SCHEHERAZADE BY HARUKI MURAKAMI

Each time they had sex, she told Habara a strange and gripping story afterward. Like Queen Scheherazade in “A
Thousand and One Nights.” Though, of course, Habara, unlike the king, had no plan to chop off her head the
next morning. (She never stayed with him till morning, anyway.) She told Habara the stories because she
wanted to, because, he guessed, she enjoyed curling up in bed and talking to a man during those languid,
intimate moments after making love. And also, probably, because she wished to comfort Habara, who had to
spend every day cooped up indoors.

Because of this, Habara had dubbed the woman Scheherazade. He never used the name to her face, but it was
how he referred to her in the small diary he kept. “Scheherazade came today,” he’d note in ballpoint pen. Then
he’d record the gist of that day’s story in simple, cryptic terms that were sure to baffle anyone who might read
the diary later.

Habara didn’t know whether her stories were true, invented, or partly true and partly invented. He had no way
of telling. Reality and supposition, observation and pure fancy seemed jumbled together in her narratives.
Habara therefore enjoyed them as a child might, without questioning too much. What possible difference could
it make to him, after all, if they were lies or truth, or a complicated patchwork of the two?

Whatever the case, Scheherazade had a gift for telling stories that touched the heart. No matter what sort of
story it was, she made it special. Her voice, her timing, her pacing were all flawless. She captured her listener’s
attention, tantalized him, drove him to ponder and speculate, and then, in the end, gave him precisely what he’d
been seeking. Enthralled, Habara was able to forget the reality that surrounded him, if only for a moment. Like
a blackboard wiped with a damp cloth, he was erased of worries, of unpleasant memories. Who could ask for
more? At this point in his life, that kind of forgetting was what Habara desired more than anything else.

Scheherazade was thirty-five, four years older than Habara, and a full-time housewife with two children in
elementary school (though she was also a registered nurse and was apparently called in for the occasional job).
Her husband was a typical company man. Their home was a twenty-minute drive away from Habara’s. This was
all (or almost all) the personal information she had volunteered. Habara had no way of verifying any of it, but
he could think of no particular reason to doubt her. She had never revealed her name. “There’s no need for you
to know, is there?” Scheherazade had asked. Nor had she ever called Habara by his name, though of course she
knew what it was. She judiciously steered clear of the name, as if it would somehow be unlucky or
inappropriate to have it pass her lips.

On the surface, at least, this Scheherazade had nothing in common with the beautiful queen of “A Thousand and
One Nights_._” She was on the road to middle age and already running to flab, with jowls and lines webbing
the corners of her eyes. Her hair style, her makeup, and her manner of dress weren’t exactly slapdash, but
neither were they likely to receive any compliments. Her features were not unattractive, but her face lacked
focus, so that the impression she left was somehow blurry. As a consequence, those who walked by her on the
street, or shared the same elevator, probably took little notice of her. Ten years earlier, she might well have been
a lively and attractive young woman, perhaps even turned a few heads. At some point, however, the curtain had
fallen on that part of her life and it seemed unlikely to rise again.

Scheherazade came to see Habara twice a week. Her days were not fixed, but she never came on weekends. No
doubt she spent that time with her family. She always phoned an hour before arriving. She bought groceries at
the local supermarket and brought them to him in her car, a small blue Mazda hatchback. An older model, it had
a dent in its rear bumper and its wheels were black with grime. Parking it in the reserved space assigned to the
house, she would carry the bags to the front door and ring the bell. After checking the peephole, Habara would
release the lock, unhook the chain, and let her in. In the kitchen, she’d sort the groceries and arrange them in the
refrigerator. Then she’d make a list of things to buy for her next visit. She performed these tasks skillfully, with
a minimum of wasted motion, and saying little throughout.
Once she’d finished, the two of them would move wordlessly to the bedroom, as if borne there by an invisible
current. Scheherazade quickly removed her clothes and, still silent, joined Habara in bed. She barely spoke
during their lovemaking, either, performing each act as if completing an assignment. When she was
menstruating, she used her hand to accomplish the same end. Her deft, rather businesslike manner reminded
Habara that she was a licensed nurse.

After sex, they lay in bed and talked. More accurately, she talked and he listened, adding an appropriate word
here, asking the occasional question there. When the clock said four-thirty, she would break off her story (for
some reason,it always seemed to have just reached a climax), jump out of bed, gather up her clothes, and get
ready to leave. She had to go home, she said, to prepare dinner.

Habara would see her to the door, replace the chain, and watch through the curtains as the grimy little blue car
drove away. At six o’ clock, he made a simple dinner and ate it by himself. He had once worked as a cook, so
putting a meal together was no great hardship. He drank Perrier with his dinner (he never touched alcohol) and
followed it with a cup of coffee, which he sipped while watching a DVD or reading. He liked long books,
especially those he had to read several times to understand. There wasn’t much else to do. He had no one to talk
to. No one to phone. With no computer, he had no way of accessing the Internet. No newspaper was delivered,
and he never watched television. (There was a good reason for that.) It went without saying that he couldn’t go
outside. Should Scheherazade’s visits come to a halt for some reason, he would be left all alone.

Habara was not overly concerned about this prospect. If that happens, he thought, it will be hard, but I’ll scrape
by one way or another. I’m not stranded on a desert island. No, he thought, I am a desert island. He had always
been comfortable being by himself. What did bother him, though, was the thought of not being able to talk in
bed with Scheherazade. Or, more precisely, missing the next installment of her story.

“I was a lamprey eel in a former life,” Scheherazade said once, as they lay in bed together. It was a simple,
straightforward comment, as offhand as if she had announced that the North Pole was in the far north. Habara
hadn’t a clue what sort of creature a lamprey was, much less what one looked like. So he had no particular
opinion on the subject.

“Do you know how a lamprey eats a trout?” she asked.

He didn’t. In fact, it was the first time he’d heard that lampreys ate trout.

“Lampreys have no jaws. That’s what sets them apart from other eels.”

“Huh? Eels have jaws?”

“Haven’t you ever taken a good look at one?” she said, surprised.

“I do eat eel now and then, but I’ve never had an opportunity to see if they have jaws.”

“Well, you should check it out sometime. Go to an aquarium or someplace like that. Regular eels have jaws
with teeth. But lampreys have only suckers, which they use to attach themselves to rocks at the bottom of a river
or lake. Then they just kind of float there, waving back and forth, like weeds.”

Habara imagined a bunch of lampreys swaying like weeds at the bottom of a lake. The scene seemed somehow
divorced from reality, although reality, he knew, could at times be terribly unreal.
“Lampreys live like that, hidden among the weeds. Lying in wait. Then, when a trout passes overhead, they dart
up and fasten on to it with their suckers. Inside their suckers are these tonguelike things with teeth, which rub
back and forth against the trout’s belly until a hole opens up and they can start eating the flesh, bit by bit.”

“I wouldn’t like to be a trout,” Habara said.

“Back in Roman times, they raised lampreys in ponds. Uppity slaves got chucked in and the lampreys ate them
alive.”

Habara thought that he wouldn’t have enjoyed being a Roman slave, either.

“The first time I saw a lamprey was back in elementary school, on a class trip to the aquarium,” Scheherazade
said. “The moment I read the description of how they lived, I knew that I’d been one in a former life. I mean, I
could actually remember—being fastened to a rock, swaying invisibly among the weeds, eying the fat trout
swimming by above me.”

“Can you remember eating them?”

“No, I can’t.”

“That’s a relief,” Habara said. “But is that all you recall from your life as a lamprey—swaying to and fro at the
bottom of a river?”

“A former life can’t be called up just like that,” she said. “If you’re lucky, you get a flash of what it was like.
It’s like catching a glimpse through a tiny hole in a wall. Can you recall any of your former lives?”

“No, not one,” Habara said. Truth be told, he had never felt the urge to revisit a former life. He had his hands
full with the present one.

“Still, it felt pretty neat at the bottom of the lake. Upside down with my mouth fastened to a rock, watching the
fish pass overhead. I saw a really big snapping turtle once, too, a humongous black shape drifting past, like the
evil spaceship in ‘Star Wars.’ And big white birds with long, sharp beaks; from below, they looked like white
clouds floating across the sky.”

“And you can see all these things now?”

“As clear as day,” Scheherazade said. “The light, the pull of the current, everything. Sometimes I can even go
back there in my mind.”

“To what you were thinking then?”

“Yeah.”

“What do lampreys think about?”

“Lampreys think very lamprey-like thoughts. About lamprey-like topics in a context that’s very lamprey-like.
There are no words for those thoughts. They belong to the world of water. It’s like when we were in the womb.
We were thinking things in there, but we can’t express those thoughts in the language we use out here. Right?”

“Hold on a second! You can remember what it was like in the womb?”
“Sure,” Scheherazade said, lifting her head to see over his chest. “Can’t you?”

No, he said. He couldn’t.

“Then I’ll tell you sometime. About life in the womb.”

“Scheherazade, Lamprey, Former Lives” was what Habara recorded in his diary that day. He doubted that
anyone who came across it would guess what the words meant.

Habara had met Scheherazade for the first time four months earlier. He had been transported to this house, in a
provincial city north of Tokyo, and she had been assigned to him as his “support liaison.” Since he couldn’t go
outside, her role was to buy food and other items he required and bring them to the house. She also tracked
down whatever books and magazines he wished to read, and any CDs he wanted to listen to. In addition, she
chose an assortment of DVDs—though he had a hard time accepting her criteria for selection on this front.

A week after he arrived, as if it were a self-evident next step, Scheherazade had taken him to bed. There had
been condoms on the bedside table when he arrived. Habara guessed that sex was one of her assigned duties—
or perhaps “support activities” was the term they used. Whatever the term, and whatever her motivation, he’d
gone with the flow and accepted her proposal without hesitation.

Their sex was not exactly obligatory, but neither could it be said that their hearts were entirely in it. She seemed
to be on guard, lest they grow too enthusiastic—just as a driving instructor might not want his students to get
too excited about their driving. Yet, while the lovemaking was not what you’d call passionate, it wasn’t entirely
businesslike, either. It may have begun as one of her duties (or, at least, as something that was strongly
encouraged), but at a certain point she seemed—if only in a small way—to have found a kind of pleasure in it.
Habara could tell this from certain subtle ways in which her body responded, a response that delighted him as
well. After all, he was not a wild animal penned up in a cage but a human being equipped with his own range of
emotions, and sex for the sole purpose of physical release was hardly fulfilling. Yet to what extent did
Scheherazade see their sexual relationship as one of her duties, and how much did it belong to the sphere of her
personal life? He couldn’t tell.

This was true of other things, too. Habara often found Scheherazade’s feelings and intentions hard to read. For
example, she wore plain cotton panties most of the time. The kind of panties he imagined housewives in their
thirties usually wore—though this was pure conjecture, since he had no experience with housewives of that age.
Some days, however, she turned up in colorful, frilly silk panties instead. Why she switched between the two he
hadn’t a clue.

The other thing that puzzled him was the fact that their lovemaking and her storytelling were so closely linked,
making it hard to tell where one ended and the other began. He had never experienced anything like this before:
although he didn’t love her, and the sex was so-so, he was tightly bound to her physically. It was all rather
confusing.

“I was a teen-ager when I started breaking into empty houses,” she said one day as they lay in bed.

Habara—as was often the case when she told stories—found himself at a loss for words.

“Have you ever broken into somebody’s house?” she asked.

“I don’t think so,” he answered in a dry voice.

“Do it once and you get addicted.”

“But it’s illegal.”

“You betcha. It’s dangerous, but you still get hooked.”

Habara waited quietly for her to continue.

“The coolest thing about being in someone else’s house when there’s no one there,” Scheherazade said, “is how
silent it is. Not a sound. It’s like the quietest place in the world. That’s how it felt to me, anyway. When I sat on
the floor and kept absolutely still, my life as a lamprey came back to me. I told you about my being a lamprey in
a former life, right?”

“Yes, you did.”

“It was just like that. My suckers stuck to a rock underwater and my body waving back and forth overhead, like
the weeds around me. Everything so quiet. Though that may have been because I had no ears. On sunny days,
light shot down from the surface like an arrow. Fish of all colors and shapes drifted by above. And my mind
was empty of thoughts. Other than lamprey thoughts, that is. Those were cloudy but very pure. It was a
wonderful place to be.”

The first time Scheherazade broke into someone’s house, she explained, she was a high-school junior and had a
serious crush on a boy in her class. Though he wasn’t what you would call handsome, he was tall and clean-cut,
a good student who played on the soccer team, and she was powerfully attracted to him. But he apparently liked
another girl in their class and took no notice of Scheherazade. In fact, it was possible that he was unaware she
existed. Nevertheless, she couldn’t get him out of her mind. Just seeing him made her breathless; sometimes she
felt as if she were going to throw up. If she didn’t do something about it, she thought, she might go crazy. But
confessing her love was out of the question.

One day, Scheherazade skipped school and went to the boy’s house. It was about a fifteen-minute walk from
where she lived. She had researched his family situation beforehand. His mother taught Japanese language at a
school in a neighboring town. His father, who had worked at a cement company, had been killed in a car
accident some years earlier. His sister was a junior-high-school student. This meant that the house should be
empty during the day.

Not surprisingly, the front door was locked. Scheherazade checked under the mat for a key. Sure enough, there
was one there. Quiet residential communities in provincial cities like theirs had little crime, and a spare key was
often left under a mat or a potted plant.

To be safe, Scheherazade rang the bell, waited to make sure there was no answer, scanned the street in case she
was being observed, opened the door, and entered. She locked the door again from the inside. Taking off her
shoes, she put them in a plastic bag and stuck it in the knapsack on her back. Then she tiptoed up the stairs to
the second floor.

His bedroom was there, as she had imagined. His bed was neatly made. On the bookshelf was a small stereo,
with a few CDs. On the wall, there was a calendar with a photo of the Barcelona soccer team and, next to it,
what looked like a team banner, but nothing else. No posters, no pictures. Just a cream-colored wall. A white
curtain hung over the window. The room was tidy, everything in its place. No books strewn about, no clothes on
the floor. The room testified to the meticulous personality of its inhabitant. Or else to a mother who kept a
perfect house. Or both. It made Scheherazade nervous. Had the room been sloppier, no one would have noticed
whatever little messes she might make. Yet, at the same time, the very cleanliness and simplicity of the room,
its perfect order, made her happy. It was so like him.
Scheherazade lowered herself into the desk chair and sat there for a while. This is where he studies every night,
she thought, her heart pounding. One by one, she picked up the implements on the desk, rolled them between
her fingers, smelled them, held them to her lips. His pencils, his scissors, his ruler, his stapler—the most
mundane objects became somehow radiant because they were his.

