Authors: Jung-myung Lee
All winter Dong-ju read his poems out loud in the interrogation room and Sugiyama wrote them down as though he were taking down a confession. The poems Dong-ju recited were
dark but glorious, steeped in sorrow but brimming with joy – they sang of a wanderer’s thoughts as he walked down a dark snow-covered road, a man suffering in a strong tempest, a young
scholar betrayed by the times. His poetry illuminated the darkness briefly, line by line. Sugiyama copied it all down. He was the first to hear the young poet’s new work, poems that had
formed in Dong-ju’s head over weeks or months, poems previously unknown to the world.
The poems flew up like doves on the belly of Sugiyama’s kites. They leaped over the walls with the breeze. The kite danced and circled in the blue sky in tandem with the girl’s kite
waiting on the outside. The prison’s feeble kite, cut by the girl’s glass-studded line, tilted in the wind and sank. The girl chased after the kite as it took off sluggishly over the
fields. Often the kites disappeared from the girl’s sight and became stuck inside a thorny bush, fell in mud or ended up in a narrow, dirty alley. The girl looked all over for the missing
kites until, late in the evening, she found them impaled on an electric pole in the harbour or torn and wet on the sandy beach. She discovered clumsily written poems on the back of the creased
kites and, upon returning home, hid them deep in her cupboard.
Dong-ju often entered the interrogation room looking grey and pallid, as though he had been doused in ash. But he regained his vitality as I began to question him. He talked
about things that didn’t exist but could be perceived, that couldn’t be seen but could be inferred, that vanished from earth but remained in memory, that he couldn’t possess but
longed for. We sat facing each other. We talked not as a guard and prisoner, but as equals. We discussed writers and their tales, conversed about poets and novelists, philosophers and artists.
But the very fact that we were in this interrogation room enraged me. ‘Poetry?’ I spat out once. ‘Hope? It’s ridiculous. We’re in a barren prison.’
‘We’re waiting for spring, but maybe spring is already here,’ Dong-ju insisted, ever optimistic. ‘One realizes that spring has come and gone only when it’s summer.
There’s happiness even behind these cold bars.’
‘No,’ I argued. ‘There’s nothing in this forsaken hell. There’s no beauty or virtue or intellect in this place.’
‘But we can look for it.’
‘There’s no point.’
‘If we look and we can’t find it, I guess we’ll just have to create hope and happiness and dreams and beautiful poetry. The poetry we both long for isn’t on paper. Look
around you! It’s everywhere; in the narrow cells and behind the thick bars. Thanks to the thick steel that imprisons me, I can write even more heartfelt poems.’
I hoped that was true.
‘After I came here, I gave up on poetry for a while,’ Dong-ju confessed.
‘How were you able to write again?’
‘Sugiyama – I had Sugiyama,’ Dong-ju said, looking pained. ‘Without him, I wouldn’t have been able to write again.’ He suddenly looked very old.
I wanted to lighten the mood. ‘I have a question about your poem “The Blowing Wind”. You say, “I haven’t loved a single woman.” Are you saying you’ve
never loved anyone?’ Although I’d read many of Dong-ju’s poems, I hadn’t come across a single poem about love. Had he truly never loved anyone? There had to have been a
happy period in his life, when he’d been able to laugh, sing and love.
‘Everyone has secrets,’ he answered obliquely. He frowned, gave me an embarrassed smile and began to recite a poem. ‘“The Temple of Love.” Suni, when did you come
into my temple? / When did I enter yours? / Ours is / A temple of love steeped in old customs. / Suni, lower your crystal eyes like a doe. / I will groom my tousled hair like a lion. / Our love was
merely a mute. / Ah, youth! / Before the weak flame on the holy candlestick extinguishes / Suni, run towards the front door. / Before darkness and wind slam into our window / I will carry my
eternal love for you / And disappear through the back door. Now / You have a cosy lake in the woods, / And I have steep mountains.’
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.’
I was struck dumb – original sin was reflected against a pure sense of self and a bleak situation. I could feel Dong-ju’s powerful will for life, the will to construct his own
reality. His emotive poem drew out deep feelings within me; perhaps the more so because he recited the words in a calm, low voice. I put down the pen and lobbed my nightly questions at him.
‘What’s your name?’ ‘Where is your home town?’ ‘What’s the date today?’ ‘When will you be released?’ ‘What words can you think of
now?’ I didn’t ask for his prisoner number or his Japanese name and I didn’t make him recite the multiplication tables again. Those questions polluted and ruined his memories. He
deserved to recall happier times.
‘In the winter, white snow covered the village, and the deer and boars came as if they were guests, looking for food. The children flew kites that filled the sky, and the adults hunted
falcons. I lived in a large, traditional tile-roof house near the school. We had a plum tree in our yard, an orchard of apricot trees in the back, and a large mulberry tree and a deep well outside
the east gate. Oh, the mulberries were so sweet! I would shout into the well to hear the echo and raise my head, and see the sunlight on the far-away cross atop the church belfry. I took long
walks, crossing the stream into the forest, climbing the hill towards the village, on paths that were lined with dandelions, where magpies flew overhead, where I passed young ladies, feeling the
breeze . . .’ His eyes were dreamy.
I remained quiet, unwilling to break his reverie. Memory had to be like a muscle: the more it was used, the stronger it must become.
He struggled to raise his eyes to meet mine. ‘Yuichi – Watanabe Yuichi!’ he called out.
‘Yes?’
He smiled. I realized he’d just wanted to utter my name before it, too, disappeared, before he ceased to recognize me. He was fighting a fierce battle in a war he would end up losing. He
recited Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Rilke and Jammes constantly. He began talking ceaselessly, about his home town, his school days, literature, music and artists. Before, I used to ask him
questions and he would answer, but now he talked and I listened. Watching him desperately cling to the last of his memory sent pangs through my heart. Since he no longer trusted his own mind, he
was trying to move his memories into mine. ‘Have you seen Van Gogh’s paintings?
Starry Night
or
Cafe Terrace at Night
?’ he suddenly asked.