A Greater Music (10 page)
Authors: Deborah; Suah; Smith Bae
I'm not sure what prompted the decision to write about M. Our relationship was hardly a suitable theme for German-language homework, though of course, I told myself, I needn't necessarily put down every reckless thought and unbridled emotion that sprang into my mind. But the desire to write, the blazing desire to set down sentences that were true, sincere, and not the stuff of children, eventually won out over circumspection. Perhaps I just wanted to show Erich that I could write something other than clumsy descriptive pieces larded with senseless, immature words, something that could never be accused of having anything one could label “content.” However it was, an uncontrollable flood of strength carried me straight from the first sentence to the last. I remember the evening I wrote it. M was in the bedroom and I was writing in her living room. For dinner we had instant pasta with mozzarella and basil, the kind that you can just pour water in and boil. If you like, you can add a lump of butter to the water as it boils, and mix some powdered tomato sauce in with the pasta. Neither M nor I were fond of cooking. M's aversion was a little more serious than mine, so that even having to add a few vegetables, like boiled potatoes, chiles, or cabbage, seemed like too much fuss over nothing. On top of that she spent quite a while as a strict vegetarian, and wouldn't even allow herself shrimp or smoked salmon with the pasta. M was terribly emaciated. Rather than being naturally small-boned, it was just that there wasn't an ounce of excess
fat on her, no unnecessary softness rounding out her body. That body began at her cheekbones, their flat planes strikingly exotic, almost like those of a Finn, and at her pale, wide forehead. M was tall, with a fairly broad chest; her pelvis was narrow, and her legs were long and slender. Her skin was a pale, matte white. There was nothing sensuous or voluptuous about her body, partly because it didn't serve for such things, but mainly because she was just so thin. M herself would never acknowledge this, though, and whenever she gained any weight would immediately claim that she needed to lose at least five kilos. I, on the other hand, had a much more healthy appetite, and could never get rid of the habit of adding plenty of butter when I made pasta. I left the lid off while I boiled the pasta, so the kitchen floor and the cupboard handles became slippery with grease, and the smell of buttery tomato sauce spread through the whole house. The only way to get rid of it was to open the window in the living room, where we ate. That evening the weather was bitterly cold, so M, who risked suffering a potentially fatal asthma attack if she caught a cold, took
The Complete Correspondence of Clara and Robert Schumann
to read in the bedroom. The first time we met we shook hands, and I'd been struck by how long and inflexible M's hand was, almost like a fish, while the skin of her palm had seemed unusually rough and dry. Later she told me that as a teenager, almost every year in early summer her palms would crack, fissuring into excruciating wounds that became inflamed, then covered over with proud flesh. And then there are M's blue-gray eyes. Those eyes each like a winter lake with an iceberg at its heart, its perfect stillness undisturbed by waterfowl, fish, or even a single wavering blade of grass, eyes that crystallized in a single gaze the most sublime perfection of silence. In an orchestra, M said, I am the piano, and you are the contrabass. I couldn't not write about M.
Erich praised the piece about M too, but in a fairly perfunctory way, so I assumed he was simply being polite. The meticulous red-inked corrections were still there, though there were far fewer errors overall than for any of the previous pieces, and none of them were really that significant. And that was the sum total of the feedback I received. I always looked forward to Erich's comments, particularly when he set the grammatical issues aside and gave me his own personal response to the piece, or asked about possible subjects for future compositions. But when it came to the final piece, the one about M, there was none of that; instead, Erich invited M and I to his birthday party the following week. The other guests were all current or former students of his, their friends, plus his own friends and colleagues. All the students at the party insisted on talking to him in English rather than German, including the two Chinese students I shared my classes with. Two tables had been set out in the kitchen, one for vegetarians and the other for those who ate meat. The food was all delicious, the company uniformly friendly and intelligent. Up until then I'd only ever seen Erich in the guise of a no-nonsense teacher, one whose strict discipline even tended to make his students nervous, but at the party I was shocked to find him playing the jesterâhe was even wearing a red Pierrot mask! To me this was all extremely incongruous, but according to M he'd always had a playful side, you just had to catch him in the right mood. M and I stood by the vegetarian table eating ice cream, arm in arm under the faint glow of the kitchen lights. It would have been rude to try and cut into other people's conversations, so I preferred to just hover on the edges, trying to make my presence seem as natural as possible. M had promised not to leave me alone if she could help it. Just then, the sheer joy of having met M, how utterly unique she was, and the fact that she felt the same
about me, thrilled through me in such a powerful, unprecedented rush that I impulsively pressed my lips to the back of M's hand. M reached over with her other hand and grasped mine. I felt my cheeks flush hot, and thoughts of the future flashed through my mind. Who could tell what might happen? Then Erich waved both arms at me from the other side of the corridor where he was surrounded by a gaggle of students, calling out “Hey, the guys are
here
! All the men worth putting out for”âthis was a fairly crude expression which I only knew thanks to Joachim, and I remember being shocked to hear Erich use itâ“are over here, so what are you doing over there? Come and mingle!”