She opened his desk drawers and carefully checked their contents. The uppermost drawer was divided into
compartments, each of which contained a small tray with a scattering of objects and souvenirs. The second
drawer was largely occupied by notebooks for the classes he was taking at the moment, while the one on the
bottom (the deepest drawer) was filled with an assortment of old papers, notebooks, and exams. Almost
everything was connected either to school or to soccer. She’d hoped to come across something personal—a
diary, perhaps, or letters—but the desk held nothing of that sort. Not even a photograph. That struck
Scheherazade as a bit unnatural. Did he have no life outside of school and soccer? Or had he carefully hidden
everything of a private nature, where no one would come across it? Still, just sitting at his desk and running her
eyes over his handwriting moved Scheherazade beyond words. To calm herself, she got out of the chair and sat
on the floor. She looked up at the ceiling. The quiet around her was absolute. In this way, she returned to the
lampreys’ world.

“So all you did,” Habara asked, “was enter his room, go through his stuff, and sit on the floor?”

“No,” Scheherazade said. “There was more. I wanted something of his to take home. Something that he handled
every day or that had been close to his body. But it couldn’t be anything important that he would miss. So I
stole one of his pencils.”

“A single pencil?”

“Yes. One that he’d been using. But stealing wasn’t enough. That would make it a straightforward case of
burglary. The fact that I had done it would be lost. I was the Love Thief, after all.”

The Love Thief? It sounded to Habara like the title of a silent film.

“So I decided to leave something behind in its place, a token of some sort. As proof that I had been there. A
declaration that this was an exchange, not a simple theft. But what should it be? Nothing popped into my head. I
searched my knapsack and my pockets, but I couldn’t find anything appropriate. I kicked myself for not having
thought to bring something suitable. Finally, I decided to leave a tampon behind. An unused one, of course, still
in its plastic wrapper. My period was getting close, so I was carrying it around just to be safe. I hid it at the very
back of the bottom drawer, where it would be difficult to find. Thatreally turned me on. The fact that a tampon
of mine was stashed away in his desk drawer. Maybe it was because I was so turned on that my period started
almost immediately after that.”

A tampon for a pencil, Habara thought. Perhaps that was what he should write in his diary that day: “Love
Thief, Pencil, Tampon.” He’d like to see what they’d make of that!

“I was there in his home for only fifteen minutes or so. I couldn’t stay any longer than that: it was my first
experience of sneaking into a house, and I was scared that someone would turn up while I was there. I checked
the street to make sure that the coast was clear, slipped out the door, locked it, and replaced the key under the
mat. Then I went to school. Carrying his precious pencil.”

Scheherazade fell silent. From the look of it, she had gone back in time and was picturing the various things that
had happened next, one by one.

“That week was the happiest of my life,” she said after a long pause. “I scribbled random things in my notebook
with his pencil. I sniffed it, kissed it, rubbed my cheek with it, rolled it between my fingers. Sometimes I even
stuck it in my mouth and sucked on it. Of course, it pained me that the more I wrote the shorter it got, but I
couldn’t help myself. If it got too short, I thought, I could always go back and get another. There was a whole
bunch of used pencils in the pencil holder on his desk. He wouldn’t have a clue that one was missing. And he
probably still hadn’t found the tampon tucked away in his drawer. That idea excited me no end—it gave me a
strange ticklish sensation down below. It didn’t bother me anymore that in the real world he never looked at me
or showed that he was even aware of my existence. Because I secretly possessed something of his—a part of
him, as it were.”

Ten days later, Scheherazade skipped school again and paid a second visit to the boy’s house. It was eleven
o’clock in the morning. As before, she fished the key from under the mat and opened the door. Again, his room
was in flawless order. First, she selected a pencil with a lot of use left in it and carefully placed it in her pencil
case. Then she gingerly lay down on his bed, her hands clasped on her chest, and looked up at the ceiling. This
was the bed where he slept every night. The thought made her heart beat faster, and she found it difficult to
breathe normally. Her lungs weren’t filling with air and her throat was as dry as a bone, making each breath
painful.

Scheherazade got off the bed, straightened the covers, and sat down on the floor, as she had on her first visit.
She looked back up at the ceiling. I’m not quite ready for his bed, she told herself. That’s still too much to
handle.

This time, Scheherazade spent half an hour in the house. She pulled his notebooks from the drawer and glanced
through them. She found a book report and read it. It was on “Kokoro,” a novel by Soseki Natsume, that
summer’s reading assignment. His handwriting was beautiful, as one would expect from a straight-A student,
not an error or an omission anywhere. The grade on it was Excellent. What else could it be? Any teacher
confronted with penmanship that perfect would automatically give it an Excellent, whether he bothered to read
a single line or not.

Scheherazade moved on to the chest of drawers, examining its contents in order. His underwear and socks.
Shirts and pants. His soccer uniform. They were all neatly folded. Nothing stained or frayed. Had he done the
folding? Or, more likely, had his mother done it for him? She felt a pang of jealousy toward the mother, who
could do these things for him each and every day.

Scheherazade leaned over and sniffed the clothes in the drawers. They all smelled freshly laundered and
redolent of the sun. She took out a plain gray T-shirt, unfolded it, and pressed it to her face. Might not a whiff of
his sweat remain under the arms? But there was nothing. Nevertheless, she held it there for some time, inhaling
through her nose. She wanted to keep the shirt for herself. But that would be too risky. His clothes were so
meticulously arranged and maintained. He (or his mother) probably knew the exact number of T-shirts in the
drawer. If one went missing, all hell might break loose.Scheherazade carefully refolded the T-shirt and returned
it to its proper place. In its stead, she took a small badge, shaped like a soccer ball, that she found in one of the
desk drawers. It seemed to date back to a team from his grade-school years. She doubted that he would miss it.
At the very least, it would be some time before he noticed that it was gone. While she was at it, she checked the
bottom drawer of the desk for the tampon. It was still there.

Scheherazade tried to imagine what would happen if his mother discovered the tampon. What would she think?
Would she demand that he explain what on earth a tampon was doing in his desk? Or would she keep her
discovery a secret, turning her dark suspicions over and over in her mind? Scheherazade had no idea. But she
decided to leave the tampon where it was. After all, it was her very first token.

To commemorate her second visit, Scheherazade left behind three strands of her hair. The night before, she had
plucked them out, wrapped them in plastic, and sealed them in a tiny envelope. Now she took this envelope
from her knapsack and slipped it into one of the old math notebooks in his drawer. The three hairs were straight
and black, neither too long nor too short. No one would know whose they were without a DNA test, though they
were clearly a girl’s.

She left his house and went straight to school, arriving in time for her first afternoon class. Once again, she was
content for about ten days. She felt that he had become that much more hers. But, as you might expect, this
chain of events would not end without incident. For, as Scheherazade had said, sneaking into other people’s
homes is highly addictive.

At this point in the story Scheherazade glanced at the bedside clock and saw that it was 4:32 P.M. “Got to get
going,” she said, as if to herself. She hopped out of bed and put on her plain white panties, hooked her bra,
slipped into her jeans, and pulled her dark-blue Nike sweatshirt over her head. Then she scrubbed her hands in
the bathroom, ran a brush through her hair, and drove away in her blue Mazda.

Left alone with nothing in particular to do, Habara lay in bed and ruminated on the story she had just told him,
savoring it bit by bit, like a cow chewing its cud. Where was it headed? he wondered. As with all her stories, he
hadn’t a clue. He found it difficult to picture Scheherazade as a high-school student. Was she slender then, free
of the flab she carried today? School uniform, white socks, her hair in braids?

He wasn’t hungry yet, so he put off preparing his dinner and went back to the book he had been reading, only to
find that he couldn’t concentrate. The image of Scheherazade sneaking into her classmate’s room and burying
her face in his shirt was too fresh in his mind. He was impatient to hear what had happened next.

Scheherazade’s next visit to the house was three days later, after the weekend had passed. As always, she came
bearing large paper bags stuffed with provisions. She went through the food in the fridge, replacing everything
that was past its expiration date, examined the canned and bottled goods in the cupboard, checked the supply of
condiments and spices to see what was running low, and wrote up a shopping list. She put some bottles of
Perrier in the fridge to chill. Finally, she stacked the new books and DVDs she had brought with her on the
table.

“Is there something more you need or want?”

“Can’t think of anything,” Habara replied.

Then, as always, the two went to bed and had sex. After an appropriate amount of foreplay, he slipped on his
condom, entered her, and, after an appropriate amount of time, ejaculated. After casting a professional eye on
the contents of his condom, Scheherazade began the latest installment of her story.

As before, she felt happy and fulfilled for ten days after her second break-in. She tucked the soccer badge away
in her pencil case and from time to time fingered it during class. She nibbled on the pencil she had taken and
licked the lead. All the time she was thinking of his room. She thought of his desk, the bed where he slept, the
chest of drawers packed with his clothes, his pristine white boxer shorts, and the tampon and three strands of
hair she had hidden in his drawer.

She had lost all interest in schoolwork. In class, she either fiddled with the badge and the pencil or gave in to
daydreams. When she went home, she was in no state of mind to tackle her homework. Scheherazade’s grades
had never been a problem. She wasn’t a top student, but she was a serious girl who always did her assignments.
So when her teacher called on her in class and she was unable to give a proper answer, he was more puzzled
than angry. Eventually, he summoned her to the staff room during the lunch break. “What’s the problem?” he
asked her. “Is anything bothering you?” She could only mumble something vague about not feeling well. Her
secret was too weighty and dark to reveal to anyone—she had to bear it alone.
“I had to keep breaking into his house,” Scheherazade said. “I was compelled to. As you can imagine, it was a
very risky business. Even I could see that. Sooner or later, someone would find me there, and the police would
be called. The idea scared me to death. But, once the ball was rolling, there was no way I could stop it. Ten days
after my second ‘visit,’ I went there again. I had no choice. I felt that if I didn’t I would go off the deep end.
Looking back, I think I really was a little crazy.”

“Didn’t it cause problems for you at school, skipping class so often?” Habara asked.

“My parents had their own business, so they were too busy to pay much attention to me. I’d never caused any
problems up to then, never challenged their authority. So they figured a hands-off approach was best. Forging
notes for school was a piece of cake. I explained to my homeroom teacher that I had a medical problem that
required me to spend half a day at the hospital from time to time. Since the teachers were racking their brains
over what to do about the kids who hadn’t come to school in ages, they weren’t too concerned about me taking
half a day off every now and then.”

Scheherazade shot a quick glance at the clock next to the bed before continuing.

“I got the key from under the mat and entered the house for a third time. It was as quiet as before—no, even
quieter for some reason. It rattled me when the refrigerator turned on—it sounded like a huge beast sighing. The
phone rang while I was there. The ringing was so loud and harsh that I thought my heart would stop. I was
covered with sweat. No one picked up, of course, and it stopped after about ten rings. The house felt even
quieter then.”

Scheherazade spent a long time stretched out on his bed that day. This time her heart did not pound so wildly,
and she was able to breathe normally. She could imagine him sleeping peacefully beside her, even feel as if she
were watching over him as he slept. She felt that, if she reached out, she could touch his muscular arm. He
wasn’t there next to her, of course. She was just lost in a haze of daydreams.

She felt an overpowering urge to smell him. Rising from the bed, she walked over to his chest of drawers,
opened one, and examined the shirts inside. All had been washed and neatly folded. They were pristine, and free
of odor, just like before.

Then an idea struck her. She raced down the stairs to the first floor. There, in the room beside the bath, she
found the laundry hamper and removed the lid. Mixed together were the soiled clothes of the three family
members—mother, daughter, and son. A day’s worth, from the looks of it. Scheherazade extracted a piece of
male clothing. A white crew-neck T-shirt. She took a whiff. The unmistakable scent of a young man. A
mustiness she had smelled before, when her male classmates were close by. Not a scintillating odor, to be sure.
But the fact that this smell was his brought Scheherazade unbounded joy. When she put her nose next to the
armpits and inhaled, she felt as though she were in his embrace, his arms wrapped firmly about her.

T-shirt in hand, Scheherazade climbed the stairs to the second floor and lay on his bed once more. She buried
her face in his shirt and greedily breathed in. Now she could feel a languid sensation in the lower part of her
body. Her nipples were stiffening as well. Could her period be on the way? No, it was much too early. Was this
sexual desire? If so, then what could she do about it? She had no idea. One thing was for sure, though—there
was nothing to be done under these circumstances. Not here in his room, on his bed.

In the end, Scheherazade decided to take the shirt home with her. It was risky, for sure. His mother was likely to
figure out that a shirt was missing. Even if she didn’t realize that it had been stolen, she would still wonder
where it had gone. Any woman who kept her house so spotless was bound to be a neat freak of the first order.
When something went missing, she would search the house from top to bottom, like a police dog, until she
found it. Undoubtedly, she would uncover the traces of Scheherazade in her precious son’s room. But, even as
Scheherazade understood this, she didn’t want to part with the shirt. Her brain was powerless to persuade her
heart.

Instead, she began thinking about what to leave behind. Her panties seemed like the best choice. They were of
an ordinary sort, simple, relatively new, and fresh that morning. She could hide them at the very back of his
closet. Could there be anything more appropriate to leave in exchange? But, when she took them off, the crotch
was damp. I guess this comes from desire, too, she thought. It would hardly do to leave something tainted by
her lust in his room. She would only be degrading herself. She slipped them back on and began to think about
what else to leave.

Scheherazade broke off her story. For a long time, she didn’t say a word. She lay there breathing quietly with
her eyes closed. Beside her, Habara followed suit, waiting for her to resume.

At last, she opened her eyes and spoke. “Hey, Mr. Habara,” she said. It was the first time she had addressed him
by name.

Habara looked at her.

“Do you think we could do it one more time?”

“I think I could manage that,” he said.

So they made love again. This time, though, was very different from the time before. Violent, passionate, and
drawn out. Her climax at the end was unmistakable. A series of powerful spasms that left her trembling. Even
her face was transformed. For Habara, it was like catching a brief glimpse of Scheherazade in her youth: the
woman in his arms was now a troubled seventeen-year-old girl who had somehow become trapped in the body
of a thirty-five-year-old housewife. Habara could feel her in there, her eyes closed, her body quivering,
innocently inhaling the aroma of a boy’s sweaty T-shirt.

This time, Scheherazade did not tell him a story after sex. Nor did she check the contents of his condom. They
lay there quietly next to each other. Her eyes were wide open, and she was staring at the ceiling. Like a lamprey
gazing up at the bright surface of the water. How wonderful it would be, Habara thought, if he, too, could
inhabit another time or space—leave this single, clearly defined human being named Nobutaka Habara behind
and become a nameless lamprey. He pictured himself and Scheherazade side by side, their suckers fastened to a
rock, their bodies waving in the current, eying the surface as they waited for a fat trout to swim smugly by.

“So what did you leave in exchange for the shirt?” Habara broke the silence.

She did not reply immediately.

“Nothing,” she said at last. “Nothing I had brought along could come close to that shirt with his odor. So I just
took it and sneaked out. That was when I became a burglar, pure and simple.”

