Greek Lessons

by Han Kang

As his dying wish, Borges requested the epitaph “He took the sword and laid the naked metal between them.”

I didn’t take any photographs. The sights were recorded only in my eyes. The sounds, smells and tactile sensations that a camera cannot capture in any case were impressed on my ears, nose, face and hands. There was not yet a knife between me and the world, so at the time this was enough.

The most agonizing thing was how horrifyingly distinct the words sounded when she opened her mouth and pushed them out one by one. Even the most nondescript phrase outlined completeness and incompleteness, truth and lies, beauty and ugliness, with the cold clarity of ice. Spun out white as spider’s silk from her tongue and by her hand, those sentences were shameful. She wanted to vomit. She wanted to scream.

She moved without language and understood without language—as it had been before she learned to speak, no, before she had obtained life, silence, absorbing the flow of time like balls of cotton, enveloped her body both outside and in.

Like a shadow bereft of physical form, like the hollow interior of a dead tree, like that dark blank interstitial space between one meteor and another, it is a bitter, thin silence.

If only she’d made a map of the route her tears used to take. If only she’d used a needle to engrave pinpricks, or even just traces of blood, over the route where the words used to flow. But, she mutters, from a place deeper than tongue and throat, that was too terrible a route.

The world is an illusion, and living is dreaming, it read: How is that dream so vivid? How does blood flow and hot tears gush forth?

It’s a common belief that blind or partially sighted people will pick up on sounds first and foremost, but that isn’t the case with me. The first thing I perceive is time. I sense it as a slow, cruel current of enormous mass passing constantly through my body to gradually overcome me.

Why had I been such a fool when it came to loving you? My love for you wasn’t foolish, but I was; had my own innate foolishness made love itself foolish?

Voice. Your voice. The sound I have not forgotten in more than twenty years. If I said that I still loved that voice, would you slam your fist into my face again?

It was around then that I realized for the first time that falling in love is like being haunted.

Even before I opened my eyes in the morning, you would slip in under my eyelids. When I opened them, you instantly transferred to the ceiling, the wardrobe, the windowpane, the street, the far-off sky, and glimmered there like dappled light. You haunted me more persistently than I imagine any ghost ever could.

When I walk into complete darkness, is it all right if I remember you without this unrelenting ache?

Even when she could talk, she’d always been soft-spoken. It wasn’t an issue of vocal cords or lung capacity. She just didn’t like taking up space. Everyone occupies a certain amount of physical space according to their body mass, but voice travels far beyond that. She had no wish to disseminate her self.

To her, there was no touch as instantaneous and intuitive as the gaze. It was close to being the only way of touching without touch.

Language, by comparison, is an infinitely more physical way to touch. It moves lungs and throat and tongue and lips, it vibrates the air as it wings its way to the listener. The tongue grows dry, saliva spatters, the lips crack.

“The world is an illusion, and living is dreaming,” I muttered. Yet blood runs and tears gush forth.

That when the most frail, tender, forlorn parts of us, that is to say our life-breaths, are at some point returned to the world of matter, we will receive nothing in recompense.

You said, Beauty is only that which is intense, has a vibrant energy.

You said, This thing we call life mustn’t ever become something endured.

You said, Dreaming of another world than ...

He kisses her mouth without opening his eyes. Kisses the damp hair beneath her ears, her eyebrows. Like a faint answer heard from far away, the tips of her cold fingers graze his eyebrows, then vanish. They touch the chilly edges of his ear, the scar that runs from the corner of his eye to his mouth, then vanishes. Sunspots explode, without a sound, in the distance. Hearts and lips touch across a fault line, at once joined and eternally sundered.

As I speak the first syllable, I close and open my eyes with intention. As if readying myself to discover, upon reopening them, that everything will have vanished.