“After you type them all up, I plan to print copies to use in class as our course reader. I’m sorry to put you up to this, but maybe it will help you study.”
Small scraps of paper were stuck between the pages of the manuscript. Some of the pages had Post-its covered with handwritten notes. Professor Yoon took a large envelope from the top of his desk and slid the manuscript inside. His slim fingers caught my eye.
“You can add the comments on the notes to the manuscript according to the directions I wrote down.”
I had learned to type while living with my cousin. The landlord’s daughter, who was the same age as me, attended a vocational high school and owned a typewriter. She must have owned a great many things, but all I ever thought about was that typewriter. I wanted it so badly that when I closed my eyes, I could easily picture the word Clover branded on the front. Whenever I had reason to go into her room, I would stand in front of the typewriter, stretch my fingers, and tap at the keys—tak tak tak. She did not like it at first when I touched her typewriter, but when she saw how fond I was of it, she taught me how to type. I learned the positions of all the keys and enjoyed the sound it made when I tapped them. Each time I moved my fingers—tak tak tak—the quiet keys leapt into action, and inky black letters appeared one by one on the white paper, like an answer to a question. Later on, the landlord’s daughter started bringing it to our apartment so I could use it. Whenever that happened, I felt so excited and overjoyed that I clung to it like it was my mother. At first, I filled the paper with ga, na, da, ra, then me, you, us over and over, like someone first learning how to write. By the time I outpaced the landlord’s daughter at typing, I was copying the letters Van Gogh had sent to his younger brother Theo. I started typing them because I liked the sound of the words Dear Theo.
Careful study and the constant and repeated copying of Bargue’s Exercises au Fusain have given me a better insight into figure-drawing. I have learned to measure and to see and to look for the broad outlines, so that, thank God, what seemed utterly impossible to me before is gradually becoming possible now. I have drawn a man with a spade, that is un bècheur, five times over in a variety of poses, a sower twice, a girl with a broom twice. Then a woman in a white cap peeling potatoes and a shepherd leaning on his crook and finally an old, sick peasant sitting on a chair by the hearth with his head in his hands and his elbows on his knees. And it won’t be left at that, of course. Once a few sheep have crossed the bridge, the whole flock follows. Now I must draw diggers, sowers, men and women at the plough, without cease. Scrutinize and draw everything that is part of country life. Just as many others have done and are doing. I no longer stand helpless before nature as I used to.
I stopped in the middle of typing to stare at the part where he talked about copying Bargue’s plates. He must have meant that he no longer stood helpless before nature because he had drawn those plates over and over. I folded up the typewritten paper and sent it to Dahn, hoping all the while that Dahn, who had vowed to never stop drawing, would become an artist like Van Gogh. Now I felt that all of that time I had spent learning how to type had led me to Professor Yoon.
My eyes drifted over to the shelf where the books sat facing in.
“Are you wondering why I shelved them that way?” the professor asked.
“Yes.”
“They belong to writers who died before the age of thirty-three. I used to collect them.”
Writers who died before the age of thirty-three … I savored the words in my head.
“You’re probably now wondering why thirty-three. That’s the age at which Jesus was crucified and Alexander the Great created his empire and died. After thirty-three, you can’t really say you’re young anymore. And don’t we say that someone has died young if they die before the age of thirty-three? For artists, an early death is sometimes an honor. Their works fill me with awe and sympathy. If you’re interested, you may borrow them.”
“Thank you.”
Professor Yoon walked around the wall of books. Suddenly he asked, “Are you friends with Miru?”
“I met her for the first time today,” I said.
He looked at me for a moment.
“I also wanted to thank you.”
He was echoing what Myungsuh had said right before leaving the office.
“Thank you for reaching out to her. I was only thinking about how to make her confront her issues, and it didn’t occur to me to do what you did. I felt ashamed of myself. She didn’t take your hand, but maybe she’ll be able to free herself on her own, thanks to you.”
Professor Yoon sat down at his desk with his back to me. He looked frail and tired. I watched him for a moment and then put the manuscript in my bag, left the office, and quietly closed the door. I looked at his name printed on the office door, turned the sign next to it to read out of office, and walked down the hallway. I made my way over to the big zelkova tree. I thought maybe Myungsuh and Miru would be there, but they were nowhere to be seen. A group of students walked quickly past. I sat on a bench beneath the tree and looked up. The distant sky was passing from summer to early autumn; white clouds like mounds of ice cream floated past. A breeze whispered through the branches. Had the school always been like this? The sting of tear gas in the air was the same as before, but the yew trees planted like a wall around the campus had never looked so green. Some distance away, the students I had just seen in the classroom were sitting on the grass together and talking. Their conversation carried all the way to where I sat beneath the zelkova. They were talking about the story of Saint Christopher.
“So, my young Christophers!” Someone was mimicking Professor Yoon. “Can someone answer the title of this book?”
He was holding up the textbook for Professor Yoon’s writing class. It was titled What Is Art?