When, twelve days later, Scheherazade went back to the boy’s house for the fourth time, there was a new lock
on the front door. Its gold color gleamed in the midday sun, as if to boast of its great sturdiness. And there was
no key hidden under the mat. Clearly, his mother’s suspicions had been aroused by the missing shirt. She must
have searched high and low, coming across other signs that told of something strange going on in her house.
Her instincts had been unerring, her reaction swift.

Scheherazade was, of course, disappointed by this development, but at the same time she felt relieved. It was as
if someone had stepped behind her and removed a great weight from her shoulders. This means I don’t have to
go on breaking into his house, she thought. There was no doubt that, had the lock not been changed, her
invasions would have gone on indefinitely. Nor was there any doubt that her actions would have escalated with
each visit. Eventually, a member of the family would have shown up while she was on the second floor. There
would have been no avenue of escape. No way to talk herself out of her predicament. This was the future that
had been waiting for her, sooner or later, and the outcome would have been devastating. Now she had dodged it.
Perhaps she should thank his mother—though she had never met the woman—for having eyes like a hawk.

Scheherazade inhaled the aroma of his T-shirt each night before she went to bed. She slept with it next to her.
She would wrap it in paper and hide it before she left for school in the morning. Then, after dinner, she would
pull it out to caress and sniff. She worried that the odor might fade as the days went by, but that didn’t happen.
The smell of his sweat had permeated the shirt for good.

Now that further break-ins were out of the question, Scheherazade’s state of mind slowly began to return to
normal. She daydreamed less in class, and her teacher’s words began to register. Nevertheless, her chief focus
was not on her teacher’s voice but on her classmate’s behavior. She kept her eye discreetly trained on him,
trying to detect a change, any indication at all that he might be nervous about something. But he acted exactly
the same as always. He threw his head back and laughed as unaffectedly as ever, and answered promptly when
called upon. He shouted as loudly in soccer practice and got just as sweaty. She could see no trace of anything
out of the ordinary—just an upright young man, leading a seemingly unclouded existence.

Still, Scheherazade knew of one shadow that was hanging over him. Or something close to that. No one else
knew, in all likelihood. Just her (and, come to think of it, possibly his mother). On her third break-in, she had
come across a number of pornographic magazines cleverly concealed in the farthest recesses of his closet. They
were full of pictures of naked women, spreading their legs and offering generous views of their genitals. Some
pictures portrayed the act of sex: men inserted rodlike penises into female bodies in the most unnatural of
positions. Scheherazade had never laid eyes on photographs like these before. She sat at his desk and flipped
slowly through the magazines, studying each photo with great interest. She guessed that he masturbated while
viewing them. But the idea did not strike her as especially repulsive. She accepted masturbation as a perfectly
normal activity. All those sperm had to go somewhere, just as girls had to have periods. In other words, he was
a typical teen-ager. Neither hero nor saint. She found that knowledge something of a relief.

“When my break-ins stopped, my passion for him began to cool. It was gradual, like the tide ebbing from a
long, sloping beach. Somehow or other, I found myself smelling his shirt less often and spending less time
caressing his pencil and badge. The fever was passing. What I had contracted was not something like sickness
but the real thing. As long as it lasted, I couldn’t think straight. Maybe everybody goes through a crazy period
like that at one time or another. Or maybe it was something that happened only to me. How about you? Did you
ever have an experience like that?”

Habara tried to remember, but drew a blank. “No, nothing that extreme, I don’t think,” he said.

Scheherazade looked somewhat disappointed by his answer.

“Anyway, I forgot all about him once I graduated. So quickly and easily, it was weird. What was it about him
that had made the seventeen-year-old me fall so hard? Try as I might, I couldn’t remember. Life is strange, isn’t
it? You can be totally entranced by something one minute, be willing to sacrifice everything to make it yours,
but then a little time passes, or your perspective changes a bit, and all of a sudden you’re shocked at how its
glow has faded. What was I looking at? you wonder. So that’s the story of my ‘breaking-and-entering’ period.”

She made it sound like Picasso’s Blue Period, Habara thought. But he understood what she was trying to
convey.

She glanced at the clock next to the bed. It was almost time for her to leave.
“To tell the truth,” she said finally, “the story doesn’t end there. A few years later, when I was in my second
year of nursing school, a strange stroke of fate brought us together again. His mother played a big role in it; in
fact, there was something spooky about the whole thing—it was like one of those old ghost stories. Events took
a rather unbelievable course. Would you like to hear about it?”

“I’d love to,” Habara said.

“It had better wait till my next visit,” Scheherazade said. “It’s getting late. I’ve got to head home and fix
dinner.”

She got out of bed and put on her clothes—panties, stockings, camisole, and, finally, her skirt and blouse.
Habara casually watched her movements from the bed. It struck him that the way women put on their clothes
could be even more interesting than the way they took them off.

“Any books in particular you’d like me to pick up?” she asked, on her way out the door.

“No, nothing I can think of,” he answered. What he really wanted, he thought, was for her to tell him the rest of
her story, but he didn’t put that into words. Doing so might jeopardize his chances of ever hearing it.

Habara went to bed early that night and thought about Scheherazade. Perhaps he would never see her again.
That worried him. The possibility was just too real. Nothing of a personal nature—no vow, no implicit
understanding—held them together. Theirs was a chance relationship created by someone else, and might be
terminated on that person’s whim. In other words, they were attached by a slender thread. It was likely—no,
certain—that that thread would eventually be broken and all the strange and unfamiliar tales she might have told
would be lost to him. The only question was when.

It was also possible that he would, at some point, be deprived of his freedom entirely, in which case not only
Scheherazade but all women would disappear from his life. Never again would he be able to enter the warm
moistness of their bodies. Never again would he feel them quiver in response. Perhaps an even more distressing
prospect for Habara than the cessation of sexual activity, however, was the loss of the moments of shared
intimacy. What his time spent with women offered was the opportunity to be embraced by reality, on the one
hand, while negating it entirely on the other. That was something Scheherazade had provided in abundance—
indeed, her gift was inexhaustible. The prospect of losing that made him saddest of all.

Habara closed his eyes and stopped thinking of Scheherazade. Instead, he thought of lampreys. Of jawless
lampreys fastened to rocks, hiding among the waterweeds, swaying back and forth in the current. He imagined
that he was one of them, waiting for a trout to appear. But no trout passed by, no matter how long he waited.
Not a fat one, not a skinny one, no trout at all. Eventually the sun went down, and his world was enfolded in
darkness. ♦
 CHRISTMAS CAROL BY KIM YOUNG HA

“Don’t you think we should get together?”

Jeong-sik was the first to pick up the phone and suggest that they meet.
“So you saw the news. Did you get in touch with Jung-gweon? OK, then I’ll do it.”
Yeong-su hung up and carefully dialed Jung-gweon’s number. He couldn’t reach him—he wasn’t at home
and his cell phone was turned off.
‘That idiot,’ Yeong-su thought. ‘Where could he have gone?’
Yeong-su tossed the phone on the couch and got up.
“Is something wrong?” his wife asked from the kitchen, her eyes narrowed. She sensed that something was
going on.
“It’s nothing. We were just making plans for a year-end get together.”
“You guys shouldn’t drink so much, you know. If you're not careful you’ll drink yourself to death.”
She took the trash bag and walked toward the front door. “I'm going to take out the trash.”
While she was out, Yeong-su tried calling Jung-gweon again, but he couldn’t get through.
‘I wonder... could he have done it?’ Yeong-su thought, and called Jeong-sik again.
“Jeong-sik? I haven’t been able to reach Jung-gweon.”
The silence towered over the two men, glowering down at them like a totem pole. They were probably
thinking the same thing. Surely it couldn’t be... no. Would he do something like that? No, of course not. It takes
a truly twisted person to do something like that.
“OK, then, how about just the two of us meet? Sure, why not. Where should we meet? OK, that sounds
good. What time? Four o’clock? That’s a bit early, isn’t it? OK, five o’clock. We can just talk for a little while
and then have dinner. Alright. See you then.”
Yeong-su’s wife came back in from taking out the trash. She held in her hand a red envelope.
“This came for you.”
“What is it?”
“Well, it looks like a Christmas card. Are you expecting a Christmas card from someone?”
She brusquely tossed the card at Yeong-su, as if to say, ‘Well, now I’ve seen everything.’ Yet she couldn't
stop thinking about that card even after she returned to the kitchen.
“Aren’t you going to open it?”
Yeong-su stole a glance at the card. In the upper left-hand corner, in small letters, was written “Jin-suk.”
“Who is it from?” his wife asked.
“I’m not sure.”
Yeong-su tore the envelope open. Out popped Santa Claus as if he were spring-loaded, and at the same
time an electronic melody began to play that sounded something like a music box. Be-Be-Be-Beep, Be-Be-Be-
Beep¡¦ “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.”
“Merry Christmas, Yeong-su,” the card read. “It’s me, Jin-suk. It’s been a while since I’ve sent you a card
like this, hasn’t it? Do you remember that Christmas, ten years ago?”
Yeong-su’s wife could finally stand it no longer and came back out into the living room. “What on earth is
that card?”
Before Yeong-su could even begin to explain, his wife took the card. Her face turned as red as a brick.
“Jin-suk? That Jin-suk? Why is she sending you a card now? You two must be seeing each other. Did you
see her? When? Hmm? You wanted me to see this card, didn't you? What, are you two playing house now? And
what is this stupid music? Do you want me out of this house, is that it?”
Yeong-su didn’t say a word, silently waiting until her barrage of questions was finished. When she quieted
down, Yeong-su spoke.
“That’s enough.”
“What’s enough? I haven’t even started yet!”
“I heard you. That’s enough.”
“Why?”
“Jin-suk... she’s dead.”
“Dead? When did she die? And how does a dead person send a card?”
 “She died a few days ago,” Yeong-su said, and he showed her the newspaper that had been under the living
room tea table.
“Korean resident of Germany meets violent death,” the headline read. “Police are investigating the murder
of a Korean resident of Germany who had returned to Korea for a year-end visit. Her body was found on the
15th in an inn in Changcheon-dong, Seoul. The body was discovered by the owner of the inn, who entered the
room at noon to investigate when the occupant showed no sign of leaving. Police are assuming it was a crime of
passion or revenge, citing the facts that the victim’s wallet and valuables were left untouched and the victim
was cruelly murdered with a sharp weapon. They are now conducting an investigation centered on those closest
to the victim.”
Without taking her eyes off the newspaper, she asked, “It wasn’t you, was it?”
“Are you crazy?” Yeong-su was furious. “Suk-gyeong Lee, look at me! I said look at me!” Yeong-su
screamed, his voice dry and rasping.
“If it wasn’t you, then fine.” His wife got up and went back to the kitchen.

