‘Ayami, you misunderstand me! There could be a dangerous misunderstanding here. None of this has anything to do with you. You’re not a poet. There’s no need to identify with them. You’re still young, healthy and beautiful. The future belongs to you; why make such a frightful substitution?’
‘I’m not so young. And I’m certainly not beautiful. And as for the future belonging to me, is that a line of poetry? It sounds so unusual.’
‘Don’t worry too much about finding another job. As long as you have the resolve, it will all work out, though it may take a little time. Take my advice, and write a letter to the foundation. They’ll be sure to respond.’
‘It’s not despair over my job prospects that’s making me pessimistic. It just came over me all of a sudden. Though, in fact, ever since the German-language teacher … ever since Yeoni postponed our lessons because of her illness, I’ve found myself becoming depressed every now and then.’
‘Yeoni will get better. Her health will recover.’
‘Why would she have taken an unknown, experimental drug in the first place?’
‘She must have believed it would cure her. And, of course, it was free.’
‘Oh, yes,’ the director said after a pause, ‘I was talking to one of the poets, Kim Cheol-sseok, and he gave me a collection of his poetry.’
‘Kim Cheol-seok?’
‘No, Cheol-sseok, Kim Cheol-sseok.’
‘That can’t have been his real name, can it?’
‘I asked that, and he said it was a pen name, something he’d made up.’
‘Did he explain what it’s supposed to mean?’
‘Apparently it’s the sound of earth being poured onto his coffin.’
Ayami didn’t laugh. Her attention was concentrated on making careful forays with her fork, until she finally succeeded in spearing a piece of lamb and bringing it to her mouth.
‘He also said,’ the director’s voice continued, ‘that he’d never once managed to convince another person of anything. Whenever he spoke to anyone, their response amounted to nothing more than the world tossing a shovelful of earth onto his grave. Which meant that by this point in his life, he was buried deep, very deep; he laughed for a long time after he said that, bleating like a goat.’
The guide approached without a sound and then asked: ‘Shall I bring dessert?’
Ayami said yes – she had ordered walnut ice cream – but the director now wanted only a cup of coffee. The sound of the air conditioning, which had filled the room, abruptly shut off. Not a minute passed before their skin became clagged with particles of stifling heat. Ayami felt droplets of sweat form behind her ears and trickle down the nape of her neck.
‘A power cut,’ a voice said, when the air con was heard to start up again. ‘There must have been a sudden spike in electricity usage.’
The director’s voice picked up where it had left off. ‘That was the last thing he said to me – I left almost immediately afterwards. And someone pulled the door tightly closed behind me, though it had been open the whole time. But before it closed completely I sensed that the room was suddenly plunged into darkness. I say sensed, not saw, because I was facing the other way. As though all the lights had gone out; no, as though the lecture hall itself had disappeared … I couldn’t explain it … I suppose they might have been going to use a projector, but still … it was as though all those silent elderly poets had been sucked into the shadows, taking their suspicious body odour with them, vanishing into thin air. Could I have been talking with myself the whole time, sitting among three-dimensional images whose forms were obliterated the moment someone slammed the door behind me, without anyone having turned to watch me go? The traces of this imprecise notion lingered in my mind.’
‘What kind of poetry does Kim Cheol-sseok write?’
‘I don’t know – I had a meeting after the event, and left his book there. I only realised after I got here.’ There was a sigh as he said this, but seemingly not over the book. ‘When I returned after the meeting, the terminally unconvincing seemed to have left long ago: the lecture hall was deserted. But I stood in front of the door for a long time. I couldn’t bring myself to leave.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’d realised that I, yes, I who had pitied them was pitiful myself, a pitiful person who’d also always failed in convincing others. In other words, I was one of them. I hadn’t been with the wrong people, or in the wrong place, at all. They were a hallucination of myself, so I couldn’t help but despise them. I’d been talking with the ghosts of myself, perhaps the ghosts of my future. I just hadn’t realised it!’
‘Is it really so important? Being convincing?’
‘Oh yes, it’s important. That’s self-evident. As for how important, everyone has to judge for themselves.’
‘Mightn’t it be a … poetic expression? What people call metaphor, or metaphysical expression? Words like Max Ernst’s objets, for example, flying about in the air around us. Abstract objects clothed in the material. Like the gap between word and image, like how we are here while our ghosts could simultaneously be wandering in some northern desert. Perhaps the ability to convince others, or the lack of it, isn’t as meaningful as language itself … the difference between someone who receives love and acknowledgement from others and someone who doesn’t, it might be important in the world of words and concepts, but is it really so decisive for ourselves, for our egos? After all—’
‘Yes?’
‘After all, as you said, we aren’t poets. Using language to convince is not our calling. If someone wants to pour earth over our faces, we can just avert our gaze and keep on as we were. Like the herders of the Altai. That actually is how we live, you know, every day.’
‘But doesn’t that leave us incredibly isolated? If we can’t convince a single person, not anyone at all, and if no one has any interest in our graves, you say we can simply turn away and go alone into the wilderness. Without knowing where it is we’re going. We might have to spend our days with only the sheep and stars to gaze at. The stars die and are born again, and it must be the same for the sheep, mustn’t it? You’d say that the world is unchanging. But if we lived like that, and eventually lost even the sad consciousness of our own inability to convince, that would be incredibly lonely, Ayami.’
‘So we have to convince others because we’re lonely?’
‘Because loneliness is failure. I, at least, have had obligations I couldn’t fulfil. Like preventing the audio theatre from closing …’
‘That’s beyond the power of any one person. It was the foundation’s decision, after all.’
‘Not only that; ultimately, I even failed to convince my wife. I couldn’t undo a single one of the many knots that had formed between us. Those knots will keep dragging me along, shaping my life … as though they themselves are my life’s essential form. That’s right, my wife doesn’t want to see me. She hates me more than anyone else in this world. I understand her hating me. She says that it’s because of my incompetence and my silence, but the real reason is that I married her, and dragged her into my life. Her hatred is becoming something irrevocable. I am powerless in the face of it. And this is how I will be defeated by my own life, how it will triumph over me at the last, as a part of the unchanging world.