7)
Love is easily negated, and always imprisoned in a haze of obscurity; it can be shallow, wounding, irresponsible and shameless, constantly making excuses for itself. Long after having dwindled to nothingness it can still be found waiting in the wings, grimly intent on any opportunity to speak itself back into existenceâeven more self-obsessed than some simpering woman giggling about how she's ruined her figure by getting herself knocked upâand worst of all is the way it drones on, oblivious to the existence of anything outside itself, that tedious voice that gets forgotten so quickly it's almost embarrassing, its memory fading swifter than the beauty of roses in full bloom. It's nothing, it was nothing from the first, and later on it was even more nothing. I'm resting my head on M's chest, listening to the footsteps of the cold, cold rain as it falls on the empty fields, the fields that we drove through to get here. The rustle of dry grass, a wood's purple shadow streaked across the horizon, the tracks of wild animals, the exposed flesh of a tree where a branch has been cut off, bare feet
shocked blue with cold, the seemingly indecipherable slant of M's damp eyebrows, the rose that grew in M's aunt's garden, the two small graves, the garden pond, the stubby apple trees.
M pointed out her favorite plates, which dated from well before the war. When she stayed here as a child, she said, they'd always been reserved for her especial use. A bookcase filled a whole wall in the living room, but it was almost bare; her uncles must have thrown out all the books and records that M remembered so fondly. All that remained was an encyclopedia so old it was only of use as a museum piece, a box full of typed manuscripts, theater scripts written in an old-fashioned hand, an illustrated
Gone with the Wind
, a bundle of old magazines with curling, yellowed pages, books by writers now dead and almost completely unknown, a thirty-year-old volume on the theory of stage directing, and a rather shabby-looking collection of Buchner's plays. These were the unclaimed relics. M's aunt had been a playwrightâapparently, she'd been quite well-known at one time. The last time the two of them had seen each other was when M was six, and her parents had left her here while they went traveling to East Asia. It wasn't the first time she'd been left with her aunt like that, but M's parents got divorced shortly after that particular trip and never went traveling again, not even by themselves, so M never saw her aunt again. With being so young at the time, M's only memory of her aunt was of an old woman who'd really hated it if M didn't eat her soup in absolute silence, scolding her into frightened obedience. The window in the study looked out over the garden, with its two small graves and its apple trees. The graves were dogs' graves. M wanted us to take a stroll around the garden, barefoot. The rain was coming down continuously, and the ground was hard and cold. The distant woods, the horizon knuckled by low hills, the signpost informing us of the name of the street and the location of
the post office, and the gently sloping roadâthis was all that was visible to the eye. We were barely a few dozen kilometers from the city but the houses were almost all single-story, the tallest things around being a handful of huge barns. But in their yards there was no sign of anything living, and even the road had nowhere to go except over the hills and into the sky; in fact the sky was almost all there was, the sky and the falling rain. The only other moving thing was a yellow postal van. I watched as the van receded into the distance, moving away up the road's gentle slope until it disappeared altogether, and the vibrating waves of silence seemed to have absorbed the last audible traces of its existence. M was lying down on the chaise longue, eyes closed, both hands on her chest. Her breathing had a ragged edge to it. I got a dry towel from the bathroom cupboard and rubbed her bare feet.
That was a happy time for me. That whole period of my life seems to have passed by in a flash, but if asked whether my happiness was purely the result of being with M, I would have to say yes, it was. I spent a long time trying to deny that fact, but without success. Now, though, the only place where that happiness still remains is in fossilized memories. Memories of M, of course, but the M that exists within them is not the real M. As time passes, the gap between the two grows ever wider. The former lacks physical form, doesn't interact with me, isn't even aware of me, and though its outer appearance resembles M's, even down to the clothes it wears and the way it shapes a gesture, this is only superficial, utterly meaningless. That thing is not M. In time, those memories hardened in such a way that the M who lived within them ended up as a composite of all characteristics most unlike those of the M who really exists. That's just the way it turned out. And now I can't even claim to know her any more. Absolutely not, not by any means.
