to such imaginary characters. But you will wander among them in vain your whole life. You will consider them as intimate and secretly pitiful as though they are you yourself. I will not say anything about the kind of decision you will have made when you, my Nan, who must now be facing deep, dark anxiety and fear, finally greet that day. But that day too, your deep womb of memory will release the smell of kindling that has failed to catch fire, having withered itself to death and collapsed over the long passage of time.
Bae Suah, one of the most highly acclaimed contemporary Korean authors, has published more than a dozen works and won several prestigious awards. She has also translated several books from the German, including works by W. G. Sebald, Franz Kafka, and Jenny Erpenbeck. Her first book to appear in English, Nowhere to Be Found, was longlisted for a PEN Translation Prize and the Best Translated Book Award.
Deborah Smith’s other literary translations from the Korean include two novels by Han Kang (The Vegetarian and Human Acts), and two by Bae Suah (A Greater Music and Recitation). She also founded Tilted Axis Press to bring more works from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East into English.
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Gesell Dome
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La Grande
The One Before
Scars
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Mikhail Shishkin (Russia)
Maidenhair
Sölvi Björn Sigurðsson (Iceland)
The Last Days of My Mother
Andrzej Sosnowski (Poland)
Lodgings
Albena Stambolova (Bulgaria)
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The Canvas
Georgi Tenev (Bulgaria)
Party Headquarters
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Europe in Sepia
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The Guinea Pigs
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Season of Ash
Antoine Volodine (France)
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