North Station. Suah Bae
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