Han Kang - The Vegetarian

When it was all over, she was crying. He couldn’t tell what these tears meant — pain, pleasure, passion, disgust, or some inscrutable loneliness that she would have been no more able to explain than he would have been to understand. He didn’t know.

I’m scared , she’d muttered, turned away from him. No, it wasn’t that. You’re scaring me . At that point he was already slipping into a death-like sleep, so he couldn’t be sure if those words had really passed his wife’s lips. She might have lain there sobbing for hours in the darkness. He didn’t know.

But the next morning she hadn’t acted any different from usual. On the phone just now, there’d been no trace in her voice of what had happened between them, no particular sense of hostility toward him. It was just that her way of speaking — that almost inhuman patience, those trademark sighs of hers — made him feel incredibly uncomfortable. He walked a little faster, trying to shake that feeling off.

Surprisingly, his sister-in-law was already waiting at the station exit, slumped on the steps as if she’d been there a long time. Wearing a fairly chunky brown sweater over shabby jeans, she seemed to have stepped straight out of another season. He stared at her face, which was shiny with sweat, and ran his eyes over the contours of her body. He stood there for a while without calling out to her, wanting to keep her there in freeze-frame. Passersby flicked uneasy glances toward this man who looked possessed.

—

“Take off your clothes,” he said in a low voice.

She was standing staring blankly at the white poplars outside the window. The afternoon sunlight shone desolate on the white sheet. She didn’t turn around. Thinking she hadn’t heard him, he was on the point of repeating himself when she raised her arms and pulled her sweater up over her head. The white T-shirt she had on underneath came off next, exposing her naked back; she wasn’t wearing a bra. She slipped off her old jeans and revealed her two white buttocks.

He held his breath and examined them. Above were the pair of dimpled hollows commonly called “the angel’s smile.” The birthmark was thumb sized, imprinted on the upper left buttock. How could such a thing still be there after all these years? It didn’t make any sense. Its pale blue-green resembled that of a faint bruise, but it was clearly a Mongolian mark. It called to mind something ancient, something pre-evolutionary, or else perhaps a mark of photosynthesis, and he realized to his surprise that there was nothing at all sexual about it; it was more vegetal than sexual.

Only after some time did he tear his eyes away from the Mongolian mark and consider her naked body in its entirety. Her composure was impressive considering that she wasn’t a professional model, and taking into account the kind of relationship she’d had with her now ex-husband. Suddenly he remembered being told how she’d been found stripped to the waist in front of the hospital fountain, that day when she slit her wrist; that that was what had led to her being put in a closed ward; that her discharge had been delayed because even in the hospital she kept trying to take her clothes off and expose herself to the sunlight.

“Should I sit down?” she asked.

“No, lie on your stomach,” he told her, his voice so low it was barely intelligible. She did as he said. He stood there completely motionless, frowning as he struggled to identify the source of the roiling confusion inside him, which the sight of her prone body had stirred up. “Stay just like that. Give me a minute to set up.”

He fixed the camcorder to the tripod and adjusted the height. Once he’d arranged it so that her prone body filled the frame exactly, he got out his paints, his palette and brushes. He’d decided to film himself painting her.

First he swept up the hair that was falling over her shoulders, and then, starting from the nape of her neck, he began to paint. Half-open buds, red and orange, bloomed splendidly on her shoulders and back, and slender stems twined down her side. When he reached the hump of her right buttock he painted an orange flower in full bloom, with a thick, vivid yellow pistil protruding from its center. He left the left buttock, the one with the Mongolian mark, undecorated. Instead, he just used a large brush to cover the area around the bluish mark with a wash of light green, fainter than the mark itself, so that the latter stood out like the pale shadow of a flower.

Every time the brush swept over her skin he felt her flesh quiver delicately as if being tickled, and he shuddered. But it wasn’t arousal; rather, it was a feeling that stimulated something deep in his very core, passing through him like a continuous electric shock.

By the time he eventually completed the leaves and long stems, which continued over her right thigh all the way down to her slender ankle, he was completely drenched with sweat.

“All done,” he said. “Just stay like that for a minute more.”

He took the camera off the tripod and began to film her close up. He zoomed in on the details of each flower, and made a long collage of the curve of her neck, her disheveled hair, her two hands resting on the sheet, seeming tense, and the buttock with the Mongolian mark. Once he’d finally captured her whole body on the tape, he switched off the camcorder.

“You can get up now.”

Fairly worn out, he sat down on the sofa in front of the brick stove. She rested her elbows on the floor, raising herself up slowly as though her limbs were stiff and aching.

“Aren’t you cold?” He wiped away his sweat, stood up and spread his sweater over her shoulders. “It wasn’t difficult for you?”

This time she looked at him and laughed. Her laughter was faint but lively, seeming to reject nothing and be surprised by nothing.

Only then did he realize what it was that had shocked him when he’d first seen her lying prone on the sheet. This was the body of a beautiful young woman, conventionally an object of desire, and yet it was a body from which all desire had been eliminated. But this was nothing so crass as carnal desire, not for her — rather, or so it seemed, what she had renounced was the very life that her body represented. The sunlight that came splintering through the wide window, dissolving into grains of sand, and the beauty of that body that, though this was not visible to the eye, was also ceaselessly splintering…the overwhelming inexpressibility of the scene beat against him like a wave breaking on the rocks, alleviating even those terrifyingly unknowable compulsions that had caused him such pain over the past year.

—

She put on her jeans and his sweater, and wrapped her hands around a mug from which the steam was rising. She left her slippers by the door, stepping lightly across the floor in her bare feet.

“It wasn’t cold?” he asked for the second time, and she shook her head. “And it wasn’t difficult?”

“All I did was lie there. And the floor was warm.”

The whole situation was undeniably bizarre, yet she displayed an almost total lack of curiosity, and indeed it seemed that this was what enabled her to maintain her composure no matter what she was faced with. She made no move to investigate the unfamiliar space, and showed none of the emotions that one might expect. It seemed enough for her to just deal with whatever it was that came her way, calmly and without fuss. Or perhaps it was simply that things were happening inside her, terrible things, which no one else could even guess at, and thus it was impossible for her to engage with everyday life at the same time. If so, she would naturally have no energy left, not just for curiosity or interest but indeed for any meaningful response to all the humdrum minutiae that went on on the surface. What suggested to him that this might be the case was that, on occasion, her eyes would seem to reflect a kind of violence that could not simply be dismissed as passivity or idiocy or indifference, and which she would appear to be struggling to suppress. Just then she was staring down at her feet, her hands wrapped around the mug, shoulders hunched like a baby chick trying to get warm. And yet she didn’t look at all pitiful sitting there; instead, it made her appear uncommonly hard and self-contained, so much so that anyone watching would feel uneasy, and want to look away.