Greek Lessons, page 5
But that couldn’t be the cause of her muteness either. It couldn’t be that simple.
•
δύσβατός γέ τις ὁ τόπος
φαίνεται καὶ ἐπίσκιος.
ἔστι γοῦν σκοτεινὸς καὶ
δυσδιερεύνητος.
This place is a place
where it is difficult to take a step in any given direction.
All around has grown dark
It is a place where it is difficult to find anything.
* * *
She bends her head over the book that lies open on her desk. It’s a thick dual-language edition of the first few books of The Republic, containing both the original Greek and the Korean translation. Drops of sweat trickle down from her temples and fall on to the Greek sentences. The coarse-grained recycled paper bulges where they land.
When she raises her head, it seems as though the dimly lit classroom has suddenly brightened, unsettling her. Only then does she properly pick up on the hushed conversation that the usually quiet man behind the pillar is conducting with the postgrad.
“Angkor Wat. I got back from there yesterday morning. Four nights, five days; an early-summer holiday. I was tired from the flight and thought I might skip class today, but it seemed a waste of tuition to skip two weeks in a row. Ha, ha, I’m still pretty fit, you know. Go hiking every weekend. Hmm, I can’t tell, but people have been saying I look tanned. Ah, you can’t compare the heat out there to how it is here. They have a squall at least once every day, but it barely takes the edge off the heat…It’s just, you know, I’m interested in ruins. There was ancient Khmer writing engraved on the temple stones and I liked the look of it more than the Ancient Greek script.”
She looks up at the blackboard, blank now during the break. The lecturer has wiped it clean with the cloth eraser, but only lightly, so there are still the odd fragments of Greek script visible. She can even make out one third of a sentence. And a rough whirl of smudged chalk that looks intentional, like it was done with a broad brush.
She bends over the book again. She takes in a deep breath, and hears the distinct sound of her inhalation. Since losing speech, she gets the sense sometimes that her inhales and exhales resemble speech. They seem to stir the silence as boldly as the voice does.
She’d had a similar thought while witnessing her mother’s final moments. Every time her mother, by then in a coma, expelled a mouthful of hot breath, silence had taken a step back. And when she breathed in, the shudderingly cold silence had shrieked as it was sucked into her mother’s body.
She clutches the pencil and peers at the sentence she was just reading. She could puncture every single one of these letters. If she pressed down with the pencil lead and made a long tear, she could bore through a whole word, no, a whole sentence. She examines the small black letters, conspicuous on the coarse grey paper, the diacritics that resemble insects both curled up and stretching their backs. A place in shadow, obscured and difficult to tread. A sentence in which Plato, no longer young, ponders and stalls for time. The indistinct voice of someone whose mouth is hidden behind their hand.
She tightens her grip on the pencil. Carefully, she breathes out. The emotion permeating the sentence becomes apparent, like chalk marks or a casual thread of dried blood. She endures it.
* * *
•
Her body bears witness to the fact of her long-term muteness. It appears firmer or heavier than it really is. Her footsteps, the movements of her hands and arms, the long, rounded contours of her face and shoulders—all demarcate clear, strong perimeters. Nothing seeps out, and nothing seeps in past these limits.
She’d never been one to spend a great deal of time examining herself in the mirror, but now the very thought seems incomprehensible to her. The face we each imagine most frequently over the course of our lives must be our own. But once she stopped picturing her face, she found that over time it began to feel unreal. When she happens to catch a glimpse of her face reflected in a window or mirror, she examines her eyes carefully. Those two clear pupils seem to her to be the only passage linking her to that stranger’s face.
Sometimes she thinks of herself as more like some form of substance, a moving solid or liquid, than like a person. When she eats hot rice, she feels that she herself becomes that rice, and when she washes her face with cold water there is no distinction between her and that water. At the same time she knows that she is neither rice nor water, but some harsh, solid substance that will never commingle with any being, living or otherwise. The only things that she sees as worth reclaiming from the icy silence, something that takes all the strength she possesses, are the face of the child with whom she has been allowed to spend one night every two weeks, and the dead Greek words that she gouges into the paper with the pencil she grips.
γῇ κεῖται γυνή.
A woman lies on the ground.
She puts down the pencil, which is sticky with sweat. With the palm of her hand, she wipes away the beads of moisture that cling to her temples.
* * *
•
“Mum, they’ve said I can’t come here any more after September.”
Last Saturday night, she had stared at her son’s face in alarm at these words. He’d grown again, even in the space of two weeks, looking taller, but also slimmer, than before. His lashes were long and thin, tiny diagonals clearly outlined over his soft white cheeks, like a miniature drawing done in pen.
