North Station. Suah Bae
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