Yeong-su stared at his wife as she stood in front of the sink, as if he was looking through the wrong end of
a telescope. It was a war without gunfire, a truce without parley. The two did not say a word and buried
themselves in their own worlds; Yeong-su turned on the television and Suk-gyeong began to prepare dinner.
She peeled the green onions and washed the fish. When it came time to do the bean sprouts, she grabbed the
newspaper from the tea table in front of her husband, spread it out on the kitchen floor and dumped the bean
sprouts out on top of it. The bean sprouts covered Jin-suk’s article, but some of the words and letters were still
visible between the heads and stems.
“Korea· ········ ·· Germany ·eets vio··nt death. Police are ····stigating the mu·der of a Korea· resident ··
Ge·ma·· who had ········ ·· ····· for a year-··· ······ H·· ···· was found on ··· ··th in ·· ··· ·· ················ Seou··
··· body was dis······· by the ow·er o· th· ···, wh· enter·· t·e r··m at ·oon to ·····tigat· ···· ··e occ····t showe· ··
···· of l···ing ······ ··· ·····ing ·· ·as a ···me of pa·sion or ··venge, cit··· ··e fac·· ···· the v······· ··lle· ···
valua···· ···· ···· ·····ched and the ······ ··· crue··· mur··red wit· · sha·· weapon. Th·· ·re ··· ···ducting an
investig····· ····ered ·n tho·· clo···· ·· the ·ict···”
As each bean sprout was cleaned and put in a bowl, the words began to take shape again, and they told her
that Jin-suk was dead. Someone had gone into the room where she was staying and killed her, ruthlessly
stabbing her with a sharp knife. Suk-gyeong cast a furtive glance at her husband sitting in the living room. He
was nervously biting his fingernails, and his toes tapped on the tea table. He was clearly fraught with anxiety.
Could he have killed her? With an exaggerated motion, she popped the head off the bean sprout she was
holding. Not just anyone can commit murder, though. There was no way such an unremarkable person as her
husband would take a knife, break into an inn room and go through with a murder, changing his life forever.
She knew her husband too well. He was the type of person who never booked tickets in advance. He wasn’t the
type to do anything decisive, either. In fact, if it hadn’t been for her, they would never have been able to buy the
apartment they were living in now.
“I can’t stand being in debt,” he had said, shaking his head.
“How can you call 20 million won debt?”
“Debt is debt. And you’re not going to be repaying it, anyway, are you?”
“Then who’s going to repay it?”
“I’ll have to.”
He was the type of person who would argue over whose money it was whenever there was a disagreement.
That sort of person could never have done away with Jin-suk—he was just too petty. But what if Jin-suk had
demanded money? No, Jin-suk would not have done that, and even if she had, her husband, Yeong-su Jeong the
accountant, would never have gone into her room with a knife.
But what if... what if he had done it? Freedom. The word that first came to mind was ‘freedom.’ She would
be free. If he had really committed murder, and a brutal stabbing at that, he would get at least a life sentence. If
that happened, then this apartment and all their possessions would naturally be hers by marriage. It would also
be easy to get a divorce from a husband she could no longer live with, even more so since the fault for that
would be his. Of course, she would have to pay a lawyer as a formality, but that was unavoidable. She would at
least have to put up a front. And if he would just be so kind as to be killed in a traffic accident, well then the life
insurance money would be the icing on the cake. One mustn’t be too greedy, though.
“Ah!” The blade of the knife passed over her left thumbnail. It didn’t leave a mark, but her conscience
stung. ‘What on earth am I thinking?’ she said to herself, shaking her head. Her thoughts then went to Jin-suk,
lying there bleeding to death in the inn room. What had she felt like, seeing all that blood gushing out of her
body? She must have felt woozy, like the feeling you get from sleeping pills.
That good-for-nothing tramp. She had been thrown out of the dormitory before even the first year was
over. The offense was staying out overnight without permission, for a total of three times. There had been a
rumor that she was sleeping around, and one of the guys mentioned in the rumor was Yeong-su. Of course, he
had denied it.
“That’s just a meaningless rumor. I’m not that close to Jin-suk; she's just a girl I know. You think I'm the
only guy she knows?”
Jin-suk had lived in the room across from Suk-gyeong. There was that one time... just once. Suk-gyeong
pressed her lips together, finished cleaning the bean sprouts and put them in the pot. There was the time when
she had stolen a pair of Jin-suk’s underwear. Many of the girls liked to steal Jin-suk’s underwear because she
had been with a lot of guys. ‘I was different,’ thought Suk-gyeong, shaking her head. ‘The reason I stole her
underwear was....’ She looked up at the ceiling. ‘The reason was....’ She looked down again. ‘Actually, my
reasons were no different from everybody else's. That’s right. I hated her. In fact, I was even a bit jealous. And
there was more. Not why I stole it, but the way I stole it. The other girls would quietly steal them from the
clothesline, but I deliberately stole it from the hamper in her room. What did I do with those panties? I don’t
know. Probably threw them away in the bathroom. Yes, that’s what I did.’
The thieving never ended in the dormitories. Every day someone was stealing something from someone
else. Of course, Suk-gyeong had makeup, underwear and watches stolen from her. One of those items might
have even found its way into Jin-suk’s hands, Suk-gyeong thought. The filthy girl. The tramp, the slut who slept
with anyone and everyone. That’s why she had so many pairs of pretty underwear. Someone had once asked her
where she had bought them, and Jin-suk answered in her peculiar, stammering way. “They were presents.”
The very fact that panties were given as presents—that panties could be given as presents—came as a
shock, and all the girls in the dormitory gaped in surprise.
“What kind of presents?”
“Well, this was a birthday present, and this was a Christmas present.”
The panties she had received for Christmas actually had a picture of Santa Claus on them.
“What is she, an idiot?” Suk-gyeong asked her roommate when they returned to their room.
Her roommate answered without a second thought. “Her? Of course she’s an idiot. Do you know what her
nickname is? The vending machine.”
“Who said that?”
“A guy I know. She’s got quite a reputation among her classmates, too.”
“And she doesn’t know this?”
“Probably not.”
Of course, as time went on, there were those who told her what people were saying about her. Jin-suk was
depressed for a few days, but then went back to her old self. It might have been understandable if she was
pretty, but she wasn’t even that. How such a chubby and ordinary girl, with the looks of a simple county
bumpkin, could attract so many guys was always a mystery to Suk-gyeong.
She turned her head to look at the newspaper that was spread out on the kitchen floor. “Korean resident of
Germany meets violent death.” Who could possibly have killed Jin-suk? She must have had countless men
during the ten or so years after she left Korea, and it must have been one of them. On the off chance that her
husband had done it, yes, there would be an uproar at first. Detectives and reporters would storm the house and
carry out an investigation, and her husband’s family would probably camp out there, too. Ah, she would
actually feel alive. Not everyone experiences what it’s like to be the wife of a murderer. “Were you aware that
your husband was such a heinous criminal?” Requests would flood in from women’s magazines. “My husband
was a murderer!” That would make a great headline. People would want to know what it was like to be married
to a murderer, to have dinner with a murderer, to go on a honeymoon with a murderer.
While she was thinking these things, her husband was getting ready to go out.
 “Where are you going?” she asked.
“I won’t be long.”
“I asked where you were going.”
“Don’t you remember the phone call I got from Jeong-sik a little while ago? I’m going to meet him for
dinner.”
“Didn’t you see me preparing dinner all this time? Why do you have to see Jeong-sik? Ah, since Jin-suk
died you figured you’d go pay your respects? Is her old screwing club getting together to give her a funeral
oration?”
Yeong-su put on his coat and scarf without a word. As he slid his heel into his shoe with the help of a shoe
horn, he muttered his protest.
“It’s so easy to say those things, isn’t it?”
Suk-gyeong was about to reply when the door slammed shut. Suk-gyeong threw the ladle into the sink.
“Bastard.”
Yeong-su left the house with the word “bastard” at his heels and pushed his heavy body into the car parked
in front of their apartment. His belly bulged out and hung over the seat belt. ‘I am so out of shape,’ he thought.
The car struggled out of the apartment complex and crawled into the street. At every traffic light he tried calling
Jung-gweon, but he still couldn’t get through.
When he arrived at the appointed place he found Jeong-sik already there. His face looked as dark as the
sky just before a storm.
“Say, are you sure we should be meeting like this?” he queried, looking sidelong at Yeong-su.
“Ah, coffee,” Yeong-su said when the waiter arrived. “Ah, whatever... OK, the house blend will do.”
He turned back to Jeong-sik. “What are you talking about? What have we done wrong? Is there any reason
we shouldn't we be meeting?”
Jeong-sik unwrapped a piece of candy and popped it into his mouth. “It’s not that, damn it. It could look
suspicious. Strictly speaking, there isn't any reason we should be meeting either, is there? Hey, you don’t think
those guys are undercover cops, do you?” He pointed to a group of men sitting at a corner table.
“I don’t think so. Undercover cops don’t wear suits.”
“Some of them do.”
Yeong-su’s coffee arrived, and he took a sip of the lukewarm drink. “It wasn’t... you, was it?” Yeong-su
asked without taking his eyes from the coffee cup.
“There’s one thing that I know for sure,” Jeong-sik said, noisily rolling the candy around in his mouth.
“And that is that I didn’t kill Jin-suk.”
“Then who did?”
For the first time their gazes met.
“It could have been that bastard Jung-gweon. He’s separated now, isn’t he?” Yeong-su asked. “Ugh, this is
bitter!” It was only then that he realized he hadn’t added sugar to his coffee. He hastily dumped in two
spoonfuls.
“What does being separated have to do with committing murder?” Jeong-sik retorted guardedly, but
without conviction.
“I heard his business went under last year. What business was that?”
“It was a fried chicken franchise. He did that and sold coffee and kebabs during the day, or something like
that. I’m not really sure. When that went under he and his wife separated.”
“Didn’t he live with Jin-suk for a little while way back when?” Yeong-su asked.
“Live with her? He probably just slept with her a few times. Jin-suk used to visit his place from time to
time, remember? Say, didn’t you and Jung-gweon share a place?”
“Did we? Ah, for a little while, maybe a few months, yeah.”
“Jin-suk was pretty loose. More thickheaded than loose, actually. Ah, but they said she was stuck with a
knife. I wonder who did it. And did he really have to do it that way? I mean, he could have just strangled her
and that would have been the end of it.”
“Yeah, tell me about it. Say, did you quit smoking?”
“Yeah, not too long ago.”
 “You're one willful bastard. They say you should never mess with a guy who quits smoking or a guy with a
perfect poker face.”
“You should quit too, man,” Jeong-sik shot back. “I’m glad I quit.”
“You really think I’d be able to quit in a situation like this?”
“Situation? What situation? By the way, you haven’t heard anything from the police, have you?”
“Not yet. You?”
“No. You don’t think the police will know that we met like this, do you?”
“Of course not. How would they know?”
“Ah, I never should have gone out that night. I just figured I’d go out to meet you and Jung-gweon, and
look at me now.”
The two men looked regretful and were silent for a while.
“It was that night, wasn’t it?” Jeong-sik asked.
“Apparently so.”
“So, Jin-suk met us for a drink and then went back to her room at the inn, right? She met somebody there.
It could have been someone who went to see her, or she might have called someone. Who could it have been?”
“I don’t know. She knew plenty of guys.”
Jeong-sik narrowed his eyes. “You went straight home that night, right?”
Yeong-su threw his cigarette into the ash tray. “Are you doubting me?”
“No, I just wanted to make sure you got home alright that night. But anyway, I’ve got a problem on my
hands now.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, the police are probably going to check out her wallet, right? Then they’ll find her schedule, and
even phone numbers.”
Yeong-su retrieved his cigarette from the ash tray and put it back in his mouth. “What’s to worry about? If
we haven’t done anything wrong we’ll be fine.”
“It’s not that, it’s that I have to leave the country on a business trip the day after tomorrow. Let’s say that
the police find my name and come to investigate, but I’m on a business trip overseas. I’ll become the prime
suspect, won’t I? I will, won’t I?”
“Well, they might have already issued an order preventing you from leaving the country. That’s the first
thing they do these days when someone falls under suspicion.”
“Ah, then I’m finished. Nobody knows how to handle this furniture exhibition but me. If I don’t go we
don’t get the contract. Do you know how big a deal this is? What am I supposed to tell the company? That I
can’t leave the country because I’ve been implicated in a murder, and we should forget the exhibition? That I
can’t leave the country because I had a drink with a girl I knew some ten years ago who had just returned home,
and that girl just happened to get whacked that very night?”
Yeong-su held up his hand. “Why are you getting angry at me? I’m not the one preventing you from
leaving the country. For all we know they might not have given the order yet. So relax,” he said. “But your wife
doesn’t know yet, right? All because of that stupid Christmas card....”
“Wait. Card? What card?”
“Jin-suk sent a card to my house. My wife saw it and flew into a rage. I just can’t understand why she’s
making such a fuss. It’s not like I slept with her.”
“You did sleep with her.”
“Me? When?”
“Back then.”
“That was back then.”
“True. But tell me more about this card. It wasn’t in a red envelope, was it?”
“Yeah, it was. A red envelope. What is she, a teenager? Sending a Christmas card like that....”
Jeong-sik jumped up from his seat. “It’s just one thing after another, isn’t it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“On my way out I saw a red envelope sitting all by itself in the mailbox. I thought it was just some
advertisement, and I left it there. Damn it! That must’ve been the card Jin-suk sent! That bitch, she’s hounding
me even in death. I’d better go.”
 c
Jeong-sik grabbed a few pieces of candy from the counter on his way out. As soon as he got into his car he
tossed one of the candies into his mouth. He rolled it around a few times with his tongue before crushing it with
his molar. In ten minutes he was home. Fortunately, the Christmas card was still in the mailbox. Jeong-sik’s
wife didn’t know about Jin-suk, but she would certainly not be happy about the card. As he took the card out of
the mailbox, someone appeared at his side.
“Jeong-sik Lee? Ah, yes. Would you come with us, please?” the detective asked. “What? In your home?
Look here, Mr. Lee. Do you think you're so important that we’d question you in your home?”
Jeong-sik began to follow them to the car without a word when he stopped. He gently freed his arms from
their grasp, so as not to give the impression that he was trying to run away, and walked over to the mailbox.
“Ah, I’m just going to put this back in. I think it’s for my wife.” He held in his hand the Christmas card
from Jin-suk.
While one of the detectives put Jeong-sik in the car, the other detective strode over to the mailbox and took
the card back out again.
“What are you doing with my mail?” Jeong-sik protested. “Put that back! Am I going to have to report
you? Do you have a search warrant?”
The detective paid no attention to Jeong-sik’s protests, put the card in his inside coat pocket and climbed
into the passenger seat.
“Let’s go,” he said, and the car slowly pulled out of the apartment complex.
“It’s a card from the victim,” the detective in the passenger seat said, smiling widely. He clearly enjoyed
finding evidence of the victim. “Cuff him,” he ordered.
His colleague in the back seat handcuffed Jeong-sik. Jeong-sik realized that they now considered him a
threat, one who might destroy evidence or try to escape. He softened his manner.
“Please, don’t do this. I haven’t done anything wrong. Let me ask you something? Why on earth are you
doing this?”
Not one of the detectives in the car answered him. Just as the workers who carry the boxes of cola don’t
speak to the cola bottles, just as the middlemen at a cattle market don’t speak to the cows, detectives don’t
speak to suspects while they are being transferred. When they arrived at the police department the detectives
brought Jeong-sik to the violent crimes department. Then they began to interrogate him for real, as he sat there.
The dark room, a swinging incandescent lamp, a typewriter... these are all just scenes from a movie—they
don’t exist in a real police station. At a glance, the police station might have been mistaken for a tax office.
People sat with obsequious expressions in front of bored staff members, earnestly explaining their situations.
“Age? Occupation?” Jeong-sik answered every question sincerely. Or at least he tried to give that
impression. ‘I have nothing to hide, so ask whatever you want.’ But that strategy didn’t seem to be too
successful. The more he tried to give that impression, the more his words sounded like forced excuses. Like in
some fable, he felt as if the words that sprung from his mouth turned into snakes and frogs.
“Jin-suk, she was just a girl I knew long ago. That’s all. You know how it’s all the rage these days to meet
with old schoolmates. She had returned to Korea after being abroad for a long time, and it was an opportunity to
meet old friends, so we just got together. Why on earth would I stab to death an old schoolmate I hadn’t seen in
such a long time? Hmm? Think about it.”
The detective stared at him blankly over the LCD screen of his notebook computer and then smiled. “‘That
damn girl, I’ve got to kill her.’ You said that, right?”
“Ah, well... officer, you wouldn’t happen to have any candy, would you? I stopped smoking not too long
ago, you see. Do you smoke? Ah, then you’ll understand. The withdrawal is killing me. If I don’t at least have a
piece of candy I’m going to go insane. If you have a piece of candy, maybe....”
The detective shook his head from side to side.
“‘That damn girl, I’ve got to kill her.’ You said that, right?” he asked again, enunciating each syllable
slowly and carefully.
“Yes, but that was just something I said when I was angry. If I had known she was going to die like this I
probably wouldn’t have said that.”
 “That night, you had a drink with Yeong-su Jeong, Jung-gweon Park, and the victim, Jin-suk Jo, and
afterwards you went to the inn room where Ms. Jo was staying, correct?”
Jeong-sik lifted up his head. Letting out a pained breath, he said, “Officer, if you don’t have any candy, do
you at least have a cigarette?”
The detective took out a cigarette. With the peculiar, servile expression of a turncoat, Jeong-sik awkwardly
lit the cigarette and began to smoke it.
“I’m even starting to smoke again because of that damn girl. Yes, I went to her room. Haven’t you ever
done anything like that, officer? If you haven’t, well, I guess there’s no explaining it. Jin-suk and I used to be
