The Vegetarian

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

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

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

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

  And then everything grew quiet.

  —

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

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

  “What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  —

  When he woke up she was still sleeping.

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

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

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

  There was a wrapped lunch box next to her elbow, and her limp fingers clutched her mobile. The camcorder was upside down underneath the table, its deck open. She must have heard him as he moved toward her, but she didn’t stir.

  “D…darling,” he said. His head was swimming; he couldn’t believe this was happening. Only then did she lift her head from the table and stand up, but he quickly realized that she wasn’t planning to come anywhere near him. Instead, she seemed to want to keep the table between them, to stop him from getting too close.

  “I hadn’t heard anything from Yeong-hye, so…so I thought I’d stop by on my way to the shop. I just happened to have made some seasoned vegetables, you see.” Her voice was incredibly tense. She was struggling to maintain her composure, as though she were the one trying to justify herself. He knew that tone. It was the slow, low, faintly tremulous tone that meant she was fighting to conceal extreme emotion.

  “The door was open, so I came in. Then I saw that Yeong-hye was all covered in paint, and I thought, that’s strange…I didn’t recognize you at first, because your face was turned to the wall and your body was covered by the quilt.” Still clutching her mobile, she brushed her hair back from her face. Both her hands were shaking visibly. “I guessed Yeong-hye had found a man, or maybe that she’d gone crazy for the second time, what with that stuff on her body…I knew I ought to just get out of there, but…that man could have been anyone, and what if Yeong-hye needed my protection…then I spotted the camcorder by the door, and I picked it up and rewound the tape, just like you taught me, ages ago…” She was having to exercise extreme self-control, squeezing out every ounce of her courage so that she could go on. “And I saw you on the tape.”

  In her eyes there was a mixture of shock, fear and despair that couldn’t be expressed in words, whereas her facial expression looked almost callous. Only then did he realize that his naked body seemed to be actively disgusting her, and he hurriedly looked about for his shirt.

  He found it by the bathroom, tossed in a crumpled heap, and put it on. “Darling. I can explain. It won’t be easy for you to understand, but…”

  She cut him off abruptly, raising her voice. “I’ve called the emergency services.”

  “What?” He took a step toward her, incomprehension furrowing his brow.

  She backed away. “You and Yeong-hye are both clearly in need of medical treatment.”

  Several seconds passed before he grasped that she was in earnest. “What are you saying? That you’re committing me to a mental hospital?”

  Just then a rustling sound came from over by the mattress. Both he and his wife held their breath. Yeong-hye pushed the sheet aside and stood up, stark naked. He saw that tears were streaming from his wife’s eyes.

  “Bastard,” she muttered, swallowing her sobs. “Just look at her…she clearly isn’t well. In her mind. How could you?”

  Up until then, Yeong-hye had seemed oblivious to her sister’s presence in the apartment; only now did she look over at the two of them, her face a perfect blank. Her gaze was utterly devoid of any form of expression.

  She slowly turned her back on them and walked out onto the veranda. The chill air rushed into the apartment when she opened the sliding door. He fixed hi
s eyes on the pale blue of her Mongolian mark, seeing the traces of his saliva and semen that had dried there like sap. Suddenly it felt to him that he had grown old, had experienced everything there was to experience, and that not even death held any fear for him anymore.

  She thrust her glittering golden breasts over the veranda railing. Her legs were covered with scattered orange petals, and she spread them wide as though she wanted to make love to the sunlight, to the wind. He heard the sounds of the approaching ambulance siren, of screams, sighs, the yells of children, all the commotion of the alleyway down below. The sound of feet hurrying up the stairs, coming closer.

  He had to rush out onto the veranda, now, and throw himself over the railing against which she was leaning. He would fall down three floors and smash his head to pieces. It was the only way. The only way to make a clean end of all this. And yet he kept on standing there as if rooted to the spot, as if this were the final moment of his life, staring fixedly at the blazing flower that was her body, that body which now glittered with images so much more intense than those he had filmed during the night.

