A Cage Went in Search of a Bird, page 8
Winter came. I left the outdoor labourers, and moved into what seems like my pre-allocated place in the societal grid—the realm of the permanent part-timers. I may or may not be the woman who scanned your items at the convenience store this morning. I could also be the one who served you drinks and snacks in your karaoke cubicle in the evening. There are strange altercations sometimes; I’ve been warned to keep my mouth shut about “what I saw,” sometimes somebody will beg me to keep quiet, or I’ll get paid off, and I say this is strange because each time this happens, I have no idea what these guilty-seeming people are referring to. Back then I hardly ever watched anybody; I couldn’t be bothered to. But it’s as if I’ve got a pair of false eyes painted on me. Eyes with an unblinking, possibly harassing gaze that gets me hated or sucked up to.
Anyway, lockdown started, and the “what are you seeing” stuff got worse; the friends and family I video-called would get jumpy and nervous and ask why I was staring at the space behind them with this “shaman look” . . .
Everybody who had to sit alone with themselves during lockdown probably built an intricate nest of diseased thoughts around them, but these were mine: It seemed to me that I’d been built for a purpose I want no part of. I disliked the blanks in me; I think if an online user account created specifically for leaving nasty comments underneath other people’s photos and articles gained sentience, it might feel the way I felt during lockdown. I washed and washed, and it helped to reduce that sense of expelling some sort of distressing pollutant without any idea of how to rein it in. I stopped video calls, but kept up with written messages and phone calls. I beefed up my cleansing procedures, from washing individual strands of hair to scrubbing between toes.
I fled my home as soon as it was safe to do so. A lot of people did. I could spot my fellow jjimjilbang nomads a mile away. We’re the ones who switch our street clothes for the spa-provided T-shirt and shirts as quickly as we can, and we take the longest to relinquish our uniform when it’s time to go, easing our feet out of those soft white slippers and back into those germ vehicles with pavement-soiled soles . . . ugh. I fell into this lifestyle like it was a feather bed. We’re all the same here, every girl is just like all the other girls, regardless of age or anything else. Steam enfolds us, inexorable angels with loofahs and three-thousand-carat knuckles knead our muscles and peel our old skin away, naked, clothed and then naked again, we lie on warm stones with our souls swelling like the plumpest of yeast buns. Then we bathe again, anointing each other with waterfalls, and we head back towards the steam room. Rest and repeat, rest and repeat. No ritual sorts you out like the jjimjilbang rituals. Having met you at our favourite bathhouse, there’s no need to persuade you of this, Haewon-ssi. But have you ever considered giving yourself over to the jjimjilbangs completely? Staying overnight at a jjimjilbang close to your workplace every night can be ever so slightly more affordable than monthly rent in outer Seoul, provided you pick establishments that offer the best value and also factor in loyalty discounts. All I had to do was reduce the bulk of my possessions so that they fit into a rucksack and a wheeled duffel bag—oh, and I had to keep circulating, so as not to overstay my welcome at any of my seventeen homes.
Hwang Violaine took her own path to jjimjilbang nomadism—I’m not sure if she told you about it. Somehow I doubt it. In order to know that story the two of you would’ve had to have a non-scripted conversation. Look, the main thing is that all three of us—you, me and Hwang Violaine—were checking in at that bathhouse at the same time. You saw Hwang Violaine, and, desperate to talk to her (I understand; that happened to me too, she’s so very disdainful, it feels amazing when she lifts the VIP rope and lets you through), you hit upon the ruse of offering to take a photo of her and her friend.
“My friend?” Hwang Violaine asked. “What friend?” You meant me. I wasn’t yet acquainted with Violaine, I was only queuing behind her. Actually I’d tried to speak to her a few moments before you approached us—we’d accidentally made eye contact for the second time in three days (I’d spotted her at another jjimjilbang two days prior) so I said “Haha, hello again,” but she’d only stared at me and said “What?” without taking her earphones out of her ears.