“Not demonstrating!” someone shouted in a self-mocking tone, and the cheerful mood instantly turned quiet. “Of what use is art to us? It can’t teach us how to make money or get a job. It can’t tell us how to succeed in romance. And it definitely can’t tell us whether or not we should demonstrate!” He was speaking in a high-pitched voice, as if to lift the mood, but it didn’t help. He fell back on the grass, looked up at the sky, and said, “Remember what Rimbaud said. The best thing in life is getting drunk on cheap liquor and sleeping on the beach.”
“So what are you supposed to do after you sober up? What can you do?”
“Find more cheap liquor and roam the streets.”
“Idiot!” the student who had mimicked Professor Yoon yelled. “You think you can live your whole life like some old bohemian?” He got up and ran off.
The boy lying on the grass sat up and looked over at the shouting student protesters. I rose from beneath the tree and walked around the old stone buildings on campus and the newer ones with elevators. I had never wandered around campus so intently before. Each time I saw a group of students, I scanned their faces. I didn’t know at first who I was looking for. Once I realized I was looking for Myungsuh and Miru, I trudged back to the zelkova tree and sat there for a long time. They were nowhere to be seen.
I had that dream again. I think I hear someone calling me, so I open the door and look out. But all I see are layers of darkness. I take a single step into the dark and stand there. When I told Miru about the dream, she squeezed my hand tight. Told me not to follow the voice. Said if I have that dream again, I should keep the door shut and not go out, as if I could control the dream however I wanted.
“You won’t go out there, right?” she asked. She looked so serious that she made me think I had dreamt something really remarkable.
“Only if you promise to stop looking for him,” I said.
Miru gave me a hard look. I felt bad. Like I was letting her sister Mirae down. I apologized to her after a while.
“Please don’t act like my parents,” she said. “I’ll never ask you to help me look for him again, so leave me alone.”
I listened and didn’t say a word. Miru cleared her
throat and continued.
“If I don’t find out what happened to the man my sister was looking for, I won’t be able to live with myself.”
A while back, before the semester started, Miru was reading one of the professor’s books. It was a collection of essays that had come out six years ago. Miru suddenly asked me if he was a bachelor. I said that if by bachelor she meant someone who lives alone, then yes. She said she thought she knew why he lived alone. It was strange to see her talk that way about someone she had never met. The book she was reading, which was his only published work aside from two books of poetry published when he was younger, consisted of reveries on poetry, with no mention of his private life. He had not published anything else since that book, including any poetry collections. The only way to read his more recent work was to dig through old magazines in the library. Until Miru brought it up, I had never given any thought to the fact that he wasn’t married, even though it was obvious he was a bachelor. I asked her how she knew.
“I think he’s seen something,” she said, and muttered under her breath, “It must haunt him.”
I asked her why she said that.
“Look,” she said. “What do you suppose this picture is doing here?”
She showed me the page. There was no mention of the artist, but I knew at once who it was.
“Arnold …
I stumbled on the pronunciation of his last name, so Miru finished for me.
“Arnold Böcklin.”
She seemed to be turning something over in her head. Then she said she wanted to sit in on his class. I wondered aloud why someone who had stopped going to her own school would want to go to someone else’s, but then I thought maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Maybe the professor’s class would help her turn her life around. Whenever I told her she should start acting like a normal college student again, she would retort, “You’re one to talk!” She was becoming more like her sister every day. She said she would do whatever it took to find the man who had disappeared, the one her sister had failed to find. But how are you supposed to find someone who’s dead? I didn’t know what to say to her.
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I saw Jung Yoon in class today. I thought that was her first name, but I guess it’s just Yoon, and Jung is her family name. Turns out she was taking a break from school. She looks like she’s lost weight. But then again, even when she was a new student, she never seemed happy or excited. I wonder what’s bothering her. I could tell she didn’t recognize me. One time, I walked behind her all the way to school. She was deep in thought, and the feeling coming off her was very strange. She stopped in front of the school. Just stood there without going in. I stopped, too, and waited to see what she would do. How often had I watched her from a distance? I had also watched her once as she was sitting by herself at school reading Emily Dickinson. She stood in front of the gate with her head down, scuffed the ground a few times, and then turned and walked away. She was gone in an instant.
|||
That day, I didn’t see her on campus at all. I found out later that she had applied for a leave of absence. She always kept her distance from others. Come to think of it, I’d never properly spoken to her except for one time when she was a new student. During that first semester, all of the students in our department had gone to Ilyeong on an overnight retreat. Out of all of those students, she was the only one who caught my eye. I still remember the way she looked: black hair falling to her shoulders, black vest over a white shirt, snow-white sneakers, stubbornly closed mouth. While everyone else sat in a circle next to the river and sang, she stared into the glowing flames and refused to sing along. The next morning, I woke up hungover on the floor of the guesthouse next to the others who had passed out drunk and got up and headed outside. The nausea was overwhelming. While I was dry heaving on all fours on the riverbank, I glimpsed her through the haze rising off the river. At first, I thought she had just dipped her face in the water. Her face was wet. When she noticed me watching her, she jumped and hid her face. I realized that she had been crying. Her eyes were puffy, like she had been weeping without restraint. She put her head down and walked away, but I followed her. She stopped next to the pile of wood leftover from the night before. The thick fog had settled over the charred remains of the campfire. She squatted next to the ashes. I sat beside her. She rested her arms on her knees and buried her face in them. I did the same. She lifted her head and rested it on her forearms. I did the same.