like that. We were in the same club at school. So after having a drink we’d just slip out, meet at an inn and...
well, you know, don’t you?”
“But that night, Mr. Park was already there, wasn’t he?”
“How do you know that? Jung-gweon isn’t here by any chance, is he?”
“You don’t need to know that. Just answer the question, please.”
Jeong-sik let out a breath. “Officer, you don’t know what it was like between us. I doubt you’ll understand
even if I tell you. Jin-suk was, well, she was sort of public property between the three of us way back when. We
didn’t know this at first, of course. We found out later when we were having a drink together. Yeong-su
probably said something about it first. Anyway, we all found out that the three of us had been sleeping with Jin-
suk at around the same time. In that sort of situation, men act in one of two ways. The first way would be to
back off. Declare a sort of joint security area, so to speak.”
He chuckled at the thought. “If Jin-suk had been the least bit intelligent or pretty, that’s what we would
have done. But the problem was that Jin-suk was a bit stupid. She was so stupid that the first time I did it with
her she thought it was my finger inside her. She didn’t even know. I don’t know how such a girl made it to
university.
“Oh, and the second way would be to pretend that the girl didn’t exist, that she still doesn’t exist. That is,
no one talks about her, but the relationships continue. We could never all meet at the same time, of course. In a
word, she was a ghost, and it’s quite a problem if everyone can see a ghost. Yes, you’re beginning to understand
now, aren’t you? Because she didn’t exist, there was no problem with her being public property.
“This sort of thing used to happen in the countryside all the time. Every village had its wench., the kind of
girl that everyone had a piece of, from the pig-tailed boy of fifteen to the old man of seventy. Nonetheless, there
were no problems. That’s exactly what happened with us.”
The phone rang and the detective picked up the receiver.
“Yes. I see. That’s enough now.”
The detective hadn’t recorded a single word of Jeong-sik’s carrying on at the end. That sort of testimony
was not fit to be included in a report, because only clear facts could be recorded in a report. Nonetheless, the
detective listened patiently. He had already written down everything required for the report and was waiting for
the results of the on-site criminal investigation by the National Institute of Scientific Investigation. Naturally, he
would have to change his report based on the results of that investigation. Finally, he received the call telling
him that the results of the primary criminal investigation were in. The detective spoke so that the suspect in
front of him couldn't follow the conversation.
“Who did they say it was? Is that so? Are you positive? OK.”
The detective hung up the phone and pulled his notebook computer closer. “You didn’t kill her?” he asked
Jeong-sik.
“Why would I kill her?”
“Then why did you say you had to kill her?” The detective chewed on a matchstick.
“That was a joke.”
“Do you often make those kinds of jokes?” The matchstick broke.
Jeong-sik waved his hand in denial with a servile expression on his face.
“You left the inn room with Mr. Park for another drink, right? And that’s when you said that?”
“Yes.”
“And then Mr. Park said that his life had turned out this way because of that damn girl, and how he had
actually gone to kill her. He said something like that, no?”
“Yes, I think.”
 “Why would Mr. Park think that his life was wrecked because of the victim?”
“The thing about Jung-gweon, well, he had a problem. You see, he actually—this is pretty funny, but, he
seemed to really like Jin-suk. The reason that the three of us stopped speaking to each other ten years ago was
Jung-gweon. After we graduated, Yeong-su passed the CPA exam and went to work for an accounting firm, and
I found a job as well, and we were all busy with our own lives. After a while we decided to get together to
celebrate us all finding jobs.
“Well, that night, Jung-gweon, he wasn’t even all that drunk, but suddenly out of nowhere he grabs a knife
and goes into a rage, and I thought I was going to die. He said he was going to kill us all. That he wouldn’t let
us touch Jin-suk one more time. Huh, why would we want to touch her? We only slept with her because she
never said she didn’t want to. Wouldn’t you have done the same?
“He had acted just as we had, and now he says that he was in love and we were just having fun. Have you
ever seen such obstinacy? Actually, I kind of feel sorry for Jung-gweon, too. The only girl he had ever slept
with up until graduation was Jin-suk. But still, to come at his friends with a knife and say he was going to kill
us. Jung-gweon, he had a bit of a drastic side. I’m not saying that he killed Jin-suk, of course. He must have
been a bit gloomy, seeing that his business went under and he got a divorce and all.”
“He’s separated, not divorced,” the detective corrected.
“You know everything, don’t you.” Jeong-sik swallowed hard.
‘Why am I swallowing,’ he thought. He worried that the detective might have heard him swallow. Then he
began to worry because he was worrying about pointless little things like that. But just then the detective gave
him the good news.
“OK, you’re free to go. Don’t go far for the time being. You’re still not completely cleared of suspicion.”
Jeong-sik hesitated as if to say something, but then changed his mind and got up. He had wanted to
mention his upcoming business trip, but his first priority was to escape from the police station without any
further trouble.
Actually, half of what he had said about the international furniture exhibition was just boasting. He was
always exaggerating his abilities and hinting that everything would be lost without him. Surely the international
furniture exhibition wouldn’t fold just because he wasn’t there.
This is what Yeong-su had been thinking while listening to Jeong-sik speak. He sat in the cafe, slowly
drinking the coffee that the staff kept full, long after Jeong-sik left to retrieve the Christmas card from his
mailbox. For some reason he didn’t want to go home. He feared that detectives would be staked out around his
house, watching his every movement. And his wife would interrogate him just as mercilessly as the detectives
about his relationship with Jin-suk. When they were at school together, Suk-gyeong was clearly displeased
every time Jin-suk was mentioned.
“I know you’re comparing me with her every time we sleep together,” she had said in bed one day.
“You’re not by any chance thinking that there’s no difference between her and me?”
At times like that Yeong-su took great pains to appease her. But it was that much harder to explain himself
when he was thinking, ‘Well, there really isn’t any difference, is there? If there is a difference, it’s that you,
unlike Jin-suk, only sleep with me.’
“There’s nothing going on with Jin-suk. Why do you keep doing this?”
“If nothing is going on, then why do you break into a sweat every time I mention her?”
Suk-gyeong was a vicious sparring partner. Of course, even while he was fooling around with Suk-gyeong
he was sleeping with Jin-suk. And there were times when he wondered how Jin-suk could have chosen that sort
of life for herself.
“Well, I’ll tell you.” Jin-suk, who had returned from Germany, answered his question. “Back then, I didn’t
think anything of myself. I thought I was a bug, and there’s nothing you can’t do if you think you’re a bug. And
once I became that bug, as long as you guys didn’t rape me—that is, as long as you were at least civil—there
was no problem. Only one person ever told me I shouldn’t live like that, and that person is now my husband.”
“That German guy?”
“Yes, the German guy. He told me that I wasn’t a bug. That I was precious. Oh, my God, that was the first
time I had ever heard that—that I wasn’t a bug, and that I was precious. You know that my husband is president
of the Dusseldorf chapter of the Green Party, right? Of course, I’m a member of the Green Party too. When I
came back to Korea, some magazine said that I was an environmental activist, but, uh, that’s not true. I’m just a
member of the Green Party; in the strict sense of the word I’m not an environmental activist.
“I’ve changed? Well, I’ve always been impatient. When I was in Germany, I often heard about how
quickly Korea was changing. First the Soviet Union collapsed, then the bubble economy grew, and then the
economic crisis hit. I was worried about how much you guys and Korean society had changed, and whether or
not I would be able to adjust. But now that I’m here I see that I have changed the most. You guys, you’re the
same as ever. You’re not upset, are you?”
As she calmly recounted the last ten years of her life, the only thing Yeong-su could think was, ‘Well, so
much for sleeping with her.’ That thought turned itself into the words he said next.
“You’ve become quite smart.”
Jin-suk shook her head. “You guys think I was an idiot, don’t you. Yeah, I was an idiot. But I felt a little
sorry for you guys. You guys, in your early 20s—don’t take this the wrong way, it’s all in the past anyway—
you were, um, you were like little dogs who had to take a crap. You guys couldn’t even feel sorry for me.
Consumed by your lust and disgusted with yourselves, you guys didn’t even have the strength left to feel
anything like compassion for anyone else. You would stride into my room pretending to be so gallant, shoot
your loads within ten minutes, then slip out again like thieves; you guys must have thought you were some sort
of guerillas.”
“OK, that’s enough,” Yeong-su interrupted. “We were wrong.”
Jin-suk was calm. “I’m not asking for an apology. What do you guys have to apologize for? In reality, the
biggest problem was that I thought of myself as a bug. If a girl thinks of herself as a bug it’s only natural that
other bugs should swarm to her. It’s just that you guys seemed to think I was an idiot, and I always wanted to
correct at least that. Of course, I only began to think this way after I went to Germany.”
It was at that moment that Yeong-su undeniably began to harbor thoughts of murder. Yes, it was true. That
girl was a walking videotape, and in that tape were recorded without fail all the sins of his repulsive past. All
she had to do was push the play button and the audio and video would begin, no power or batteries required.
While she was going on, the murderous impulse violently took root in Yeong-su’s mind. In his imagination
he rearranged her insides with a knife, pressed a pillow down over her face and suffocated her, and took her up
to the roof and pushed her off. He was particularly fascinated by the thought of stabbing her in the chest with a
long, sharp knife while she was sleeping. The blood gushed out like a fountain, and when the whole room
reeked of blood he changed into the clean clothes he had brought along and quietly slipped out of the room.
Glug, glug... each time her heart pumped out another spurt of blood, Jin-suk would gag and spit it up.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t want to do this. You shouldn’t have come back like that. The three of us were quite
happy with our lives. We had children, we bought houses, and we even go shopping on the weekends. We’ve all
forgotten the past when we shared one girl. So you’re just going to have to disappear for us.’
But it was all in his imagination. Yeong-su didn’t do anything. Before he could take those thoughts any
further Jung-gweon and Jeong-sik arrived at the appointed place, and their awkward meeting began. Jin-suk's
sudden appearance was a cause of great discomfort for all three of the men. They had believed that she had
completely disappeared. They were even thankful for it. Who would have thought she would leave for a distant
land as soon as they graduated? Actually, they had even forgotten the fact that she had disappeared. So when
the foolish girl of their youth returned as an environmental activist, there was no way they could simply accept
it. And it was even harder for them to bear the absurdity of all of them being in the same place at the same time.
The power relationship between the four of them had now clearly changed. Now she summoned the three
of them and led the meeting. This was possible because of the nature of their relationships. She knew each of
them individually, but none of the men knew what sort of relationship the other two had with Jin-suk. They
could only guess. And though they had denied the very existence of their relationships, they could no longer
deny them now that Jin-suk had returned. Thus it was natural that the initiative would pass to Jin-suk.
Although they did not speak of it, there was probably not a single one of them that didn’t feel the desire to
murder Jin-suk as she coolly exposed their disgrace. That is why, when Jin-suk was murdered, they could not
help but slowly look at their own hands. ‘Could it be that I, without knowing it, stabbed her? Did I really take a
taxi straight home last night?’ In fact, Jin-suk had already been murdered many times in their dreams. There
was no end to her blood. There was no atoning for their sin. One cannot repent of a sin one hasn’t committed,
and they hadn’t killed her, so how could they repent? In order to be able to cope with arrest by the powers that
be, that is, so they wouldn’t make a slip of the tongue in a possible police investigation, they never sought to
atone for their sin. Instead, they paid the price for it in their dreams. Their dreams were always dreams of great
fear, and in waking they were no less fearful.
Yeong-su arrived at his house in this fearful state of mind, stealing a furtive glance behind him. He
couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was staring at him through binoculars. He felt that he was being
watched, and that feeling bordered on paranoia. After carefully examining his surroundings, he pushed the
doorbell. The door opened, and the smell of bean sprouts wafted out from within the house. His wife opened the
door without a word, returned to the living room and sat down in front of the television.
“Did anyone call?” Yeong-su asked.
“Humph. Were you expecting a call? No one called,” Suk-gyeong answered curtly. “Did the co-
conspirators’ meeting go well?” she asked cuttingly.
Yeong-su started to get angry but held back. But Suk-gyeong didn’t stop there.
“Well, the police haven’t raided our home yet, so I guess intelligent criminals really are different.”
This time Yeong-su could stand it no longer, and he went to stand in front of Suk-gyeong. His face was so
twisted that she could not help being frightened.
“Turn off the television.”
“What’s wrong with you?” Suk-gyeong protested.
“I said turn off the television!”
Suk-gyeong turned off the television. As soon as it was off, Yeong-su went into their bedroom and laid
down on the bed. Suk-gyeong turned the television back on. The news was on the cable news channel, but there
were no more reports about the murder at the Changcheon-dong inn. Well, it’s not like one girl getting stabbed
to death is such a big deal. The news was now urgently reporting on the large illegal loans taken out by venture
companies and the restructuring of the banks.
Suk-gyeong got up and went to her husband in their bedroom. “Why don’t you take a vacation? Maybe
visit your hometown?”
Yeong-su shot up. “What is wrong with you? That’s something a criminal would do! Me, the only thing I
did wrong was to have a drink with Jin-suk. That’s all.”
Suk-gyeong’s eyes flashed. “A drink? You had a drink? With Jin-suk? Oh ho! And when was this?”
Yeong-su bowed his head. “The 15th.”
“The 15th? Wasn’t that the night Jin-suk was killed? Are you sure you should even be sitting around at
home like this?”
Yeong-su sprang up, grabbed Suk-gyeong by the hair and threw her down on the bed.
Suk-gyeong screamed. “Go ahead! Kill me! Kill me! One more isn’t going to make a difference, is it?!”
Yeong-su jumped on top of her and pressed down on her throat, and she began to choke. But he couldn’t
keep it up for long.
“Idiot,” Suk-gyeong spat coldly as she pushed Yeong-su aside, got up and left the room.
Lying on the bed, Yeong-su thought, ‘I didn’t even lay a finger on Jin-suk, and here we are acting like this.
There is not a single reason for me to feel guilty. That bitch.’
The last curse was directed at his wife, Suk-gyeong. ‘You’d think she could be a little more understanding
when her husband is faced with a crisis like this. Intelligent criminals are different, she says? It’s almost as if
she wishes I had actually committed the murder. Really... maybe I should just leave the country. Gather up all
our belongings and emigrate to Canada, the land of dreams, just like that. We’d see how proud that bitch would
be then.’
Just then Yeong-su’s cell phone rang.
“It’s Jeong-sik.” He spoke shortly. “Turn on the television.”
Yeong-su fumbled around for the remote control and turned on the small bedroom television set.
“Channel 7.”
The screen showed Jung-gweon being taken from the police station under arrest. The news ended with that
clip, so it was impossible to learn the details.
“What happened?” Yeong-su asked.
“They said on the news that Jung-gweon killed her.”
Yeong-su asked mechanically, “Jung-gweon? Why?”
 Jeong-sik replied weakly in a voice devoid of tension, and thus just a little regretful. “Who knows?
According to the police, he harbored a grudge against her for not meeting him, but as you know, we had a drink
together that night.”
Yeong-su clucked his tongue. “They probably meant that she wouldn’t meet him alone. Anyway, Jung-
gweon, he’s finished now.”
“Not just him, either. What about Jin-suk, returning home after all that time? He finished her, too. So, are
you OK? Well, you said your wife knows all about it... I guess there’s no way you’d be OK.”
“I’m fine. Don’t worry about me. But here’s the strange thing: why don’t we feel relieved? Damn it, I
don’t have a single drop of blood on my hands!”
Jeong-sik exploded. “Neither do I! Damn it, life is just like that!” He continued, “Anyway, I haven’t been
able to sleep for the past few days. I feel like I’m dead on my feet. Now I think I’ll stretch out and go to sleep.
OK, keep in touch.”
They hung up. Yeong-su went out into the living room and went over to his wife, who was pouting and
staring at the television.
“Look,” he said tenderly. “It’s Christmas, right? Do you want to go get a tree at Namdaemun Market?”
His wife looked at him, confused. Yeong-su continued with an exaggerated tone and gestures, like some
wise man from the East bearing glad tidings. “Jin-suk... they said that Jung-gweon killed her. It was just on the
news. The bastard should have called us or something. We were worried for nothing!”
Suk-gyeong stared at Yeong-su for a moment, and then spit out her words in a mixture of regret and scorn.
“Some wonderful friends you are.”
Yeong-su fought back his anger and tried again. “Do you want to buy a tree or not?”
Suk-gyeong didn’t answer.
“Forget it then!” Yeong-su shouted angrily and went into the bathroom. As he washed his hands the water
turned red as blood. ‘I didn’t kill her.’ He lifted his head to look at the mirror and saw a beast-like man standing
there staring back at him.
Out in the living room, Suk-gyeong screamed, “I told you to put that down!”
Santa Claus is coming to town.... Apparently their child had opened the red Christmas card Jin-suk had
sent. This was followed by the sound of his wife tearing the card to bits. But the monotonous electronic carol
from the built-in Chinese music chip droned on. Before he knew it, Yeong-su began to hum along with the
melody. Santa Claus knows. He knows who’s been bad and who’s been good. And he’s coming tonight. La la la
la la la.
Suk-gyeong rummaged through the trash to find the tenacious music chip that she had thrown out, opened
the veranda window, and tossed the chip out. Santa Claus is coming to town—the Christmas carol that would
continue to play obstinately until the battery was fully exhausted. Of course, it was only a monotonous melody,
never to be heard again by Suk-gyeong and Yeong-su.