But when you offered to take the photo of us she took her earphones out of her ears, put her arm around me and told me to give you my phone. We posed as BFFs, for your benefit and ours too, I suppose. What to blame that on? Giddiness after years of having to shy away from strangers? The confidence of a jjimjilbang regular communing with another jjimjilbang regular?
So, Haewon-ssi, you gave me my phone back with your number saved as a contact, you returned to the queue for the men’s area, and V told me she remembered me! “Same here,” I said, thinking she was talking about the spa. But she was talking about a book signing she’d done years and years ago. She’d just given a reading from her latest book, the bookshop had been packed with literature fiends, she’d spent the next hour or so signing copies for everybody who asked. At a chance interval she’d looked up and seen me join the signing queue, an even longer line than this jjimjilbang one. At another chance interval she’d looked up and seen me shake my head, put her book back on the nearest shelf and leave the bookshop empty-handed. “Huh,” I said. I’d forgotten all about it, but of course it all came back to me once she told me about it. She said she’d stored that sight away in her mind because it was humbling.
You facetiously asked what foundations people like us build our friendships on. For future reference, the answer is roasted eggs and the wisdom of ancients. Once we’d changed into our pale orange T-shirts and shorts, I tracked Violaine down and insisted on buying her dinner. She was all no, no, you don’t have to do that, but now that we were in a photo together I felt bad about robbing her of a book sale.
V found a spot in the TV room with a good view of the screens, I joined her with a platter of eggs and two bowls of sikhye, and before we got stuck in, Violaine said: “First of all, Minjeong, let us pray.”
She’d already fetched a book out of her locker—it was the Tao Te Ching. She raised it aloft and read aloud:
Nothing in all beneath heaven is so soft and weak as water. And yet, for conquering the hard and strong, nothing succeeds like water. And nothing can change it:
weak overcoming strong,
soft overcoming hard.
Everything throughout all beneath heaven knows this,
and yet nothing puts it into practice.
“But we will,” I said.
“Amen,” said Violaine. And on the count of three, we cracked our roasted eggs on our foreheads and fell to feasting.
I don’t expect an answer to this, Haewon-ssi.
Look after yourself,
Kwak Minjeong
THE LANDLORD
Keith Ridgway
He came at the weekends in the afternoons, usually on Saturday, occasionally Sunday. He would leave his plump car glowing in front of the building, half on the footpath, half on the road. Once he came unannounced on a Friday evening, a little the worse for wear, and leaned heavily against the door jamb, struggling to write in my rent book, laughing about something behind me, or on my shoulder perhaps. Giggling. Just the once, this was, on a Friday. I watched him drive off and then come to a stop after only a few metres. The car crouched there like a dropped fruit, a lime from its tree, for example, or an unripe apple, and it didn’t move, not until some other sort of car pulled up behind it and sounded a tentative horn. At which point my landlord, with a squeal of tyres, accelerated away at high speed.
In the summer he often came with his son, an overweight boy of about twelve, who would cut the grass in front of the house while his father made his calls. The sudden noise of the lawn mower would rouse me, and I would glance out the window and see the boy, and the car, and go then and stand at the door to my flat and wait. Sometimes I put my ear to the door. Sometimes I put my forehead to it. I would at these times be tense in my body and vacant in my mind, as if there was nothing else I could possibly be doing. It was possible to estimate his proximity from the voices, the knocking, the noises, and it was possible to get it wrong.
I lived at the top of the house, in what was probably once an attic but which consisted then of a very small bathroom, a larger storeroom where the landlord kept old furniture and bits and pieces, and my single room with its broken bed, its table, a sink and cooker, a fridge and the chairs. Several chairs, only one of them comfortable. There were shelves on the sloping walls which could not bear the weight of more than a few dusty paperbacks and various mementos—photographs, little tins and boxes, my father’s letters. The electricity came and went and in the summer the sun made the place impossible during most of the day. I would go to the park and walk there amongst the cool trees and see the swimmers in the lake and nod at men like myself who walked in the shade or lingered near the ruins of the old fort. In winter I would sit close to the gas heater.
He wanted always to talk. To take my money—the rent—of course, but also to talk, to pass the time, to ask my advice, to worry sometimes about his son, the boy in the garden, but more often to talk about his wife.
