Han Kang - The Vegetarian

Her room was in a fairly quiet alley near to a women’s university. He stood in front of the multistory building, laden down with two big bags of fruit that his wife had insisted he bring with him — tangerines, pears and apples from Jeju Island, and even some out-of-season strawberries. The knotted muscles in his hands and arms ached, but still he stood there wavering, realizing as he did that the thought of going up to her apartment, of encountering her in person, was making him afraid.

At last he set the fruit down, flipped open his mobile and dialed her number. When she still hadn’t answered after the tenth ring, he picked the fruit up again and began to climb the stairs. When he reached the third floor he went over to the corner apartment and pressed the doorbell, which had a picture of a semiquaver. Just as he’d thought: no answer. He tried turning the handle. To his surprise, the door opened. He readjusted his baseball cap, only then realizing that his hair was soaked with sweat, tidied himself up a bit, took a deep breath, and pushed the door.

—

The south-facing studio apartment was bathed in the early-October sunlight as far in as the kitchen area, and felt still. Some of his wife’s clothes, which she’d passed on to her sister, were lying scattered across the floor, and there were tiny dust balls rolling about, but somehow the place managed not to seem untidy. Perhaps that was because of the almost complete lack of furniture.

After putting the fruit down next to the door, he took off his shoes and went in. There was no sign of her anywhere. Perhaps she’d gone out. Perhaps she’d gone out deliberately because he’d told her he was coming. There was no television, and there was something unseemly about the way the two wall sockets, next to the hole for an antenna, lay exposed in the middle of the wall. At the far end of the living room — cum — bedroom, where his wife had installed a solitary telephone, there was a mattress, on top of which the quilt was rumpled up into a cave-like mound, as though someone had just slid out from under it.

The air felt stale, and he was on the point of opening the door to the veranda when he heard a noise and whipped around. The breath caught in his throat.

She was coming out of the bathroom. The real shock, though, was that she was naked. She stood there blankly for a moment, as though she, too, were somewhat startled, and without the slightest trace of moisture visible on her naked body. But then she began to pick up the scattered clothes one by one and slip them on. She did this quite calmly, not in the least flustered or embarrassed, as though getting dressed were merely something demanded by the situation, rather than something she herself felt to be necessary.

While she stood there getting dressed, calmly and methodically and without turning her back to him, he was of course aware that he should either avert his gaze or hurry outside. And yet he remained standing there, as if rooted to the spot. She wasn’t as gaunt as when she’d initially turned vegetarian. She’d gradually put on weight after being admitted to the hospital, and she’d eaten well when she’d been staying with him and his wife, thanks to which her breasts had now rounded out into softness. Her waist narrowed sharply, her body hair was fairly sparse, and the overall effect, aside from the line of her thigh, which he felt could have done with being a little rounder, was one of an enticing lack of superfluity. Rather than provoking lust, it was a body that made one want to rest one’s gaze quietly upon it. Once she’d finished sorting through the clothes and putting them on she came up to him, and it occurred to him that he hadn’t managed to get a look at her Mongolian mark.

“I’m sorry.” Belatedly he stammered his excuse. “What with the door being open, I thought you’d just popped out for something or other.”

“It’s okay.” Now, too, she spoke as though answering like this was the expected, necessary thing. “It’s just that I enjoy being like this when I’m on my own.”

So. He tried to collect his thoughts; his mind had gone blank. She’s saying that she always walks around with her clothes off in the house. He’d been fine just a moment ago when confronted with her naked body, but as soon as he grasped what she was saying he became flustered and felt his penis becoming engorged. He took off his baseball cap and squatted down awkwardly, trying to conceal his erection.

“I’ve nothing to offer you to eat…”

She walked over to the kitchen area and he took in the fact that her light gray tracksuit bottoms were grazing her bare skin, knowing from what he’d just seen that she wasn’t wearing anything underneath. Her buttocks were neither large nor particularly voluptuous. Nothing to account for why his mouth was suddenly so dry.

“I’m not really hungry,” he said, stalling for time in the hope he’d be able to suppress his arousal. “How about we just eat some of this fruit?”

“If you like.” She went over to the front door, picked up the pears and apples and carried them to the sink. Listening to the sound of running water and the clinking of dishes, he tried to concentrate on the ugly electrical sockets and the angular telephone buttons, but the memory of her pubic region only intensified in his mind. His head throbbed with the image of her buttocks crowded with colored petals, overlying that of the man and woman having sex, with which he’d covered page after page of his sketchbook.

When she came and sat down next to him, carrying plates of the peeled, sliced fruit, he had to bow his head so that she wouldn’t see the look in his eyes.

“I don’t know if the apples will be any good…” He trailed off.

After a while, she broke the silence. “You know, you don’t have to come and visit me.”

“Oh?”

“The doctor said I wasn’t to do any kind of job where I would be left alone with my own thoughts,” she continued in a low voice, “so I’m thinking of trying somewhere like a department store. I even had an interview last week.”

“Really?”

This was surprising. “Would you be able to put up with a wife who was always like that, zoned out on psychiatric medication every day, completely dependent on you for her livelihood?” This was something Mr. Cheong had said to him during one of their phone calls, slurring as if he were drunk. Now it turned out that prediction had been off; she wasn’t as far gone as all that. Turning his upper body toward her, though with his eyes still fixed on the ground, he finally got to the point.

“How about working at your sister’s store instead?” As he carried on talking he felt his arousal subside a little. “Ji-woo’s mum pays a decent wage — you know what a good person she is — and she’d much rather see it go to you than to a stranger. She’s your sister, which means you can trust each other, and she’d like for the two of you to spend more time together. Besides, the work wouldn’t be as tough as at a department store.”

Slowly she turned to face him, and he saw that her expression was as serene as that of a Buddhist monk. Such uncanny serenity actually frightened him, making him think that perhaps this was a surface impression left behind after any amount of unspeakable viciousness had been digested, or else settled down inside her as a kind of sediment. He reproached himself for having used her as a kind of mental pornography, when she simply had an innocent wish to be naked. All the same, he was unable to deny that the image of her naked was now stamped indelibly on his brain, burned into him like a brand.

“Have some pear.” She held the plate out to him.

“You have some too.”

Using her fingers instead of a fork, she picked up a piece of pear and put it in her mouth. He averted his head, frightened by the sudden urge he had to throw his arms around her still form — so still in fact she appeared to be lost in thought — to suck on her index finger, sticky with sweet pear juice, and lick the last of the juice from her lips and tongue, and to pull her baggy tracksuit bottoms down right then and there.