A Gentleman’s C, by Padgett Powell

My father, trying to finally graduate from college at sixty-two, came, by curious circumstance, to be enrolled in
an English class I taught, and I was, perhaps, a bit tougher on him than I was on the others. Hadn’t he been
tougher on me than on other people’s kids growing up? I gave him a hard, honest, low C. About what I felt he’d
always given me.

We had a death in the family, and my mother and I traveled to the funeral. My father stayed put to complete his
exams–it was his final term. On the way home we learned that he had received his grades, which were low
enough in the aggregate to prevent him from graduating, and reading this news on the dowdy sofa inside the
front door, he leaned over as if to rest and had a heart attack and died.

For years I had thought that the old man’s passing away would not affect me, but it did.
WE ATE THE LAST CHILDREN BY YANN MARTELL

The first human trial was on Patient D, a 56-year-old male, single and childless, who was suffering from colon
cancer. He was a skeletal man with white, bloodless skin who could no longer ingest even clear fluids. He was
aware that his case was terminal and he waived all rights to legal redress should the procedure go wrong. His
recovery was astounding. Two days after the operation, he ate six lunch meals in one sitting. He gained 24 kilos
in two weeks. Clearly, his liver, pancreas and gall bladder, the source of greatest worry, had adapted to the
transplant. The only side-effect noted at the time concerned his diet. Patient D rapidly came to dislike sweet
dishes, then spicy ones, then cooked food altogether. He began to eat bananas and oranges without peeling
them. A nurse reported that one morning she found him eating the flowers in his room.

The French medical team felt vindicated. Until then, the success rate of full-organ xenografts was zero; all
transplants of animal organs to humans - the hearts, livers and bone marrow of baboons, the kidneys of
chimpanzees - had failed. The only real achievement in the field was the grafting of pigs' heart valves to repair
human hearts and, to a lesser extent, of pigs' skin on to burn victims. The team decided to examine the species
more closely. But the process of rendering pigs' organs immunologically inert proved difficult, and few organs
were compatible. The potential of the pig's digestive system, despite its biological flexibility, stirred little
interest in the scientific community, especially among the Americans; it was assumed that the porcine organ
would be too voluminous and that its high caloric output would induce obesity in a human. The French were
certain that their simple solution to the double problem - using the digestive system of a smaller, pot-bellied
species of pig - would become the stuff of scientific legend, like Newton's apple. "We have put into this man a
source of energy both compact and powerful - a Ferrari engine!" boasted the leader of the medical team.

Patient D was monitored closely. When asked about what he ate, he was evasive. A visit to his apartment three
months after the operation revealed that his kitchen was barren; he had sold everything in it, including fridge
and stove, and his cupboards were empty. He finally confessed that he went out at night and picked at garbage.
Nothing pleased him more, he said, than to gorge himself on putrid sausages, rotten fruit, mouldy brie,
baguettes gone green, skins and carcasses, and other soured leftovers and kitchen waste. He spent a good part of
the night doing this, he admitted, since he no longer felt the need for much sleep and was embarrassed about his
diet. The medical team would have been concerned except that his haemoglobin count was excellent, his blood
pressure was ideal, and further tests revealed what was plain to the eye: the man was bursting with good health.
He was stronger and fitter than he had been in all his life.

Regulatory approval came swiftly. The procedure replaced chemotherapy as the standard treatment for all
cancers of the digestive tract that did not respond to radiotherapy.

Les Bons Samaritains, a lobby group for the poor, thought to apply this wondrous medical solution to a social
problem. They suggested that the operation be made available to those receiving social assistance. The poor
often had unwholesome diets, at a cost both to their health and to the state, which had to spend so much on
medical care. What better, more visionary remedy than a procedure that in reducing food budgets to nothing
created paragons of fitness? A cleverly orchestrated campaign of petitions and protests - " Malnutrition: zéro!
Déficit: zéro! " read the banners - easily overcame the hesitations of the government.

The procedure caught on among the young and the bohemian, the chic and the radical, among all those who
wanted a change in their lives. The opprobrium attached to eating garbage vanished completely. In short order,
the restaurant became a retrograde institution, and the eating of prepared food a sign of attachment to deplorable
worldly values. A revolution of the gut was sweeping through society. "Liberté! Liberté! " was the cry of the
operated. The meaning of wealth was changing. It was all so heady. The telltale mark of the procedure was a
scar at the base of the throat; it was a badge we wore with honour.

Little was made at the time of a report by the Société protectrice des animaux on the surprising drop in the
number of stray cats and dogs. Garbage became a sought-after commodity. Unscrupulous racketeers began
selling it. Dumps became dangerous places. Garbage collectors were assaulted. The less fortunate resorted to
eating grass.

Then old people began vanishing without a trace. Mothers who had turned away momentarily were finding their
baby carriages empty. The government reacted swiftly. In a matter of three days, the army descended upon
every one of the operated, without discrimination between the law-abiding and the criminal. The newspaper Le
Cochon Libre tried to put out a protest, but the police raided their offices and only a handful of copies escaped
destruction. There were terrible scenes during the round-up: neighbours denouncing neighbours, children being
separated from their families, men, women and children being stripped in public to look for telling scars,
summary executions of people who tried to escape. Internment camps were set up, nearly always in small,
remote towns: Les Milles, Gurs, Le Vernet d'Ariège, Beaune-la-Rolande, Pithiviers, Recebedou.

No provisions were made for food in any of the camps. The story was the same in all of them: first the detainees
ate their clothes and went naked. Then the weaker men and women disappeared. Then the rest of the women.
Then more of the men. Then we ate those we loved most. The last known prisoner was an exceptional brute by
the name of Jean Proti. After 41 days without a morsel of food except his own toes and ears, and after 30 hours
of incessant screaming, he died.

I escaped. I still have a good appetite, but there is a moral rot in this country that even I can't digest. Everyone
knew what happened, and how and where. To this day everyone knows. But no one talks about it and no one is
guilty. I must live with that

KISS BY CARLOS RUIZ ZAFÓN

I never told anybody, but getting that apartment was nothing short of a miracle. All I knew about Laura was that
she worked part-time at the offices of the landord on the first floor, and that she kissed like a tango. I met her on
a July night when the skies blanketing Barcelona sizzled with steam and desperation. I had been sleeping on a
bench in a nearby square when I was awakened by the brush of her lips.
Do you need a place to stay?
She led me to the lobby. The building was one of those vertical mausoleums that haunt the old town, a labyrinth
of gargoyles and patch-ups at the top of which you could still make out 1886 somewhere beneath the layer of
soot.
I followed her upstairs, almost feeling my way in the darkness. The building creaked under my feet like an old
ship. Laura never asked for any references, personal or financial. Good thing, because in prison you don't get
either. The attic was the size of my former cell, a spare room perched over the endless roofworld of the old city.
I'll take it.
Truth be told, three years in the slammer had obliterated my sense of smell and the issue of voices leaking
through the walls wasn't exactly a novelty for me. One man's hell is another's paradise lost.
Laura would come to me every night. Her cold skin and her misty breath were the only things that didn't burn
during that scorching summer. At dawn she would silently vanish downstairs, leaving me to doze off during the
day.
The neighbors had that meek kindness granted by years of misery and oblivion. I counted six families, all with
children and old-timers reeking of dead flowers and damp soil. My favorite was Don Florian, who lived right
downstairs and painted dolls and tin toys for a living. I spent weeks without venturing out of the building.
Spiders were building arabesques at my threshold. But Doña Luisa, on the third floor, always brought me
something to eat. Don Florian lent me old magazines and challenged me to endless domino matches. The kids in
the building invited me to play hide and seek.
It was a good life. For the first time ever I felt welcomed. Even appreciated.
By midnight Laura would bring me her nineteen years wrapped in white silk and give herself to me as if it were
the last time. I'd make love to her until the break of dawn, savoring in her body everything life had denied me.
Afterward, I'd dream in black and white, like dogs and cursed people. But even the lowest of the low sometimes
get a taste of happiness in this world. That summer was mine.
When the demolition people came by in late August I mistook them for cops. The chief engineer told me he had
nothing personal against squatters, but unfortunately they had to dynamite the place and raze it to the ground no
matter what.
There must be a mistake.
Most chapters in my life begin with that line.
I ran downstairs to the landlord’s office on the first floor looking for Laura. All I found was a coathanger and
two inches of dust. I went to Don Florian's. Fifty eyeless dolls rotting in shadow. I went through the entire
building looking for just one neighbor, one voice. Silent corridors lay covered in debris.
This property has been closed down since 1938, young man, the chief engineer informed me. The bomb
damaged the structure beyond repair.
I believe we had some words. The wrong kind. My kind. I believe I pushed him. Down the stairs. Hard.
This time the judge had a field day with me.
My old cellmates , it turned out, were still waiting.
After all, you always come back.
Hernán, the library guy, found a ten-year-old newspaper article about the bombardment during the civil war. In
the photograph the bodies are lined up in pine boxes, disfigured by shrapnel, but they were still recognizable to
me. A shroud of blood spreads over the cobblestones. Laura is dressed in white, her hands crossed over her
open chest.
It's been almost two years now, but in prison you live or die by memories. The guards think they’re smart, but
she knows how to sneak in past any walls.
At midnight I am awakened by the brush of her icy lips. She brings regards from Don Florian and the others.
You'll love me always, won't you?, she asks.
And I say yes.

BLOOD OF A MOLE
Zdravka Evtimova

Few customers visit my shop. They watch the animals in the cages and seldom buy them. The room is narrow
and there is no place for me behind the counter, so I usually sit on my old moth-eaten chair behind the door.
Hours I stare at frogs, lizards, snakes and insects. Teachers come and take frogs for their biology lessons;
fishermen drop in to buy some kind of bait; that is practically all. Soon, I’ll have to close my shop and I’ll be
sorry about it, for the sleepy, gloomy smell of formalin has always given me peace and an odd feeling of home.
I have worked here for five years now.
One day a strange small woman entered my room. Her face looked frightened and grey. She approached me, her
arms trembling, unnaturally pale, resembling two dead white fish in the dark. The woman did not look at me,
nor did she say anything. Her elbows reeled, searching for support on the wooden counter. It seemed she had
not come to buy lizards and snails; perhaps she had simply felt unwell and looked for help at the first open door
she happened to notice. I was afraid she would fall and took her by the hand. She remained silent and rubbed
her lips with a handkerchief. I was at a loss; it was very quiet and dark in the shop.
"Have you moles here?" she suddenly asked. Then I saw her eyes. They resembled old, torn cobwebs with a
little spider in the centre, the pupil.
"Moles?" I muttered. I had to tell her I never had sold moles in the shop and I had never seen one in my life.
The woman wanted to hear something else - an affirmation. I knew it by her eyes; by the timid stir of her
fingers that reached out to touch me. I felt uneasy staring at her.
"I have no moles," I said. She turned to go, silent and crushed, her head drooping between her shoulders. Her
steps were short and uncertain.
"Hey, wait!" I shouted. "Maybe I have some moles." I don’t know why I acted like this.
Her body jerked, there was pain in her eyes. I felt bad because I couldn't help her.
"The blood of a mole can cure sick people," she whispered. "You only have to drink three drops of it."
I was scared. I could feel something evil lurking in the dark.
"It eases the pain at least," she went on dreamily, her voice thinning into a sob.
"Are you ill?" I asked. The words whizzed by like a shot in the thick moist air and made her body shake. "I’m
sorry."
"My son is ill."
Her transparent eyelids hid the faint, desperate glitter of her glance. Her hands lay numb on the counter, lifeless
like firewood. Her narrow shoulders looked narrower in her frayed grey coat.
"A glass of water will make you feel better," I said.
She remained motionless and when her fingers grabbed the glass her eyelids were still closed. She turned to go,
small and frail, her back hunching, her steps noiseless and impotent in the dark. I ran after her. I had made up
my mind.
"I’ll give you blood of a mole!" I shouted.
The woman stopped in her tracks and covered her face with her hands. It was unbearable to look at her. I felt
empty. The eyes of the lizards sparkled like pieces of broken glass. I didn't have any mole’s blood. I didn't have
any moles. I imagined the woman in the room, sobbing. Perhaps she was still holding her face with her hands.
Well, I closed the door so that she could not see me, then I cut my left wrist with a knife. The wound bled and
slowly oozed into a little glass bottle. After ten drops had covered the bottom, I ran back to the room where the
woman was waiting for me.
"Here it is", I said. "Here’s the blood of a mole."
She didn't say anything, just stared at my left wrist. The wound still bled slightly, so I thrust my arm under my
apron. The woman glanced at me and kept silent. She did not reach for the glass bottle, rather she turned and
hurried toward the door. I overtook her and forced the bottle into her hands.
"It’s blood of a mole!"
She fingered the transparent bottle. The blood inside sparkled like dying fire. Then she took some money out of
her pocket.
"No. No," I said.
Her head hung low. She threw the money on the counter and did not say a word. I wanted to accompany her to
the corner. I even poured another glass of water, but she would not wait. The shop was empty again and the
eyes of the lizards glittered like wet pieces of broken glass.
Cold, uneventful days slipped by. The autumn leaves whirled hopelessly in the wind, giving the air a brown
appearance. The early winter blizzards hurled snowflakes against the windows and sang in my veins. I could not
forget that woman. I’d lied to her. No one entered my shop and in the quiet dusk I tried to imagine what her son
looked like. The ground was frozen, the streets were deserted and the winter tied its icy knot around houses,
souls and rocks.
One morning, the door of my shop opened abruptly. The same small grey woman entered and before I had time
to greet her, she rushed and embraced me. Her shoulders were weightless and frail, and tears were streaking her
delicately wrinkled cheeks. Her whole body shook and I thought she would collapse, so I caught her trembling
arms. Then the woman grabbed my left hand and lifted it up to her eyes. The scar of the wound had vanished
but she found the place. Her lips kissed my wrist, her tears made my skin warm. Suddenly it felt cosy and quiet
in the shop.
"He walks!" The woman sobbed, hiding a tearful smile behind her palms. "He walks!"
She wanted to give me money; her big black bag was full of different things that she had brought for me. I
could feel the woman had braced herself up, her fingers had become tough and stubborn. I accompanied her to
the corner but she only stayed there beside the street-lamp, looking at me, small and smiling in the cold.
It was so cosy in my dark shop and the old, imperceptible smell of formalin made me dizzy with happiness. My
lizards were so beautiful that I loved them as if they were my children.
In the afternoon of the same day, a strange man entered my room. He was tall, scraggly and frightened.
"Have you... the blood of a mole?" he asked, his eyes piercing through me. I was scared.
"No, I haven’t. I have never sold moles here."
"Oh, you have! You have! Three drops... three drops, no more... My wife will die. You have! Please!"
He squeezed my arm.
"Please... three drops! Or she’ll die..."
My blood trickled slowly from the wound. The man held a little bottle and the red drops gleamed in it like
embers. Then the man left and a little bundle of bank-notes rolled on the counter.
On the following morning a great whispering mob of strangers waited for me in front of my door. Their hands
clutched little glass bottles.
"Blood of a mole! Blood of a mole!"
They shouted, shrieked, and pushed each other. Everyone had a sick person at home and a knife in his hand.

