Greek Lessons

by Han Kang

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.

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.

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

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.