Jung Young Moon: Vaseline Buddha

I went to her house that day, but all we did was sit by the window and have a drink. She gave me a seashell as a gift, and told me she collected seashells. But there was only a few shells she’d collected, too few to be called a collection. I told her that I collected bones, and suddenly recalled how, when I went to a snow-covered mountain in Nepal, I tried to find some kind of a bone there as well. I collected bones without thinking that I was collecting them, and there were some animal bones of unknown origin in my house, but not many. Still, I thought that I could collect bones, and that perhaps people could leave their children a certain bone in their body when they died, and that it could be a great keepsake. (And I collected sleeping pills — including tranquilizers and antidepressants — which could amount to a lethal doze when taken at once, but I never thought that I would take them at once someday. I collected leftover sleeping pills as a sort of hobby, just as some people collected things such as stamps or trays or knives. Is this true? Perhaps I’m saying something somewhere between the truth, something close to the truth, and something far from the truth. In any case, I collected a good amount of sleeping pills, with which I filled five small transparent glass bottles, each of which could hold about a hundred pills, and put them in a music box and the kitchen cabinet. The sleeping pills in the cabinet look like a kind of seasoning for food, not medicine. One day, I was so bored that, looking at the glass bottles containing sleeping pills of various colors, I thought I could perhaps crush up the pills to the size of sand grains and create a desert scene of mummies lying in sand, after the manner of sand bottles created by Arab artisans, pouring colored desert sand into glass bottles to reproduce desert scenes, such as oases or camels, to relieve the boredom a little, just a little, really, but I didn’t actually do it. But it seemed that doing so would be a kind of little magic, and I was reminded of ancient Arabians, for whom magic was a part of life. A desert scene of mummies lying in sand, made up of grains of sleeping pills that were like sand grains, would enhance the feeling that everything in the scene was in eternal slumber, and be a nice souvenir of my sleeplessness. And I think that one day, I could put a sleeping pill scorpion or palm tree, or fish or dolphin, in a small glass bottle, although it wouldn’t be an easy task.) I told her how I used to carry around in my pocket something that looked like a boar canine, which I picked up in a mountain somewhere, and left it in the seat pocket in front of me on a train when I got off. She said that there were a lot of boars living in the forests of Berlin, and that you could see a fox from time to time if you were lucky. I said that if I had a chance, I’d like to go to a forest in Berlin with her to see a fox, but I never got to see a fox in a forest in Berlin. We didn’t go to a forest in Berlin together to see a fox, and we didn’t meet again, either.

That night, being very passive, I was going to stay the night in her room if she asked me to, but she didn’t show that much initiative, thanks to which nothing happened between us. Leaving her house, I thought that I wasn’t in a position to be nitpicky, but that I was being strangely fussy, and going down the corridor, I thought that I wanted to keep being fussy.

One day, without a word to her, I moved to a house in another area of Berlin (not far from where David Bowie once stayed), and fingering the very old and chipped seashell I got from the woman who collected seashells, I hoped that the woman, with whom nothing had actually happened, and whom I may be able to suddenly recall in the distant future, after having almost completely forgotten about her, when I saw a woman wearing a sweater, or a child jumping on a trampoline, would be happy, collecting many pretty seashells, and live the life she wanted, and wearing her pretty green sweater, do something similar to farting while jumping on a trampoline in a park in the middle of the night with someone she recently met, making him grow fond of her, and making both of them feel merry, and making them grow affectionate toward each other.

I didn’t say anything either to the French owner of the café where I met her, and to be honest, there was nothing to talk about with him besides disparaging things about Germany and the German people. And he was so chatty that I felt like heaving a sigh when I listened to him talk, and all that he said to me were negative things about Germany. On the day I moved, I thought that a virtually nonexistent relationship was all there was to my encounter with her, and felt that my brief encounter with her would remain a good memory for me. And although I wasn’t sure if by doing so, I broke the heart of a German woman, and although I didn’t think that by doing so, I made a German woman go through what a French girl, who had stood me up long ago, made me go through, but I felt good, thinking that I’d taken some sort of a revenge. I hoped that she, too, would take revenge on someone in the future, if she felt betrayed by me. No, that was a childish, shameful thought, and I tried not to think like that. Could it perhaps be that by doing so, I thought I could figure out the reason why the French girl had stood me up? But I still couldn’t figure out the reason. But it wasn’t such a bad thing to suddenly recall something that happened with someone because of something that could never be explained, and wonder about it, and still be without an explanation.

In my new area, too, I mostly took brief walks around the house, but most of the time, I stayed in my room. Late at night, I’d go into little parks and playgrounds that made people just pass them by and gave the feeling of being withdrawn, and come to a stop at every street corner as if there were something special there that made me come to a stop even though there wasn’t, and roam the building and tree lined streets that gently revealed themselves in the streetlights, with nothing overwhelming about them, and seemed to be giving me their everything and embracing me, and when I did, I felt like a true city walker. And even when I returned to my room after a walk I could see a huge poplar tree in the courtyard, and the moss-covered tree, which didn’t really look as if it were dying, looked age old. I spent a lot of time looking at the broken bicycles and strollers discarded around the tree, the way I do when I observe something very carefully, and thought that I was turning into someone or something I’d never considered, and wrote down, in my notebook full of bizarre thoughts, such as, If everything that looks like latex aliens standing next to unstable blue order is heading toward an irrevocable end, there’s nothing that can be done about it, and thought about going to a city in Germany someone told me about, with a street whose buildings, from number one to one hundred, were full of offices of one of the greatest publishing groups in the world, and wasn’t very much to look at as a city, and also recalled that I once saw, between fields of reeds by a lake created by the only active volcano in Germany, which I visited while traveling long ago in Germany, bubbles that indicated that the volcano was still active. With me at the time was a friend I’d made while traveling somewhere else, a German guy who worked as a stained glass restorer at the Cologne Cathedral, and thanks to him, I had the chance to see a structure at the top of the cathedral that looked like an emptied whale’s belly.

Just once I took a night bus in the middle of the night and rode through downtown Berlin to the Brandenburg Gate, the Potsdamer Platz, and the Alexanderplatz, and the snowy streets were almost empty, and the scenes outside the window withdrew like phantoms, and it seemed that during that stretch of time, at least, the silent streets and buildings were the true keepers of the city.