FUNGUS BY GUADALUPE NETTEL

When I was a little girl my mother had a fungus on one of her toenails. On her left pinkie toe to be exact. From
the moment she discovered it she tried everything to get rid of it. Every morning she’d step out of the shower
and with the help of a tiny brush pour over her toe a capful of iodine whose smell and sepia, almost reddish tone
I remember well. She saw to no avail several dermatologists, including the most prestigious and expensive in
the city, who repeated the same diagnoses and suggested the same futile treatments, from traditional
clotrimazole ointments to apple cider vinegar. The most radical among them even prescribed her a moderate
dose of cortisone, which only inflamed my mother’s yellowed toe. Despite her efforts to banish it, the fungus
remained there for years until a Chinese doctor to whom nobody—not even my mother— gives credit, was able
to drive it away in a few days. It happened so unexpectedly that I could not help wondering if the parasite itself
hadn’t decided to move on to another place.
Until that moment fungi had always been—at least for me—curious mushrooms that appeared in children’s
book illustrations and that I associated with the forest and elves. In any case, nothing to do with that rugosity
that gave my mother’s toenail the texture of an oyster shell. However, more than the dubious and shifting
appearance, more than its tenacity and attachment to the invaded toe, what I remember best about the whole
affair was the disgust and repulsion the parasite inspired in my mother. I have seen other people over the years
with mycosis on different parts of their body. All kinds of mycoses, from those that cause the bottom of the foot
to dry out and peel to the circular red fungi you often see on chefs’ hands. Most people bear them with
resignation, some with stoicism, others with genuine disregard. My mother on the other hand suffered the
presence of her fungus as if it were a mortifying affliction. Terrified by the thought that it might spread to the
rest of her foot, or worse, her entire body, she separated the affected toenail with a thick piece of cotton to keep
it from rubbing against the adjacent toe. She never wore sandals and avoided taking off her socks in front of
anyone she wasn’t very close to. If for some reason she had to use a public shower she always wore plastic
slippers, and to swim in a pool she’d take off her shoes right at the edge just before diving in, so that nobody
would see her feet. And so much the better; if anyone had found out about that toe and all the treatments it had
been through, they would have thought that instead of a simple fungus, what my mother had was the beginning
of leprosy.
Children, unlike adults, adapt to everything. So little by little, despite my mother’s disgust, I began to see that
fungus as an everyday presence in my family life. It didn’t inspire the same aversion in me as it did my mother;
just the opposite. I felt a protective sympathy for that iodine-painted toenail, which seemed vulnerable to me,
similar to what I would have felt for a crippled pet that had trouble moving around. Time went on and my
mother stopped making such a fuss over her affliction. For my part, I grew up and completely forgot about it
and never again thought about fungi until I met Philippe Laval.
At that time I had just turned thirty-five. I was married to a patient and generous man who was ten years my
senior and the director of the National School of Music, where I had completed the first part of my training as a
violinist. We didn’t have children. We had tried for a while, but rather than agonizing over it, I felt fortunate to
be able to focus on my career. I had completed my training at Juilliard and had garnered certain international
prestige, enough to be invited to Europe and the United States to give concerts two or three times a year. I’d just
recorded a CD in Denmark and was about to return to Copenhagen to teach a six-week course in a palace that
every summer hosted the best students in the world.
I remember one Friday afternoon shortly before I was to leave I received a list with the biographical information
of all the professors who would be at the residency that year. Laval’s was among them. It wasn’t the first time I
read his name. He was a violinist and conductor of great renown, and on more than one occasion I’d heard from
the mouths of friends words of praise about his live performances and how naturally he led the orchestra with
his violin. From the list I learned that he was French and lived in Brussels, but often went to Vancouver where
he taught at the School of Art. That weekend my husband, Mauricio, had gone out of town to attend a
conference. I didn’t have plans that night so I searched the Internet to find which of his concerts was available
to purchase online. After browsing for a while I ended up buying one of Beethoven, filmed live at Carnegie Hall
years earlier. I remember the sense of wonderment I felt listening to it. The night was hot. I had the balcony
doors open to let fresh air in and still, emotion restricted my breathing. Every violinist knows that
arrangement—many by heart—but hearing his interpretation was an absolute revelation. As if I could at last
understand it in all its depth. I felt a mix of reverence, envy, and gratitude. I listened to it three times at least and
each time produced the same shiver. I then searched for pieces interpreted by other musicians invited to
Copenhagen, and while the level was undoubtedly very high, not one of them surprised me as much as Laval
did. Afterward I closed the file and though I thought of him more than once, I didn’t listen to the concert again
in the following two weeks.
It wasn’t the first time I’d be separated from Mauricio for a few months, but being accustomed to it didn’t
lessen the sadness of leaving him. As I did for every long trip, I asked him to come with me. The residency
allowed it and despite his insisting otherwise I’m sure his work did as well. He could at least have spent two of
the six weeks of the course there, or visited me once at the beginning and again at the end of my stay. Had he
accepted, things between us would have gone down a different path. However, it didn’t make sense to him. He
said that the time would go by quickly for us both and the best thing for me would be to concentrate on my
work. It would be, according to him, an incredible opportunity, one I couldn’t miss or cut short, to plumb my
depths and collaborate with other musicians. And it was that, just not in the way we’d imagined.
The castle where the summer school was held was located in Christiania, a neighborhood just outside the city. It
was late July and at night the temperature was very pleasant. I wasted almost no time in making friends with
Laval. At the beginning his schedule was more or less the same as mine: he was unquestionably nocturnal; I
was still on North American time. After classes we’d work the same hours in soundproof rooms so as not to
wake the others, and now and again we’d run into each other in the kitchen or at the tea stand. We were the
first—and only—ones to make it to the early breakfast, when the cafeteria began serving. From friendly and
excessively polite our conversations became increasingly personal. An intimacy quickly grew between us, and a
sense of closeness different from what I felt toward the other teachers.
A summer school is a place beyond reality that allows us to surrender to that which we usually deny ourselves.
You can take all kinds of liberties; to visit the heart of the host city, attend dinners and events, socialize with the
locals or other residents, give in to laziness, to bulimia, to some addicting habit. Laval and I fell into the
temptation of falling in love. A classic, it would seem, in such a place. During the six weeks of the program we
passed through Copenhagen’s parks on buses and bikes, went to bars and museums, attended operas and several
concerts. But mostly we were intent on getting to know each other as much as possible in that limited amount of
time. When you know a relationship is fated to end on a given day it is easy to let fall the walls you put up to
protect yourself. We are more benign, more indulgent with someone who will soon cease to be there than with
those who take shape as long-term partners. No fault, no defect deters us, as we won’t have to stand it in the
future. When a relationship has an expiration date as clear as ours had, there’s no wasting time on judging the
other person. The only thing you focus on is enjoying their best qualities, fully, urgently, voraciously, as time is
not on your side. At least that is what happened to Philippe and me during that residency. His infinite quirks
when it came to work, to sleep, and to organizing his room amused me. His phobia of sickness and every type
of contagion, his chronic insomnia, melted me and made me want to protect him. The same happened to him
with my obsessions, my fears, my own insomnia, and my constant frustration with my music. Still, I should say
that it was also a time of great creativity. If I had noticed in my CD recorded months earlier in Copenhagen a
certain stiffness, a certain horological precision, then now my music had more flow and greater presence. Not
the strict vigilance of someone who fears making a mistake, but rather the abandon and spontaneity of someone
who thoroughly enjoys what she is doing. There is, luckily, some evidence of that favored moment in my
career. In addition to the recordings required by our host institution, I did three radio programs that I hold as
proof of my greatest personal achievements. Laval conducted two concerts at the Royal Danish Theatre, both
awe-inspiring. The audience gave him a standing ovation that lasted several minutes and, after the event, the
musicians professed it had been an honor to share the stage with him. Having followed closely his development
since then, I can attest that the month and a half he spent in that city marked one of the best—if not the very
best— moments in his entire career. Yes, he established himself later on, but it is enough to listen to the
recordings from those weeks to realize that within them there is an extraordinary emotional transparency.
Like me, Laval was married. Waiting for him in a chalet outside of Brussels were his wife and daughters, three
blond, round-faced girls whose treasured photographs he kept in his phone. We preferred not to speak too much
about our respective relationships. Despite what one might think, in that state of exceptional bliss there was no
space for guilt or fear of what would happen later, when we returned to our worlds. There was no time but the
present. It was like living in a parallel dimension. Whoever has not been through something similar will think I
am coming up with these failed metaphors to justify myself. Those who have will know exactly what I’m
talking about.
The residency ended in late September and we returned to our respective countries. At first it felt good to be
home and to get back to our daily lives. But, speaking for myself, I did not return to the same place I had left.
To begin with, Mauricio was out of town. A work trip had taken him to Laredo. His absence couldn’t have been
better for me; it gave me enough time to refamiliarize myself with the apartment and my normal life. It’s true
that, for example, in my study things were intact; the books and CDs in their places, my music stand and sheet
music covered by a layer of dust barely thicker than when I’d left. But the way I was in my home, in every
space and even in my own body, had changed, and even though I wasn’t aware of it then there was no going
back. During the first days I still carried on me the scent and taste of Philippe. More often than I would have
liked they rushed over me like crushing waves. Despite my efforts to maintain composure, none of it left me
unaffected. Once I’d given in to those feelings described, they were followed by those of being lost, of longing,
and then by guilt for reacting that way. I wanted my life to go on as it always had, not because it was my only
option, but because I liked it. I chose it every morning when I woke up in my bedroom, in the bed I had shared
with my husband for over ten years. That is what I chose, not the sensorial tsunamis and not the memories that,
had I been able to, I would have eradicated forever. But my will was an inadequate antidote to the pull of
Philippe.
Mauricio came home on a Saturday at noon, before I’d been able to sort my feelings out. He brought me relief,
like the boat you find in the middle of a storm that will save you from the shipwreck. We spent the weekend
together. We went to the movies and the supermarket. On Sunday we had breakfast at one of our favorite
restaurants. We told each other the details of our trips and the annoyances of our respective flights. In these
days of reacquainting I wondered more than once if I should explain to him what had happened with Laval. It
troubled me to hide things from him, especially things so serious. I had never done it before. I realized that I
needed his absolution and, if it were possible, his advice. But I preferred not to say anything for the time being.
Greater than my need to be honest was my fear of hurting him, of something between us rupturing. On Monday
we both returned to work. The memories continued their attack on me but I managed, rather adeptly, to keep
them at bay until Laval reappeared two weeks later.
One afternoon I got a long-distance phone call from a blocked number. My heart started beating faster before I
picked up. I lifted the receiver and, after a brief silence, I recognized Laval’s Amati on the other end of the line.
Hearing him play from thousands of miles away, being in my own home, it tore open what I had tried so hard to
heal. That call, seemingly harmless, brought Philippe into a place where he didn’t belong. What did he want,
calling like that? Probably to reestablish contact, to show me that he still thought of me, that his feelings for me
still burned. Nothing explicit, and yet, so much more than my emotional stability could take. There was a
second call, this time with his own voice, made, he said, from a phone booth two blocks from his house. He told
me what his music already had: he still thought about us and was having trouble breaking free. He talked and
talked for several minutes, until he’d used up all the credit he’d put in the phone. I barely had enough time to
make two important things clear to him: first, everything he was feeling was mutual; and second, I didn’t want
him calling my house again. Laval exchanged phone calls for e-mails and text messages. He wrote in the
morning and at night, telling me all kinds of things, from how he was feeling to what he’d had for lunch and
dinner. He gave me reports on his outings and work events, on what his daughters were doing and when they
got sick, but most of all—and this was the hardest part—he gave me in-depth descriptions of his desire. So it
was as if the parallel dimension, which I believed to be suspended indefinitely, not only opened up again, but
began to become everyday, stealing space from the tangible reality of my life, from which I became
increasingly absent. Bit by bit I learned his routines, when he took his daughters to school, the days he stayed
home and those when he went into town. The exchange of messages gave me access to his world and, by asking
questions, Laval was able to open up a similar space in my own existence. I’d always been a person who often
daydreamed but because of him this tendency increased dramatically. If before I had lived 70 percent of the
time in reality and 30 in my imagination, that ratio did a complete reversal. It got to the point that everyone who
came into contact with me began to worry, including Mauricio, who I suspect already harbored some notion of
what was going on.
I was becoming addicted to my correspondence with Laval, to this interminable conversation, and to thinking of
it as the most intense and essential part of my daily life. When for some reason it took longer than usual for him
to write or it wasn’t possible for him to immediately respond to my messages, my body exhibited obvious signs
of anxiety: clenched jaw, sweaty palms, leg twitches. If before, especially in Copenhagen, we almost never
spoke about our respective spouses, that restriction ceased to be enforced in a long-distance dialogue. Our
marriages became objects of daily voyeurism. At first we only told each other about our partners’ suspicions
and worries; then about our arguments with and judgments of them; but so too about the gestures of affection
they showed us to justify, to the other and to us, their determination to remain married. Unlike me, who lived in
a calm and taciturn marriage, Laval was not happy with his wife. At least that’s what he told me. Their
relationship, which had already gone on for over eighteen years, had been for the vast majority of that time a
living hell. Catherine, his wife, did nothing but demand his attention and intensive care and would unleash upon
him her uncontrollable violence. It was unbearably sad to think of Laval living in such a situation. It was
unbearably sad to imagine him, for example, stuck in the house on a Sunday, enduring the screaming and the
accusations as the interminable Brussels rain fell outside. But Laval wouldn’t think of leaving his family. He
had resigned himself to living that way to the end of his days and I should say that that resignation, though
incomprehensible, suited me. I didn’t want to leave Mauricio either.
After three months of messages and occasional phone calls, we finally settled into a routine I felt more or less
comfortable with. Even though my attention, or what remained of it, was on Laval’s virtual presence, my daily
life began to be tolerable, even enjoyable, until the possibility of seeing each other again arose. As I mentioned,
every three months Laval traveled to Vancouver and on his next trip, post-Copenhagen, it occurred to him we
could meet there. It would be easy enough for him to secure an official invitation from the school for me to lead
a very well-paid workshop during the same days he’d have to be there that winter.
The idea, if extremely dangerous, could not have been more tempting and it was impossible to say no, even
knowing that it threatened the precarious balance we had found.
So we saw each other in Canada. It was an incredible three-day trip surrounded once again by lakes and forests.
The same thing we had felt during the residency again took root between us, only this time it was more urgent,
more concentrated. We declined social obligations as far as it was possible. Whenever we were not working we
were alone in his room, rediscovering in every way imaginable the other’s body, the other’s reactions and
moods, as if returning to a familiar land you never want to leave again. We also spoke a lot about what was
happening between us, about the joy and novelty this encounter had added to our lives. We came to the
conclusion that happiness can be found beyond conventionality, in the narrow space that our familial situations
as much as geographical distance had condemned us to.
After Vancouver we saw each other in the Hamptons; months later at the Berlin Festival of Chamber Music;
then at the festival held in Ambronay for ancient music. Philippe had orchestrated every one of these
encounters. And still, all the time we spent together was never enough for us. Each return was, at least for me,
more difficult than the last. My distractedness was worse and much more obvious than when I came home from
Denmark; I it became impossible for me to live with my husband. Reality, which I was no longer interested in
holding up, began to crumble like an abandoned building. I might never have noticed were it not for a call from
my mother-in-law that drew me out of my lethargy. She had spoken to Mauricio and was very worried.
“If you’re in love with another man, it’s slipping through your fingers,” she said to me with the bluntness she
was known for. “You do whatever you have to to get it under control.”
Her comment fell on absent but not deaf ears.
One afternoon Mauricio came home from work early to the sound of a Chopin piece for piano and violin that
Laval had performed ten years before. A CD I’d never played in his presence. I don’t know if it was the look of
surprise on my face to see him home or if he had decided beforehand, but that day he interrogated me about my
feelings. I wanted to give his questions honest answers. I wanted to tell him of my conflicts and my fears. I
wanted most of all to tell him what I had been suffering. However, all I could do was lie. Why? Maybe because
it pained me to betray someone whom I continued to love deeply, but in a different way; maybe I was scared of
how he would react, or because I clung to the hope that, sooner or later, things would go back to the way they
were. Mauricio’s mother was right: I was losing my grip on the affair.
After turning it over in my mind, I decided to call off the next trip and put all my energy into distancing myself
from Laval. I wrote to him explaining the state of things and I asked his help in recovering the life that was
dissolving before my eyes. My decision upset him but he understood.
Two weeks went by without any kind of contact between Laval and me. However, when two people think
constantly of each other there grows between them a bond that transcends orthodox means of communication.
Even though I was determined to forget him, or at least to not think of him with the same intensity, my body
rebelled against that plan and started manifesting its own volition through feelings, physical and, of course,
uncontrollable.
I first felt a soft itch in my crotch. But when I inspected the area several times I didn’t see anything and gave up.
After a few weeks the itch, faint at first, barely noticeable, became intolerable. No matter the time of day, no
matter where I was, I felt my sex, and feeling it inevitably meant also thinking of Philippe. I received his first
message about it around that time. An e-mail, concise and alarmed, in which he swore that he’d contracted
something serious, probably herpes, syphilis, or some other venereal disease, and he wanted to warn me so that
I could take the necessary precautions. That was Philippe, tout craché, as they say in his language, and that was
the classic reaction of someone given to hypochondria. The message changed my perspective: if we both had
the symptoms, then most likely the same thing afflicted us both. Not a serious illness as he thought but maybe a
fungus. Fungi itch; if they are deeply rooted, they can even hurt. They make us always aware of the body part
where they have grown and that was exactly what was happening to us. I tried to assure him with affectionate
messages. Before resuming our silence, we agreed to see doctors in our respective cities.
The diagnosis I got was just what I’d suspected. According to my gynecologist, a change in my mucus acidity
had fostered the appearance of the microorganisms and simply applying a cream for five days would eradicate
them. Knowing this did not calm me. Far from it. To think that some living thing had grown on our bodies
precisely where the absence of the other was most evident astonished and rattled me. The fungus bound me to
Philippe even more. Though at first I applied the prescribed medicine punctually and diligently, I soon stopped
the treatment; I’d developed a fondness for the shared fungus and a sense of ownership. To go on poisoning it
was to mutilate an important part of myself. The itch became, if not pleasurable, at least as soothing as the next
best thing. It allowed me to feel Philippe on my own body and imagine with such accuracy what was happening
to his. That’s why I decided not only to preserve the fungus, but also to take care of it, the way that some people
cultivate a small garden. After some time, as it grew stronger, the fungus started to become visible. The first
thing I noticed was white dots that, upon maturing, turned into small bumps, smooth in texture and perfectly
round. I came to have dozens of those little heads on my body. I spent hours naked, pleased to see that they had
grown over the surface of my labia in their path toward my groin. All the while I imagined Philippe doing all he
could, to no end, to get rid of his own strand. I discovered I was wrong when one day I received an e-mail in my
inbox: “My fungus wants one thing only: to see you again.”
The time I had before dedicated to communicating with Laval I now devoted to thinking about the fungus. I
remembered my mother’s, which I’d all but erased from my memory, and I began to read about those strange
beings, akin in appearance to the vegetable kingdom but clinging to life and to a host, and cannot but be near us.
I found out for example that organisms with very diverse life dynamics can be classified as fungi. There exist
around a million and a half species, of which a hundred thousand have been studied. I realized that something
similar happens with emotions: very different kinds of feelings—often symbiotic—are identified by the
word love. Loves are often born unforeseen, of spontaneous conception. One evening we suspect their existence
because of some barely noticeable itch, and by the next day we realize they have already settled into us in such
a way that if it is not permanent, it at least seems to be. Eradicating a fungus can be as complicated as ending an
unwanted relationship. My mother knew all about it. Her fungus loved her body and needed it in the same way
that the organism that had sprouted between Laval and me was reclaiming the missing territory.
I was wrong to think that when I stopped writing to him, I would detach myself from Laval. I was also wrong to
believe that that sacrifice would be enough to get my husband back. Our relationship never came back to life.
Mauricio left discreetly, no fuss of any kind. He started by not coming home one night out of three and then
extended his periods of desertion. Such was my absence from our common space that, although I could not help
noticing it, neither could I do anything to stop him. I still wonder today if, had I tried harder, it would have been
possible to reestablish the ties that had dissolved between us. I am certain that Mauricio discussed the
circumstances of our divorce with very few of our friends. However, those people spoke to others and the
information reached our relatives and closest friends. There were even people who felt authorized to express to
me their support or disapproval, which angered me to no end. Some told me, as consolation, that “things happen
for a reason”; that they had seen it coming and that the separation was necessary, as much for my own growth
as for Mauricio’s. Others claimed that for several years my husband had maintained a relationship with a young
musician and that I should not feel guilty. This latter part had never been proven. Far from calming me, the
comments did nothing but increase my feeling of abandonment and isolation. My life had not only ceased to be
mine, it had become fodder for others’ discussions. For that reason I couldn’t stand to see anybody. But neither
did I like being alone. If I’d had children it probably would have been different. A child would have been a very
strong anchor in the tangible and quotidian world. I would have been attentive to the child and its needs. A child
would have brought joy to my life with that unconditional affection I was so badly in need of. But besides my
mother, who was always so busy with her work, in my life there was only the violin and the violin was Laval.
When I finally decided to seek him out, Philippe not only resumed contact as enthusiastic as ever, he was even
more supportive than before. He called and wrote several times a day, listened to my doubts, gave me
encouragement and advice. Nobody was as involved in my psychological recovery as he was in those first
months. His calls and our virtual conversations became my only enjoyable contact with another human being.
Unlike my mother during my childhood, I decided to remain with the fungus forever. To live with a parasite is
to accept the occupation. Any parasite, as harmless as it may be, has the uncontainable need to spread. It is
important to limit it, or else it will invade us entirely. I, for example, have not allowed mine to reach my groin,
nor any other part beyond my crotch. Philippe has adopted an attitude toward me similar to mine toward the
fungus. He never allows me beyond my territory. He calls my home whenever he needs to but I cannot, under
any circumstance, call his. It is he who decides when and where we meet and who always cancels our trips if his
wife or daughters mess up our plans. In his life, I am an infallible ghost he can summon. In mine, he is a free
spirit that sometimes appears. Parasites—I understand this now—we are unsatisfied beings by nature. Neither
the nourishment nor the attention we receive will ever be enough. The secrecy that ensures our survival often
frustrates us. We live in a state of constant sadness. They say that to the brain, the smell of dampness and the
smell of depression are very similar. I do not doubt it’s true. Whenever the anguish builds in my chest, I take
refuge in Laval, like turning to a psychologist or a sedative. And though not always immediately, he almost
never refuses me. Nevertheless, as to be expected, Philippe cannot stand my neediness. Nobody likes to be
invaded. He already has too much pressure at home to tolerate this scared and pained woman he has turned me
into, so different from the one he met in Copenhagen. We have seen each other again a few times, but the trysts
are not like before. He’s scared too. His responsibility in my new life is weighing him down and he reads, even
in my most innocent remarks, the plea for him to leave his wife. I realize this. That is why I have lessened, at
the cost of my health, my imploring. But my need remains bottomless.
It’s been more than two years since I assumed the nature of an invisible being, which barely has a life of its
own, that feeds on memories, on fleeting encounters in whatever part of the world, or on what I am able to steal
from another organism that I yearn for to be mine and in no way is. I still play music but everything I play
seems like Laval, sounds like him, like a distorted copy nobody cares about. I don’t know how long it’s possible
to live like this. But I do know that some people do for years and that in this dimension they are able to build
families, entire colonies of fungi spread far and wide that live in secrecy and then one day, just when the
infested being dies, raise their head during the funeral and make themselves known. That will not be me. My
body is infertile. Laval will have no descendants with me. Sometimes I think I catch, in his face or the tone of
his voice, a certain annoyance similar to the repulsion my mother felt for her yellowed toe. So despite my
enormous need for attention I do everything I can to come off inconspicuous, so that he thinks of my presence
only when he desires or needs it. I can’t complain. My life is tenuous but I do not want for nourishment, even
though it comes one drop at a time. The rest of the time I live locked up and motionless in my apartment where
I have barely raised the blinds in the past few months. I like the dimness and the dampness of the walls. I spend
a lot of time touching the cavity of my genitalia—that crippled pet I glimpsed as a child— where my fingers
awaken the notes Laval has left there. I’ll stay like this as long as he lets me, forever confined to one piece of
his life or until I find the medicine that, at last, once and for all, frees us both.