“I don’t want to go. My English isn’t even that good. Dad’s sister who lives there, I’ve never even met her. He says I have to go for a whole year. I’ve only just managed to make friends, and now I have to move again?”
She’d just bathed and put the child to bed, and an apple scent rose from his hair. She could see her face reflected in his round eyes. His face was reflected again in the reflection of her eyes, and in those eyes there was her face again…in an infinite series of reflections.
“Mum, can’t you talk to Dad? If you can’t talk, can’t you write him a letter? Can’t I come back to live here again?”
He turned his face to the wall in frustration, and she silently reached out her hand and turned him back to face her.
“I can’t? I can’t come back? Why not?”
He turned to face the wall again. “Turn off the light, please. How can I sleep when it’s so bright?”
She stood up and switched off the light.
The glow from the street lights shone in through the ground-floor window, so she was soon able to make out the clear form of her child in the darkness. There was a deep furrow in the center of his forehead. She laid her hand there and smoothed it out. He frowned again. He lay there with his eyes tightly shut, and even his breathing was muted.
* * *
In the late-night darkness that day in June, the smell of waterlogged grass and tree sap mingled with the smells of food waste. After dropping off her son, she walked the nearly two-hour route through the center of Seoul instead of taking the bus. Some of the roads were as brightly lit as they would be in the middle of the day, with suffocating exhaust fumes and blaring music, while others were dark, and decaying, and stray cats tore at rubbish bags with their teeth, and glared at her.
Her legs didn’t hurt. She wasn’t tired. Illuminated by the pale light in front of the lift, she stood and stared at her front door, the door through which she was now supposed to enter, leading to the bed where she was now supposed to sleep. She turned around and went back out of the building, out into that summer-night smell, the smell of things that had once been alive going bad. She walked faster and faster, until finally she was almost running, throwing herself into the public phone booth in front of the caretaker’s lodge, where she pulled all the coins she could find out of her trouser pocket.
She heard a voice. “Hello?”
She opened her mouth. She forced out a breath. She breathed in, and then out again.
The same voice spoke again. “Hello?”
Her hand trembled as it clutched the receiver.
How could you dream of taking him? That far away? And for so long? You bastard. You heartless bastard.
Her teeth chattered and trembled until her spasming fingers put down the phone. She ran her hand roughly over her cheek, almost as if she were slapping her own face. She rubbed away at her philtrum, her jaw, her lips that no one had gagged.
* * *
•
That night, for the first time since she lost speech, she looked at herself properly in the mirror. She thought that she must be seeing incorrectly, though she didn’t put the thought into words. Surely her eyes couldn’t be this serene. She would have been less shocked to see blood or pus or grey sludge running from them. She saw her mute self reflected in her eyes, and in that reflected self saw yet another reflection of her mute self, and another…in an endless silence.
* * *
The hatred that had boiled up in her a long time ago went on seething, and the agony that used to surge in her remained swollen, a blister that wouldn’t burst.
* * *
Nothing healed.
* * *
Nothing ended.
* * *
•
The middle-aged man and the philosophy student, who had been chatting together, must have gone out into the corridor at some point, and now returned, each holding a can of coffee. The man is talking to someone on his mobile, continuing the conversation as he resumes his seat.
“Well, obviously they should have had all staff, rather than the most competent, in mind. What’s the point of staff training if only some are following? What’s that now, supplementary classes? We’re a small business, not a corporation. Have the instructor give me a call tomorrow.”
The young philosophy student signals to the man with his eyes and sits back down. He stretches, giving out a low groan as he crunches his neck forward, backward, and side to side. The ten minutes’ break time is already up, but today the Greek lecturer, usually so punctual, is late getting back. Suddenly everything becomes quiet.
She is sitting at her desk, motionless as ever. Her back, neck and shoulders are stiff from spending so long in the same position. She opens the notebook and scans the sentences she wrote down during the hour before the break. She jots down words in the blank spaces between the sentences. She perseveres through verb declensions and complicated usages of tense and voice to form simple, incomplete sentences, and waits for her lips and tongue to stir into motion. Waits for the first sound to spring from them.
γῇ κεῖται γυνή.
A woman lies on the ground.
χιὼν ἐπὶ τῇ δειρῄ.
Snow in throat.
ῥύπος ἐπὶ τῷ βλεφάρῳ.
Earth in eyes.
“What’s that?” asks the philosophy student, who sits in the same row as her. He points to the notebook, where she’s written incomplete sentences in Ancient Greek following on from γῆ γῇ κεῖται γυνή, “A woman lies on the ground,” which was one of the examples they’d learned earlier in the lesson. She doesn’t get flustered, doesn’t hastily shut the notebook. She musters all her strength and looks at the young man’s eyes as though into the depths of ice.
