Han Kang - The Vegetarian

He ached.

—

When he pressed the buzzer for 709 it was exactly twenty minutes past nine. The woman who opened the door and came out said in a hushed voice, “Ji-woo’s been asking for his mother; he’s just fallen asleep a few minutes ago.” A little girl — judging by her braids, she was in the second or third year of primary school — held out Ji-woo’s plastic forklift truck for him to take. He thanked them and put the truck in his backpack. He left the door to his apartment, 710, open, and carried the sleeping child through carefully. The walk down the corridor to the child’s bedroom felt unusually long. Ji-woo couldn’t have been sleeping very deeply, because as soon as he laid him down in the bed he could hear the wet sound of the boy sucking his thumb, a lonely sound in the darkened room.

He went into the living room and turned on the light, locked the front door and sat down on the sofa. He remained lost in thought for a while, then stood up, went back over to the door, opened it and went out. After taking the lift down to the ground floor, he went and sat in the driver’s seat of the parked car. While he was busy rummaging around in the bag that held the two 6mm tapes and the sketchbook, his phone rang.

“Ji-woo?” His wife’s voice sounded subdued.

“He’s asleep.”

“Did he have dinner?”

“He must have done. He was already asleep when I got there.”

“Okay. I’ll be back around eleven.”

“He’s sleeping so deeply I…well.”

“What?”

“I’m just going to pop to the studio. There’s something I haven’t quite finished yet.” His wife didn’t answer. “I’m sure Ji-woo won’t wake up. He’s really sound asleep. You know he sleeps through till morning these days.” Nothing.

“Are you listening?” Still nothing.

“Darling.”

To his surprise, it sounded as though she were crying. Was there no one else in the shop? It would be highly unusual for her to let herself cry in front of others, she who was always so acutely aware of prying eyes.

After a while she appeared to have calmed herself down, and spoke in a voice he’d never heard from her before, such was the complex mix of emotions it seemed to express: “If you want to go, then go. I’m going to close up the shop and head home now.”

She hung up. Ordinarily, she was the kind of person who could never bring herself to hang up first, no matter how busy she was. Thrown into confusion, he felt an unexpected pang of guilt and sat there for a while undecided, still clutching the phone in his hand. He hesitated over whether to go back inside and wait for his wife to get in, but soon made up his mind and started the engine. The roads were fairly empty at this hour; it would only take her twenty minutes or so to get home. In all likelihood, the child would stay sound asleep and nothing at all would happen. But in any case, he simply couldn’t face the thought of sitting there in that brightly lit apartment, waiting for his wife to come home, only to be confronted with the darkness in her face.

When he arrived at the studio there was only J there.

“You’re here late! I was just about to leave.”

He hoped that J wouldn’t hang around on his account. Given that the space was shared by four people, and all of them night owls, the opportunity for a whole night’s uninterrupted work was rare.

He turned on the computer while J was getting his things together and putting on his trench coat. J seemed surprised to see the two tapes he was holding.

“You’ve made something.”

“That’s right.”

J smiled at his lack of elaboration. “I’d love to take a look at it when you’re done.”

“Of course.”

J sketched a playful bow, opened the door and swung his arms vigorously as he marched out, impersonating someone who felt the need to make himself scarce. He laughed. Once the laughter had subsided, it struck him what a long time it had been since he’d laughed like that.

—

The sun was well up the next day when he took out the master tape and turned off the computer.

The tapes had turned out better than he’d expected. The lighting, her movements, the atmosphere these evoked — all were breathtakingly compelling. He toyed briefly with the idea of adding some background music, before deciding to keep it silent, to make it seem as though everything on-screen were occurring in a kind of vacuum. Her gentle tossing, her naked body littered with gorgeous blooms, the Mongolian mark — against a background of silence, a soundless harmony recalling something primeval, something eternal.

He struggled through the tedious process of rendering for what felt like an age, smoking his way through an entire pack of cigarettes, sticking at it until it was done. The running time of the finished piece was four minutes fifty-five seconds. It began with a shot of his hand as he painted her prone body, faded out on the Mongolian mark, and then, after a shot capturing the desert of her face, her features so shadowed she was almost unrecognizable, faded out again.

It was a long time since he’d known the exhaustion that comes from staying up all night. He felt as if grains of sand were embedded here and there in his skin, a sense of everything having taken on some alien form. He wrote on the label of the master tape with a black pen: “Mongolian Mark 1—Flowers of Night and Flowers of Day.”

As soon as he was finished he put his hands over his eyes, consumed by the thought of that image that he knew he should never attempt to capture, but to which, were such a thing possible, he would affix the title “Mongolian Mark 2.”

The image of a man and woman, their bodies made brilliant with painted flowers, having sex against a background of unutterable silence. Their shifting limbs matter-of-fact in that vacuum. A progression of scenes lurching from violence to tenderness, with no extreme left unexplored. One stripped-down, drawn-out moment of quiet purification, extremity sublimated into some kind of peace.

He clutched the master tape, running his fingers over it while the thoughts ran through his head. If he was to choose a man to be filmed having sex with his sister-in-law, whoever it was it couldn’t be him. He was all too aware of his wrinkled stomach, his love handles, his sagging buttocks and thighs.

He started the car, but instead of driving home he headed to a nearby sauna. He changed into the white T-shirt and shorts they gave him at the desk, and gazed, disillusioned, at his reflection in the mirror. There was no doubt about it: it couldn’t be him. But then who? Whom could he find to have sex with her? He wasn’t making a porn movie, nor was it enough for them to just feign the motions. He needed authenticity, and that meant actual penetration. But then who? Who would agree to such a thing? And how would his sister-in-law react?

He knew he had reached a point of no return. But he couldn’t stop now. No, he didn’t want to stop.

He tried to fall asleep in the sauna, his dangling limbs caressed by the warm steam. The place felt like being inside a summer night, time doubling back on itself. Enveloped by the warm radiance of that image, the only image that was forbidden him, all the energy drained from his exhausted body.

—

The first thing he saw when he woke from his brief sleep was her.

Her skin was a pale green. Her body lay prone in front of him, like a leaf that had just fallen from the branch, only barely begun to wither. The Mongolian mark was gone; instead, her whole body was covered evenly with that pale wash of green.

He turned her over onto her back. A dazzling light came from her naked body, making him squint, and he couldn’t see the area above her breasts — as though the source of the light was somewhere around her face. He spread her legs; her thighs parted with an ease that could only mean she was awake. A green sap, like that which oozes from bruised leaves, began to flow out from her vagina when he entered her. The acrid sweetness of the grass was so pungent he found it difficult to breathe. When he pulled out, on the point of climax, he saw that the whole of his penis was stained green. A blackish paste was smeared over his skin from his lower stomach to his thighs, a fresh sap which could have come from either her or him.