Jesse Ball - Silence Once Begun

But when I came back some days later, I found her things gone from the house. She was gone from the house. On the bed was a note. I am beginning a new life .

I went to the airport and bought a ticket. I flew for hours, got on another plane, flew for hours. It was a great distance. When I arrived in her country, I found a bus to the city, and I took it. I found myself the next morning, walking through foreign streets to the house where I guessed she would be staying. It was a place I had never been to before.

I rang the doorbell, then. The person who came out bore only a small resemblance to the girl I knew, so much had she changed. Though it had been only three days, four days — so much had she changed.

Joo adjusted her skirt, staring at me in the dim room, and I realized I had stopped speaking. I had not been speaking for some time.

You see, I said.

She nodded.

A moment passed, and noise filtered up from the street. Someone dragging something along the pavement. The noise grew and then faded away. And all the while, Joo stared at me, waiting.

Since that day, I continued, I have learned nothing more about it. I have tried to find it in her, going there to speak to her, again and again, but she no longer knows, if she ever did, and I have sought it in myself. I do not know it either. My life has been in immense confusion. I make no choices with any sense of the consequences involved. I found myself here. I saw this poem, and it struck me that there are things you know. Maybe they are not the things I need, but they are things, and they are near perhaps to what I need. Will you say them to me? Anything anyone knows about silence. Anything you know.

Come back in two weeks, said Jito Joo.

She stood up.

Can you find this house?

I can, I said.

Then come and find it in two weeks and I will see what I can say to you.

I started to leave and Joo called me back.

You know, she said, nothing is for any reason.

She shut the door.

I went down the stairs past three broken lights and one that flickered. The door to the ground floor apartment was partly open and I could hear people laughing. Someone was singing and there was the smell of cooking.

This is what we bear, I thought, the nearness of other lives.

But out in the street there was a man selling batteries and he smiled at me. I couldn’t understand him. He was saying something, but I could understand none of it. When he saw that, he held up a handful of the batteries as if in victory. He smiled again.

I shook my head at him. No, I won’t have any batteries. This actual good smile, the smile of an actual good person, fell over me. But after a moment he was gone, or I was — the street was empty and none of it remained.

I wanted to explain myself better to Joo. I felt that what I would receive from her depended entirely on what I could give to her, on how clearly I could explain what had happened to me. I felt I had not explained myself at all. I was sure I had done it badly. I could scarcely remember what I had said.

I wrote a letter to her, and as I was beginning it, I fell asleep at my desk.

That night, I dreamed again of Joo’s lake, but now there were chattering birds flying over it. They were shrieking and chattering, but no sound came. I could feel their cries on the surface of the lake, and I wept to feel it, but try as I might, I could hear nothing.

When I woke the next day, I worked at the letter. I worked at it all day, and in the evening I went and dropped it at the building where Joo lived. There was a little box with her apartment number in it, right there in the foyer of the building. I put the letter there. A kid with a stick was leaning against a wall. He was hitting the stick against his leg and looking at me.

No one lives there, he said.

I know someone does, I said. I saw her there yesterday.

Then I’m wrong, he said. I don’t know who you’re looking for.

Don’t touch this letter, I said. If it goes missing …

I started to leave, and he left too. We went out into the nighttime street at the same time. He went right and I went left. When he got outside, he broke into a trot and was soon invisible. I looked up at Joo’s window, but, of course, her window was only at the back of the building. In the front apartment a light was on and people were moving back and forth, their inaccessible lives casting off something like the light that settled on them.

I felt tempted then to believe, as I always do, that the people inside were happy, that they knew things I did not know, but I thought no more about it, and went home to my own cold room, and I thought of the letter I had written to Jito Joo.

Dear Jito Joo ,

Please ignore everything I said yesterday. Allow me to explain it in a different way. I have not spoken of it really to anyone, and so it came out wrong. What I said was perhaps closer factually to the way it happened, but I can say it in a way that you may understand better, in a way of immediate understanding. Let me give you that now .

A man fell in love with a tree. It was as simple as that. He went into the forest to cut wood and he found a tree and he knew then that he loved it. He forgot about his axe. It fell from his hand and he knew it not. He forgot about the village that he had come from, forgot the path along which he had come, forgot even the brave ringing voices of his fellows, which sounded even then in the broad wood as they called his name, seeking after him. He sat down there before the tree and he made a place for himself and soon no one passing there could even see that he was lying between the roots .

It was for him as though a blade of grass had turned to reveal a map of broad longing and direction and over it he could pass — and did .

He and his love then sought what they would with nothing asked of anyone. Asking no permission, they devised all manner of delights and found in each other everything that the world had lacked. You are as bright as a coin. You are as tall as a grove. You are as swift as a thought. And so well did they hide themselves in their love that grass grew over their hearts and all their loud songs became indecipherable ribbons of air .

But then one day, the man awoke. He found himself again in front of a tree, but it was one he had never seen before. He had never seen the forest either — and the clothes he wore were worn almost to shreds. Where have I been, he asked himself, and stumbled out of the woods to where others waited at a string of houses. But, they could tell him no tidings of himself .

Where have I been, he wondered. With whom, in my loveliest dreams, have I so endlessly been speaking? But as he thought it fell away, and he was poorer then than anyone .

Raise yourself up, the others called to him. Raise yourself up, you fool .

Ah, he said, so this is how fools are made. For I did never know .

++

For two weeks, then, I wandered about in a bit of a haze. Speaking about my life had set me at an angle to the world I was experiencing. I felt in some way that I had put myself before Joo to be judged. What a ridiculous thing! Especially considering that she had done nothing to earn it. In fact, her part in the entire business with Sotatsu would lead one to believe nothing good about her. Yet, somehow, Sotatsu had trusted her, and likewise, now, I was trusting her.

I wrote several letters to people I knew back home. I tried to read two different novels unsuccessfully. I ate at several different restaurants, all of which were good, and ordered either much too much food or far too little.