Han Kang - The Vegetarian

He recalled the face of her ex-husband, whom he’d never liked, and whom he no longer had any need to call “brother-in-law.” A dry face, which seemed to value nothing outside of the everyday, nothing he couldn’t touch with his own two hands; the mere thought of those vulgar lips pressed greedily against her body, those lips that had never mouthed anything other than the trite and conventional, filled him with a kind of shame. Did that insensitive oaf know about her Mongolian mark? He couldn’t imagine their naked bodies twined together without its seeming insulting, and defiling, and violent.

She stood up, holding out the empty cup, and so he stood up too. He took the cup and put it down on the table. He then replaced the tape in the camcorder and readjusted the tripod.

“Shall we go again?” She nodded and walked over to the sheet. The sunlight was now a little weaker than before, so he turned on one of the overhead tungsten lights, the one directly over the sheet.

She shed her clothes and lay down again, on her back this time, looking up at the ceiling. The spotlighting made him narrow his eyes as if dazzled, although the upper half of her body was still in shadow. Of course, he’d seen her naked body front-on before, when he’d accidentally disturbed her in her apartment, but the sight of her lying there utterly without resistance, yet armored by the power of her own renunciation, was so intense as to bring tears to his eyes. Her skinny collarbones; her breasts that, because she was lying on her back, were slender and elongated like those of a young girl; her visible ribcage; her parted thighs, their position incongruously unsexual; her face, still and swept clean, open eyes which could well have been asleep. It was a body from which all superfluity had gradually been whittled away. Never before had he set eyes on such a body, a body that said so much and yet was no more than itself.

This time he painted huge clusters of flowers in yellow and white, covering the skin from her collarbone to her breasts. If the flowers on her back were the flowers of the night, these were the brilliant flowers of the day. Orange day lilies bloomed on her concave stomach, and golden petals were scattered pell-mell over her thighs.

A thrilling energy seemed to flow out quietly from some unknowable place inside his body and collect on the tip of his brush. He wanted only to draw it out for as long as possible. The light from the tungsten lamp only illuminated as far as her throat, leaving her face in darkness; she looked as if she were sleeping, but when the tip of the brush grazed her skin her tremulous quivering told him that she was wide awake. Her calm acceptance of all these things made her seem to him something sacred. Whether human, animal or plant, she could not be called a “person,” but then she wasn’t exactly some feral creature either — more like a mysterious being with qualities of both.

When he eventually set the brush down, he looked down at her body, at the flowers blooming on it, with all thoughts of filming gone out of his head. But the sunlight was gradually failing, her face being slowly erased by the late-afternoon shadows, and so he quickly set his thoughts in order and stood up.

“Lie on your side for me.” Slowly, as though timing her movements to some music only she could hear, she bent her arms, legs and waist and rolled onto her side. He panned the camera down the ridge of her side and over the soft curve of her buttocks, then filmed first the flowers on her back, the flowers of night, and then the flowers of the sun on her front. Once he’d finished this he moved on to her Mongolian mark, faint like some blue relic in the gradually fading light. He hesitated, he’d promised himself he wouldn’t do this, but as she gazed over at the pitch-black window he couldn’t stop himself from taking a close-up of her face. The screen filled with her pale lips, the shadowed hollow above her protruding collarbones, her forehead with her disheveled hair, and her two empty eyes.

—

She stood in front of the door with her arms folded while he loaded the equipment into the car trunk. As M had asked, he pushed the key inside one of the hiking boots that had been left on the landing.

“All done,” he said. “Let’s be off.” Even though she was wearing his sweater over her own, she was shivering as though cold. “Shall we go and eat something at yours? Or if you’re hungry, how about we find somewhere to eat around here?”

“Whatever you like,” she murmured, then gestured toward her chest. “Will this come off with water?” As though this practical detail was the only thing she was curious about.

“I wouldn’t have thought it’d come off too easily. You’ll have to wash it a few times to—” She interrupted him.

“I don’t want it to come off.”

Momentarily at a loss, he looked across at her face, but the darkness obscured whatever expression might have been there.

—

Heading into a more built-up area, they tried a few different alleys in their search for somewhere to eat. As she didn’t eat meat, they chose a place that advertised Buddhist cuisine. They ordered the set meal, and around twenty neatly arranged side dishes were brought out, alongside stone-pot rice with chestnuts and ginseng. Watching her as she ate, it suddenly occurred to him that, despite her having spent the past four hours stark naked, nothing he’d done had drawn from her any meaningful response. Of course, his plan hadn’t been to get her aroused, only to film her naked, but all the same it was surprising that the process hadn’t provoked in her even the slightest feelings of desire.

Now, as she sat across from him wearing his chunky sweater and with her spoon in her mouth, he felt that the miracle of that afternoon, which had finally succeeded in neutralizing the persistent, agonizing desire of the past year, was well and truly over. The imagined sight of him throwing her down, rough enough to make all the people in the restaurant scream if they could see it, descended in front of her moving lips like a semi-transparent veil, an all-too-familiar hellish projection flickering in front of his eyes. He looked down at the table and awkwardly swallowed a mouthful of rice.

“Why is it you don’t eat meat? I’ve always wondered, but somehow I couldn’t ask.” She lowered her chopsticks and looked across at him. “You don’t have to tell me if it’s difficult for you,” he said, fighting all the time to suppress the sexual images that were running through his head.

“No,” she said calmly. “It isn’t difficult. It’s just that I don’t think you’d understand.” She raised her chopsticks again and slowly chewed some seasoned bean sprouts. “It’s because of a dream I had.”

“A dream?” he repeated.

“I had a dream…and that’s why I don’t eat meat.”

“Well…what kind of dream?”

“I dreamed of a face.”

“A face?”

Seeing how utterly baffled he was, she laughed quietly. A melancholic laugh. “Didn’t I say you wouldn’t understand?”

He couldn’t ask: in that case, why did you use to bare your breasts to the sunlight, like some kind of mutant animal that had evolved to be able to photosynthesize? Was that because of a dream too?

—

He parked the car in front of her building, and they both got out.

“Thank you so much for today.”

She smiled in response. Her smile was quiet and thoughtful, not dissimilar to that of his wife. For all the world as though she were a perfectly ordinary woman. It’s true, he thought, she really is ordinary. It’s me who’s the crazy one.

She went in through the main door to the building, vanishing without bowing good-bye. He stood there and waited for the lights to come on in her room, then, when her window still hadn’t lit up, got back in the car and started the engine. In his mind he sketched her darkened room, and her sliding her naked body, still covered with the brilliant flowers, between the mattress and the quilt. That body which he had spent so many hours close beside, yet which he had touched only with the tip of his brush.