“Why are you copying me?” she asked.
“To make you laugh!”
She laughed weakly, as if to be polite.
“Do you know me?” she asked.
“Not yet.”
“If you don’t know me, then how can you make me laugh?”
She kept using the formal register with me, despite my attempts to get close to her.
“But I just did,” I said.
She peered at me through the fog. Her eyes were still swollen. She must have seen me throwing up, because she took an aspirin out of her pocket, handed it to me, stood up, and disappeared into the mist.
—Brown Notebook 2
CHAPTER 3
We Are Breathing
I made the right decision to learn about the city by walking around it. Walking made me think more and focus on the world around me. Moving forward, putting one foot in front of the other, reminded me of reading a book. I came across wooded paths and narrow market alleyways where people who were strangers to me shared conversations, asked one another for help, and called out to one another. I took in both people and scenery.
After I found a way to get to school without having to go through the large traffic tunnel, I enjoyed walking to school as well. I had walked toward the school one day only to find myself back in front of the tunnel again. I looked around, wondering what to do, when I saw a staircase to the right of the tunnel. At the top of the stairs, a narrow, winding path led uphill over the tunnel and through old tile-roofed buildings. The school was only a couple of minutes away by bus, but if I took the path that led over the tunnel, it would be a good twenty minutes on foot. As I walked farther, I came across more staircases.
It felt like a different city up there. A tall, redbrick smokestack had BATHHOUSE painted on it in huge white letters. A house that sold clay jars of all sizes sat with its front gate open, and I even came across a sign for the Social Science Library. A crepe-myrtle tree like the one by my mother’s grave was growing in an empty lot. But it must have been quite old, because the base of the trunk was incomparably thicker and the branches spread much wider than my mother’s tree. At one point, the path became so narrow that I had to step to the side when two giggling girls wearing backpacks passed me in the opposite direction. People up there lived life at a slower pace and did not concern themselves with those who lived below the tunnel. I peeked over a shoulder-high wall to see slices of daikon radish drying on a round straw tray. Bright red chili peppers hung from vines planted in even rows in a blue plastic container. There was even the occasional flowerpot planted with premature chrysanthemums sitting in front of someone’s house. In one alleyway, I came upon a long wooden deck placed between two of the houses upon which elderly women were kneading dough and julienning what looked like pumpkin. When I walked by, they stopped what they were doing and stared at me like I was another species. The first time I went through there, I walked very slowly so I could take it all in. But I soon grew so familiar with the place that I could get from one end to the other in ten minutes. Later still, even when I was not on that road, the road was with me. When it rained, I found myself wondering whether the straw tray had been taken inside. I even enjoyed the small pleasure of exchanging greetings with the girls who passed me on the street. I lowered my head when I saw a man mixing concrete. He had taken off his shirt and was dripping with sweat, and the tan lines from his undershirt made me aware of the difficulty of his labor. I discovered that if I took just a five-minute detour on the way from school back to my apartment, I could pass a s
treet lined with used-book stores. I had to take an underpass and detour around a baseball stadium to get there, but it was worth it. I would stroll past the towering stacks of used books and pause to peruse the titles at the very bottom. When I got to know that street, the feeling of being a runaway, which I had had ever since I started walking around the city, finally started to soften.
During the nearly three weeks that I spent exploring the different paths to school, I did not see Miru once. I didn’t see Myungsuh, either, except in Professor Yoon’s class. Whenever I walked into the classroom, the first thing I did was check to see if he was there. He was always sitting by himself in the back, where he had sat next to Miru on the first day of class. Always in the same seat. I would glance back again at the end of class, but he was usually gone by then. Sometimes while walking, I got so distracted by my feelings toward him and Miru that I lost all track of where I was.
I didn’t understand why I couldn’t get Miru off of my mind. She haunted me. And when I was not in Professor Yoon’s class, I wandered around the school wondering where Myungsuh might be. I didn’t have anything to say to him, but I looked for him all the same. After a while, I couldn’t tell whether the person I was really curious about was him or Miru.
Then one day, Professor Yoon distributed copies of the course reader that I had typed up. Myungsuh was not in class that day. Professor Yoon set the stack on the podium so everyone could grab a copy on the way out. I stared at the black letters of the manuscript that I had typed, then took two more copies and put them in my bag. I was thinking of Myungsuh and Miru. When Professor Yoon announced to the class that I was the one who had typed the manuscript, I unconsciously glanced back at Myungsuh’s seat. I hadn’t seen him when I first got there, but he might have come in after me. His seat was still empty. I was disappointed that he wasn’t there to hear Professor Yoon tell everyone that I had done the typing. Though that was all I had done, I felt proud to see the printed and bound copies. On the cover of the finished book was the title, We Are Breathing. It was in Professor Yoon’s handwriting.