Han Kang - The Vegetarian

He set the filming equipment down by the front door; it was heavy, and he’d had to carry some of it slung over his shoulders as well as what he could carry in his hands. When he took off his shoes and moved over in the direction of the mattress, he could make out the faint outline of a person sitting there. Even in the darkness, he could still tell that she was naked. She got up and came toward him.

“Shall I turn on the light?” His voice was hoarse with desire.

“You smell…,” she said in a low voice, “…of paint.”

He groaned and reached out for her, forgetting about the lighting, the camcorder, everything. None of that existed now.

He laid her down with a snarl, clutching at her breasts with one hand and haphazardly sucking her lips and nose as he hurriedly unbuttoned his shirt. He tugged at the lower buttons, tearing them off in his haste.

As soon as he was naked he pushed her legs wide apart and entered her. A constant panting sound, as if from a wild animal, was coming from somewhere, interspersed with a moaning that rose into an eerie shriek. When he realized that these noises were coming from him, he shuddered; he’d never made a sound during sex, had always thought of it as the preserve of flirtatious young women. Into her already soaking wet vagina, which was contracting alarmingly, he released a jet of semen with a gasp of pain, falling forward as though swooning.

—

“I’m sorry,” he said, reaching out for her face in the darkness.

“Can I turn on the light?” she asked. She sounded perfectly composed.

“What for?”

“I want to be able to see you properly.” She stood up and walked over to the switch. Their sex had been fairly one-sided, and hadn’t even lasted five minutes, so it was no wonder she didn’t seem tired.

When she flicked the lights on he shaded his eyes from the sudden glare. He waited, blinking, until he was able to lower his hands. She was leaning against the wall. The flowers scattered over her body were as beautiful as ever.

Suddenly self-conscious, he put his hands over his paunch and tried to suck it in.

“Don’t cover it…I like it. The petals look like they’re wrinkled.” She slowly came toward him. She bent over and, as she’d done with J, reached out and began to stroke the flowers on his chest.

“Just a minute.” Still naked, he stood up and went over to the front door, where he’d left the equipment. He set the tripod up, quite low, and fixed the camcorder in place, then pushed the mattress out onto the veranda, and spread the white sheet, which he’d brought with him, out on the floor. He set up the lighting just as it had been in M’s studio.

“Can you lie down?”

Once she was lying down he estimated where their entwined bodies would end up, and adjusted the camcorder accordingly.

She lay stretched out under the blinding spotlight. He carefully lowered himself on top of her. Would their bodies look like overlapping petals, as they had with her and J? Would they seem like one body, a hybrid of plant, animal and human?

Every time they changed position he readjusted the camcorder. Before he took her from behind, which J had refused to do, he first took a long close-up of her buttocks. After he inserted himself, he checked how the image looked in the exterior monitor, then started to thrust.

Everything was perfect. It was just like in his sketches. His red flower closed and opened repeatedly above her Mongolian mark, his penis slipping in and out of her like a huge pistil. He shuddered at the appalling nature of their union, a union of images that were somehow repellent and yet compellingly beautiful. Every time he closed his eyes he could see the lower half of his body dyed green, soaked from the stomach to the thighs with a sticky, grassy sap.

Forever, he gasped, all of this forever, as an unendurable sense of satiation shuddered through his body and she burst into tears. She who hadn’t let slip a single moan in close to thirty minutes, whose lips had merely trembled at times, who had kept her eyes closed and communicated her keen ecstasy to him purely through the movements of her body. And now it had to end. He raised himself into a sitting position. Still clasping her to him, he moved over to the camcorder, groped for the button and switched it off.

The image he’d wanted to capture on film had to be one that could be repeated over and over, forbidden either to end or to come to a climax. And so, this was where the filming had to stop. He waited until her sobs had subsided before laying her back down on the sheet. In their final minutes of sex she gnashed her teeth, screamed rough and shrill, spat out a panting “stop” and then, at the end, she cried again.

And then everything grew quiet.

—

In the dark blue light of dawn, he licked her buttocks for a long time.

“I wish I could transfer it onto my tongue.”

“What?”

“This Mongolian mark.” She turned and looked at him over her shoulder, seeming surprised. “How come you’ve still got it?”

“I don’t know. I used to think everyone had them. But then I went to the public baths one day…and I saw that I was the only one.”

He held her at the waist and stroked the mark, wishing that he could share it with her, that it could be seared onto his skin like a brand. I want to swallow you, have you melt into me and flow through my veins .

“Will the dreams stop now?” she muttered, her voice barely audible.

“Dreams? Ah, the face…that’s right, you said it was a face, no?” he said, feeling drowsiness slowly creep through his body. “What kind of face? Whose face?”

“It’s different every time. Sometimes it feels very familiar, other times I’m sure I’ve never seen it before. There are times when it’s all bloody…and times when it looks like the face of a rotting corpse.”

He looked her in the eye, his own eyes heavy with the effort of staying open. She, on the other hand, didn’t look the least bit tired; her eyes were agitated as she attempted to convey the cause of her affliction. “I thought it was all because of eating meat,” she said. “I thought all I had to do was to stop eating meat and then the faces wouldn’t come back. But it didn’t work.” He knew he ought to concentrate on what she was saying, but he couldn’t stop his eyes from gradually falling closed. “And so…now I know. The face is inside my stomach. It rose up from inside my stomach.” With her words sounding in his ears like a lullaby, one he could make neither head nor tail of, he plunged over the edge of consciousness and into a seemingly bottomless sleep. “But I’m not scared anymore. There’s nothing to be scared of now.”

—

When he woke up she was still sleeping.

The sunlight coming into the room was bright. Her disheveled hair wrapped her head like an animal’s mane, while the crumpled sheet was coiled around her lower body. The smell of her body filled the room, a sour, tangy smell with notes of sweetness, bitterness, and a rank animal musk.

What time was it? He fished his mobile out of the pocket of his sweater, which he’d hurriedly tossed aside the previous night. One in the afternoon. He’d fallen asleep sometime around six a.m., which meant he’d been sleeping like the dead for seven straight hours. He pulled on his pants and trousers and looked around for his equipment. He packed up the tripod and lighting, but he couldn’t see the camcorder anywhere. He remembered putting it down after he’d finished filming, right by the front door so it wouldn’t get knocked over; but now it was nowhere to be seen.

Could she have briefly woken up earlier and put it away somewhere? He went to take a look in the kitchen. Heading toward the sink behind the partition, he noticed something shiny that had fallen to the floor. It was the 6mm tape. Strange, he thought, then rubbed his eyes and took a proper look around him. There was a woman sitting with her face resting on the table. His wife.