Sometimes it was the mower I heard first. Usually though it was the front door slamming in a way that was distinctly his. Slamming is too strong a word. A door let go, not closed. Not careless, but not entirely careful. The tenants closed the door. He let it go, with perhaps a small push of his hand, perhaps a couple of fingers. Then the loud, no-nonsense knocking at other doors as he made his way upstairs. I had the top-floor flat, as I say, at the front. I could see the road, the garden, the path, the first of the steps. I was rarely taken by surprise. I’ve said that. The car sometimes, the boy’s voice, the lawn mower, the letting go of the front door, the knocking. And I would stand waiting. Sometimes I might drift off, and the knock then came like blows against the body, and I would flinch, winded for a moment, as if toppled while out on the wide grass.
I wanted nothing more than a place to live, you understand, nothing other than a place to be.
I was terribly timid as a child. My father raised me. He was a gentleman. Overly gentle, I would say. He has left me also gentle, and afraid sometimes. Fearful. Which people find unattractive in a man. I played sport, was good at football, and I swam. But as I grew older, my health. Now I walk. I walk great distances. And when I can, when there is no one to be seen, I run.
His voice at other doors seemed brusque. Occasionally raised. What my neighbours did to displease him I have no idea. I rarely spoke to them. But with me he had a quiet, respectful tone. He mispronounced my name. But he did it consistently and confidently, so that after some time I began to suspect that his pronunciation was correct and mine was not. At first he would just stand at the door. Lean sometimes against the jamb. He would greet me smiling and I would hand him my yellow rent book, the bank notes inside, marking the page. He would always deftly, quickly, with two or three fingers of one hand fan out the notes to count them, and fold and vanish them, content. He would write then in the book—the date, the amount, his initials—and hand it back to me. All the time talking, speaking, saying my name, flitting his eyes over my shoulder at the room, at the heater in the corner and the stale bed, the shirts hanging mildewed on the rail, the journals and plates on the table, and at some point he began to ask to come in.
May I come in?
Sometimes it was to take some small piece of furniture out of the storeroom. Or to put something in there. A hat stand. A mirror. A rug rolled up and tied. Maybe that is how it started. Him rummaging around in there. Me offering him something. Would you like something?
May I come in?
My mouth opened and closed and I shook, I think, my head, not in refusal, but in that way we do, a lip distorted, a small shrug of the shoulders, men like me, as much as to say, of course, if you like, certainly, I suppose, if you really want to, I don’t know why you would, but yes, I’m hardly going to say no, am I?, come in, come in, you own the place after all, and I stay here at your generous indulgence. Certainly, please, I apologise for the mess. There was never any mess. A chair. Please. Have a seat. Some tea? Some tea?
In the summer when it was very hot he would walk over to the window and look out at the boy mowing the lawn, and complain about the heat, and complain about the boy, and he would see all my windows open and turn down the tea and seem puzzled by something. He would turn down tea in the summer. But sometimes in the winter he would say yes, and he might have one sip or none but he never drank it all. I offered him food but he seemed to have no interest in food. He was stout nevertheless. A belly hung over his belt, and his head was fat, puffy, his hair hanging down at the sides, bald on top, turning from a dirty brown to a clean-looking silver. He wore shirts typically, never particularly clean, always a little tight, and trousers the same. He was not in any way a handsome or elegant man, but he did not seem to know this, and so carried himself confidently. In my room anyway. Coming up the stairs. In the house. In the garden. In and out of his car. Maybe there were places where his confidence dipped, I’m sure there were, but I have no access to places like that. Not then, not since. Places where you can come and go as you please, and hang pictures on the wall, and paint, or ask friends around for dinner or to stay. Of course my father, in his letters, upbraided me for this state of affairs, insisting that a lack of initiative on my part explained these deficiencies, that I was nothing if not to blame. The landlord was never so direct. He would ask me politely how my work was going, whether I had had any luck, whether the gods or the angels or fate or fortune had deigned to smile on me in some way, that sort of generic enquiry. Always enquiring, as if to enquire, why are you still here?
