I stopped transcribing the poem and laid down the pencil stub. ‘Is it still love if you can’t say “I love you”?’
I thought of Midori. In front of her I was a mute. She didn’t know of the passionate feelings roiling in my heart. Or maybe she knew, but pretended not to.
Dong-ju’s voice broke me out of my reverie. ‘No, that’s still love. It may even be deeper love than the one you can talk about.’
I quickly changed the subject. ‘Suni — do you know where she is now?’
He smiled bitterly and shook his head.
For a moment I was worried that I had brought back unpleasant memories. But I realized that there was no such thing as a bad memory. All memories are precious, and even a painful one is formative. That meant that my time at Fukuoka would also become a formative part of me. When time passed, would I think of Midori in the way Dong-ju was now thinking of his girl?
He recited two more poems: ‘Boy’ and ‘Snowing Map’. ‘Boy’ depicted a boy’s passionate love for the beautiful Suni, and ‘Snowing Map’ drew a boy’s pain as he said farewell to his beloved Suni one winter morning. All three poems traced the tale of meeting a girl, falling in love and parting. Did Dong-ju really love a girl named Suni? Was she real? I couldn’t ask. I was afraid Dong-ju wouldn’t remember. I didn’t want to confirm that his memories were rusting, crumbling, vanishing.
He looked famished, not from his physical starvation, but from a deeper hunger in his soul. ‘Can I read The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge just once?’ His voice broke.
I understood. Some books had the power to heal illness and provide the essence of life. I had experienced that myself when I took comfort in the bookcases in our bookshop. Would The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge make Dong-ju stronger and help him recover his memories?
I ran to the inspection office and retrieved the book from his box. The yellowed pages were so faded that they might crumble at a mere touch. I returned to the interrogation room and placed the old book on the desk. With a trembling hand Dong-ju caressed the old cover, as if it were the face of a woman he’d once loved. He turned the pages slowly and stopped. I stole a glance at the page he was reading:
I think I should begin to work on something, now that I am learning to see. I am twenty-eight, and just about nothing has happened. Let’s summarize: I have written a study of Carpaccio, which is bad, a drama called Marriage that tries to prove something false by ambiguous means, and poems. But alas, with poems one accomplishes so little when one writes them early. One should hold off and gather sense and sweetness a whole life long, a long life if possible, and then, right at the end, one could perhaps write ten lines that are good. For poems are not, as people think, feelings (those one has early enough) — they are experiences. For the sake of a line of poetry one must see many cities, people and things, one must know animals, must feel how the birds fly, and know the gestures with which small flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to paths in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings one long saw coming; to childhood days that are still not understood, to parents one had to hurt when they brought one a joy and one did not understand it (it was a joy to someone else); to childhood illnesses that set in so strangely with so many profound and heavy transformations, to days in quiet, muted rooms and to mornings by the sea, the sea altogether, to nights travelling that rushed up and away and flew with all the stars; and if one can think of all that, it is still not enough. One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which resembled another, of screams in the delivery room and of easy, pale, sleeping women delivered, who are closing themselves. But one must also have been with the dying, have sat by the dead in the room with the open window and the spasmodic noises. But it is still not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them, if they are many, and have the great patience to wait for them to come again. For it is not the memories themselves. Only when they become blood in us, glance and gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves, only then can it happen that in a very rare hour the first word of a line arises in their midst and strides out of them.
Rilke’s sentences brimmed with passion. I knew that the same poetic passion thrummed within Dong-ju. Perhaps he understood this book intuitively because he was now close to Rilke’s age when he wrote it. I hoped I, too, would be able to comprehend it in that way at twenty-six.
Dong-ju stroked the page. And that was when it happened. The book might not be able to recognize me, but I recognized the book. I snatched it out of Dong-ju’s hands and hurriedly flipped through the pages. When I found what I was looking for, I felt as though I would faint. A barely visible line was drawn under a sentence I had read a long time ago:
At first he did not want to believe that a long life could be spent forming the first, short, false sentences that are without meaning.
One long-ago autumn day, crouched in the corner of our dust-filled bookshop, I was caught by a raging fervour for literature that I had not been able to shake off. That night, as we walked home, my mother had told me about a young Korean man who’d asked her to reserve for him a copy of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge if it came in. Thinking about the copy I had hidden deep in the bookshelves, I felt a small pang of guilt and a slight relief. After I enlisted in the military, my mother, finding that copy, would have remembered the Korean student. And she would have handed him the book that carried her son’s fingerprints. This old book linked us. It was an implausible coincidence; we loved the same poet and the exact same book, almost as though we were in love with the same girl.
Dong-ju pushed it towards me. ‘You can have it.’
I turned the pages one by one. This book had come to me from some stranger and stayed with the young poet before returning to me. Rilke’s words had wandered through the world, embracing and healing damaged spirits. That night, the world became a little more beautiful.
Dong-ju’s memories were fleeting. He murmured to himself in Korean as we walked towards the interrogation room. He was trying his hardest to cling to the words that were attempting to desert him. Snow fell silently outside.
‘Can I rest for a while?’ he asked.
‘Certainly,’ I said.
He looked into his reflection in the window. ‘The snow blankets everything in white.’ He started walking slowly again, murmuring in Korean.
The heavy chain dragged along, pressing down on my soul. Dong-ju accidentally took the wrong corridor. Had he forgotten this familiar route? At our destination I had to grab his shoulder to stop him; he would have continued to walk past the interrogation room. The room was freezing. It didn’t seem to bother him, though; he opened his mouth as soon as he sat down, perhaps fearing that the words in his head might die there and vanish without a trace.
‘“Another Morning at the Beginning of the World.” The snow blankets everything in white / And the telephone pole weeps / conveying God’s words. / What revelation is forthcoming? / When spring comes / Quickly / I sin / And eyes / Are bright. / After Eve finishes the hard work of delivering a baby / She will hide her nakedness with a fig leaf and / I will have to sweat, beading on my forehead.’