We were both equally unaware of our respective pasts, and gave no real thought to the future. Past and future; their very existence is tinged with sadness, revealing, as they do, both irrevocable mistakes and unavoidable oblivion. M would frequently work herself up into a passion, knowing that when next spring came I would no longer be eligible to stay in the country, and would have to go back home. It was difficult for M to just quietly acquiesce to this, a phenomenon that she saw as highly irrational. Perhaps the difficulty was partly due to her lack of experience with this type of situation. Not all of us live like nomads, after all. Her fragile health meant she'd never strayed very far from the city where she'd been born and raised. I wasn't actually all that differentâI, too, had never formed such an intimate relationship with someone living in a distant country, and the thought of us ending up thousands of kilometers apart left me equally at a loss. It was a difficult situation all around, especially given M's emotional response whenever I tried to broach the topic of my departure. Yes, I would have to leave, but I tried to assure her that soon afterward, at the earliest opportunity, in fact, I would come back. The only problem was that there was no way of knowing when that earliest opportunity might be. There would be all sorts of things that needed sorting out when I got back to Korea, things that might well keep me tied up there for some time, so that I couldn't say with any certainty when I would be coming back. I could understand M's frustration, her anger. It was impossible for M to go to Korea, where it might be difficult to obtain the medicine she needed, much less find a GP specializing in her allergies. Not to mention the various endemic diseases that were no doubt particular to the country. But none of this altered the fact that I had to go, and my firmnessâsome might call it crueltyâin explaining this to M had hurt her deeply. The way I saw it, there was simply no other option. M insisted I could work
around the entry visa by leaving Germany only brieflyâI could stay with her stepsister in Parisâbut while this would take care of the most obvious and immediate issue, the more fundamental ones would still be left unsolved. If I wanted to stay in Germany long-term, things had now reached the point where I really needed to start tying up the various loose ends I'd left behind me in Korea. Some of these were financial, and could only be dealt with in person at the bank; then, if I wanted to permanently relocate from Korea to Germany, I'd first need to go and reclaim all the belongings I'd put in storage. Three or four months, at the most, would probably be sufficient. But potential problems mounted up, one following the other: the bank might not loan me all the money I needed, I might not be able to find somewhere suitable to move into, or a new place to store all my things; the process of finding a flat and moving might take longer than I anticipated, or end up costing far more than I'd initially factored in, so really, how could I be expected to make even a rough estimate of how much time I was going to need? It was less the number of different things that needed sorting out, and more that what did need doing had been left completely up in the air. I could have gone ahead and told M “three or four months at the most,” but it wasn't a promise I could be sure of keeping. I never discussed this with M in any real detail. They were my problems, for one, and it was really money that lay at the root of them. Besides, if I tried to go into detail then my sentences would end up getting longer and longer, with even the slightest grammatical error opening the door for uncertainty or misunderstanding to creep in, and I'd have to keep qualifying myself, explaining my explanation, the shabby rags of my words piling up in a dizzying accumulation, guilt and shame rising up in me even as I tried to explain this guilt away. In the face of all this, M would eventually be forced to accept that I had to go, that
I had to go without setting a precise date for my return, and that there was nothing she could do to stop me. But though I would have succeeded in forcing her acceptance, it would be at the cost of giving her the impression that I was doing all this deliberately, that my decision to leave was the result of a conscious choice rather than necessity forcing my hand, and that all my talk was just one excuse after another, a litany of self-justification; the thing is, what I'm trying to say, which added no new information and would only serve to make her think that I was one of those puffed-up, permanently unsatisfied egoists who swell the ranks of the lower-middle class. I didn't want that. There was nothing M could gain from such a spiel, no response it could elicit aside from simple acquiescence. I would miss her, oh, as soon as I stepped onto the plane, and was merely thinking of all the preparations I'd need to make in order to come back to her, and, if possible, to stay for slightly longer next time. I told M all this; she couldn't help but interpret it as nothing more than that polite farewell dictated by convention, a mere kindness on the part of the one who is leaving toward the one being left behind. But wasn't there perhaps another reason for my wanting to go back to Korea? Wasn't I also worried about my relationship with M, a relationship, after all, which had come about so quickly I'd almost been taken by surprise? Did the prospect of long-term love not perhaps fill me with unease, and wasn't I hoping to put some distance between myself and this love, just for a little while? Just as M feared being left alone in Berlin, wasn't I worried about being left alone in love? These doubts roiled inside me, but I never let so much as a hint at them pass my lips. If M announced one day that she was going to pack her bags and leave for some distant country, abandoning me here in Berlin, saying I will always love you, but, and I honestly want to come back as soon as possible, but, the thing is, you see, I just can't make
any definite promises; if our roles were reversed, how could I even express the agony I know I'd feel? The transfixing pain of a shaft of ice cast by a frozen autumn day, the internal conflict between doubting love and simultaneously craving it, desperately seeking constant assurances, fear of being abandoned, envy toward the one who is free to leave, the suffocating premonition that the moment will come when our love will be lost, when we become strangers to each other, knowing, at the end of our love, no more of each other than we had done before its first stirrings, and worst of all is that none of this will have the power to move me any more, to produce even the faintest pang of regret. Eventually, there was one argument when instead of responding to the point I'd raised, M simply turned to gaze out of the window. After that, she never raised the subject again. She didn't get angry, didn't swear, stopped trying to calculate the earliest possible date of my return, stopped sighing out loud and pestering me with questions. All she said, quite quietly, was that she understood my situation and accepted that I had to leave. Nothing else had changed. I know now how deeply hurt she must have been.