  She stands and looks out at the rain-swept road. She is at the bus stop across from Maseok terminal. Huge goods vans thunder past, speeding along in the fast lane. The raindrops drum against her umbrella, so forcefully it seems they might rip through the material.

  She isn’t really young anymore, and it would be difficult to call her a beauty, exactly. The curve of her neck is quite attractive and the look in her eyes is open and friendly. She wears light, natural-looking makeup, and her white blouse is neat, uncreased. Thanks to that smart impression, which one might reasonably expect to attract curiosity, attention is deflected away from the faint shadows clouding her face.

  Her eyes glimmer briefly; the bus she has been waiting for has appeared in the distance. She steps down into the road. She watches as the bus, which had been tearing along at a great pace, slows down.

  “You’re going to Ch’ukseong Psychiatric Hospital, right?”

  The bus driver, in late middle age, nods to her and motions her up. She pays the fare, and as she scans the bus for somewhere to sit her eyes pass over the faces of the other passengers. They are all watching her closely. Is she a patient, or is she a nurse? There doesn’t seem to be anything odd about her. Well used to this, she keeps her eyes averted from those probing gazes, that mix of suspicion, caution, repugnance and curiosity.

  She shakes the water off her folded umbrella. The floor of the bus is already wet, black and glistening. It wasn’t the kind of rain for which an umbrella could provide sufficient shelter, and so her blouse and trousers are half soaked. The bus picks up speed, racing along the wet road. She struggles to keep her balance as she walks down the aisle. Finding a double seat where both spaces are unoccupied, she takes the one next to the window. The windows have steamed up, so she gets a tissue out of her bag and wipes a patch clear. She watches the streaks of rain lashing the window, with the untouched steadiness unique to those accustomed to solitude. As they reach Maseok, the late-June woods begin to unfurl on either side of the road. There is something battened down about the woods in this torrential rain, like a huge animal suppressing a roar. As it turns up the road to Ch’ukseong mountain, the road gradually narrows and becomes winding, bringing the wet body of the woods undulating nearer. The base of that mountain over there—might those be the woods where, three months ago, her sister, Yeong-hye, had been found? One by one, the black spaces between the trees, concealed by the shaking canopy of rain-lashed leaves, pass in front of her eyes. She turns away from the window.

  The hospital staff told her that Yeong-hye had gone missing sometime during the hour that was set aside for the patients to take brief, unaccompanied walks—between two and three in the afternoon. This happened only on fixed days, only for non-serious patients, and only when the rain swelling the black clouds overhead seemed likely to stay there. Apparently, when the nurses had checked on the patients at three, they’d been able to confirm that Yeong-hye hadn’t come back. It was only then, they said, that the rain had finally begun to spit, just one or two drops at a time. The entire hospital staff were put on emergency. The management and staff hurriedly set up a roadblock on the corner where the buses and taxis went past. When a patient went missing, one possibility was that they had gone down from the mountains and already got as far as Maseok; or the opposite possibility, that they had in fact gone deeper into the mountains.

  The rain had gradually grown heavier as the afternoon wore on. This was March, so when darkness fell it did so very swiftly. It was extremely lucky that one of the nurses, who between them had fanned out and searched every inch of the neighboring mountain, did manage to find Yeong-hye; no, in fact it was nothing short of a miracle. That was what the doctor had said. Apparently this nurse had stumbled upon Yeong-hye in an isolated spot deep in the woods covering the mountain slope, standing there stock-still and soaked with rain as if she herself were one of the glistening trees.

  When she’d got the call saying Yeong-hye had disappeared, which came around four in the afternoon, she’d been with her son, Ji-woo, who was six years old. The boy had been running a temperature for several days at that point, and she’d taken him to have his lungs X-rayed. He was standing alone in front of the machine, glancing back and forth between her and the doctor, apprehensive.

  “Ms. Kim In-hye?”

  “Speaking.”

  “I’m Kim Yeong-hye’s nurse.”

  This was the first time since Yeong-hye had been admitted that someone from the hospital had contacted her on her mobile. She herself called them only rarely, to check visiting times or occasionally to ask her sister whether everything was okay. In a composed tone of voice designed to conceal the urgency of the situation, the nurse informed her that Yeong-hye was missing.