* * *
The new agony, caused by what her son had told her, could make no crack in her silence; all it did was to leave trails of blood over the frozen surface each day. She spent too long brushing her teeth, too long standing in front of the open refrigerator, banged her leg against the front bumper of a stationary car, or clumsily knocked against a shelf in a shop and sent its goods crashing to the floor. Every time she slipped under the chilly bed sheet and closed her eyes, the snowy street, the unfamiliar pedestrians, the child wearing unfamiliar clothes, the pale face that could have been either her own or that of her son, were waiting for her.
She knew that the passage that led to speech had descended to a still-deeper place, and that if things continued like this she would lose her son for good. The more aware of this she became, the further down that passage buried itself. As though there was some god who, the more earnestly she asked for something, did the reverse of what she asked. She didn’t moan, as even that failed to reach her lips, and so she only grew quieter still. Neither blood nor pus flowed from her eyes.
* * *
•
“Is it poetry? Poetry written in Greek?” The postgrad student sitting by the window turns to look at her, curiosity etched on his face. Just then, the lecturer comes back into the classroom.
“Seonsaengnim!” The philosophy student chuckles mischievously. “Look, she’s been writing poetry in Greek.”
In his seat behind the pillar, the middle-aged man turns to look at her, his expression one of amazed admiration, and bursts into loud laughter. Startled by the sound, she closes the notebook. She watches blankly as the lecturer approaches her chair.
“Really? Would you mind if I take a quick look?”
She has to strain herself to concentrate on his words, as if she’s deciphering a foreign language. She looks up at his glasses, their pale green lenses so thick they make her eyes swim. All at once she understands the situation, and packs the thick study book, her notebook, dictionary and pencil case in her bag.
“No, please stay seated. You don’t have to show it to me.”
She stands up, shoulders her bag, pushes her way past the row of empty chairs and heads for the door.
* * *
•
In front of the emergency exit that leads to the stairs, someone grabs hold of her arm from behind. Startled, she whips round. It’s the first time she’s seen the lecturer from this close up. He’s shorter than she thought, now that he isn’t standing on the raised platform at the front of the classroom, and, oddly, his face suddenly looks aged.
“I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.” Taking a deep breath, he steps closer. “Are you…do you maybe not hear what I’m saying?” He raises his hands and makes a gesture. He repeats the same gesture a couple of times, and, as if interpreting himself, haltingly speaks the words, “I’m sorry. I came out to say I’m sorry.”
She stares mutely at his face, looks at him as he takes another breath and, undeterred and emphatic, continues signing: “We don’t have to talk. You don’t have to make any kind of answer. I’m really sorry. I came out to say I’m sorry.”
* * *
•
The single-lane one-way street runs for a fair stretch alongside the motorway noise barrier. She is walking along its pavement. Not many people go this way, so the council has let it get somewhat neglected. Clumps of grass rise tenaciously from the cracks in the paving slabs. The thick black branches of the acacias, which had been planted in a broad line around the flats in place of a wall, stretch toward one another like arms. The repulsive fug of exhaust fumes mingles with the scent of grass in the humid night air. This close to the road, the roar of car engines slices into her eardrums as sharp skates cut into ice. In the grass at her feet, a grasshopper cries slowly.
It’s strange.
It’s as if she’s already experienced a night exactly like this.
It feels like she’s walked this road before, wrapped up in a similar sense of shame and embarrassment.
She would have still had language then, so the emotions would have been clearer, stronger.
But now there are no words inside her.
Words and sentences track her like ghosts, at a remove from her body, but near enough to be within ear- and eyeshot.
It is thanks to that distance that any emotion not strong enough drops away from her like a scrap of weakly adhering tape.
* * *
She only looks. She looks, and doesn’t translate any of the things that she sees into language.
Images of objects form in her eyes, and they move, fluctuate, or are erased in time with her steps, without ever being translated into words.
* * *
•
On one such summer night, a long time ago, she had suddenly started to laugh to herself while walking down a street.
She had looked at the gibbous thirteenth-day moon, and laughed.
Thinking that it resembled someone’s sullen face, that its round sunken craters were like eyes concealing disappointment, she had laughed.
As though the words inside her body had first burst out into laughter, and it was that laughter that had spread across her face.
* * *
That night when the heat that arrived just past the summer solstice had, as now, withdrawn hesitantly behind the darkness,
that night long ago that was not so long ago,
her child walking ahead of her, while she followed along, cradling a huge cold watermelon in her arms.
Her voice had been affectionate as it gently diffused outwards, trying to take up the minimum of space.
Her lips hadn’t shown signs of gritted teeth.