I used to think that he and my father would get on famously.
His wife, he told me, was terribly depressed. She waited by the window all day. He woke in the morning and found himself alone, and went downstairs and into the front room that overlooks the gardens, the gardens of their house, and his wife sat there, in an armchair she had turned around, looking out over the grounds, down the long driveway to the gate. She did not stir at his voice. She did not say anything as he placed his hand on her shoulder, but she put her own small hand over his, and gently squeezed it, and he was relieved that her hand was warm, relieved that she could bring herself to touch him, relieved and of course distraught. She told him to leave the door open. He went to the kitchen and made the boy his breakfast. He would not name his wife. Or his son. They were “my wife,” “my son.” He asked me what he should do, how he should get through to her. I asked him if something had happened to his wife, or whether her depression was—as can often be the case, of course—without discernible cause. He looked at me curiously. He ran his hand over his forehead and sighed. And thanked me for the glass of water and stood up to leave. Pausing at the door, he turned to me and said that I had asked a very interesting question, one that had not occurred to him, and that he would give it a great deal of thought, and he looked forward to seeing me the following week.
She was waiting, his wife, perhaps, for someone to call. Hence the chair at the window. Hence the long driveway, the grounds, some sort of tree, a large tree, around which a path, that sort of thing. Someone or perhaps anyone. I thought I might call. Or at least . . .
I wondered where they lived. I looked through the documents. Tenancy agreement, rental contract. Itemisation of property contents, fixings, fixtures, furniture and ambient status. Condition thereof. Non-alteration declaration. Schedule of payments. Deposit receipt. Conditions of forfeiture. Proof of entitlement. Proof of good standing. Responsibilities of tenancy. Break-clause parameters. I looked for an address. But there was nothing but my address. For my landlord just a name, a telephone number. His name, that ambiguity. I wasn’t sure I was reading it correctly. And I had dialled the telephone number once, when the woman in the basement fell. When she fell on the steps that time. I don’t know what I thought I’d say to him, but in any case the number was not in service. A voice said that, or something like it. This number is not in service. This number does not exist.
At least walk up their driveway. So that she would see me. A figure, slouching up through the rain, hunched, solitary, a foul smell in the garden, the corpse of some animal. Or in the sunshine, obscured by a parasol, moving slowly as if dragging a foot, as if injured, looking for somewhere to rest for a while, pausing to lean against the tree. The big tree. I was curious what would happen. She would gasp and rise and go to the door. His wife. Would he be in? No. She would gasp and rise and go to the door. The door first of the room she was in, the door then of the house. She would gasp and rise and go to the door.
You poor man. You are soaked. Come in. Undress. I will dry you.
She wouldn’t say that.
I have been waiting for you. I realise now that you are a cripple, so I must I suppose not be angry with you and yet I am. I have been waiting. Waiting for you and you have taken up too much of my time crawling to my lair.
She wouldn’t say lair. Why would she say lair? She wouldn’t say cripple. She would think it. But these people.
I have been waiting for you. My husband tells me that you are an ideal tenant. He says that you pay your rent every week in full, that you have never been late with a payment, that you keep the flat in good order, that the neighbours have made no complaints, that you do not hang pictures or make noise or have a trail of people coming and going at all hours, visitors, unsocial hours, music, you do not have music, that there is very little evidence that you are there at all most of the time, perhaps the glow of a light late at night, but dim, seen only from across the street, not unattractive in a house like that, better than a cold blank darkness in the upper windows, and you sometimes leave it on, don’t you? Overnight. Why? Because you think that some sign that someone lives there is good for everyone, good for my husband, good for his investment, my son, good for my son, who is my husband’s chief investment, good for me, as my husband’s beneficiary, good for your neighbours, not to live in a house that looks empty, and good for you, as a sign in the world that you are in the world. A simple sign. A low warm light. Some warmth. Let’s not romanticise things. It is a single bulb that casts an orange sort of glow over your shelves and the black glass, the book you read, your plate and cup, your table top, your bedclothes, your skin.