  “We’re doing all we can to find her, but if by chance she turns up at your home, you have to call us right away.” Before she hung up the nurse asked, “Is there anywhere else she might possibly have gone? Perhaps to your parents?”

  “They live out in the countryside…I can contact them if you need me to.” She flipped the phone closed and put it in her bag, went into the X-ray room and hugged Ji-woo. He’d lost weight over the past few days, and his body felt light and hot in her arms.

  “I did really well, Mum.” Perhaps it was just because of the fever, but his face seemed flushed with the expectation of praise.

  “That’s right, he really didn’t move a muscle.”

  After the doctor told her she didn’t think it was pneumonia she hugged Ji-woo again, bundled him into a taxi and was driven home in the rain. She hurriedly washed him, gave him rice porridge and medicine, and put him to bed early. There was no room in her thoughts for her missing sister. She hadn’t been able to sleep properly for the five days her son had been ill. And that night, if the fever didn’t abate, she would have to take him to be admitted to the general hospital. She was packing Ji-woo’s clothes and making sure she had his medical insurance certificate, just in case the need did arise, when the phone rang again. This had been sometime around nine in the evening.

  “We’ve found her.”

  “Thank goodness. I’ll come and visit next week as normal.” Her thanks were sincere, but subdued by fatigue. Only after she had hung up did it occur to her that the rain she had seen all day must have been pouring down on the mountain where Yeong-hye had been found too. An indiscriminate connection, their existences briefly aligned.

  There was no way for her to judge the accuracy of the scene she saw then in her mind’s eye but had never seen in reality. She’d held a wet flannel to her snuffling son’s forehead all night, slipping occasionally into a sleep that was more like fainting, and saw a tree flickering in the rain like the spirit of some dead person. Black rain, black woods, the pale patient’s uniform, soaked through. Wet hair. Black mountain slope. Yeong-hye, an inchoate mass formed of darkness and water, standing tall like a ghost. Eventually the day dawned, and when sh
e placed the palm of her hand on her son’s forehead she was relieved by the coolness she felt there. She got up, went out of the bedroom and stared blankly at the bluish half-light leaching in from the living room veranda.

  She curled up on the sofa and tried to sleep. She had to get some sleep before Ji-woo woke up, even if it was only an hour.

  Look, sister, I’m doing a handstand; leaves are growing out of my body, roots are sprouting out of my hands…they delve down into the earth. Endlessly, endlessly…yes, I spread my legs because I wanted flowers to bloom from my crotch; I spread them wide…

  Yeong-hye’s voice, which came to her while she was suspended in that halfway state between sleep and wakefulness, was low and warm at first, then innocent like that of a young child, but the last part was mangled, inaudible, a distorted animal sound. Her eyes snapped open in fright, and she was stung by a waking hatred the likes of which she’d never felt before, before being thrown back into sleep. This time she was standing in front of the bathroom mirror. In the reflection, blood was trickling from her left eye. She quickly reached up to wipe the blood away, but somehow her reflection in the mirror didn’t move an inch, only stood there, blood running from a staring eye.

  She swung herself up at the sound of Ji-woo’s coughing and went into the bedroom. Yeong-hye had sat there hunched in a corner of the room, a long time ago, but now she pushed that image from her mind and clasped her son’s small hand, lifting it up as if playing a game. “It’s okay now,” she muttered, but it wasn’t clear who these words were intended to comfort; the boy or herself.

  —

  The bus pulls over as it turns up the hill. She steps down and opens her umbrella. She is the only passenger alighting here. Without delay, the bus races off down the road.

  The narrow road splits here. One road goes up over the hill. You pass through a tunnel, around fifty meters in length. When you emerge, the other side of the small hospital is visible, flanked by mountains on all sides. The rain is still pouring down, its measured cacophony slightly less vicious. She bends down. As she rolls up her trousers to keep them out of the wet, she notices the flaxleaf fleabane that has broken through the asphalt here and there. She adjusts her heavy bag, trying to ease her shoulders, puts up the umbrella and starts walking toward the hospital.