Jung Young Moon - Vaseline Buddha

The story I began to write around the beginning of summer and planned to finish during summer continued into winter, and I seek to end the story as I greet winter, talking about winter in the story. The pumpkin vines in the garden outside the window, which had been thick in summer, and had made a kitten tremble in fear one very bright morning, were nipped by frost and the leaves have withered, but the stems are still intact.

I’m sitting in the sun like a cat. There’s nothing but a few withered trees in the garden outside the window. I once had a dream that the landlady of the house I was renting appeared in an empty garden, no, it’s possible that it wasn’t a garden, but a place I was sure was a garden, or used to be a garden, and suddenly for some reason, took off her pants and paced up and down in her underwear, and then quietly disappeared. No, that’s not true. I say that I dreamt it, but it actually happened. I don’t know why she did such a thing. Before she went off somewhere, she glanced in the direction of the window where I was, and our gazes met for a very brief moment. I saw two cats playing around at the back, slapping each other with their front paws. It was May then, and there was a thick growth of small leaves that looked like duck feet on the sycamore trees in the garden. The landlady was a bit off in the head, and one day, I saw her walking up and down on a patch of various vegetables on one side of her garden. Once, she brought me an armful of persimmon that I just couldn’t eat and I took them to a nearby woods and wondered what her intention was as I hurled them one by one, counting them — there were twenty-seven in all — but I couldn’t be sure.

Generally, a garden is nice to spend time in, and nice to look at through a window. Around the beginning of winter, I went to Brussels for some time to attend a dull literary event, then to Berlin to gauge the publication of a book of mine that was being translated into German (it was fruitless, as expected), and spent most of the time staring at the garden outside the window in a room on the fourth floor of a building that was in a residential area in the city. Being quite dizzy, I had no choice but to stay cooped up in the room most of the time. I had barely managed, in fact, to get to the room in Berlin. I was faced with the greatest crisis at Brussels Airport, when I felt so dizzy after the long flight that I had difficulty just making it to the transfer ramp, so I sat down in a chair with my hands on the cart, and was going to ask someone around me, someone kind looking, to put me in the cart and take me just up to the transfer ramp, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask a stranger to do such a thing, and in the end, I made it to the departure gate, pushing the cart and leaning on it, after resting for over an hour.

The only person I knew in Berlin was an old Jewish man who lived in the room next door and who worked as the building manager. He was very old, and had difficulty getting around. We chatted when we ran into each other now and then in the corridor, and I learned that he was from the Czech Republic and spent two years in hiding, seeing almost no light at all, in the home of a kind Christian man, and moved to Israel several years after the war ended, but was unable to settle there because there was something about the place that he didn’t like, and returned to live in Germany, and I thought that maybe I could go to Prague when I got better. He told me frankly that he became a little strange after living in a dark, closed space for two years. He was, in fact, receiving ongoing psychotherapy, and had the eyes of someone who was slightly crazy. At a certain time of the day, he listened to some old music on a record that sounded like something that might have been heard playing on the radio during the Second World War, and listening to the sound of the music coming from his room, I could picture him in the dark, listening carefully to the British BBC radio broadcast reporting on the war situation. Still, he looked like someone who was kind by nature, and although he never actually helped me in any way, he tried to help me in one way or another and seemed to regret not being able to help me. I, too, regretted not being able to help him, and it seemed that my regret was greater.

Once when we ran into each other again in the corridor, I wanted to learn more about his past, and he said he’d set aside some time in a few days to tell me. But when the appointed time came and I went to see him in his room, he looked quite unwell, and courteously declined the interview, apologizing that he had been wrong to tell me that he would talk to me. It seemed that he no longer wanted to say anything about his past. I wasn’t particularly interested in his past, or the Jewish issue, either, so I said that I hoped he was okay. And when I ran into him again after that, he was doing something astonishing, standing on a small red carpet he’d laid out in the corridor in front of his room and holding some kind of a red flower. He said he was waiting for his boyfriend. But when I returned a couple of hours later after going out, he was still standing in the same spot, holding the flower, looking a little tired and disappointed. But I wasn’t sure if he had a lover of the same sex and was waiting for him or if he was doing such a thing because he was out of his mind. It was a sad sight, whether he had a lover of the same sex and had invited him home and was waiting for him, who never showed up, or whether he was doing such a thing because he was off his rocker and imagined up a lover of the same sex who didn’t exist. In any case, I hoped that the latter was true, because someone actually being stood up seemed the sadder thing to me. Nevertheless, I pictured him standing before a mirror in his room, holding a red flower on a small red carpet he’d laid out. It seemed like the only thing left for him to do. And it seemed sad but beautiful.

I spent about fifteen days like that, lying on a bed in a room next door to the room of a somewhat strange Jewish man who lived a life similar to that of Anne Frank’s at a certain period in time, staring at the garden four floors down, as if staring off into an infinite expanse. For the most part, I didn’t really mind that my somewhat poor condition persisted. Sometimes, things were good because I was unwell, and in fact, good ideas often came to me when I was unwell. A poor condition wasn’t all bad, at least when it came to writing. But during those fifteen days in Berlin I was in such poor condition that I could do almost nothing. That was an unusual period of time even for me, who had no desire to do anything most of the time, and tried to do as little as possible, as far as I was able to do, or as far as I was able to not do. Unlike at any other period of time I had no desire at all to live, but it wasn’t that I was longing to die, either. I was in a very terrible, obscure state in which I didn’t want to do anything for myself, and didn’t seem to have any strength to do so, either. And I thought as negatively as possible, as if on purpose, although it wasn’t on purpose. The thought that I was somehow okay today even in such state, but tomorrow, when tomorrow came, I wouldn’t be okay, wouldn’t leave me, like some sort of a belief.

All I could manage to do was drag myself out into the street when darkness fell early in the afternoon, and come home after walking on the streets for a little while. And I would return to my room after the short walk, and lie down on the bed and smile faintly in my mind, just managing to feel a pure joy that comes from being drained of all energy. Sometimes the feeling that I was almost perfectly alone, that I had no one, was so appealing that it seemed like something I couldn’t give away, not to anyone.

And then I usually took some sleeping pills and fell into a long slumber, like someone who had come to the city in order to sleep. When I woke up, everything seemed so far away, and I felt as if I were in another world different from this one. Sleep, which felt violent yet gentle, seemed like an imaginary creature that gave me a hard time when I came out of it after being in it. I even thought that I could perhaps return to this city someday, only to sleep. My newly prescribed sleeping pills put me in a haze until the next afternoon, and made my palate too sensitive and fussy, making eating, which was difficult to begin with, even more difficult, and had side effects, such as making it so that I couldn’t bear the slightest noise, which may have had nothing to do with the sleeping pills because I had always been that way, and perhaps I could learn about other side effects in the future.