HYDE PARK BY PETINA GAPPAH

I was a student when I made my first visit to London. It was the summer of 1997, I was poor and on a budget. I
came just for the day, on a National Express coach from Cambridge. I was a little uneasy because the driver
spoke loudly in a cockney accent, had a shaven head and tattoos that snaked up his arms from his wrists and
disappeared into his short sleeves. Dark thoughts of what skinheads did to black people in Europe entered my
mind. “Here you go darlin’,” he said as he handed me my change. I was disarmed. London lived in my
imagination long before I saw it. On that first visit, I wanted to see everything. From the top of several “hop on,
hop off” buses, I saw Pudding Lane and Westminster Abbey, the Old Bailey, the sparkling, dirty Thames and
the many sights and places that I knew from books and television. By four in the afternoon, I was London-
glutted and sight-sore. “Coming up is Marble Arch,” said our tour guide. I immediately thought of Jeff
Buckley’s “Hallelujah”. My best friend David Ottewell had introduced me to his music the month before, only
for Buckley to drown a few weeks after I first heard him. I hopped off the bus and walked into Hyde Park from
the Marble Arch entrance. It was as good a place as any to eat my sandwich lunch. As I walked into the park, I
almost became part of a crowd of Hare Krishna followers. The small enthusiastic crowd was mainly middle-
aged, the men in white linen trousers and tunics, the women looking incongruous in clothes from two continents
separated by a vast ocean: they wore saris accessorised with colourful woven bags from Latin America. They
thrust up their arms and danced their way through the park as everyone but the tourists ignored them. I walked
away from the Hare Krishnas and found myself at Speakers’ Corner. I listened to a bearded Christian evangelist
preaching hell and brimstone in such soft tones that he did not appear to be particularly convinced of the
impending doom he prophesied. There was also a member of the International Socialists organisation, who
talked as though the Berlin Wall was still to fall, and a group of students campaigning against a multinational
that was forcing infant formula on women in developing countries, making me feel terribly guilty because all I
could think of was one of the multinational’s famed chocolate bars. I took that as a prompt to have my late
lunch, and walked to eat it in the loveliness of the Rose Garden. After my meal, I turned right and found myself
in Rotten Row. I felt immediately homesick for Zimbabwe. There are not many Rotten Rows in the world, and
one of them is in Harare. I spent an hour wandering in a happy daze in Hyde Park. I have visited Hyde Park
many times since then, and have come to love other sights that I missed that day — particularly the moving
Holocaust Memorial with its text from the Book of Lamentations — but the charm of the first visit has never
left me. Speakers’ Corner speaks to the quality I love most about the British: their tolerance for eccentricity It is
one of my favourite places in London. Speakers’ Corner is famously associated with freedom of speech but, to
me, it speaks to the quality that I love the most about the British: their tolerance for eccentricity. And that day
showed me another quality that I love in big-city dwellers — not just Londoners but those of other big cities
too. Coming from a city in the guise of a village, where to be present is to invite attention and loud comment on
your clothes, your hair, your very being, I loved that there was an accepted code of behaviour about being
private in public, and that I could disappear into my own world in the middle of a communal park. I love Hyde
Park also because it reminds me of home, not only because of Rotten Row but because it gives me an idea of
what my city’s planners had in mind when they put the Harare Gardens, my city’s largest park, in the middle of
the city. As I left the park through Hyde Park Corner that day in 1997, I walked away with an idea in my mind
of the kind of place that my city could have become, of the kind of place that Harare still could be when, and if
ever, it grows up.